The Other Side of You (10 page)

‘Well, it’s a wise child that knows its own parent,’ I agreed, and maybe because I felt I had been a little pompous, or maybe because of the reference to children which Olivia and I had never had, and noticing that time was getting on I excused myself in order to ring home.

I wasn’t surprised to get no answer and I left a message to say that I’d be back late. I was careful how I phrased the words, conscious they were being overheard, which didn’t prevent my patient asking when I returned to my chair, ‘Shouldn’t you be going? Haven’t you things to do?’

The very words she told me she had used to the absconding Thomas.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I shouldn’t be going anywhere.’ As I spoke I heard a new note of resolution in my voice. ‘And I’ve nothing I’d rather do than listen to you right now. That is, if you don’t mind?’

I
N THE AUTUMN AFTER THE YOUNG
C
RUIKSHANKS WERE PACKED
off to boarding schools, which, from my patient’s description, sounded to be of depressing mediocrity, an Italian cousin of her father’s died.

‘How did your parents react to your marriage, by the way?’

‘They were thrilled, particularly my mother. She thought I’d done very well for myself with Gerrards Cross.’

‘It’s alarming how often children marry to fulfil the parents’ fantasies for themselves.’

A legal complication, relating to Italian inheritance tax, made it expedient for one of the family to go to Rome. My patient, who had never before taken advantage of her Italian blood—any impulse having been crushed by an unhappy holiday in Rimini curtailed, at the mother’s insistence, after three days—volunteered to go in place of her father, whose health was beginning to trouble him and who was gratifyingly thankful for her offer.

‘That was brave of you.’

It was then, I think, that she must have mentioned her birthday and her sense of somehow starting a new term. ‘I felt the children had finally gone. I needed, I don’t know, something
—I’d been such an ineffectual mother.’

‘It’s hard to be effectual on your own.’

Being unused to travel, and with a sense of nervous anticipation, she arrived early at Heathrow and, having checked in and acquired her seat, was hesitating over whether to go through to the departure lounge or to fritter time in the airport shops.

It was the hands she saw first. The owner of the hands was crouched, with his back to her, at the end of the check-in line, adjusting the strap round his suitcase. By the time he stood up and turned round her knocking heart had recognised him.

‘Good Lord,’ Thomas said, pushing his glasses up his nose in a gesture which she realised had never left her mind. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m on my way to Rome.’

It was fifteen years, eight months and three days since she had last seen him.

‘Good God, so am I. What flight?’

It was the same flight.

‘Stay where you are,’ Thomas said. ‘No, don’t stay where you are. Come over here while I check in. Don’t dare to disappear!’

At the counter, he magisterially changed her seat so they could sit together. ‘I was scared sick,’ she told me, ‘that my longing to sit with him was so transparent it would frighten him away.’

Dazed, trying not to count her luck, praying that Neil or Primrose would not suddenly materialise, like malign figures in a fairy tale, and whisk her back to Gerrards Cross, she moved through to the departure lounge where he steered her towards a café and ordered double rations of toast and coffee.

‘I have to drink lashings of coffee,’ Thomas explained, ‘or I
shall fall asleep for a hundred years and a thorn hedge will grow round me and then only a kiss from a beautiful woman will wake me. I’ve been up all night looking for my passport. It’s always in my travel bag and then suddenly it wasn’t. Lucky I checked before I left. Does that happen to you? Do you like coffee, I forget? Have some more.’

‘I don’t think you could have known whether I like coffee or not. I’ve never lost my passport, but I don’t travel much.’

‘I always thought of you as a sensible girl,’ Thomas said. It wasn’t clear if he was referring to the travel, the coffee or the passport. ‘Didn’t we drink coffee at Bainbridge’s that day?’

‘I remember you made me an omelette.’

Her heart which had always rested quietly under her breastbone was burning through her chest.

‘I was going to make you a cheese soufflé the next time.

‘I’d have liked that.’

‘I would have liked it too,’ Thomas said. ‘I’d better pay the bill. Look, it says on the screen we’re boarding. They’re bound to be lying but people bag all the overhead locker room if you don’t get in first.’

On the plane, he organised her luggage—‘Specs? Oh, that’s too unfair, don’t tell me you don’t need them yet. Why are you going to Rome, as if you need a reason?’

She explained about the mission for her father.

‘Of course, you’re half Italian, aren’t you? I’ve forgotten your name.’

She began to say ‘Eliz—’ but he interrupted.

‘Don’t be absurd, naturally I know you’re “Elizabeth”. The other one.’

‘It was Bonelli but it’s Cruikshank now.’

‘So there’s a Mr Cruikshank? Who is he?’

‘Someone I met soon after we met.’

‘Tell me all about him.’ She’d forgotten his trick of putting his head on one side. ‘Do you know, the Indians believed that the eyes of twin souls are an identical width apart?’ He had taken his glasses off and was looking at her with his bright brown eyes.

‘The American Indians?’ was all she could manage.

‘The Eastern ones. It was a Vedic belief. The eyes are the entrance to the soul so only kindred spirits can gain access’.

They spent the flight absorbed in the kind of conversation she had not dared to risk rehearsing since the brief but splendid afternoon they had spent, her in her neighbour’s dressing gown. It was as if a river which had gone underground had as abruptly reissued with a silent roar. The flow was rolling on, apparently uninterrupted, from their first encounter, though neither broached the subject of the unexplained loss of contact. As they ate their airline meal—‘Isn’t it like hospital food? We need more wine!’—the mystery must have hovered between them, enlivening, with its possibilities, the predictable lunch and the unspectacular wine.

When, early in the afternoon, they arrived at Rome and there was some hitch with the baggage, she stood among the impatient bodies of the other passengers—worrying volubly over their bags—praying that hers, and his, had been stolen, or left behind at Heathrow, or gone to Helsinki or, better still, to Hell, anything to postpone the closing-off of this unlooked-for loophole in time. But his shabby case, with the buckled strap, arrived on the conveyor belt, which rolled relentlessly past them like a parody
of time, and soon after her own, less venerable, and altogether ordinary, travel bag arrived and he carried both to the station as all the luggage trolleys had been commandeered.

They took the train to Trastevere and then there was the matter of the taxi.

‘We’ll go to your hotel first and then I’ll know where to find you,’ Thomas said. ‘What time shall I come?’

‘When?’

‘When? Tonight. Or this afternoon. I have to see someone immediately but, no, look, take a taxi, would you, and come to mine? Come as soon as you can after five and we’ll be in time to walk on the Palatine and catch the view.’ He wrote the name and number of his hotel on the label of her suitcase.

Having bathed and, in high agitation, changed her clothes several times—nothing that she’d brought to wear being anywhere up to the mark—she took a taxi to his hotel, where she stood outside to recover herself before walking into the lobby, where it took a further five minutes of forcing her courage to ask the receptionist to ring to say she was there.

When Thomas came towards her across the marble floor it was as if a lift was crashing down inside her, leaving her lips so stiff and bloodless that it was hard to mouth the polite formula she eventually found to greet him with.

‘This is nicer than my hotel.’

‘Change then and come here.’

It was a close evening, and they walked past the hideous Victor Emmanuel monument and climbed Michelangelo’s noble steps to the Capitoline Hill, where the copy of the statue of the stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius sat, in fine bronze sandals, astride
his fine bronze horse. And then Thomas steered her round by the Tarpeian rock, and down the stony Via di Consolazione, named to console those whose fate was to be thrown from the eponymous rock.

‘I hope they died quickly,’ she said. ‘It looks a little tame to be sure of an instant death.’

At the top of the Palatine Hill they surveyed the ancient Forum: the austere, ruined arches of the mighty basilica of Constantine and Maximilius, before which St Paul might have preached; the semicircular remnants of the Temple of the Vestal Virgins, Rome’s most nubile debutantes; the elaborately decorated arches, of Septimius Severus at one entrance to the site and, at the other, of Titus, on which, he told her, the sack of the Temple in Jerusalem is celebrated in the triumphal sporting of the Jewish menorah.

Beyond all this, he pointed out a dazzling vista of light and shadow, tall
campaniles
, greening cupolas, imperious
palazzi
, dominated by St Peter’s supremely self-confident dome. ‘How do you feel?’

‘Lucky to be here.’

‘Lucky me to be the one to show it to you first.’

Descending through terraces of oleander and pale blue plumbago, and old stone basins gently overflowing water, he led her back out of the Forum and through little squares and cobbled streets and arches till they landed up in the Campo de’ Fiori, where the only flowers now to be found are on the stalls of the daily market held there.

A gang of cleaners were engaged in dispatching petals, leaves, rotting figs, wasp-infested grapes, crushed walnut shells, sweet
papers and sluicing the square of its patina of fish scales, but there was still a solitary flower seller, whose stall was pitched at the feet of the statue of the luckless Bruno, put to death by the Inquisition, Thomas explained, hustled, his tongue in a gag, under cover of darkness and burned on the site of his statue at a hastily erected stake, for refusing to deny his refutation of Catholic dogma.

From the lone flower seller they bought yellow roses and laid them at the base of the dark-cowled effigy, in memory of the burned man; and close by was a congenial-looking
osteria
, where they ate lamb cooked with artichokes and strawberries steeped in white wine.

Walking back, the sky turned indigo and crackled and then growled. ‘Jove’s throwing things,’ Thomas said. ‘I expect he’s committed a marital indiscretion and Juno’s in a rage.’

The rain came, first in outsize drops, then, suddenly, drenchingly, and they ran along shining, perilous cobbles to his hotel where in the vestibule he touched her shoulder and said, with equal lightness, ‘You’ll stay, won’t you? It’s better.’

In the stuffy hotel bathroom she ran water into the washbasin, dipped her hands and splashed her face, took off all her clothes, very fast, dropping them on to the floor, to get it over with, and when she walked into the bedroom Thomas had taken his off too, and they stood looking at each other, saying nothing, with her now so faint that she was afraid to move.

But he must have moved, for suddenly the space between them had vanished and he said, ‘Look, our bodies fit. I knew they did.’

Afterwards, fused from a frantic, fervent, mutual exchange,
which seemed to reach right down and through to the level of the molecular, wet, from sweat and rain, and wrung out and beached up, at last, on the hard foreign mattress in grateful, glad exhaustion, they made the promises of children, playing, as if they will play for ever, in some sequestered garden, where the shadows are lengthening and elsewhere, in a parallel universe, the adult world is preparing to summon them back inside:

‘Don’t let me go again.’

‘I’m never going to let you go.’

‘I don’t ever want you to let me go.’

‘That’s settled then.’

Piteous words, as I heard them in my wintry Brighton consulting room, her face, the three or so feet away from mine, as pale and as distant as the moon. Their vows, repeated now, in her flat tone, conveyed, as plainly as if she had spelled it out in pokerwork, the stark fact that nothing is ever settled between two human souls, for nothing is or can be settled until we are finally done and gone.

But lovers are children; and I suppose that when you feel you have made true love you believe you’ve found a back door into eternity and cannot afford the notion that it may not be open to you on your return.

I
T WASN’T UNTIL THE FOLLOWING MORNING THAT SHE RISKED
raising any query over his unexplained disappearance, for even after a night of further feverishly joyous engagement she told me she was reluctant to open her eyes lest, for a second time, she find herself abandoned.

But then a foot found hers and in her ear she heard a reassuring snore.

‘You didn’t mind the snoring?’ Olivia always poked me in the back when I’d drunk too much and snored as a consequence.

‘I found it comforting. Like sleeping with a long-backed pig.’

‘And was his explanation equally reassuring?’

‘It was upsetting. But it clarified everything.’

On the evening he had left her, he explained as they sat in bed—knees propped congenially together, drinking coffee and eating croissants—he was due to meet a colleague, a Milanese art historian, whose visits to London were few, which was why, he took pains to say, he had not forgone the meeting for the greater pleasure of her continued company. He met the colleague and they discussed their shared area of research, but towards the evening he began to feel seedy, as if, he said, he was on the point
of coming down with a nasty flu. He made his apologies to his colleague, cancelled their dinner, caught an early train back to Oxford, walked home from the station and retired to bed feeling pretty rough.

The following morning he said he felt so ropy he stayed in bed. His last distinct memory was feeling diabolically shaky in the bathroom, finding himself unequal to his usual shower and wondering if he could manage to pee without keeling over.

The next thing he was conscious of was a pain in his arm as a nurse in the hospital was changing the drip.

‘Septicaemia?’ I hazarded.

‘Nearly fatal. He was found, thank God, by a friend who was dropping off a book.’

‘So he must have been out of action for a while?’ Septicaemia’s a bummer. More young men died of it in the First World War than were ever done in by enemy fire.

‘Weeks in hospital. And after that he was as weak as a kitten and not up to much. And when he was feeling a bit more like himself and rang me…’

‘The bird had flown?’

‘We worked out he must have rung about ten days after I finally left.’

‘And you left no number?’

‘Who was going to ring me? I couldn’t live with the anxiety of not hearing from him a second longer,’ she bleakly declared.

‘What fucking awful luck!’ I allowed myself. On the whole, I refrained from swearing and never with patients.

‘Awful,’ she echoed bleakly. ‘And you see, all the time Thomas
was mortally ill, instead of being with him, and being there to look after him, I was with Neil…’

I did see. It was an outrageous snub of fate.

‘And Thomas, what did he make of this?’

‘He thought what I’d thought, that I couldn’t have been so interested in him after all,’ she almost wailed.

‘But he tried, at least? He tried to find you?’ I hoped almost savagely that he had.

‘He did, he was much more determined than I was. But as I told you, I had closed down that part of my life completely. He even rang Bainbridge in Australia, but of course Bainbridge didn’t know where I was either, and in the end he gave up. We’d only met that once.’

‘But you’d made an impression.’ Since she’d embarked on her story, she was informed by quite a different spirit. I could feel for myself how their encounter might have stayed in Thomas’s mind.

‘Apparently.’

‘So what had happened to Thomas all this while?’

‘He’d married too. In fact, he married one of the doctors from the John Radcliffe, whom he met while he was ill. But he wanted children and his wife didn’t. I gathered she was very dedicated to her career. He said in the end it seemed pointless being together, and they parted, though they remained friends.’

‘So he was free when you met again?’

‘He was free,’ she agreed.

‘And you found you got on as well out of bed as in?’

‘Oh, it wasn’t just sex!’ she dismissed the suggestion with scorn.
‘If
he’d been paralysed I would have minded, of course, for his sake, but nothing essential would have been lost. I loved his
body—but that wasn’t the point. It was as if we knew each other from way back, always, I mean really knew, not just the surface pleasantries, the deep down things that no one could know because you don’t know them yourself, until you meet someone who knows them for you. It was the effortless knowing and being known that was so extraordinarily—’ She halted, searching.

‘Comforting? Like the pig?’

‘Comforting, yes, but also—’ She looked around as if my room might hold the clue for the word she wanted.

‘What is that egg? I mean, what bird?’

‘I was told it was a thrush’s.
And thrush / Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring / The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing.
’

‘Who is that?’

‘Hopkins.’

‘I like the lightnings.’

‘Yes. Poor Hopkins.’

‘Why “poor”?’

‘He thought sex was wrong, or his own sort was.’

‘Poor Hopkins,’ she agreed.

When I left Bar, I was too cowardly to tell her what I was doing, so I did what cowards do, I wrote her a letter, the recollection of which makes me go red with shame. In it I suggested—so original was my insight!—that I was doing her a favour, and that she would be better off without me. It’s a bad thing to do, that: deny the truth of someone’s feelings because we find them inconvenient.

Bar sent me the egg—which we’d found in an abandoned nest in the pear tree in her garden, the weekend when I half
proposed to her, and she, half jokingly, as I excused it to myself later, accepted. She sent the egg in a box and within the swathe of protective tissue and cotton wool there was a note:
Don’t teach your granny to suck these!

‘The thing was,’—she was gently rocking the egg in her hand—‘it all seemed so uncomplicated.’

‘Human associations generally tend to be complicated.’

‘With us it wasn’t. It was simple. That’s what I found so hard to believe. It was the straightforwardness which was the mystery. I don’t mean it was dull.’

She laughed, and again I saw the dancing moon. ‘We were passionate, passionate, intensely so in Rome, but what I took from it was this sense of being utterly and unquestionably known. And utterly and unquestioningly liked for it.’

‘To be both thoroughly known and thoroughly liked for it would be a tremendous allure.’ I was conscious of a touch of envy.

‘Have a bath,’ Thomas said, when they had finished breakfast and he had concluded his explanation, ‘and I’ll bring you another cup of coffee and talk to you and then we’ll go and visit the most perfect secular building in the world.’

On the way, they passed Bernini’s little elephant valiantly balancing an ancient Egyptian obelisk on its back.

‘Why does it have acorns on its cope?’ she asked.

‘You know, I don’t know,’ Thomas said. ‘Maybe because oaks are as strong as elephants.’

He led her round to the back of the Pantheon and pointed out the remnants of the marble facing and the dolphins and the scallop shells in the few extant fragments of the frieze.

There was a single remaining column. Peering up, she spotted something on a small roundel just above the capital. ‘Is that a snake?’

‘Clever person. Most people don’t spot it.’

They walked back past the elephant and round to the entrance where a man in a dirty blue frock coat and a powdered periwig tried, unsuccessfully, to sell them tickets for a performance of
The Barber of Seville.
‘Did you know, Rossini used to compose in bed by an open window so he could lie down and look at the sky while he transcribed the music in his mind? He was so lazy that when some sheets of a score blew away, rather than trouble to get out of bed to retrieve them he wrote a whole new section.’

Preoccupied, she wasn’t really attending. ‘Do you think it’s an omen?’

‘The snake?’ He always seemed to know what she meant.

‘Yes.’

‘A snake in our paradise?’ Better still, he never pretended not to know.

‘Yes.’

‘I had a snake once. A grass snake called Doris. I found her at my grandmother’s, where I used to be sent in the holidays, and I kept her one summer in a tank in my room there—nobody noticed: no one ever noticed what I did, which had advantages—till I saw for myself it was cruel and freed her. I met her quite often afterwards, by the greenhouse. For the Greeks and the Romans, snakes were symbols of healing. It depends how you want to read it, Elizabeth Cruiksnake.’

‘And was the Pantheon the most perfect building, did you think?’ I asked.

‘It might have been the floor of heaven that morning with the discs and squares of different coloured marble shining in the rain.’

‘Look,’ Thomas had said, gesturing upwards.

There were few others there as with the threat of further heavy rain the majority of sightseers were cautiously waiting to judge the likely course of the weather before venturing outside. Her eye followed the arc of his hand to the singular hole in the great domed ceiling, through which the sun was posting a tremulous pole of pale light on to the yellow marble below.

‘What is it?’

‘The oculus. It’s what gives the effect of diffused radiance.’

‘And lets the rain in?’

‘That’s its peculiar beauty. I was here once when it was snowing.’ He fluttered his fingers and she could see the slow, dizzy descent of flakes. ‘The ceiling isn’t as the Romans would have seen it. It was gilded, but the Vatican nicked all the gold.’

‘I like it better bare.’

‘I certainly like you better that way.’ He squeezed her shoulder. ‘Are you cold?’

‘No. Just a goose walking over my grave. It’s…I can’t find the word.’

‘It’s the harmony. The proportions are impeccable: it can house a perfect sphere.’

She gazed up at the coffered ceiling, denuded of gold, enjoying the spareness. The Vatican were welcome to its plunder. ‘It’s tranquil,’ she said at last, feeling the luminance seep into her bones, as if, after all, all would be well.

‘Because it hasn’t a wrong note. It’s the geometry of grace.’

In my mind’s eye, I pictured the pair of them, fugitives from the cynical world, rejoicing in the unlooked-for security of their freshly discovered alliance as they wandered together, in comfortable companionship, through ruins and old churches, palaces and secluded gardens within the ancient lineaments of the hilled city that has looked on centuries of lovers, their passion, pain and ardour, and seen all vanish before its consummate indifference.

‘It was the most remarkable seven days of my life. I wrapped up my father’s business as soon as I could—with Thomas’s help it wasn’t too taxing—and then we did everything together. There was nothing we didn’t enjoy.’

‘You were fortunate,’ I suggested. ‘Rome is a numinous city but it has its sinister side.’

‘Yes. Thomas said you feel the presence of the ranks of the dead more than in any other city in the world.’

‘That’s where Keats gave up the ghost,’ Thomas said, pointing to an upper room. They were walking up the Spanish Steps to collect some of her things. It was raining again and they had had to buy flimsy umbrellas and bash their way through the stouter umbrella-bearing crowd. ‘We’ll go and pay our respects to his spirit and then we’ll go to the cemetery to pay our respects to his mortal remains. You’ll like it there: there’s a pyramid.’

‘A pyramid?’

‘An insignificant Roman had it built as one of those selfaggrandising memorials. When Keats realised he was dying, he sent Severn to do a recce of the cemetery and when he came back and told Keats there was a pyramid he was as pleased as Punch.’

‘Who was Severn?’

‘A devoted friend. A hearth companion. He was with Keats till the bitter end.’

‘What’s a hearth companion?’

‘Someone who sleeps beside you at the hearth and watches your back in a fight.’

There were almost as many cats as graves. Hand in hand, they walked the stone paths, through cypress and pine and bay and olive, and past two regal palms by Caius Cestius’s impressive pyramid, searching for Keats’s grave.

‘The other thing he liked about being buried here,’ Thomas said, when they had found the pine-cone-scattered grave—Keats side by side with the loyal Severn, like an old couple tucked up in a double bed—‘was the flowers. Violets were his favourites and Severn said that when he came back with the report of where his sick friend was bound, Keats was “joyed to learn that there were violets covering the graves” and said he almost seemed to feel them growing over him.’

Small piping birds, signalling that the rain had finally stopped, had begun to weave through the branches of the pines, and butterflies, like white pansies, were crookedly navigating the tilted gravestones.

‘His name isn’t even here,’ she said, thinking of the Roman nonentity’s pyramid and reading the epitaph:
Here lies One Whose Name was Writ in Water.
‘It looks too ordinary for such a great poet.’

‘Death is extremely ordinary. It happens to everyone, though people seem to forget this. It’s why you and I mustn’t waste time.’

‘D’you think we will?’

‘I don’t know, Elizabeth.’

His eyes had the serious look she wasn’t quite equal to and to change the subject she said, ‘Why was Keats in Rome?’

‘Supposedly for his health, to escape the perilous British fog. But maybe he came to die. He was the sort who, unconsciously, would have known where to die. It’s not a bad place to choose, Rome.’

‘We should have brought violets.’

‘We shall next time.’

‘You’ve not said why Thomas was in Rome.’

‘He was researching his subject, Caravaggio.’ So that was the connection. Silently I blessed Gus. ‘Thomas was possessed by Caravaggio. He talked to me about him all the time.’

It’s a feature of love that it can invade any subject. I intimated as much but she repudiated the implication.

‘It was never boring because Thomas so loved his work.’

‘And love is never boring?’

She swept aside my feeble squib of sarcasm. ‘Not if it’s real, and Thomas was a true enthusiast. It was an extraordinary education. We must have visited every available Caravaggio in Rome that week.’