At Last (14 page)

‘The last time I saw her, I got stuck behind a cedar tree for twenty minutes,’ Patrick explained to Johnny, as they walked into a pale blue room with high French windows overlooking a placid communal garden. ‘When I saw her coming, I dashed behind a tree while they took over the bench I’d been sitting on.’

‘Serves you right for abandoning your depression buddy,’ said Johnny.

‘I was having an epiphany.’

‘Oh, well…’

‘It all seems so far away.’

‘The epiphany or the Priory?’

‘Both,’ said Patrick, ‘or at least they did until that woman turned up.’

‘Maybe insight comes when you need to get out of the madhouse. The loony downstairs might be a catalyst.’

‘Anything might be a catalyst,’ said Patrick. ‘Anything might be evidence, anything might be a clue. We can never afford to relax our vigilance.’

‘Fortunately we can help with that,’ Johnny slipped again into his American doctor’s voice, ‘thanks to Vigilante. Fought over by fighter pilots, presiding over presidents, terrifying terrorists, the busy-ness behind the business of America.
Vigilante: “Keeping Our Leaders on the Job Around the Clock.”
’ Johnny’s voice switched to a rapid murmur. ‘Do not take Vigilante if you are suffering from high blood pressure, low blood pressure, or normal blood pressure. Consult your physician if you experience chest pains, swollen eyelids, elongated ears…’

Patrick tuned out of the disclaimer and looked around at the almost empty room. Nancy was already deep in a plate of sandwiches at the far end of a long table loaded with too much food for the small party of mourners. Henry was standing next to her, talking to Robert. Behind the table was an exceptionally pretty waitress, with a long neck and high cheekbones and short black hair. She gave Patrick a friendly open smile. She must be an aspiring actress between auditions. She was absurdly attractive. He wanted to leave with her straight away. Why did she seem so irresistible? Did the table of almost untouched food make her seem generous as well as lovely? What was the proper approach on such an occasion? My mother just died and I need cheering up? My mother never gave me enough to eat but you look as if you could do much better? Patrick let out a short bark of private laughter at the absurdity of these tyrannical impulses, the depth of his dependency, the fantasy of being saved, the fantasy of being nourished. There was just too much past weighing down on his attention, taking it below the waterline, flooding him with primitive, pre-verbal urges. He imagined himself shaking off his unconscious, like a dog just out of the sea. He walked over to the table, asked for a glass of sparkling water and gave the waitress a simple smile with no future. He thanked her and turned away crisply. There was something hollow about the performance; he still found her utterly adorable, but he saw the attraction for what it was: his own hunger, with no interpersonal implications whatsoever.

He was reminded of Jill from his Depression Group, who had complained one day that she had ‘a relationship problem – well, the problem is that the person I have a relationship with doesn’t know that we have a relationship’. This confession had elicited peals of derisive laughter from Terry.

‘No wonder you’re in treatment for the ninth time,’ said Terry.

Jill hurried from the room, sobbing.

‘You’re going to have to apologize for that,’ said Gordon.

‘But I meant it.’

‘That’s why you have to apologize.’

‘But I wouldn’t mean it if I apologized,’ Terry argued.

‘Fake it to make it, man,’ said Gary, the American whose opportunistic tourist of a mother had created such a flurry during Patrick’s first Group session.

Patrick wondered if he was faking it to make it – a phrase that had always filled him with disgust – by turning away so resolutely from a woman he would rather have seduced? No, it was the seduction that would have been faking it, the Casanova complex that would have forced him to disguise his infantile yearnings with the appearance of adult behaviour: courtesy, conversation, copulation, commentary; elaborate devices for distancing him from the impotent baby whose screams he could not bear to hear. The glory of his mother’s death was that she could no longer get in the way of his own maternal instincts with her presumptive maternal presence and stop him from embracing the inconsolable wreck that she had given birth to.

As the room began to fill, Patrick was drawn out of his private thoughts and back into his role as host. Nicholas walked past him with haughty indifference to join Nancy at the far end of the room. Mary came over with the Amitriptyline woman in tow, followed closely by Thomas and Erasmus.

‘Patrick,’ said Mary, ‘you should meet Fleur, she’s an old friend of your mother’s.’

Patrick shook hands with her politely, marvelling at her whimsical French name. Now that she had taken off her overcoat he could see the green sweater and tweed skirt he recognized from the Priory. Bright red lipstick in the shape of a mouth shadowed Fleur’s own mouth, about half an inch to the right, giving the impression of a circus clown caught in the middle of removing her make-up.

‘How did you know…’ Patrick began.

‘Dada!’ said Thomas, too excited not to interrupt. ‘Erasmus is a real philosopher!’

‘Or at any rate a realist philosopher,’ said Erasmus.

‘I know, darling,’ said Patrick, ruffling his son’s hair. Thomas hadn’t seen Erasmus for a year and a half, and clearly the category of philosopher had come into focus during that time.

‘I mean,’ said Thomas, looking very philosophical, ‘I always think the trouble with God is: who created God? And,’ he added, getting into the swing of it, ‘who created whoever created God?’

‘Ah, an infinite regress,’ said Erasmus sadly.

‘Okay, then,’ said Thomas, ‘who created infinite regress?’ He looked up at his father to check that he was arguing philosophically.

Patrick gave him an encouraging smile.

‘He’s frightfully clever, isn’t he?’ said Fleur. ‘Unlike my lot: they could hardly string a sentence together until they were well into their teens, and then it was only to insult me – and their father, who deserved it of course. Absolute monsters.’

Mary slipped away with Thomas and Erasmus, leaving Patrick stranded with Fleur.

‘That’s teenagers for you,’ said Patrick, with resolute blandness. ‘So, how did you know Eleanor?’

‘I adored your mother. I think she was one of the very few good people I ever met. She saved my life really – I suppose it must have been thirty years ago – by giving me a job in one of the charity shops she used to run for the Save the Children Fund.’

‘I remember those shops,’ said Patrick, noticing that Fleur was gathering momentum and didn’t want to be interrupted.

‘I was thought by some people,’ Fleur motored on, ‘well, by everyone except your mother really, to be unemployable, because of my episodes, but I simply had to get out of the house and
do
something, so your mother was an absolute godsend. She had me packing up second-hand clothes in no time. We used to send them off to the shop we thought they’d do best in, keeping the really good ones for our shop in Launceston Place, just round the corner from your house.’

‘Yes,’ said Patrick quickly.

‘We used to have such fun,’ Fleur reminisced, ‘we were like a couple of schoolgirls, holding up the clothes and saying, “Richmond, I think,” or “
Very
Cheltenham.” Sometimes we’d both shout, “Rochdale!” or, “Hemel Hempstead!” at exactly the same time. Oh, how we laughed. Eventually your mother trusted me enough to put me on the till and let me run the shop for the whole day, and that, I’m afraid, is when I had one of my episodes. We had a fur coat in that morning – it was the time when people started to get paint thrown at them if they wore one – an amazing sable coat – I think that’s what tipped me over the edge. I was gripped by a need to do something really glamorous, so I shut up the shop and took all the money from the till and put on the sable coat – it wasn’t very suitable at the height of June, but I had to wear it. Anyway, I went out and hailed a cab and said, “Take me to the Ritz!”’

Patrick looked around the room anxiously, wondering if he would ever get away.

‘They tried to take my coat off me,’ Fleur accelerated, ‘but I wouldn’t hear of it, and so I sat in the Palm Court in a heap of sable, drinking champagne cocktails and talking to anyone who would listen, until a frightfully pompous head waiter asked me to leave because I was being “a nuisance to the other guests”! Can you imagine the rudeness of it? Well, anyway, the money I’d taken from the till turned out not to be enough for the enormous bill and so the wretched hotel insisted on keeping the coat, which turned out to be very inconvenient because the lady who had given it to us came back and said she’d changed her mind…’

By now Fleur was falling over herself to keep up with her thoughts. Patrick tried to catch Mary’s eye, but she seemed to be deliberately ignoring him.

‘All I can say is that your mother was absolutely marvellous. She went and paid the bill and rescued the coat. She said she was used to it because she was always clearing her father’s bar bills in grand places, and she didn’t mind at all. She was an absolute saint and let me go on running the shop when she was away, saying that she was sure I wouldn’t do it again – which I’m afraid to say I did, more than once.’

‘Would you like a drink?’ asked Patrick, turning back towards the waitress with renewed longing. Perhaps he should run away with her after all. He wanted to kiss the pulse in her long neck.

‘I shouldn’t really but I’ll have a gin and tonic,’ said Fleur, hardly pausing before she continued. ‘You must be very proud of your mother. She did an enormous amount of practical good, the only sort of good there
is
really – touched on hundreds of lives, threw herself into those shops with tremendous energy – I firmly believe she could have been an entrepreneur, if she had needed the money – the way she used to set off to the Harrogate Trade Fair with a spring in her step.’

Patrick smiled at the waitress and then looked down at the tablecloth bashfully. When he looked up again she was smiling at him with sympathy and laughter in her eyes. She clearly understood everything. She was wonderfully intelligent as well as impossibly lovely. The more Fleur talked about Eleanor, the more he wanted to start a new life with the waitress. He took the gin and tonic from her tenderly and handed it on to the loquacious Fleur, who seemed to be saying, ‘Well, do you?’ for reasons he couldn’t fathom.

‘Do I what?’ he asked.

‘Feel proud of your mother?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Patrick.

‘What do you mean, you “suppose so”? You’re worse than my children. Absolute monsters.’

‘Listen, it’s been a great pleasure to meet you,’ said Patrick, ‘and I expect we’ll talk again, but I probably ought to circulate.’

He moved away from Fleur unceremoniously and, wanting to look as if he had a firm intention, walked towards Julia, who stood alone by the window drinking a glass of white wine.

‘Help!’ said Patrick.

‘Oh, hi,’ said Julia, ‘I was just staring out of the window vacantly, but not so vacantly that I didn’t see you flirting with that pretty waitress.’

‘Flirting? I didn’t say a word.’

‘You didn’t have to, darling. A dog doesn’t have to say a word when it sits next to us in the dining room making little whimpering sounds while strings of saliva dangle down to the carpet; we still know what it wants.’

‘I admit that I was vaguely attracted to her, but it was only after that grey-haired lunatic started talking to me that she began to look like the last overhanging tree before the roar of the rapids.’

‘How poetic. You’re still trying to be saved.’

‘Not at all; I’m trying not to want to be saved.’

‘Progress.’

‘Relentless forward motion,’ said Patrick.

‘So who is this lunatic who forced you to flirt with the waitress?’

‘Oh, she used to work in my mother’s charity shop years ago. Her experience of Eleanor was so different from mine, it made me realize that I’m not in charge of the meaning of my mother’s life, and that I’m deluded to think that I can come to some magisterial conclusion about it.’

‘Surely you could come to some conclusion about what it means to you.’

‘I’m not even sure if that’s true,’ said Patrick. ‘I’ve been noticing today how inconclusive I feel about both my parents. There isn’t any final truth; it’s more like being able to get off on different floors of the same building.’

‘It sounds awfully tiring,’ Julia complained. ‘Wouldn’t it be simpler to just loathe their guts?’

Patrick burst out laughing.

‘I used to think that I was detached about my father. I thought that detachment was the great virtue, without the moral condescension built into forgiveness, but the truth is that I feel everything: contempt, rage, pity, terror, tenderness, and detachment.’

‘Tenderness?’

‘At the thought of how unhappy he was. When I had sons of my own and felt the strength of my instinct to protect them, I was freshly shocked that he had deliberately inflicted harm on his son, and then the hatred returned.’

‘So you’ve pretty much abandoned detachment.’

‘On the contrary, I just recognize how many things there are to be detached about. The incandescent hatred and the pure terror don’t invalidate the detachment, they give it a chance to expand.’

‘The StairMasters of detachment,’ said Julia.

‘Exactly.’

‘I wonder if I’m allowed to smoke out here,’ said Julia, opening the French windows and stepping outside. Patrick followed her onto the narrow balcony and sat on the edge of the white stucco balustrade. As she took out her packet of Camel Blue, his eyes traced the elegant profile he had often studied from a neighbouring pillow, now set against the restrained promise of the still-leafless trees. He watched Julia kiss the filter of her cigarette and suck the swaying flame of her lighter into the tightly packed tobacco. After the first immense drag, smoke flowed over her upper lip, only to be drawn back through her nose into her expanding lungs and eventually released, at first in a single thick stream and then in the little puffs and misshapen rings and drifting walls formed by her smoky words.

‘So, have you been working out especially hard on your Inner StairMaster today?’

‘I’ve felt a strange mixture of elation and free-fall. There’s something cool and objective about death compared to the savage privacy of dying which my mother’s illness forced me to imagine over the last four years. In a sense I can think about her clearly for the first time, away from the vortex of an empathy that was neither compassionate nor salutary, but a kind of understudy to her own horror.’

‘Wouldn’t it be even better not to think about her at all?’ said Julia with a second languorous gulp of cigarette smoke.

‘No, not today,’ said Patrick, suddenly repelled by Julia’s enamelled surface.

‘Oh, of course, not today – of all days,’ said Julia, sensing his defection. ‘I just meant eventually.’

‘The people who tell us to “get over it” and “get on with it” are the least able to have the direct experience that they berate navel-gazers for avoiding,’ said Patrick, in the prosecuting style he adopted when defending himself. ‘The “it” they’re “getting on with” is a ghostly re-enactment of unreflecting habits. Not thinking about something is the surest way to remain under its influence.’

‘It’s a fair cop, guv,’ said Julia, disconcerted by Patrick’s sincerity.

‘What would it mean to be spontaneous, to have an unconditioned response to things – to anything? Neither of us is in a position to know, but I don’t want to die without finding out.’

‘Hmm,’ said Julia, clearly not tempted by Patrick’s obscure project.

‘Excuse me,’ said a voice behind them.

Patrick looked round and saw the beautiful waitress. He had forgotten that he was in love with her, but now it all came back to him.

‘Oh, hi,’ he said.

She scarcely acknowledged him, but kept her eyes fixed on Julia.

‘I’m sorry but you’re not allowed to smoke out here,’ she said.

‘Oh, dear,’ said Julia, taking a drag on her cigarette, ‘I didn’t know. It’s funny, because it is outside.’

‘Well, technically it’s still part of the club and you can’t smoke anywhere in the club.’

‘I understand,’ said Julia, continuing to smoke. ‘Well, I’d better put it out then.’ She took another long suck on her almost finished cigarette, dropped it on the balcony and ground it underfoot before stepping back indoors.

Patrick waited for the waitress to look at him with complicity and amusement, but she returned to her post behind the long table without glancing in his direction.

The waitress was useless. Julia was useless. Eleanor was useless. Even Mary in the end was useless and would not prevent him from returning to his bedsit alone and without any consolation whatever.

It was not the women who were at fault; it was his omnipotent delusion: the idea that they were there to be useful to him in the first place. He must make sure to remember that the next time one of the pointless bitches let him down. Patrick let out another bark of laughter. He was feeling a little bit mad. Casanova, the misogynist; Casanova, the hungry baby. The inadequacy at the rotten heart of exaggeration. He watched a modest veil of self-disgust settle on the subject of his relations with women, trying to prevent him from going deeper. Self-disgust was the easy way out, he must cut through it and allow himself to be unconsoled. He looked forward to the austere demands of that word, like a cool drink after the dry oasis of consolation. Back in his bedsit unconsoled, he could hardly wait.

It was getting cold on the balcony and Patrick wanted to get back indoors, but he was prevented by his reluctance to join Kettle and Mary, who were standing just the other side of the French windows.

‘I see that you and Thomas are still practically glued to each other,’ said Kettle, casting an envious glance at her grandson draped comfortably around his mother’s neck.

‘Nobody can hope to ignore their children as completely as you did,’ sighed Mary.

‘What do you mean? We always…communicated.’

‘Communicated! Do you remember what you said to me when you telephoned me at school to tell me that Daddy had died?’

‘How awful it all was, I suppose.’

‘I couldn’t speak I was so upset, and you told me to
cheer up.
To
cheer up
! You never had any idea who I was and you still don’t.’