Eleanor looked over at her mother. She was staring straight ahead, waiting for an apology.
‘We’ve got to give him some money,’ said Eleanor. ‘He’s starving.’
‘So am I,’ said her mother, without turning her head. ‘If this Italian woman doesn’t show up soon, I’m going to go crazy.’
She tapped the glass separating her from the front seat and waved impatiently at the footman.
When they eventually got inside the house, Eleanor spent the party in her first flush of philanthropic fever. Her rejection of her mother’s values fused with her idealism to produce an intoxicating vision of herself as a barefoot saint: she was going to dedicate her life to helping others, as long as they weren’t related to her. A few years later, her mother speeded Eleanor along the path of self-denial by allowing herself to be bullied, as she lay dying of cancer, into leaving almost all of her vast fortune outright to Eleanor’s stepfather. He had protested that the original will, in which he only had the use of her fortune during his lifetime, was an insult to his honour since it implied that he might cheat his stepdaughters by disinheriting them. He, in turn, broke the promise he had made to his dying wife and left the loot to his nephew. Eleanor was by then too implicated in her spiritual quest to admit how bewildered she was about the loss of all that money. The resentment was being passed on to Patrick, carefully preserved like one of the antiques which Jean loved to collect at his wife’s expense. Her mother had liked dukes whereas Eleanor liked would-be witch doctors, but regardless of the social decline the essential formula remained the same: rip off the children for the sake of some cherished self-image, the grande dame, or the holy fool. Eleanor had pushed on to the next generation the parts of her experience she wanted to get rid of: divorce, betrayal, mother-hatred, disinheritance; and clung to an idea of herself as part of the world’s salvation, the Aquarian Age, the return to primitive Christianity, the revival of shamanism – the terms shifted over the years, but Eleanor’s role remained the same: heroic, optimistic, visionary, proud of its humility. The result of her psychological apartheid was to keep both the rejected and aspirant parts of herself frozen. On the night of that Roman party, she had borrowed some money from a family friend and dashed outside to find the starving tramp whose life she was going to save. A few corners later, she found that the streets had not recovered as quickly from six years of war as the merrymakers she had left behind. She couldn’t help feeling conspicuous among the rats and the rubble, dressed in her sky-blue ball gown with a large banknote gripped in her eager fist. Shadows shifted in a doorway, and a splash of fear sent her shivering back to her mother’s car.
Fifty-five years later, Eleanor still hadn’t worked out a realistic way to act on her desire to be good. She still missed the feast without relieving the famine. When things went wrong, and they always did, the bad experiences were not allowed to inform the passionate teenager; they were exiled to the bad-experience dump. A secret half of Eleanor grew more bitter and suspicious, so that the visible half could remain credulous and eager. Before Seamus there had been a long procession of allies. Eleanor handed her life over to them with complete trust and then, within a few hours of their last moment of perfection, they were suddenly rejected, and never mentioned again. What exactly they had done to deserve exile was never mentioned either. Illness was producing a terrifying confluence of the two selves which Eleanor had gone to such trouble to keep apart. Patrick was curious to know whether the cycle of trust and rejection would remain intact. After all, if Seamus crossed over into the shadows, Eleanor might want to dismantle the Foundation as vehemently as she had wanted to set it up. Maybe he could delay things for another year. There he was, still hoping to hang on to the place.
Patrick could remember wandering around the rooms and gardens of his grandmother’s half-dozen exemplary houses. He had watched a world-class fortune collapse into the moderate wealth that his mother and his aunt Nancy enjoyed from a relatively minor inheritance they received before their mother caved in to the lies and bullying of her second husband. Eleanor and Nancy looked rich to some people, living at good addresses, one in London and one in New York, each with a place in the country, and neither of them needing to work, or indeed shop, wash, garden or cook for themselves, but in the history of their own family they were surviving on loose change. Nancy, who still lived in New York, combed the catalogues of the world’s auction houses for images of the objects she should have owned. On the last occasion Patrick visited her on 69th Street, she had scarcely offered him a cup of tea before getting out a sleek black catalogue from Christie’s, Geneva. It had just arrived and inside was a photograph of two lead jardinières, decorated with gold bees almost audibly buzzing among blossoming silver branches. They had been made for Napoleon.
‘We didn’t even used to comment on them,’ said Nancy bitterly. ‘Do you know what I’m saying? There were so many beautiful things. They used to just sit on the terrace in the rain. A million and a half dollars, that’s what the little nephew got for Mummy’s garden tubs. I mean, wouldn’t you like to have some of these things to give to your children?’ she asked, carrying over a new set of photograph albums and catalogues, to syncopate the sale price with the sentimental significance of what had been lost.
She went on decanting the poison of her resentment into him for the next two hours.
‘It was thirty years ago,’ he would point out from time to time.
‘But the little nephew sells something of Mummy’s every week,’ she growled in defence of her obsession.
The continuing drama of deception and self-deception made Patrick violently depressed. He was only really happy when Thomas first greeted him with a burst of uncomplicated love, throwing open his arms in welcome. Earlier that morning, he had carried Thomas around the terrace, looking for geckos behind the shutters. Thomas grabbed every shutter as they passed, until Patrick unhooked it and creaked it open. Sometimes a gecko shot up the wall towards the shelter of a shutter on the upper floor. Thomas pointed, his mouth rounded with surprise. The gecko was the trigger to the real event, the moment of shared excitement. Patrick tilted his head until his eyes were level with Thomas’s, naming the things they came across. ‘Valerian … Japonica … Fig tree,’ said Patrick. Thomas stayed silent until he suddenly said, ‘Rake!’ Patrick tried to imagine the world from Thomas’s point of view, but it was a hopeless task. Most of the time, he couldn’t even imagine the world from his own point of view. He relied on nightfall to give him a crash course in the real despair that underlay the stale, remote, patchily pleasurable days. Thomas was his antidepressant, but the effect soon wore off as Patrick’s lower back started to ache and he caved in to his terror of early death, of dying before the children were old enough to earn a living, or old enough to handle the bereavement. He had no reason to believe that he would die prematurely; it was just the most flagrant and uncontrollable way of letting his children down. Thomas had become the great symbol of hope, leaving none for anyone else.
Thank goodness Johnny was coming later in the month. Patrick felt sure that he was missing something which Johnny could illuminate for him. It was easy to see what was sick, but it was so difficult to know what it meant to be well.
‘Patrick!’
They were after him. He could hear Julia calling his name. Perhaps she could come and join him behind the olive tree, give him a very quick blow job, so that he felt a little lighter and calmer during lunch. What a great idea. Standing outside her door last night. The tangle of shame and frustration. He clambered to his feet. Knees going. Old age and death. Cancer. Out of his private space into the confusion of other people, or out of the confusion of his private space into the effortless authority of his engagement with others. He never knew which way it would go.
‘Julia. Hi, I’m over here.’
‘I’ve been sent to find you,’ said Julia, walking carefully over the rougher ground of the olive grove. ‘Are you hiding?’
‘Not from you,’ said Patrick. �
��Come and sit here for a few seconds.’
Julia sat down next to him, their backs against the forking trunk.
‘This is cosy,’ she said.
‘I’ve been hiding here since I was a child. I’m surprised there isn’t a dent in the ground,’ said Patrick. He paused and weighed up the risks of telling her.
‘I stood outside your door last night at four in the morning.’
‘Why didn’t you come in?’ said Julia.
‘Would you have been pleased to see me?’
‘Of course,’ she said, leaning over and kissing him briefly on the lips.
Patrick felt a surge of excitement. He could imagine pretending to be young, rolling around among the sharp stones and the fallen twigs, laughing manfully as mosquitoes fed on his naked flesh.
‘What stopped you?’ asked Julia.
‘Robert. He found me hesitating in the corridor.’
‘You’d better not hesitate next time.’
‘Is there going to be a next time?’
‘Why not? You’re bored and lonely; I’m bored and lonely.’
‘God,’ said Patrick, ‘if we got together, there would be a terrifying amount of boredom and loneliness in the room.’
‘Or maybe they have opposite electrical charges and they’d cancel each other out.’
‘Are you positively or negatively bored?’
‘Positively,’ said Julia. ‘And I’m absolutely and positively lonely.’
‘You may have a point, then,’ smiled Patrick. ‘There’s something very negative about my boredom. We’re going to have to conduct an experiment under strictly controlled conditions to see whether we achieve a perfect elimination of boredom or an overload of loneliness.’
‘I really should drag you back to lunch now,’ said Julia, ‘or everyone will think we’re having an affair.’
They kissed. Tongues. He’d forgotten about tongues. He felt like a teenager hiding behind a tree, experimenting with real kissing. It was bewildering to feel alive, almost painful. He felt his pent-up longing for closeness streaming through his hand as he placed it carefully on her belly.
‘Don’t get me going now,’ she said, ‘it’s not fair.’
They climbed groaning to their feet.
‘Seamus had just arrived when I came to get you,’ said Julia, brushing the dust off her skirt. ‘He was explaining to Kettle what went on during the rest of the year.’
‘What did Kettle make of that?’
‘I think she’s decided to find Seamus charming so as to annoy you and Mary.’
‘Of course she has. It’s only because you’ve got me all flustered that I hadn’t worked that out already.’
They made their way towards the stone table, trying not to smile too much or to look too solemn. Patrick felt himself sliding back under the microscope of his family’s attention. Mary smiled at him. Thomas threw out his arms in welcome. Robert gazed at him with his intimidating, knowledgeable eyes. He picked up Thomas and smiled at Mary, thinking, ‘A man may smile and smile and be a villain.’ Then he sat down next to Robert, feeling as he did when he defended an obviously guilty client in front of a famously difficult judge. Robert noticed everything. Patrick admired his intelligence, but far from short-circuiting his depression as Thomas did, Robert made him more aware of the subtle tenacity of the destructive influence that parents had on their children – that he had on his children. Even if he was an affectionate father, even if he wasn’t making the gross mistakes his parents had made, the vigilance he invested in the task created another level of tension, a tension which Robert had picked up. With Thomas he would be different – freer, easier, if one could be free and easy while feeling unfree and uneasy. It was all so hopeless. He really must get a decent night’s sleep. He poured himself a glass of red wine.
‘It’s good to see you, Patrick,’ said Seamus, rubbing him on the back.
Patrick felt like punching him.
‘Seamus has been telling me all about his workshops,’ said Kettle. ‘I must say they sound absolutely fascinating.’
‘Why don’t you sign up for one?’ said Patrick. ‘It’s the only way you’ll see the place in the cherry season.’
‘Ah, the cherries,’ said Seamus. ‘Now, they’re something really special. We always have a ritual around the cherries – you know, the fruits of life.’
‘It sounds very profound,’ said Patrick. ‘Do the cherries taste any better than they would if you experienced them as the fruits of a cherry tree?’
‘The cherries…’ said Eleanor. ‘Yes … no…’ She rubbed out the thought hastily with both hands.
‘She loves the cherries. They’re grand, aren’t they?’ said Seamus, clasping Eleanor’s hand in his reassuring grip. ‘I always take her a bowl in the nursing home, freshly picked, you know.’
‘A handsome rent,’ said Patrick, draining his glass of wine.
‘No,’ said Eleanor, panic-stricken, ‘no rent.’
Patrick realized he was upsetting his mother. He couldn’t even go on being sarcastic. Every avenue was blocked. He poured himself another glass of wine. One day he was going to have to drop the whole thing, but just for now he was going to go on fighting; he couldn’t stop himself. Fight with what, though? If only he hadn’t gone to such trouble to make his mother’s folly legally viable. She had handed him, without any sense of irony, the task of disinheriting himself, and he had carried it out carefully. He had sometimes thought of putting a hidden flaw in the foundations. He had sat in the multi-jurisdictional meetings with notaires and solicitors, discussing ways of circumventing the forced inheritance of the Napoleonic code, the best way to form a charitable foundation, the tax consequences and the accountancy procedures, and he had never done anything except refine the plan to make it stronger and more efficient. The only way out was that elastic band of debt which Eleanor was now proposing to snip. He had really put it in for her protection. He had tried to set aside the hope that she would take advantage of it, but now that he was about to lose that hope, he realized that he had been cultivating it secretly, using it to keep him at a small but fatal distance from the truth. Saint-Nazaire would soon be gone for ever and there was nothing he could do about it. His mother was an unmaternal idiot and his wife had left him for Thomas. He still had one reliable friend, he sobbed silently, splashing more red wine into his glass. He was definitely going to get drunk and insult Seamus, or maybe he wasn’t. In the end, it was even harder to behave badly than to behave well. That was the trouble with not being a psychopath. Every avenue was blocked.
A scene was unfolding around him, no doubt, but his attention was so submerged that he could hardly make out what was going on. If he clawed his way up the slippery well shaft, what would he find anyway, except Kettle extolling Queen Mary’s child-rearing methods, or Seamus radiating Celtic charisma? Patrick looked over the valley, a gauntlet of memory and association. In the middle of the view was the Mauduits’ ugly farmhouse, its two big acacia trees still growing in the front yard. When he was a child he had often played with the oafish Marcel Mauduit. They used to fashion spears out of the pale green bamboos that flanked the stream at the bottom of the valley. They flung them at little birds which managed to leave several minutes before the bamboo clattered onto the abandoned branch. When Patrick was six years old Marcel invited him to watch his father beheading a chicken. There was nothing more curious and amusing than watching a chicken run around in silly circles looking for its head, Marcel explained. You really had to see it for yourself. The boys waited in the shade of the acacia trees. An old hatchet was stuck at a handy angle among the crisscross cuts on the surface of a brownish plane tree stump. Marcel danced around like an Indian with a tomahawk, pretending to decapitate his enemies. In the distance, Patrick could hear the panic in the chicken coop. By the time Marcel’s father arrived, gripping a hen by the neck, her wings beating uselessly against his vast belly, Patrick was beginning to side with her. He wanted this one to get away. He could see that she knew
what was going on. She was held down sideways, her neck stuck over the edge of the stump. Monsieur Mauduit brought the hatchet down so that her head flopped neatly at his feet. Then he put the rest of her quickly on the ground and, with an encouraging pat, set her off on a frantic dash for freedom, while Marcel jeered and laughed and pointed. Elsewhere, the hen’s eyes stared at the sky and Patrick stared at her eyes.
With his fourth glass of wine, Patrick found his imagination tilting towards Victorian melodrama. Dark scenes formed of their own accord, but he did nothing to stop them. He saw the bloated figure of a drowned Seamus floating in the Thames. His mother’s wheelchair seemed to have lost control and was bouncing down the coastal path towards a Dorset cliff. Patrick noted the magnificent National Trust backdrop as she pitched forwards over the edge. One day he really must drop the whole thing, get real, get contemporary, accept the facts, but just for the moment he would go on imagining himself putting the last touches to a forged will, while Julia, seated on the edge of his desk, bemused him with the complexity of her undergarments. Just for now, he would have another little splash of wine.
Thomas leant forward in Mary’s lap, and with her usual perfect intuition, she immediately handed him a biscuit. He sank back on her chest convinced, as he was hundreds of times a day, that he would never need something without being given it. Patrick scanned himself for jealousy, but it wasn’t there. There was plenty of dark emotion but no rivalry with his infant son. The trick was to keep up a high level of loathing for his own mother, leaving no room to feel jealous of Thomas getting the solid foundations his father so obviously lacked. Thomas leant forwards a second time and, with an enquiring murmur, held out his biscuit to Julia, offering her a bite. Julia looked at the wet and blunted biscuit, made a face and said, ‘Yuk. No thank you very much.’
Patrick suddenly realized that he couldn’t make love to someone who missed the point of Thomas’s generosity so completely. Or could he? Despite his revulsion, he felt his lust running on, not unlike a beheaded chicken. He had now achieved the pseudo-detachment of drunkenness, the little hillock before the swamps of self-pity and memory loss. He saw that he really must get well, he couldn’t go on this way. One day he was going to drop the whole thing, but he couldn’t do that until he was ready, and he couldn’t control when he would be ready. He could, however, get ready to be ready. He sank back in his chair and agreed at least to that: his business for the rest of the month was to get ready to be ready to be well.
The Patrick Melrose Novels Page 49
