At Last (17 page)

‘You mustn’t jump,’ he explained, ‘because the last thing we need is another death on our hands.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of jumping,’ said Erasmus.

‘What were you thinking about?’ asked Robert.

‘Whether doing some good to a lot of people is better than doing a lot of good to a few,’ Erasmus replied.

‘The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one,’ said Robert solemnly, making a strange gesture with his right hand.

Thomas, recognizing the allusion to the Vulcan logic of
Star Trek II
, made the same gesture with his hand.

‘Live long and prosper,’ he said, smiling uncontrollably at the thought of growing pointed ears.

Fleur strode onto the balcony and addressed Erasmus without any trivial preliminaries.

‘Have you tried Amitriptyline?’ she asked.

‘I’ve never heard of him,’ said Erasmus. ‘What’s he written?’

Fleur realized that Erasmus was much more confused than she had originally imagined.

‘You’d better come inside,’ she said coaxingly.

Glancing into the room Erasmus noticed that the majority of the guests had left and assumed that Fleur was hinting tactfully that he should be on his way.

‘Yes, you’re probably right,’ said Erasmus.

Fleur reflected that she had a real talent for dealing with people in extreme mental states and that she should probably be put in charge of the depression wing of a psychiatric hospital, or indeed of a national policy unit.

As he went indoors, Erasmus decided not to get entangled in more incoherent social life, but simply to say goodbye to Mary and then leave immediately. As he leant over to kiss her, he wondered if a person of the predominantly narrative type would desire Mary because he had desired her in the past, and whether he would be imagining that fragment of the past being transported, as it were, in a time machine to the present moment. This fantasy reminded him of Wittgenstein’s seminal remark that ‘nothing is more important in teaching us to understand the concepts we have than constructing fictitious ones’. In his own case, his desire, such as it was, had the character of an inconsequential present-tense fact, like the scent of a flower.

‘Thank you for coming,’ said Mary.

‘Not at all,’ mumbled Erasmus, and after squeezing Mary’s shoulder lightly, he left without saying goodbye to anyone else.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Fleur to Patrick, ‘I’ll follow him at a discreet distance.’

‘You’re his guardian angel,’ said Patrick, struggling to disguise his relief at getting rid of Fleur so easily.

Mary followed Fleur politely onto the landing.

‘I haven’t got time to chat,’ said Fleur, ‘that poor man’s life is in danger.’

Mary knew better than to contradict a woman of Fleur’s strong convictions. ‘Well, it’s been a pleasure to meet such an old friend of Eleanor’s.’

‘I’m sure she’s guiding me,’ said Fleur. ‘I can feel the connection. She was a saint; she’ll show me how to help him.’

‘Oh, good,’ said Mary.

‘God bless you,’ Fleur called out as she set off down the stairs at a cracking pace, determined not to lose track of Erasmus’s suicidal progress through the streets of London.

‘What a woman!’ said Johnny, watching through the doorway as Fleur left. ‘I can’t help feeling that somebody should be following her rather than the other way round.’

‘Count me out,’ said Patrick, ‘I’ve had an overdose of Fleur. It’s a wonder she was ever allowed out of the Priory.’

‘She looks to me as if she’s just at the beginning of a manic episode,’ said Johnny. ‘I imagine she was enjoying it too much and decided not to take her pills.’

‘Well, let’s hope she changes her mind before she “saves” Erasmus,’ said Patrick. ‘He might not survive if she rugby tackles him on a bridge, or leaps on him while he’s trying to cross the road.’

‘God!’ said Mary, laughing with relief and amazement. ‘I wasn’t sure she was ever going to leave. I hope Erasmus made it round the corner before she got outside.’

‘I’m going to have to leave myself,’ said Johnny. ‘I’ve got a patient at four o’clock.’

He said goodbye to everyone, kissing Mary, hugging the boys, and promising to call Patrick later.

Suddenly the family was alone, apart from the waitress, who was clearing up the glasses and putting the unopened bottles back into a cardboard box in the corner.

Patrick felt a familiar combination of intimacy and desolation, being together and knowing they were about to part.

‘Are you coming back with us?’ asked Thomas.

‘No,’ said Patrick, ‘I have to go and work.’

‘Please,’ said Thomas, ‘I want you to tell me a story like you used to.’

‘I’ll see you at the weekend,’ said Patrick.

Robert stood by, knowing more than his brother but not enough to understand.

‘You can come and have dinner with us if you like,’ said Mary.

Patrick wanted to accept and wanted to refuse, wanted to be alone and wanted company, wanted to be close to Mary and to get away from her, wanted the lovely waitress to think that he led an independent life and wanted his children to feel that they were part of a harmonious family.

‘I think I’ll just…crash out,’ he said, buried under the debris of contradictions and doomed to regret any choice he made. ‘It’s been a long day.’

‘Don’t worry if you change your mind,’ said Mary.

‘In fact,’ said Thomas, ‘you should change your mind, because that’s what it’s for!’

As he laboured up to his bedsit, a miniature roof conversion with sloping walls on the fifth floor of a narrow Victorian building in Kensington, Patrick seemed to regress through evolutionary history, growing more stooped with each flight, until he was resting his knuckles on the carpet of the top landing, like an early hominid that has not yet learned to stand upright on the grasslands of Africa and only makes rare and nervous expeditions down from the safety of the trees.

‘Fuck,’ he muttered, as he got his breath back and raised himself to the level of the keyhole.

It was out of the question to invite that adorable waitress back to his hovel, although her telephone number was nestling in his pocket, next to his disturbingly thumping heart. She was too young to have to squeeze herself out from under the corpse of a middle-aged man who had died in the midst of trying to justify her wearisome climb to his inadequate flat. Patrick collapsed onto the bed and embraced a pillow, imagining its tired feathers and yellowing pillowcase transformed into her smooth warm neck. The anxious aphrodisiac of a recent death; the long gallery of substitutes substituting for substitutes; the tantalizing thirst for consolation: it was all so familiar, but he reminded himself grimly that he had come back to his non-home, now that he was alone at last, in order to be unconsoled. This flat, the bachelor pad of a nonbachelor, the student digs of a non-student, was as good a place as he could wish for to practise being unconsoled. The lifelong tension between dependency and independence, between home and adventure, could only be resolved by being at home everywhere, by learning to cast an equal gaze on the raging self-importance of each mood and incident. He had some way to go. He only had to run out of his favourite bath oil to feel like taking a sledgehammer to the bath and begging a doctor for a Valium script.

Nevertheless, he lay on the bed and thought about how determined he was: a Tomahawk whistling through the woods and thudding into its target, a flash of nuclear light dissolving a circle of cloud for miles around. With a groan he rolled slowly off the bed and sank into the black armchair next to the fireplace. Through the window on the other side of the flat he could see slate roofs sloping down the hill, the spinning metal chimney vents glinting in the late-afternoon sun and, in the distance, the trees in Holland Park, their leaves still too tight-fisted to make their branches green. Before he rang the waitress – he took out the note and found that she was called Helene – before he rang Mary, before he went out for a long sedative dinner and tried to read a serious book, under the dim lighting and over the maddening music, before he pretended that he thought it was important to keep up with current affairs and switched on the news, before he rented a violent movie, or jerked off in the bath because he couldn’t face ringing Helene after all, he was going to sit in this chair for a while and show a little respect for the pressures and intimations of the day.

What exactly had he been mourning? Not his mother’s death – that was mainly a relief. Not her life, he had mourned her suffering and frustration years ago when she started her decline into dementia. Nor was it his relationship with her, which he had long regarded as an effect on his personality rather than a transaction with another person. The pressure he had felt today was something like the presence of infancy, something far deeper and more helpless than his murderous relationship with his father. Although his father had been there with his rages and his scalpels, and his mother had been there with her exhaustion and her gin, this experience could not be described as a narrative or a set of relationships, but existed as a deep core of inarticulacy. For a man who had tried to talk his way out of everything he had thought and felt, it was shocking to find that there was something huge that he had failed to mention at all. Perhaps this was what he really had in common with his mother, a core of inarticulacy, magnified in her case by illness, but in his case hidden until he heard the news of her death. It was like a collision in the dark in a strange room; he was groping his way round something he couldn’t remember being there when the lights went out. Mourning was not the word for this experience. He felt frightened but also excited. In the post-parental realm perhaps he could understand his conditioning as a single fact, without any further interest in its genealogy, not because the historical perspective was untrue, but because it had been renounced. Someone else might achieve this kind of truce before their parents died, but his own parents had been such enormous obstructions that he had to be rid of them in the most literal sense before he could imagine his personality becoming the transparent medium he longed for it to be.

The idea of a voluntary life had always struck him as extravagant. Everything was conditioned by what had gone before; even his fanatical desire for some margin of freedom was conditioned by the drastic absence of freedom in his early life. Perhaps only a kind of bastard freedom was available: in the acceptance of the inevitable unfolding of cause and effect there was at least a freedom from delusion. The truth was that he didn’t really know. In any case he had to start by recognizing the degree of his unfreedom, anchored in this inarticulate core that he was now at last embracing, and look on it with a kind of charitable horror. Most of his time had been spent in reaction to his conditioning, leaving little room to respond to the rest of life. What would it be like to react to nothing and respond to everything? He might at least inch in that direction. As he had been trying to tell an unreceptive Julia, he was less persuaded than ever by final judgements or conclusions. He had long suffered from Negative Incapability, the opposite of that famous Keatsian virtue of being in mysteries, uncertainties and doubts without reaching out for facts and explanations – or whatever the exact phrase was – but now he was ready to stay open to questions that could not necessarily be answered, rather than rush to answers that he refused to question. Maybe he could respond to everything only if he experienced the world as a question, and perhaps he continually reacted to it because he thought that its nature was fixed.

The phone on the little table next to him started to ring and Patrick, dragged out of his thoughts, stared at it for a while as if he had never seen one before. He hesitated and then finally picked it up just before his answerphone message cut in.

‘Hello,’ he said wearily.

‘It’s me, Annette.’

‘Oh, hi. How are you? How’s Nicholas?’

‘I’m afraid I’ve got terrible news,’ said Annette. ‘Nicholas didn’t make it. I’m so sorry, Patrick, I know he was an old family friend. He actually stopped breathing in the ambulance. They tried to revive him when we got to the hospital, but they couldn’t get him back. I think all those electrodes and adrenalin are so frightening. When a soul is ready to go, we should let it go gently.’

‘It’s difficult to find a legal formulation for that approach,’ said Patrick. ‘Doctors have to pretend that they think more life is always worth having.’

‘I suppose you’re right, legally,’ sighed Annette. ‘Anyway, it must be overwhelming for you, and on the day of your mother’s funeral.’

‘I hadn’t seen Nicholas for years,’ said Patrick. ‘I suppose I was lucky to get a last glimpse of him when he was on top form.’

‘Oh, he was an amazing man,’ said Annette. ‘I’ve never met anyone quite like him.’

‘He was unique,’ said Patrick, ‘at least I hope so. It would be rather terrifying to find a village full of Nicholas Pratts. Anyhow, Annette,’ Patrick went on, realizing that his tone was not quite right for the occasion, ‘it was very good of you to go with him. He was lucky to be with someone spontaneously kind at the time of his death.’

‘Oh, now you’re making me cry,’ said Annette.

‘And thank you for what you said at the funeral. You reminded me that Eleanor was a good person as well as an imperfect mother. It’s very helpful to see her from other points of view than the one I’ve been trapped in.’

‘You’re welcome. You know that I loved her.’

‘I do. Thank you,’ said Patrick again.

They ended the conversation with the improbable promise to talk soon. Annette was flying back to France the next day and Patrick was certainly not going to call her in Saint-Nazaire. Nevertheless he said goodbye with a strange fondness. Did he really think that Eleanor was a good person? He felt that she had made the question of what it meant to be good central – and for that he was grateful.

Patrick took in the news that Nicholas was dead. He pictured him, back in the sixties, in a Mr Fish shirt, making venomous conversation under the plane trees in Saint-Nazaire. He imagined himself as the little boy he had been at that time, shattered and mad at heart, but with a ferocious heroic persona, which had eventually stopped his father’s abuses with a single determined refusal. He knew that if he was going to understand the chaos that was invading him, he would have to renounce the protection of that fragile hero, just as he had to renounce the illusion of his mother’s protection by acknowledging that his parents had been collaborators as well as antagonists.

Patrick sank deeper into the armchair, wondering how much of all this he could stand. Just how unconsoled was he prepared to be? He covered his stomach with a cushion as if he expected to get hit. He wanted to leave, to drink, to dive out of the window into a pool made of his own blood, to cease to feel anything for ever straight away, but he mastered his panic enough to sit back up and let the cushion drop to the floor.

Perhaps whatever he thought he couldn’t stand was made up partly or entirely of the thought that he couldn’t stand it. He didn’t really know, but he had to find out, and so he opened himself up to the feeling of utter helplessness and incoherence that he supposed he had spent his life trying to avoid, and waited for it to dismember him. What happened was not what he had expected. Instead of feeling the helplessness, he felt the helplessness and compassion for the helplessness at the same time. One followed the other swiftly, just as a hand reaches out instinctively to rub a hit shin, or relieve an aching shoulder. He was after all not an infant, but a man experiencing the chaos of infancy welling up in his conscious mind. As the compassion expanded he saw himself on equal terms with his supposed persecutors, saw his parents, who appeared to be the cause of his suffering, as unhappy children with parents who appeared to be the cause of their suffering: there was no one to blame and everyone to help, and those who appeared to deserve the most blame needed the most help. For a while he stayed level with the pure inevitability of things being as they were, the ground zero of events on which skyscrapers of psychological experience were built, and as he imagined not taking his life so personally, the heavy impenetrable darkness of the inarticulacy turned into a silence that was perfectly transparent, and he saw that there was a margin of freedom, a suspension of reaction, in that clarity.

Patrick slid back down in his chair and sprawled in front of the view. He noticed how his tears cooled as they ran down his cheeks. Washed eyes and a tired and empty feeling. Was that what people meant by peaceful? There must be more to it than that, but he didn’t claim to be an expert. He suddenly wanted to see his children, real children, not the ghosts of their ancestors’ childhoods, real children with a reasonable chance of enjoying their lives. He picked up the phone and dialled Mary’s number. He was going to change his mind. After all, that’s what Thomas said it was for.