I MUST HAVE KNOWN THOMAS WAS DEAD—THOUGH I HAD NOT known I had known. I read once a remark of Harold Pinter’s: Apart from the known and unknown what is there? At first I thought it a smart observation until it occurred to me that all serious matter exists somewhere between the known and unknown. I knew and didn’t know that Thomas was dead. But then, I had known and not known about Jonny.
She lay on her back on the floor, in the pool of light made by the Hermes lamp, with her hand behind her head—as she had told me Thomas had lain, the last time she saw him, watching her pack to return to England—and told me how he had died. And if you’d produced a couple of pins I would have lain on the floor beside her.
Thomas’s belief was that a minor painter, Paolo Geraci, a follower of Caravaggio but in no way his equal, had got his hands on an original and had used it as a base for his own Road to Emmaus. Thomas had verified that a painting with this title was in the collection of a monastery, north of Rome, and his plan was to examine it and, if need be, persuade the monastery to allow it to be investigated further. There were problems with this since, in stripping down to any earlier work, the upper layers of a painting must necessarily be removed, so that any later work, albeit of potentially lesser value, will be destroyed permanently in the process. It is, thus, inevitably, a risky business, but, as she said, if there was any chance an original Caravaggio was to be uncovered then Thomas was the man to convince the most cautious.
They had planned to make this investigative trip together and she had hoped he might reschedule the appointment with the monastery for her return from Gerrards Cross. Hearing her say so, I felt the futility of this. It suggested, painfully, to me that at the end she had lost touch with the mind of her lover.
He set out, dogged and alone, for his appointment with the monastery’s curator, driving up into the mountains, and he never reached his destination. An alert driver noticed the hired car, askew and dangerously close to a vertiginous hairpin bend. Stopping to investigate, he found an unconscious heap over the wheel.
Thomas survived a cardiac arrest for two days in intensive care, while back in Gerrards Cross she was frantically trying to trace his whereabouts. When she finally tracked him down it was through Claudia in Milan.
‘She met me at the airport when I made it back to Rome. I didn’t want to see her, but she seemed to want it, and, you know…’
‘I know about not wanting to upset people because we are upset ourselves.’
‘She made my upset seem very small beer. She must have doubted that Thomas and I were at all close.’
‘And was she like a pig, at all?’
‘You know, there was something faintly porcine. I felt mean thinking so, when I met her, because she was a nice enough girl and also exceedingly glamorous. But Thomas had this devastating eye. He could see the essence of people.’
‘It’s a great gift.’
‘I’m afraid it makes you lonely.’
‘It would make you lonely. Great gifts do.’
I’d no need to ask if she’d got to Thomas before he died: my bones had already informed me.
‘When I finally got to the hospital in Rome I spoke to the consultant, whose care Thomas was under for that brief spell. A kind man. He took trouble to give me his time without making me feel he was doing so. He was most upset that they’d failed to save him.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘He confirmed it was probably the septicaemia which had compromised the healthy functioning of Thomas’s heart. If he’d been found sooner they’d have had more chance. You know, when I was lying with my head on his chest I could hear an arrhythmia.’
(‘It’s like a bird,’ she had said once, ‘your heart, trying to get free from a snare.’
‘You’re the bird,’ he had replied, drawing her down to him to dismiss her concern.)
‘The doctor was kind but he couldn’t answer all my questions and you know—’ the words had come fluently but here she stumbled and, hardly a pace behind, inwardly, I stumbled too—‘distress places a burden on the heart. I’d upset him. He was uncharacteristically passive that evening. I thought it was disappointment in me but I feel now he was already unwell.’
‘We all tend to project our own concerns.’
‘I don’t believe Thomas did. Or less than most. He was unusually clear-eyed.’
She confided she had had a fantasy that he might be buried in the Protestant cemetery, where they had gone together, on that first fine reunion, to honour Keats’s remains.
‘I take it he’s not buried near Keats?’
‘No. But I did go there and I took violets.’
‘He would have liked that,’ I felt able to say. ‘Where is he buried?’
‘In Kensal Rise. He’d have hated that but I had no say in it. I’ve never even been there. His wife organised it all.’
‘And did you meet her, too?’
She crooked her head towards the blue brocade chair. ‘Yes, through that.’
‘What?’
‘What’s in my bag. Thomas’s notebook. He’d written my name over his address, to say where, if the book was lost, it should be returned. Very decently, his wife did so. Or, rather, she wrote to me care of the mews—I still had the key—and asked if we could meet.’
‘And did you?’
‘We met there.’
‘And was it difficult?’
‘It was awkward, certainly. For some reason, I ended up recounting what Thomas had told me the first time I stayed, after we returned from Rome: a mews is so called because the first was built on the site where the royal hawks had been mewed.’
And quite distinctly I saw a bird’s hovering image over the spire which, she had told me, lifted her heart every time she approached her lover’s home. ‘What did she make of that?’
‘Oh, she took it in her stride. I felt she grasped the awkwardness.’
‘What was she like?’
‘A doctor. Practical. Steady. Unimaginative, which would have been difficult for Thomas but I didn’t dislike her.’
It made sense. Particularly after his drastic illness, a highly strung soul like Thomas might have been drawn to someone who offered a sense of security—before he learned that security, finally, is always an inward matter.
‘And the notebook?’
‘Oh, David.’ She sat up on the floor and put her head in her hands.
Years later, when I visited the Louvre to find The Death of the Virgin, and saw for myself the figure of the grieving Magdalene, I recalled Elizabeth Cruikshank’s doubled-over form, sitting on the hospital floor of my consulting room with an empty plate and glass beside her. A difficult repentance.
But when I spoke of this to Gus Galen, he told me that what we translate as ‘repentance’ means more accurately, in the original Greek, a turnaround, or change of mind. Metanoia. I would rather say a change of heart.
‘It’s so like him,’ she said, looking up. ‘His ideas, his sketches—of faces, flowers, seed pods, trees, buildings; quotations he’d liked, words—he’d a passion for unusual vocabulary—accounts of places he’d visited, people he’d met on trains, dreams, cloud formations, recipes (lots of those), fragments of poems and things he’d written about me.’
‘Nice things?’ The banal question hid the degree to which I was moved.
‘Better than “nice”’.
I didn’t ask her to amplify but she got up and went to the brown bag and took out a green leather notebook. ‘I’ve always loved the smell of this.’
She turned the pages till she came to what she was looking for and read:
‘Elizabeth here last eve and the world restored for me. I keep thinking she will discover how insufferable I am. How little really I have to give her except my plain difficult self. Is one self enough? Well, it’s all I have to give her and she may have it if she wants it…
‘Elizabeth rang and I wanted to fly down and scoop her up and run with her, head down against all takers, like a rugby player with her the ball. But I must do what I’m worst at and be patient. People have their own inner clocks. I’m a fast-ticking one, she’s slower.
‘He was right about the clocks,’ I said. I’d noticed that what goes awry between people is often a matter of mismatched timing.
‘He was right about most things. This is what he wrote the morning I left, the last thing he wrote, in fact: E off this a.m. from Rome, summoned by the Gerrards X. I was too knocked up even to see her off at the airport. God knows what she’ll be met with. A crooked deception, no doubt. It’s funny how you imagine loving someone is enough to make them believe you love them. Love needs belief, not to exist but to work. Without belief love is hobbled and lame.
‘He was right about that, too,’ she concluded.
‘About belief: is it yours, then, that if you hadn’t left he wouldn’t have died?’ There was no point in mincing words.
‘Of course it is. What do you think?’
I waited wondering if this was a rhetorical question. ‘What do I think…?’
‘Do you think he would be alive if I hadn’t gone trotting back to Gerrards Cross like a tame poodle?’
‘I don’t know, Elizabeth.’
‘I know you don’t “know”. But what do you think?’ I said nothing and she said, ‘Thomas would have told me.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you what I think. I think your Roman consultant was right. Septicaemia can jeopardise the functioning of the heart. It could have led to a ventricular fibrillation, which can lead to cardiac arrest, and to death. It is also true that emotional distress can be a trigger of this kind of fatal arrhythmia in someone whose heart is already under strain. So it is possible that had you not left him as you did he would not have suffered the attack. It is also the case that had you been with him you might have succeeded in getting him treatment faster, and the sooner a cardiac arrest is attended to the likelier it is that the patient will be saved. However, it is also not only possible but likely that this fatal episode would have occurred anyway, that it had nothing to do with your leaving but was purely a consequence of an impairment which had never been diagnosed. It should have been, if, as you say, an arrhythmia was detectable, which suggests to me that Thomas was careless of his own safety and that he would have died in the car with you beside him, or later at the hospital, even had you succeeded in getting him there sooner than was the case. To my best knowledge, that is what I think.’
‘Thank you,’ she said gravely. ‘That is exactly what I wanted to hear.’
‘It’s what you knew already.’
‘It’s what I knew already,’ she granted. ‘But I needed to hear it. I could never have put it so clearly to myself. It is good of you. You can’t have enjoyed saying that.’
‘I’m sorry you weren’t with him, Elizabeth. Very, very sorry.’ I doubt I had ever been sorrier for anything in my life, except Jonny.
‘Yes. So am I. Thank you for listening to me. And for telling me the truth.’
‘Thank you for telling me what you have told me. And for telling me to tell you the truth. It was brave of you.’
‘It was brave of you to tell me.’
‘Why did you wait seven years?’
‘Before I tried to top myself?’ She was smiling, to reassure me.
‘Well, yes. If it’s not an intrusive question.’
‘It was the rain,’ she said, simply. ‘The rain this October was so like the rain that October in Rome, when we were together first. And I kept thinking of Keats’s epitaph in the cemetery and Thomas saying that we mustn’t waste time.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again. There didn’t seem to be much else to say. Except, ‘Thomas’s Caravaggio Road painting? Did anything ever turn up?’
‘I never bothered any more about it. It wasn’t my first concern and he was gone and, well…’
‘I understand.’
‘It didn’t seem worth pursuing. Nothing did.’
‘Nothing,’ she said again, ‘has seemed worth much since.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again.
‘I know you are.’
I thought of something else. ‘Was Thomas right about Neil? Did he have a mistress?’
At this she laughed quite gustily. ‘He’d had her stowed away for years! Long before Thomas and I met on our way to Rome. He told me, Neil did, before the divorce.’
‘Who was she?’
‘A harmless woman, who worked in his office, called Norma, with a matronly bosom and those spindly legs top-heavy women often have. He asked me not to let on to Primrose that he’d told me. It made us quite conspiratorial. Poor Neil, he had a guilty conscience about it—not about having a mistress, I noticed he was unapologetic about that, but about using my adultery in the divorce. In the end he didn’t, in spite of Primrose. He behaved quite decently, overall.’
‘So the Russian Vine was cut down to size. Thomas would have been pleased.’
‘Well, you know, they had things in common, Thomas and Primrose. They were both uncompromising. She was all right in her way.’
But loyalty to Thomas made me protest. ‘She sounds to me quite wrong. Thomas’s was an altogether different order of being.’
‘Yes, you’re right.’
‘Good,’ I said, ‘I’m glad we’ve sorted one thing out this evening to our satisfaction.’