W
E DRANK ANOTHER WHISKY, AND THEN
, I
THINK, ANOTHER
, and she continued to sit on my floor from where she read me scraps from Thomas’s notebook. One letter he’d copied into his book, written by Joseph Severn at Keats’s death, seemed almost unbearably poignant.
Rome, 27 February 1821
My dear Brown
,He is gone—he died with the most perfect ease—he seemed to go to sleep. On the 23rd, about 4, the approaches of death came on. ‘Severn—I—lift me up—I am dying—I shall die easy—don’t be frightened—be firm, and thank God it has come!’ I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seemed boiling in his throat, and increased until 11, when he gradually sunk into death—so quiet—that I still thought he slept. I cannot say now—I am broken down from four nights’ watching, and no sleep since, and my poor Keats gone. Three days since, the body was opened; the lungs were completely gone. The Doctors could not conceive by what means he had lived these two months. I followed his poor
body to the grave on Monday, with many English. They take such care of me here—that I must, else, have gone into a fever. I am better now—but still quite disabled.The Police have been. The furniture, the walls, the floor, every thing must be destroyed by order of the law. But this is well looked to by Dr C.
The letters I put into the coffin with my own hand.
I must leave off.
J.S.
This goes by the first post. Some of my kind friends would have written else. I will try to write you every thing next post; or the Doctor will. They had a mask—and hand and foot done—I cannot go on—
Sometimes Thomas’s observations were outrageously funny and perhaps it was the whisky, or perhaps it was the relief, or the lateness of the hour, or I don’t know what, but a couple of times we laughed until we cried.
She also read me his speculations about the
Road
painting:
There may well be as many lost masterpieces hidden away as found ones
, he wrote.
Waiting for someone to recognise and restore them.
I hadn’t wanted to consult my watch in case it prompted her to leave but it was gone ten by the time we parted and then it was she who’d made the first move.
‘I should go. You must be tired.’
‘You must be. Would you like a sleeping pill?’
‘Not after all that whisky, Doctor!’
‘By the way, what maniac prescribed you Soneryl?’
‘I stole them from Primrose.’
‘Oh, Elizabeth!’
‘I know. D’you know, that was almost the worst thing, when I came round, and realised that I’d survived. I thought how terribly angry Thomas would have been, especially at my using Primrose’s sleeping pills.’
‘Rightly so. How did you get them?’
‘I filched them from her drawer when I came back from Rome, the second time. After Thomas had died.’
I calculated. ‘You mean the third time?’
‘Oh yes, it must have been the third.’
‘So you kept them all this while?’
‘They were my exit visa.’
‘Well, you’ve used it up,’ I said briskly. ‘No more Soneryl. Too bad!’
‘Yes, too bad.’ She got up from the floor and stretched and walked across to the desk. ‘Who gave you this?’ She had picked up the egg again and was balancing it on her open palm.
‘A friend.’
‘It’s a heavenly blue.’
‘I think so.’
‘Thomas would have matched it to some painter’s palette.’
‘Thomas isn’t here,’ I said. ‘You are.’ I had no idea why I came out with that. It sounded brutal.
‘I’m sorry your brother died,’ she said. ‘But if he saved you I’m glad.’
But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you
A
ND
I
WAS GLAD THAT
E
LIZABETH
C
RUIKSHANK AND
I
HAD
already exchanged these words because when I opened the door of my room Bar Buirski was waiting outside.
I touched Elizabeth on the shoulder. ‘Will you be all right to—?’
But she was ahead of me. ‘I know my way back by now.’
‘Goodnight, then.’ The world we had returned to seemed a shadowy place and I admit that I didn’t want her to go. I would have had her for a hearth companion any day.
I caught a glance at my unexpected visitor before she answered ‘Goodnight’ and went quickly down the badly lit corridor. I watched till she rounded the corner before asking, ‘What’s up?’ Bar would never come to the hospital, certainly not so late, without a pretty sound reason.
‘I thought you might know where Dan is.’
‘No.’
‘He said you were playing squash tonight.’
‘Hell, was I? I’m sorry. I must have forgotten. I had this emergency and—’
‘My meeting was cancelled so I walked over to the court,
but he wasn’t there—or in the bar. And he’s not been home. I wondered if he was maybe with you here?’
‘No.’
‘Oh,’ Bar said. ‘Well, I wanted a walk and I was passing so thought I’d call by and see.’ She continued to stand there.
After a minute too long I said, ‘Look, I’m pretty nearly dead on my feet. Let’s go for a drink and then I’ll drive you home. He’s probably gone round to the Powells’ or something.’
I got my things from the room and we went and found my car, which I’d left sloppily parked that morning. Someone had left a note on the windscreen:
Please show consideration for other drivers.
Probably Mackie. The idea of having to clear this up made me feel extremely weary. I drove, humming, to avert conversation, to a decentish bar which I knew from experience wouldn’t be too rowdy or smell too foully of cigarette smoke, where I ordered a couple of whiskies, which, considering what I’d drunk already, I shouldn’t have done. Though in fact I might have drunk nothing but the purest spring water all evening for all the drunkenness I felt.
After I’d downed a gulp of whisky I said, ‘D’you remember that weekend we spent in Paris?’
‘When was that?’ Bar asked and I was about to remind her, a little chagrined, when she laughed and said,
‘Of
course I remember, don’t be silly. It was one of the nicest weekends of my life. You took me to the Louvre. I’d never been.’
‘So I did. What did we see?’
‘Oh, everything. Too much to remember. I thought you would despise me for knowing so little about art.’
‘But I knew next to nothing about art.’ If we had happened on
The Death of the Virgin
I would have walked past it.
‘I thought you did. I thought you were terribly intellectual and cultivated and I felt inadequate and inferior.’
‘Oh, Bar!’
‘I did, Davey. I always did. You always seemed so lofty.’
We fell silent. I was thinking that she must have wondered what I was doing with Olivia if I was supposed to be so intellectual. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing then. I was realising how little clue I had now.
My mind kept reverting to Thomas, whom I would now never know, who, nonetheless—here was the paradox—I now knew maybe better than anyone, save his lover, my patient, the suffering Elizabeth. Listening to her, I had come to hear his voice sounding through hers, informing it, and my ear, with its ringing insistence, its hatred of false currency, its laudable and unselfconscious directness. Thomas didn’t fuck about, as he had told her. He said it like it was, or as it looked to him, and be hanged to the consequences.
‘I remember you wore a red dress in Paris.’
‘You bought me lilies of the valley when I was wearing it.’
‘Did I?’ I couldn’t even picture what they looked like.
‘They have an enchanting smell.’
‘I’m sorry to have forgotten.’
‘Women have an annoying way of remembering these things. I’m sure men wish they didn’t. Davey, where d’you suppose Dan is?’
Which was when I knew she knew all the time where Dan was; and when I knew that I had known all the time too. I began to know from the moment of her enquiry, because I had had no squash date with him that evening. Even under pressure, I never forget appointments.
Bar was too old a friend to dissemble with, but I simply asked, ‘Where do you think he is?’
And she said, ‘What about you? Where do you imagine Livy is?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘perhaps home by now. I was thinking if I took you home I might ring her from your place.’
‘Davey,’ Bar said, ‘what shall we do? Shall we just pretend nothing’s happening?’ Her face looked white. I couldn’t help comparing it with Elizabeth Cruikshank’s face. It was a different sort of white. More chalky-looking.
‘I’m not sure quite—’
I was about to prevaricate when Bar cut me off. ‘You are sure. But we don’t have to say anything. Not even between ourselves, if you’d rather not.’
This was so like her that I took her hand and squeezed it. ‘What do you want to do?’ I felt surprisingly calm at the idea that my wife was committing adultery with one of my closest friends. I must have known. It had a kind of ludicrous predictability to it.
‘Go back to Paris, maybe? But we can’t go back, can we?’
I didn’t feel this was a question that needed answering right then, and in the end she drank a second whisky and I, overruling the tempter inside me, moved on to orange juice and then I drove her home. The lights were on in the Buirskis’ flat and I waited in the car to see if she would come down again, in case Dan wasn’t there—or in case he was and she wanted me to come up too. But after a while the lights were extinguished and I assumed I wasn’t needed so I drove on home.
It was nearly midnight by the time I reached the flat and
there were signs that Olivia was back, her shoes kicked off by the sofa in the sitting room. High-heeled slingbacks, two-toned navy and white. My mind conjured Thomas again, singing ‘The Raggle Taggle Gypsies’ down the telephone, while his lover stood listening, torn between her perceived duty and her unperceived heart, her narrow feet in the green wellingtons, as the rain washed the sides of the phone booth in Gerrards Cross; the same chemical compound but so different from the rain in Rome.
Thomas was right to have urged her so vehemently to come to him. He was right because he had grasped the nature of mortality. He had a mind free enough and a heart bold enough to take on board, properly take on board, that just as there are first things so also—it is after all, if we could take it in, implicit—there are last things. That everything in human life tends towards its ending and that any meeting, however full of hope and promise, will be the first stage in a progress towards a last meeting—and that this may happen sooner than we imagine and without fair warning. I think I can say that this was something he understood generally because he had made me aware of it; it wasn’t only a premonition of his own end.
Looking at Olivia’s shoes, stylish, sexually provocative, I thought Thomas was right about that other ‘death’, too. Only rarely does sex feel right, because only rarely do we have it with the right person. Olivia was never the right person. I’d lied about that: to her, and to myself. I didn’t blame her for wanting it with someone else. She’d a right to it. Thomas would have agreed.
Nevertheless, I didn’t feel like sharing a bed with her so I fetched a couple of the scratchy grey blankets, which I believe
were once my mother’s, from the linen cupboard and stretched out on the sitting-room sofa. My neck and back had fused into an aching arch, my eyes might have been pickled in brine, and a cruel wire was cutting into my temples. I felt washed up, washed out and insufferably weary. Elizabeth Cruikshank’s story, Jonny’s death, the meeting with Bar, the discovery of Dan and Olivia’s liaison, swirled like a maelstrom through my overcharged brain. There was nothing I wanted at that moment more than oblivion.
When I looked at my watch next it was 5 a.m. and a huge barn owl was pecking viciously at my left foot. I snatched the foot away in terror. So acute and disturbing was the impression of this assault that I fumbled for the table light, missed it, overturned the standard lamp on the other side of the sofa, found the overhead light switch and inspected my foot for a bloody wound. Only then did I realise that had I been standing—as, still partly asleep, I believed I had—the sole of my foot, where the bird had attacked so ferociously, would have been protected. What I had been walking on was dream ground and not the solid earth at all.
I lay down again, and for a while hovered in that non-realm, between the waking and the sleeping worlds, where, for a blessed space, we are released from mortal ties and duty’s daily round. And as I lay, half in, half out of sleep, the owl flew into focus and I knew it for the same great white bird that had beaten its wings, helplessly against the wire, in that far-off first dream of my analysis.
The owl had flown free but it had returned to deliver a sharp stab to my understanding.
I found I was shuddering with cold. The grey utility blankets had slipped during the night from the narrow sofa and I wrapped myself in one now and went into the kitchen and filled the kettle, as noiselessly as possible so as not to wake Olivia. And then, because I wasn’t yet ready to contemplate what I was going to say to her, I went to my study and stood on a chair and from the topmost, dustiest shelf, where all my childhood stuff had been shoved in tottering, heedless piles, pulled down the shabby little broken-backed Bible which I hadn’t opened since I was a boy.
When I opened it I read inside, in a blue-ink, childishly curved script:
This book belongs to David Edward McBride, 29, Burlington Road, Chiswick, London W4, England, Great Britain, United Kingdom, Europe, The Northern Hemisphere, The World, The Milky Way, near The Sun.
Beneath this was appended:
If this book should dare to roam, box its ears and send it home, to the above, i.e. David Edward McBride etc.
After leafing through, and a certain amount of skim-reading, I located right at the end of the Gospel according to Luke, the story that Caravaggio had painted.
And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs.
It was a bare two days since I’d walked to the National Gallery from Gus’s tiny flat and found the Caravaggio and looked at it—looked and seen it, or, I should say, begun to see it, for the first time. With all that I’d had been hearing from Elizabeth Cruikshank, and all that had passed since, it seemed at least two centuries since I’d stood there, a different man. For—I could say this to myself, though to anyone else it would have sounded trite
or pompous—I was not the same person. As I pondered this, it dawned on me that here was another mystery: that in the gap of my precisely not seeing the painting, but hearing Elizabeth Cruikshank’s account of it, it had acquired a new dimension, and now its diffuse brilliancy radiated something which, even as I contemplated it—anticipating the taste of the freshly drawing coffee—was searching out a moribund corner of my own heart.
I was changed. Changed by my patient, and by her story, which was also her lover’s story, and my own story, and by the story of that long-ago scene, which may or may not have ever occurred in what is facilely referred to as ‘real life’. But Caravaggio had made it real, through his exacting hand and eye; an eye which saw uncompromisingly through the prism of his searing heart.
Two men on a road ‘threescore furlongs’ long. How far was a furlong? How many furlongs made a mile? What distance had they to travel, those two, when they were joined by that enigmatic third on their unexplained journey?
I looked again at the frontispiece of the scuffed little Bible in case I had recorded any of the useful information—about pints of water and pounds and gallons and chains and acres and maybe furlongs—as I seemed to recall I had in other of my school texts. But there was only the boy’s endearingly old-fashioned request that should it stray, the book’s ears be boxed before being sent home to Burlington Road.
Burlington Road was where we moved to after Jonny died. Our first home without him. The first time I had a bedroom which was mine alone and where he was not some kind of presence by me at night and I had to begin to come to terms with
the fact that even during the ambiguous hours of darkness, where, in our old room, he hovered still, he was there no more. In all my life I had experienced no loss greater than this. And all my life I had denied my own part in it. I had lived with this invisible gash in my side, this breach in my dyke, this crumbling portion of my sea wall. The lorry which had crushed my brother’s body, as he had placed it, valiantly, to protect mine, had also crashed the sustaining boundaries of my world.
And they talked together of all these things which had happened. And it came to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them. But their eyes were holden that they should not know him. And he said unto them, What manner of communications are these that ye have one to another, as ye walk, and are sad?
What else would they be of, the communications, as the two men made their way together on the dusty road, but the affair that had left them so heavy-hearted? They were sad, because they believed they had lost the person they loved best, as I had done, as Elizabeth Cruikshank had. They had lost their heart’s best treasure and as they walked it was natural that they should talk of this grievous loss. Except that most of us don’t. Most of us haven’t the knack of opening our hearts to another without reserve.