I HAVE WONDERED SOMETIMES IF COMPASSION ISN’T THE most dangerous enemy of promise because it so readily wears the mask of virtue. Com passion: with passion. But it wasn’t any aspect of passion, I concluded, hearing Elizabeth Cruikshank’s story, which kept her from going to Thomas. It was something more insidious, which the golden blast of the stolen days in Rome had dislodged but failed finally to banish.
It reverberated in the dulled tone in which she reported the resumed monotony of life at Gerrards Cross, which had taken on for me, as well as her impatient lover, the desolating atmosphere of a polite suburb of Hell.
‘Why did you really stay on in Gerrards Cross?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Didn’t you believe Thomas?’ I wasn’t sure that I would have done.
‘I did believe him. But…’ She paused and stared again at her coffee. I felt some discomfort again over the clumsy mug and the lack of a gracious Italian cup. ‘I did believe him,’ she repeated, ‘but, it was more…I can’t explain.’
‘Was it that you couldn’t believe your luck?’ ‘Yes,’ she sounded grateful. ‘That was it. I couldn’t believe my luck.’
I’ve thought more about luck since I had this conversation with Elizabeth Cruikshank. Luck is the heart’s genius but it is sustained by belief. And the head, so often at odds with the heart, mistrusts belief and has secret, and often violent, purposes of its own. What I was hearing in my patient’s account was something I recognised in myself: the faltering spirit that cunningly allies itself with decency.
‘You imagined you weren’t worth it?’
‘I wasn’t worth it.’
I let this pass. ‘And how did Thomas take your disbelief?’
‘I don’t know. I knew he minded. Though, now you ask, I don’t believe I believed either that he really minded. It’s a hard thing to explain.’
‘I think I understand. But he stayed?’
‘Yes.’ Her voice was a dry whisper. ‘For a while.’
After initial vociferous protests, she said, Thomas lapsed into a semi-permanent ironic note over what he referred to as ‘bearing the Gerrards Cross’. The postponement of the life they had conceived together in Rome continued. Primrose’s long arm of control was merely extended from her wheelchair and my patient developed the subterfuge necessary to visit the mews.
It’s hard to be sure how far you can know another person when you perceive them only through the prism of another’s perceptions. And yet, for all his differences from myself, I felt I had begun to understand Thomas. I liked him. I liked him, it occurs to me now, in much the same way that I had begun to like Caravaggio, that is, coming from an initial reserve.
Among the elements I admired in him was the guerrilla war he fought against Gerrards Cross. Round about this time it seemed Primrose seconded the Church as ally.
‘Was she religious?’ I didn’t really need an answer to this.
‘Not remotely! But she fancied the vicar.’
‘Ah, yes. Clergy tend to attract transferences the way psychiatrists and analysts do but they aren’t as a rule so prepared for them.’
‘I shouldn’t think he was, poor man.’
‘What was it about him?’
‘Oh, he was young and good-looking and sympathetic.’
‘And naive?’
‘She used her condition to get him to come round and talk to her. She was a powerful presence in the church community. He couldn’t very well say no.’
I have often thought there should be a book written on the need to say no. ‘And what did she want with the vicar, your mother-in-law?’
‘Thomas said she was enlisting him on the side of “right”.’
‘Right,’ Thomas declared one evening, ‘is a terribly wrong concept.’
They were eating supper in bed, cheese on toast with chutney. Thomas, I had been noticing, was a master of the bedroom snack.
‘But there is such a thing as “right”’, she suggested.
‘I don’t know. Or rather, we don’t know. I dare say there is but I doubt that any human being would recognise it. Think of all the terrible things that people do in the name of “right”. It’s almost always bullying and invasive.’
‘Where does the idea that right is right come from?’
‘God knows. Or rather, God doesn’t know, I shouldn’t imagine. God, if there is one, would be most unlikely to be fussy about right or wrong.’
‘Primrose thinks God is “right”’.
‘What would a Russian Vine know about God, please? An RV would just smother God with its own insidious presence. Smother Mother, ugh!’
‘She’s become very thick with the vicar.’
‘Poor sod,’ said Thomas. ‘She’ll be trying to enrol him in the Russian Vine Church of Moral Righteousness. I should lend him my secateurs.’
‘He might need them. She’s got a crush on him.’
‘What’s his name? I’ll buy him a pair and send them to him anonymously.’
‘Why is sex so rarely right?’ she asked a bit later, trying to brush toast crumbs out of the bed.
‘Because it’s extremely rare for the right people to have it together.’
‘How do you know who’s “right”, though?’
‘You do know,’ he said. ‘You know when it happens. You’re right, I’m right. We don’t need to be righter than that. Sex with the wrong person can be fun, and often is, or it can be frankly terrible, but never right.’
‘I don’t know what right we are talking about now.’
‘Neither do I,’ Thomas said. ‘Shut up for a moment. If you’ve got rid of those crumbs I want to see how right we can be again.’
Later still, disengaging herself, she said, ‘I don’t do this any more with Neil.’
‘I don’t want to know what you do with Neil.’
‘But I don’t. I want you to know.’
‘I’ve said, I don’t want to know.’
‘Thomas—’
‘No, please, Elizabeth. Listen to me. What you do with Neil in that hell-hole is your affair.’
‘I wouldn’t because it would be wrong.’
‘I’ve said already, I know nothing about right or wrong.’
‘You do, though. You said, earlier, about right not being right. It wouldn’t be right of me. It would be wrong.’
‘I’ve said I don’t want to know. And I don’t know, and don’t want to know, because I don’t believe anyone who talks about it—not even you—knows about right and wrong. Or, indeed, right or wrong.’
‘But I don’t want to—’
‘Elizabeth, stop, please.’
‘But I don’t want to do any wrong to you,’ she insisted.
‘OK,’ Thomas said.
In the short silence she heard a car door bang and a woman’s voice call out, ‘You’ve forgotten your keys, you’ll forget your stupid head next.’
‘You ask me about right and wrong. I’ll tell you. I think it’s wrong that you are there and not here. I think it’s wrong because it’s dangerous. I think it’s wrong because it’s a kind of perverseness in you. I think your reasons for being there are frankly lousy and suspect. But I love you, so I’m putting up with it. Which might be right, I don’t know. And it might be wrong, I don’t know that either, but if it is I don’t care. What I do know is this, and this is right because it is what is right for me, so hear me, please, OK? I don’t, repeat don’t, wish to have my imagination sullied by the thought of your having sexual intercourse—or not having sexual intercourse, it’s no odds to me—with your husband. It’s not a subject I wish to entertain at any time, at any price, in any neck of the woods, but especially not—especially not—here with you in my own bed. Right or wrong, I don’t wish to know. OK?’
‘Thomas—’
‘No, Elizabeth!’ He had jumped out of the bed and stood facing her, naked and furious, his myopic eyes darkly bright with rage.
Looking at him quite coolly, she appraised his long, spare body as an artist might. You’re like a painting yourself, she thought.
‘I’ve told you. You’re stronger than me. I have only myself. You believe you have right on your side.’
‘Who says? I never did.’
‘I do. I do. I can feel it. I feel it here.’ He smacked the palm of his hand against his naked chest which made a surprisingly loud noise. ‘You believe in pissy things like good manners and adultery.’
‘I believe in not hurting people.’
‘And do you think you will prevent people being hurt by staying on in Gerrards Cross? Do you? Do you? Listen, here’s who you’ll hurt. Let me tell you: one, me, i.e. Thomas Carrington, OK, let’s not count him because he loves us, and we don’t count ourselves, so let’s try two, Elizabeth Cruikshank, née Bonelli, well, we don’t count her, either, do we?, because see one, Thomas Carrington loves her et cetera, et cetera—so let’s move on to three, Neil Cruikshank, we’ll do better with him because he doesn’t love us so he counts more than one and two put together but, look, if you stay he’ll love you, if anything, even less because my hunch is he’s really longing for you to leave him so he can be a real martyr, but, look, finally, four, hurrah! at last we’ve hit the jackpot, Primrose Cruikshank, aka the Russian Vine, who is going to get hurt worst of all because she’s dying, my darling, just dying for you to run off and fulfil all her direst prophecies about you so she can say “I told you so” to her ickle son and fall into the unfortunate vicar’s arms and—and—don’t you see, DON’T YOU SEE—?’
‘Thomas, Thomas darling, don’t, don’t, Thomas…’
He was crying and she held him tight in her arms and they were both crying and then it all seemed all right again.
It was partly this row that persuaded her to go to Paris with him a few weeks later.
‘I wish we could go back to Rome,’ she had said after they had made it up in bed with the cheese-on-toast crumbs.
‘Why is it, no matter how you brush them out crumbs stay in a bed for ever and a day? We can do nearly as good as Rome. We can go to Paris, if you can extract yourself from the RV’s toils.’
Thomas, it appeared, wished to visit the Louvre to examine a Caravaggio. They stayed in one of the small Left Bank hotels, short on light and smelling of tobacco and that faint aroma of something exotic, which might be no more than vanilla, but anyway a smell which once seemed unique to France.
The hotel was near the Musée de Cluny, which they visited to look at the medieval artefacts and tapestries, and also, beneath the museum, the robuster Roman baths. She told me she preferred the remains of the latter to the pale tapestry ladies and courtly flowers and ivory-backed looking glasses and intricately jewelled caskets. ‘Maybe just because they were Roman and by then I was prejudiced in favour of all things Roman but I liked that the baths seemed so practical.’
‘I’ve always admired the Romans’ plumbing,’ I agreed.
‘Thomas was keen on their drains.’
I was mildly chuffed by this evidence of a shared taste between myself and the uncompromising Thomas. ‘And Paris, you enjoyed it?’
I could hardly imagine she hadn’t. To be with her ebullient lover in Paris struck me as offering another peak of joyous possibility. Bar and I went to Paris once and it has remained in my memory as three of the happiest days in my life. We had to drag the mattress on to the floor to sleep, because the hotel bed was so ropy and dipped so much that we rolled into each other. We made quite a bit of the dip, I seem to recall, before we repaired to the floor.
But it seemed that I’d misjudged this Paris visit because her face clouded.
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘The Roman baths were the best part.’
‘Oh?’
During their visit to the Louvre Thomas had announced that he would be moving at the beginning of the year to Milan. My own heart practically juddered to a stop at hearing of this new turn of events.
‘We were looking at The Death of the Virgin when he told me.’
‘You know,’ she said, ‘it’s not the big things that demolish you. It’s the way, for example, people push their glasses up their nose.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I can tell you what he said exactly. He said, about the picture, “That’s my idea of a difficult repentance.” Then he said, “I’m going to go and live in Milan for a while. They’ve offered me a job there.”’
‘What did you say?’
I expected her not to respond but she said, apparently calmly, ‘Not what I felt. I must have asked some stupid question about his house—I loved that little house—because I remember what he said in reply. “I’ll keep that in case you ever come to live with me, but while I am waiting I might as well take up this offer. It’s a good one.” It was a good one. A chair at Milan University.’
‘Thomas was older than you?’ I’d not enquired about his age.
‘He was forty-five. How old are you?’
‘Forty-five.’ My laugh was embarrassed. In my imagination Thomas had seemed younger; more youthful in spirit, anyway, than my middle-aged self. The coincidence flustered me. To hide the awkwardness I asked a more than usually direct question. ‘What did you feel you wanted to say to him?’
‘Oh,’ she said, wearily, ‘I don’t know. Now you pin me down, what did I really want to say?’
She got up and walked over to my desk, put out a finger and touched Jonny’s bell, as if she were going to refer the question there. But, instead, she walked back and stood grasping the back of the blue brocade chair with her blue-veined hands.
‘I wanted to say—’ her voice lifted—‘I wanted to say: Don’t go, stay, please stay with me. I am not myself any longer because now I am yourself, or you are myself, I no longer know, or some other strange new self that exists between us. I don’t know what I shall do if you take that away from me. I am terrified, scared to death, scared witless at what you are saying. Show me that you understand. Show me you understand that I am standing here, looking at the blood-red dress of the mother of Christ, and the blood-red hanging over her deathbed, and my heart is bleeding away inside me, blood-red blood inside. Take away this terror that I am losing you, you must take it away because only you can, only you in all the world have ever been able to help me. If you won’t understand what I don’t understand myself, because I can’t myself understand why I don’t come to you, you might as well strap my hands and gag my tongue and bind my eyes and take me out by night and burn me at the stake, in dire darkness, in blind and filthy darkness, as you told me—when you loved me first, before you told me you loved me first—they did to the astronomer Bruno in Rome.
‘But I didn’t say it.’
‘You should have done.’ I didn’t intend to be cruel.
She seemed to acknowledge this because she walked round and sat down carefully in the chair again and said, ‘I know I should but I didn’t know how.’
We sat, unwilling to meet each other’s gaze, which was when I said, ‘D’you fancy a drink? I’ve got a bottle of Scotch in my drawer’, and she said, ‘Thanks, I’d love one. I wasn’t Bruno, you see. At his trial he said, “Perhaps you, my judges, pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.” By the way, what time is it?’, and I got out the bottle of Famous Grouse, which I kept for my own private emergencies, and poured a couple of tumblers full and we sat and drank together in companionable gloom while I mentally dispatched the General Medical Ethics Council to perdition. I reckoned it was a legitimate prescription: we both badly needed something to lift our spirits. I didn’t bother to consult my watch: we were past such considerations by this time.
And I suppose because I couldn’t take any more emotion just then, and felt we could both do with a break, I said, ‘Tell me about the painting.’
‘Which painting?’
‘The one you were looking at when he told you.’
‘The Death of the Virgin? For the rest of my life I shall remember it.’
When I was last in Paris I visited the Louvre to see this painting and I could hear Elizabeth Cruikshank’s emotionless voice describing it to me all those years before.
‘It’s a scene which is usually called “The Dormition”, the socalled transit of the Virgin from this life to the next. Except that Caravaggio has dared to paint it as if it is the end and there will be no life to come.
‘She’s young, his Mary. White-faced and exhausted, worn out with sorrow, and laid out, dead, with big, veined peasant’s hands, and her feet, all ungainly, sticking out of her shift, with no attempt at elegant piety.
‘John, the beloved disciple, is standing at her head and all the other disciples are shuffling up to pay their respects, and you can tell from their posture that they’re crushed with the profoundest grief. He took the story from The Golden Legend, a medieval book, popular then, of the lives of the saints and the legend was that, at Mary’s death, the Apostles were all miraculously transported to her bedside, though the real miracle in this scene is Caravaggio’s execution of it.
‘Mary Magdalene, who’s washed the dead body, is sitting beside the bed and he’s painted her folded over almost in two with the weight of her despair. It’s the second death she’s had to bear, you see, and you can tell it’s defeated her. I remember looking at her and thinking: Yes, I know how you feel.’
‘How did you feel?’
She pondered. ‘It was a kind of second death for me, too.’
‘Because you felt you were losing him again?’
‘Because I felt I was losing him again. You know, they hated Caravaggio, for that painting. He used his whore as his model for the Virgin. She wasn’t what they had in mind at all.’
‘What did they have in mind?’
‘Oh, you know, sweetness and light. Transfiguration. Certainly not some clapped-out prostitute. The picture of death wasn’t what they wanted either.’
‘I suppose death never is.’
‘No.’
‘What did “they” want for that, would you say?’
She considered again. ‘Hope. Hope that this isn’t the end. It’s not allowed to be, is it? I mean, people, even people who aren’t religious, don’t like to think that it is.’
‘I suppose not.’ I contemplated the plate empty of sandwiches and the browning apple core she’d gnawed to next to nothing and felt a snatch of her wolfish hunger. ‘What did Thomas mean by repentance?’
‘“A difficult repentance” was what he called it. I’m not sure. Maybe…no, now you ask, I don’t really know. She was a prostitute, of course, Mary Magdalene; it was her he was referring to. But I doubt he meant that sort of repentance. He didn’t go in for that kind of thinking.’
‘Nor did Caravaggio, from the sound of it.’ The painter’s was clearly a nature which needed to rattle swords at piety and convention. ‘I imagine that’s why he didn’t let them have what they wanted for their image of death.’ It crossed my mind to ask if she shared the painter’s unsentimental view of the afterlife.
‘For me that’s its virtue.’
I didn’t need to ask the question. ‘And did he go? Did Thomas go to Milan?’
Her voice sounded kind, as if reluctant to speak words she knew might hurt me. ‘Oh yes, he went. People do go in the end. They get tired of waiting.’