The Other Side of You (12 page)

A fortnight later, allegedly visiting the same friend, for a trumped-up trip to the theatre, she tried to mollify. ‘We’re getting a live-in help. When I’ve got her properly organised I’ll break it to Neil.’

‘Nothing could ever be “properly organised” in Gerrards Cross. It’s a contradiction in terms. Who is this library friend, anyway? What on earth is that you’re wearing?’

‘What?’

‘The thing on your back?’

‘You mean my coat? Don’t you like it?’

‘Elizabeth, it makes you look like a dead sheep.’

‘Well, it’s sheep skin.’

‘For God’s sake, take it off.’

‘I was going to—what are you doing?’

‘I’m throwing it away.’

‘Why?’

‘Into the dustbin with it. There.’

‘Thomas, at least let me give it away to someone. That’s very wasteful.’

‘You can take it out tomorrow if you like. Tonight it stays there. I don’t want it in my house. I suspect Neil bought it you for Christmas, or your birthday—don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. He only bought it for you because he hoped it would make you look unattractive. Unhappily for him, that’s impossible. When is your birthday, incidentally? I think I should be told. I shall buy you something decent for that but I’ll buy it tomorrow to replace the dead sheep. Meantime, we aren’t going anywhere where you’ll need it, the bedroom’s perfectly warm.’

Over supper of kedgeree he enquired again about the friend she was supposed to be staying with.

‘Janet? I met her years ago in Camden. But I’ve given your number as hers, just in case they need to ring me. They won’t, but just in case.’

‘Darling person, do I adopt a permanent falsetto to answer the phone in case that bloody old bitch rings to check up on you? My other friends will be the tiniest bit surprised.’

‘Thomas, please. It won’t be long.’

‘Elizabeth, please, it will be. Also, what kind of man believes that his wife, after all this time, has suddenly taken to visiting a friend he has never heard of? I would knock you down rather than stomach such garbage. He doesn’t believe you. D’you know that? It’s another nonsense. I should have locked you in and forbidden you to leave here when we came back from Rome. You don’t know what’s good for you. No, correction. You do know what’s good for you and you don’t like it. You don’t like what’s good for you, that’s the trouble. You don’t trust it. You won’t come now.’

‘I will. Of course I will.’ She was crying. ‘Thomas, don’t be like that, I’m trying.’

‘You are trying. Extremely trying. I’ve never met anyone so trying. And I’m not being “like” anything except myself. I see things you don’t see. It was there from the beginning. You didn’t wait for me. You went and married him. You didn’t wait. I should have seen. I should have stopped you when we came back from Rome. I knew I should. I could have stopped you. I could have done. At least I’ve disposed of that terrible coat. Thank God the dustmen come first thing tomorrow. Good riddance! Ah, no, too bad! I’m not letting you out of bed now.’

I
HAVE WONDERED SOMETIMES IF COMPASSION ISN’T THE
most dangerous enemy of promise because it so readily wears the mask of virtue.
Com passion:
with passion. But it wasn’t any aspect of passion, I concluded, hearing Elizabeth Cruikshank’s story, which kept her from going to Thomas. It was something more insidious, which the golden blast of the stolen days in Rome had dislodged but failed finally to banish.

It reverberated in the dulled tone in which she reported the resumed monotony of life at Gerrards Cross, which had taken on for me, as well as her impatient lover, the desolating atmosphere of a polite suburb of Hell.

‘Why did you really stay on in Gerrards Cross?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Didn’t you believe Thomas?’ I wasn’t sure that I would have done.

‘I did believe him. But…’ She paused and stared again at her coffee. I felt some discomfort again over the clumsy mug and the lack of a gracious Italian cup. ‘I did believe him,’ she repeated, ‘but, it was more…I can’t explain.’

‘Was it that you couldn’t believe your luck?’
‘Yes,’ she sounded grateful. ‘That was it. I couldn’t believe my luck.’

I’ve thought more about luck since I had this conversation with Elizabeth Cruikshank. Luck is the heart’s genius but it is sustained by belief. And the head, so often at odds with the heart, mistrusts belief and has secret, and often violent, purposes of its own. What I was hearing in my patient’s account was something I recognised in myself: the faltering spirit that cunningly allies itself with decency.

‘You imagined you weren’t worth it?’

‘I wasn’t worth it.’

I let this pass. ‘And how did Thomas take your disbelief?’

‘I don’t know. I knew he minded. Though, now you ask, I don’t believe I believed either that he really minded. It’s a hard thing to explain.’

‘I think I understand. But he stayed?’

‘Yes.’ Her voice was a dry whisper. ‘For a while.’

After initial vociferous protests, she said, Thomas lapsed into a semi-permanent ironic note over what he referred to as ‘bearing the Gerrards Cross’. The postponement of the life they had conceived together in Rome continued. Primrose’s long arm of control was merely extended from her wheelchair and my patient developed the subterfuge necessary to visit the mews.

It’s hard to be sure how far you can know another person when you perceive them only through the prism of another’s perceptions. And yet, for all his differences from myself, I felt I had begun to understand Thomas. I liked him. I liked him, it occurs to me now, in much the same way that I had begun to like Caravaggio, that is, coming from an initial reserve.

Among the elements I admired in him was the guerrilla war he fought against Gerrards Cross. Round about this time it seemed Primrose seconded the Church as ally.

‘Was she religious?’ I didn’t really need an answer to this.

‘Not remotely! But she fancied the vicar.’

‘Ah, yes. Clergy tend to attract transferences the way psychiatrists and analysts do but they aren’t as a rule so prepared for them.’

‘I shouldn’t think he was, poor man.’

‘What was it about him?’

‘Oh, he was young and good-looking and sympathetic.’

‘And naive?’

‘She used her condition to get him to come round and talk to her. She was a powerful presence in the church community. He couldn’t very well say no.’

I have often thought there should be a book written on the need to say no. ‘And what did she want with the vicar, your mother-in-law?’

‘Thomas said she was enlisting him on the side of “right”.’

‘Right,’ Thomas declared one evening, ‘is a terribly wrong concept.’

They were eating supper in bed, cheese on toast with chutney. Thomas, I had been noticing, was a master of the bedroom snack.

‘But there is such a thing as “right”’, she suggested.

‘I don’t know. Or rather, we don’t know. I dare say there is but I doubt that any human being would recognise it. Think of all the terrible things that people do in the name of “right”. It’s almost always bullying and invasive.’

‘Where does the idea that right is right come from?’

‘God knows. Or rather, God doesn’t know, I shouldn’t imagine. God, if there is one, would be most unlikely to be fussy about right or wrong.’

‘Primrose thinks God is “right”’.

‘What would a Russian Vine know about God, please? An RV would just smother God with its own insidious presence. Smother Mother, ugh!’

‘She’s become very thick with the vicar.’

‘Poor sod,’ said Thomas. ‘She’ll be trying to enrol him in the Russian Vine Church of Moral Righteousness. I should lend him my secateurs.’

‘He might need them. She’s got a crush on him.’

‘What’s his name? I’ll buy him a pair and send them to him anonymously.’

‘Why is sex so rarely right?’ she asked a bit later, trying to brush toast crumbs out of the bed.

‘Because it’s extremely rare for the right people to have it together.’

‘How do you know who’s “right”, though?’

‘You do know,’ he said. ‘You know when it happens. You’re right, I’m right. We don’t need to be righter than that. Sex with the wrong person can be fun, and often is, or it can be frankly terrible, but never right.’

‘I don’t know what right we are talking about now.’

‘Neither do I,’ Thomas said. ‘Shut up for a moment. If you’ve got rid of those crumbs I want to see how right we can be again.’

Later still, disengaging herself, she said, ‘I don’t do this any more with Neil.’

‘I don’t want to know what you do with Neil.’

‘But I don’t. I want you to know.’

‘I’ve said, I don’t want to know.’

‘Thomas—’

‘No, please, Elizabeth. Listen to me. What you do with Neil in that hell-hole is your affair.’

‘I wouldn’t because it would be wrong.’

‘I’ve said already, I know nothing about right or wrong.’

‘You do, though. You said, earlier, about right not being right. It wouldn’t be right of me. It would be wrong.’

‘I’ve said I don’t want to know. And I don’t know, and don’t want to know, because I don’t believe anyone who talks about it—not even you—knows about right and wrong. Or, indeed, right
or
wrong.’

‘But I don’t want to—’

‘Elizabeth, stop, please.’

‘But I don’t want to do any wrong to you,’ she insisted.

‘OK,’ Thomas said.

In the short silence she heard a car door bang and a woman’s voice call out, ‘You’ve forgotten your keys, you’ll forget your stupid head next.’

‘You ask me about right and wrong. I’ll tell you. I think it’s wrong that you are there and not here. I think it’s wrong because it’s dangerous. I think it’s wrong because it’s a kind of perverseness in you. I think your reasons for being there are frankly lousy and suspect. But I love you, so I’m putting up with it. Which might be right, I don’t know. And it might be wrong, I don’t know that either, but if it is I don’t care. What I do know is this, and this
is
right because it is what is right for me, so hear me, please, OK? I
don’t, repeat don’t, wish to have my imagination sullied by the thought of your having sexual intercourse—or
not
having sexual intercourse, it’s no odds to me—with your husband. It’s not a subject I wish to entertain at any time, at any price, in any neck of the woods, but especially not—
especially not
—here with you in my own bed. Right or wrong, I don’t wish to know. OK?’

‘Thomas—’

‘No, Elizabeth!’ He had jumped out of the bed and stood facing her, naked and furious, his myopic eyes darkly bright with rage.

Looking at him quite coolly, she appraised his long, spare body as an artist might. You’re like a painting yourself, she thought.

‘I’ve told you. You’re stronger than me. I have only myself. You believe you have right on your side.’

‘Who says? I never did.’

‘I do. I do. I can feel it. I feel it here.’ He smacked the palm of his hand against his naked chest which made a surprisingly loud noise. ‘You believe in pissy things like good manners and adultery.’

‘I believe in not hurting people.’

‘And do you think you will prevent people being hurt by staying on in Gerrards Cross? Do you? Do you? Listen, here’s who you’ll hurt. Let me tell you:
one
, me, i.e. Thomas Carrington, OK, let’s not count him because he loves us, and we don’t count ourselves, so let’s try
two
, Elizabeth Cruikshank, née Bonelli, well, we don’t count her, either, do we?, because see
one
, Thomas Carrington loves her et cetera, et cetera—so let’s move on to
three
, Neil Cruikshank, we’ll do better with him because he doesn’t love us so he counts more than
one
and
two
put together
but, look, if you stay he’ll love you, if anything, even less because my hunch is he’s really longing for you to leave him so he can be a real martyr, but, look, finally,
four
, hurrah! at last we’ve hit the jackpot, Primrose Cruikshank, aka the Russian Vine, who is going to get hurt worst of all because she’s dying, my darling, just dying for you to run off and fulfil all her direst prophecies about you so she can say “I told you so” to her ickle son and fall into the unfortunate vicar’s arms and—and—don’t you see, DON’T YOU SEE—?’

‘Thomas, Thomas darling, don’t, don’t, Thomas…’

He was crying and she held him tight in her arms and they were both crying and then it all seemed all right again.

It was partly this row that persuaded her to go to Paris with him a few weeks later.

‘I wish we could go back to Rome,’ she had said after they had made it up in bed with the cheese-on-toast crumbs.

‘Why is it, no matter how you brush them out crumbs stay in a bed for ever and a day? We can do nearly as good as Rome. We can go to Paris, if you can extract yourself from the RV’s toils.’

Thomas, it appeared, wished to visit the Louvre to examine a Caravaggio. They stayed in one of the small Left Bank hotels, short on light and smelling of tobacco and that faint aroma of something exotic, which might be no more than vanilla, but anyway a smell which once seemed unique to France.

The hotel was near the Musée de Cluny, which they visited to look at the medieval artefacts and tapestries, and also, beneath the museum, the robuster Roman baths. She told me she preferred the remains of the latter to the pale tapestry ladies and
courtly flowers and ivory-backed looking glasses and intricately jewelled caskets. ‘Maybe just because they were Roman and by then I was prejudiced in favour of all things Roman but I liked that the baths seemed so practical.’

‘I’ve always admired the Romans’ plumbing,’ I agreed.

‘Thomas was keen on their drains.’

I was mildly chuffed by this evidence of a shared taste between myself and the uncompromising Thomas. ‘And Paris, you enjoyed it?’

I could hardly imagine she hadn’t. To be with her ebullient lover in Paris struck me as offering another peak of joyous possibility. Bar and I went to Paris once and it has remained in my memory as three of the happiest days in my life. We had to drag the mattress on to the floor to sleep, because the hotel bed was so ropy and dipped so much that we rolled into each other. We made quite a bit of the dip, I seem to recall, before we repaired to the floor.

But it seemed that I’d misjudged this Paris visit because her face clouded.

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘The Roman baths were the best part.’

‘Oh?’

During their visit to the Louvre Thomas had announced that he would be moving at the beginning of the year to Milan. My own heart practically juddered to a stop at hearing of this new turn of events.

‘We were looking at
The Death of the Virgin
when he told me.’

‘What did he say?’

‘You know,’ she said, ‘it’s not the big things that demolish you. It’s the way, for example, people push their glasses up their nose.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I can tell you what he said exactly. He said, about the picture, “That’s my idea of a difficult repentance.” Then he said, “I’m going to go and live in Milan for a while. They’ve offered me a job there.”’

‘What did you say?’

I expected her not to respond but she said, apparently calmly, ‘Not what I felt. I must have asked some stupid question about his house—I loved that little house—because I remember what he said in reply. “I’ll keep that in case you ever come to live with me, but while I am waiting I might as well take up this offer. It’s a good one.” It was a good one. A chair at Milan University.’

‘Thomas was older than you?’ I’d not enquired about his age.

‘He was forty-five. How old are you?’

‘Forty-five.’ My laugh was embarrassed. In my imagination Thomas had seemed younger; more youthful in spirit, anyway, than my middle-aged self. The coincidence flustered me. To hide the awkwardness I asked a more than usually direct question. ‘What did you feel you wanted to say to him?’

‘Oh,’ she said, wearily, ‘I don’t know. Now you pin me down, what did I really want to say?’

She got up and walked over to my desk, put out a finger and touched Jonny’s bell, as if she were going to refer the question
there. But, instead, she walked back and stood grasping the back of the blue brocade chair with her blue-veined hands.

‘I wanted to say—’ her voice lifted—‘I wanted to say: Don’t go, stay, please stay with me. I am not myself any longer because now I am yourself, or you are myself, I no longer know, or some other strange new self that exists between us. I don’t know what I shall do if you take that away from me. I am terrified, scared to death, scared witless at what you are saying. Show me that you understand. Show me you understand that I am standing here, looking at the blood-red dress of the mother of Christ, and the blood-red hanging over her deathbed, and my heart is bleeding away inside me, blood-red blood inside. Take away this terror that I am losing you, you must take it away because only you can, only you in all the world have ever been able to help me. If you won’t understand what I don’t understand myself, because I can’t myself understand why I don’t come to you, you might as well strap my hands and gag my tongue and bind my eyes and take me out by night and burn me at the stake, in dire darkness, in blind and filthy darkness, as you told me—when you loved me first, before you told me you loved me first—they did to the astronomer Bruno in Rome.