IT WASN’T UNTIL THE FOLLOWING MORNING THAT SHE RISKED raising any query over his unexplained disappearance, for even after a night of further feverishly joyous engagement she told me she was reluctant to open her eyes lest, for a second time, she find herself abandoned.
But then a foot found hers and in her ear she heard a reassuring snore.
‘You didn’t mind the snoring?’ Olivia always poked me in the back when I’d drunk too much and snored as a consequence.
‘I found it comforting. Like sleeping with a long-backed pig.’
‘And was his explanation equally reassuring?’
‘It was upsetting. But it clarified everything.’
On the evening he had left her, he explained as they sat in bed—knees propped congenially together, drinking coffee and eating croissants—he was due to meet a colleague, a Milanese art historian, whose visits to London were few, which was why, he took pains to say, he had not forgone the meeting for the greater pleasure of her continued company. He met the colleague and they discussed their shared area of research, but towards the evening he began to feel seedy, as if, he said, he was on the point of coming down with a nasty flu. He made his apologies to his colleague, cancelled their dinner, caught an early train back to Oxford, walked home from the station and retired to bed feeling pretty rough.
The following morning he said he felt so ropy he stayed in bed. His last distinct memory was feeling diabolically shaky in the bathroom, finding himself unequal to his usual shower and wondering if he could manage to pee without keeling over.
The next thing he was conscious of was a pain in his arm as a nurse in the hospital was changing the drip.
‘Septicaemia?’ I hazarded.
‘Nearly fatal. He was found, thank God, by a friend who was dropping off a book.’
‘So he must have been out of action for a while?’ Septicaemia’s a bummer. More young men died of it in the First World War than were ever done in by enemy fire.
‘Weeks in hospital. And after that he was as weak as a kitten and not up to much. And when he was feeling a bit more like himself and rang me…’
‘The bird had flown?’
‘We worked out he must have rung about ten days after I finally left.’
‘And you left no number?’
‘Who was going to ring me? I couldn’t live with the anxiety of not hearing from him a second longer,’ she bleakly declared.
‘What fucking awful luck!’ I allowed myself. On the whole, I refrained from swearing and never with patients.
‘Awful,’ she echoed bleakly. ‘And you see, all the time Thomas was mortally ill, instead of being with him, and being there to look after him, I was with Neil…’
I did see. It was an outrageous snub of fate.
‘And Thomas, what did he make of this?’
‘He thought what I’d thought, that I couldn’t have been so interested in him after all,’ she almost wailed.
‘But he tried, at least? He tried to find you?’ I hoped almost savagely that he had.
‘He did, he was much more determined than I was. But as I told you, I had closed down that part of my life completely. He even rang Bainbridge in Australia, but of course Bainbridge didn’t know where I was either, and in the end he gave up. We’d only met that once.’
‘But you’d made an impression.’ Since she’d embarked on her story, she was informed by quite a different spirit. I could feel for myself how their encounter might have stayed in Thomas’s mind.
‘Apparently.’
‘So what had happened to Thomas all this while?’
‘He’d married too. In fact, he married one of the doctors from the John Radcliffe, whom he met while he was ill. But he wanted children and his wife didn’t. I gathered she was very dedicated to her career. He said in the end it seemed pointless being together, and they parted, though they remained friends.’
‘So he was free when you met again?’
‘He was free,’ she agreed.
‘And you found you got on as well out of bed as in?’
‘Oh, it wasn’t just sex!’ she dismissed the suggestion with scorn. ‘If he’d been paralysed I would have minded, of course, for his sake, but nothing essential would have been lost. I loved his body—but that wasn’t the point. It was as if we knew each other from way back, always, I mean really knew, not just the surface pleasantries, the deep down things that no one could know because you don’t know them yourself, until you meet someone who knows them for you. It was the effortless knowing and being known that was so extraordinarily—’ She halted, searching.
‘Comforting? Like the pig?’
‘Comforting, yes, but also—’ She looked around as if my room might hold the clue for the word she wanted.
‘What is that egg? I mean, what bird?’
‘I was told it was a thrush’s. And thrush / Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring / The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing.’
‘Who is that?’
‘Hopkins.’
‘I like the lightnings.’
‘Yes. Poor Hopkins.’
‘Why “poor”?’
‘He thought sex was wrong, or his own sort was.’
‘Poor Hopkins,’ she agreed.
When I left Bar, I was too cowardly to tell her what I was doing, so I did what cowards do, I wrote her a letter, the recollection of which makes me go red with shame. In it I suggested—so original was my insight!—that I was doing her a favour, and that she would be better off without me. It’s a bad thing to do, that: deny the truth of someone’s feelings because we find them inconvenient.
Bar sent me the egg—which we’d found in an abandoned nest in the pear tree in her garden, the weekend when I half proposed to her, and she, half jokingly, as I excused it to myself later, accepted. She sent the egg in a box and within the swathe of protective tissue and cotton wool there was a note: Don’t teach your granny to suck these!
‘The thing was,’—she was gently rocking the egg in her hand—‘it all seemed so uncomplicated.’
‘Human associations generally tend to be complicated.’
‘With us it wasn’t. It was simple. That’s what I found so hard to believe. It was the straightforwardness which was the mystery. I don’t mean it was dull.’
She laughed, and again I saw the dancing moon. ‘We were passionate, passionate, intensely so in Rome, but what I took from it was this sense of being utterly and unquestionably known. And utterly and unquestioningly liked for it.’
‘To be both thoroughly known and thoroughly liked for it would be a tremendous allure.’ I was conscious of a touch of envy.
‘Have a bath,’ Thomas said, when they had finished breakfast and he had concluded his explanation, ‘and I’ll bring you another cup of coffee and talk to you and then we’ll go and visit the most perfect secular building in the world.’
On the way, they passed Bernini’s little elephant valiantly balancing an ancient Egyptian obelisk on its back.
‘Why does it have acorns on its cope?’ she asked.
‘You know, I don’t know,’ Thomas said. ‘Maybe because oaks are as strong as elephants.’
He led her round to the back of the Pantheon and pointed out the remnants of the marble facing and the dolphins and the scallop shells in the few extant fragments of the frieze.
There was a single remaining column. Peering up, she spotted something on a small roundel just above the capital. ‘Is that a snake?’
‘Clever person. Most people don’t spot it.’
They walked back past the elephant and round to the entrance where a man in a dirty blue frock coat and a powdered periwig tried, unsuccessfully, to sell them tickets for a performance of The Barber of Seville. ‘Did you know, Rossini used to compose in bed by an open window so he could lie down and look at the sky while he transcribed the music in his mind? He was so lazy that when some sheets of a score blew away, rather than trouble to get out of bed to retrieve them he wrote a whole new section.’
Preoccupied, she wasn’t really attending. ‘Do you think it’s an omen?’
‘The snake?’ He always seemed to know what she meant.
‘Yes.’
‘A snake in our paradise?’ Better still, he never pretended not to know.
‘Yes.’
‘I had a snake once. A grass snake called Doris. I found her at my grandmother’s, where I used to be sent in the holidays, and I kept her one summer in a tank in my room there—nobody noticed: no one ever noticed what I did, which had advantages—till I saw for myself it was cruel and freed her. I met her quite often afterwards, by the greenhouse. For the Greeks and the Romans, snakes were symbols of healing. It depends how you want to read it, Elizabeth Cruiksnake.’
‘And was the Pantheon the most perfect building, did you think?’ I asked.
‘It might have been the floor of heaven that morning with the discs and squares of different coloured marble shining in the rain.’
‘Look,’ Thomas had said, gesturing upwards.
There were few others there as with the threat of further heavy rain the majority of sightseers were cautiously waiting to judge the likely course of the weather before venturing outside. Her eye followed the arc of his hand to the singular hole in the great domed ceiling, through which the sun was posting a tremulous pole of pale light on to the yellow marble below.
‘What is it?’
‘The oculus. It’s what gives the effect of diffused radiance.’
‘And lets the rain in?’
‘That’s its peculiar beauty. I was here once when it was snowing.’ He fluttered his fingers and she could see the slow, dizzy descent of flakes. ‘The ceiling isn’t as the Romans would have seen it. It was gilded, but the Vatican nicked all the gold.’
‘I like it better bare.’
‘I certainly like you better that way.’ He squeezed her shoulder. ‘Are you cold?’
‘No. Just a goose walking over my grave. It’s…I can’t find the word.’
‘It’s the harmony. The proportions are impeccable: it can house a perfect sphere.’
She gazed up at the coffered ceiling, denuded of gold, enjoying the spareness. The Vatican were welcome to its plunder. ‘It’s tranquil,’ she said at last, feeling the luminance seep into her bones, as if, after all, all would be well.
‘Because it hasn’t a wrong note. It’s the geometry of grace.’
In my mind’s eye, I pictured the pair of them, fugitives from the cynical world, rejoicing in the unlooked-for security of their freshly discovered alliance as they wandered together, in comfortable companionship, through ruins and old churches, palaces and secluded gardens within the ancient lineaments of the hilled city that has looked on centuries of lovers, their passion, pain and ardour, and seen all vanish before its consummate indifference.
‘It was the most remarkable seven days of my life. I wrapped up my father’s business as soon as I could—with Thomas’s help it wasn’t too taxing—and then we did everything together. There was nothing we didn’t enjoy.’
‘You were fortunate,’ I suggested. ‘Rome is a numinous city but it has its sinister side.’
‘Yes. Thomas said you feel the presence of the ranks of the dead more than in any other city in the world.’
‘That’s where Keats gave up the ghost,’ Thomas said, pointing to an upper room. They were walking up the Spanish Steps to collect some of her things. It was raining again and they had had to buy flimsy umbrellas and bash their way through the stouter umbrella-bearing crowd. ‘We’ll go and pay our respects to his spirit and then we’ll go to the cemetery to pay our respects to his mortal remains. You’ll like it there: there’s a pyramid.’
‘A pyramid?’
‘An insignificant Roman had it built as one of those selfaggrandising memorials. When Keats realised he was dying, he sent Severn to do a recce of the cemetery and when he came back and told Keats there was a pyramid he was as pleased as Punch.’
‘Who was Severn?’
‘A devoted friend. A hearth companion. He was with Keats till the bitter end.’
‘What’s a hearth companion?’
‘Someone who sleeps beside you at the hearth and watches your back in a fight.’
There were almost as many cats as graves. Hand in hand, they walked the stone paths, through cypress and pine and bay and olive, and past two regal palms by Caius Cestius’s impressive pyramid, searching for Keats’s grave.
‘The other thing he liked about being buried here,’ Thomas said, when they had found the pine-cone-scattered grave—Keats side by side with the loyal Severn, like an old couple tucked up in a double bed—‘was the flowers. Violets were his favourites and Severn said that when he came back with the report of where his sick friend was bound, Keats was “joyed to learn that there were violets covering the graves” and said he almost seemed to feel them growing over him.’
Small piping birds, signalling that the rain had finally stopped, had begun to weave through the branches of the pines, and butterflies, like white pansies, were crookedly navigating the tilted gravestones.
‘His name isn’t even here,’ she said, thinking of the Roman nonentity’s pyramid and reading the epitaph: Here lies One Whose Name was Writ in Water. ‘It looks too ordinary for such a great poet.’
‘Death is extremely ordinary. It happens to everyone, though people seem to forget this. It’s why you and I mustn’t waste time.’
‘D’you think we will?’
‘I don’t know, Elizabeth.’
His eyes had the serious look she wasn’t quite equal to and to change the subject she said, ‘Why was Keats in Rome?’
‘Supposedly for his health, to escape the perilous British fog. But maybe he came to die. He was the sort who, unconsciously, would have known where to die. It’s not a bad place to choose, Rome.’
‘We should have brought violets.’
‘We shall next time.’
‘You’ve not said why Thomas was in Rome.’
‘He was researching his subject, Caravaggio.’ So that was the connection. Silently I blessed Gus. ‘Thomas was possessed by Caravaggio. He talked to me about him all the time.’
It’s a feature of love that it can invade any subject. I intimated as much but she repudiated the implication.
‘It was never boring because Thomas so loved his work.’
‘And love is never boring?’
She swept aside my feeble squib of sarcasm. ‘Not if it’s real, and Thomas was a true enthusiast. It was an extraordinary education. We must have visited every available Caravaggio in Rome that week.’
‘A memorable courtship!’
I was conscious again of that sly undercurrent of envy beneath my slightly stuffy tone. I warmed to Thomas’s passion, which, even second-hand, infused his most pedestrian observations with its ardent light. But it probed some vague and painful discomfort of my own.
I glanced at my patient in case the shade of something personal had registered and saw a gleam streak her face. For the first time in our acquaintance she was crying. An unspoken injunction had relaxed and it must have released us both, as for the first time, too, I addressed her by name.
‘Would you like to stop, Elizabeth?’
‘What’s your other name, Dr McBride?’
‘David. My family call me Davey.’
‘I prefer David.’
‘You can call me David if you like.’
‘I don’t want to stop, thanks, David. Unless you need to?’
‘I don’t need to, Elizabeth. I want you to go on.’