AGE AND DISEASE AND DEATH MAY DESTROY OUR PHYSICAL being but it is other people who get inside us and damage our hearts and minds. My work has occasioned ample example of this but it was Elizabeth Cruikshank who really made me understand it.
Understand. The act of standing under. A word I had used perhaps every day and yet never really analysed.
That night I dreamed I was in a forest and the trees, tall as pylons, formed a high screen above my head. I was walking a narrow path, through the thickly knitted trees, so thick that I have an impression of holding up my hands as if to protect my eyes and face, when a barn owl flew out of the fretted darkness and savagely bit me.
It is the borrowed truths we cling to most tenaciously and, as Gus was always intimating, our profession tends to adhere to rules which have little to do with natural human exchanges. That long winter afternoon, which grew into evening, while I sat with Elizabeth Cruikshank and she told me her story, I abandoned all the accepted methods of working.
From time to time, she would get up from the blue chair and drift about my room, apparently inspecting the objects I had on my desk: the lump of volcanic lava from the holiday in Sicily I took before I went to medical school, where I had all the predictable student thoughts of daringly staying on and living a life of honest labour; the ugly silver inkstand, which had belonged to my mother’s father, the judge, and which I never used but had the residue of an ink my grandfather, quite unselfconsciously, would have called ‘nigger brown’ encrusted on the bottom of the glass inner well; and the small round bell which was my only tangible link with Jonny.
The bell had been on a pair of red slippers embellished with smiling clowns’ faces, and when our mother finally brought herself to gather his things together, I stole one night, when I couldn’t sleep, into the spare room, where Jonny’s socks and pants and shorts and T-shirts had been set aside to be donated to some charity. I guess that, thrifty as she was, my mother couldn’t bear the prospect of the sight of her dead son’s clothes on her surviving child. I don’t recall what I felt about seeing Jonny’s things all piled up there to give away but the idea now is painful. I don’t remember either, though I know I must have done it, tearing the bell from one of the slippers.
I see Jonny still, sliding on the polished parquet floor of our hall, which used to stretch before my eyes in palatial dimensions and reason tells me I would now find cramped. He’s in the dressing gown, one of the few garments which escaped redistribution to become mine, unless, perhaps, it was passed on before he died: a camel dressing gown, with blue-and-red twisted cord around the collar and a plaited blue-and-red tasselled cord for the waist, and he’s wearing the slippers of which only one, the left, has on it a bell. My mother must have known I kept the bell under my pillow, because she would have seen it when the sheets were changed. She never mentioned it. But she would never have guessed that I sometimes rang it for Jonny in the night.
Elizabeth Cruikshank was speaking to me and I saw she had picked up the bell which was cupped in her hand, as if it were as fragile as the blown egg I have also on my desk.
‘It was his voice I heard first.’
I wondered if she might ring the bell and, if she did, whose spirit would be summoned—Jonny’s, or another’s presence. But she replaced my relic, unrung, as meticulously as if it were the eggshell. I dare say she had ascribed its precise value to me—as I said, she had the knack of seeing through to the back of one’s mind.
‘Where did you hear it?’
Voices count. The first contact a foetus makes with the world is the parental voice. In the slight pause before she answered I had a recollection of Jonny calling to me from the bathroom: ‘Davey, come on, Davey, quick, hurry up, the water’s getting cold!’
‘In the bath. I was in the bath!’
As she said this she smiled and I had a shock, because, suddenly, the moon danced and I saw her naked, not at all like Wanda Williams, with whom I had dutifully and dolefully gone to bed. I don’t mean I felt desire for my patient; I didn’t, or not in that way.
‘I see.’ I was smiling too, partly because of the coincidence of the bathrooms. ‘So, go on then, tell me.’
In those days, I had one of those electric coffee-filtering devices with a hotplate—the sort which made a bitter-tasting liquor if you left it too long, a monster of a machine. It catered to my one true addiction. I am frequently advised by concerned acquaintances that for reasons of health and longevity I should eschew coffee. Longevity has even fewer attractions for me today, but even if it had I could never care enough for it to forgo coffee. I reckon we drank tankerloads of coffee that evening, Elizabeth Cruikshank and I.
At one point, I sent out for sandwiches. Maguire poked her head round the door, expecting me to have finished for the day and ready with some quip, but sharp enough to suppress it when she observed the two of us in serious conversation; though not before I’d said, ‘Any chance you could run down to the canteen and get Mrs Cruikshank and me a round or two of sandwiches? Cheese and pickle and ham, in my case, I don’t know what she might want?’
And Maguire, efficiently interpreting the brief signal for the same order from my patient, was off and back again with a reassuringly piled plate of sandwiches, plus some of the ropy fruit, a wizened orange and an over-red, Snow White apple, which the canteen palmed off on us.
It is said that when we touch pitch we are defiled. But when we touch, or are touched by, another’s story that also affects our being, and more radically. I can still recall the almost visceral sensation with which I intuited something large and cold roll away inside my patient, as she embarked on the tale that, for so many years, I was to learn, she had had shored up inside her.
As she had already told me, as a young librarian she had rented a run-down flat, up in the roof of one of the big, white, stucco-fronted houses in Camden Square. The flat was sparsely furnished by a stingy landlord, and among its several deficiencies was an erratic immersion heater which regularly broke down. While she was prepared to put up with a good deal she shared another of my mild obsessions: a fondness for baths.
People shower more nowadays but I still prefer the comfort of a warm bath. It was my patient’s love of baths which brought about her meeting with Thomas Carrington.
A sculptor, Cecil Bainbridge, rented the flat below and one morning, when the landlord had promised, and failed for the third time, to call for an inspection of the faulty heater, my patient decided, for her unusually, to take independent action. Bainbridge’s air of absent-minded shabbiness had softened her customary defences. They’d exchanged a few pleasantries, so with no one else to turn to she knocked on his door to enquire about a plumber.
‘You’re welcome to borrow my bathroom while I’m away,’ he offered. And, gratefully, she accepted a spare key and the use of his hot water in return for some minor plant-watering duties.
Some days later, as she lay in the bath, enjoying a sense of daring at the temporary tenure of a strange environment, she heard a voice. Someone who wasn’t Cecil Bainbridge was speaking in the next room where, secure against intrusion, she had left all her clothes.
The unexpected voice startled her. But she was surprisingly unafraid. There was something in the timbre which reassured her. Or didn’t, at least, alarm her.
Helping herself to Bainbridge’s bathrobe, she listened at the door. The voice appeared to be conducting a conversation, but there was no answering participant in this dialogue. Maybe whoever it was was on the phone and in the room where without a second thought she had left all her clothes.
She called out, ‘Who is that?’
‘Who’s this?’
‘Who are you?’
‘I might ask the same question.’
The bathroom door was pulled back and a tall, beaky-nosed man stood there, his glasses steaming up in the warm air.
‘I’m a friend of Bainbridge’s’ and ‘I’m a friend of Cecil’s’, they simultaneously explained.
‘I should hope so,’ the man continued, ‘seeing that you’re practically naked as nature intended in his bathroom.’
She explained, still less embarrassed than she might have been, about the plumber and the landlord.
‘Plumbers and landlords are not natural bedfellows.’
‘Is “naked as nature intended” a quotation?’
‘A film. It used to be on at a seedy cinema in Piccadilly where they showed non-stop porn. Or what passed then for porn. It wouldn’t now. As a boy, I was beside myself to see it.’
‘And did you?’
‘Sadly, no.’
‘Is there someone else here?’
‘No. Why?’
‘I heard you talking to someone.’
‘Only to myself. Don’t you talk to yourself?’ He had taken off his glasses and was looking at her with bright brown eyes. ‘Surely you must. I’m Thomas Carrington, by the way.’
‘I’m Elizabeth Bonelli. In a way I do.’
‘What way? Are you Italian? You have an old-master look.’ He looked at her consideringly. ‘Giorgione, maybe. Nice.’
‘Half.’
‘Half talk to yourself or half Italian?’
‘Both, I suppose. I do talk to myself, but not out loud. At least, I don’t think so.’
‘I find I have to say things aloud so I can listen, because I’m the only person who understands me well. Where are your clothes, Elizabeth Bonelli?’ He spoke her name with an easy and enchanting familiarity.
The thought of her clothes lying exposed in the next room embarrassed her for the first time and she began to flush. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t notice them.’ She wished she could remember what knickers she’d been wearing.
‘I was preoccupied,’ Thomas said. ‘Talking to myself and then having to think up some answer to me. It gets wearing. Do you find that?’ He still had his glasses off and he looked at her again, his head on one side.
‘I should get dressed,’ she said, ignoring his other question.
But she didn’t get dressed. Or not for a while.