The Other Side of You (14 page)

O
F COURSE
I
SAW.
I,
WHO HAD A PROBLEM EVEN BELIEVING
that I am remembered by my patients, let alone my friends, or my wife, felt a swift and acute sympathy. To a diffident soul, even Thomas’s trenchant affection might, at a distance, have grown to seem fantastic and implausible.

A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love
, and if what I recount now is coloured by my own emotion, it is because I was no longer a bystander in these lovers’ story but had become involved. I make no apology for this, insisting only that what follows is as it lingers in my mind when so much that might have more seeming relevance to me has long left it.

Thomas had found the letter from the hospitable Marchesa, in whose house Caravaggio had in fact been born (his father, I learned, was his steward), in a batch of bills, mostly relating to the painter Giorgione, which he bought from a dealer in Milan. Recalling their first conversation, and Thomas’s reference to Giorgione, I raised my eyebrows.

‘It was because of Giorgione that Thomas bought them, if that’s what you’re wondering. There was an ink sketch of a woman’s face in the margin of one of the invoices and he…’

‘Did he think it looked like you?’

‘I think so, yes.’

The letter spoke of a painting, making no mention of the artist but referring to it as
Il Signore Andando ad Emmaus.
Attached behind this letter, so it had perhaps not been scrutinised before, was another letter, which suggested the first letter was a means of establishing the painting’s provenance to a potential buyer. This second letter was from a Mantuan agent, Gentile Ottavio, addressed to a French collector, in Aix-en-Provence, and described the painting as having been originally sold for 110 scudi, a high price in those days for a contemporary painting. So, whoever the artist was, clearly it was counted valuable.

By a lucky stroke, Thomas’s doctoral thesis had explored the history of the Aix collection, in which he had traced a number of the Aix paintings back to another collection which had later been dispersed, through a family’s fortune failing, in sales in and around Rome. But even with his prior knowledge the detective work took up time, and he had a programme of academic studies to organise and oversee, so he delegated part of the work to his research assistant.

The assistant was attractive, eager and decidedly taken with the new
professore.

‘And you were jealous?’

‘Not to begin with.’

‘But later?’

‘I became jealous.’

‘Why? I mean why specially?’

‘He kept mentioning her.’

‘That’s generally a sign of innocence. He would be
more likely to suppress her name if she was important to him.’

‘You aren’t rational when you’re jealous.’

‘Of course not. I’m sorry. Please go on.’

That summer, nine months after they had met en route to Rome, Thomas rang her by arrangement at the little mews house.

‘How is the passion flower?’

‘It’s fine, I think.’

‘You have to watch passion flowers. They’re like me, they look full of buck and gusto but underneath they’re tender. Do you know why it’s called passion flower?’

‘I don’t think I do.’

‘Look at it. Go on, go and look now.’

‘I’m talking to you now. I’ll look later.’

‘And the Albertine? How’s my Albertine? They have the best of scents but they’re terrifically thorny and prima donna-ish to make up for it. Be careful of your dear hands.’

‘The Albertine’s fine too. I’ve sprayed it and tied it up and I wear gloves.’

‘Good. And the lilies, how are my lilies? Angelic?’

‘They’re well too and smelling heavenly. You’ll be able to see for yourself soon.’

Pause. ‘I’m not coming back this summer, Elizabeth.’

‘Why not?’

‘Claudia has found what she thinks may be a lead to the
Road
painting.’

‘So?’

‘So I’m going to pursue it. It’s the only time I have.’

‘It’s the only time you have with me, too.’

‘You can come here.’

‘I can’t, you know I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s the children’s holidays.’

‘OK. Then you have to choose. Holidays with children, or me.’

‘What will I say?’

‘I don’t know, Elizabeth. I would say, Max, Amanda, I am going to spend the summer with Thomas. Because I love him. I love you too, and if, finally, I find the will to go and live with him I will love you that bit better, and more honestly, and in the end that will be better for everybody. Because living a pretend life is the very devil. But that is only what I would say.’

‘Would you really say that?’

‘I don’t know, Elizabeth. I believe so. Remember, I don’t have children.’ He didn’t, as he had in the past, add that he hoped to have children with her some day but merely asked after the Russian Vine. ‘No, don’t tell me. Unless you’ve slipped a dose of weedkiller into her gin and tonic I don’t want to know.’

When they had finished talking, she made herself coffee in the pot with the complicated glaze and went outside to the garden, with one of the white porcelain cups they’d bought in Rome, and studied the greenish-white petals of the passion flower, its corona of fine purple filaments, and the five yellow stamens and three dark pistils at its dark heart.

One of the things Gus had instilled in me was the danger of seeming to pounce. Not that I am by nature a ‘pouncer’, but he put into words what I hope tact would anyway make instinctive. So I didn’t rush out with what was uppermost in my mind, which
was ‘What did you feel about having—or not having—Thomas’s children?’

The subject of children was not my strong suit. If I was unsure-footed about them with my patients it was because I was unsure-footed about them with myself. The whole issue of children produced in me one of those mental blurs which I knew to be an index of undigested pain and Elizabeth Cruikshank’s attitude towards her own children betrayed some similar confusion.

The slight girlish demeanour concealed, as I was learning, a strength of passion which, according to the usual natural laws, should have also found its object in children—and I wondered if it was maybe the very intensity of the desire which had held its expression back. Or if the children conceived so near that early loss of Thomas had fallen under its shadow. Yet, surely, she must have longed for her lover’s child.

‘Did it worry you that he didn’t mention wanting children?’ I refrained from observing that it was the first I’d heard of it.

She looked out into the deepening night and I glanced at my watch, almost by accident, noted it was pushing nine and only faintly wondered if Olivia would be home and questioning what was keeping me.

‘I think that was one of the things I couldn’t believe.’

‘Couldn’t or didn’t?’

‘Are they different?’

‘I would say so. Think about it.’

He met her at Milan airport and seemed as thrilled as ever to see her.

‘You came!’

‘I came.’

‘Why, as a matter of interest?’

‘Thomas, how can you ask “why”?’

In the wide white bed, made up with linen sheets, in the white bedroom of his white Milanese apartment, in the high modern block she said, ‘It’s so unlike the mews.’

‘It isn’t. Both are as nice as pie.’

‘Thomas, why is it called a passion flower?’

‘Didn’t you look? It’s got a crown of thorns.’

‘The other “passion”, then. Not our kind.’

‘Is it? All passion leads to suffering, I think. Passion is suffering, most of the time. Why, really, did you come?’

‘I wanted to see you.’

‘That’s not a proper answer. I shall fine you. Right, that’s a hundred scudi. A steep fine.’

‘What am I being fined for?’

‘For wriggling evasion. On your honour, Elizabeth Cruikshank, née Bonelli, what made you come here after all?’

‘I wouldn’t have seen you all summer otherwise.’

‘Yes, and…?’

‘I thought you were annoyed with me.’

‘Dead right, I was. And…?’

‘I thought you might…’

‘What?’

‘Take some sort of revenge.’

‘Oh, Elizabeth.’ He sat up in bed and his face reminded her of that other time, before he went to Milan, when he had shouted
at her and cried. ‘You thought I might sleep with Claudia.’ It wasn’t a question.

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, Elizabeth,’ he repeated.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You should be.’

‘It happens.’

‘Yes, it happens. But if that were going to happen I’d tell you. I’d say, “I’m getting tired of this and I’m worried I might just accept Claudia’s often-intimated invitations for me to peel off her tight black dress and undo her all-too-visible black lace bra and take down her matching lace knickers—and don’t ask how I know what her knickers are like, you don’t need personal evidence to be sure that an Italian woman of Claudia’s type is fussy about that sort of thing—and fuck her, as she would like.” That’s what I’d say. She looks like a pig, by the way, to me at least she does, poor creature, not that that makes any difference. You know what I say is true.’

‘Yes.’ She felt sick as a dog.

‘Elizabeth, I don’t fuck about. You should know this.’

‘Yes. I’m sorry.’

‘I don’t fuck around either because I don’t fuck about. You seem not to grasp that.’

‘I do. It’s just that—’

‘It’s just that—no, hear me, please! I’m speaking!—it’s “just that” you don’t believe me. You have no faith in me, or my words. You imagine that I say what will please you, and myself, and then go and do quite other things. You don’t believe that I mean what I say. Do you? Do you? You believe that while I say that I love
you, and need you, and want you, I am secretly plotting to fuck my assistant. Don’t you? Don’t cry, answer me. Well, DON’T YOU?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You know what? You aren’t going to like this but I’m going to say it anyway.’

‘Don’t say it.’

‘OK, I won’t.’ He turned away and she noticed again how vulnerable naked shoulder blades look. ‘You’re my hearth companion,’ he had said to her, by the castellated gateway in the old walls, as they were leaving the dead Keats behind in the cemetery in Rome. Maybe a hearth companion had to watch the other’s back even against the companion’s own self.

‘I’m sorry. Say it.’

‘OK, I will. What people imagine is generally what’s in their own minds, not what is in other people’s. You imagine I am planning to fuck Claudia because that’s what you might do. I’m sorry to have to say this. Actually, why am I saying that? I’m not sorry. You see, lying is catching.’

‘Thomas, I wouldn’t.’

‘Not Claudia, no. Not fucking, maybe, because that’s not your style. But unfaithful, yes. You don’t believe I’m faithful because you’re not.’

She was crying too badly now to say anything.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Thomas. He rolled on to his back and flung an arm over his eyes and lay there speechless for several minutes. Then he said, ‘I’m knackered. You must be too. Let’s get some sleep.’

His long body in the wide white bed didn’t touch hers once
all that night while she lay, listening to the hysterical moan of the Milanese traffic, with sore dry eyes.

In the early morning, she looked at his sleeping form, at the mercy of the cruel dawn light, with one square-fingered hand flung not across her breast but across his own dark-haired one, as if to protect it. The sheet, lying in folds, where he had drawn it round him, had to her the look of a shroud.

The following morning he took her to see Caravaggio’s other
Emmaus Supper.

Since she spoke of this to me I have visited the great Pinocoteca di Brera, in Milan, and seen the painting too. It is as like the London
Supper
as chalk to cheese.

Caravaggio painted it in 1606, around the time he was indicted for the murder charge. The dimensions of the two paintings appear identical and the composition is much the same: the two startled disciples, the pivotal figure of Christ; the only difference being that, rather than one, there are two awkwardly uncomprehending servants placed at his other side. But the mood is vastly different. Where the London
Supper
is intense in colour, the foodstuffs on the inn table luxuriant and plentiful, the perspective steep, the light almost insolent in its raking brightness, in the later painting the autumnal vividness has attenuated to wintry blue and browns, the paint thinly applied as if to let in light. The light glows at the picture’s centre, sombrely incandescent, the perspective is enfolding, the meal only the bare essentials, the atmosphere grave.

On the left of the picture is an eloquent emptiness and Christ is no longer the renovated young renovator of the earlier
work. Here he is bearded, world-weary, fragile, fatigued. Observing him, I felt that he had returned with reluctance from the restful shades of death to our brash world of necessary light.

‘How different it is,’ she suggested. As different as the two of them were that day from the day she had stood beside him in London and looked at the companion painting. Her heart burned with the recollection of it.

Thomas said nothing but simply stood studying it. He had a particular posture when he was absorbed. Slightly stooped about the shoulders, like a heron. She watched him, gangling and heron-like, pushing his glasses up his nose and squinting sideways at the painting. Then he said, ‘They are, very different, but don’t start saying you like one more than the other. I can’t stand favourites.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ she said, stiffly.

He walked off and ahead of her and she had to hurry to catch up. ‘So where shall we lunch?’

‘Wherever you like.’

‘Thomas, how do I know? I don’t know Milan. You live here.’

‘I don’t live anywhere,’ said Thomas. ‘You should know that.’

‘What are you talking about?’

They were outside now and crossing the noisy road; still striding ahead of her he yelled over his shoulder, ‘I DON’T LIVE ANYWHERE! I DON’T CARE WHERE I LIVE!’

‘Don’t shout.’

‘Why shouldn’t I shout?’

‘I don’t want other people hearing us.’