Sarah Calgary waitressed for fun. She liked to change the colour of her lipstick each day and had a habit of wearing pink on Friday, as if her mouth could hold the promise of the weekend. She could carry up to five big plates back into the kitchen and then return to the floor with three piled high with food, naming each dish in a way which made the diner pleased they had ordered it. She was a bubbly but also sometimes arrogant woman, who coughed when she was nervous and who lived in Wimbledon with her husband James, a rich, successful painter twenty years older than her. James, who she met when she was fifteen, was going blind.
She was sitting with Josh, their friend. They heard James close the bathroom door upstairs and finally, he came into the room. He was wearing a crisp white shirt in which he had always seemed ready and intelligent, his strong, slim body recast in this item of clothing as a symbol of pure potential. In the pine chest of drawers in the bedroom were neatly folded t-shits, boxers, jeans, running clothes, shirts and an orderly line of shoes along his side of the bed. These were all things he would never see clearly again. Also cufflinks and belts, and a small collection of aftershave. He had stood for a moment after his shower over the bottles on top of the drawers and searched for his favourite. Smells were becoming more and more important to him now he was loosing his sight.
‘You look great,’ his wife said, emitting a little cough as James brushed the wall with his fingertips and felt for the sofa. He could see broad sweeps of shapes and colours, but he was already trying to store information in his fingertips, preparing for darkness.
‘It feels like a Friday or something,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll have a beer, I put some in the fridge.’ He sat down. ‘I can’t see details, that’s the worst of it. They’re gone and they won’t come back. I can’t see them now, even when I squint and strain. I want to stop fighting it. Tonight anyway, I’ll put my fingers in the wounds. The star test. Oh God.’
‘I can’t imagine what it’s like,’ Josh said.
‘No, I don’t think you can,’ he replied. Sarah came back with the beer and handed it to her husband.
‘Well, cheers,’ he said. Then as if remembering it was the end of a day and he was in company, he winked, but the gesture fell in the empty space in the middle of the room.
He had decided to go to the hill again. By the door, the telescope stood neatly packed in its black case. He had bought it as soon as the final acceleration towards blindness began three months ago. They would go for dinner before they went to the hill this time. There should be someone else with them too, James had said. He didn’t want to deal with Sarah directly after he looked through the telescope; he did not want her to observe him closely. He said he had asked Josh rather than someone they knew better, because he didn’t want anyone filled with the fear that had crept up with his blindness, a fear that would be in one of James’s painter friends for example, or family.
Josh moved to Wimbledon at the same time as the couple and was Sarah’s age – thirty-five. He now worked with her as a chef. He was tall, with a lithe, muscular frame. He looked like the son of a sportsman or a wealthy European; slightly spoilt. He’ll be a liability until he falls hard for someone, one of the other waitresses had said to Sarah on a pink-lip Friday.
Josh, sitting in dark blue jeans and a black t-shirt, was already a little uneasy. It was hard to pretend they were just going for dinner and then, to look at the stars. It would be hard to relax. He had walked to their house on the edge of Wimbledon Common as the afternoon light sharpened the edges of the scattering of clouds. The house with its wide open windows – every room held a soft breeze – had stood out from the rest like a place in which some great cleaning and clearing was being done.
James cast his failing eyes over the room, the large table made of oak, the low white coffee table in front of the sofa with its scattering of thick, glossy books. There was a book on the history of Revolutions, a biography of Picasso, cityscape photography, the constellations of the stars, and they all appeared now as blocky colours, their details vanished just like his pictures on the walls, now just colour held in thick black frames. He looked at it all as if they were still signs and symbols that were ordering a sense of peace in him, but really, they were becoming irritations. He knew Josh’s aftershave and his tall outline on a chair at the table had edges and meaning, but he couldn’t name them.
Certainly, he thought, the naming of things was flowing more and more from his memories; early memories before Sarah, before he had seen her as a teenager standing in front of his painting. Before he had taught her and listened to her until she wanted to kiss him. Sometimes he felt guilty about the determination with which he had pursued her, never letting any desire appear stronger than the slightest of strokes – Monet – yes, she had appeared from his canvas.
But now, with blindness approaching, memories arose from when he was a boy. Home, not where he sat now on Homefield Road, Wimbledon, but his original one with the stone steps to the patio and down further again to the lawn where he had played football in endless dusky evenings, home which held his dad’s stubbled cheek and the warm yellow light of the Friday evening kitchen in winter filled with the smell of chicken casserole.
His adult life seemed to be made up of memories and things which slipped now more easily into loose suggestions of what they once were. It was all, and quite suddenly, less firm. There is a slipperiness to things you draw too you, he thought, and the moment you glimpse this you become aware of the approach of darkness, or perhaps the original darkness.
‘Do you want to grab one another one?’ James said.
‘A beer?’ Josh said.
‘Yes.’
‘I have one on the go here.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Quarter past six,’ his wife said.
‘Do you want to go?’
‘I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘There is no rush, the night is young.’
James didn’t want to go. He didn’t want to have to accept what was happening to him, he wanted to put it off.
‘Did you book us a table?’ he said.
‘No, it’s Thursday, we’ll be OK.’
‘We might as well just go.’ James finished his beer and stood, tugging lightly on his belt to check the buckle was sitting neatly in the middle.
His blindness had begun when he was in his teens. He experienced a loss of detail in the edges of colours and shapes suddenly, confirming he had inherited two genes which would lead to blindness. James’s grandfather went blind at sixty-two. For James, the first changes in his sight were correctable. He wore glasses and became a painter. He became a painter to be with colour. But he walked a ledge after that. He knew the second bout of macular degeneration would bring on complete blindness and it had begun three months ago, just weeks after his fifty-fifth birthday. Now, the skin around his eyes appeared to have become thinner, seemed to emit weakness. The change in his eyes had taken something essential from him. He was missing from himself, his glassy spiritless eyes already fixed on something beyond.
In the car Josh sat in the back. The houses and trees, cars and people were sharply edged by the sun and windows had darkened in the dying light. James let the broad waves of colour sweep across his eyes. Well, if the devil’s in the detail, he thought, I lose nothing.
At the restaurant they waited near the bar which was full. Men in t-shirts and light shirts and women in skirts and summer tops were talking and laughing loudly. On the walls were large reprints of Hopper paintings and posters of past productions at Wimbledon Theatre in thin black frames. Sarah linked arms with James as they walked from the car. She saw a chatty couple they knew, the Browns.
‘Look straight ahead, the Browns are over there. They haven’t seen us, we’ll head to the back.’
‘Did they see us?’ James asked as they were seated. ‘Do they know? Oh, I can’t be bothered.’
‘Stealth mode in operation, sir,’ she said, touching his arm.
The waiter was wearing tight black jeans, a dark red and navy checked shirt and a denim apron. He pulled his docket book out of the apron and landed a pen, which he had whipped from his ear, onto the paper.
‘Can I get you something to drink?’
‘Is the Pope Catholic?’ Sarah said. She looked for champagne. ‘The Roederer Brut Vintage 2008, do you have it?’ She pointed at the list.
‘Yes.’
‘Bring us a bottle of that.’
‘So we’re hitting the Champers tonight?’ Josh said when the waiter had gone.
‘It’s all about delighting the senses we’ve got,’ Sarah said.
‘Thanks so much for coming out with us tonight, Josh,’ James said. ‘It will be worth it, the sky will be gorgeous. You and Sarah can describe stars I can’t see.’
‘Of course.’
‘We haven’t actually ordered champagne here before,’ he said softly.
When James and Sarah had eaten at the restaurant they would sit near the bar with it’s row of local ales and craft beers. They had never ordered anything other than beer here. James sat quietly. He felt despair but also a faint note of excitement. Perhaps, he thought, he was sensing the deep, promising rumble of chaos. But he was also trying to imagine the day when everything would be clear darkness. He could not imagine it. It was difficult to think, even now, of the world as he once knew it, to think of the exact details of the strokes of colour that bring something into being.
Sarah asked him if he was OK.
‘I think so,’ he said. ‘I just don’t know. I’m going blinder by the day.’ He was addressing Josh now. ‘I try to savour every colour and shape, but…’ He was suddenly overwhelmed with sadness. ‘I am having trouble accepting this is happening to me.’
Very little was exchanged across the table at dinner. They had already used up all the words that might land naturally between them. They couldn’t muster light chatter – there was simply no reliable bridge between them. In the end, Sarah tried to pour the last drop of the second bottle of Champagne into Josh’s glass. Josh shook his head.
‘You go for it,’ he said.
‘She’s probably had enough,’ James said. ‘What did you think?’
‘Of the champagne? Delicious. Dangerously good.’
‘Yes, it was good, more than enough. Like a warm, freshly picked tomato, the Taj Mahal… or the stars on a clear night. It makes you realise there are … there is so much.’
Sarah coughed and reached over for James’s hand. Josh felt moved and the mood lifted between them. They sat snugly complicit in the silence until they made their way out.
James stared out of the window as they drove. The hill in Surrey was a forty minute drive away. The breeze was shifting the trees in slow, strong strokes. There were no clouds and the stars pricked the luminescent black.
‘The stars are very bright, aren’t they?’ James said. ‘I can feel them all, am I right?’
‘You are,’ his wife said. ‘There are thousands of them.’
‘Do you look at the stars?’ he asked Josh. ‘I’m sure you do. Where are you from again? I’ve forgetten.’
‘Warwickshire.’
‘Warwickshire,’ James said. He was silent for a few moments. ‘We were going to move to the countryside. Do you ever wish you still lived there?’
‘Oh, sometimes, I suppose. I haven’t thought about it too much. It’s one of those things that depends on work and I suppose who you fall in love with.’
‘You could could fall in love with a woman who loves the countryside and find a job there.’
‘Yes, perhaps.’
‘You could do all that in the beat of a drum,’ James said.
The road began to zigzag to the top of the hill. James was tired by the time Sarah turned the engine off. They sat together in the car as if they were waiting for a song to end on the radio, but there was no music. Sarah was thinking of the way the tripod would sink into the ground when they mounted the telescope. The end of it was small, in the darkness she might have to guide James’s head down towards it and listen to his little intakes of breath as he searched for the pin pricks of light. She was becoming more and more nervous. She would manage somehow.
‘I remember my grandfather,’ James said. ‘He wanted to tell me things as he lost his sight, things he had seen when he was young. My grandmother, the day he met her in a red dress at his friends’ wedding, her poise. How he fell in love with the pool of shadow between her collar bone and her neck. How she danced, so freely, wrong, almost for all the light and shadows of the angles of her body. He went on like this for months before there was complete darkness. He told me a story about a man who was shot in the back of the head when he worked as a doorman in East London. Executed by a gang. The man was ordered to kneel on the street outside the club. The blood ran thicker and faster from his head then he thought it would. It was what the films try and show, he was holding my wist when he said that, he wanted me to know that seeing it for real was nothing like the TV.’
Sarah and Josh said nothing, waiting for James to go on.
‘I think we should go and look at the stars now,’ James said. It was dark. He undid his seatbelt. ‘I’m OK,’ he told his wife. ‘Let me get out of the car myself.’
Josh and Sarah paused for a moment and watched James feel his way out before they got out. Then they went to the boot to collect the telescope.
‘You two go and I’ll stay in the car,’ Josh whispered.
‘I want you to come with me,’ Sarah said. He shook his head.
‘It doesn’t feel right.’
James leant against the bonnet with his head back, his broken eyes fixed on the sky. Sarah and Josh stood at the open boot and she held the strap of the oblong bulk in the air in front of him.
‘Please, you have to. He is not going to be able to see them tonight and I don’t want to be alone with him then.’ There was silence. Neither of them moved. ‘Josh.’
‘Do you know what you are doing?’
‘Of course I do.’
He took the bag. Sarah and James walked towards the path which led to the very top of the hill, Josh following behind.
The track was made of chalky white stone, a purpose-built clean path to the top which they had taken dozens of times. The first summer Sarah lived with James, when she was nineteen, they bought craft beer sold in brightly labelled bottles from Frankie’s Van in the car park, and walked to the top of the hill to sit and look at the stars. It was delicious beer. She thought it tasted crimson. They had gone back every summer for years. Sarah had kept some bottles and placed them on top of the kitchen cabinets. She linked arms with James and climbed.
There it was, through the shadowy moon soaked canopy of trees, the clearing at the top. There was the cylinder of stone topped with a big metal compass. Sarah tried to think of a way not to go on. Maybe she could say she was sick, the telescope could break somehow, or perhaps that the sky could become cloudy.
She looked back to check Josh was following with the bag. She called to him to hurry up and walk with them. His feet crunched on the gravel as he trotted forward. When he arrived at James’s side there was silence again. Sarah felt herself rippling with the fear of havng to face something from which she had no hope of escaping. She felt weightless. She was barely able to hold James’s arm.
James had prepared himself. He had put on his favourite shirt which he had bought along with a pair of triangular blue cufflinks, and had now folded half way up his forearms. It would be the shirt he was wearing the first day he couldn’t see the stars. He had made an effort to commit to being attentive to his clothes and appearance once his sight began to deteriorate this time. His grandfather, once blind, relied on the kindness and intimacy of others to dress him in the clothes he had once selected. James held close the jarring memory of an unseen, uncoloured world announced on a jumper hanging over trousers that no longer knitted the man he knew together in the right way.
When she had set up the telescope, Sarah stood as if waiting for James to prove he was ready. He turned his head towards her without seeing. It was dark and he was experiencing blindness. He felt his stomach turn. The blood drained from his face.
‘Well, sweetheart,’ he said. Sarah tried to reply. She took a deep breath and bent to clutch the lens. He was perched against the stone cylinder, his arms crossed. ‘Shall we?’ he said.
‘Wait, sorry, it’s just not focussing,’ she said slowly. She gripped the telescope. She was going to lie; she had to keep him from looking. Josh was sitting a little way away, his arms outstretched behind him and his legs straight and crossed in front. He appeared to want nothing to do with the moment. Loneliness crept over her. She played with the focus of the telescope, capturing the stars sharply and then letting them smudge.
Finally, she pulled Orion’s Belt into focus and went to James and put her arm around his shoulder.
‘Sarah,’ he said.
‘Yes?’
‘I know I have to see nothing tonight to believe this.’ He reached to take her hand which was resting on his shoulder. Somehow it frightened her, as if his touch held the guarantee she would go with him into blackness. ‘You know, I have never seen a woman as beautiful as you, a woman who moves like you, moves so fully. It sounds soppy, I know.’
‘James,’ she said in a sharp whisper
‘Do you love me?’ Sarah’s stomach churned in despair.
‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’
‘Well mind yourself as we do all this.’
‘I will.’
Sarah was beautiful. Her small breasts and bony body seemed even more present once she was clothed. He let go of her hand and pulled her body towards him so it faced his. He kissed her. For a moment he was not afraid. They would be as they had once been. He slid his hands down her arms and pressed his fingers into her palms.
‘Show me the telescope,’ he said. They bent down together. ‘Do you remember when you were working in the gallery and we met that first time? I knew I would marry you right away. I saw something in your eyes, and the curve of your back. I felt so lucky, Sarah.’
She was barely breathing. He waited but she didn’t say anything. She watched him at the eye of the telescope –he had done it so many times before. She heard a little intake of breath. One hand now gripped the dial to focus the lens. She had met him when he was thirty-five and he believed, so she believed, he was the only person who could love her fully. Now she had led him to a hill to confirm his world was vanishing. Finally, James spoke.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’ Sarah had no words to comfort him. She knew what was coming. ‘I need to be alone for a moment, sweetheart,’ he said.
She rubbed his back for a moment. Above an inexplicable expanse of stars filled the night. She gazed at them for a few seconds, then turned towards Josh sitting motionless on the grass. He looked at her as she approached.
‘I thought you might have gone back to the car,’ she said.
‘I didn’t want to move.’
‘He can’t see them,’ she said and sat down.
‘Did he really want me here?’ he said.
‘Baby, he was the one who asked for you.’
‘I doubt that Sarah.’ Josh stood up.
‘Seriously. Sit, he wants to be alone for a moment,’ Sarah said.
‘It just doesn’t feel right.’
‘Why? Do you not love me anymore?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Don’t do this. Wait. Wait until we come down off the hill,’ Sarah said. Josh stepped back. She was desperate. ‘Go down to the car,’ she said.
‘No, I’m all right.’
‘Go, and we’ll meet you there.’ She looked back and saw James lying down on the ground, his face to the sky. She moved towards Josh. ‘Josh?’
‘Yes.’
‘I need you.’
‘I shouldn’t have come up here,’ he said. Sarah held his face, and searched for his eyes with hers. ‘Stop it,’ he said.
‘Please,’ she moved her hand down below his belt, searching for him, slowly pushing and rubbing her hand across his jeans. He was becoming hard. He looked over to see the dark outline of James on his back, looking upwards.
‘Stop Sarah.’
‘He’ll lie there for ages, Josh. He does it every time we are here now. He wants me to be over here with you. That is why he asked you, he wants me to have company. Come to the trees.’
She held his hand and led him across to the edge of the trees. He followed, his mouth dry. He wanted to turn her around, to stop her, knock her to the ground even, but moonlight flashed across her bare arms and she moved in complete harmony with the pulses of blood rushing to the core of him.
They kissed against a sprawling fatherly oak. They shifted their clothes enough, she gripped him tightly around the neck, her legs around his waist and they pushed themselves into each other. Sarah whispered things to Josh in rhythms that matched their bodies. Josh closed his eyes tightly, overwhelmed by her.
Sarah did not hear the sound of James approaching. It was the crack of a twig, then slowly another. Josh froze as a silhouette came waveringly into view. James had nothing to hold on to, and his body was bent slightly, his hands poised at his side like the first man to walk.
‘Sarah?’ he said.
‘James?’ she said, her eyes wide with terror and fixed on Josh.
She slid herself from him, holding her breath. They were hidden behind the oak.
‘Are you ok?’ she asked, stupidly.
‘No, the world is disappearing.’
‘Oh God,’ Sarah murmured. He stood like a ghost, waiting for her to come. He didn’t seem to care about Josh. Sarah went to him and hugged him, overcome with terror.
‘I thought it would just be a fact confirmed tonight,’ he said bitterly and began to cry. ‘But it is useless, it is as if I am learning all this for the first time. As if I never knew. I am so scared; it all feels so wrong.’
‘We knew it would feel like this, James. We knew it was not just about accepting the notion of the thing.’
‘I can’t see, I can’t see.’ James repeated this as Sarah held him. He heard a crack from movement in the trees. Then, to Josh, he said bitterly, ‘You’re still up here?’
‘I am going down now,’ Josh said.
‘We knew it would be hard,’ Sarah said again to James.
‘I never want to come out here again,’ James’s sobs held something for Josh too.
‘I am so sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She could think of nothing more to say. Josh held his belt together with his hand, to stop the clink of the metal fastening echoing across the night. He walked past them, towards the car.
‘I don’t know how to let you have that Sarah,’ James said. ‘I thought I could do it, but I can’t, there is no light and there is no shadow. There is nothing if you are not completely mine. It is as if I am dead already.’
Sarah clung to him as he withdrew his permission to let her love Josh and a soft breeze sent a shiver across her skin.