THE YEAR WAS DROPPING FAST TOWARDS THE WINTER solstice so I had already switched on the lights in my room when I saw Elizabeth Cruikshank the following afternoon. From my chair I watched her enter the room with the awkward, faintly hesitant gait which betrayed uncertainty about her welcome.
As she settled into the blue chair and I registered a glance at my clown. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but the planes of her half-averted face looked even more pale and prominent than usual. She had about her that bird-like look which evoked painful images of cats, or cages.
I expected to begin with one of our familiar silences. I had had to cancel her previous session and I feared she might mind this dereliction, and my hunch was that she would mind that she minded. So I decided to tackle the subject right away.
‘I’m sorry I had to miss our last meeting.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘If you say not.’
‘It’s not important.’ This time I held my peace. ‘I don’t make the mistake of assuming I matter to you!’ she broke out suddenly again, with more than a glint of sharpness.
Ah, my bird, I thought, a little more of that and I’ve caught you! But aloud I said, ‘You think you are the only one to whom our meetings matter?’
The silence passed to her. Under her sway it deepened, chilled, iced over, and then, as rapidly, shifted temperature and melted as her neck and face flushed a violent red. Good, I thought. Time you showed your colours.
‘How do I know what you think?’
‘You might allow me to mind that I have possibly let you down.’
I’m not someone who plays games. Nor have I ever been of the view that games of any kind are what should be played in my business, or indeed in any human transaction. But it is not only in love affairs that there is a kind of dance, a stepping forward and a stepping back, a taking hold and a letting go, and I suppose I was banking on my studied politeness to provide a space for her to step out of where she was hiding.
‘I didn’t say you had,’ she murmured angrily.
‘But you would be entitled to think so,’ I said, deliberately maintaining my tone.
I wondered if she would risk asking what had kept me from seeing her, and if she did, how I would answer her: that I had been releasing a patient, who believed a wolf was trapped in his skull, from years of being unnecessarily confined; that I had to appear as an expert witness in a London court on behalf of a doctor whose patient had committed suicide? It was with a mixture of regret and relief that I recognised she was going to stick with silence.
For the first time since I had begun to see her, I found myself becoming bored. I had spent more time and attention on this case than by any official reckoning I should have done and I had other, equally pressing, claims. And had I been asked to justify myself, I would have been hard put to give grounds for the amount of time I’d spent, or the level of my concern. There was nothing untoward in it, other than, by now, a well-kindled interest. But I was growing tired. Maybe I was too tired to continue trying to get blood out of this stone?
And then two things happened. That wretched cat appeared on the fence again and looked at me. Nothing more. It just looked, with its vile psychopathic stare, and clear as a bell I heard my mother’s voice, which, perhaps unfairly, I always heard cutting me down to size. ‘A cat may look at a king, you know, Davey.’ And, as was often the way when I recalled my mother’s familiar discouragements, I saw an image of Jonny, standing in the road, smiling and beckoning me to cross. And then my mind flickered to Gus, and myself drinking whisky in his snug, untidy room, in the atmosphere of comfortable masculine intimacy and then that image dissolved too, and reconfigured itself into the sweating bulk of the terrified Dr Hannan. Whatever the judgement of the court, poor Hannan would not escape his own judgement and the unspoken judgement of the dead Melanie Claybourne. Melanie Hope Claybourne, in whom, and for whom, all hope was now dead, dead as a doornail.
Something moved in me as palpably as if an old weathervane, which had stuck fast pointing North, had, through the aid of some invisible force, unjammed and careered round to the South.
‘I had to attend a meeting to assess some patients at another hospital and then I was called to London to act as a witness on behalf of a colleague whose patient succeeded in killing herself,’ I heard myself enunciate, and, as I did so, I had the impression that I was delivering this statement up to someone, or some thing, over and above the woman in my room. Her head shot up but I couldn’t read the look in her eyes. It might have been fear or anger. Possibly both. Whatever it was it didn’t deter me.
‘I thought a lot about you while I was away. I thought that although it is your right to choose to die, I would be glad if you didn’t. Very glad, in fact.’
‘To save your own skin?’ It was not quite a jeer.
‘Yes, if you like. But for other reasons too.’
She said nothing so I pressed on. I’d got the bit between my teeth now.
‘I looked in on a painting of Caravaggio’s at the National Gallery yesterday. The Supper at Emmaus. I remembered you said that you liked him.’
‘Yes?’
‘My friend Gus Galen, as I think I mentioned to you once, likes him too. It was Gus who showed me the painting first. And the evening of the day I missed seeing you, when we should have been meeting here, I saw Gus and we spoke about you—’ anticipating a protest I hurried on—‘or rather I spoke. He listened. Forgive me, but I’ve been worried for you. Worried about you. I told him you liked Caravaggio and he sent me back to look at this one. Or—’ again I struggled to be accurate: it seemed more than usually urgent—‘I went back myself, off my own bat. Because of what he said, what Gus said. Gus is someone I trust. I hadn’t really looked at that painting before, but I did yesterday. I rather fell in love with it. In my profession, the business of falling in love is often dismissed as fantasy, neurotic wishful thinking. But there are ways of falling in love which are, I would say, important. Crucial. And real.’ I believe I might have been sweating though the temperature was December chill.
The quince’s blossomless, lichen-covered branches were tracing a silver-grey pattern behind the glass and my mother’s wounded mango tree came to mind.
‘And painful,’ I added, pushing myself over a further threshold. I was conscious of slightly raising my voice. ‘Love is painful. Isn’t it? It forces change upon you. It forces you—I should say us—to change. Or have a shot at changing, anyway,’ I more lamely concluded.
There followed a very long silence during which I didn’t allow myself to consider the odds on this gamble. Perhaps to counter a heightened sense of precariousness my thoughts reverted to Lady Bertram on her sofa, with her pug, and her basket of cut flowers from the beds at Mansfield Park. There had grown in me a sneaking liking for idle Lady Bertram. She had no conscience whatsoever and I suspected that, for similar reasons, Jane Austen liked her too. Lady Bertram wouldn’t have had the whisker of a notion of what I was on about. The only change she would have undertaken was to Pug’s collar or her own bonnet strings.
‘You know, what I said before?’
The voice was so low that in my distraction I believed I’d not heard and asked her to repeat her words. She started, hesitated, then stalled, and my thoughts flew anxiously from Sir Thomas Bertram’s morally insentient wife to Melanie Hope’s resolutely fatal despair, while my laggardly brain caught up with the sense of the words.
‘Yes,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m sorry, I do know.’ And nothing in the world was more moving to me at that moment than that one human heart can open to another. ‘Or rather, I should say I don’t know. But I remember what you said.’
‘So,’ she appeared to continue but halted as abruptly. And then there was a quite new kind of silence which I tried not to interrupt even with my thoughts.
The silence slipped around us, between us, over us, covering us, and the room, and everything in it, with the invisible lustre of possibility. But the possibility was not mine. I could only sit within it and wait.
‘It was like this,’ said Elizabeth Cruikshank, at last.