She managed to find a bench nearby and sat quietly waiting to see what would happen next. A revelation of faith? It seemed unlikely. If she had gone completely blind she would have called out for help, but the loss of only one eye didn’t seem cause enough to involve complete strangers. (“That’s ridiculous,” Millie said when she told her. “I would have been screeching my head off.” But Nancy was not Millie.) After ten minutes or so of sitting on the bench in a kind of quiet contemplation, the blackout blind lifted—as quickly and mysteriously as it had fallen—and the sight in her eye returned.
“Nerves scrambled or something,” she said to the consultant when she eventually arrived at the hospital. “I suppose it was jolly good luck I wasn’t driving, or cycling for that matter.” She found herself chatty with relief, the crisis past, the biblical disaster averted. “Well,” the consultant said, “let’s get you checked out thoroughly anyway, shall we?” He was neither youthful nor maternal nor avuncular and had very little to say on the subject of migraines.
Oh, and then it all just went on so quickly, like some awful express train that wouldn’t stop. They did more tests, and X-rays. They were vague with her, unsure about what they were seeing, they said. She was married, wasn’t she? Why didn’t she bring her husband along to the next appointment? “Not if they don’t give me a diagnosis,” she said to Bea on the phone. “They’re being cagey with me for no good reason.” She knew what happened with bad cases. They told spouses, siblings, even friends, anyone but the patient, so that they could “go on living a normal life.” She’d known a WREN at Bletchley Park—Barbara Thoms—down-to-earth type, one of the cogs in the wheel. The many wheels. Nancy had been a bigger wheel, a decoder, one of the boys. Normally she wouldn’t have had much to do with a lowly cog but they had both been county netball players, had tried, and failed, to get a team going at Bletchley. (Nancy had been a Half Blue at Cambridge.) Nancy had had her own table by the end of the war, was deputy head of the hut. She had known them all—Turing, Tony Kendrick, Peter Twinn. She had loved that world, occluded, secretive, self-sufficient, but she had always understood that it was temporary, that “normal service would be resumed.” Would have to be resumed.
Poor Barbara developed a cancer, “very rapid, incurable.” A woman’s cancer, too embarrassing for her less down-to-earth mother to go into detail over. Mrs. Thoms had told someone Barbara worked with and pretty soon all the girls in Barbara’s section knew. Everyone except for Barbara. They were sworn to secrecy by Mrs. Thoms because that was what her doctors had advised, “so as not to cast a shadow over what’s left of her life,” she explained to them. The poor girl kept on working until she couldn’t go on any longer and then went home, to die, still in ignorance, still waiting in hope to be cured.
She had almost forgotten about Barbara when Mrs. Thoms wrote and said she was dead and buried. “A quiet funeral. She never knew what was wrong, that was a comfort.” Pah! Nancy thought. If she had some horrible disease that was going to kill her she didn’t want to be kept in the dark, she wanted to know. In fact she would have it the other way round—she would know and her nearest and dearest wouldn’t. Why should Teddy and Viola live beneath the “shadow”?
“You need to see someone in Harley Street,” Bea said to her. “I’ve still got a few connections in the medical world.” Bea had been married to a surgeon after the war but it hadn’t lasted (“I don’t think I’m cut out for marriage”). “I’ll find out who’s best in the field, someone who won’t mess you about. But you should tell Teddy, Nancy.”
“I shall, I promise.”
She had nearly died when she gave birth to Viola and had felt somehow that she was “proofed” against disaster. Perhaps that was why it had taken her so long to chase this thing down. And all the time it was chasing her. And her mind, of all things. If only it could have been a breast, an arm, an eye. Even if it had meant an early death, at least she would have been able to keep her mind to the end. Sometimes, when she found herself mired in the twin duties of marriage and motherhood, she thought how her life had been compromised by love. Viola coming out of the womb on a wave of anger, Teddy always putting on a cheerful front, pretending that he wasn’t brooding inside.