At Last (6 page)

Eleanor gestured frantically to Mary to come closer and then produced one of her rare whole sentences.

‘I can never forget that he’s David’s son.’

‘I don’t think it’s his father who haunts him these days,’ said Mary, surprised by her own sharpness.

‘Haunts…’ said Eleanor.

Mary was thrusting the wheelchair through the dappled potholes of the Woodland Walk by the time Eleanor was able to speak again.

‘Are…you…all…right?’

She asked the same question again and again, with mounting agitation, ignoring the haze of bluebells, mingled with the yellow stalks of wild garlic, under the shifting and swelling shade of the oaks. She was trying to save Mary from Patrick, not out of any insight into her circumstances, but in order to save herself, by some retroactive magic, from David. Mary’s attempts to give an affirmative answer tormented Eleanor, since the only answer she could accept was: ‘No, I’m not all right! I’m living in hell with a tyrannical madman, just as you did, my poor darling. On the other hand, I sincerely believe that the universe will save us, thanks to the awesome shamanic powers of the wounded healer that you truly are.’

For some reason Mary couldn’t quite bring herself to say this, and yet there was still a troubling sisterhood between the two women. Mary recognized certain features of Eleanor’s upbringing all too easily: the intense shyness, the all-important nanny, the diffident sense of self, the masochistic attraction to difficult men. Eleanor was the cautionary tale of these forces, a warning against the worthlessness of self-sacrifice when there was almost no self to sacrifice, of dealing with being lost by getting more lost. Above all, she was a baby, not a ‘big baby’ like so many adults, but a small baby perfectly preserved in the pickling jar of money, alcohol and fantasy.

Since that colourful day in Kew, neither of the boys had been taken to see their grandmother in her nursing home. Patrick stopped visiting her as well, after her excruciating flirtation with assisted suicide two years before. Only Mary persevered, sometimes with the scant dutiful reminder that Eleanor was, after all, her mother-in-law; sometimes with the more obscure conviction that Eleanor was out of balance with her family and that the work of redressing that balance must start straight away, whether Eleanor was able to participate or not. It was certainly strange, as the months wore on, to be talking into space, hoping that she was doing some good, while Eleanor stared ever more rigidly and blankly at the ceiling. And in the absence of any dialogue, she often ran aground on her contempt for Eleanor’s failure to protect her child.

She could remember Eleanor describing the first few weeks after she returned from hospital with the infant Patrick. David was so tormented by his son’s crying that he ordered her to take the noisy brat to the remotest room in the attic. Eleanor already felt exiled enough in David’s beloved Cornwall, at the end of a headland overlooking an impenetrably wooded estuary, and she could hardly believe, as she was thrown out of her bedroom too suddenly to put on her slippers, or to collect a blanket for the baby, that there was a further exile available, a small cold room in the big cold house. For her the building was already sodden with melancholy horror. She had married David in the Truro registry office when she was heavily pregnant with their first child. Overestimating his medical skills, he had encouraged her to have the child at home. Without the incubator that she needed, Georgina died two days later. David sailed his boat out into the estuary, buried her at sea, and then disappeared for three days to get drunk. Eleanor stayed in bed, bleeding and abandoned, staring at the grey water through the bay window of her bedroom. After Georgina’s death, she had refused to go to bed with David. One evening he punched her in the back of the knees as she was going upstairs. When she fell, he twisted her arm behind her back and raped her on the staircase. Just as she thought she was finally disgusted enough to leave him, she found that she was pregnant.

Up in the attic with the new rape-born baby in her arms, she felt hysterically unconfident. Looking at the narrow bed she was gripped by the fear that if they lay down on it together, she would roll over and asphyxiate him, and so she chose the wooden chair in the corner, next to the empty fireplace, and sat up all night, clutching him in her arms. During those nights in the wooden chair, she was sucked down into sleep again and again, and then woken abruptly by sensing the baby’s body sliding down her nightdress towards the precipice of her knees. She would catch him at the last moment, terrified that his soft head was about to crash onto the hard floor; and yet unable to go to the bed they both longed for, in case she crushed him to death.

The days were a little better. The maternity nurse came in to help, the housekeeper bustled about in the kitchen, and with David out sailing and drinking, the house took on a superficially cheerful atmosphere. The three women fussed over Patrick and when Eleanor was resting back in her own bedroom she almost forgot about the dreadful nights; she almost forgot about the death of Georgina when she closed her eyes and could no longer see the stretch of grey water outside her window, and when she fed the baby from her breasts and they fell asleep together, she almost forgot about the violence that had brought him into the world.

But then one day, three weeks after they came back from hospital, David stayed behind. He was in a dangerous mood from the start; she could smell the brandy in his coffee and see the furious jealousy in his looks. By lunchtime, he had wounded everyone in the house with his cutting remarks, and all the women were anxious, feeling him pacing around, waiting for the chance to hurt and humiliate them. Nevertheless, they were surprised when he strode into the kitchen, carrying a battered leather bag and wearing a surgeon’s ill-fitting green pyjamas. He ordered them to clear a space on the scrubbed oak table, unfolded a towel, took out a wooden case of surgical instruments from the bag and opened it next to the towel. He asked for a saucepan of boiling water, as if everything had already been agreed and everyone knew what was going on.

‘What for?’ said the housekeeper, the first to wake from the trance.

‘To sterilize the instruments,’ David answered in the tone of a man explaining something very obvious to someone very stupid. ‘The time has come to perform a circumcision. Not, I assure you,’ he added, as if to allay their innermost fears, ‘for religious reasons,’ he allowed himself a fleeting smile, ‘but for medical ones.’

‘You’ve been drinking,’ Eleanor blurted out.

‘Only a beaker of surgical spirit,’ he quipped, a little giddy from the prospect of the operation; and then, no longer in the mood for fun, ‘Bring me the boy.’

‘Are you sure it’s for the best?’ asked the maternity nurse.

‘Do not question my authority,’ said David, throwing everything into it: the older man, the doctor, the employer, the centuries of command, but also the paralysing dart of his psychological presence, which made it seem life-threatening to oppose him.

His credentials as a murderer were well established in Eleanor’s imagination. Late at night, when he was down to one listener, amongst the empty bottles and crushed cigars, David was fond of telling the story of an Indian pig-sticking hunt he had been on in the late nineteen-twenties. He was thrilled by the danger of galloping through the high grass with a lance, chasing a wild boar whose tusks could ruin a horse’s legs, throw a rider to the ground and gore him to death. Impaling one of these fast, tough pigs was also a terrific pleasure, more involving than a long-distance kill. The only blemish on the expedition was that one of the party was bitten by a wild dog and developed the symptoms of rabies. Three days from the nearest hospital, it was already too late to help, and so the hunters decided to truss up their foaming and thrashing friend in one of the thick nets originally intended for transporting the bodies of the dead pigs, and to hoist him off the ground, tying the corners of the net to the branches of a big jacaranda tree. It was challenging, even for these hard men, to enjoy the sense of deep relaxation that follows a day of invigorating sport with this parcel of hydrophobic anguish dangling from a nearby tree. The row of lanterns down the dinner table, the quiet gleam of silver, the well-trained servants, the triumph of imposing civilization on the wild vastness of the Indian night, seemed to have been thrown into question. David could only just make out, against a background of screams, the splendid tale of Archie Montcrieff driving a pony and trap into the Viceroy’s ballroom. Archie had worn an improvised toga and shouted obscenities in ‘an outlandish kind of Cockney Latin’, while the pony manured the dance floor. If his father hadn’t been such a friend of the Viceroy’s he might have had to resign his commission, but as it was, the viceroy admitted, privately of course, that Archie had raised his spirits during ‘another damned dull dance’.

When the story was finished, David rose from the table muttering, ‘This noise is intolerable,’ and went into his tent to fetch his pistol. He walked over to the rabies victim and shot him in the head. Returning to the dumbfounded table, he sat down with a ‘feeling of absolute calm’ and said, ‘Much the kindest thing to do.’ Gradually, the word spread around the table: much the kindest thing to do. Rich and powerful men, some of them quite high up in government, and one of them a judge, couldn’t help agreeing with him. With the silencing of the screams and a few pints of whisky and soda, it became the general view by the end of the evening that David had done something exceptionally courageous. David would almost smile as he described how he had brought everyone at the table round, and then in a fit of piety, he would sometimes finish by saying that although at the time he had not yet set eyes on a copy of
Gray’s Anatomy
, he really thought of that pistol shot as the beginning of his ‘love affair with medicine’.

Eleanor felt obliged to hand over the baby to him in the kitchen in Cornwall. The baby screamed and screamed. Eleanor thought there must be dogs whimpering in their kennels a hundred miles away, the screams were so loud and high. All the women huddled together crying and begging David to stop and to be careful and to give the baby some local anaesthetic. They knew this was no operation, it was an attack by a furious old man on his son’s genitals; but like the chorus in a play, they could only comment and wail, without being able to alter the action.

‘I wanted to say, “You’ve already killed Georgina and now you want to kill Patrick,”’ Eleanor told Mary, to show how bold she would have been if she had said anything at all. ‘I wanted to call the police!’

Well, why didn’t you? was all that Mary could think, but she said nothing about Eleanor saying nothing; she just nodded and went on being a good listener.

‘It was like…’ said Eleanor, ‘it was like that Goya painting of Saturn devouring his son.’ Brought up surrounded by great paintings, Eleanor had experienced a late-adolescent crush on the History of Art, rudely guillotined by her disinheritance, and replaced by a proclivity for bright dollops of optimistic symbolism. Nevertheless, she could still remember, when she was twenty, driving through Spain in her first car, and being shocked, on a visit to the Prado, by the black vision of those late Goyas.

Mary was struck by the comparison, because it was unusual for Eleanor to make that sort of connection, and also because she knew the painting well, and could easily visualize the gaping mouth, the staring eyes and the ragged white hair of the old god of melancholy, mad with jealousy and the fear of usurpation, as he fed on the bleeding corpse of his decapitated child. Watching Eleanor plead for exoneration made Mary realize that her mother-in-law could never have protected anyone else when she was so entranced by her own vulnerability, so desperate to be saved. Later in her marriage, Eleanor did manage to get police protection for herself. It was in Saint-Nazaire, just after she learned about her mother’s death and, not yet knowing the content of the will, was expecting to get control of a world-class fortune. She had to fly to Rome later that morning for the funeral, and David sat opposite her at the breakfast table, brooding about the possible consequences of his wife’s increased independence.

‘You’re looking forward to getting your hands on all that lovely money,’ he said, walking round to her side of the table. She got up, sensing danger. ‘But you’re not going to,’ he added, grabbing her and pressing his thumbs expertly into her throat, ‘because I’m going to kill you.’

Almost unconscious, she had managed to knee him in the balls with all her remaining strength. In the reflex of pain, he let go long enough for her to slide across the table and bolt out of the house. He pursued her for a while, but the twenty-three-year age difference took its toll on his tired body and she escaped into the woods. Convinced that he would follow by car, she struggled through the undergrowth to the local police station, and arrived scratched, bleeding and in tears. The two gendarmes who drove her back to the house stood guard over a proud and sulky David while she packed her bags for Rome. She left with relief, but without Patrick, who stayed behind with only the flimsy protection of yet another terrified nanny – they lasted, on average, about six weeks. Eleanor might have been out of reach, but once he had given the nanny a munificent day out, and sent Yvette home, David had the consolation of torturing his son without any interference from the gendarmerie.

In the end, Eleanor’s betrayal of the maternal instinct that ruled Mary’s own life formed an absolute barrier to the liking she could feel for her. She could remember her own sons at three weeks old: their hot silky heads burrowing their way back into the shelter of her body to soften the shock of being born. The thought of handing them over, before their skin could bear the roughness of wool, to be hacked at with knives by a cruel and sinister man required a level of treachery that blinded her imagination.

No doubt David had searched hard among the foolish and the meek to find a woman who could put up with his special tastes, but once his depravity was on full display, how could Eleanor escape the charge of colluding with a sadist and a paedophile? She had invited children from other families to spend their holidays in the South of France and, like Patrick, they had been raped and inducted into an underworld of shame and secrecy, backed by convincing threats of punishment and death. Just before her first stroke, Eleanor received a letter from one of those children, saying that after a lifetime of insomnia, self-harm, frigidity, promiscuity, perpetual anxiety and suicide attempts, she had started to lead a more normal life, thanks to seven years of therapy, and had finally been able to forgive Eleanor for not protecting her during the summer she stayed with the Melroses. When she showed the letter to Mary, Eleanor dwelt on the injustice of being made to feel guilty about a category of behaviour she had not even known existed, although it was going on in the bedroom next to hers.