At Last (3 page)

He nodded conspiratorially. She relaxed her grasp and searched the ceiling for the next worry.

Nancy’s instructions, without even a stroke to justify them, would have been the exact opposite. Tell nobody? Tell everybody! Behind the cartoon contrasts of Nancy’s worldliness and Eleanor’s otherworldliness, Nancy’s bulk and Eleanor’s emaciation, there was a common cause, a past that had to be falsified, whether by suppression or selective glorification. What was that? Were Eleanor and Nancy individuals at all, or were they just part of the characteristic debris of their class and family?

Eleanor had taken Patrick to stay with her Aunt Edith in the early 1970s when he was twelve. While the rest of the world was worrying about the OPEC crisis, stagflation, carpet bombing, and whether the crisis, stagflation, carpet bombing and whether the effects of LSD were permanent, eternal or temporary, they found Edith living in a style which made no concession whatsoever to the fifty years since Live Oak had been given to her. The forty black servants made the slaves in
Gone With the Wind
look like extras on a film set. On the evening that Patrick and Eleanor arrived, Moses, one of the footmen, asked if he could be excused in order to go to his brother’s funeral. Edith said no. There were four people at dinner and Moses was needed to serve the hominy grits. Patrick didn’t mind if the servant who brought the quail, or the one who took the vegetables around, served the hominy grits as well, but there was a system in place and Edith was not going to allow it to be disrupted. Moses, in white gloves and a white coat, stepped forward silently, tears pouring down his cheeks, and offered Patrick his first taste of grits. He never knew if he would have liked them.

Later, beside a crackling fire in her bedroom, Eleanor raged against her aunt’s cruelty. The scene over dinner had been too resonant for her; she could never disentangle the taste of the grits from Moses’s tears, or indeed her mother’s perfect taste from her own childhood tears. Eleanor’s sense that her sanity was rooted in the kindness of servants meant that she would always be on Moses’ side. If she had been articulate, this loyalty might have made her political; as it was it made her charitable. Most of all she raged against the way her aunt made her feel as if she were still twelve years old, as she had been when she was a passionate but mute guest at the beginning of the war, staying at Fairley, Bill and Edith’s place on Long Island. His mother was hypnotized by the memory of being Patrick’s age. Her arrested development always rigorously shadowed his efforts to grow up. In his early childhood she had been preoccupied by how much her nanny meant to her, while failing to provide him with a similar paragon of warmth and trustworthiness.

Looking up from his mother’s coffin, Patrick saw that Nancy and Nicholas were planning to approach him again, their instinct for social hierarchy turning a bereaved son into the temporary top dog at his mother’s funeral. He rested a hand on Eleanor’s coffin, forming a secret alliance against misunderstanding.

‘My dear,’ said Nicholas, apparently refreshed by some important news, ‘I hadn’t realized, until Nancy enlightened me, what a serious partygoer your Mama used to be, before she took up her “good works”.’ He seemed to poke the phrase aside with his walking stick, clearing it from his path. ‘To think of shy, religious little Eleanor at the Beistegui Ball! I didn’t know her then, or I would have felt compelled to shield her from that stampede of ravenous harlequins.’ Nicholas moved his free hand artistically through the air. ‘It was a magical occasion, as if the gilded layabouts in one of Watteau’s paintings had been released from their enchanted prison and given an enormous dose of steroids and a fleet of speedboats.’

‘Oh, she wasn’t all that shy, if you know what I’m saying,’ Nancy corrected him. ‘She had any number of beaux. You know your mother could have made a dazzling marriage.’

‘And saved me the trouble of being born.’

‘Oh, don’t be so silly. You would have been born anyway.’

‘Not quite.’

‘When I think,’ said Nicholas, ‘of all the impostors who claim to have been at that legendary party, it’s hard to believe that I knew someone who was there and chose never to mention it. And now it’s too late to congratulate her on her modesty.’ He patted the coffin, as an owner might pat a winning racehorse. ‘Which shows the pointlessness of that particular affectation.’

Nancy spotted a white-haired man in a black pinstriped suit and a black silk tie walking down the aisle.

‘Henry!’ she said, staggering back theatrically. ‘We needed some Jonson reinforcements.’ Nancy loved Henry. He was so rich. It would have been better if the money had been hers, but a close relation having it was the next best thing.

‘How are you, Cabbage?’ she greeted him.

Henry kissed Nancy hello, without looking especially pleased to be addressed as ‘Cabbage’.

‘My God, I didn’t expect to see you,’ said Patrick. He felt a wave of remorse.

‘I didn’t expect to see you either,’ said Henry. ‘Nobody communicates in this family. I’m over here for a few days staying at the Connaught, and when they wheeled in
The Times
with my breakfast this morning, I saw that your mother had died and that there was a ceremony here today. Fortunately, the hotel got me a car straight away and I was able to make it.’

‘I haven’t seen you since you kindly had us to stay on your island,’ said Patrick, deciding to plunge in. ‘I think I was rather a nightmare. I’m sorry about that.’

‘I guess nobody enjoys being unhappy,’ said Henry. ‘It always spills over. But we mustn’t let a few foreign-policy differences get in the way of the really important things.’

‘Absolutely,’ said Patrick, struck by how kind Henry was being. ‘I’m so glad you’ve made it here today. Eleanor was very fond of you.’

‘Well, I loved your mother. As you know, she stayed with us at Fairley for a couple of years at the beginning of the war and so naturally we became very close. She had an innocent quality that was really attractive; it drew you in and at the same time it kept you at a certain distance. It’s hard to explain, but whatever you feel about your mother and this charity she got involved with, I hope you know that she was a good person with the best intentions.’

‘Yes,’ said Patrick, accepting the simplicity of Henry’s affection for a moment, ‘I think “innocent” is exactly the right word.’ He marvelled again at the effect of projection: how hostile Henry had seemed to him when Patrick was hostile towards everyone; how considerate he seemed now that Patrick had no argument with him. What would it be like to stop projecting? Was it possible at all?

As he turned to leave, Henry reached out and touched Patrick’s shoulder.

‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ he said, with a formality that was by then infused with emotion. He nodded to Nancy and Nicholas.

‘Excuse me,’ said Patrick, looking back at the entrance of the crematorium, ‘I have to say hello to Johnny Hall.’

‘Who’s he?’ asked Nancy, sensing obscurity.

‘You may well ask,’ scowled Nicholas. ‘He wouldn’t be anybody at all, if he wasn’t my daughter’s psychoanalyst. As it is, he’s a fiend.’

Patrick walked away from his mother’s coffin, aware that unless he rushed back hysterically, he had stood beside her for the last time. He had seen the cold damp contents of the coffin the night before, when he paid a visit to Bunyon’s funeral parlour. A friendly, blue-suited woman with short white hair had greeted him at the door.

‘Hello, love, I heard a taxi and I thought it was you.’

She guided him downstairs. Pink and brown diamond carpet like the bar of a country house hotel. Discreet advertisements for special services. A framed photograph of a woman kneeling by a black box from which a dove was only too pleased to be set free. Bolting upwards in a blur of white wings. Did it return to the Bunyon’s dovecote and get recycled? Oh, no, not the black box again. ‘We can release a dove for you on the day of your funeral’. Gothic script seemed to warp every letter that passed through the door of the funeral parlour, as if death were a German village. There were stained-glass windows, electrically lit, on the stairs down to the basement.

‘I’ll leave you with her. If there’s anything you need, don’t hesitate. I’ll be upstairs.’

‘Thank you,’ said Patrick, waiting for her to turn the corner before stepping into the Willow Chapel.

He closed the door behind him and glanced hurriedly into the coffin, as though his mother had told him it was rude to stare. Whatever he was looking at, it was not the ‘her’ he had been promised with solemn cosiness a few minutes before. The absence of life in that familiar body, the rigid and rectified features of the face he had known before he even knew his own, made all the difference. Here was a transitional object for the far end of life. Instead of the soft toy or raggie that a child uses to cope with its mother’s absence, he was being offered a corpse, its scrawny fingers clutching an artificial white rose whose stiff silk petals were twisted into position over an unbeating heart. It had the sarcasm of a relic, as well as the prestige of a metonym. It stood for his mother and for her absence with equal authority. In either case, it was her final appearance before she retired into other people’s memory.

He had better take another look, a longer look, a less theoretical look, but how could he concentrate in this disconcerting basement? The Willow Chapel turned out to be under a busy pavement, pierced by the declamatory brightness of mobile-phone talk and tattooed by clicking heels. A rumbling taxi emerged from the general traffic and splashed a puddle onto the paving stones above the far corner of the ceiling. He was reminded of the Tennyson poem he hadn’t thought of for decades, ‘Dead, long dead, / Long dead! / And my heart is a handful of dust, / And the wheels go over my head, / And my bones are shaken with pain, / For in a shallow grave they are thrust, / Only a yard beneath the street, / And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat, / The hoofs of the horses beat, / Beat into my scalp and my brain, / With never an end to the stream of passing feet.’ He could see why Bunyon’s had chosen to call this room the Willow Chapel rather than the Coal Cellar or the Shallow Grave. ‘Hello, love, your Mum’s in the Coal Cellar,’ muttered Patrick. ‘We could release a dove in the Shallow Grave, but it would have no chance whatever of escape.’ He sat down and rocked his torso over his folded arms. His entrails were in torment, as they had been since hearing about his mother’s death three days ago. No need for ten years of psychoanalysis to work out that he felt ‘gutted’. He was doing what he always did under pressure, observing everything, chattering to himself in different voices, circling the unacceptable feelings, in this case conveniently embedded in his mother’s coffin.

She had left the world with screeching slowness, sliding inch by inch into oblivion. At first he could not help enjoying the comparative quiet of her presence, but then he noticed that he was clinging to the urban noises outside in order not to be drawn into the deep pit of silence at the centre of the room. He must take a closer look, but first he really had to turn down the lights that were glaring through chrome grids in the low polystyrene ceiling. They bleached the glow of the four stout candles impaled on brass stands at the corners of the coffin. He dimmed the spotlights and restored some of the ecclesiastical pomposity to the candles. There was one more thing he had to check. A pink velvet curtain partitioned the room; he had to know what was behind it before he could pay attention to his mother. It turned out to hide a storage area packed with equipment: a grey metal trolley with sensible wheels, some no-nonsense rubber tubes and a huge gold crucifix. Everything needed to embalm a Christian. Eleanor had expected to meet Jesus at the end of a tunnel after she died. The poor man was a slave to his fans, waiting to show crowds of eager dead the neon countryside that lay beyond the rebirth canal of earthly annihilation. It must be hard to be chosen as optimism’s master cliché, the Light at the End of the Tunnel, ruling over a glittering army of half-full glasses and silver-lined clouds.

Patrick let the curtain drop reluctantly, acknowledging that he had run out of distractions. He edged towards the coffin, like a man approaching a cliff. At least he knew that this coffin contained his mother’s corpse. Twenty years ago, when he had been to see his father’s remains in New York, he was shown into the wrong room. ‘In loving memory of Hermann Newton’. He had done everything he could to opt out of that bereavement process, but he was not going to evade this one. A cool dry part of his mind was trying to bring his emotions under its aphoristic sway, but the stabbing pain in his guts undermined its ambitions, and confused his defences.

As he stared into the coffin, he felt the encroachment of an agitated animal sadness. He wanted to linger incredulously by the body, still giving it some of the attention it had commanded in life: a shake, a touch, a word, an enquiring gaze. He reached out and put his hand on her chest and felt the shock of its thinness. He leant over and kissed her on the forehead and felt the shock of its coldness. These sharp sensations lowered his defences further, and he was overwhelmed by an expanding rush of sympathy for the ruined human being in front of him. During its fleeting life, this vast sense of tenderness reduced his mother’s personality to a detail, and his relationship with her to a detail within a detail.

He sat down again and leant forward over his crossed legs and folded arms to give himself some faint relief from the pain in his stomach. And then he suddenly made a connection. Of course, how strange – how determined. Aged seven, going on his first trip alone abroad with his mother, a few months after his parents’ divorce. His first flash of Italy: the white number plates, the blue bay, the ochre churches. They were staying at the Excelsior in Naples, on a waterfront buzzing with waspish motorcycles and humming with crowded trams. From the balcony of their magnificent room, his mother pointed to the street urchins crouched on the roofs, or clinging to the backs of the trams. Patrick, who thought they were in Naples on holiday, was alarmed to hear that Eleanor had come there to save these poor children. There was a marvellous man, a priest called Father Tortelli, who never tired of picking up lost Neapolitan boys and giving them shelter in the refuge that Eleanor had been bankrolling from London. She was now going to see it for the first time. Wasn’t it exciting? Wasn’t it a good thing to be doing? She showed Patrick a photograph of Father Tortelli: a small, tough, fifty-year-old man in a black shirt who looked as if he was no stranger to the boxing ring. His bearish arms were locked around the fragile, sharp-boned shoulders of two sun-tanned boys in white vests. Father Tortelli was protecting them from the streets, but who was protecting them from Father Tortelli? Not Eleanor. She was providing him with the means to fill his refuge with ever-growing numbers of orphans and runaways. After lunch that day, Patrick had an attack of violent gastro-enteritis, and instead of leaving him in luxurious neglect while she went to look after the other children, his mother was made to stay with him and hold his hand while he screamed with pain in the green marble bathroom.

No amount of stomach ache could make her stay now. Not that he wanted her to stay, but his body had a memory of its own which it continued to narrate without any reference to his current wishes. What was it that had driven Eleanor to furnish children for her husband and for Father Tortelli, and why was the drive so strong that, after the collapse of her marriage, she immediately replaced a father with a Father, a doctor with a priest? Patrick had no doubt that her motives were unconscious, as unconscious as the somatic memory that had taken him over in the last three days. What could he do but drag these fragments out of the dark and acknowledge them?

After a quiet knock, the door opened and the attendant leant into the room.

‘Just to make sure everything is all right,’ she whispered.

‘Maybe it is,’ said Patrick.

The journey back to his flat had a mildly hallucinatory quality, surging through the rainy night in a fluorescent bus, freshly flooded by so many fierce impressions and remote memories. There were two Jehovah’s Witnesses on board, a black man handing out leaflets and a black woman preaching at the top of her voice. ‘Repent of your sins and take Jesus into your heart, because when you die it will be too late to repent in the grave and you’ll burn in the fires of Hell…’

A red-eyed Irishman in a threadbare tweed jacket started shouting in counterpoint from a back seat. ‘Shut up, you fuckin’ bitch. Go suck Satan’s cock. You’re not allowed to do this, whether you’re Muslim, or Christian, or Satanic.’ When the man with the leaflets headed for the upper deck, he persisted, investing his accent with a sadistic Southern twang, ‘I can see you, Boy. How do you think you’d look with your head under your arm, Boy. If you don’t shut that bitch up, I’ll adjust your face for you, Boy.’

‘Oh, do shut up yourself,’ said an exasperated commuter.

Patrick noticed that his stomach pains had gone. He watched the Irishman sway in his seat, his lips continuing to argue silently with the Jehovah’s Witness, or with some Jesuit from his youth. Give us a boy till the age of seven and we’ll have him for life. Not me, thought Patrick, you won’t have me.

As the bus pushed haltingly towards his destination, he thought about those brief but pivotal nights in the Suicide Observation Room, unpeeling one sweat-soaked T-shirt after another, throwing off the sauna of the bedclothes only to shudder in the freezer of their absence; turning the light on and off, pained by the brightness, alarmed by the dark; a poisonous headache lurching around his skull like the lead in a jumping bean. He had brought nothing to read except
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
, hoping to find its exotic iconography ridiculous enough to purge any fantasies he might still cling to about consciousness continuing after death. As it turned out, he found his imagination seduced by a passage from the introduction to the
Chonyid Bardo
, ‘O nobly born, when thy body and thy mind were separating, thou must have experienced a glimpse of the Pure Truth, subtle, sparkling, bright, dazzling, glorious, and radiantly awesome, in appearance like a mirage moving across a landscape in springtime in one continuous stream of vibrations. Be not daunted thereby, nor terrified, nor awed. That is the radiance of thine own true nature. Recognize it.’

The words had a psychedelic authority that overpowered the materialist annihilation he longed to believe in. He struggled to restore his faith in the finality of death, but couldn’t help seeing it as a superstition among superstitions, no more bracingly rational than the rest. The idea that an afterlife had been invented to reassure people who couldn’t face the finality of death was no more plausible than the idea that the finality of death had been invented to reassure people who couldn’t face the nightmare of endless experience. His delirium tremens collaborated with the poets of the
Bardo
to produce a sensation of seething electrocution as he was goaded towards the abattoir of sleep, terrified that the slaughter of his rational mind would present him with a ‘glimpse of the Pure Truth’.

Memories and phrases loomed and flitted like fog banks on a night road. Thoughts threatened him from a distance, but disappeared as he approached them. ‘Drowned in dreams and burning to be gone’. Who had said that? Other people’s words. Had he already thought ‘other people’s words’? Things seemed far away and then, a moment later, repetitious. Was it like fog, or was it more like hot sand, something he was labouring through and trying not to touch at the same time? Cold and wet, hot and dry. How could it be both? How could it be other than both? Similes of dissimilarities – another phrase that seemed to chase itself like a miniature train around a tight circuit. Please make it stop.

A scene that kept tumbling back into his delirious thoughts was his visit to the philosopher Victor Eisen after Victor’s near-death experience. He had found his old Saint-Nazaire neighbour in the London clinic, still strapped to the machines that had flat-lined a few days earlier. Victor’s withered yellow arms emerged limply from an institutional dressing gown, but as he described what had happened his speech was as rapid and emphatic as ever, saturated by a lifetime of confident opinions.

‘I came to a riverbank and on the other side was a red light which controlled the universe. There were two figures either side of it, who I knew to be the Lord of Time and the Lord of Space. They communicated to me directly through their thoughts, without using any speech. They told me that the fabric of Time-Space was torn and that I had to repair it, that the fate of the universe depended on me. I had a tremendous sense of urgency and purpose and I was on my way to fulfil my task when I felt myself being dragged back into my body and I very reluctantly returned.’

For three weeks Victor was won over by the feeling of authenticity that accompanied his vision, but then the habits of his public atheism and the fear that the logical reductions enshrined in his philosophical work might be invalidated made him squeeze his new sense of openness back into the biological crisis he was suffering at the time. He decided that the pressing mission he had been sent on by the controller of the universe was an allegory of a brain running out of oxygen. His mind had been failing, not expanding.