I dismissed this with a wave of my hand. That was all semantics as far as I was concerned. I knew what I wanted to say but was unsure whether I could express it correctly. I didn’t want him to get angry with me.
“You haven’t noticed the way that she looks at me and Bastiaan?” I said. “The way she speaks to us?”
“Not particularly,” he replied. “Why, what has she said?”
“It’s not something specific,” I began.
“So she hasn’t said anything then? You’re just imagining things?”
“She doesn’t respect what we have here,” I told him. “What the three of us have.”
“Of course she does,” said Ignac. “She knows how much you’ve both done for me. And she respects it.”
“She thinks there’s something untoward about how we took you in.”
“No, she doesn’t.”
“She practically said as much to me! How much does she know anyway?” I asked. “About your history, I mean.”
He shrugged. “She knows everything,” he told me.
“Not everything?” I said, leaning closer to him and feeling my heart skip a beat.
“No, of course not,” he said, shaking his head. “Not about…that.” The things that had happened toward the end of our stay in Amsterdam were never discussed between any of us. They were part of our past, something that perhaps we all thought about privately from time to time but never discussed aloud.
“But she knows about me,” he said. “What I was. The things I did. I’m not ashamed of any of it.”
“And nor should you be. But you should be careful who you talk to about those times. When people know too much about your life, they can use it against you.”
“I don’t like to keep secrets,” he said.
“It’s not about keeping secrets,” I insisted. “It’s about holding some of yourself back. It’s about privacy.”
“But what’s the point? If I’m going to be close to someone, Cyril, then they can ask about my life and those days are part of my life. If they’re bothered by it, then they can move on, I don’t care. But I will never lie about who I am or what I’ve done.”
He wasn’t trying to be cruel, I knew that. He knew very little about my own past and the lies that I had told over the years of my youth, not to mention the damage that I had inflicted on so many people. And I wanted it to stay that way.
“If you really want to go to Dublin,” I said. “If you want to see Trinity and find out whether it would be a good fit, then perhaps I could take you there.” The idea slightly terrified me, but I said it nonetheless. “The three of us could go together.”
“You, me and Emily?”
“No, you, me and Bastiaan.”
“Well, maybe,” he said, looking away. “I don’t know. At the moment, it’s just an idea, that’s all. It might come to nothing. I might end up staying on in the States. I don’t have to make any decisions for a while yet.”
“All right,” I said, not wanting to push him. “But just make the decision yourself, OK? Without anyone pressuring you.”
“And will you try to get on better with Emily in the meantime?” he asked.
“I can try,” I said doubtfully. “But she has to stop calling me Mr. Avery. It’s driving me fucking crazy.”
Patient 630
The patient who I enjoyed spending time with the most was a lady in her eighties named Eleanor DeWitt who had spent most of her life flitting between the island of Manhattan and the parlors of political salons in Washington, D.C., while summering in Monte Carlo or on the Amalfi Coast. A lifelong hemophiliac, she found herself infected with the disease after a careless transfusion delivered corrupted blood into her body. She had taken her misfortune steadfastly, however, never complaining, and claiming that if it hadn’t been AIDS that had taken her down, it would have been cancer or a stroke or a brain tumor, which might have been true, of course, but I’m not sure that many people would have shared her stoicism. When she was a girl, her father had run unsuccessfully for governor of New York—twice—and in between political campaigns he’d made a fortune in construction. She’d been a debutante in the 1920s and had mixed, she told me, with a fast and witty crowd: writers, artists, dancers, painters and actors.
“Of course, most of them were fairies, just like you, darling,” she told me one day while I sat feeding grapes to her, as if she was Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra and I was her Richard Burton. She was lying in her hospital bed, her skin unnaturally thin, almost transparent, the contaminated blood visible as it coursed through her veins. She wore an enormous blonde wig to hide the sores and wounds that lay beneath, many of which were replicated around her body. “I should know,” she added. “I married three of them.”