‘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.’
S
HE RETURNED TO
E
NGLAND DETERMINED TO END THE MARRIAGE
but stopping, to stoke her resolve, at Thomas’s west London home, which bore the unmistakable marks of its owner’s character.
The house, with dark green paintwork, stood at the end of a mews overlooked by a tall church spire. Its plaster façade was partly obscured by tangled boles of wisteria and passion flower. The rooms were small but orderly, blessedly free of ornament—for which the fussily crowded Gerrards Cross rooms had produced a particular aversion—save for several arresting abstract paintings, some antique pots, a painted wooden saint, with what looked like a wall eye, and a strange fragment of what turned out to be the nose of a life-size seventeenth-century porphyry horse.
There were books, in double-depth bookshelves, piles of records, a chess table, set with ivory and sandalwood chessmen, tattered Turkish rugs, worn leather armchairs, potted herbs, racks of wine, a collection of coffee pots with intriguing glazes, an easel with a large unfinished oil of a lime tree and a pervading smell of coffee. The gilded old French bed of carved walnut was graciously accommodating and the mattress, after Rome, easy
on hard-worked bones. It was, as she conveyed it to me, ten worlds away from Gerrards Cross.
‘Do you have to go?’ Thomas asked the next morning, watching her dress. ‘We can send for your things, or buy you new. You look better without anyway.’ In Rome he had thrown out—with cries of ‘Hideous!’—most of her underwear.
Over breakfast he said, again, ‘Don’t go.’
They were in his pea-green dining room, eating toast and drinking coffee in wide white porcelain cups transported, in a brown paper parcel, from Rome. The shuttered windows opened to the cobbled mews and a white cat jumped from the garden fence on to the ledge outside. As she described the scene, drinking the bitter coffee from my machine, from an old CND mug I’d had as a student and Olivia had long ago relegated, I glanced to see if the evil orange tom had reappeared. But only the quince tree was palely visible through the dark. It struck me that the difference of scene resembled some hideous moral metaphor.
‘I have to go,’ she told him. ‘I can’t simply never go back.’
‘Why? I mean, why not?’
‘I owe Neil some sort of explanation.’
‘OK,’ said Thomas. ‘What’s that going to look like? What is an “explanation” of love, please?’
‘It’s decency,’ she protested.
‘It isn’t,’ Thomas said. ‘It’s guilt. You imagine by talking to him you’ll make it better. You won’t. You’ll make it worse. He won’t understand. He can’t understand. He doesn’t love you. That sort don’t. They don’t know how to love.’
‘But that isn’t a reason for me to behave badly.’
‘For God’s sake,’ said Thomas. ‘Behaving “badly” as you put
it. What’s that? By Neil’s lights you’ll be behaving appallingly badly by leaving him for a complete stranger. Anyway, why not behave badly? What’s wrong with bad behaviour? Bad behaviour, good behaviour, what’s the difference? Do you think you know? Really know? And you do know, don’t you, he’ll feel better if you behave, as you put it, “badly”? You’ll be doing him a kindness if he can say you’ve behaved like a trollop. Be a trollop. Abandon him. Abandon your principles. They aren’t yours anyway. They’re made up. You should stop making yourself up.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said. She wasn’t quite prepared to cry.
‘Look,’ said Thomas, less fiercely, ‘it’s like this. You aren’t the person you’ve made yourself out to yourself to be. You’re another person, quite a different one, maybe not too nice at all, I don’t know. I don’t care. I don’t love you because you’re nice. What’s nice, anyway? They can be “nice”. Let them be. I’m not.’
‘You are nice. And I can’t believe you love me.’
‘No,’ said Thomas. ‘You can’t. Understandably. But I do, as it happens. It’s no credit to you, actually. It’s just a fit.’
‘A fit?’
‘Not as in mad. Or epileptic. As in match. As in hand in glove. No, not in glove. As in hand in hand.’
‘It’s still hard to believe.’
‘I know that. It is hard. Good things are. Good things are much harder to believe than bad things. Much. Human beings are shockingly bad at believing good things. They prefer bad news. That’s one of the secrets I know. It’s why I don’t want you going back to drink at the fountain of bad faith. The water is
tainted. Foul. It’ll give you a taste for the bad again. Pah!’ He made a spitting gesture.
‘They’re not bad people, really.’
‘They are not good people, Elizabeth. They are a lot of things but “good” isn’t one of them. They are conventional and meanspirited and fairly cruel. They have shut you in a dark room and you are starved of nourishment and deprived of light. It’s very terrible for people like us to be without light.’ His passionate face was as serious as a priest’s.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m not used to this. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to manage it.’
‘Listen,’ said Thomas. ‘There’s no “used to”. Nothing in life prepares us for what happens next. Nothing. OK? It’s not that you “get used to” things. That’s a made-up nonsense. Things happen and you do what the occasion demands, if you can. If you have the courage. And the wit. And the will. That’s all. Listen to me. If there had been a winged chariot I could have laid hands on that day we met at Bainbridge’s, I would have said to you, “Excuse me, but now you have finished the omelette I have made for you—which, though cooked in Bainbridge’s pathetically useless frying pan, wasn’t at all bad—may I escort you to my chariot, which happens to be handily parked outside this rather crummy flat off the Camden Road, and take you away for all time?” And you would have come. Because then, at that moment,
at that precise moment
you knew what was good for you. It’s my fault. I should have gone out and found a chariot.’
‘There aren’t many winged chariots around in Camden.’
‘Yes, well, I blame the Tories,’ Thomas said. He picked up
the cups and took them out into his yellow kitchen and began to rinse them noisily under the running tap.
Watching the white cat on the window ledge she said, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be feeble.’
An indecipherable sound issued from the kitchen.
‘What?’
‘YOU ARE NOT FEEBLE!’ Thomas yelled suddenly. ‘That’s the trouble. You’re FORMIDABLY STRONG!’ He walked back into the dining room and picked up the coffee pot with the complicated green-and-brown glaze. For half a second it looked as if he was going to throw it at her. Then he put it back down on the table, extra carefully, and said, ‘So, are you going back, then? You know, you’re stronger than me.’
The cat had jumped down out of sight. She wondered if Thomas’s shout had disturbed it. It hadn’t really disturbed her. At some level it pleased her but still she said, ‘I’m not. And I shan’t be away long. I promise.’
‘You are,’ Thomas said. ‘And you will, because you do things your way. That’s another thing I know. You think I’m strong because I sound off and go on about things and am very direct and seem very full of myself—no, don’t contradict me, I know what I am and how I seem!—but the truth is I am much, much feebler than you. I just go on like this to keep my end up. You think what you’re doing is right and that gives you strength. You see, I know I’m not right. I know there is no right. The only “right” I am is that I know what I like and what I want, and what I like and what I want is you, more than anyone else in all the world does, or could. But you won’t believe that—the one thing I know and am right about you won’t believe. And don’t
remind me later that I said so. I don’t want to be reminded later that I’m right. There’s no comfort in being right. I never understand why people imagine there is. And don’t say I’ve just said I’m right about this when I’ve said I don’t believe in right. I know I have. And don’t make promises either. That’s more making things up.’
Two days after her return to Gerrards Cross, while she was caught in a cross-bias of missing Thomas yet fearful at having to deliver her news, Primrose suffered a stroke.
‘I can’t come,’ she explained to Thomas from a phone box. She had walked in the wet to find the necessary privacy. ‘Not yet. It would be too unkind.’
‘Yes,’ said Thomas, ‘but you know what? It’s less unkind in the long run to be unkind right away. What’s that noise? Cows?’
‘Rain. It’s raining. But it’s not like the rain in Rome.’
‘Of course it isn’t. What are you wearing?’
‘A raincoat.’
‘And on your feet?’
‘My feet?’
‘Your lovely feet. They’re like a saint’s feet in a medieval painting. I want to know what horror you have bound your long white feet with in Gerrards Cross.’
‘I’m wearing wellingtons.’
‘I hate to think of those saint’s feet in wellingtons. Are they green? The wellingtons, not the feet.’
‘Yes, green. It’s wet. What’s wrong with wellingtons?’
‘I knew they would be green. I can just imagine you, all respectable in your raincoat. I bet it’s beige, isn’t it? Don’t answer.
I know it is and I don’t want to know. You could go barefoot. You could open the door of that phone booth—does it smell of urine? I suppose drunks don’t piss in Gerrards Cross, do they?—and throw the wellingtons into the night and walk out barefoot, like the lady in “Raggle Taggle Gypsies”’.
‘Who are the Raggle Taggle Gypsies?’
‘I’ll sing it to you.’
Standing in the phone booth with the rain sluicing down round her she heard his bass-baritone voice.
‘She kickèd off her high-heeled shoes,
All made of Spanish leather-o,
And it’s out in the street,
In her bare, bare feet,
To dance with the Raggle Taggle Gypsies-o.
‘Only in your case it’s green wellingtons rather than shoes of Spanish leather-o. Kick ’em off and walk back to me. Go on, Elizabeth Cruikshank, be like the lady, dance in your bare feet to happiness, I dare you.’
‘You’re always wanting me to take things off.’
‘You look better in nothing. They’ve terrible taste, in Gerrards Cross. You’ve caught it. Did you know that?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘What for? Your taste will improve in two shakes of a lamb’s tail when you come to live with me. It’s OK, really. Just squashed. Speaking of which, I’d like you squashed under me right now. You squash well, d’you know that? Very well for someone so bony.’
‘I can’t walk out now and leave Neil to cope on his own. He’s not up to it. My father-in-law’s in a flap and Neil’s devastated.’
‘So what if he is devastated? Do him good. He could do with a bit of devastation. But he isn’t really.’
‘He keeps crying.’
‘Oh,’ said Thomas. ‘Crying! I can cry, if you want. Crying’s not hard. Anyway, he isn’t really crying. He’s faking. Like women faking orgasm. Disgusting!’
‘Thomas, please…’
‘What?’
‘Don’t.’
‘Don’t what? Cry? OK, I shan’t cry.’
‘Don’t be nasty.’
‘Why not? I feel nasty. What’s wrong with nasty? At least nasty isn’t fake.’
‘He needs me, Thomas.’
‘“Need”, hah! What is it? A sad contest. A sordid jostle for position. If it’s a competition then I need you too, if it comes to that. I’m unused to missing people and I’m not enjoying it.’
‘It’s not the same.’
‘Why not?’
‘He cares about her.’
‘Ugh! “Cares”! What a word. He doesn’t “care” about her. He’s probably quite glad this has happened. Secretly, he probably wants her dead. That’s OK. Mostly people only care about themselves. It’s only love that makes you have a tittle or a jot of feeling for anyone else and even that’s pretty paltry. But it’s a start. You’ve something real to go on, not a lot of milk junket
and crocodile tears. Listen, Elizabeth. Don’t be fooled by this stuff. It’s bogus. Fake. I know about fake. It’s my life’s work. I know real and I’m real. I may be intemperate, difficult, maddening, and often foully unpleasant—as you are learning—but I’m real. And you’re real too. Don’t lose sight of that in your effort to be liked. It won’t work anyway. They’ll never like you.’
‘Thomas.’
‘What?’
‘I’m sorry. Really.’
‘Elizabeth, I’m sorry too. Really.’
When she visited ten days later, using as an excuse the reappearance of an old friend from her library days in London, he took up the cudgels again. They had returned from the National Gallery where he had taken her to see the Caravaggio
Supper
painting. He had a knack, she had noticed on the plane, of carrying on a conversation as if there had been no interruption.
‘You don’t even like your mother-in-law. “Primrose”, what a misnomer! She should be called “Russian Vine”.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Surely you know what Russian Vine is? Gerrards Cross must be coming down with it.’
‘Primrose never lets me touch the garden. I leave all that to her.’
‘Russian Vine’s the horticultural sin against the Holy Ghost. It’s an evil creeper, which pretends to innocence but gets into everything, goes everywhere, takes everything over. It’s rampant and predatory and vile and foully and criminally invasive. Like
Hitler with Poland. Morally, we should shoot anyone who grows Russian Vine.’
‘It’s more that she doesn’t like me.’
‘How could she? She’s a Russian Vine. Russian Vines don’t know about liking, they only know about smothering. May I point out that I do like you? Immensely.’
‘I like you immensely too,’ she said, miserably. ‘But I can’t leave with her like this. Not yet.’
‘Why not yet? Do you imagine there’s going to be a better time? Believe me, there are no better times for doing difficult things than the very moment you perceive how difficult they are. That’s another thing I know which I know you’ll pay no attention to.’
‘I’m sorry, I can’t. I can’t behave so badly.’
‘Does not behaving “badly” mean reverting to Gerrards Cross knickers?’
‘Thomas, I can’t be seen putting on nice knickers to visit Janet.’
‘These are not just not “nice”, these are terrible knickers. They make you look like a gym mistress.’
‘I’m afraid I just grabbed what was in the drawer.’
‘OK, I’ll just have to take them off.’