At Last (7 page)

And yet how ignorant could she really have been? The year before the arrival of the letter that so dismayed Eleanor, Patrick had received a letter from Sophie, an old au pair, who had heroically stayed with the Melroses for more than two years, more than twenty times the average endurance shown by the parade of incredulous young foreign women who passed through the house. In her letter, Sophie confessed to decades of guilt about the time she had spent looking after Patrick. She used to hear screams down the corridor of the house in Lacoste, and she knew that Patrick was being tormented, not merely punished or frustrated, but she was only nineteen at the time and she hesitated to intervene. She also confessed that she was terrified of David and, despite being genuinely fond of Patrick and feeling some pity for Eleanor, longed to get away from his grotesque family.

If Sophie knew that something was terribly wrong, how could Eleanor not have known? It was common enough to ignore what was seemingly impossible to ignore, but Eleanor stuck to her blindness with uncommon tenacity. Through all her programmes of self-discovery and shamanic healing, she avoided acknowledging her passion for avoidance. If she had ever discovered her real ‘power animals’, Mary suspected they would have been the Three Monkeys: See no Evil, Hear no Evil, Speak no Evil. Mary also suspected that these grim vigilantes had been killed off by one of her strokes, flooding her all at once with the fragments of knowledge that she had kept sealed off from each other, like the cells of a secret organization. In a parody of wholeness, the fragments converged when it was too late to make them cohere.

Eleanor was entirely confined to the nursing home for the last two years of her life, rarely leaving her bed. For the first year, Mary went on assuming that at least one of the threads holding Eleanor to her tormented existence was concern for her family, and she continued to reassure her that they were well. Later, she began to see that what really trapped Eleanor was not the strength of her attachments, but rather their weakness: without anything substantial to ‘let go’ of, she was left with only the volatility of her guilt and confusion. Part of her was aching to die, but she could never find the time; there was no gap between the proliferating anxieties; the desire to die collided instantly with the dread of dying, which in turn gave birth to a renewed desire.

For the second year, Mary was largely silent. She went into the room and wished Eleanor well. What else was there to do?

The last time she had seen her mother-in-law was two weeks ago. By then Eleanor had achieved a tranquillity indistinguishable from pure absence. Gaunt and drawn, her face seemed incapable of any deliberate change. Mary could remember Eleanor telling her, in one of those alienating confidential chats, that she knew exactly when she was going to die. The mysterious source of this information (Astrology? Channelling? A morbid guru? A drumming session? A prophetic dream?) was never unveiled, but the news was delivered with the slightly boastful serenity of pure fantasy. Mary felt that the certainty of death and the uncertainty of both its timing and its meaning were fundamental facts of life. Eleanor, on the other hand, knew exactly when she was going to die and that her death was not final. By the end, as far as Mary could tell, this conviction had deserted Eleanor, along with all the other features of her personality, as if a sandstorm had raged through her, ripping away every sign of comfort, and leaving a smooth and sterile landscape under a dry blank sky.

Still, Eleanor had died on Easter Sunday, and Mary knew that nothing could have pleased her more. Or would have pleased her more, had she known. Perhaps she did know, even though her mind appeared to be fixed in a realm removed from anything as mundane as a calendar. Even then there was still no way of knowing whether that was the day she had been expecting to die.

Mary adjusted her position on the uncomfortable crematorium bench. Where was a convincing and practical theory of consciousness when you really needed it? She glanced back a few rows at Erasmus, but he appeared to have fallen asleep. As she turned back to the coffin a few feet in front of her, Mary’s speculations collapsed abruptly. She found herself imagining, with a vividness she couldn’t sustain while it was still going on, how it had felt for Eleanor during those two last brutal years, having her individuality annihilated, faculty by faculty, memory by memory.

Her eyes blurred with tears.

‘Are you all right?’ whispered Patrick, as he sat down next to her.

‘I was thinking about your mother,’ she said.

‘A highly suitable choice,’ Patrick murmured, in the voice of a sycophantic shopkeeper.

For some reason Mary started to laugh uncontrollably, and Patrick started laughing too, and they both had to bite their lower lips and keep their shoulders from shaking too wildly.

Hoping to master his fit of grief-stricken laughter, Patrick breathed out slowly and concentrated on the dull tension of waiting to begin. The organ sighed, as if bored of searching for a decent tune, and then meandered on resignedly. He must pull himself together: he was here to mourn his mother’s death, a serious business.

There were various obstructions in his way. For a long time the feeling of madness brought on by the loss of his French home had made it impossible to get over his resentment of Eleanor. Without Saint-Nazaire, a primitive part of him was deprived of the imaginary care that had kept him sane as a child. He was certainly attached to the beauty of the place, but much more deeply to a secret protection that he dare not renounce in case it left him utterly destroyed. The shifting faces formed by the cracks, stains and hollows shifting faces formed by the cracks, stains and hollows of the limestone mountain opposite the house used to keep him company. The line of pine trees along its ridge was like a column of soldiers coming to his rescue. There were hiding places where nobody had ever found him; and vine terraces to jump down, giving him the feeling he could fly when he had to flee. There was a dangerous well where he could drown rocks and clods of earth, without drowning himself. The most heroic connection of all was with the gecko that had taken custody of his soul in a moment of crisis and dashed out onto the roof, to safety and to exile. How could it ever find him again, if Patrick wasn’t there any more?

On his last night in Saint-Nazaire there was a spectacular storm. Sheet lightning flickered behind ribbed banks of cloud, making the dark bowl of the valley tremble with light. At first, fat tropical raindrops dented the dusty ground, but soon enough, rivulets guttered down the steep paths, and little waterfalls flowed from step to step. Patrick wandered outside into the warm heavy rain, feeling mad. He knew that he had to end his magical contract with this landscape, but the electric air and the violent protest of the storm renewed the archaic mentality of a child, as if the same thick piano wires, hammered by thunder and pelting rain, ran through his body and the land. With water streaming down his face there was no need for tears, no need to scream with the sky cracking overhead. He stood in the drive, among the milky puddles and the murmur of new steams and the smell of the wet rosemary, until he sank to the ground, weighed down by what he was unable to give up, and sat motionless in the gravel and the mud. Forked lightning landed like antlers on the limestone mountain. In that sudden flash, he made out a shape on the ground between him and the wall that ran along the edge of the drive. Concentrating in the murky light, he saw that a toad had ventured out into the watery world beyond the laurel bushes, where Patrick imagined it had been waiting all summer for the rain, and was now resting gratefully on a bar of muddy ground between two puddles. They sat in front of each other, perfectly still.

Patrick pictured the white corpses of the toads he used to see each spring, at the bottom of the stone pools. Around their spent bodies, hundreds of soft black tadpoles clung to the grey-green algae on the walls, or wriggled across the open pond, or overflowed into the runnels that carried the water from pool to pool, between the source and the stream in the crease of the valley. Some of the tadpoles slipped limply down the slope, others swam frantically against the current. Robert and Thomas spent hours each Easter holiday, removing the little dams that formed overnight, and when the covered part of the channel was blocked and the grass around the lower pond flooded, airlifting the stranded tadpoles in their cupped hands. Patrick could remember doing the same thing as a child, and the sense of giant compassion that he used to feel as he released them back into the safety of the pond through his flooding fingers.

In those days there had been a chorus of frogs during the spring nights, and during the day, sitting on the lily pads in the crescent pond, bullfrogs blowing their insides out like bubble gum; but in the system of imaginary protection that the land used to allow him, it was the lucky tree frogs that really counted. If only he could touch one of them, everything would be all right. They were hard to find. The round suckers on the tips of their feet meant that they could hang anywhere in the tree, camouflaged by the bright green of a new leaf or an unripe fig. When he did see one of these tiny frogs, fixed to the smooth grey bark, its brilliant skin stretched over a sharp skeleton, it looked to him like pulsing jewellery. He would reach out his index finger and touch it lightly for good luck. It might have only happened once, but he had thought about it a thousand times.

Remembering that charged and tentative gesture, he now looked with some scepticism at the warty head of the sodden toad in front of him. At the same time, he remembered his A-level Arden edition of
King Lear
with its footnote about the jewel in the head of the toad, the emblem of the treasure hidden in the midst of ugly, muddy, repulsive experience. One day he would live without superstition, but not yet. He reached out and touched the head of the toad. He felt some of the same awe he had felt as a child, but the resurgence of what he was about to lose gave the feeling a self-cancelling intensity. The mad fusion of mythologies created an excess of meaning that might at any moment flip into a world with no meaning at all. He drew away and, like someone returning to the familiar compromises of his city flat after a long exotic journey, recognized that he was a middle-aged man, sitting eccentrically in his muddy driveway in the middle of a thunderstorm, trying to communicate with a toad. He got up stiffly and slouched back to the house, feeling realistically miserable, but still kicking the puddles in defiance of his useless maturity.

Eleanor had given Saint-Nazaire away, but at least she had provided it in the first place, if only as a massive substitute for herself, a motherland that was there to cover for her incapacities. In a sense its loveliness was a decoy, the branches of almond blossom reaching into a cloudless sky, the unopened irises, like paintbrushes dipped in blue, the clear amber resin bleeding from the gunmetal bark of the cherry trees – all of that was a decoy, he must stop thinking about it. A child’s need for protection would have assembled a system out of whatever materials came to hand, however ritual or bizarre. It might have been a spider in a broom cupboard, or the appearance of a neighbour across the well of a block of flats, or the number of red cars between the front door and the school gates, that took on the burden of love and reassurance. In his case, it had been a hillside in France. His home had stretched from the dark pinewood at the top of the slope, all the way to the pale bamboo that grew beside the stream at its foot. In between were terraces where vine shoots burst from twisted stumps that spent the winter looking like rusted iron, and olive trees rushed from green to grey and grey to green in the combing wind. Halfway down the slope were the cluster of houses and cypresses and the network of pools where he had experienced the most horror and negotiated the most far-fetched reprieves. Even the steep mountainside opposite the house was colonized by his imagination, and not only with the army of trees marching along its crest. Later on, its rejection of human encroachment became an image of his own less reliable aloofness.

Nobody could spend their whole life in a place without missing it when they left. Pathetic fallacies, projections, substitutions and displacements were part of the inevitable traffic between any mind and its habitual surroundings, but the pathological intensity he had brought to these operations made it vital for him to see through them. What would it be like to live without consolation, or the desire for consolation? He would never find out, unless he uprooted the consolatory system that had started on the hillside at Saint-Nazaire and then spread to every medicine cabinet, bed and bottle he had come across since; substitutes substituting for substitutes: the system was always more fundamental than its contents, and the mental act more fundamental still. What if memories were just memories, without any consolatory or persecutory power? Would they exist at all, or was it always emotional pressure that summoned images from what was potentially all of experience so far? Even if that was the case, there must be better librarians than panic, resentment and dismembering nostalgia to search among the dim and crowded stacks.

Whereas ordinary generosity came from a desire to give something to someone, Eleanor’s philanthropy had come from a desire to give everything to anyone. The sources of the compulsion were complex. There was the repetition syndrome of a disinherited daughter; there was a rejection of the materialism and snobbery of her mother’s world; and there was the basic shame at having any money at all, an unconscious drive to make her net worth and her self-worth converge in a perfect zero; but apart from all these negative forces, there was also the inspiring precedent of her great-aunt Virginia Jonson. With a rare enthusiasm for an ancestor, Eleanor used to tell Patrick all about the heroic scale of Virginia’s charitable works; how she made so much difference to so many lives, showing that ardent selflessness which is often more stubborn than open egotism.

Virginia had already lost two sons when her husband died in 1901. Over the next twenty-five years she demolished half the Jonson fortune with her mournful philanthropy. In 1903 she endowed the Thomas J. Jonson Memorial Fund with twenty million dollars and in her will with another twenty-five million, at a time when these were sums of a rare vastness, rather than the typical Christmas bonus of a mediocre hedge-fund manager. She also collected paintings by Titian, Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Tintoretto, Bronzino, Lorenzo di Credi, Murillo, Velasquez, Hals, Le Brun, Gainsborough, Romney and Botticelli, and donated them to the Jonson Wing of the Cleveland Museum of Art. This cultural legacy was what interested Eleanor least, perhaps because it resembled too closely the private acquisitive frenzy taking place in her own branch of the Jonson family. What she really admired were Virginia’s Good Works, the hospitals and YMCAs she built, and above all, the new town she created on a four-hundred-acre site, in the hope of clearing Cleveland’s slums by giving ideal housing to the poor. It was named Friendship, after her summer place in Newport. When it was completed in 1926, Virginia addressed a ‘Greeting’ to its first residents in the
Friendship Messenger.

To Eleanor, there had been something deeply moving about this Queen Victoria of Ohio, a little woman with a puffy white face, always dressed in black, always reclusive, seeking no personal glory for her charitable acts, driven by deep religious convictions, still naming streets and buildings after her dead sons right up to the end – her Albert had his Avenue and her Sheldon had his Close in the safer, child-friendly precincts of Friendship.

At the same time, the coolness of relations between the Jonson sisters and their Aunt Virginia showed that in the opinion of her nieces she had not struck the right balance between the civic-minded and the family-minded. If anyone was going to give away Jonson money, the sisters felt that it should be them, rather than the daughter of a penniless clergyman who had married their Uncle Thomas. They were each left a hundred thousand dollars in Virginia’s will. Even her friends did better. She endowed a Trust with two and a half million dollars to provide annuities for sixty-nine friends for the rest of their lives. Patrick suspected that Virginia’s talent for annoying Eleanor’s mother and her aunts was the unacknowledged source of Eleanor’s admiration for her great-aunt. She and Virginia stood apart from the dynastic ambitions of wealth. For them, money was a trust from God that must be used to do good in the world. Patrick hoped that during her frantic silence in the nursing home, Eleanor had been dreaming, at least some of the time, of the place she might occupy next to the great Jonson philanthropist who had Gone Before.

Virginia’s meanness to the Jonson Sisters was no doubt underpinned by the knowledge that her brother-in-law would leave each of them with a huge fortune.

Nevertheless, by their generation, the thrill of being rich was already shadowed by the shocks of disinheritance and the ironies of philanthropy. The 1929 Crash came two years after Virginia’s death. The poor became destitute, and the white middle classes, who were much poorer than they used to be, fled the inner city for the half-timbered cosiness of Friendship, even though Virginia had built it in memory of a husband who was ‘a friend to the Negro race’.

Eleanor’s friendship was with something altogether vaguer than the Negro race. ‘Friend to the neoshamanic revival of the Celtic Twilight’ seemed less likely to yield concrete social progress. During Patrick’s childhood, her charitable focus had resembled Virginia’s Good Works much more closely, except that it was devoted overwhelmingly to children. He had often been left alone with his father while Eleanor went to a committee meeting of the Save the Children Fund. The absolute banishment of irony from Eleanor’s earnest persona created a black market for the blind sarcasm of her actions. Later, it was Father Tortelli and his Neapolitan street urchins who were the targets of her evasive charity. Patrick could not help thinking that this passion for saving all the children of the world was an unconscious admission that she could not save her own child. Poor Eleanor, how frightened she must have been. Patrick suddenly wanted to protect her.

When Patrick’s childhood had ended and the inarticulate echoes of her own childhood faded, Eleanor stopped supporting children’s charities, and embarked on the second adolescence of her New Age quest. She showed the same genius for generalization that had characterized her rescue of children, except that her identity crisis was not merely global, but interplanetary and cosmic as well, without sinking one millimetre into the resistant bedrock of self-knowledge. No stranger to ‘the energy of the universe’, she remained a stranger to herself. Patrick could not pretend that he would have applauded any charitable gift involving all of his mother’s property, but once that became inevitable, it was a further pity that it had all gone to the Transpersonal Foundation.