The Other Side of You by Salley Vickers

Author:Salley Vickers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

8

I HAVE WONDERED SOMETIMES IF COMPASSION ISN’T THE most dangerous enemy of promise because it so readily wears the mask of virtue. Com passion: with passion. But it wasn’t any aspect of passion, I concluded, hearing Elizabeth Cruikshank’s story, which kept her from going to Thomas. It was something more insidious, which the golden blast of the stolen days in Rome had dislodged but failed finally to banish.

It reverberated in the dulled tone in which she reported the resumed monotony of life at Gerrards Cross, which had taken on for me, as well as her impatient lover, the desolating atmosphere of a polite suburb of Hell.

‘Why did you really stay on in Gerrards Cross?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Didn’t you believe Thomas?’ I wasn’t sure that I would have done.

‘I did believe him. But…’ She paused and stared again at her coffee. I felt some discomfort again over the clumsy mug and the lack of a gracious Italian cup. ‘I did believe him,’ she repeated, ‘but, it was more…I can’t explain.’

‘Was it that you couldn’t believe your luck?’ ‘Yes,’ she sounded grateful. ‘That was it. I couldn’t believe my luck.’

I’ve thought more about luck since I had this conversation with Elizabeth Cruikshank. Luck is the heart’s genius but it is sustained by belief. And the head, so often at odds with the heart, mistrusts belief and has secret, and often violent, purposes of its own. What I was hearing in my patient’s account was something I recognised in myself: the faltering spirit that cunningly allies itself with decency.

‘You imagined you weren’t worth it?’

‘I wasn’t worth it.’

I let this pass. ‘And how did Thomas take your disbelief?’

‘I don’t know. I knew he minded. Though, now you ask, I don’t believe I believed either that he really minded. It’s a hard thing to explain.’

‘I think I understand. But he stayed?’

‘Yes.’ Her voice was a dry whisper. ‘For a while.’

After initial vociferous protests, she said, Thomas lapsed into a semi-permanent ironic note over what he referred to as ‘bearing the Gerrards Cross’. The postponement of the life they had conceived together in Rome continued. Primrose’s long arm of control was merely extended from her wheelchair and my patient developed the subterfuge necessary to visit the mews.

It’s hard to be sure how far you can know another person when you perceive them only through the prism of another’s perceptions. And yet, for all his differences from myself, I felt I had begun to understand Thomas. I liked him. I liked him, it occurs to me now, in much the same way that I had begun to like Caravaggio, that is, coming from an initial reserve.

Among the elements I admired in him was the guerrilla war he fought against Gerrards Cross. Round about this time it seemed Primrose seconded the Church as ally.

‘Was she religious?’ I didn’t really need an answer to this.

‘Not remotely! But she fancied the vicar.’

‘Ah, yes. Clergy tend to attract transferences the way psychiatrists and analysts do but they aren’t as a rule so prepared for them.

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