Certain words cleave to our brain, certain phrases. Perhaps a book emerges from just one phrase. ‘Myopic vision,’ said Mr. Jarvis, ‘it’s catching.’ Myopic vision is catching, it sounds true. Short-sightedness, it’s everywhere. You can’t look further than the end of your nose. My grandmother used to say that, and it’s true; human beings can’t see much beyond themselves. We know that’s true because always there’s a fight on to look beyond, to see.
Someone explained this to me yesterday, this predicament of ours never to see, and I listened because what she said was sounding true to me: that her peculiar symptoms were what everyone experienced as they went about their daily lives, because we are the blueprint for all reality. What we experience everyone must experience too. It’s how humans think. Her symptoms were not usual, they were unusual. Losing your sight in first one eye and then the other is not usual.
My character, Miss Cull, fears this maybe so. So she makes a trip to the chemist to get her glasses fixed in the hope…..in the hope…..that Mr. Jarvis will have something sensible to say about the whole business of seeing. Her lenses, her glasses, Mr. Jarvis, are you listening? Miss Cull would like to be seen. She trusts Mr. Jarvis; he comes with a certain sort of local quackery, you might say natural authority, local authority. Some would, my mother might, but perhaps not directly so – not about a man -- unless he was the right sort. We all carry prejudice. Miss Cull and Mr. Jarvis are riddled with prejudice: they prefer things the old ways, their way. Nothing should change they say, and yet everything does, all the time. Children find that difficult, certain adults too, myopic vision is catching. Mr. Jarvis and Miss Cull have that in common.
All stories begin with a pair, and all sorties too. Mr. Jarvis and Miss Cull come together as a very unlikely couple. But that is my point: they must come together. One must poke and prod the other. Mr. Jarvis will bring Miss Cull out of herself. It’s the beginning of ‘an interesting relationship’ as my other mother would say. Implausible, you say, that those two would pair off. But they do, they do, and we follow them – all the way to France – because their pairing begins as a bit of an experiment just to see what will happen. Who will get tired of whom first? After a while, relationships run out of fuel, so bring them to a crisis. Hold your nerve. Turn Mr. Jarvis into someone you could never imagine him being, because that is real life, we have all seen that unfold. The implausibility of human nature when removed from familiar contexts, those props aiding and abetting her routines.
Mr. Jarvis likes to place his bet every Saturday morning. He’s been doing that for years. Now he has to place his bet elsewhere, and so must I – the writer – because nothing is ever made without risk. Nothing. For the truth is that when I begin to write I have no idea where I’m heading, only that I have this irresistible desire to pair off two implausible specimens. Like Miranda and Caliban on Shakespeare’s lonely island, it is a rough kind of magic. Where is the magician? Like Beauty and the Beast, like the sworn bachelor and the steadfast spinster dancing around each other at the chemist over a pair of broken glasses. I watch them dance, and across the dusty counter covered with bottles of scent, with cough sweets and boxes of tissues, their courting begins. Like the Princess and the frog, it is a most unlikely match: until you see what lies beneath the white overall, the pair of gloves she pulls from her trembling hands and spreads out to touch whatever it is she cannot yet see.