At Last (11 page)

Nicholas had started to feel that special sense of claustrophobia he associated with being trapped in chapel at school. Wave after wave of Christian sentiment without even the consolation of an overdue Latin translation tucked furtively in his hymnal. He cheered himself up with his own version of the Christian story: God sent his only begotten son to Earth in order to save the poor, and it was a complete washout, like all half-baked socialist projects; but then the Supreme Being came to his senses and sent Nicholas to save the rich, and it came to pass that it was an absolute
succès fou
.’ No doubt with its deplorable history of torture, Inquisition, religious wars, crushing dogma, as well as its altogether more forgivable history of sexual impropriety and worldly self-indulgence, the Roman Catholic Church would look on this crucial development as a heresy; but a heresy was only the prelude to a new Protestant religious order. ‘Nicholism’ would sweep through what his ghastly American investment adviser called the ‘high-net-worth community’. The great question, as always, was what to wear. As the Arch Plutocrat of the Church for the Redemption of Latter-Day Riches one had to cut a dash. Nicholas’s imagination wandered back to the page’s outfit he had worn as a ten-year-old boy at a very grand royal wedding – the silk breeches, the silver buttons, the buckled shoes…he had never felt quite as sure of his own importance since that day.

Johnny renewed his efforts at intonation for the final stanza.

Complete rubbish, thought Nicholas, to imply that one returned to the place from which one came. How could it be the same after one’s immensely colourful contribution, and how could one’s attitude to it be the same after passing through this Vale of Invitations and Sardonic Laughter? He glanced down at the order of service. It looked as if that poem by Vaughan was the last reading. At the bottom of the page there was a note inviting everyone to join the family at the Onslow Club for a drink after the ceremony. He would love to get out of it, but in a moment of reckless generosity he had promised Nancy that he would accompany her. He also had a four o’clock appointment to visit a dying friend at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and so it was in fact conveniently nearby. Thank goodness he had booked a car for the day; with distances of that kind (about six hundred yards) one always had to put up with the ill temper of cab drivers who were drifting around the Fulham Road dreaming of a fare to Gatwick or Penzance. He must keep a firm hold on his car; otherwise Nancy would commandeer it for her own purposes. He could easily totter out of the hospital, suffering from the ‘compassion burn-out’ he knew sometimes afflicted the most heroic nurses, only to find that his car was in Berkeley Square where Nancy was trying to bamboozle a Morgan Guaranty employee into giving her some cash. Her cousin Henry, who had unexpectedly turned up today, had once told him that when he and Nancy were children she had been known as ‘the Kleptomaniac’. Little things used to disappear – special hairbrushes, childish jewellery, cherished piggy banks – and turn up in the magpie’s nest of Nancy’s bedroom. Parents and nannies explained, pedantically at first and then with growing anger, that stealing was wrong, but the temptation was too strong for Nancy and she was expelled from a series of boarding schools for theft and lying. Ever since Nicholas had known her, she had been locked into a state of covetousness, a sense of how much better she would have used, and how much more she deserved, the fabulous possessions belonging to her friends and family. She resisted envying things which belonged to people she didn’t know at all, but only to distance herself from her maid, who filled the kitchen with prurient babble about the lives of soap-opera stars. Her recounting of their commonplace ‘tragedies’ was used to soothe what had been excited by earlier stories of unmerited rewards and ludicrous lifestyles.

Celebrities were all very well for the masses, but what counted for Nicholas was what he called ‘the big world’, namely the minuscule number of people whose background, looks, or talent to amuse made them worth having to dinner. Nancy belonged to the big world by birth and could not be exiled from that paradise by her perfectly ghastly personality. One had to be loyal to something, and since it offered more scope for treachery than anything except politics, Nicholas was loyal to the big world.

He watched Patrick with a predator’s vigilance, hoping for a sign that the ceremony was finally over. Suddenly, the sound system swelled back to life with the brassy opening strains of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’.

Here we go again, thought Nicholas, off to the bloody moon. Frank Sinatra’s voice, oozing with effortless confidence, drove him to distraction. It reminded him of the kind of fun he had not been having in the fifties and sixties. No doubt Eleanor had imagined she was enjoying herself when she lowered the record needle onto a Frank Sinatra single, whizzing round at a giddy forty-five rpm, its discarded sleeve, among the lipstick-smeared glasses of gin and the overflowing ashtrays, displaying a photograph of that sly undistinguished face grinning from the upper reaches of a sky-blue suit.

He continued to stare at Patrick and Mary in the hope that they would leave. Then he saw, to his horror, that it was not Eleanor’s son but her coffin that was on the move, sliding forward on steel rollers towards a pair of purple velvet curtains.

The coffin receded behind the closing curtains and disappeared. Mary got up at last and led the way down the aisle, followed closely by Patrick.

Finding himself unexpectedly agitated by the sight of Eleanor’s coffin being mechanically swallowed, Nicholas lurched hastily into the aisle, interposing himself between Mary and Patrick. He hobbled forwards, his walking stick reaching eagerly ahead of him, and burst through the doorway into the chill London spring.

Patrick stepped into the pallid light, relieved that his mother’s funeral was over, but oppressed by the party that still lay ahead. He walked up to Mary and Johnny who stood under the barely blossoming branches of a cherry tree.

‘I don’t feel like talking to anyone for a while – except you, of course,’ he added politely.

‘You don’t have to talk to us either,’ said Johnny.

‘Perfect,’ said Patrick.

‘Why don’t you go ahead with Johnny?’ asked Mary.

‘Well, if that’s all right. Can you…’

‘Cope with everything,’ suggested Mary.

‘Exactly.’

They smiled at each other, amused by how typical they were both being.

As Patrick walked to Johnny’s car, a plane roared and whistled overhead. He glanced back at the Italianate building he had just left. The campanile encasing the furnace chimney, the low arches of the brick cloister, the dormant rose garden, the weeping willow and the mossy benches, formed a masterpiece of decent neutrality.

‘I think I’ll get cremated here myself,’ said Patrick.

‘No need to rush,’ said Johnny.

‘I was going to wait until I died.’

‘Good thinking.’

A second plane screeched above them, goading the two men into the muffled interior of the car. Through the railings, beside the Thames, joggers and cyclists bobbed along, determined to stay alive.

‘I think my mother’s death is the best thing to happen to me since…well, since my father’s death,’ said Patrick.

‘It can’t be quite that simple,’ said Johnny, ‘or there would be merry bands of orphans skipping down the street.’

The two men fell silent. Patrick was not in the mood to banter. He felt the presence of a new vitality that could easily be nullified by habit, including the habit of seeming to be clever. Like everyone else, he lived in a world where the same patterns of emotion were projected again and again against the walls of an airless chamber, but just for the moment, he felt the absurdity of mistaking that flickering scene for life. What was the meaning of a feeling he had had forty years ago, let alone one he had refused to have? The crisis was not in the past but in clinging to the past; trapped in a decaying mansion on Sunset Boulevard, forced to watch home movies by a wounded narcissist. Just for the moment he could imagine tiptoeing away from Gloria Swanson, past her terrifying butler, and out into the roar of the contemporary streets; he could imagine the whole system breaking down, without knowing what would happen if it did.

At the little roundabout beyond the crematorium gates, Patrick saw a sign for the Townmead Road Re-Use and Recycling Centre. He couldn’t help wondering if Eleanor was being recycled. Poor Eleanor was already muddled enough without being dragged through the dull lights and the dazzling lights and multicoloured mandalas of the Bardo, being challenged by crowds of wrathful deities and hungry ghosts to achieve the transcendence she had run away from while she was alive.

The road ran beside the hedge-filled railings of the Mortlake Cemetery, past the Hammersmith and Fulham Cemetery, across Chiswick bridge, and down to the Chiswick Cemetery on the other side. Acre upon acre of gravestones mocking the real-estate ambitions of riverside developers. Why should death, of all nothings, take up so much space? Better to burn in the hollow blue air than claim a plot on that sunless beach, packed side by side in the bony ground, relying on the clutching roots of trees and flowers for a vague resurrection. Perhaps those who had known good mothering were drawn to the Earth’s absorbing womb, while the abandoned and betrayed longed to be dispersed into the heartless sky. Johnny might have a professional view. Repression was a different kind of burial, preserving trauma in the unconscious, like a statue buried in the desert sand, its sharp features protected from the weather of ordinary experience. Johnny might have views on that as well, but Patrick preferred to remain in silence. What was the unconscious anyway, as against any other form of memory, and why was it given the sovereignty of a definite article, turning it into a thing and a place when the rest of memory was a faculty and a process?

The car climbed the narrow, battered flyover that straddled the Hogarth roundabout. A temporary measure that just wouldn’t go away, it had been crying out for replacement ever since Patrick could remember. Perhaps it was the transport equivalent of smoking: never quite the right day to give it up – there’s going to be a rush hour tomorrow morning…the weekend is coming up…let’s do this thing after the Olympics…2020 is a lovely round number, a perfect time for a fresh start.

‘This dodgy flyover,’ said Patrick.

‘I know,’ said Johnny, ‘I always think it’s going to collapse.’

He hadn’t meant to talk. An inner monologue had broken the surface. Better sink back down, better make a fresh start.

Making a fresh start was a stale start. There was nothing to make and nothing to start, just a continuous breaking out of appearances from potential appearances, like speech from an inner monologue. To be on an equal plane with that articulation: that was freshness. He could feel it in his body, as if in every moment he might cease to be, or continue to be, and that by continuing he was renewed.

‘I was just thinking about repression,’ said Patrick, ‘I don’t think that trauma does get repressed, do you?’

‘I think that’s now the right view,’ said Johnny. ‘Trauma is too strong and intrusive to be forgotten. It leads to disassociation and splitting off.’

‘So, what does get repressed?’ asked Patrick.

‘Whatever challenges the accommodations of the false self.’

‘So there’s still plenty of work for it to do.’

‘Tons,’ said Johnny.

‘But there could be no repression at all, no secret burial; just life radiating through us.’

‘Theoretically,’ said Johnny.

Patrick saw the familiar concrete facade and aquarium-blue windows of the Cromwell Hospital.

‘I remember spending a month in there with a slipped disc, just after my father died.’

‘And I remember bringing you some extra painkillers.’

‘I salute its ambitious wine list and its action-packed Arabic television channels,’ said Patrick, waving majestically at the post-brutalist masterpiece.

The traffic flowed smoothly across the Gloucester Road and down towards the Natural History Museum. Patrick reminded himself to keep quiet. All his life, or at least since he could talk, he had been tempted to flood difficult situations with words. When Eleanor lost the power to speak and Thomas had not yet acquired it, Patrick discovered a core of inarticulacy in himself that refused to be flooded with words, and which he had tried to flood with alcohol instead. In silence he might see what it was he kept trying to obliterate with talk and drink. What was it that couldn’t be said? He could only grope for clues in the darkness of the pre-verbal realm.

His body was a graveyard of buried emotion; its symptoms were clustered around the same fundamental terror, like that rash of cemeteries they had just passed, clustered around the Thames. The nervous bladder, the spastic colon, the lower-back pain, the labile blood pressure that leapt from normal to dangerously high in a few seconds, at the creak of a floorboard or the thought of a thought, and the imperious insomnia that ruled over them, all pointed to an anxiety deep enough to disrupt his instincts and take control of the automatic processes of his body. Behaviours could be changed, attitudes modified, mentalities transformed, but it was hard to have a dialogue with the somatic habits of infancy. How could an infant express himself before he had a self to express, or the words to express what he didn’t yet have? Only the dumb language of injury and illness was abundantly available. There was screaming of course, if it was allowed.

He could remember, when he was three years old, standing beside the swimming pool in France looking at the water with apprehensive longing, wishing he knew how to swim. Suddenly he felt himself being hoisted off the ground and thrown high in the air. With the slowness of horror, when the density of impressions registered by the panic-stricken mind makes time thicken, he used all the incredulity and alarm that rushed into his thrashing body to distance himself from the lethal liquid he had been warned so often not to fall into by accident, but soon enough he plunged down into the drowning pool, kicking and beating the thin water until at last he broke the surface and sucked in some air before he sank back down again. He fought for his life in a chaos of jerks and gulps, sometimes taking in air and sometimes water, until finally he managed to graze his fingers on the rough stone edge of the pool and he gave in to sobbing as quietly as possible, swallowing his despair, knowing that if he made too much noise his father would do something really violent and unkind.

David sat in his dark glasses smoking a cigar, angled away from Patrick, a jaundiced cloud of pastis on the table in front of him, extolling his educational methods to Nicholas Pratt: the stimulation of an instinct to survive; the development of self-sufficiency; an antidote to maternal mollycoddling; in the end, the benefits were so self-evident that only the stupidity and sheepishness of the herd could explain why every three-year-old was not chucked into the deep end of a swimming pool before he knew how to swim.

Robert’s curiosity about his grandfather had prompted Patrick to tell him the story of his first swimming lesson. He felt that it would be too burdensome to tell his son about David’s beatings and sexual assaults, but at the same time wanted to give Robert a glimpse of his grandfather’s harshness. Robert was completely shocked.

‘That’s so horrible,’ he said. ‘I mean a three-year-old would think he was dying. In fact, you could have died,’ he added, giving Patrick a reassuring hug, as if he sensed that the threat was not completely over.

Robert’s empathy overwhelmed Patrick with the reality of what he had taken to be a relatively innocuous anecdote. He could hardly sleep and when he did he was soon woken by his pounding heart. He was hungry all the time but could not digest anything he ate. He could not digest the fact that his father was a man who had wanted to kill him, who would rather have drowned him than taught him to swim, a man who boasted of shooting someone in the head because he had screamed too much, and might shoot Patrick in the head as well, if he made too much noise.

At three of course Patrick would have been able to speak, even if he was forbidden to say what was troubling him. Earlier than that, without the sustenance of narrative, his active memory disintegrated and disappeared. In these darker realms the only clues were lodged in his body, and in one or two stories his mother had told him about his very early life. Here again his father’s intolerance of screaming was pivotal, exiling Patrick and his mother to the freezing attic of the Cornish house during the winter he was born.

He sank a little deeper into the passenger seat. As he recognized that he had gone on expecting to be suffocated or dropped, he felt the suffocation and vertigo of the expectations themselves, and if he asked himself whether infancy was destiny, he felt the suffocation and the vertigo of the question. He could feel the weight of his body and the weight on his body. It was like a restraining wall, buckled and sweating from the pressure of the hillside behind it; the only means of access, and at the same time a ferocious guard against the formless miseries of infancy. This was what Johnny might want to call a pre-Oedipal problem, but whatever name was given to a nameless unease, Patrick felt that his tentative new vitality depended on a preparedness to dig into that body of buried emotion and let it join the flow of contemporary feeling. He must pay more attention to the scant evidence that came his way. A strange and upsetting dream had woken him last night, but now it had slipped away and he couldn’t get it back.

He understood intuitively that his mother’s death was a crisis strong enough to shake his defences. The sudden absence of the woman who had brought him into the world was a fleeting opportunity to bring something slightly new into the world instead. It was important to be realistic: the present was the top layer of the past, not the extravaganza of novelty peddled by people like Seamus and Annette; but even something slightly new could be the layer underneath something slightly newer. He mustn’t miss his chance, or his body would keep him living under its misguided heroic strain, like a Japanese soldier who has never been told the news of surrender and continues to booby-trap his patch of jungle, and prepare for the honour of a self-inflicted death.

Nauseating as it was to upgrade his father’s cruelty to the ‘front of the plane’ in homicidal class, he felt an even greater reluctance to renounce his childhood view of his mother as the co-victim of David’s tempestuous malice. The deeper truth that he had been a toy in the sadomasochistic relationship between his parents was not, until now, something he could bear to contemplate. He clung to the flimsy protection of thinking that his mother was a loving woman who had struggled to satisfy his needs, rather than acknowledging that she had used him as an extension of her lust for humiliation. How self-serving was the story of the freezing attic? It certainly reinforced the picture of Eleanor as a fellow refugee escaping with burns on her back and a baby in her arms from the incendiary bombs of David’s rage and self-destruction. Even when Patrick found the courage to tell her that he had been raped by his father, she had rushed to say, ‘Me too.’ Falling over herself to be a victim, Eleanor seemed indifferent to the impact that her stories might be having at any other level. Suffocated, dropped, born of rape as well as born to be raped – what did it matter, as long as Patrick realized how difficult it had been for her and how far she was from having collaborated with their persecutor. When Patrick asked why she didn’t leave, she had said she was afraid that David would kill her, but since he had already twice tried to kill her when they were living together, it was hard to see how living apart would have made it more likely. The truth, which made his blood pressure shoot up as he admitted it, was that she craved the extreme violence of David’s presence, and that she threw her son into the bargain. Patrick wanted to stop the car and get out and walk; he wanted a shot of whisky, a shot of heroin, a revolver shot in the head – kill the screaming man, get it over with, be in charge. He let these impulses wash over him without paying them too much attention.