‘And her?’
‘Oh, these things are always mutual. Stands to reason, they have to be. You’ll be in touch somehow, somewhere.’
‘She did ring me.’
‘She’ll ring again. Or if she doesn’t you’ll know where to find her. Or it will. After all, it brought you together in the first place.’
‘It?’
‘Whatever is behind it all. What it all adds up to, whatever that is when it’s at home. Christ knows, I don’t. I’m just an old fool who pisses in his pants.’
‘D’you think he did?’
‘Who?’
‘Christ.’
‘What?’
‘Did he, though?’
‘What, piss in his pants? Probably, when they came for him. You don’t see that referred to much!’
‘Did he know, d’you think, what’s really behind things?’
‘Oh Lord,’ Gus said. ‘Don’t ask me. I’m just a simple Jew boy from the East End.’ I was used to this brand of Gus’s showing off and because I was talked out I waited. ‘Mind you, he was one too, though not from the East End. But he knew how to tell a good story. That’s why his own story’s so popular.’
‘He wasn’t a bad physician, either, from what I can tell.’
‘Same thing,’ said Gus. ‘Different method, that’s all. Did I ever tell you the story about the great Rabbi Israel Baal Shem-Tov?’
He knew he hadn’t but I obediently made a show of shaking my head.
‘Pity there’s no more of that cake. Have we got any biscuits?’
‘I’ll look.’ I went to the kitchen and made us both more coffee and found some soggy shortbread fingers in a sticky tin.
‘Thank you, dear boy. I seem to need something sweet. Have one.’
‘No thank you.’
‘Go on. Break out a bit.’
‘Gus, I don’t like sweet things.’
‘Extraordinary! I never quite believe that. Any road, when Rabbi Israel Shem-Tov saw misfortune looming, it was his custom to go into a particular glade of the forest to meditate. But before he began his meditation he would always light a fire and offer up a prayer and the disaster would be averted. Years passed, and his disciple, Magid of Mexeritch, finding himself in a similar situation, went to the forest glade and said to the powers
that be, “I do not know how to light the fire, but I can offer up the prayer,” and, again, disaster was averted. Later still, Rabbi Moshe-Leib wandered into the forest, saying, “I do not know the whereabouts of the special glade or how to light the fire, but at least I can say the prayer,” and, once more, disaster was averted. Finally, it was the turn of Rabbi Israel of Rizhin to deal with impending doom. He sat in his study for long hours with his head in his hands. At last he said, “Listen, Lord. I cannot light the fire, or find the special glade in the forest and, forgive me, I am old and tired and failing in my wits and, to be frank, I have forgotten, if I ever knew, the words of the prayer. But I can tell the story.”
‘I need a pee, and I’m sorry but you’re going to have to help me with this bloody zip and see I don’t wet my trousers. Incidentally, how’s that paper coming you’re giving for me in Rome?’
T
HE HOTEL
I
HAD BOOKED INTO WASN’T FAR FROM THE
P
ANTHEON
and, sticky after my flight, I washed and changed before walking round to the piazza, where I sat, over two cappuccinos, in one of the cafés opposite the famous rotunda, while I studied the inscription over the many-pillared portico. The temple had been built, it declaimed, by Marcus Agrippa in 27 BC.
Before going inside, I walked round to the back to see if I could spy Elizabeth Cruikshank’s snake and congratulated myself on finding it, just where I’d recalled from her description, on a small plaque above the capital of the solitary column.
Thomas was right. The building was a consummate example of human invention: a great feat of engineering, the massive concrete dome apparently having been cast in one splendid piece, and yet so effortlessly encompassing the ethereal through its porthole to the sky.
I passed through the mighty studded brazen doors and wandered round the soothing interior, where I examined the tomb of the gracious Raphael and the statue of
The Madonna of the Stone
, and admired the variant marble of the floor.
Presently, to stretch my legs further after the flight, I walked
up towards the Spanish Steps and caught Keats’s house before it closed.
The room he died in was surprisingly small: narrow, with a coffered ceiling of azure and gold, a marble fireplace, a desk, a chair and a silk damask-covered barque bed, made of walnut—like Thomas’s. These were not the original furnishings, all of which were destroyed after Keats died, burned under Vatican law, as was required of the effects of those who died of tuberculosis.
The courteous custodian had impressed on me that I might enjoy the use of the chairs and, taking advantage of this piece of civilised licence, I sat at the desk and looked out over the Spanish Steps, lit by the yellow afternoon sun.
Keats would have sat at this window, before he grew too weak to rise from his bed, believing his genius unrecognised, fearing his impending extinction, missing Fanny Brawne and steeling himself to miss her for all time; and desolately staring out at these same steps, wet from the February rains. I wondered if that maybe was the origin of his melancholy image of his name being ‘writ in water’. He could never have guessed how that watery inscription would abide.
And when Thomas Carrington, with Elizabeth Cruikshank, had seen the same steps last, they were wet too, unless Thomas had come here again, alone, after she had obeyed that fateful summons to Gerrards Cross. From what I had gleaned, it was plausible that he might have done. I almost felt he was here now, and with me, as I sat recalling his story.
I walked downstairs and out of the house and climbed the steps, ‘steep as Paradise’, his lover had told me Thomas had said of them, when they had gone to collect her things and take them
to his hotel, in the palmy days of their brief time together. From the stone-balustraded platform at the top, I looked out over an ochre and green and terracotta Rome and then descended and turned in to ‘Babington’s Tearooms’, where the ambience is more English than in England, and where I was served toasted teacakes soused in butter and Darjeeling tea, in a silver-plated pot with a cat for the handle of the lid, and hot-water jug to match, and tried to keep my anxious thoughts from the paper I was to give the following day.
I woke in the night with a terrible sense of impending doom, my heart juddering violently. I wondered if I had wet myself because the sheet, and my pyjamas, seemed to be soaked right through and while the hotel room seemed oppressively hot, so that I was having trouble breathing, my body was freezing cold.
My first frightened supposition was that this must be a heart attack. And then I recognised that it was panic I was in the grip of.
Sitting up in the bed, I breathed into my cupped hands, still pouring sweat, my berserk heart banging away and, after what seemed an eternity, but my watch told me was just over twenty minutes, the hammering abated and dwindled to an erratic flutter and then gradually returned to normal. I got up, thankfully, and made myself a cup of tea and put on a sweater and got back into bed, still shivering.
A panic attack. What was that about? I was aware that the talk had been weighing on me but while I never enjoyed giving papers I was not unused to the experience.
The manuscript was by my bed, and as I drank the hot sweet
tea, I forced myself to read it. It gave me no pleasure to do so.
It was a fastidious compilation of a couple of cases I’d treated over the past year, offering verbatim material of turning points in the treatment and a sound theoretical explanation of the underlying issues. It was well written, well argued and fundamentally false. I’d no appetite for reading the words I’d laboured over, still less for declaiming them in public, and given my present state it seemed likely that I would be in little position to do so.
I had undertaken this wretched task for Gus’s sake, because I loved him, and he had wanted me to. He had asked because he had confidence in me and I couldn’t let Gus down. But nor could I face the idea of standing before an audience to read this milk-and-water stuff aloud. My recently taxed heart revolted at the prospect and, as if in confirmation of my resolve, the iron fist, which appeared to have commandeered it, volunteered a warning squeeze.
In an effort to calm my racing mind, I picked up
The Portrait of a Lady
, which I’d brought with me to read in Rome. And out of it fell the postcard I kept as a bookmark.
The meeting was packed. The choice of venue for the conference had brought larger than usual numbers eager to debate the subject of depression in this undepressing environment. I swept an appraising eye discreetly round and detected a mood of dull inattention. Jeffries had shown some slides illustrating the neural pathways in the brain to indicate the likely prophylactic effects of various new forms of drug therapy. The slides were informative but supremely unriveting.
I stepped up to the podium and surveyed my audience. The day was warm and the room hot, the air conditioning had been
running noisily and Jeffries had asked for it to be turned off. Under my linen jacket my shirt was already damp.
A technical assistant, in chic army fatigues, had produced a machine able to project the postcard and a mild hum of speculation was audible when
The Supper at Emmaus
resolved into focus on the screen.
‘It’s like this,’ I said, and I was fully conscious of the words I was using. ‘As many of you will recognise, this is a painting by Caravaggio which is to be found not here in Rome but in London’s National Gallery. It is one of two paintings by Caravaggio called
The Supper at Emmaus
and it illustrates a scene in a story told in the Gospel of Luke.’
I paused to pour a glass of water from the jug on the table to prime my dry mouth.
‘Two men, disciples of the recently dead Jesus, travelling to an obscure village called Emmaus, a few miles west of Jerusalem, are joined by a third party, an apparent stranger, who journeys with them to their destination where he makes as if he means to travel on further. The other two detain him and press him to share their supper at the inn. He accepts their invitation, and when he breaks bread they recognise him for the friend they have believed dead, whereupon he vanishes out of sight.
‘Please let me assure you, before I proceed, that I am not speaking from any religious position, perspective or background. It was only when I had reason to look at the Caravaggio here that I considered the story from which this scene is drawn. I was familiar with only its bare outline before the painting sent me off to read it.’
I took another sip from the glass of water, in which angles
of coloured light, from the refracted image of the painting on the screen, were mingling.
‘It is relevant to our concerns here that this brief tale appears only in Luke—it is not to be found in the other Gospels—as Luke himself was very probably a physician, perhaps from Antioch. It is also relevant that the radical young Galilean he writes of, the man known as Jesus of Nazareth, was renowned among his contemporaries first and foremost as a healer with very considerable powers. In other words, both author and subject of this story were, if you like, colleagues of ours and much of Luke’s account of the life of Jesus can be read as a series of case studies of a variety of disorders which nowadays we would assume to have a psychological source.’
As I was saying this, there was a minor disturbance at the door and my peripheral vision registered a latecomer enter the hall and sit down at the far side towards the back.
‘You might like to hear how I came upon this painting for that is also relevant to my theme…’
I carried on, describing how Elizabeth Cruikshank had come to my attention, of my persistent failure to reach her through her cryptically broken silences until I shared my anxieties over my reticent patient with my colleague, Gus Galen, and how, as a consequence of this conversation, I had returned to look at the painting to which he had introduced me. I have no idea what precise words I used; I can only say they seemed to issue unedited from my disencumbered heart.
‘The history my patient finally entrusted to me is not mine to divulge. It is another story. Hers. But I came to this conference with the intention of presenting a case history, or case histories,
treated not by drugs but by other, less material, methods, and I mean not to fail in that undertaking. However, the case I wish to invite you to consider is not that of the suicidal patient I have been alluding to but my own, and the part played by Caravaggio’s painting, and the story it portrays, in developing my understanding.’
Here, I felt a wave of uneasiness swell in the room and for reassurance glanced at the familiar figures in the painting, the two fishermen, and their recently recovered friend, and took another sip of inspiration from their dancing images in the glass of water.
‘I believe that, in my dealings with this patient, nothing could have been accomplished without three factors: one, my own incompetence and attendant fear, which I was enabled to recognise through the kindness of my friend and colleague Gus Galen; two, my own desire to liberate myself from some long-term inner restriction, which I expressed in the misplaced decision over a high-security patient; three, my willingness to express my personal commitment to my patient’s continued existence, which I did with uncharacteristic force.
‘However, there is a further factor more critical than any of these. My patient had experienced a loss which was the catalyst of her desire to end her life. I have experienced an equivalent loss. Her loss activated feelings about my own and while I did not speak of these directly, or not immediately, I have little doubt that they made themselves known to her and were a
vital
—I use this word advisedly—element in what unfolded between us.’
I talked on, suddenly fluent, all my distraining anxiety fallen away, and as I talked I remembered how I had always felt that the world where our real selves reside—our hopes, perplexities,
anxieties, aversions, longings, fears and loves, those elements which make up our sense of who we are—remains always invisible to others. My audience could see my speaking, gesticulating, sweating, awkward outward form, but the real David was elsewhere: they didn’t know the half of me.
‘This is the kind of thing which can happen, I suggest, when we dare to truly engage. Two people with open hearts, and the willingness to speak from them, create a reality more powerful and more salient than either individual. That is the essence of the meaning of that journey to Emmaus celebrated in this painting here. What transpired between myself and my patient was the emergence of a truth, born of our meeting, which only came to life through our conversation. It was not a truth I immediately recognised. Because you don’t immediately recognise truth when it emerges. Very often it appears alien and strange. Sometimes downright objectionable. Nor was it a miracle, except the kind of everyday miracle which occurs when stories are told and heard in conditions of love and trust. But nothing would have been furthered had I maintained my position of professional distance and excluded my own history from my understanding of my patient’s story.’
I sat down, wiped my sweating face and polished off the tumbler of water in the ensuing silence. There was a fractured burst of applause, the chair asked for questions and there was silence again.
Someone asked in what circumstances I would be prepared to prescribe antidepressants, and another for my views on ECT. One questioner, a young woman doctor from Poland, asked if I felt there was any relevance in the fact that the first-century
Emmaus story was recreated in the seventeenth-century Caravaggio painting and was now the subject of my contemporary paper, which was a thoughtful question and I tried to answer it coherently, though I got myself into a bit of a tangle trying to do so.
‘A colleague of mine in the UK,’ I said, smiling at her, partly because she was pretty, partly out of gratitude for this token of genuine interest and partly because I was feeling almightily thankful that it was over and I would never have to put myself through such a thing again, ‘would deal better with your question. She has a theory that all consciousness is connected.’
There was a further silence at this and the chair was about to wrap things up when towards the back of the hall there was a scraping sound as someone got to his feet.
‘I hesitate to add my two penn’orth after Dr McBride’s moving and enlightening exposition, but with regard to the last question, and the nub of his commentary, as I understand it, there’s an old Jewish tale which comes to mind about the Rabbi Israel Baal Shem-Tov.’