At Last (12 page)

The car was turning into Queensbury Place, next to the Lycée Français de Londres, where Patrick had spent a year of bilingual delinquency when he was seven years old. At the prize-giving ceremony in the Royal Albert Hall, there was a copy of
La Chèvre de Monsieur Seguin
on his red plush seat. He soon became obsessed with the story of the doomed and heroic little goat, lured into the high mountains by the riot of Alpine flowers (‘Je me languis, je me languis, je veux aller à la montagne’). Monsieur Seguin, who has already lost six goats to the wolf, is determined not to lose another and locks the hero in the woodshed, but the little goat climbs out through the window and escapes, spending a day of ecstasy on slopes dotted with red and blue and yellow and orange flowers. Then, as the sun begins to set, he suddenly notices among the lengthening shadows the silhouette of the lean and hungry wolf, sitting complacently in the tall grass, contemplating his prey. Knowing he is going to die, the goat nevertheless determines to fight until the dawn (‘pourvu que je tienne jusqu’à l’aube’), lowers his head and charges at the wolf’s chest. He fights all night, charging again and again, until finally, as the sun rises over the grey crags of the mountain opposite, he collapses on the ground and is destroyed. This story never failed to move Patrick to tears as he read it every night in his bedroom in Victoria Road.

That was it! Last night’s strange dream: a hooded figure striding among a herd of goats, pulling their heads back and slitting their throats. Patrick had been one of the goats on the outer edge of the herd and with a sense of doom and defiance worthy of his childhood hero he reached up and tore out his own larynx so as not to give the assassin the satisfaction of hearing him scream. Here was another form of violent silence. If only he had time to work it all out. If only he could be alone, this knot of impressions and connections would untangle at his feet. His psyche was on the move; things that had wanted to be hidden now wanted to be revealed. Wallace Stevens was right: ‘Freedom is like a man who kills himself / Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife / Grows sharp in blood.’ He was longing for the splendours of silence and solitude, but instead he was going to a party.

Johnny turned into Onslow Gardens and sped along the suddenly empty stretch of street.

‘Here we are,’ he said, slowing down to look for a parking space close to the club.

Kettle had explained to Mary her principled stand against attending Eleanor’s funeral.

‘It would be sheer hypocrisy,’ she told her daughter. ‘I despise disinheritance, and I think it’s wrong to go to someone’s funeral boiling with rage. The party’s a different matter: it’s about supporting you and Patrick. I’m not pretending it doesn’t help that it’s just round the corner.’

‘In that case you could look after the boys,’ said Mary. ‘We feel exactly the same way about their coming to the cremation as you feel about going. Robert disconnected from Eleanor years ago and Thomas never really knew her, but we still want them to come to the party, to mark the occasion for them in a lighter way.’

‘Oh, well, of course, I’d be delighted to help,’ said Kettle, immediately determined to get her revenge for being burdened with an even more troublesome responsibility than the one she had been trying to evade.

As soon as Mary had dropped the boys off at her flat, Kettle got to work on Robert.

‘Personally,’ she said, ‘I can’t ever forgive your
other
grandmother for giving away your lovely house in France. You must miss it terribly; not being able to go there in the holidays. It was really more of a home than London, I suppose, being in the countryside and all that.’

Robert looked rather more upset than she had intended.

‘How can you say that? That’s a horrible thing to say,’ said Robert.

‘I was just trying to be sympathetic,’ said Kettle.

Robert walked out of the kitchen and went to sit alone in the drawing room. He hated Kettle for making him think that he should still have Saint-Nazaire. He didn’t cry about missing it any more, but he still remembered every detail. They could take away the place but they couldn’t take away the images in his mind. Robert closed his eyes and thought about walking back home late one evening with his father through the Butterfly Wood in a high wind. The sound of creaking branches and calling birds was torn away and dissolved among the hissing pines. When they came out of the wood it was nearly night, but he could still make out the gleaming vine shoots snaking through the ploughed earth, and he saw his first shooting star incinerated on the edge of the clear black sky.

Kettle was right: it was more of a home than London. It was his first home and there could only ever be one, but he held it now in his imagination and it was even more beautiful than ever. He didn’t want to go back and he didn’t want to have it back, because it would be such a disappointment.

Robert had started to cry when Kettle came briskly into the drawing room with Thomas behind her.

‘I asked Amparo to get a film for you. If you’ve got over your tantrum you could watch it with Thomas; she says her grandchildren absolutely love it.’

‘Look, Bobby,’ said Thomas, running over to show Robert the DVD case, ‘it’s a flying carpet.’

Robert was furious at the injustice of the word ‘tantrum’, but he quite wanted to see the film.

‘We’re not allowed to watch films in the morning,’ he said.

‘Well,’ said Kettle, ‘you’ll just have to tell your father you were playing Scrabble, or something frightfully intellectual that he would approve of.’

‘But it’s not true,’ said Thomas, ‘because we’re going to see the film.’

‘Oh, dear, I can’t get anything right, can I?’ said Kettle. ‘You’ll be pleased to hear that silly old Granny is going out for a while. If you can face the treat I’ve gone to the trouble of organizing, just tell Amparo and she’ll put it on for you. If not, there’s a copy of the
Telegraph
in the kitchen – I’m sure you can get the crossword puzzle done by the time I’m back.’

With this triumphant sarcasm, Kettle left her flat, a martyr to her spoilt and oversensitive grandsons. She was going to the Pâtisserie Valerie to have coffee with the widow of our former ambassador to Rome. If the truth be told, Natasha was a frightful bore, always going on about what James would have said, and what James would have thought, as if that mattered any more. Still, it was important to stay in touch with old friends.

Transport by Ford limousine was all part of the Bunyon’s Bronze Service package that Mary had selected for the funeral. Neither the four vintage Rolls-Royces of the Platinum Service, nor the four plumed black horses and glass-sided carriage of the High Victorian Service, offered any serious competition. There was room for three other people in the Ford limo. Nancy had been Mary’s first dutiful choice but Nicholas Pratt had a car and driver of his own and had already offered Nancy a lift. In the end, Mary shared the car with Julia, Patrick’s ex-lover; Erasmus, her own ex-lover; and Annette, Seamus’s ex-lover. Nobody spoke until the car was turning, at a mournful pace, onto the main road.

‘I hate bereavement,’ said Julia, looking at the mirror in her small powder compact, ‘it ruins your eyeliner.’

‘Were you fond of Eleanor?’ asked Mary, knowing that Julia had never bothered with her.

‘Oh, it’s nothing to do with her,’ said Julia, as if stating the obvious. ‘You know the way that tears spring on you, in a silly film, or at a funeral, or when you read something in the paper: not really brought on by the thing that triggers them, but from accumulated grief, I suppose, and life just being so generally maddening.’

‘Of course,’ said Mary, ‘but sometimes the trigger and the grief are connected.’

She turned away, trying to distance herself from the routine frivolity of Julia’s line on bereavement. She glimpsed the pink flowers of a magnolia protesting against the black-and-white half-timbered facade of a mock-Tudor side street. Why was the driver going by Kew Bridge? Was it considered more dignified to take the longer route?

‘I didn’t put on my eyeliner this morning,’ said Erasmus, with the studied facetiousness of an academic.

‘You can borrow mine if you like,’ said Annette, joining in.

‘Thank you for what you said about Eleanor,’ said Mary, turning to Annette with a smile.

‘I only hope I was able to do justice to a very special lady,’ said Annette.

‘God yes,’ said Julia, reapplying her eyeliner meticulously. ‘I do wish this car would stop moving.’

‘She was certainly someone who wanted to be good,’ said Mary, ‘and that’s rare enough.’

‘Ah, intentionality,’ said Erasmus, as if he were pointing out a famous waterfall that had just become visible through the car window.

‘Paving the road to Hell,’ said Julia, moving on to the other eye with her greasy black pencil.

‘Aquinas says that love is “desiring another’s good”,’ Erasmus began.

‘Just desiring another is good enough for me,’ interrupted Julia. ‘Of course one doesn’t want them to be run over or gunned down in the street – or not often, anyway. It seems to me that Aquinas is just stating the obvious. Everything is rooted in desire.’

‘Except conformity, convention, compulsion, hidden motivation, necessity, confusion, perversion, principle.’ Erasmus smiled sadly at the wealth of alternatives.

‘But they just create other kinds of desire.’

‘If you pack every meaning into a single word, you deprive it of any meaning at all,’ said Erasmus.

‘Well, even if you think Aquinas is a complete genius for saying that,’ said Julia, ‘I don’t see how “desiring another’s good” is the same as desiring others to think you’re a goody-goody.’

‘Eleanor didn’t just want to be good, she was good,’ said Annette. ‘She wasn’t just a dreamer like so many visionaries, she was a builder and a mover and shaker who made a practical difference to lots of lives.’

‘She certainly made a practical difference to Patrick’s life,’ said Julia, snapping her compact closed.

Mary was driven mad by Julia’s presumption that she was more loyal than anyone to Patrick’s interests. Her fidelity to his infidelity was an act of aggression towards Mary that Julia wouldn’t have allowed herself without Erasmus’s presence and Patrick’s absence. Mary decided to keep a cold silence. They were already in Hammersmith and she was easily furious enough to last until Chelsea.

When Nancy invited Henry to join her in Nicholas’s car, he pointed out that he had a car of his own.

‘Tell him to follow us,’ said Nicholas.

And so Henry’s empty car followed Nicholas’s full car from the crematorium to the club.

‘One knows so many more dead people than living ones,’ said Nicholas, relaxing into an abundance of padded black leather while electronically reclining the passenger seat towards Nancy’s knees so as to lecture his guests from a more convenient angle, ‘although, in terms of sheer numbers, all the people who have ever existed cannot equal the verminous multitude currently clutching at the surface of our once beautiful planet.’

‘That’s one of the problems with reincarnation: who is being reincarnated if there are more people now than the sum of the people who have ever existed?’ said Henry. ‘It doesn’t make any sense.’

‘It only makes sense if lumps of raw humanity are raining down on us for their first round of civilization. That, I’m afraid, is all too plausible,’ said Nicholas, arching his eyebrow at his driver and giving a warning glance to Henry. ‘It’s your first time here, isn’t it, Miguel?’

‘Yes, Sir Nicholas,’ said Miguel, with the merry laugh of a man who is used to being exotically insulted by his employer several times a day.

‘It’s no use telling you that you were Queen Cleopatra in a previous lifetime, is it?’

‘No, Sir Nicholas,’ said Miguel, unable to control his mirth.

‘What I don’t understand about reincarnation is why we all forget,’ complained Nancy. ‘Wouldn’t it have been be more fun, when we first met, to have said, “How are you? I haven’t seen you since that perfectly ghastly party Marie-Antoinette gave in the Petit Trianon!” Something like that, something fun. I mean, if it’s true, reincarnation is like having Alzheimer’s on a huge scale, with each lifetime as our little moment of vivid anxiety. I know that my sister believed in it, but by the time I wanted to ask her about why we forget, she
really
did have Alzheimer’s, and so it would have been tactless, if you know what I’m saying.’

‘Rebirth is just a sentimental rumour imported from the vegetable kingdom,’ said Nicholas wisely. ‘We’re all impressed by the resurgence of the spring, but the tree never died.’

‘You can get reborn in your own lifetime,’ said Henry quietly. ‘Die to something and go into a new phase.’

‘Spare me the spring,’ said Nicholas. ‘Ever since I was a little boy, I’ve been in the high summer of being me, and I intend to go on chasing butterflies through the tall grass until the abrupt and painless end. On the other hand, I do see that some people, like Miguel, for instance, are crying out for a complete overhaul.’

Miguel chuckled and shook his head in disbelief.

‘Oh, Miguel, isn’t he awful?’ said Nancy.

‘Yes, madam.’

‘You’re not supposed to agree with her, you moron,’ said Nicholas.

‘I thought Eleanor was a Christian,’ said Henry, who disliked Nicholas’s servant-baiting. ‘Where does all this Eastern stuff come from?’

‘Oh, she was just generally religious,’ said Nancy.

‘Most people who are Christian at least have the merit of not being Hindu or Sufi,’ said Nicholas, ‘just as Sufis have the merit of not being Christian, but religiously speaking, Eleanor was like one of those amazing cocktails that make you wonder what motorway collision could have first combined gin, brandy, tomato juice, crème de menthe, and Cointreau into a single drink.’

‘Well, she was always a nice kid,’ said Henry stoutly, ‘always concerned about other people.’

‘That can be a good thing,’ admitted Nicholas, ‘depending on who the other people are, of course.’

Nancy rolled her eyeballs slightly at her cousin in the back seat. She felt that families should be allowed to say horrible things to each other, but that outsiders should be more careful. Henry looked longingly back at his empty car. Even Nicholas needed to take a rest from himself. As his car sped past the Cromwell Hospital everyone fell silent by mutual consent and Nicholas closed his eyes, gathering his resources for the social ordeal that lay ahead.

After the film, Thomas sat on a cushion and pretended to be riding his own flying carpet. First of all he visited his mother and father, who were at his grandmother’s funeral. He had seen photographs of his dead grandmother that made him think he could remember her, but then his mother had told him that he last saw her when he was two and she was living in France and so he realized that he had made up the memory from the photograph. Unless in fact he had a very dim memory of her and the photograph had blown on the tiny little ember of his connection with his granny, like a faint orange glow in a heap of soft grey ash, and for a moment he really could remember when he had sat on his granny’s lap and smiled at her and patted her wrinkly old face – his mother said he smiled at her and she was really pleased.

The flying carpet shot on to Baghdad, where Thomas jumped off and kicked the evil sorcerer Jafar over the parapet and into the moat. The princess was so grateful that she gave him a pet leopard, a turban with a ruby in the middle, and a lamp with a very powerful and funny genie living in it. The genie was just expanding into the air above him when Thomas heard the front door opening and Kettle greeting Amparo in the hall.

‘Have the boys been good?’

‘Oh, yes, they love the film, just like my granddaughters.’

‘Well, at least I’ve got that right,’ sighed Kettle. ‘We must hurry; I have a cab waiting outside. I was so exhausted by my friend’s complaining that I had to hail a taxi the moment I got out of the patisserie.’

‘Oh, dear, I’m so sorry,’ said Amparo.

‘It can’t be helped,’ said Kettle stoically.

Kettle found Thomas cross-legged on a cushion next to the big low table in the middle of the drawing room and Robert stretched on the sofa staring at the ceiling.

‘I’m riding on a flying carpet,’ said Thomas.

‘In that case, you won’t need the silly old taxi I’ve got for us to go to the party.’

‘No,’ said Thomas serenely, ‘I’ll find my own way.’