At Last (8 page)

Aunt Virginia would not have approved either. She wanted to bring real benefits to fellow human beings. Her influence on Eleanor had been indirect but strong and, like all the other strong influences, matriarchal. The Jonson men sometimes seemed to Patrick like those diminutive male spiders that quickly discharge their only important responsibility before being eaten by the much larger females. The founder’s two sons left two widows: Virginia, the widow of good works, and Eleanor’s grandmother, the widow of good marriages, whose second marriage to the son of an English earl launched her three daughters on their dazzling social and matrimonial careers. Patrick knew that Nancy had been intending to write a book about the Jonsons for the last twenty years. Without any tiresome show of false modesty, she had said to him, ‘I mean, it would be much better than Henry James and Edith Wharton and those sort of people, because it
really
happened.’

Men who married Jonson women didn’t fare much better than the founder’s sons. Eleanor’s father and her Uncle Vladimir were both alcoholics, emasculated by getting the heiress they thought they wanted. They ended up sitting together in White’s, nursing their wounds over a luxurious drink; divorced, discarded, cut off from their children. Eleanor was brought up wondering how an heiress could avoid destroying the man she married, unless he was already too corrupt to be destroyed, or rich enough to be immune. She had chosen from the first category in marrying David, and yet his malice and pride, which were impressive enough to begin with, were still magnified by the humiliation of depending on his wife’s money.

Patrick was not one of the Jonson castrati by marriage, but he knew what it was to be born into a matriarchal world, given money by a grandmother he scarcely knew, and cut off by a mother who still expected him to look after her. The psychological impact of these powerful women, generous from an impersonal distance, treacherous up close, had furnished him with one basic model of what a woman should look like and how she would in fact turn out to be. The object of desire generated by this combination was the Hiso Bitch – Hiso was an acronym for high society invented by a Japanese friend of his. The Hiso Bitch had to be a reincarnation of a Jonson Sister: glamorous, intensely social, infinitely rich in the pursuit of pleasure, embedded among beautiful possessions. As if this was not enough (as if this was not too much) she also had to be sexually voracious and morally disoriented. His first girlfriend had been an embryonic version of the type. He still thought sometimes about kneeling in front of her, in the pool of light from the reading lamp, the shining folds of her black silk pyjamas gathered between her splayed legs, a trickle of blood running down her proffered arm, the gasp of pleasure, whispering, ‘Too much too much,’ the film of sweat on her angular face, the syringe in his hand, her first fix of cocaine. He did his best to addict her, but she was a vampire of a different sort, feeding off the despairing obsession of the men who surrounded her, draining ever more socially assured admirers in the hope of acquiring their sense of belonging, even as she trivialized it in their eyes by making herself seem the only thing worth having and then walking away.

In his early thirties his compulsive search for disappointment brought him Inez, the Sistine Chapel of the Hiso Bitch. She insisted that every one of her cartload of lovers was exclusive to her, a condition she failed to secure from her husband, but successfully extorted from Patrick, who left the relatively sane and generous woman he was living with in order to plunge into the hungry vacuum of Inez’s love. Her absolute indifference to the feelings of her lovers made her sexual receptiveness into a kind of free-fall. In the end the cliff he fell off was as flat as the one Gloucester was made to leap off by his devoted son: a cliff of blindness and guilt and imagination, with no beetling rocks at its base. But she did not know that and neither did he.

With her curling blonde hair and her slender limbs and her beautiful clothes, Inez was alluring in an obvious way, and yet it was easy enough to see that her slightly protruding blue eyes were blank screens of self-love on which a small selection of fake emotions was allowed to flicker. She made rather haphazard impersonations of someone who has relationships with others. Based on the gossip of her courtiers, a diet of Hollywood movies and the projection of her own cunning calculations, these guesses might be sentimental or nasty, but were always vulgar and melodramatic. Since she hadn’t the least interest in the answer, she was inclined to ask, ‘How
are
you?’ with great gravity, at least half a dozen times. She was often exhausted by the thought of how generous she was, whereas the exhaustion really stemmed from the strain of not giving away anything at all. ‘I’m going to buy six thoroughbred Arab stallions for the Queen of Spain’s birthday,’ she announced one day. ‘Don’t you think it’s a good idea?’

‘Is six enough?’ asked Patrick.

‘You don’t think six is enough? Do you have any idea how much they cost?’

He was amazed when she did buy the horses, less surprised when she kept them for herself and bored when she sold them back to the man she had bought them from. However maddening she was as a friend, it was in the cut and thrust of romance that her talents excelled.

‘I’ve never felt this way before,’ she would say with troubled profundity. ‘I don’t think anybody has really understood me until now. Do you know that? Do you know how important you are to me?’ Tears would well up in her eyes as she hardly dared to whisper, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever felt at home until now,’ nestling in his strong manly arms.

Soon afterwards he would be left waiting for days in some foreign hotel where Inez never bothered to show up. Her social secretary would call twice a day to say that she had been delayed but was really on her way now. Inez knew that this tantalizing absence was the most efficient way to ensure that he would think of nothing but her, while leaving her free to do the same thing at a safe distance. His mind might wander almost anywhere if she was lying in his arms talking nonsense, whereas if he was nailed to the telephone, haemorrhaging money and abandoning all his other responsibilities, he was bound to think of her constantly. When they did eventually meet up, she would hurry to point out how unbearable it had all been for her, ruthlessly monopolizing the suffering generated by her endlessly collapsing plans.

Why would anyone allow himself to be annihilated by such shallowness, unless a buried image of a careless woman was longing for outward form? Lateness, let-down, longing for the unobtainable: these were the mechanisms that turned a powerful matriarchal stimulant into a powerful maternal depressant. Bewildering lateness, especially, took him directly into an early despair, waiting in vain on the stairs for his mother to come, terrified that she was dead.

Patrick suddenly experienced these old emotions as a physical oppression. He ran his fingers along the inside of his collar to make sure that it was not concealing a tightening noose. He couldn’t bear the lure of disappointment any longer, or for that matter the lure of consolation, its Siamese twin. He must somehow get beyond both of them, but first he had to mourn his mother. In a sense he had been missing her all his life. It was not the end of closeness but the end of the longing for closeness that he had to mourn. How futile his longing must have been for him to disperse himself into the land at Saint-Nazaire. If he tried to imagine anything deeper than his old home, he just pictured himself standing there, straining to see something elusive, shielding his eyes to watch a dragonfly dip into the burning water at noon, or starlings twisting against the setting sun.

He could now see that the loss of Saint-Nazaire was not an obstacle to mourning his mother but the only possible means to do so. Letting go of the imaginary world he had put in her place released him from that futile longing and took him into a deeper grief. He was free to imagine how terrified Eleanor must have been, for a woman of such good intentions, to have abandoned her desire to love him, which he did not doubt, and be compelled to pass on so much fear and panic instead. At last he could begin to mourn her for herself, for the tragic person she had been.

Patrick had little idea what to expect from the ceremony. He had been on a business trip to America at the time of his mother’s death and pleaded the impossibility of preparing anything to say or read, leaving Mary to take over the arrangements. He had only arrived back from New York yesterday, just in time to go to Bunyon’s funeral parlour, and now that he was sitting in a pew next to Mary, picking up the order of service for the first time, he realized how unready he was for this exploration of his mother’s confusing life. On the front of the little booklet was a photograph of Eleanor in the sixties, throwing her arms out as if to embrace the world, her dark glasses firmly on and no breathalyser test results available. He hesitated to look inside; this was the muddle, the pile-up of fact and feeling he had been trying to outmanoeuvre since the end of Eleanor’s flirtation with assisted suicide two years ago. She had died as a person before her body died, and he had tried to pretend that her life was over before it really was, but no amount of anticipation could cheat the demands of an actual death and now, with a combination of embarrassment and fear and evasiveness, he leant forward and slipped the order of service back onto the shelf in front of him. He would find out what was in it soon enough.

He had gone to America after receiving a letter from Brown and Stone LLP, the lawyers for the JohnJ. Jonson Corporation, known affectionately as ‘Triple J’. They had been informed by ‘the family’ – Patrick now suspected that it was Henry who had told them – that Eleanor Melrose was incompetent to administer her own affairs, and since she was the beneficiary of a trust created by her grandfather, of which Patrick was the ultimate beneficiary, measures should be taken to procure him a US power of attorney in order to administer the money on his mother’s behalf. All this was news to Patrick and he was freshly astonished by his mother’s capacity for secrecy. In his amazement he failed to ask how much the trust contained and he got onto the plane to New York not knowing whether he would be put in charge of twenty thousand dollars or two hundred thousand.

Joe Rich and Peter Zirkovsky met him in one of the smaller oval-tabled, glass-sided conference rooms of Brown and Stone’s offices on Lexington Avenue. Instead of the sulphurous yellow legal pads he was expecting, he found lined cream paper with the name of the firm printed elegantly on the top of each page. An assistant photocopied Patrick’s passport, while Joe examined the doctor’s letter testifying to Eleanor’s incapacity.

‘I had no idea about this trust,’ said Patrick.

‘Your mother must have been keeping it as a nice surprise,’ said Peter with a big lazy smile.

‘It might be that,’ said Patrick tolerantly. ‘Where does the income go?’

‘Currently we’re sending it to…’ Peter flicked over a sheet of paper, ‘the Association Transpersonel at the Banque Populaire de la Côte d’Azur in Lacoste, France.’

‘Well, you can stop that straight away,’ said Patrick.

‘Whoa, slow down,’ said Joe. ‘We’re going to have to get you a power of attorney first.’

‘That’s why she didn’t tell me about it,’ said Patrick, ‘because she’s continuing to subsidize her pet charity in France while I pay for her nursing-home fees in London.’

‘She may have lost her competence before she had a chance to change the instructions,’ said Peter, who seemed determined to furnish Patrick with a loving mother.

‘This letter is fine,’ said Joe. ‘We’re going to have to get you to sign some documents and get them notarized.’

‘How much money are we talking about?’ asked Patrick.

‘It’s not a large Jonson trust and it’s suffered in the recent stock-market corrections,’ said Joe.

‘Let’s hope it behaves incorrigibly from now on,’ said Patrick.

‘The latest valuation we have,’ said Peter, glancing down at his notes, ‘is two point three million dollars, with an estimated income of eighty thousand.’

‘Oh, well, still a useful sum,’ said Patrick, trying to sound slightly disappointed.

‘Enough to buy a country cottage!’ said Peter in an absurd impersonation of an English accent. ‘I gather house prices are pretty crazy over there.’

‘Enough to buy a second room,’ said Patrick, eliciting a polite guffaw from Peter, although Patrick could in fact think of nothing he wanted more than to separate the bed from the sit.

Walking down Lexington Avenue towards his hotel in Gramercy Park, Patrick began adjusting to his strange good fortune. The long arm of his great-grandfather, who had died more than half a century before Patrick was born, was going to pluck him out of his cramped living quarters and get him into a place where there might be room for his children to stay and his friends to visit. In the meantime it would pay for his mother’s nursing home. It was puzzling to think that this complete stranger was going to have such a powerful influence on his life. Even his benefactor had inherited his money. It had been his father who had founded the Jonson Candle Company in Cleveland, in 1832. By 1845 it was one of the most profitable candle companies in the country. Patrick could remember reading the founder’s uninspiring explanation for his success: ‘We had a new process of distilling cheap greases. Our competitors were using costly tallow and lard. Candles were high and our profits were large for a number of years.’ Later, the candle factory diversified into paraffin, oil treatment and hardening processes, and developed a patented compound that became an indispensable ingredient in dry cleaning around the world. The Jonsons also bought buildings and building sites in San Francisco, Denver, Kansas City, Toledo, Indianapolis, Chicago, New York, Trinidad and Puerto Rico, but the original fortune rested on the hard-headedness of the founder who had ‘died on the job’, falling through a hatchway in one of his own factories, and also on those ‘cheap greases’ which were still lubricating the life of one of his descendants a hundred and seventy years after their discovery.

John J. Jonson, Jr., Eleanor’s grandfather, was already sixty by the time he finally married. He had been travelling the world in the service of his family’s burgeoning business, and was only recalled from China by the death of his nephew Sheldon in a sledging accident at St Paul’s School. His eldest nephew, Albert, had already died from pneumonia at Harvard the year before. There were no heirs to the Jonson fortune and Sheldon’s grieving father, Thomas, told his brother it was his duty to marry. John accepted his fate and, after a brief courtship of a general’s daughter, got married and moved to New York. He fathered three daughters in rapid succession, and then dropped dead, but not before creating a multitude of trusts, one of which was meandering its way down to Patrick, as he had discovered that afternoon.

What did this long-range goodwill mean, and what did it say about the social contract that allowed a rich man to free all of his descendents from the need to work over the course of almost two centuries? There was something disreputable about being saved by increasingly remote ancestors. When he had exhausted the money given to him by a grandmother he scarcely knew, money arrived from a great-grandfather he could never have known. He could only feel an abstract gratitude towards a man whose face he would not have been able to pick out from a heap of sepia daguerreotypes. The ironies of the dynastic drive were just as great as the philanthropic ironies generated by Eleanor, or her Great-Aunt Virginia. No doubt his grandmother and his great-grandfather had hoped to empower a senator, enrich a great art collection or encourage a dazzling marriage, but in the end they had mainly subsidized idleness, drunkenness, treachery and divorce. Were the ironies of taxation any better: raising money for schools and hospitals and roads and bridges, and spending it on blowing up schools and hospitals and roads and bridges in self-defeating wars? It was hard to choose between these variously absurd methods of transferring wealth, but just for now he was going to cave in to the pleasure of having benefited from this particular form of American capitalism. Only in a country free from the funnelling of primogeniture and the levelling of
égalité
could the fifth generation of a family still be receiving parcels of wealth from a fortune that had essentially been made in the 1830s. His pleasure coexisted peacefully with his disapproval, as he walked into his dim and scented hotel, which resembled the film set of an expensive Spanish brothel, with the room numbers sewn into the carpet, on the assumption that the guests were on all fours after some kind of near overdose and could no longer find their rooms as they crawled down the obscure corridors.

The phone was ringing when he arrived in the velvet jewel box of his room, bathed in the murky urine light of parchment lampshades and presumptive hangover. He groped his way to the bedside table, clipping his shin on the bowed legs of a chair designed to resemble the virile effeminacy of a matador’s jacket, with immense epaulettes jutting out proudly from the top of its stiff back.

‘Fuck,’ he said as he answered the phone.

‘Are you all right?’ said Mary.

‘Oh, hi, sorry, it’s you. I just got impaled on this fucking matador chair. I can’t see anything in this hotel. They ought to hand out miner’s helmets at the reception.’

‘Listen, I’ve got some bad news.’ She paused.

Patrick lay back on the pillows with a clear intuition of what she was going to say.

‘Eleanor died last night. I’m sorry.’

‘What a relief,’ said Patrick defiantly. ‘Amongst other things…’

‘Yes, other things as well,’ said Mary and she gave the impression of accepting them all in advance.

They agreed to talk in the morning. Patrick had a fervent desire to be left alone matched only by his fervent desire not to be left alone. He opened the minibar and sat on the floor cross-legged, staring at the wall of miniatures on the inside of the door, shining in the dazzling light of the little white fridge. On shelves next to the tumblers and wine glasses were chocolates, jellybeans, salted nuts, treats and bribes for tired bodies and discontented children. He closed the fridge and closed the cupboard door and climbed carefully onto the red velvet sofa, avoiding the matador chair as best he could.

He must try not to forget that only a year ago hallucinations had been crashing into his helpless mind like missiles into a besieged city. He lay down on the sofa, clutching a heavily embroidered cushion to his already aching stomach, and slipped effortlessly into the delirious mentality of his little room in the Priory. He remembered how he used to hear the scratch of a metal nib, or the flutter of moth wings on a screen door, or the swish of a carving knife being sharpened, or the pebble clatter of a retreating wave, as if they were in the same room with him, or rather as if he was in the same place as them. There was a broken rock streaked with the hectic glitter of quartz that quite often lay at the foot of his bed. Blue lobsters explored the edges of the skirting board with their sensitive antennae. Sometimes it was whole scenes that took him over. He would picture, for instance, brake lights streaming across a wet road, the smoky interior of a car, the throb of familiar music, a swollen drop of water rushing down the windscreen, consuming the other drops in its path, and feel that this atmosphere was the deepest thing he had ever known. The absence of narrative in these compulsory waking dreams ushered in a more secretive sense of connection. Instead of trudging across the desert floor of ordinary succession, he was plunged into an oceanic night lit by isolated flares of bioluminescence. He surfaced from these states, unable to imagine how he could describe their haunting power to his Depression Group and longing for his breakfast oxazepam.

He could have all that back with a few months of hard drinking, not just the quicksilver swamps of early withdrawal with their poisonous, fugitive, shattering reflections, and the discreet delirium of the next two weeks, but all the group therapy as well. He could still remember, on his third day in the Alcohol and Addiction Group, wanting to dive out of the window when an old-timer had dropped in to share his experience, strength and hope with the trembling foals of early recovery. A well-groomed ex-meths drinker, with white hair and a smoker’s orange fingers, he had quoted the wisdom of an even older-timer who was ‘in the rooms’ when he first ‘came round’: ‘Fear knocked at the door!’ (Pause) ‘Courage answered the door!’ (Pause) ‘And there was nobody there!’ (Long pause). He could also have more of the Scottish moderator from the Depression Group, with his cute mnemonic for the power of projection: ‘you’ve got what you spot and you spot what you’ve got’. And then there were the ‘rock bottoms’ of the other patients to reconsider, the man who woke next to a girlfriend he couldn’t remember slashing with a kitchen knife the night before; the weekend guest surrounded by the hand-painted wallpaper he couldn’t remember smearing with excrement; the woman whose arm was amputated when the syringe she picked up from the concrete floor of a friend’s flat turned out to be infected with a flesh-eating superbug; the mother who abandoned her terrified children in a remote holiday cottage in order to return to her dealer in London and countless other stories of less demonstrative despair – moments of shame that precipitated ‘moments of clarity’ in the pilgrim’s progress of recovery.

All in all, the minibar was out. His month in the Priory had worked. He knew as deeply as he knew anything that sedation was the prelude to anxiety, stimulation the prelude to exhaustion and consolation the prelude to disappointment, and so he lay on the red velvet sofa and did nothing to distract himself from the news of his mother’s death. He stayed awake through the night feeling unconvincingly numb. At five in the morning, when he calculated that Mary would be back from the school run in London, he called her flat and they agreed that she would take over the arrangements for the funeral.

The organ fell silent, interrupting Patrick’s daydream. He picked up the booklet again from the narrow shelf in front of him, but before he had time to look inside, music burst out from the speakers in the corners of the room. He recognized the song just before the deep black cheerful voice rang out over the crematorium.