SALLEY VICKERS LIVES AT the top of a tall cream stucco mansion block in West London. She also has a cottage a long way west, in Celtic border country: both are salvage from the wreck of her short marriage to the Irish writer and broadcaster Frank Delaney. They had invested jointly in a substantial property in Somerset but in 2002, after only four years together, Delaney left her, married wife No 4 and disappeared to New York. Vickers was 50 when they married, a novelist and experienced psychoanalyst: how did she fall for a Bolter?
“I was flattered,” she says with a small shrug. In The Other Side of You, her new novel, David, the narrator, observes: “Seldom, very seldom, do two people unite through sheer reciprocal joy in the other’s being.” I frowned when I read it; it seemed so sad. Does she truly believe it?
“Yes,” she says calmly,
“because we are connected to our damage. The reasons people end up with each other are to do with projection and insecurities. It is rare to actually take simple delight in another person’s being. Most associations come freighted with an implicit demand or need.”
But surely being in love is exactly that: delight in the other person? And you marry because you want to go on being delighted!
She nods politely: “But then rather quickly our possessiveness and need to control starts to take over, and our need to turn the other person into something we want.”
Vickers has two sons, now in their thirties, whom she raised after a failed first marriage, working first as an academic and then as a psychoanalyst until four years ago when she gave up to write full time. Did psychoanalysis make her a novelist? “No,” she says, “but being a psychoanalyst is another way of being a novelist: both are about story — the patient’s story evolves, elicited by the analyst — both require a real interest in other people, which I have. Psychoanalysis confirmed my intuitions — my understanding of my patients came from finding the equivalent, though unlived, part of myself.”
This fourth novel — a return to the scintillating form of her first, the bestselling Miss Garnett’s Angel — is a sustained examination of love: the way, through timidity or lack of self worth, we allow it to elude us; the appalling role of bad timing in relationships and the redemptive power of understanding and acceptance.
Psychoanalyst, Dr David McBride has a patient, Elizabeth, who, after several sullenly resistant sessions, is persuaded to reveal the reason for her recent attempt at suicide; a painting by Caravaggio, Supper at Emmaus, plays a crucial role in her surrender.
As a young librarian, lonely and inexperienced in love, Elizabeth met Thomas, quite by accident, and in a few hours they were intoxicated with each other. They parted, he promised to ring her, and didn’t. Savagely disappointed, Elizabeth moved away, met a young man and embarked on a passionless, sequestered marriage that produced two children. Fourteen years later she meets Thomas again, on the way to Rome, and they embark on an affair. He introduces her to Caravaggio and the city’s secrets; he is generous and high-handed, he throws away her dreary underwear and encourages her to leave her dreary marriage; she prevaricates . . . It’s not fair to give away more; suffice to say Elizabeth loses one of the most attractive men one is likely to encounter in a novel.
Vickers offers tea and pads off to the kitchen. “I adore Thomas,” I say, through the open door. “Oh good,” she says , “so do I. He is the other side of me — like Jung, I believe in contrasexual identity.”
Thomas feels welcome in the world, she says. “This is a rare gift. Neither David nor Elizabeth has it.” Is feeling loved as a child essential for this feeling? “Oh, yes, but some people absorb love better than others from the start.
“The effects of an unhappy beginning are various,” explains Vickers, “shame, rage, anxiety, inhibition, insecurity, self doubt, a propensity for self harm. But there is one common factor: a fundamental mistrust, an insidious feeling that the world is not a place where you are welcome or can be at home.”
So Elizabeth loses Thomas because she was so used to feeling unvalued that she couldn’t trust herself to believe that he loved her?
“Yes. The key is that she didn’t feel valued until she spoke to David about Thomas and realised the truth. The truth sets people free.”
When David was a child his adored older brother was killed trying to protect him from being run over and David has always felt blamed by their parents. He, too, has a loveless marriage but has covered up the emptiness with the alibi of a rich professional life. Still, he admits to fantasies about letting the car veer off the road. So he, too, has a kind of death wish?
“Yes, it’s a kind of reluctance to be here,” she says. “Many people have it. I do myself.” She quotes David’s colleague Gus: “ ‘There is no cure for being alive.’ It’s probably why I wrote this book, my personal motive.”
The afternoon is fading; Vickers is sitting in a pool of lamplight, her slender legs tucked under her. Why does she have this “reluctance”? She puts her hands to her head: “I don't know if I can explain it. It’s not that I’m suicidal, just conscious that life is often quite difficult.” In what way?
“Oh, close personal relationships, the competing demands of loving people. I don’t look forward to old age and decrepitude but quite look forward to death itself. It’ll be a nice rest!” She laughs unselfconsciously. She laughs a lot. What makes her happiest? “Being with my children and my baby granddaughter. Friends, dancing. I love dancing.”
She once said that she disliked the cult of personality, that the books were the thing and had nothing to do with her life or the people in it. I don’t understand how she can claim that; she doesn’t live in a bubble.
“No but my characters are not based on anyone. They get built from inside me. I am scrupulous about places though — like Rome, or the Dewdrop Inn.” This is the roadhouse where David is overcome with misery and weeps into his bacon and eggs. As a psychoanalyst, she must have seen more blokes in tears than most.
“Oh yes, lots. I’m very sympathetic to men finding it hard to express emotion. They feel criticised by women for not being able to.” But women go on too much. Men’s restraint is very moving. She agrees. “I love David. He is the one I miss.”
The doctor does a good job: Elizabeth is redeemed and he is also healed in the process. “I think that all good analysts and therapists are seriously wounded,” says Vickers says. “You decipher others’ pain as a diversion from your own.”
Brought up by communist parents, Vickers was fascinated by religion, as all children are by forbidden fruit. “Nature, art, love are all portholes to religious experience,” she says. “Very often it is the coincidence of the person and a painting or a work of nature and the time. Or of two people, like Elizabeth and Thomas. Congruence; moments of recognition, they create a third reality: that is what the other side of you is meaning really.”
She has drawn her title from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land:
Who is the third who always walks beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you . . .
— But who is that on the other side of you?
Now, abruptly, the intimate afternoon in the flat with its warm, autumnal colours and shelves of books has come to an end: Vickers must to the opera, I to something less glamorous. She gives me a sheaf of postcards of the frontispiece, of her book, a detail from Caravaggio’s The Death of the Virgin. Mary Magdalene is sitting by the deathbed, doubled over with grief, pressing a fistful of white sleeve to her face; light falls on her neck and the folds of her red dress. “A difficult repentance,” is how Thomas described it to Elizabeth. Later, examining it in the taxi, I am moved to tears. The painting is in the Louvre and I resolve to go and see it. “Congruence" Vickers might call it.
