At Last (16 page)

‘What’s that?’ said Thomas.

‘It’s a way of getting access to hidden truths about your feelings,’ said Johnny.

‘Like hide and seek?’ said Thomas.

‘Exactly,’ said Johnny, ‘but instead of hiding in cupboards and behind curtains and under beds, this kind of truth hides in symptoms and dreams and habits.’

‘Can we play?’ said Thomas.

‘Can we stop playing?’ said Johnny, more to himself than to Thomas and Robert.

Julia came up and interrupted Johnny’s conversation with the children.

‘Is this the end?’ she said. ‘It’s enough to put one off having a temper tantrum. Oh, God, that religious fanatic is cradling his head. That would definitely finish me off.’

Annette was sitting on her heels next to Nicholas, with her hands cupped around his head, her eyes closed and her lips moving very slightly.

‘Is she praying?’ said Julia, flabbergasted.

‘That’s nice of her,’ said Thomas.

‘They say one should never speak ill of the dead,’ said Julia, ‘and so I’d better get a move on. I’ve always thought that Nicholas Pratt was perfectly ghastly. I’m not a particular friend of Amanda’s, but he seems to have ruined his daughter’s life. Of course you’d know more about that than I do.’

Johnny had no trouble staying silent.

‘Why don’t you stop being so horrible?’ said Robert passionately. ‘He’s an old man who’s really ill and he might hear what you’re saying, and he can’t even answer back.’

‘Yes,’ said Thomas, ‘it’s not fair because he can’t answer back.’

Julia at first seemed more bewildered than annoyed, and when she finally spoke it was with a wounded sigh.

‘Well, you know it’s time to leave a party when the children start to mount a joint attack on your moral character.’

‘Could you say goodbye to Patrick for me?’ she said, kissing Johnny abruptly on both cheeks and ignoring the two boys. ‘I can’t quite face it after what’s happened – to Nicholas, I mean.’

‘I hope we didn’t make her angry,’ said Robert.

‘She made herself angry, because it was easier for her than being upset,’ said Johnny.

Only seconds after her departure, Julia was forced back into the room by the urgent arrival of the waitress, two ambulance men, and an array of equipment.

‘Look!’ said Thomas. ‘An oxygen tank and a stretcher. I wish I could have a go!’

‘He’s over here,’ said the waitress unnecessarily.

Nicholas felt his wrist being lifted. He knew his pulse was being taken. He knew it was too fast, too slow, too weak, too strong, everything wrong. A rip in his heart, a skewer through his chest. He must tell them he was not an organ donor, or they would steal his organs before he was dead. He must stop them! Call Withers! Tell them
to put a stop to it at once
. He couldn’t speak. Not his tongue, they mustn’t take his tongue. Without speech, thoughts plough on like a train without tracks, buckling, crashing, ripping everything apart. A man asks him to open his eyes. He opens his eyes. Show them he’s still compos mentis, compost mentis, recycled parts. No! Not his brain, not his genitals, not his heart, not fit to transplant, still writhing with self in an alien body. They were shining a light in his eyes, no, not his eyes; please don’t take his eyes. So much fear. Without a regiment of words, the barbarians, the burning roofs, the horses’ hooves beating down on fragile skulls. He was not himself any more; he was under the hooves. He could not be helpless; he could not be humiliated; it was too late to become somebody he didn’t know – the intimate horror of it.

‘Don’t worry, Nick, I’ll be with you in the ambulance,’ a voice whispered in his ear.

It was the Irish woman. With him in the ambulance! Gouging his eyes out, fishing around for his kidneys with her nimble fingers, taking a hacksaw out of her spiritual tool box. He wanted to be saved. He wanted his mother; not the one he had actually had, but the real one he had never met. He felt a pair of hands grip his feet and another pair of hands slip around his shoulders. Hung, drawn, and quartered: publicly executed for all his crimes. He deserved it. Lord have mercy on his soul. Lord have mercy.

The two ambulance men looked at each other and on a nod lifted both ends of Nicholas at once and placed him on the stretcher they had spread out beside him.

‘I’m going with him in the ambulance,’ said Annette.

‘Thank you,’ said Patrick. ‘Will you call me from the hospital if there’s any news?’

‘Surely,’ said Annette. ‘Oh, it’s a terrible shock for you,’ she said, giving Patrick an unexpected hug. ‘I’d better go.’

‘Is that woman going with him?’ asked Nancy.

‘Yes, isn’t it kind of her?’

‘But she doesn’t even know him. I’ve known Nicholas forever. First it’s my sister and now it’s practically my oldest friend. It’s too impossible.’

‘Why don’t you follow her?’ said Patrick.

‘There is one thing I could do for him,’ said Nancy, with a hint of indignation, as if it was a bit much to expect her to be the only person to show any real consideration. ‘Miguel, his poor driver, is waiting outside without the least idea of what’s happened. I’ll go and break the news to him, and take the car on to the hospital, so it’s there if Nicholas needs it.’

Nancy could think of at least three places she might stop on the way. The examination was bound to take ages, in fact Nicholas might already be dead, and it would help to take poor Miguel’s mind off the dreadful situation if he drove her around all afternoon. She had no cash for taxis, and her swollen feet were already bulging out of the ruthlessly elegant inside edges of her two-thousand-dollar shoes. People said she was incorrigibly extravagant, but the shoes would have cost two thousand dollars
each
, if she hadn’t bought them parsimoniously in a sale. She had no prospect of getting any cash for the rest of the month, punished by her beastly bankers for her ‘credit history’. Her credit history, as far as she was concerned, was that Mummy had written a lousy will that allowed her evil stepfather to steal all of Nancy’s money. Her heroic response had been to spend as if justice had been done, as if she were restoring the natural order of the world by cheating shopkeepers, landlords, decorators, florists, hairdressers, butchers, jewellers, and garage owners, by withholding tips from coatcheck girls, and by engineering rows with staff so that she could sack them without pay.

On her monthly trip to the Morgan Guaranty – where Mummy had opened an account for her on her twelfth birthday – she collected fifteen thousand dollars in cash. In her reduced circumstances, the walk to Sixty-Ninth Street was a Venus flytrap flushed with colour and shining with adhesive dew. She often arrived home with half her month’s money spent; sometimes she counted out the entire sum and, seeming mystified by the missing two or three thousand, managed to walk away with a pink marble obelisk or a painting of a monkey in a velvet jacket, promising to come back that afternoon, marking another black spot in the complex maze of her debt, another detour on her city walks. She always gave her real telephone number, with one digit changed, her real address, one block uptown or downtown, and an entirely false name – obviously. Sometimes she called herself Edith Jonson, or Mary de Valençay, to remind herself that she had nothing to be ashamed of, that there had been a time when she could have bought a whole city block, never mind a bauble in one of its shops.

By the middle of the month she was invariably flat broke. At that point she fell back on the kindness of her friends. Some had her to stay, some let her add her lunches and her dinners to their tabs at Jimmy’s or Le Jardin, and others simply wrote her a large cheque, reflecting that Nancy had barged to the front of the queue again and that the victims of floods, tsunamis and earthquakes would simply have to wait another year. Sometimes she created a crisis that forced her trustees to release more capital in order to keep her out of prison, driving her income inexorably lower. For Eleanor’s funeral, she was staying with her great friends the Tescos, in their divine apartment in Belgrave Square, a lateral conversion across five buildings on two floors. Harry Tesco had already paid for her air ticket – first class – but she was going to have to break down sobbing in Cynthia’s little sitting room before going to the opera tonight, and tell her the terrible pressure she was under. The Tescos were as rich as God and it really made Nancy quite angry that she had to do anything so humiliating to get more money out of them.

‘You couldn’t drop me off on the way, could you?’ Kettle asked Nancy.

‘It’s Nicholas’s private car, dear, not a limo service,’ said Nancy, appalled by the indecency of the suggestion. ‘It’s really too upsetting when he’s so ill.’

Nancy kissed Patrick and Mary goodbye and hurried away.

‘It’s St Thomas’ Hospital, by the way,’ Patrick called after her. ‘The ambulance man told me it’s the best place for “clot-busters”.’

‘Has he had a stroke?’ asked Nancy.

‘Heart attack, they could tell from the cold nose – the extremities go cold.’

‘Oh, don’t,’ said Nancy, ‘I can’t bear to think about it.’

She set off down the stairs with no time to waste: Cynthia had made her an appointment at the hairdresser’s using the magic words, ‘charge it to me’.

When Nancy had left, Henry offered the aggrieved Kettle a lift. After only a few minutes of complaint about the rudeness of Patrick’s aunt, she accepted, and said goodbye to Mary and the children. Henry promised to call Patrick the next day, and accompanied Kettle downstairs. To their surprise they found Nancy still standing on the pavement outside the club.

‘Oh, Cabbage,’ she said with a wail of childish frustration, ‘Nicholas’s car has gone.’

‘You can come with us,’ said Henry simply.

Kettle and Nancy sat in the back of the car in hostile silence. Up in front Henry told the driver to go to Princes Gate first, then on to St Thomas’ Hospital and finally back to the hotel. Nancy suddenly realized what she had done by accepting a ride. She had forgotten about Nicholas altogether. Now she was going to have to borrow money from Henry to catch a taxi back to the hairdresser’s from some godforsaken hospital in the middle of nowhere. It was enough to make you scream.

Nicholas’s fall, the commotion that followed, the arrival of the ambulance men and the dispersal of some of the guests had all eluded Erasmus’s attention. When Fleur had burst into song in the middle of her conversation with Nicholas, the words ‘re-clothe us in our rightful minds’ sent a little shock through him, like a piercing dog whistle, inaudible to the others but pitched perfectly for his own preoccupations, it recalled him to his true master, insisting that he leave the muddy fields of inter-subjectivity and the intriguing traces of other minds for the cool ledge of the balcony where he might be allowed, for a few moments, to think about thinking. Social life had a tendency to press him up against his basic rejection of the proposition that an individual identity was defined by turning experience into an ever more patterned and coherent story. It was in reflection and not in narrative that he found authenticity. The pressure to render his past in anecdote, or indeed to imagine the future in terms of passionate aspirations, made him feel clumsy and false. He knew that his inability to be excited by the memory of his first day at school, or to project a cumulative and increasingly solid self that wanted to learn the harpsichord, or longed to live in the Chilterns, or hoped to see Christ’s blood streaming in the firmament, made his personality seem unreal to other people, but it was precisely the unreality of the personality that was so clear to him. His authentic self was the attentive witness to a variety of inconstant impressions that could not, in themselves, enhance or detract from his sense of identity.

Not only did he have an ontological problem with the generally unquestioned narrative assumptions of ordinary social life but he also, at this particular party, found himself questioning the ethical assumption, shared by everyone except Annette (and not shared by Annette for reasons that were in themselves problematic), that Eleanor Melrose had been wrong to disinherit her son. Setting aside for a moment the difficulties of judging the usefulness of the Foundation she had endowed, there was an undeniable potential Utilitarian merit to the wider distribution of her resources. Mrs Melrose might at least count on John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham and Peter Singer and R. M. Hare to look sympathetically on her case. If a thousand people, over the years, emerged from the Foundation having discovered, by whatever esoteric means, a sense of purpose that made them into more altruistic and conscientious citizens, would the benefit to society not outweigh the distress caused to a family of four people (with one barely conscious of the loss) who had expected to own a house and turned out not to? In the maelstrom of perspectives could a sound moral judgment be made from any other point of view but that of the strictest impartiality? Whether such a point of view could ever be established was another question to which the answer was almost certainly negative. Nevertheless, even if Utilitarian arithmetic, based on the notion of an unobtainable impartiality, were set aside on the grounds that motivation was desire-based, as Hume had argued, the autonomy of an individual’s preferences for one kind of good over another still offered a strong ethical case for Eleanor’s philanthropic choice.

There had been a widespread sense of relief when Fleur accompanied Nicholas’s stretcher downstairs and appeared to have left the party, but ten minutes later she reappeared resolutely in the doorway. Seeing Erasmus leaning on the balustrade staring pensively down at the gravel path, she immediately expressed her alarm to Patrick.

‘What’s that man doing on the balcony?’ she asked sharply, like a nanny who despairs of leaving the nursery for even a few minutes. ‘Is he going to jump?’

‘I don’t think he was planning to,’ said Patrick, ‘but I’m sure you could persuade him.’

‘The last thing we need is another death on our hands,’ said Fleur.

‘I’ll go and check,’ said Robert.

‘Me too,’ said Thomas, dashing through the French windows.