If she’d had the opportunity to advise him now, Patricia would not begin with the problem of his eyes. She would castigate him first for giving up his bright study upstairs next to the living room. Though he did, indeed, miss it when the November fogs swirled in off the water low and muffled the base of the house while the upper floors were still in a watery sunlight, he didn’t regret his decision. He would have put to her his suspicion that, though Dr Thomlin had been the best eye man in town, he was David’s age, and there must be younger men with more up-to-date training. And she would answer, as she had before, that the good younger men had six months’ waiting lists because they thought too well of themselves to set aside more than a couple of hours a week for refractions.

So it was that David found himself back in Thomlin’s office, nervously critical of the five-year-old magazines and the cracked vinyl on the chairs. Thomlin had lost his wife, too, some time back, and perhaps she had been the one who looked after such things. There was no receptionist on duty. Thomlin himself showed the previous patient out. David noticed how slowly the doctor moved with an old man’s shuffle.

‘Well, David,’ he said without enthusiasm. ‘Come in.’

David tried with a nearly poetic accuracy of description to make his complaints vivid enough, fresh enough to catch Thomlin’s interest.

‘Same old eyes, eh?’ Thomlin said.

‘Worse,’ David replied.

‘We’ll have a look.’

‘I can’t read directions on medicine bottles without taking my glasses off. My granddaughter asked me why I had to smell the label. Even newsprint defeats me—not that I want to read a paper, but I ought to be able to.’

Thomlin put him through the tests he had taken so many times before, finally handing him a paragraph in small print which David read out with the fake interest of the news reporter he had been.

‘There’s really nothing the matter, David,’ Thomlin said.

‘How can that be when I can’t read?’

‘The scientific answer is that you can read. You just have,’ Thomlin said. ‘A lot of people your age couldn’t read that without a magnifying glass, which, by the way, might help for medicine bottles.’

David left the office, humiliated and enraged. A magnifying glass! It was like being told to get an ear trumpet, for god’s sake! And there was no one to bluster home to who wouldn’t think him as silly an old fool as he thought Thomlin was.

When Mary called to him from the kitchen to ask what the doctor had said, David refrained from any reply but, ‘He says they’re much the same.’

‘Maybe you need a better reading light,’ she suggested.