The Other Side of You (22 page)

‘
G
US, THANK YOU
.’

I was exceedingly pleased to see him. The talk had left me shaky and, suddenly and swingeingly, depressed.

‘It shut them up anyway. I liked what you said. It was good stuff. You didn’t fuck about. It behoves us’—he pronounced this the old-fashioned way to rhyme with ‘moves’—‘not to fuck about. Mind you, they won’t have a bloody clue what you were on about. Mostly.’

‘I know.’

‘Not that that matters,’ Gus said. ‘One or two may take something in. You sow seeds and some sprout, as the man said.’

‘Yes.’

‘You look done in,’ Gus said. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here. They’ve succeeded in getting me to lay off alcohol for the time being, but I’ll buy you a beer and watch you drink it.’

We walked until we found a congenial-looking café, and sat while I drank a beer, and Gus drank coffee, which truth to tell I’d have preferred. But, as he said, it didn’t matter. Not much mattered. Which didn’t mean that nothing mattered, either. I’d honoured Elizabeth Cruikshank’s story, and Caravaggio’s story
and Luke’s and, I hoped, my own. I wasn’t up to much more.

‘By the way,’ Gus suddenly remarked. ‘That woman rang looking for you.’

‘Which woman?’

‘Your Caravaggio woman, the one you were on about.’

‘When?’

‘Just now.’

‘No, I mean when did she ring? Where?’

‘Yesterday. She rang me in London. St Kit’s told her you’d left and she couldn’t get any joy out of Olivia.’

‘Olivia doesn’t know I’m here. What did she want?’

‘She wanted to speak to you. She asked if I had your number and I said you were in Rome and then I couldn’t remember where the hell you were staying.’

‘I don’t think I told you.’

‘I forget everything these days, including what I wasn’t told. Anyway, I thought I’d come myself and tell you.’

‘Gus, are you fit enough to fly?’

‘Nice voice. I was feeling sorry for myself and then she rang and I thought, What ho! I’ll bugger off to Rome. It was a good excuse. You know what? She’s a catalyst, that one. I’ve met those. They’re the sort who slip in and you don’t know what’s going on but they change things. The quiet kind. Bet she’s not a looker, though.’

‘Her lover liked her looks.’

‘Oh, well, lovers.’

‘He had taste. I like them too, if it comes to that,’ I said, a shade defensively.

‘You would. Incidentally, who’s the colleague you mentioned
to that Polish girl? The one who said everything’s connected?’

‘Lennie’s Granma.’

‘Who?’

‘Lennie’s Granma. Lennie’s my black schizophrenic cleaner at the hospital. Or was. His grandmother says everything’s connected.’

‘We’ll get her to speak next time. Now then, d’you want the Caravaggio woman’s number? She’s here, by the way. I meant to say. She’s in Rome.’

My sleep that night was dreamless, a black mole-like sleep, and in the morning I woke to the echo of Sunday bells and vivid light storming my room through the window which I’d left open, the heavy curtains undrawn.

The newly arrived swallows and martins were venturing so nearly in at the window—as I stood looking out after my bath, enjoying the sense of liberation that one’s own unobserved nakedness induces—that I felt my skin almost brushed by the currents of air, as the birds swooped by in their softly shrieking ellipses. I remembered how my notes had suggested that Elizabeth Cruikshank resembled a swallow.

I breakfasted in a café, tucked, with an adroit Italian mix of shrewd commercialism and taste, above a church cloister near the Piazza Navona, where I lingered over several cups of coffee and continued my reading of
The Portrait of a Lady.
Then I walked across the piazza to the Francesi church, where Caravaggio’s
The Calling of St Matthew
is to be found.

I located it in one of the side chapels and stood a long time engrossed, while other visitors came and went, and put coins in
the machine that provided the purely mechanical illumination of the altarpieces which aids the inner kind. After that, I walked on upwards to the Piazza del Popolo, which I found thronging with people sporting red caps and white balloons, being rallied by a small darting man bawling through a megaphone.

Only in Italy would one find such a committed turnout for the Communist Party. I asked one of the bored-looking policemen standing guard over this, cheerily pacific, affair for the Santa Maria del Popolo and he gestured at the church with a tall bell tower, on the opposite side of the piazza, to which I fought my sweating way through the lively Communists.

Inside the cool building a service was concluding and I watched and waited while the congregation dispersed. This time it was Paul, or more properly, Saul whom I had come to see, struck blind, upended and dashed definitively from his horse on his way to Damascus.

A church, from long tradition, offers even strangers to worship a rest from the press of the world and as I didn’t fancy fighting through the mass of Communists again, and had time on my hands, I sat in the vaulted quiet reflecting on the Caravaggios.

What they so strikingly offered was access to those moments which invade time and contain both its annihilation and renewal. That finger of Christ, pointing from one side of the room at Matthew, as he sits chatting with his cronies at a custom-house table, describes, and forces on the surprised tax collector, a shattering choice. His bemused eyes cannot evade the level gaze of his irresistible summoner and with his left hand, the hand of the heart, he points at himself in hopeful disbelief: Is it really
me
you
want?—while, instinctively, the right hand is covering the coins on the table, guarding the money he has spent a lifetime successfully raking in.

And in that split-atom second that the vicious persecutor Saul becomes the victimised apostle Paul, he is propelled upside down, body exposed like a turned hedgehog, arms flung wide against his cruel past and the prevailing inrush of obliterating brightness.

Out of his own torment, Caravaggio apprehended those staggering reckonings, where a life spins on a point of possibility, where irreconcilable worlds, which have lain, indistinguishable and slumbering, one atop the other, rear up and show their ineluctable differences. And Elizabeth Cruikshank’s lover had also understood the piercing inexorable truth of such moments and she had made me understand them likewise.

When we met she seemed smaller, older, the strong daylight revealing the lines on her face, so that I found myself thinking that Gus was right and that she wasn’t a ‘looker’ after all. But once we had begun to speak the appeal that had drawn Thomas—which is that inner condition which appearances only reflect—began once more to hover about her presence for me like a summer haze.

We had arranged to meet in the forecourt of the Borghese Gallery and I wasn’t surprised when the warm and cautious silence—which followed our initial, and inevitably reserved, greetings—was broken by a suggestion.

‘I’ve not been here since I came with Thomas and he showed me Caravaggio’s
David.
I thought maybe, if you would like to,
that is, we could we go and see it together?’

In those days it was possible to buy a ticket for the gallery without the tedium of prior booking and she led me, with an air of authority, wordlessly through a sequence of gilded, statuecrowded, picture-resplendent rooms. Only when we reached the salmon-coloured marble-faced room, where the Caravaggios were displayed, did she indicate a gross figure of Silenus, at the room’s centre, remarking that the Romans might have done better to stick to drains. She didn’t add that this was Thomas’s opinion, but I felt that it must have been and it seemed entirely natural to ask, as we stood together before the painting of
David
, ‘What was it Thomas said about remorse?’

‘That an artist is someone who knows he is failing in living and makes something fair to feed his remorse.’

The painting, hanging on the livid marble, was like a window opening, behind the lit figure of the boy, on to a sable night. I looked at my valiant namesake with his vulnerable young throat exposed and the blade of his drawn sword resting across the crease of his groin. David also knew those moments of choice where Yes and No collide. In the act of taking life he had moved into manhood and all that this entails—the comprehension that all our acts have consequences, which we must bear, and with which we must live consciously, if life is not to become a desperate flight from ourselves—was distilled in his dark dispassionate gaze.

‘It’s a subtle observation. Not assuaging it, feeding it.’

‘Thomas’s observations were subtle. I didn’t always get them at the time.’ She smiled. ‘He wouldn’t have approved of me saying I didn’t “get them”. He was terrifically fierce.’

‘He minded,’ I said. ‘It’s a fine quality, minding. I haven’t minded enough.’

‘You minded about me and Thomas.’

‘Yes, I did, didn’t I?’

‘I shall always be grateful.’

‘I am equally grateful to you.’

Something unfathomable stirred in her expression, and if you ask me what it was I would have to own that, even now, I couldn’t say, beyond that it seemed to issue from a far-off region of her disconcerting understanding. But it encouraged me into a further emphatic, ‘It is the case, I assure you.’

In some confusion, I glanced up at the youthful David’s sorrowing eyes—and then, following their direction, down into the eyes of his victim; and I suddenly saw that Caravaggio has portrayed the suspended head with divided sight: the right eye was dead as a dead fish’s but the left was staring at me, vital, indignant, aghast.

‘I hope it won’t embarrass you if I tell you there was something I’d not faced but your story made me reconsider. I believe I was the unwitting cause of my brother’s death. I couldn’t acknowledge it, but also—as, meeting you here and telling you this now, I can see with strange clarity—I couldn’t have helped it either.’

She waited, as if to be sure there was no more to come, and then said gravely, ‘It doesn’t embarrass me.’

I turned back to the boy who had killed; and gone on to become a great and powerful king.

‘Would you say the lament again? I remember it only dimly but I’ve very often recalled your reciting it to me in my room.’

And this is my last distinct memory of Elizabeth Cruikshank, a slight figure, standing, in the marmoreal grandeur of the Borghese Gallery, before the beauteous young man with the likeness of the mauled head of his ugly creator hanging dead in his hand, her face a little averted, the Roman sun, behind her dark hair, filtering through the blinds at the long windows, reciting, in her distinctive voice, the cry of David to his lost son, who died, at war with his estranged father, unaware how grievously he would be for ever mourned.

Would God I had died for thee
, O
Absalom, my son, my son!

The note of anguish hung in the air, like the after-peal of the bells which had roused me from sleep that morning, or the motes in the sun’s fingers, and she looked at me and our eyes were full of tears, and the tears were the reciprocities of an understanding beyond words. I think that if I had walked towards her she might have opened her arms to me, and perhaps we should have found another, better, way of feeding our shared remorse. For a fraction of an interval, the possibility hovered between us, with the haunting words and the red-veined marble and the dusty sunlight and Caravaggio’s brave self-portrait and the figure of the lone boy—and the timeless stories of death and loss and remorse, which we had shared and would always share—and I knew she was involved in the same elusive, impossible calculation. And then the moment passed.

Maybe we had been through too much to accomplish a fresh beginning; maybe we were too world-worn; maybe I felt too much in the shadow of Thomas. Her story had restored the authentic likeness beneath the clumsy overlay—but that self would always be a hesitant one: it wasn’t in me to embrace her high-hearted
lover’s blazing disregard for certainty.

We walked outside and sat, side by side, decorously on a bench in the civilised gardens of the Villa Borghese, almost as we had sat those long hours in my consulting room, and spoke of many things, but mostly of a factual nature. I told her I had resigned my position at the hospitals but that Hassid, who had returned to university, kept in touch—intermittently, to my relief—and sounded to be doing fine and even had a girlfriend. Which reminded me.

‘What was that book you stole from the hospital?’

‘I thought it was a present!’

‘OK, what was the “present” we gave you?’

‘It was an old guidebook of Rome. It’s hopelessly out of date but I’m attached to it, because, well, you know…’

She asked after my cleaner and I explained that Lennie had been a headache, as I had been troubled lest he wouldn’t keep up his treatment without me, but then, in a brainwave, I’d consulted Colin Mackie and Lennie had apparently transferred his loyalties and that Mackie’s room was now treated with the reverence once reserved for mine. ‘Probably more,’ I suggested. ‘Mackie is less chaotic than I am. It’s an excellent lesson in how never to suppose we are irreplaceable.’

‘For me you were. Are.’

‘Thank you.’

‘And you’re not chaotic.’

‘By Lennie and Mackie’s standards I am,’ I interposed hastily, because I was embarrassed at what she might be going to say.

She pondered more and then said, ‘No, you’re modest. Modesty’s a fine quality. It means you let things be. It’s odd how
people can’t do that. They seem to need to poke about and interfere. Why?’

‘Probably as a distraction from themselves. I’ve done my share of interfering, too, I’m afraid.’

I spoke, then, with distress, about my poor wolf man, and how I was still anxiously awaiting the result of the inquiry into his assault on the nurse; which led, by extension, to her reminder to revisit the fabulous Etruscan wolf in the Capitoline Museum.

‘She supposedly has Romulus and Remus suckling from her but they’re later accretions. Thomas—’

‘Don’t tell me, Thomas deplored them?’

She explained how she had returned to Rome, soon after our last encounter, but that she had only recently resolved to move there permanently, which was why she had rung Gus, to tell me where she was and what she had finally accomplished. As she put it, Rome was where she had been closest to her self and she had no ties to keep her elsewhere. Her son had been all for it, and had been helpful with the move, and her relationship with both children, even in this short period, had grown increasingly close. We laughed most when she told me how, before leaving England, she had steeled herself to visit Gerrards Cross, where there were matters to tie up with Neil, and that Norma had shown herself to be of strong stuff, altogether tougher than the Russian Vine, and that Primrose had appeared quite meek under the new regime.