The author Hilary Mantel once described the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, as being “a plastic princess with dead eyes”. Now, the duchess is not one of us (we infiltrated the royal family by marrying in over 30 years ago) but we were drawn to the comment about dead eyes. We get that a lot. There is a fascination about our eyes and if memory serves, they draw the most comments about us physically that I can recall. I have variously had mine described as “Cold and dead, like a shark’s”, “like pieces of coal”, “green and envious”, “possessing that cold, chilling stare” and “lifeless”. An ex-girlfriend, Kate, would tell me that she loved my eyes. This was when I was seducing her. She explained that whenever she looked into them she saw herself reflected back and she loved this because she knew that she was very much “in my eye”. Interestingly enough, eight months later she referred to this reflection as “I look into your eyes and see nothing there, just my reflection looking back at me.” I always disliked her contradictory behaviour and failure to make her mind up.
These comments set me thinking as I am a reflective kind of fellow. As I explained in ‘Falling into Place’ I have learned how to create a mask of feigned emotion but it would appear that the one part of my face which was letting down the façade was my eyes. For some reason, no matter how hard I studied the emotions and reactions of others, this just did not happen with my eyes. As you know, I like to know the answers to everything and I did some reading around and observed that repeated people refer to the eyes as windows into the soul. There lay the answer to my conundrum; the soul and the eyes are inextricably linked. The absence of soul was being reflected in the deadening of my eyes. This required immediate attention and rectification. I now wear sunglasses a lot, even indoors.
