At Last (4 page)

As he lay sweating in that narrow room, thinking about Victor’s need to decide what everything meant, Patrick wondered if he could ever make his ego light enough to relax in not having to settle the meaning of things. What would that feel like?

In the meantime, the Suicide Observation Room lived up to its majestic name. In it, he saw that suicide had always formed the unquestioned backdrop to his existence. Even before he had taken to carrying around a copy of
The Myth of Sisyphus
in his overcoat pocket, making its first sentence the mantra of his early twenties, Patrick had greeted the day with the basic question, ‘Can anyone think of a good reason not to kill himself?’ Since he lived at the time in a theatrical solitude, crowded with mad and mocking voices, he was not likely to get an affirmative answer. Elaborate postponement was the best he could hope for, and in the end the obligation to talk proved stronger than the desire to die. During the next twenty years the suicidal chatter died down to an occasional whisper on a coastal path, or in a quiet chemist. When it returned in full force, it took the form of a grim monologue rather than a surreal chorus. The comparative simplicity of the most recent assault made him realize that he had only ever been superficially in love with easeful death and was much more deeply enthralled by his own personality. Suicide wore the mask of self-rejection; but in reality nobody took their personality more seriously than the person who was planning to kill himself on its instructions. Nobody was more determined to stay in charge at any cost, to force the most mysterious aspect of life into their own imperious schedule.

His month in the Priory had been a crucial period of his life, transforming the crisis that had led to the breakdown of his marriage and the escalation of his drinking. It was disquieting to think how close he had come to running away after only three days, lured by Becky’s departure. Before leaving, she had found him in the lounge of the Depression Wing.

‘I was looking for you. I’m not meant to speak to anyone,’ she said in a mock whisper, ‘because I’m a bad influence.’

She gave him a little folded note and a light kiss on the lips before hurrying out of the room.

The note reminded him of the jagged CRAZYs he used to doodle in the margins of his O-level chemistry notes after smoking a joint during the morning break at school. It was out of the question to visit her, he told himself, as he called a minicab service listed in the payphone booth under the back stairs. Was this what they meant by powerless?

‘Just don’t!’ he muttered, closing the door of his minicab firmly to show how determined he was not to pursue a bloodstained festival of dysfunction. He gave the driver the address on Becky’s note.

‘Well, you must be all right if they let you out,’ said the jaunty driver.

‘I let myself out. I couldn’t afford it.’

‘Bit pricey, is it?’

Patrick didn’t answer, glazed over with desire and conflict.

‘Have you heard the one about the man who goes into the psychiatrist’s office?’ asked the driver, setting off down the drive and smiling in the rear-view mirror. ‘He says, “It’s been terrible, Doctor, for three years I thought I was a butterfly, and that’s not all, it gets worse: for the last three months I thought I was a moth.” “Good God,” says the psychiatrist, “what a difficult time you’ve been having. So, what made you come here today and ask for help?” “Well,” says the man, “I saw the light in the window and I felt drawn to it, so I just flew in.”’

‘That’s a good one,’ said Patrick, sinking deeper into Becky’s imagined nakedness, while wondering how long his latest dose of oxazepam would last. ‘Do you specialize in Priory patients because of your sunny temperament?’

‘You say that,’ said the driver, ‘but last year for about four months I literally couldn’t get out of bed, literally couldn’t see the point in anything.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Patrick.

From Hammersmith Broadway to the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, they talked about the causeless weeping, the suicidal daydreams, the excruciating slowness, the sleepless nights and the listless days. By the time they reached Bayswater, they were best friends and the driver turned round to Patrick and said with the full blast of his restored cheerfulness, ‘In a few months you’ll be looking back on what you’ve just been through and saying, “
What
was all that about? What was all that fuss and aggravation about?” That’s what happened to me.’

Patrick looked back down at Becky’s note. She had signed herself with the name of a beer. Becks. He started to whisper hoarsely under his breath, in a Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone voice, ‘The one who comes to you and asks for a meeting, and has the same name as a well-known brand of beer –
she’s
the one that wants you to have a relapse…’

Not the voices, he mustn’t let them kick off. ‘It starts off with a little Marlon Brando impersonation,’ sighed Mrs Mop, ‘and the next thing you know…’

‘Shut up!’ Patrick interrupted.

‘What?’

‘Oh, not you. I’m sorry.’

They turned into a big square with a central garden. The driver drew up to a white stucco building. Patrick leant sideways and looked out of the window. Becky was on the third floor, beautiful, available and mentally ill.

To think of the things he’d done for a little intimacy; earth flying over his shoulder as he dug his own grave. There were the good women who gave him the care he had never had. They had to be tortured into letting him down, to show that they couldn’t really be trusted. And then there were the bad women who saved time by being untrustworthy straight away. He generally alternated between these two broad categories, enchanted by some variant which briefly masked the futility of defending the decaying fortress of his personality, while hoping that it would obligingly rearrange itself into a temple of peace and fulfilment. Hoping and moping, moping and hoping. With only a little detachment, his love life looked like a child’s wind-up toy made to march again and again over the precipice of a kitchen table. Romance was where love was most under threat, not where it was likely to achieve its highest expression. If a candidate was sufficiently hopeless, like Becky, she took on the magnetism of the obviously doomed. It was embarrassing to be so deluded, and even more embarrassing to react to the delusion, like a man running away from his own looming shadow.

‘I know this sounds a little bit
crazy
, for want of a better word,’ said Patrick with a snort of laughter, ‘but do you think you could drive me back? I’m not ready yet.’

‘Back to the Priory?’ said the driver, no longer quite as sympathetic to his passenger.

He doesn’t want to know about those of us who have to go back, thought Patrick. He closed his eyes and stretched out in the back seat. ‘Talk would talk and go so far askance…something, something…You don’t want madhouse and the whole thing there.’ The whole thing there. The wonderful inarticulacy of it, expanding with threat and contracting with ostensive urgency.

On the drive back, Patrick started to feel chest pains which even the violence of his longing for pathological romance could no longer explain. His hands were shaking and he could feel the sweat breaking out on his forehead. By the time he reached Dr Pagazzi’s office, he was hallucinating mildly and apparently trapped in a two-dimensional space with no depth, like an insect crawling around a window pane, looking for a way out. Dr Pagazzi scolded him for missing his four o’clock dose of oxazepam, saying that he might have a heart attack if he withdrew too fast. Patrick lifted the dull plastic tub in his shaking hand and knocked back three oxazepam.

The next day he ‘shared’ his near escape with the Depression Group. It turned out that all of them had nearly run away, or had run away and come back, or thought about running away much of the time. Some, on the other hand, dreaded leaving, but they only seemed superficially opposite to the ones who wanted to run away: everyone was obsessed with how much therapy they needed before they could begin a ‘normal life’. Patrick was surprised by how grateful he felt for the sense of solidarity with the other patients. A lifelong habit of being set apart was briefly overturned by a wave of goodwill towards everyone in the group.

Johnny Hall had taken an unassuming seat near the back of the room. Patrick worked his way round the far end of the pew to join his old friend.

‘How are you bearing up?’ said Johnny.

‘Pretty well,’ said Patrick, sitting down next to him. ‘I have a strange feeling of excitement which I wouldn’t admit to anyone except you and Mary. I felt rather knocked out for the first few days, but then I had what I think your profession would call an “insight”. I went to the funeral parlour yesterday evening and sat with Eleanor’s body. I connected…I’ll tell you later.’

Johnny smiled encouragingly. ‘Christ,’ he said, after a pause, ‘Nicholas Pratt. I didn’t expect to see him.’

‘Neither did I. You’re so lucky to have an ethical reason not to talk to him.’

‘Doesn’t everybody?’

‘Quite.’

‘I’ll see you afterwards at the Onslow,’ said Johnny, leaving Patrick to the usher who had come up to him and was standing by expectantly.

‘We can start whenever you’re ready, sir,’ said the usher, somehow hinting at the queue of corpses that would pile up unless the ceremony got going right away.

Patrick scanned the room. There were a few dozen people sitting in the pews facing Eleanor’s coffin.

‘Fine,’ he said, ‘let’s begin in ten minutes.’

‘Ten minutes?’ said the usher, like a young child who has been told he can do something really exciting when he’s twenty-one.

‘Yes, there are still people arriving,’ said Patrick, noticing Julia standing in the doorway, a spiky effusion of black against the dull morning: black veil, black hat, stiff black silk dress and, he imagined, softer black silk beneath. He immediately felt the impact of her mentality, that intense but exclusive sensitivity. She was like a spider’s web, trembling at the slightest touch, but indifferent to the light that made its threads shine in the wet grass.

‘You’re just in time,’ said Patrick, kissing Julia through her scratchy black veil.

‘You mean late as usual.’

‘No; just in time. We’re about to kick off, if that’s the phrase I’m looking for.’

‘It’s not,’ she said, with that short husky laugh that always got to him.

The last time they had seen each other was in the French hotel where their affair had ended. Despite their communicating rooms, they could think of nothing to say to each other. Sitting through long meals, under the vault of an artificial sky, painted with faint clouds and garlands of tumbling roses, they stared at a flight of steps that led down to the slapping keels of a private harbour, ropes creaking against bollards, bollards rusting into stone quays; everything longing to leave.

‘Now that you’re not with Mary, you don’t need me. I was…structural.’

‘Exactly.’

The single word was perhaps too bare and could only be outstripped by silence. She had stood up and walked away without further comment. A gull launched itself from the soiled balustrade and clapped its way out to sea with a piercing cry. He had wanted to call her back, but the impulse died in the thick carpet lengthening between them.

Looking at him now, the freshly bereaved son, Julia decided she felt utterly detached from Patrick, apart from wanting him to find her irresistible.

‘I haven’t seen you for such a long time,’ said Patrick, looking down at Julia’s lips, red under the black net of her veil. He remained inconveniently attracted to almost all the women he had ever been to bed with, even when he had a strong aversion to a revival on all other grounds.

‘A year and a half,’ said Julia. ‘Is it true that you’ve given up drinking? It must be hard just now.’

‘Not at all: a crisis demands a hero. The ambush comes when things are going well, or so I’m told.’

‘If you can’t speak personally about things going well, they haven’t changed that much.’

‘They have changed, but my speech patterns may take a while to catch up.’

‘I can’t wait.’

‘If there’s an opportunity for irony…’

‘You’ll take it.’

‘It’s the hardest addiction of all,’ said Patrick. ‘Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, that deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.’

‘Don’t!’ said Julia, ‘I’m having enough trouble wearing nicotine patches and still smoking at the same time. Don’t take away my irony,’ she pleaded, clasping him histrionically, ‘leave me with a little sarcasm.’

‘Sarcasm doesn’t count. It only means one thing: contempt.’

‘You always were a quality freak,’ said Julia. ‘Some of us like sarcasm.’

Julia noticed that she was playing with Patrick. She felt a small tug of nostalgia, but reminded herself sternly that she was well rid of him. Besides, she had Gunther now, a charming German banker who spent the middle of the week in London. It was true that he was married, as Patrick had been, but in every other way he was the opposite: slick, fit, rich and disciplined. He had opera tickets, and bookings in caviar bars and membership of nightclubs, organized by his personal assistant. Sometimes he threw caution to the winds and put on his ironed jeans and his zip-up suede jacket and took her to jazz clubs in unusual parts of town, always, of course, with a big, reassuring, silent car waiting outside to take them back to Hays Mews, just behind Berkeley Square, where Gunther, like all his friends, was having a swimming pool put into the subbasement of his triple mews house lateral conversion. He collected hideous contemporary art with the haphazard credulity of a man who has friends in the art world. There were artistic black-and-white photographs of women’s nipples in his dressing room. He made Julia feel sophisticated, but he didn’t make her want to play. The thought simply didn’t enter her head when she was with Gunther. He had never struggled to give up irony. He knew, of course, that it existed and he pursued it doggedly with all the silliness at his command.