B
ESIDES HIS VOICE, IT WAS HIS HANDS SHE REMEMBERED MOST
, though she had not been conscious of taking them in at the time. Capable hands, she told me, with square fingers and clean nails. I don’t know if at that point I glanced at my own, or if I only tried to picture what they were like. Clean and neatly clipped, I would have hoped. My mother used to say that it is the small details that betray character.
Of what they talked, on that first meeting, I am left with an impression rather than detail. I doubt she could have given me with any great exactitude more than the broad brush strokes which—between bites of sandwich, eaten ferociously—she made that winter afternoon. In any case, it is not the substance of a conversation but the way the heart irradiates it that infuses it with meaning.
Thomas, she learned, was an art historian whose work took him abroad and only occasionally back to England. He had an Oxford base in someone else’s house. Bainbridge, from a long habit of personal trust—and the generosity she herself had enjoyed—had bestowed on his friend a house key and the invitation to stay whenever he found himself in need of a London
bed. She gained half an impression that maybe there were other beds available, should Thomas have wanted to take advantage of them, but he preferred Bainbridge’s because the hospitality came, by and large, with no strings.
Finding himself the previous evening unexpectedly late in London after a lecture, Thomas had tried on the phone and failed to get Bainbridge (notoriously unpredictable in his movements) and had therefore taken up the standing invitation. He had stayed the night and was out buying a paper when, unaware of any other presence, my patient had arrived to take her daily bath. That much she discovered in Bainbridge’s kitchen, over the Formica table.
What her part was in their conversation again I can only guess. Compared to Thomas’s, her life appeared to her barrenly uneventful. She told me she mostly listened while talk flowed from the confiding stranger.
In all exchanges there must be one who listens and one who speaks but there can be no revelation without someone to whom it is revealed. I am in a position to make this judgement since it is as listener I have spent most of my working life, as I did that afternoon and evening when I sat with Elizabeth Cruikshank. But even as I listened, trying to catch and make sense of the thread of her meaning, I was spinning invisible threads of my own.
Later that afternoon, after yet more engrossing conversation, Thomas left the flat, having taken her number, with sinceresounding promises to call her the following week, when he expected to return to London to take up more of Bainbridge’s hospitality and replicate this happy meeting. There was no hint, she insisted, of any romantic involvement.
‘There was the reference to
Naked as Nature Intended
,’ I couldn’t resist pointing out, but she dismissed this with the vehemence which the sandwiches seemed to have inspired.
‘That was only a joke.’
Privately, I thought otherwise. Gus once suggested that in the first encounter between two people the seeds of what will grow between them are sown. He was speaking of his patients, but I have come to believe that this is the case with all our important associations. The first time I met Olivia I got caught in her blouse, and I met Bar sitting beside her at a conference where I borrowed her pen which I never returned. And Gus, well, Gus introduced me to Caravaggio.
My patient and this man had met while she was naked under a borrowed bathrobe and, from her account, the two of them had sat talking together with unusual intimacy, for over three hours. That some sexual alchemy, however unrealised, had been constellated seemed likely. She admitted that she returned to her own flat in a mood of tense excitement and spent the rest of the day searching the shops for a frock worthy to meet Thomas in again.
‘Did you find one?’
‘Yes. It was much too expensive.’
‘What was it like?’ Living with Olivia had developed in me some sort of eye.
‘It went to the Oxfam shop long ago.’
It took over three weeks, during which her hot water was finally fixed by the recalcitrant landlord, before she plucked up courage to approach Bainbridge, whose key she had annoyingly—for it would have provided an excuse to make contact—
returned, and for whom she had already waited many evenings on the stairs for possible news of his friend. But when she rang his doorbell there was no answer.
Days later, when, after digging into her dwindling courage, she tried his door again, it was answered by an unfamiliar man with the news that the restless sculptor had departed to Australia for six months (she remembered having seen, on the hall table, post addressed to him with a Sydney postmark). Evidently, their acquaintance had left too little impression on her neighbour for him to think of informing her of his sudden decision to leave.
This smaller dereliction amplified the glaringly larger one, the continued non-reappearance of Thomas, on whose word she had tremulously but hopefully relied. The shock of her incorrect estimate of her value to him must have sharpened the larger shock of disappointment.
Gus believes that somewhere we all know everything, and that what is generally called intuition is merely a stronger than usual capacity to disinter information and bring it to light. But, like the delicate artefacts recovered from long-sealed tombs, these buried truths are liable to crumble and perish under the harsh beam of scrutiny. It takes a strong immunity from doubt to sustain any belief, and it would have taken a steadier sense of self-worth than my patient’s to trust to the truth of an impression born out of one lightning reckoning of her inexperienced heart.
She slid, slowly at first, for Thomas’s seeming interest in her had burned into her consciousness, then, as days became weeks, more rapidly into the crippling assumption that the parting promise of soon-to-be-renewed contact was no more than a
polite tactic for getting away; and that the intense pleasure she had taken to be mutual had been merely the reflection of her own naive desire.
As she sat by a silent phone, for more bleak evenings than she cared to recall—her contacts were few and her friends sparse—she castigated herself for her presumption, for her ignorant susceptibility, for her ludicrous vanity in daring to hope that this man, of all men, could want her, of all the ridiculous cast-away souls in all the ridiculous world.
But the chastising self-remonstrations, the lessons she rehearsed to herself sternly at night—when she slept fitfully—or in the day—when her attention over her library duties wildly wandered—proved pointless, and she was to learn why the commonly advised remedy of ‘pulling oneself together’ is one which is recommended only by those who have been spared the doomed attempts to apply it.
The fact is, the only lasting safety from sorrow would lie in some kind of drastic surgery of the human faculty of affection. My patient’s heart having been so swiftly and suddenly suborned, her affections were thoroughly compromised. She was taking the first hard steps in learning that the way of things as you go on is not the way when you try to go back and there exist invisible turnstiles which, having let us pass easily through them, yield to none of our most strenuous efforts at return.
S
HE MADE TWO LAST BRAVE ATTEMPTS AT NOT LOSING TOUCH
with Thomas. One was to write to Cecil Bainbridge. She gathered, from his tenant, that his mail was being redirected to an English address and she wrote saying how sorry she was not to have had a chance to see him before his departure and boldly asking after his ‘friend’ whom she had met while enjoying the ‘kind loan of the bathroom’. She waited some further weeks, in various states of agitation, for a reply that never arrived. Bainbridge was either too indifferent or too preoccupied.
The other, less practical but bolder in scope, was to enrol as a student at the North London Polytechnic.
Thomas had mentioned, in the context of her living nearby, that he had once delivered a lecture there for the art history course. ‘I thought he might do another one day,’ she told me.
The stay at the poly was brief. The impulse which led her to take the course was founded in something too liable to express itself in a perpetual anxious monitoring of any passing male figure who remotely resembled Thomas, to leave much energy available for disciplined study, to which she was anyway unused. And the vigilant watching spawned a further anxiety: her sense
of what Thomas looked like had become insecure. All she could have sworn to was a pair of spectacles on a beaky nose, and those capable hands; hands which had never touched her but were associated in her mind with a deftly turned and supremely delicious omelette eaten at Bainbridge’s red Formica table.
It was then that she met Neil.
I imagine I gave an involuntary sigh because here, at last, was an answer to the question that had hung in my mind over that egregious husband. After so devastating a disappointment it would make sense to turn to a Neil.
To her astonishment, Neil, after their first night together, continued his attentions. He invited her to a long-running musical and then to a film about racing cars. In bed he was passably attentive, though it was clear to me, if not from anything said directly, that there was in her no answering spark. She did let slip that one anxiety she had was that she might accidentally call Neil by Thomas’s name. That there had been no actual lovemaking with Thomas was, I understood, immaterial. The most passionate sexual encounters originate in the mind.
From this I concluded that she had little expectation of being found physically attractive, and, as I knew from Olivia’s example, the assumption of sexual attractiveness is half the battle. My patient was no film starlet, as my mother might have said, but there was a delicacy about her of a kind that stirs the heart more than the cruder sexual responses. I doubted from what I had gleaned that Neil was a man to value this. To him, I guessed, she would have been no more than a reasonably personable girl willing to go to bed with him.
After a mere few weeks, she gave notice to her landlord and, with a determination to distance herself from a scene of what she saw as the grossest humiliation, moved from Camden to be with Neil. By now, thoroughly sick at heart, she longed to be free of the ritual of vainly searching the post for news. She left no forwarding address, since she wanted to ensure that the rapacious landlord would not pursue her; she had informed all the necessary billing authorities and her few acquaintance had been told of the move.
The association drifted into an unspoken engagement. In those days, it was unusual for young men and women to cohabit and in moving in with Neil she had acted with a disregard for social form. Which didn’t, I pointed out, prevent her following convention in marrying him.
She flushed hard at this and her expression took on the faint mulishness that I was beginning, affectionately, to recognise.
‘He wanted me to,’ she briefly explained.
It was explanation enough. After the disappointment over Thomas, for someone with so little sense of her own worth to be wanted at all would have been an irresistible balm. And Neil, she began to insist again, was not a bad man.
‘He was solid, he was responsible, he was fair-minded, he was—’
‘He sounds dull,’ I interposed. I felt we’d had enough of this. ‘It’s not wrong, you know, to find someone dull.’
‘He was dull,’ she gratefully accepted, taking another bite at a sandwich. I had long since surrendered any claim on the pile.
‘You know,’ I said, sensing I had made ground, ‘we’ll do better if you don’t feel you have to make the best of all this. Things
become clearer if not made the best of. It’ll be simpler in the end.’
‘It was awful.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘it must have been.’ It’s naive to pretend that life for many people isn’t pretty wretched much of the time.
‘Awful.’
‘What was it that was so awful?’
‘He got on my nerves,’ she attempted. The mismatch of their sensibilities had already conveyed itself. Like the grate of a rough cloth on sensitive fingers, Neil would have set up in her a perpetual sense of being on edge. ‘Poor Neil. He couldn’t help it.’
She was right about ‘poor Neil’. We never make anyone happy who does not make us happy. And yet this elementary emotional equation is rarely recognised. The reasons for choice of partner are obscure and what passes for love is generally a decidedly mixed bag: lust, anxiety, lack of self-worth, sadism, masochism, cowardice, fear, recklessness, selfglory, simple brutality, the need to control, the urge to be looked after; most dangerous of all, the desire to save. There are other, happier, ingredients: kindness, compassion, honour, friendship, sympathy, the wish to help, the attendant wish to be good, though these finer impulses can often wreak more havoc than the more blackguardly ones. Seldom, very seldom, do two people unite through sheer reciprocal joy in the other’s being.
‘So you married him?’ I persisted, conscious that this would needle.
‘We were married, yes.’
‘With bridesmaids and orange blossom and so on?’ I continued uncharitably.
‘With bridesmaids.’ She made it sound like confirmation of a diagnosis of cancer. ‘They were Neil’s sister’s daughters and they wore lilac dresses and had lilac in their hair.’
‘Real lilac?’ My curiosity was genuine.
‘Artificial. Neil’s mother chose their clothes.’
‘And your own wedding dress…?’
She made a face. ‘White satin.’
I let it go, though it struck me that her face, with its worn marble planes, might suit white satin.
She added that her mother had enjoyed the occasion since it presented the chance for a new outfit and that her father had startled her by crying when he gave her away.
Although she had spoken pretty freely, without prompting, at this point one of our old silences arose. I found myself dwelling on the previous evening, and the sense of loneliness I’d been conscious of with Olivia out again.
My patient’s account of her marriage was engendering some parallel assessment of my own. I couldn’t envisage a life without Olivia and yet what did I really know about her after all these years? Our initial meeting had set up that pattern of entanglement and disentanglement which had left us both little wiser about the other’s private needs or desires. Olivia knew the details of my past but had no feeling, or none I was aware of, for its persistent implications. I could hardly have avoided telling her about Jonny—but the telling amounted to no more than the bare bones of the situation; any idea that this was a loss which had left me lame would have filled her with scorn, or maybe
alarm. And yet I knew, in a sense, she was my attempted solution to Jonny. She’d filled a gap, or hadn’t so much filled as distracted me from it, diverted me with a version of desire which had kept me from the pull of that other black hole. I wasn’t in love with her, I doubted that I had ever been in love with her, though no doubt I had told myself that that was what it was at the time, and there were times now when I wasn’t sure that I even liked her. But, though I was ashamed of this, I needed her and the need held me.
And what about Olivia? What was her ‘need’ of me? I was aware so often of letting her down. The understanding I brought so readily to my work failed me in my private life and failure tends to bring indifference or, at best, a defensive incuriosity in its train. Was I to her what the uninspiring Neil Cruikshank had been to his wife? A disappointment? An object of guilt? A substitute for some dark horse whose existence I was ignorant of?
‘My mother-in-law was called Primrose,’ Elizabeth Cruikshank tossed abruptly into the silence, tersely adding, ‘She called me “Liz”.’
On the map of human choice, there are highways and byways, crossroads and narrow tracks, and cul-de-sacs. And along these routes are to be found abodes of graciousness, citadels and hovels, palaces and boltholes. And there are the houses of shame into which we creep because we feel we are worth no better. In time, my patient and her husband moved to Gerrards Cross, to a bungalow built in the grounds of Neil’s family home.
The house, built in the fifties, with the profits of the family’s civil engineering business, was red-brick and militarily regular
in its proportions, which were reflected in the layout of the garden. The rooms were correspondingly large, decorated in a range of colours that were the inspiration of a local interior designer whose friendship with Primrose Cruikshank expressed itself in the choice of the pale yellow which she took as the house’s aesthetic ‘theme’. The suites of furniture were matching, as were those in the bathrooms, and the Cruikshanks were in the vanguard of fashion in importing bidets and Swedish showers.
The grounds were extensive enough to support the planning and construction of the dwelling to which, shortly after their wedding, the young Cruikshanks were imported.
Primrose Cruikshank was active in the large garden, the local church and bridge parties, and had a crisp perm, which resembled the coat of her Pekinese dog.
‘She was called Connie. It became my job to walk her. The dog, not the mother-in-law.’
‘“Connie” as in Lady Chatterley?’
‘Yes. I got into trouble with Primrose for suggesting that.’ She delivered one of her rusty laughs.
‘She didn’t like you?’
‘She loathed me. And she knew what I would loathe. It was “Liz” at first sight. I wasn’t what she had in mind for Neil at all.’
This raised my estimation of Neil until she added, ‘Neil made me feel I was the one in the wrong.’
‘So he wasn’t loyal?’
‘He wasn’t
disloyal.
But he was never really on my side, you know?’
‘I think so,’ I fudged.
‘He tried to be fair.’
‘Oh dear. Fairness isn’t good enough, is it?’
‘I didn’t know that then. I just felt on my own.’
Poor young woman. Her flight from her dangerously kindled passion had led her to this isolated pass. ‘Were there no allies?’
‘I got on all right with Duncan, my father-in-law, but he was away at his office most of the time and it was Primrose who wore the trousers. Neil was their only boy and she doted on him. To be fair—’ She smiled. ‘To be fair,’ she repeated, to establish she recognised the irony of this, ‘she guessed I didn’t love her son.’ ‘Was he lovable?’
‘Isn’t everyone somewhere? I thought that was what we were supposed to think.’
‘Let’s not bother with “supposed”’.
‘You’re supposed to love your patients, though, aren’t you?’
‘That’s a kind of “Have you stopped beating your wife?” question.’
She considered this and then floored me by coming out with a more direct one. ‘Why do you do this? Is it love or damage?’
‘Possibly both,’ I said shortly, though, with the exception of Gus, my colleagues would say that in admitting this I had already said too much.
It was a question I had never put so directly to myself, though, naturally, it was an implied question of my own analysis. But the things you believe you see objectively are not necessarily the things you subjectively comprehend. I was aware that I found relief in deciphering others’ pain, but there was a sense in which I had chosen to remain in the dark over the mainspring of that impulse, and the bluntness of her question set off a subtle
shudder which was reverberating through me as I followed the drift of her story.
The meddlesome Primrose pursued the policy of oppression which my patient accepted as her due. She took a position at the local library until the birth of their first child, Max, kept up some part-time library sessions until the arrival of Amanda, and then gradually succumbed to the round of coffee mornings, church bazaars and garden parties which formed the accepted pattern of middle-class married life in the Gerrards Cross community.
It sounded to be a dispiriting but not unusual scene, variants on such routine social displacements being the common theme of much of so-called civilised life. It might have formed reason enough for an independent spirit to wish to make some radical move, which might even have been expressed in the most radical of all moves: the departure from not merely an aspect of life but from life itself. But, on the whole, dullness baffles enterprise and it generally takes a stiffer jolt than the threat of another church bazaar to break out of the status quo.
‘And Max and Amanda?’ I enquired. I hoped her children, at least, might have brought her some joy.
‘I wasn’t allowed to bring them up as I wanted. I loved them, of course I did. But not in the way I longed to. Primrose thought I was over-indulgent and Neil always backed her up. The children were packed off to boarding school as soon as it was feasible.’
‘That must have been difficult for you.’
The little dismissive shrug hurt me, from which I deduced it hid pain.
‘They’re fine. Max has just started as a chemical engineer and Amanda’s training to be a dentist.’
‘Do they know you’re here?’
‘Yes.’
‘And they visit you?’ Maguire’s report suggested they hadn’t.
‘I prefer they don’t.’
‘But they would miss you, had you gone for good?’
I half expected her to deny this but instead she said, ‘It’s hard to be with people who don’t like you.’
‘You feel your children don’t like you?’
‘They don’t
dislike
me,’ she corrected. ‘It’s just that they don’t “like” me. It’s not their fault. They don’t know who I am.’