The Other Side of You (7 page)

‘Why is it a joke?’ Another thing I liked about Gus was that he never made you feel that what you didn’t know or understand mattered a straw.

‘Asclepius was the god of healing. If you think about it, Socrates pays his last respects to a healer at the point when there was about to be nothing left of him to heal. I reckon he was saying, life is a sickness and death is a welcome recovery from it. Remember, there’s no cure for being alive!’

‘I told her that,’ I said. ‘I told my patient it was you who told me. It was one of the few things I’ve said which seemed to get through.’ Which was when I remembered the conversation we’d
had about painting. ‘Actually, there’s another thing. She shares your taste for Caravaggio.’

‘Does she indeed?’ said Gus. ‘You know, I’d follow that up, if I were you. Caravaggio knew about suffering. And passion. And death. There was nothing babyish or covered up about Caravaggio!’

M
Y APPOINTMENT WITH
D
R
H
ANNAN’S COUNSEL WAS NOT
till eleven so I had time, the following morning, to drop by the National Gallery.

I renewed my acquaintance with Titian’s
Man with a Blue Sleeve.
I like that blue. And I adore Titian’s supreme confidence. You can see it reflected in his nobleman, who’s so clearly a bastard but one of those bastards you can’t help but admire.

It was almost twelve years since I’d looked at the Caravaggio and I’d forgotten, if I’d ever registered, how young the risen Christ looks. His cheek is almost childishly smooth, the rounded curves defying the recent experience of death, as if in dying his bloom has been renewed. Poor Jesus. I’d never considered it before but how appalling to undergo that agonising death, and have all the relief of its being over, and then have to endure the redoubled torment of coming back.

I looked again at the stupefied pair receiving the news of this unlooked-for return. The hand of the disciple to the right, which comes springing out of the frame, as if the third dimension has been given literal shape, is the left hand, the sinister side, the hand of the unconscious, plucking life and flinging it at us out of the dark.

I’d not taken in the painting properly when Gus showed it to me first, inspecting it only out of politeness, and curiosity—mostly about my new acquaintance. Now it hit me with the delayed force that the revelation they were witnessing plainly hit the two amazed fishermen, when the friend and colleague they had loved—and walked and talked and lain down and slept with, on lousy straw and rocky, inhospitable soil, and starved with, and eaten supper with the night before he died, and believed dead and gone for ever—rematerialised out of the blue to share this other supper with them and knock them back to life.

I doubt you can know until you have someone close to you die how unnatural the loss feels. I, who had lived with that absence from childhood, had a problem understanding the degree to which the dead are dead to most of the living. When I finally accepted that Jonny had gone, I began to believe I could bring him back by willing it. I used to invent elaborate rituals with my toys, toys we had shared. We had a jam jar filled with cowrie shells, a legacy from our mother’s childhood, and Jonny used to form patterns with them on our bedroom lino. He would lay the shells out on the diamond-patterned floor and stand us both inside and speak spells and transport us to China, to India, to Arabia, to Timbuktu.

Those lands he transported us to were as real to me as the rocky Cornish seascapes where we spent our holidays, and where Jonny’s inventiveness presided over rock pools and shrimping nets and fantasies of smuggling. In important ways more real.

At dawn and dusk, at teatime, breakfast, schooldays and holidays and those isolated days I persuaded my mother I was sick and she let me off school—no easy feat, since she was rarely
susceptible to pleading—I cast the cowrie shells. I also made potions from dock and dew, which I sneaked out early in the morning to gather in a cracked doll’s cup, another relic from our mother’s childhood, and drew blood from my arm with the pin of an old Thomas the Tank Engine badge and tried to furnish my mind with words, whose precise meaning I didn’t comprehend but whose obscurities I hoped might provide the necessary summoning power. But for all my dedicated efforts, and all my willing suspension of disbelief, Jonny never returned.

But Jesus did. According to the story. The story must have had the same impact on Caravaggio as he envisaged it had on the two disciples for him to have painted the shock of it with such electrifying intensity. An intensity which reached through time and space and penetrated my inhibited English breast as I stood in the particular quiet of an unpeopled gallery. There’s a sense in which I fell in love with Gus the day he took me to see the Caravaggio. But it wasn’t until that moment that I fell in love with the painting he had showed me.

I lingered, as lovers do, over this discovery and my dislike of being unpunctual meant that I raced down the Strand and was sweating into my carefully chosen white shirt by the time I reached the court.

I needn’t have worried. The young counsel was later still. As we went through my testimony again I remarked, conversationally, that there was no way of stopping someone bent on doing themselves in any more than you could halt the progress of a wild horse.

‘Let’s skip the horse ref, yah?’ suggested the counsel, whose hair resembled the tail feathers of a bedraggled mallard duck. I wasn’t fooled; these draggled young men are eagles when they
fasten on their prey.

The image was purely for private communication, I assured him. In my testimony I would stick to medical principles of the purely conventional kind.

As I entered the windowless room, where witnesses are asked to kick their heels, a garrulous-seeming woman started up at me.

‘You a witness? I’m here for the bodily violence.’

She sounded as if she might be. The over-talkative have something of the terrorist about them. I organised my expression into what I hoped was a politely repelling aspect and withdrew into my thoughts.

Waiting is no hardship for me. Even today, when I am less oppressed by claims on my time, I am content to wait for hours at airports. It gives me a break from the perpetual feeling that I ought to be doing something—a licensed rest from the overactive sense of duty which my upbringing induced. The garrulous woman was called and I was left thankful for no further interruption. I tried to dredge from memory the story behind the Caravaggio painting. But it wouldn’t come. My knowledge of such subjects is hazy but no doctor could fail to have a soft spot for Jesus. Whatever else, he was a virtuoso healer, a colleague, in fact, though if you were to believe the story one with rather superior credentials.

But your average doctor is not a god and shouldn’t fall into the trap of feeling that is what is required. ‘Stay awake, do your best and don’t expect results,’ Gus would say. But those who suffer, and those close to them, expect results, and when these go awry the doctor can be crucified.

I’ve appeared, several times, as an expert witness and each
time the gravity of the occasion catches me. A glance at the judge revealed a narrow-featured man with serious spectacles whose wig had been thrown rakishly over his head like a dishcloth. It took me some years to work out that the greater the authority in court, the greater the licence with the wig.

I steadied myself to tell, if not the absolute truth—for how can any of us fairly do that?—at least to give my considered opinion, which was that on the available information Dr Hannan could not reasonably be said to have erred. Across the room I observed him, repeatedly wiping with a large white handkerchief his hands, the back of his neck, his broad shiny forehead, even his plump trousered knees, and my heart went out to him.

Dr Hannan, it had been established, had discussed the attempted suicide’s case with appropriate care, had requested that his patient be closely observed by the nursing staff and that all medication be strictly supervised. It was the girl’s perseverant cunning which had contrived to steal enough from a hospital drugs trolley, left carelessly by no one could establish whom, to finish the job she had started. There was something awesome about this executive efficiency. It was a disturbing affair, not only because of the girl’s youth but because from her actions you could tell that she might have amounted to something. It takes a special kind of determined will to accomplish your own death.

I pronounced, and under questioning reiterated, my view that there had been no deficiencies in the treatment of Melanie Hope Claybourne whose life had been taken by her own hand. ‘And you remain convinced,’ the prosecuting counsel pressed, ‘that everything reasonable was done by Dr Hannan to prevent any further attempts by his patient on her own life?’
Beneath his professional obligations I got the sense that no more than I did he want to condemn the sweating doctor.

‘Completely convinced,’ was my honest answer.

But inwardly I wondered a little about that name ‘Hope’, which seemed to hint at some ungrasped opportunity. The question which I had half anticipated never arrived, though I detected a shade of its possibility flicker in the eyes of our draggled counsel. What the other counsel might have asked was whether, in the circumstances, I would have followed the same procedures as Dr Hannan. The unspoken question had a certain validity. It was not that Dr Hannan had not done everything ‘reasonable’ for his patient’s well-being; it was that he had neglected to consider the ‘unreasonable’. And as Gus would say, in such cases it is often the unreasonable which is required.

Perhaps it was as well for Hannan that the unreasonable doesn’t make convincing testimony in court. Nor is it yet a recognised prophylactic in psychiatric procedure. No one in any official position would consider saying, ‘The girl was called “Hope”, maybe you should have asked her, and yourself, what that unfashionable yet suggestive name might represent?’ Nor did I have any way of knowing whether I could have succeeded where Hannan had failed. So much depends, I reflected on the train home, dog-tired at the effort of truth-telling, on how far one can gain access to the secret mind. As far as her physical person went, Hannan had behaved irreproachably but the balance of the girl’s life might have hung on whether he could find in her the ‘Hope’ for which she was named.

My mind darted anxiously to Elizabeth Cruikshank, whom it was my duty to try to perceive. How far did she want me to see her? But then, how far do any of us want to be seen? On the
one hand, it is what we fear most, that our shamefulnesses, disloyalties, meannesses, cruelties, miseries, the sum of our hopeless, abject, creeping failures be finally laid bare. But the very opposite is also the case. I believed—or believed I believed—that we are in anguish until someone finally finds us out. And the deeper truth is that human consciousness can hold two contradictory states at once, and all our unmet longings wear an overcoat of fear.

To my annoyance I found I had left my scarf, cashmere, and a present from Olivia, in the railway carriage, and had to walk home from the station pursued by a wind screaming ‘All is futile’ around my naked neck and ears.

The lights in the flat were out when I reached it and I went round turning on more than I needed. It would have been consoling to find Olivia at home, and even to have her scold me a little over the scarf. I poured myself a whisky and switched an extra heater on, though the temperature was warm enough.

There was a note on the kitchen counter:
Back late. Ham, toms, etc in fridge. O.
Sometimes Olivia decorated her initial with a smile which could irk me but I missed it now.

I helped myself to a cold supper of ham and tomatoes and plenty of chutney and, in an act of defiance, because Olivia was fussy about the smell, three pickled onions. It was late, and I was too tired to work so I settled down with a whisky and
Mansfield Park.
Getting up to refill my glass, and check the answerphone, in case Olivia might have left a message, I thought that when I had a moment I must remember to look up the story of that other supper.

T
HE YEAR WAS DROPPING FAST TOWARDS THE WINTER
solstice so I had already switched on the lights in my room when I saw Elizabeth Cruikshank the following afternoon. From my chair I watched her enter the room with the awkward, faintly hesitant gait which betrayed uncertainty about her welcome.

As she settled into the blue chair and I registered a glance at my clown. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but the planes of her half-averted face looked even more pale and prominent than usual. She had about her that bird-like look which evoked painful images of cats, or cages.

I expected to begin with one of our familiar silences. I had had to cancel her previous session and I feared she might mind this dereliction, and my hunch was that she would mind that she minded. So I decided to tackle the subject right away.

‘I’m sorry I had to miss our last meeting.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘If you say not.’

‘It’s not important.’ This time I held my peace. ‘I don’t make the mistake of assuming I matter to you!’ she broke out suddenly again, with more than a glint of sharpness.

Ah, my bird, I thought, a little more of that and I’ve caught you! But aloud I said, ‘You think you are the only one to whom our meetings matter?’

The silence passed to her. Under her sway it deepened, chilled, iced over, and then, as rapidly, shifted temperature and melted as her neck and face flushed a violent red. Good, I thought. Time you showed your colours.

‘How do I know what you think?’

‘You might allow me to mind that I have possibly let you down.’

I’m not someone who plays games. Nor have I ever been of the view that games of any kind are what should be played in my business, or indeed in any human transaction. But it is not only in love affairs that there is a kind of dance, a stepping forward and a stepping back, a taking hold and a letting go, and I suppose I was banking on my studied politeness to provide a space for her to step out of where she was hiding.

‘I didn’t say you had,’ she murmured angrily.

‘But you would be entitled to think so,’ I said, deliberately maintaining my tone.

I wondered if she would risk asking what had kept me from seeing her, and if she did, how I would answer her: that I had been releasing a patient, who believed a wolf was trapped in his skull, from years of being unnecessarily confined; that I had to appear as an expert witness in a London court on behalf of a doctor whose patient had committed suicide? It was with a mixture of regret and relief that I recognised she was going to stick with silence.

For the first time since I had begun to see her, I found myself
becoming bored. I had spent more time and attention on this case than by any official reckoning I should have done and I had other, equally pressing, claims. And had I been asked to justify myself, I would have been hard put to give grounds for the amount of time I’d spent, or the level of my concern. There was nothing untoward in it, other than, by now, a well-kindled interest. But I was growing tired. Maybe I was too tired to continue trying to get blood out of this stone?

And then two things happened. That wretched cat appeared on the fence again and looked at me. Nothing more. It just looked, with its vile psychopathic stare, and clear as a bell I heard my mother’s voice, which, perhaps unfairly, I always heard cutting me down to size. ‘A cat may look at a king, you know, Davey.’ And, as was often the way when I recalled my mother’s familiar discouragements, I saw an image of Jonny, standing in the road, smiling and beckoning me to cross. And then my mind flickered to Gus, and myself drinking whisky in his snug, untidy room, in the atmosphere of comfortable masculine intimacy and then that image dissolved too, and reconfigured itself into the sweating bulk of the terrified Dr Hannan. Whatever the judgement of the court, poor Hannan would not escape his own judgement and the unspoken judgement of the dead Melanie Claybourne. Melanie Hope Claybourne, in whom, and for whom, all hope was now dead, dead as a doornail.

Something moved in me as palpably as if an old weathervane, which had stuck fast pointing North, had, through the aid of some invisible force, unjammed and careered round to the South.

‘I had to attend a meeting to assess some patients at another
hospital and then I was called to London to act as a witness on behalf of a colleague whose patient succeeded in killing herself,’ I heard myself enunciate, and, as I did so, I had the impression that I was delivering this statement up to someone, or some thing, over and above the woman in my room. Her head shot up but I couldn’t read the look in her eyes. It might have been fear or anger. Possibly both. Whatever it was it didn’t deter me.

‘I thought a lot about you while I was away. I thought that although it is your right to choose to die, I would be glad if you didn’t. Very glad, in fact.’

‘To save your own skin?’ It was not quite a jeer.

‘Yes, if you like. But for other reasons too.’

She said nothing so I pressed on. I’d got the bit between my teeth now.

‘I looked in on a painting of Caravaggio’s at the National Gallery yesterday.
The Supper at Emmaus.
I remembered you said that you liked him.’

‘Yes?’

‘My friend Gus Galen, as I think I mentioned to you once, likes him too. It was Gus who showed me the painting first. And the evening of the day I missed seeing you, when we should have been meeting here, I saw Gus and we spoke about you—’ anticipating a protest I hurried on—‘or rather I spoke. He listened. Forgive me, but I’ve been worried for you. Worried about you. I told him you liked Caravaggio and he sent me back to look at this one. Or—’ again I struggled to be accurate: it seemed more than usually urgent—‘I went back myself, off my own bat. Because of what he said, what Gus said. Gus is someone I trust. I hadn’t really looked at that painting before, but I did yesterday.
I rather fell in love with it. In my profession, the business of falling in love is often dismissed as fantasy, neurotic wishful thinking. But there are ways of falling in love which are, I would say, important. Crucial. And real.’ I believe I might have been sweating though the temperature was December chill.

The quince’s blossomless, lichen-covered branches were tracing a silver-grey pattern behind the glass and my mother’s wounded mango tree came to mind.

‘And painful,’ I added, pushing myself over a further threshold. I was conscious of slightly raising my voice. ‘Love is painful. Isn’t it? It forces change upon you. It forces you—I should say us—to change. Or have a shot at changing, anyway,’ I more lamely concluded.

There followed a very long silence during which I didn’t allow myself to consider the odds on this gamble. Perhaps to counter a heightened sense of precariousness my thoughts reverted to Lady Bertram on her sofa, with her pug, and her basket of cut flowers from the beds at Mansfield Park. There had grown in me a sneaking liking for idle Lady Bertram. She had no conscience whatsoever and I suspected that, for similar reasons, Jane Austen liked her too. Lady Bertram wouldn’t have had the whisker of a notion of what I was on about. The only change she would have undertaken was to Pug’s collar or her own bonnet strings.

‘You know, what I said before?’

The voice was so low that in my distraction I believed I’d not heard and asked her to repeat her words. She started, hesitated, then stalled, and my thoughts flew anxiously from Sir Thomas Bertram’s morally insentient wife to Melanie Hope’s
resolutely fatal despair, while my laggardly brain caught up with the sense of the words.

‘Yes,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m sorry, I do know.’ And nothing in the world was more moving to me at that moment than that one human heart can open to another.
‘Or
rather, I should say I don’t know. But I remember what you said.’

‘So,’ she appeared to continue but halted as abruptly. And then there was a quite new kind of silence which I tried not to interrupt even with my thoughts.

The silence slipped around us, between us, over us, covering us, and the room, and everything in it, with the invisible lustre of possibility. But the possibility was not mine. I could only sit within it and wait.

‘It was like this,’ said Elizabeth Cruikshank, at last.