‘Why not? They won’t understand what I’m saying. Even if they do, they’re Italian, shouting for them is normal.’
‘It isn’t for me.’
‘Oh you…!’ he said, and swept into a dingy-looking restaurant, where voluble greetings indicated he was a valued regular.
‘You see,’ he said, over a bottle of wine and a heaped plate of pasta and a recovered temper, ‘it’s this. Most people make themselves up. They wrap themselves up with a lot of tinsel and flummery: precepts and morals and habits and fibs and shams and other pathetic dishonesties. Artists don’t do that. Or rather, if they do, they make sure to unwrap themselves when they work. The greater the artist the less wrapped up they come. When I say “artist” I mean writers, poets, composers, and so on. Caravaggio was a shit of the first order. He was a drunk, a gambler, a cheat, a liar, a thief, a fornicator and a murderer—a thoroughgoing dyed-in-the-wool bastard. Except for this: when he was painting, he didn’t wrap anything up. I don’t believe he wrapped much of his life up either. Whoever had to deal with him had to like it or lump it.’
‘Was he really gay?’
‘Who cares? He was the type who would try all sorts, mostly to get away from himself. He was a fugitive through and through. You can’t get away from yourself so easily but I doubt he had much clue about personal love.’
‘And the impersonal kind?’
‘Well, that’s the thing. He must have done. You couldn’t paint those pictures otherwise. You couldn’t, could you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Yes, you do. What do you feel when you look at them? Go on, what do you? What did you feel when you looked at that one today?’
She said, hesitatingly, ‘My heart hurt. But that was about us.’
‘No it wasn’t. Or rather it was. Because we’re in it too. You, me, Caravaggio. His heart burned, you can tell it did. That’s what burned you. It burned through him till he had to paint that painting and it probably burned right down his arm and into his hand. Hah!’ Thomas wrung his own hand in the air and the waiter, mistaking it for some urgent request, hurried across the crowded restaurant to replenish the breadbasket. ‘He painted that
Supper
while dangerously sick and very likely already on the run, in mortal fear of his life. But he had to do it. You can tell.
It
made him paint it. What is so interesting is that this is the tranquil one. It’s the other one that’s febrile. That figures too.’
‘Why?’
‘Because a real artist knows the other side of himself better than the side he’s in at the time. You don’t paint as you are; you paint as you’re not. But you only know what you’re not through knowing what you are.’
She considered this, taking what was left of his bread and mopping up the tomato sauce. ‘And the other
Supper?
Our one in London?’
‘Same thing,’ said Thomas. ‘Same story, same hand, same heart. Different mood and perspective, that’s all.’
‘Like with us?’
‘Exactly,’ Thomas said. ‘You’ve got sauce on your cheek. No, not there. Here. Look, I’ll lick it off for you.’
T
HE NEXT DAY THEY FLEW FROM
M
ILAN TO
R
OME, 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.’
I
MUST HAVE KNOWN
T
HOMAS 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.’
‘Of course.’
‘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.’