IN THE AUTUMN AFTER THE YOUNG CRUIKSHANKS WERE PACKED off to boarding schools, which, from my patient’s description, sounded to be of depressing mediocrity, an Italian cousin of her father’s died.
‘How did your parents react to your marriage, by the way?’
‘They were thrilled, particularly my mother. She thought I’d done very well for myself with Gerrards Cross.’
‘It’s alarming how often children marry to fulfil the parents’ fantasies for themselves.’
A legal complication, relating to Italian inheritance tax, made it expedient for one of the family to go to Rome. My patient, who had never before taken advantage of her Italian blood—any impulse having been crushed by an unhappy holiday in Rimini curtailed, at the mother’s insistence, after three days—volunteered to go in place of her father, whose health was beginning to trouble him and who was gratifyingly thankful for her offer.
‘That was brave of you.’
It was then, I think, that she must have mentioned her birthday and her sense of somehow starting a new term. ‘I felt the children had finally gone. I needed, I don’t know, something —I’d been such an ineffectual mother.’
‘It’s hard to be effectual on your own.’
Being unused to travel, and with a sense of nervous anticipation, she arrived early at Heathrow and, having checked in and acquired her seat, was hesitating over whether to go through to the departure lounge or to fritter time in the airport shops.
It was the hands she saw first. The owner of the hands was crouched, with his back to her, at the end of the check-in line, adjusting the strap round his suitcase. By the time he stood up and turned round her knocking heart had recognised him.
‘Good Lord,’ Thomas said, pushing his glasses up his nose in a gesture which she realised had never left her mind. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m on my way to Rome.’
It was fifteen years, eight months and three days since she had last seen him.
‘Good God, so am I. What flight?’
It was the same flight.
‘Stay where you are,’ Thomas said. ‘No, don’t stay where you are. Come over here while I check in. Don’t dare to disappear!’
At the counter, he magisterially changed her seat so they could sit together. ‘I was scared sick,’ she told me, ‘that my longing to sit with him was so transparent it would frighten him away.’
Dazed, trying not to count her luck, praying that Neil or Primrose would not suddenly materialise, like malign figures in a fairy tale, and whisk her back to Gerrards Cross, she moved through to the departure lounge where he steered her towards a café and ordered double rations of toast and coffee.
‘I have to drink lashings of coffee,’ Thomas explained, ‘or I shall fall asleep for a hundred years and a thorn hedge will grow round me and then only a kiss from a beautiful woman will wake me. I’ve been up all night looking for my passport. It’s always in my travel bag and then suddenly it wasn’t. Lucky I checked before I left. Does that happen to you? Do you like coffee, I forget? Have some more.’
‘I don’t think you could have known whether I like coffee or not. I’ve never lost my passport, but I don’t travel much.’
‘I always thought of you as a sensible girl,’ Thomas said. It wasn’t clear if he was referring to the travel, the coffee or the passport. ‘Didn’t we drink coffee at Bainbridge’s that day?’
‘I remember you made me an omelette.’
Her heart which had always rested quietly under her breastbone was burning through her chest.
‘I was going to make you a cheese soufflé the next time.
‘I’d have liked that.’
‘I would have liked it too,’ Thomas said. ‘I’d better pay the bill. Look, it says on the screen we’re boarding. They’re bound to be lying but people bag all the overhead locker room if you don’t get in first.’
On the plane, he organised her luggage—‘Specs? Oh, that’s too unfair, don’t tell me you don’t need them yet. Why are you going to Rome, as if you need a reason?’
She explained about the mission for her father.
‘Of course, you’re half Italian, aren’t you? I’ve forgotten your name.’
She began to say ‘Eliz—’ but he interrupted.
‘Don’t be absurd, naturally I know you’re “Elizabeth”. The other one.’
‘It was Bonelli but it’s Cruikshank now.’
‘So there’s a Mr Cruikshank? Who is he?’
‘Someone I met soon after we met.’
‘Tell me all about him.’ She’d forgotten his trick of putting his head on one side. ‘Do you know, the Indians believed that the eyes of twin souls are an identical width apart?’ He had taken his glasses off and was looking at her with his bright brown eyes.
‘The American Indians?’ was all she could manage.
‘The Eastern ones. It was a Vedic belief. The eyes are the entrance to the soul so only kindred spirits can gain access’.
They spent the flight absorbed in the kind of conversation she had not dared to risk rehearsing since the brief but splendid afternoon they had spent, her in her neighbour’s dressing gown. It was as if a river which had gone underground had as abruptly reissued with a silent roar. The flow was rolling on, apparently uninterrupted, from their first encounter, though neither broached the subject of the unexplained loss of contact. As they ate their airline meal—‘Isn’t it like hospital food? We need more wine!’—the mystery must have hovered between them, enlivening, with its possibilities, the predictable lunch and the unspectacular wine.
When, early in the afternoon, they arrived at Rome and there was some hitch with the baggage, she stood among the impatient bodies of the other passengers—worrying volubly over their bags—praying that hers, and his, had been stolen, or left behind at Heathrow, or gone to Helsinki or, better still, to Hell, anything to postpone the closing-off of this unlooked-for loophole in time. But his shabby case, with the buckled strap, arrived on the conveyor belt, which rolled relentlessly past them like a parody of time, and soon after her own, less venerable, and altogether ordinary, travel bag arrived and he carried both to the station as all the luggage trolleys had been commandeered.
They took the train to Trastevere and then there was the matter of the taxi.
‘We’ll go to your hotel first and then I’ll know where to find you,’ Thomas said. ‘What time shall I come?’
‘When?’
‘When? Tonight. Or this afternoon. I have to see someone immediately but, no, look, take a taxi, would you, and come to mine? Come as soon as you can after five and we’ll be in time to walk on the Palatine and catch the view.’ He wrote the name and number of his hotel on the label of her suitcase.
Having bathed and, in high agitation, changed her clothes several times—nothing that she’d brought to wear being anywhere up to the mark—she took a taxi to his hotel, where she stood outside to recover herself before walking into the lobby, where it took a further five minutes of forcing her courage to ask the receptionist to ring to say she was there.
When Thomas came towards her across the marble floor it was as if a lift was crashing down inside her, leaving her lips so stiff and bloodless that it was hard to mouth the polite formula she eventually found to greet him with.
‘This is nicer than my hotel.’
‘Change then and come here.’
It was a close evening, and they walked past the hideous Victor Emmanuel monument and climbed Michelangelo’s noble steps to the Capitoline Hill, where the copy of the statue of the stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius sat, in fine bronze sandals, astride his fine bronze horse. And then Thomas steered her round by the Tarpeian rock, and down the stony Via di Consolazione, named to console those whose fate was to be thrown from the eponymous rock.
‘I hope they died quickly,’ she said. ‘It looks a little tame to be sure of an instant death.’
At the top of the Palatine Hill they surveyed the ancient Forum: the austere, ruined arches of the mighty basilica of Constantine and Maximilius, before which St Paul might have preached; the semicircular remnants of the Temple of the Vestal Virgins, Rome’s most nubile debutantes; the elaborately decorated arches, of Septimius Severus at one entrance to the site and, at the other, of Titus, on which, he told her, the sack of the Temple in Jerusalem is celebrated in the triumphal sporting of the Jewish menorah.
Beyond all this, he pointed out a dazzling vista of light and shadow, tall campaniles, greening cupolas, imperious palazzi, dominated by St Peter’s supremely self-confident dome. ‘How do you feel?’
‘Lucky to be here.’
‘Lucky me to be the one to show it to you first.’
Descending through terraces of oleander and pale blue plumbago, and old stone basins gently overflowing water, he led her back out of the Forum and through little squares and cobbled streets and arches till they landed up in the Campo de’ Fiori, where the only flowers now to be found are on the stalls of the daily market held there.
A gang of cleaners were engaged in dispatching petals, leaves, rotting figs, wasp-infested grapes, crushed walnut shells, sweet papers and sluicing the square of its patina of fish scales, but there was still a solitary flower seller, whose stall was pitched at the feet of the statue of the luckless Bruno, put to death by the Inquisition, Thomas explained, hustled, his tongue in a gag, under cover of darkness and burned on the site of his statue at a hastily erected stake, for refusing to deny his refutation of Catholic dogma.
From the lone flower seller they bought yellow roses and laid them at the base of the dark-cowled effigy, in memory of the burned man; and close by was a congenial-looking osteria, where they ate lamb cooked with artichokes and strawberries steeped in white wine.
Walking back, the sky turned indigo and crackled and then growled. ‘Jove’s throwing things,’ Thomas said. ‘I expect he’s committed a marital indiscretion and Juno’s in a rage.’
The rain came, first in outsize drops, then, suddenly, drenchingly, and they ran along shining, perilous cobbles to his hotel where in the vestibule he touched her shoulder and said, with equal lightness, ‘You’ll stay, won’t you? It’s better.’
In the stuffy hotel bathroom she ran water into the washbasin, dipped her hands and splashed her face, took off all her clothes, very fast, dropping them on to the floor, to get it over with, and when she walked into the bedroom Thomas had taken his off too, and they stood looking at each other, saying nothing, with her now so faint that she was afraid to move.
But he must have moved, for suddenly the space between them had vanished and he said, ‘Look, our bodies fit. I knew they did.’
Afterwards, fused from a frantic, fervent, mutual exchange, which seemed to reach right down and through to the level of the molecular, wet, from sweat and rain, and wrung out and beached up, at last, on the hard foreign mattress in grateful, glad exhaustion, they made the promises of children, playing, as if they will play for ever, in some sequestered garden, where the shadows are lengthening and elsewhere, in a parallel universe, the adult world is preparing to summon them back inside:
‘Don’t let me go again.’
‘I’m never going to let you go.’
‘I don’t ever want you to let me go.’
‘That’s settled then.’
Piteous words, as I heard them in my wintry Brighton consulting room, her face, the three or so feet away from mine, as pale and as distant as the moon. Their vows, repeated now, in her flat tone, conveyed, as plainly as if she had spelled it out in pokerwork, the stark fact that nothing is ever settled between two human souls, for nothing is or can be settled until we are finally done and gone.
But lovers are children; and I suppose that when you feel you have made true love you believe you’ve found a back door into eternity and cannot afford the notion that it may not be open to you on your return.