G
US’S MEDICAL INSTINCTS HADN’T DESERTED HIM
. H
IS
PSA levels rose unacceptably and in the last week of March he was in hospital for a prostate operation. I visited him in the Middlesex, one of the big old central London hospitals near Gower Street.
I hadn’t seen Gus since the night in early December, when I was to act as a witness on Hannan’s behalf, and I spoke to him, in my despair, of Elizabeth Cruikshank. She must have stayed in his mind because once we’d discussed his treatment—on which subject he was, in turn, scornfully dismissive and touchingly appreciative—and I had delivered, under instruction, the bottle of single malt in a brown paper bag—‘Stick it in the locker, dear boy, next to the incontinence pads’—she was the first topic he raised.
‘How’s the Caravaggio woman?’
‘I don’t know. Or rather, I do. She left. She left, in fact, three days after I saw you last December.’
‘Really?’ said Gus. ‘Tell.’ His face shone with curiosity.
I wanted to put my arms round his shoulders, suddenly vulnerable in their washed-out old flannel pyjamas, and tell him that he was one of the best things that had ever happened to
me. But I knew he would rather hear about Elizabeth Cruikshank so instead I said, ‘It was you who were responsible, in fact. All your fault, old man,’ because I guessed this would really get him going.
‘How?’
‘Caravaggio,’ I explained. And then, because suddenly I didn’t really want to get him going while he was still poorly, but preferred to tell him, when he was well and ready for it, all that had occurred between me and Elizabeth Cruikshank during those long seven hours, I said, ‘Look, when are they letting you loose again on the suffering world?’ and Gus said, ‘Next Wednesday, if their word is anything to go by,’ so I said, ‘Would you mind if I came and fetched you and took you back to your flat and tucked you up in bed and spoiled you a bit and then I can tell you all about it without feeling I’m being a drain.’
Gus said, ‘I’m not fussed about the tucking-up but you’re welcome to prop me up when I totter forth from this bloody graveyard.’
So that was settled. He seemed quite tickled by our arrangement and disconcerted me by asking after Olivia. To my recollection, he’d never said a word about her before.
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Olivia and I are parting.’ Gus didn’t look too bothered at this news so I continued. ‘I wouldn’t tell anyone else but she had a mishap which ended in an abortion, not a very easy one, as things turned out.’ Poor Olivia. When I collected her from the nursing home she looked so forlorn I nearly went back on all we’d agreed. But with a reserve which I found painful, and a dignity which left me regretful, she had insisted we stick to plan. ‘She’s better now. She’s still at the flat and I’m staying
with friends.’ With Chris and Denis Powell, who had taken me in with almost no questions. It’s asking too much of people that they should ask no questions at all, I suppose.
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Gus said. He looked sad.
‘It wasn’t my child.’
Gus brightened at this and asked, ‘Anyone we know?’
‘A colleague.’
‘Funny,’ said Gus. ‘That happened to me. Wife got banged up by a research assistant of mine. Bad story. He turned out to be a scoundrel, I could have told her that. Brilliant mind. Corrupt heart. They often hang together, have you noticed? Women find it sexy.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I had no idea.’
‘Why would you? I never speak about it. I can’t have kids so I didn’t blame her.’
‘I’ve always imagined you as something of a Lothario.’
‘I hope I’ve better things to do than flash my dick around,’ said Gus, coldly.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what possessed me to say that.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Gus. ‘I’m grateful for the vote of confidence. You saw my wife once, as a matter of fact. We were walking down Shaftesbury Avenue and you pretended not to see me.’
‘Was that your wife?’ I didn’t bother to explain my evasion.
‘That’s her.’
‘I thought she was beautiful.’
‘Tanya? Yes, very beautiful.’
I got Gus out of the Middlesex with not a little trouble. He had me pack his things in a number of flimsy plastic bags and
dropped the half-drunk bottle of expensive malt I’d smuggled in for him after insisting on carrying it out himself. It smashed, embarrassingly, on the tiled floor by the lifts on the way out. A bevy of nurses appeared, not to scold but to fuss round and tell Gus he mustn’t mind and how much they would miss him. One, a very pretty brunette, hugged him quite possessively so I felt less apologetic for my philanderer diagnosis.
The snuff-coloured flat was freezing cold and smelled of sardines and escaping gas from the aged gas fire. There was no central heating, as Gus had a theory it was damaging to the mucus lining of the nasal passages, so I lit the fire to an alarming roar and smell of burning dust and forced open a few windows with the aid of a bent screwdriver, which I found under his bed in a green Clarks shoebox containing various rusting tools, some old cigarette cards and a packet of perished condoms. I didn’t succeed in tucking Gus into the bed but, as by now it was almost evening—he had forbidden me to lose a morning’s work and I hadn’t got to the hospital till late afternoon—I settled him into the peeling rhinoceros chair, poured him a large, and legitimate, glass of Scotch and asked if he’d any requests for supper.
‘Can you cook?’
‘I seem to have acquired the habit lately’—in the last few months, since Olivia and I had decided to go our separate ways and when the solicitous Chris Powell would let me. I think I’d always been fearful before that if I did anything domestic it would in some way show Olivia up.
‘You know what, all the time I was in that bloody graveyard I’ve been fantasising about scrambled eggs. Think you can rise to that?’
‘Nothing easier,’ I said. ‘I’ll nip out and get some eggs and stuff.’
I walked down Marylebone High Street and bought eggs, smoked salmon, cream, butter, bread and milk from the supermarket and was just in time to catch the French patisserie which was shutting up shop. A charming girl held the till for me while I havered and finally bought one of those deceptively thin dark chocolate cakes which conceal prodigious quantities of calories. I had a hunch Gus had a weakness for chocolate. Most whisky drinkers have.
When I got back, he was drowsing in the chair so I went to the kitchen and washed up the dirty dishes and saucepans as best I could with a filthy sponge mop and then set about supper.
‘Here we are. Scrambled egg on toast and smoked salmon.’
‘Blimey!’ said Gus, awake in a trice. ‘It’s almost worth having your bloody prostate out!’
He perked up still more at the sight of the cake and had eaten two wedges with a cup of coffee, of which I found a supply in a biscuit tin sporting a picture of
The Stag at Bay
, before he said, ‘Righto then, tell me about this woman you’re in love with.’
‘Which woman?’ For a moment I wondered if he’d misunderstood and meant Olivia.
‘The Caravaggio one.’
‘I’m not in love with her,’ I protested. But I flushed.
‘You are,’ Gus said, licking his fingers disgustingly. ‘It’s not what baboons call “in love” but that’s what it is. I knew it when you spoke about her here before.’
‘What did you know?’
‘That it was love you were in. I felt for you.’
‘How? Why?’
‘How did I know, or why did I feel? It’s a thing you can’t fake. Unmissable if you know the signs. And I felt for you because it’s the one thing we don’t want.’
‘But surely people always want love?’ But as so often with Gus once he had said it, I knew what he meant.
‘They don’t. They want candyfloss and reassurance. They want security and pats on the back and someone to tuck them up in bed and cuddle them. Love isn’t that. It’s difficult. And demanding. And a nuisance. And bloody absent much of the bloody time.’
‘Did you love Tanya?’
‘Don’t know,’ Gus said, licking his fingers some more while I wished he wouldn’t. ‘Possibly. I’ve never loved anyone else, for all my reputation!’ I was relieved to note that he had elected to take my Lothario comment as a compliment. ‘Maybe I did. She was certainly difficult. Bloody difficult! And a nuisance. And demanding. And certainly bloody well absent much of the time.’
‘But love comes in so many different forms,’ I suggested, not very originally and more for something to say because really I was dying to hear more about this wife.
‘No it doesn’t,’ Gus said. ‘That’s just something made up by baboons to avoid feeling uncomfortable. Basically, love is always the same. I don’t mean it’s all dicks and fannies. Love isn’t being up some fanny. Or arsehole.’ I didn’t at the time, but later, recalling this, I laughed out loud because it conveyed something very characteristic of Gus: that even in the heat of this conversation he was trying to be even-handed about sodomy, of which I sensed he secretly disapproved. ‘All that obsession with sex is
a load of shite, thank you, Dr Freud!’ Gus’s expression suggested that if perchance Freud were concealed behind the grubby velvet curtains he’d better stay put if he hoped to escape a thrashing. ‘Love is perfectly singular. It simply moulds itself to the person—obviously you don’t show love to a babe in arms the way you do to your mistress. But in essence it’s the same.’
‘And what is it, in essence?’ I asked, not expecting an answer.
‘Not never having to say you’re sorry, or shite like that, for a start,’ Gus said. ‘Got any more of that cake?’
‘Have you any napkins?’ The chocolatey fingers were still bothering me.
‘Christ, I’ve no idea. If I have I haven’t a clue where they are. Love might well be what I feel for this chocolate cake. Thank you, dear boy. It’s much appreciated.’
After this, I felt mean about the chocolatey fingers and, ceasing to object, as always I ceased to mind.
‘Love,’ resumed Gus, when he had bolted another portion, ‘is letting be. Letting the other be as they are. Like you with the napkins.’ Of course my agitation had not escaped his notice. ‘Wanting to help them be that, not by doing anything—you can’t
do
anything for anyone anyway—but simply by wanting them to be nothing other than they are, because that’s who they are so that is how you want them to be: as they are, whatever that may be. Just that. Easy-peasy, I don’t think.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Or rather yes, it’s not easy.’
‘But,’ said Gus, ‘sometimes it is. That’s the thing. Sometimes it’s all you want in the world and you’re prepared to fight for it. To death. Your own, if need be. You were fighting for that Caravaggio woman. And in a particular way.’
‘What way?’
‘Against yourself. You were prepared to take on yourself for her. That’s how I knew.’
I told him then all that Elizabeth Cruikshank had told me, as much as I could remember, and some, no doubt, which I couldn’t remember—because I believe now that truth is more than the accurate recall of events but something more elusive, less accountable—much as, after leaving Olivia, I had written it out for myself that long satisfying night that I spent alone in the Regency Grand. And I told him, too, of the subsequent events, as I had also tried to set them down, of my wolf man, and Lennie and Colin Mackie and Hassid, and Bar and Dan and Olivia. And also Jonny.
I explained how I had understood for the first time, that evening I spent with Elizabeth Cruikshank, my part in Jonny’s death and how I had stood on the high Downs, at the moment when she might have been leaving St Christopher’s, and howled to the uncomprehending gulls.
‘You would. I told you, the heart registers what’s what before the mind can say “Fiddlesticks!”’
‘The thing is, Jonny seems to have gone. All my life he’s been there—or, not been there, but the not being there has been a presence, d’you see?’
‘Are you saying she took him with her?’
‘Not exactly.’ It wasn’t that. Elizabeth Cruikshank had taken nothing from me.
‘You know what?’ Gus said. He had polished off the cake and was running his forefinger round the plate. ‘Exchange is no robbery.’ He picked up the plate as if he were about to lick it
and then put it down and grinned. ‘I love tormenting you. You’re a doddle to torment. Know what it is about you? You’re one of those odd birds who’s supremely tolerant about the stuff that most people get their knickers in a tangle over. And then suddenly there’s some tiny thing you can’t abide that drives you nuts. I love that in you.’ Gus was suddenly serious.
‘Not many would,’ I said.
‘You know what? You’re wrong about that. You’re unusually lovable.’
‘I’ve never thought so.’
‘No,’ said Gus. ‘You wouldn’t. Of course, that’s partly why you’re lovable. But it’s also the other.’
‘What other?’
‘The other side of you.’
‘What other side?’
‘What passes for your brother,’ Gus said, cryptically. ‘Or what did pass. Has passed, from what you say. You may or may not have been the cause of his death—who’s to say that your memory of things now is any more accurate than it was before? You won’t ever know.’
‘I think I’ve been expiating his death all my life,’ I said. Of course I had known this; but I had lived apart from the knowledge.
‘I expect you have. But there are worse things to do in expiation—helping lost souls find themselves.’
‘Or trying to be him. I’m not sure which. I’m not sure I can go on.’
‘Don’t then. You’re a grown man. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.’
Unconsciously catching Gus’s manner of speech, I said, ‘You know what? I never cry. I’ve barely cried since Jonny died—my mother discouraged tears. But for the past three months I’ve hardly been dry-eyed.’ As I spoke, my unruly eyes had begun to fill again.
‘That doesn’t surprise me.’
‘What did you mean by exchange being no robbery?’
‘What I say. I expect you’re right that she walked back through that hole left in your heart. Where your lost brother was; or rather where he wasn’t. That’s how she got into your system. She fitted. She filled the gap.’
‘Like her and Thomas?’
‘In its way. As I said, all love’s basically the same.’