The Other Side of You (23 page)

‘Maybe she misses you?’

‘Bullies only rate other bullies. Anyway, as I needn’t tell you, very few people in life truly miss us. It’s a mistake to imagine otherwise.’

‘One or two, if we’re lucky, maybe.’

A
LTHOUGH
I
DID NOT SEE
E
LIZABETH
C
RUIKSHANK AGAIN
I did speak to her because she rang me, at the hotel before I left Rome. She knew nothing of my domestic life, so I had not mentioned, when we sat in the Borghese gardens, that my wife and I had parted, though even without her acute intuition she would have guessed I was married since I had left Olivia a message during our seven-hour exchange.

She had rung, she said, to ask a ‘possibly impertinent’ question, and I was pleased to hear from her again so soon.

‘Fire away.’

‘I wondered, was the woman who was outside your room that night the person who gave you the egg?’

‘How did you know?’

‘I thought perhaps from seeing her that maybe she loved you. The egg is the kind of present someone who loves you gives.’

‘I think she did love me once. But I didn’t treat her very well.’

‘It’s not my business, but perhaps she would forgive you?’

Because this wasn’t what I wanted to hear, I brushed this off
with a gruff ‘I’m not sure I’m up to being forgiven’. But it wasn’t really that.

The whole business of Dan and Olivia had left a bad taste. I had no idea if Dan and Bar would survive as a couple but whatever I had been to Bar once I knew her well enough to know that she was not the sort to abandon a marriage because of one lapse, however treacherous. And what I really wasn’t ‘up to’ was becoming a further spanner in that marriage’s works.

But there was this besides, which I didn’t say, though maybe I didn’t need to say it: I always believed she could see through to the back of my mind. Once you have experienced a certain closeness the other kinds leave you wanting. I learned that, too, through getting to know Elizabeth Cruikshank.

From that day, in the gardens of the Villa Borghese, I have not laid waking eyes on her. Sometimes I dream about her; and when I wake I miss her. I don’t know if she ever misses me. But I had no need to explain, when we spoke, why I had resigned the position through which we met, and proposed to work from that time writing, and seeing only those few patients with whom I felt an intuitive rapport.

My life since then has been uncomplicated but not unsatisfying: I have never remarried, though for some years I have had a companion, a sculptress, who prefers her own space, and sometimes company, but enjoys mine too. We get on well and I’ve grown fond of her children, and, latterly, her children’s children. She’s not the sort to probe, so although I once mentioned Elizabeth Cruikshank she has never enquired about her. And I have preferred to keep these recollections to myself, till now.

But last year, when I was feeling the time was approaching when I might wind down my practice, and spend more time writing, I visited the exhibition at the National Gallery devoted to Caravaggio’s last years.

He has become popular and I had failed to book ahead for an allotted date and time. I queued up for my ticket, one mild March morning, and was killing time in the shop in the Sainsbury Wing when I noticed a book, written by an Italian woman, entitled
Caravaggio’s Emmaus Paintings.
I opened the book and read randomly, and across twenty intervening years I heard the cool precise voice of Elizabeth Cruikshank as her cool precise prose limpidly expanded on Caravaggio’s versions of that Emmaus Supper story; describing, technically, how the paintings were executed, and when they figured in Caravaggio’s own history and, finally, persuasively and elegantly, what it was in the subject matter that we might wish to absorb.

I bought the book but I’d read none of it when I stood by the two
Supper
paintings hung, companionably side by side, at the exhibition’s start.

As I stood, taking in the pair afresh, with Elizabeth Cruikshank’s account of them as yet unread in my hand, I heard the words with which she described to me her first experience of love:
It was as if I were meeting someone whom I had known intimately and from whom I had been separated for a very long time.

The two pictures could hardly be more different in mood but the story was the same. You see the scene one way, and then you see it another and, as Thomas would have agreed, neither way is better, or more true, or right. And then it was Gus’s words
on love which were returning to me:
It’s difficult. And demanding. And a nuisance. And bloody absent much of the bloody time.

Love also expresses itself in absence, the paintings seemed to be suggesting: love is here, and then it is not, and then it is here again, transformed, transforming. Caravaggio was absent, Thomas was absent, Jonny was absent, Elizabeth Cruikshank was absent—but I was here, and the love I felt for each of them, as I looked at those evocations of that strange story of that strange supper with that still stranger stranger, was mingling inside me, like the light of the reflected figures in the glass of water, which I drank as I tried, hopelessly, inadequately to make sense of all this, that time, long since, in a lecture theatre in Rome. No analysis, however honest, could summarise what the two masterpieces portraying Luke’s story conveyed. It seemed to me now a fool’s enterprise.

I walked through the exhibition, in mute agitation, till I came to the portrait of my namesake with his unsought-after trophy in his clenched hand. And I looked again into his darkly comprehending eyes. ‘I understand, David.’

‘Excuse me?’ An over-made-up American woman, equipped with catalogue, headphones and the informative exhibition recording, mistook the comment as intended for her. I apologised, insincerely, and rapidly melted away. In any case, I had had enough: I decided I would visit the exhibition again, when my emotions were in better order.

I felt that Elizabeth Cruikshank might appreciate this reminder of our last meeting, and I recounted it when I wrote to say how much I had enjoyed her book. And how especially pleased and intrigued I was by a footnote, which mentioned a
painting that had come to light in a monastery, north of Rome, which, she tentatively indicated, was exciting speculation since it was believed conceivable that it overlaid a lost Caravaggio on the Emmaus theme.

She answered after a goodish while, long enough for me to wonder if she had forgotten me. But her reply, when it finally arrived, was worth waiting for. It apologised for the delay, blaming it on her publisher’s tardiness in forwarding my letter. Hers was expansive and drily amusing; but she made no mention of our time together. Except that it ended with a few words of Greek, which eluded me and with which I had to ask Gus Galen’s help.

Gus, in his eighties, continues to defy cancer, and convention. From time to time, when I visit, I meet Tanya, who is still beautiful and seems impervious to the squalor in his flat. But she wasn’t there the day I went with the letter, with the postmark from Rome, in my pocket. And I was glad of it.

The line Gus translated for me, which Elizabeth Cruikshank had written in her unfaltering brown script, read:

Were not our hearts burning within us?

Beneath it she had signed her name.

First published in Great Britain in 2006 by
Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers
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www.4thestate.co.uk

Copyright © Salley Vickers 2006

FIRST EDITION

The right of Salley Vickers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2009 ISBN: 978-0-007-35815-1

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