THE NEXT DAY THEY FLEW FROM MILAN TO ROME, WHICH COULD hardly help reviving memories of their first flight there together.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘I was beside myself in case I wouldn’t be able to sit with you on the plane.’
‘Don’t be silly, of course I was going to arrange it.’
‘We mustn’t forget to take violets to Keats,’ she suddenly remembered.
He was about to respond when a stewardess came round and served them bottled water, with a flourish as if she were offering champagne.
‘We need himself to turn this into wine,’ Thomas remarked.
‘D’you think he did?’
‘He did if they believed so.’
‘But belief can’t alter the physical substance of the world.’
‘It can alter people’s perception of it. Belief does alter people, marvellously, if only they’ll believe it.’
‘Thomas, what did you see in me all those years ago when we met at Bainbridge’s? I don’t get it.’
‘What a phrase. Please don’t disfigure your pretty mouth with such phrases.’
‘All right, I won’t, but what?’
He looked past her to the window through which the sky was casually parading a cerulean blue. ‘Look out there. Tiepolo would have been in his seventh heaven. Do you know what the seventh heaven was? Never mind, I’ll tell you another time. I’ll tell you what I saw at Bainbridge’s.’ He paused to sip his water from the plastic beaker. ‘Ugh! Do you think they just fill those bottles from the tap and sell them for a fortune? I bet they do!
‘I saw you had a very pretty shape, even beneath Bainbridge’s hideous dressing gown. I saw you had an even lovelier smile, a Leonardo smile, not like that blowsy, running-to-fat, self-satisfied Mona Lisa creature but like the Virgin’s mother, St Anne, unselfconscious and serene. I saw that here was someone who didn’t make herself up. That’s what I saw most clearly. In your own way, you’re an artist because you have an artist’s ability not to pretend. Very few people—’ the square-fingered hands made emphatic gestures—‘very, very few have the capacity to withstand the temptation to become someone altogether unlike themselves. You have it. You have, or had, it naturally.’
‘You mean I haven’t any more?’
The candid gaze was unblinking. ‘You’ve been living under horrible conditions. It’s almost impossible not to pick up the atmosphere in which you live. It’s why I’ve been on at you to leave Gerrards Cross. You imagine it’s for my sake. It’s not. Or, rather, it is, because your sake is my sake. An atmosphere like that vitiates the spirit. It creates confusion. It confounds the good. It makes you doubt me, for example. You know, don’t you, that Neil is having an affair?’
‘How do you know?’ She felt a stab of excitement.
‘Because of what you’ve said. You’ve picked up duplicity and suspicion from that poisonous atmosphere.’
‘But I’m duplicitous too.’ For the moment she didn’t want to contemplate what he had said about Neil.
‘I’m sorry I don’t help.’
‘Thomas, you do help. You help me more than anyone has ever helped me in my life. I’m sorry I’m a trouble to you.’
‘It’s no trouble, Elizabeth. I’m sorry for your sake it’s so hard.’
‘And Rome?’ I asked. I wanted it to be as significant for them as before.
‘I only stayed a night.’
‘Why?’ My tone was as passionate as Thomas could have wished.
‘Primrose called me home.’
‘How? Why?’
‘I rang from the hotel. I had to, for the children. I left a number and she rang back.’
‘And?’
‘She said I should come home, that something serious had happened. I’d told them I was taking someone’s place at short notice on an art history course—of course I’d emphasised the last-minuteness of it, as if it were a cheap deal, so it was hard to argue for staying on. Especially when faced with the children.’
‘What had happened to the children?’
‘I pressed her but all she would say was that it was serious and that I should come home. I thought Max must have got into trouble at school. They were always—quite barmily, it seemed to me—expelling boys for smoking. I knew he smoked. I caught him once at the bottom of the garden and he said, “Mum, you won’t tell Granny, will you?”’
Good for Max! It sounded as if he’d known his mother better than she’d implied. ‘And was it that? Had he been expelled?’
‘No, he hadn’t.’
‘So what was it?’ Suddenly, I was overtaken by a colossal anxiety which crashed over me like a tidal wave.
‘Would you mind if I lie down?’
‘Of course not, but…’
I had nowhere for her to lie. My analyst’s couch was at my private rooms. You don’t ask psychiatric patients on the NHS to lie down.
‘I’ll lie on the floor. I often do when my back hurts.’
‘Of course. Is it hurting now?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘What time is it? It must be late. Do you want to go?’
‘It doesn’t matter what the time is and I don’t want to go.’
Thomas watched her repack, lying on the bed. He lay with one hand behind his head, watching.
‘Don’t look like that,’ she pleaded at last.
‘How am I looking?’
‘Indifferent.’
‘I’m not indifferent, Elizabeth. I’m as unindifferent as it’s possible to be. I’m tired, if you want to know. Bone-tired. And I know when I’m defeated. I told you, you’re stronger than me. People who think they’re right always are.’
‘I’ll come straight back as soon as I’ve sorted out whatever it is.’
‘How do you propose to “sort out” blackmail?’
‘There’s obviously something wrong.’
‘Yes,’ said Thomas. ‘You’re right. There is. Blackmail is wrong. Blackmail is very wrong and should never be succumbed to.’
‘I thought you didn’t believe in right or wrong.’ But she wished she hadn’t said this and went over and knelt beside him on the bed. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m tired, I told you. I didn’t sleep much last night.’
‘I’m sorry. I thought I was the sleepless one.’
‘Don’t be absurd. How could I sleep with you lying there in a state? What do you think I’m made of?’
‘I’ll come back,’ she said again, kissing him on the forehead.
‘Where will you come to? I might not be here.’ They had planned to hire a car and drive to the monastery whose collection Thomas had arranged to visit.
‘I’ll ring the hotel. You can leave me a message.’
‘Elizabeth. Be brave. Face her out. Cut the Russian Vine down to size. It’s what she’s trying to do to you. Don’t be cut down. Stay here. Stay here with me. I don’t want to cut you down. I want you. And you don’t want to go.’
She had never wanted to do anything less in her life, she told me, but early the next morning she left him, still in bed, and took a taxi to the airport. She didn’t lie on the floor to say this. She walked across to my desk and stood with her back to me and explained that Primrose had brought her from Rome to inform her that Neil was divorcing her. He, they—almost certainly Primrose, because, as she said, ‘Neil wouldn’t be so crude’—had set a private detective on her who had followed her to Milan. He had photographed her going into Thomas’s apartment and coming out with him the following morning. He had also followed them to the Brera, ‘repository of Napoleon’s finest looting’, Thomas had called it.
I don’t know quite why that struck me as the last word in gross invasiveness since even a private detective has his job to do. The Gerrards Cross contingent, prior to receipt of these instances of vulgar proof—which, I gathered, were merely the final nails in a coffin which had been eagerly constructed—had already taken counsel’s opinion. The fact that Elizabeth had abandoned her children during their holiday, in order to conduct this adulterous liaison was, Primrose averred, with singular satisfaction, likely to ensure that custody of the children would remain with Neil. In any case, as she was sure ‘Liz’ would understand it would be too great a disruption, at this stage in their lives, to remove the children from their family home.
‘It was your home too!’
‘I didn’t want it.’
‘The bitch!’ A bloody old bitch, Thomas had called her.
‘I suppose she was only defending her own.’
‘It wasn’t the correct legal position, either, I imagine, about the children?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t bother to fight it. I felt she was right about not disrupting them and they were away at boarding school much of the time. They liked their grandparents’ home.’
‘I see.’ The tidal wave had withdrawn leaving an outwash of depression. Where was Thomas’s fighting spirit? ‘And what did Thomas say? He must have been relieved about the divorce.’
‘Where did these come from?’ She had turned round with Bar’s egg and Jonny’s bell cupped in the palm of each hand. They gave an impression of devotional offerings in some longvanished rite.
‘The bell belonged to my brother.’
‘Older or younger?’
‘Older. He died when I was five.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘He died stopping the traffic to see me to safety.’
As I was saying this, with an extraordinary sense of ordinariness, I perceived that this indeed is what Jonny had been doing. It wasn’t, was it, that he hadn’t seen the lorry, as I had always supposed? Or had told myself I supposed? As the familiar scene reassembled in memory, a blind was sliding quietly up and revealing that my brother had seen the lorry, and that I had not been, as I had always imagined, on the pavement at all. It was I who had stepped heedlessly out into the road, and the lorry was looming terrifyingly towards me—and now I saw, as if it were happening there and then before my shocked eyes, that it was Jonny who had been on the pavement and had sprung between me and the approaching vehicle, holding up his hand in a vain attempt to halt its fatal progress.
Again she said, as if she feared I’d not heard, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘It was a long time ago.’ Forty years, three months and twelve days. A long time to have carried around a lie.
‘Thomas died,’ she said. ‘That seems a long time ago too, though it’s only just over seven years. If you don’t mind, I might lie down now.’