At Last (5 page)

‘We’d better find a seat,’ said Patrick. ‘I’m not quite sure what’s going on; I haven’t even had time to look at the order of service.’

‘But didn’t you organize it?’

‘No. Mary did.’

‘Sweet!’ said Julia. ‘She’s always so helpful, more like a mother than your own mother really.’

Julia felt her heart rate accelerate; perhaps she had gone too far. She was amazed that her old competition with that paragon of self-sacrifice had suddenly burst out, now that it was so out of date.

‘She was, until she had children of her own,’ said Patrick amiably. ‘That rather blew my cover.’

From fearing that he would take offence, Julia found herself wishing he would stop being so maddeningly calm.

Organ music purred into life.

‘Well, real or not, I have to burn the remains of the only mother I’ll ever have,’ said Patrick, smiling briskly at Julia and setting off down the aisle to the front row where Mary was keeping a seat for him.

Mary sat in the front pew of the crematorium staring at Eleanor’s coffin, mastering a moment of rebellion. Wondering where Patrick was, she had looked back and seen him bantering flirtatiously with Julia. Now that nothing serious depended on her cultivated indifference, she felt a thud of exasperation. Here she was again, being helpful, while Patrick, in one of the more legitimate throes of his perpetual crisis, bestowed his attention on another woman. Not that she wanted more of his attention; all she wanted from Patrick was for him to be a little freer, a little less predictable. To be fair, and she sometimes wished she could stop being so fair, that’s what he wanted as well. She had to remind herself that separation had made them grow closer. No longer hurled together or driven apart by their habitual reactions, they had settled into a relatively stable orbit around the children and around each other.

Her irritation was further blunted when a second backward glance yielded a grave smile from Erasmus Price, her own tiny concession to the consolations of adultery. She had started her affair with him in the South of France, where Patrick had insisted on renting a house during the final disintegration of their marriage, compulsively circling back to the area around his childhood home in Saint-Nazaire. Mary protested against this extravagance in vain; Patrick was in the last phase of his drinking, stumbling around the labyrinth of his unconscious, unavailable for discussion.

The Prices, whose own marriage was falling apart, had sons roughly the same age as Robert and Thomas. Despite these promising symmetries, harmony eluded the two families.

‘Anybody who is amazed that “a week is a long time in politics”,’ said Patrick on the second day, ‘should try having the Prices to stay. It turns out to be a fucking eternity. Do you know how he got his wacky name? His father was in the middle of editing the sixty-five-volume Oxford University Press
Complete Works of Erasmus
when his mother interrupted him with the news that she had given birth to a son. “Let’s call him Erasmus,” he cried, like a man inspired, “or Luther, whose crucial letter to Erasmus I was re-reading only this morning.” Given the choice…’ Patrick subsided.

Mary ignored him, knowing that he was just setting up that day’s pretext for more senseless drinking. After Patrick had passed out and Emily Price had gone to bed, Mary sat up late, listening to Erasmus’s troubles.

‘Some people think that the future belongs to them and that they can lose it,’ he said on the first evening, staring into his wine-dark glass, ‘but I don’t have that sense at all. Even when the work is going well, I wouldn’t mind if I could painlessly and instantly expire.’

Why was she drawn to these gloomy men? As a philosopher, at least Erasmus, like Schopenhauer, could make his pessimism into a world view. He cheered up at the mention of the German philosopher.

‘My favourite remark of his was the advice he gave to a dying friend: “You are ceasing to be something you would have done better never to become.”’

‘That must have helped,’ said Mary.

‘A real nostalgia-buster,’ he whispered admiringly.

According to Erasmus his marriage was irreparable; the puzzle for Mary was that it existed at all. As a guest, Emily Price had three main drawbacks: she was incapable of saying please, incapable of saying thank you, and incapable of saying sorry, all the while creating a surge in the demand for these expressions. When she saw Mary applying sunblock to Thomas’s sharp pale shoulders, she hurried over and scooped the white cream out of Mary’s cupped hand, saying, ‘I can’t see it without wanting to take some.’ By her own account, the same hunger had haunted the birth of her eldest son, ‘The moment I saw him, I thought:
I want another one
.’

Emily complained about Cambridge, she complained about her husband and about her sons, she complained about her house, she complained about France and the sun and the clouds and the leaves and the wind and the bottle tops. She couldn’t stop; she had to bail out the flooding dinghy of her discontent. Sometimes she set false targets with her complaining: Cambridge was hell, London was great, but when Erasmus applied for a job at London University, she made him withdraw. At the time, she had said that he was too cowardly to apply, but on holiday with the Melroses she admitted the truth, ‘I only wanted to move to London so I could complain about the air quality and the schools.’

Patrick was momentarily jolted out of his stupor by the challenge of Emily’s personality.

‘She could be the centrepiece of a Kleinian Conference – “Talk About Bad Breasts”.’ He giggled sweatily on the bed while Mary cultivated patience. ‘She had a difficult start in life,’ he sighed. ‘Her mother wouldn’t let her use the biros in their house, in case they ran out of ink.’ He fell off the bed laughing, knocked his head on the bedside table and had to take a handful of codeine to deal with the bump.

When Mary abandoned tolerance, she did it vehemently. She could feel Emily’s underlying sense of privation like the blast from a furnace, but she somehow made the decision to put aside her characteristic empathy, to stay with the annoying consequences and not to feel the distressing causes of Emily’s behaviour, especially after Erasmus’s clumsy pass, which she hadn’t entirely rejected, on the second evening of their endless conversation about marital failure. For a week, they kept each other afloat with the wreckage from their respective marriages. On their return to England it took them two months to admit the futility of trying to build an affair out of these sodden fragments – just long enough for Mary to struggle loyally through Erasmus’s latest work,
None the Wiser: Developments in the Philosophy of Consciousness.

It was the presence of
None the Wiser
on Mary’s bedside table that alerted Patrick to his wife’s laborious romance.

‘You couldn’t be reading that book unless you were having an affair with the author,’ he guessed through half-closed eyes.

‘Believe me, it’s virtually impossible even then.’

He gave in to the relief of closing his eyes completely, a strange smile on his lips. She realized with vague disgust that he was pleased to have the huge weight of his infidelity alleviated by her trivial contribution to the other side of the scales.

After that, there was what her mother would have called an ‘absolutely maddening’ period, when Patrick only emerged from his new blackout bedsit in order to lecture or interrogate her about consciousness studies, sometimes with the slow sententious precision of drunkenness, sometimes with its visionary fever, all delivered with the specious fluency of a man used to pleading a case in public.

‘The subject of consciousness, in order to enter the realm of science, must become the object of consciousness, and that is precisely what it cannot do, for the eye cannot perceive itself, cannot vault from its socket fast enough to glimpse the lens. The language of experience and the language of experiment hang like oil and water in the same test tube, never mingling except from the violence of philosophy. The violence of philosophy. Would you agree? Whoops. Don’t worry about that lamp, I’ll get you a new one.

‘Seriously, though, where do you stand on microtubules? Micro-tubular bells. Are you For or Against? Do you think that a theory of extended mind can base itself confidently in quantum non-locality? Do you believe that two linked particles conceived in the warm spiralling quantum womb of a microtubule could continue to inform each other as they rush through vast fields of interstellar darkness; still communicating despite the appearance of
icy separation
? Are you For, or Against? And what difference would it make to experience if these particles did continue to resonate with each other, since it is not particles that we experience?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake shut up.’

‘Who will rid us of the Explanatory Gap?’ he shouted, like Henry II requesting an assassin for his troublesome priest. ‘And is that gap just a product of our misconstrued discourse?’ He ploughed on, ‘Is reality a consensual hallucination? And is a nervous breakdown in fact a
refusal to consent
? Go on, don’t be shy, tell me what you think?’

‘Why don’t you go back to your flat and pass out there? I don’t want the children seeing you in this state.’

‘What state? A state of philosophical enquiry? I thought you would approve.’

‘I’ve got to collect the boys. Please go home.’

‘How sweet that you think of it as my home. I’m not in that happy position.’

He would leave, abandoning the consciousness debate for a slamming door. Even ‘fucking bitch’ had a welcome directness after the twisted use he made of abstract phrases like ‘property dualism’ to express his shattered sense of home. She felt less and less guilty about his stormy departures. She dreaded Robert and Thomas asking her about their father’s moods, his glaring silences, his declamatory introversion, the spectacle of his clumsiness and misery. The children in fact saw very little of him. He was ‘away on business’ for the last two months of his drinking and for his month in the Priory. With his unusual talent for mimicry, Robert still managed to impersonate the concerns that Erasmus wrote books about and Patrick used to make veiled attacks on his wife.

‘Where do thoughts come from?’ he muttered, pacing up and down pensively. ‘Before you decide to move your hand where does the decision live?’

‘Honestly, Bobby,’ said Thomas, letting out a short giggle. ‘I expect Brains would know.’

‘Well, Mr Tracy,’ stammered Robert, bobbing up and down on imaginary strings, ‘when you move your hand, your…your brain tells you to move your hand, but what tells your brain to tell your hand?’

‘That’s a real puzzle, Brains,’ said Robert, switching to Mr Tracy’s basso profundo.

‘Weh-well, Mr Tracy,’ he returned to the stammering scientist, ‘I’ve invented a machine that may be able to s-solve that puzzle. It’s called the Thinkatron.’

‘Switch it on, switch it on!’ shouted Thomas, swishing his raggie in the air.

Robert made a loud humming sound that gradually grew more threatening.

‘Oh, no, it’s going to blow up!’ warned Thomas. ‘The Thinkatron is going to blow up!’

Robert flung himself on the floor with the sound of a huge explosion.

‘Gee, Mr Tracy, I guess I must have o-overloaded the primary circuits.’

‘Don’t worry, Brains,’ said Thomas magnanimously, ‘I’m sure you’ll work it out. But seriously,’ he added to Mary, ‘what is the “consciousness debate” that Dada gets so angry about?’

‘Oh, God,’ said Mary, desperate for someone close to her who didn’t want to talk about consciousness. She thought she could put Thomas off by making the subject sound impenetrably learned. ‘It’s really the philosophical and scientific debate about whether the brain and the mind are identical.’

‘Well, of course not,’ said Thomas taking his thumb out of his mouth and rounding his eyes, ‘I mean, the brain is part of the body and the mind is the outer soul.’

‘Quite,’ said Mary, amazed.

‘What I don’t understand,’ said Thomas, ‘is why things exist.’

‘What do you mean? Why there’s something rather than nothing?’

‘Yes.’

‘I have no idea, but it’s probably worth staying surprised by that.’

‘I am surprised by it, Mama. I’m really surprised.’

When she told Erasmus what Thomas had said about the mind being the ‘outer soul’, he didn’t seem as impressed as she had been.

‘It’s rather an old-fashioned view,’ he commented, ‘although the more modern point of view, that the soul is the inner mind, can’t be said to have got us anywhere by simply inverting the relationship between two opaque signifiers.’

‘Right,’ said Mary. ‘Still, don’t you think it’s rather extraordinary for a six-year-old to be so clear about that famously tricky subject?’

‘Children often say things that seem extraordinary to us precisely because the big questions are not yet “famously tricky” for them. Oliver is obsessed with death at the moment and he’s also only six. He can’t bear it, it hasn’t become part of How it Is; it’s still a scandal, a catastrophic design flaw; it ruins everything. We’ve got used to the fact of death – although the experience is irreducibly strange. He hasn’t found the trick of putting a hood on the executioner, of hiding the experience with the fact. He still sees it as pure experience. I found him crying over a dead fly lying on the windowsill. He asked me why things have to die and all I could offer him was tautology: because nothing lasts for ever.’

Erasmus’s need to take a general and theoretical view of every situation sometimes infuriated Mary. All she had wanted was a little compliment for Thomas. Even when she finally told him that she felt there was no point in carrying on with their affair, he accepted her position with insulting equanimity, and then went on to admit that he had ‘recently been toying with the Panpsychist approach’, as if this unveiling of the wild side of his intellect might tempt her to change her mind.

Mary had decided not to take the children to Eleanor’s funeral, but to leave them with her mother. Thomas had no memory of Eleanor and Robert was so steeped in his father’s sense of betrayal that the occasion would be more likely to revive faded hostility than to relieve a natural sense of sadness and loss. They had all been together for the last time about two years before in Kew Gardens, during the bluebell season, soon after Eleanor had come back from Saint-Nazaire to live in England. On their way to the Woodland Walk, Mary pushed Eleanor’s wheelchair through the twisting Rhododendron Dell, hemmed in by walls of outrageous colour. Patrick hung back, gulping down the odd miniature of Johnnie Walker Black Label in moments of feigned fascination with a sprawling pink or orange blossom, while Robert and Thomas explored the gigantic bushes ranged against the slopes on either side. When a golden pheasant emerged onto the path, its saffron-yellow and blood-red feathers shining like enamel, Mary stopped the wheelchair, astonished. The pheasant crossed the hot cinder with the bobbing majesty of an avian gait, the price of a strained talent, like the high head of a swimming dog. Eleanor, crumpled in her seat, wearing old baby-blue flannel trousers and a maroon cardigan with big flat buttons and holes at the elbow, stared at the bird with the alarmed distaste that had taken up residence in her frozen features. Patrick, determined not to talk to his mother, hurried past muttering that he’d ‘better keep an eye on the boys’.