BESIDES HIS VOICE, IT WAS HIS HANDS SHE REMEMBERED MOST, though she had not been conscious of taking them in at the time. Capable hands, she told me, with square fingers and clean nails. I don’t know if at that point I glanced at my own, or if I only tried to picture what they were like. Clean and neatly clipped, I would have hoped. My mother used to say that it is the small details that betray character.
Of what they talked, on that first meeting, I am left with an impression rather than detail. I doubt she could have given me with any great exactitude more than the broad brush strokes which—between bites of sandwich, eaten ferociously—she made that winter afternoon. In any case, it is not the substance of a conversation but the way the heart irradiates it that infuses it with meaning.
Thomas, she learned, was an art historian whose work took him abroad and only occasionally back to England. He had an Oxford base in someone else’s house. Bainbridge, from a long habit of personal trust—and the generosity she herself had enjoyed—had bestowed on his friend a house key and the invitation to stay whenever he found himself in need of a London bed. She gained half an impression that maybe there were other beds available, should Thomas have wanted to take advantage of them, but he preferred Bainbridge’s because the hospitality came, by and large, with no strings.
Finding himself the previous evening unexpectedly late in London after a lecture, Thomas had tried on the phone and failed to get Bainbridge (notoriously unpredictable in his movements) and had therefore taken up the standing invitation. He had stayed the night and was out buying a paper when, unaware of any other presence, my patient had arrived to take her daily bath. That much she discovered in Bainbridge’s kitchen, over the Formica table.
What her part was in their conversation again I can only guess. Compared to Thomas’s, her life appeared to her barrenly uneventful. She told me she mostly listened while talk flowed from the confiding stranger.
In all exchanges there must be one who listens and one who speaks but there can be no revelation without someone to whom it is revealed. I am in a position to make this judgement since it is as listener I have spent most of my working life, as I did that afternoon and evening when I sat with Elizabeth Cruikshank. But even as I listened, trying to catch and make sense of the thread of her meaning, I was spinning invisible threads of my own.
Later that afternoon, after yet more engrossing conversation, Thomas left the flat, having taken her number, with sinceresounding promises to call her the following week, when he expected to return to London to take up more of Bainbridge’s hospitality and replicate this happy meeting. There was no hint, she insisted, of any romantic involvement.
‘There was the reference to Naked as Nature Intended,’ I couldn’t resist pointing out, but she dismissed this with the vehemence which the sandwiches seemed to have inspired.
‘That was only a joke.’
Privately, I thought otherwise. Gus once suggested that in the first encounter between two people the seeds of what will grow between them are sown. He was speaking of his patients, but I have come to believe that this is the case with all our important associations. The first time I met Olivia I got caught in her blouse, and I met Bar sitting beside her at a conference where I borrowed her pen which I never returned. And Gus, well, Gus introduced me to Caravaggio.
My patient and this man had met while she was naked under a borrowed bathrobe and, from her account, the two of them had sat talking together with unusual intimacy, for over three hours. That some sexual alchemy, however unrealised, had been constellated seemed likely. She admitted that she returned to her own flat in a mood of tense excitement and spent the rest of the day searching the shops for a frock worthy to meet Thomas in again.
‘Did you find one?’
‘Yes. It was much too expensive.’
‘What was it like?’ Living with Olivia had developed in me some sort of eye.
‘It went to the Oxfam shop long ago.’
It took over three weeks, during which her hot water was finally fixed by the recalcitrant landlord, before she plucked up courage to approach Bainbridge, whose key she had annoyingly—for it would have provided an excuse to make contact—returned, and for whom she had already waited many evenings on the stairs for possible news of his friend. But when she rang his doorbell there was no answer.
Days later, when, after digging into her dwindling courage, she tried his door again, it was answered by an unfamiliar man with the news that the restless sculptor had departed to Australia for six months (she remembered having seen, on the hall table, post addressed to him with a Sydney postmark). Evidently, their acquaintance had left too little impression on her neighbour for him to think of informing her of his sudden decision to leave.
This smaller dereliction amplified the glaringly larger one, the continued non-reappearance of Thomas, on whose word she had tremulously but hopefully relied. The shock of her incorrect estimate of her value to him must have sharpened the larger shock of disappointment.
Gus believes that somewhere we all know everything, and that what is generally called intuition is merely a stronger than usual capacity to disinter information and bring it to light. But, like the delicate artefacts recovered from long-sealed tombs, these buried truths are liable to crumble and perish under the harsh beam of scrutiny. It takes a strong immunity from doubt to sustain any belief, and it would have taken a steadier sense of self-worth than my patient’s to trust to the truth of an impression born out of one lightning reckoning of her inexperienced heart.
She slid, slowly at first, for Thomas’s seeming interest in her had burned into her consciousness, then, as days became weeks, more rapidly into the crippling assumption that the parting promise of soon-to-be-renewed contact was no more than a polite tactic for getting away; and that the intense pleasure she had taken to be mutual had been merely the reflection of her own naive desire.
As she sat by a silent phone, for more bleak evenings than she cared to recall—her contacts were few and her friends sparse—she castigated herself for her presumption, for her ignorant susceptibility, for her ludicrous vanity in daring to hope that this man, of all men, could want her, of all the ridiculous cast-away souls in all the ridiculous world.
But the chastising self-remonstrations, the lessons she rehearsed to herself sternly at night—when she slept fitfully—or in the day—when her attention over her library duties wildly wandered—proved pointless, and she was to learn why the commonly advised remedy of ‘pulling oneself together’ is one which is recommended only by those who have been spared the doomed attempts to apply it.
The fact is, the only lasting safety from sorrow would lie in some kind of drastic surgery of the human faculty of affection. My patient’s heart having been so swiftly and suddenly suborned, her affections were thoroughly compromised. She was taking the first hard steps in learning that the way of things as you go on is not the way when you try to go back and there exist invisible turnstiles which, having let us pass easily through them, yield to none of our most strenuous efforts at return.