by Meg Mason
Before he stuck up a sign banning le camera à l’intérieur, and subsequently le iPhone and encore plus, le bâton de selfie, I was captured in the background of a thousand photographs, sitting behind the counter reading new releases or looking at the slice of the river visible between buildings if the only new releases were crime or magical realism.
*
Peregrine was the first person who visited me in Paris and, apart from Ingrid, the person who visited me most, only ever for the day, arriving before noon and leaving late. We would meet at a restaurant, Peregrine preferring one that had just lost a Michelin star because he considered it an easy form of charity, bucking someone up simply by lunching and, he said, in Paris it was the only guarantee of attentive service. Whatever time of year it was, we walked to the Tuileries afterwards and from there along the river and up into the Marais, avoiding the Centre Pompidou because the architecture depressed him, and on to the Picasso Museum, staying until Peregrine said it was time to find somewhere louche to drink Dubonnet before dinner.
I measured out my time in Paris by Peregrine’s visits. Probably he knew because he would never leave without telling me when he planned to return. And he always came in September, on what he called the anniversary of my sacking – by Jonathan, not by the magazine.
I was happy whenever I was with him, even on those anniversaries, except for the year I was about to turn thirty. Entering the forecourt of the museum, Peregrine said that he had been finding my behaviour all day somewhat challenging. Thus, instead of going inside, we were going to walk all the way back and he would describe his life at precisely my age; since I would find it a very grim picture, he said, I might stop feeling so despondent about mine and walking with dreadful rounded shoulders.
On the street again, Peregrine brushed his coatsleeves then said alright, well, and we started walking. ‘Let us think. My wife had just given me the boot, having found out that my tastes ran in a different direction and while Diana set about making sure I’d get none of our money or see the children again, I moved to London, into the awfulest room in Soho, became partial to various substances and was, in consequence, given the heave-ho by my magazine at the time. I was out of money in a day and forced to return to my family seat in Gloucestershire, where I was very much unwelcome, both personally and as one of my kind, and there followed the nervous collapse. What do you think?’
I told him it was quite a grim picture and I was sorry that he had been through it, and sorry that I had never asked him about any life he’d lived before the present one.
He said yes. ‘However, the benefit of exile – one was forced to clean up one’s act because Quaaludes simply could not be got in Tewkesbury in 1970.’
I said, ‘Like pesto,’ and put my shoulders back. Peregrine took my arm and we kept going.
*
Usually we parted outside the Gare du Nord but I did not want him to leave, and asked if I could go inside with him and wait until his train. We stood at a café counter and I told him that, although I was ashamed about it, sometimes I missed Jonathan. I hadn’t told anyone else.
He said there was no shame in it, none at all. ‘Even now I find myself recalling the years I was married to Diana with immense nostalgia.’ He sipped the coffee, set it down and said, ‘Per the original Greek definition of course, which is utterly unrelated to the way members of the public use it to describe how they feel recounting their school days.’ Peregrine looked at the clock and put money from his breast pocket on the counter. ‘Nostos, Martha, returning home. Algos, pain. Nostalgia is the suffering caused by our unappeased yearning to return.’ Whether or not, he said, the home we long for ever existed. At the gate to his platform, Peregrine kissed me on both cheeks and said, ‘November,’ and I knew it would be my birthday.
*
In between: I loved Paris, the view out of the pied-à-terre window, of zinc roofs and terracotta chimneys and tangled power lines. I loved living alone after the months at Goldhawk Road. I spoke to my father on weekends and Ingrid every morning as I walked to a café on the corner to get breakfast. I started writing a different novel.
And I hated Paris, the pied-à-terre’s red linoleum floor and the communal bathroom at the end of a dark passage. I was so lonely without my father, without the noise of Nicholas and Oliver and Patrick to listen to as I tried to sleep, without Ingrid. I hadn’t been there very long when she called and told me that Patrick had started dating Jessamine, which she found hilarious and I didn’t for reasons I couldn’t explain. But afterwards, the novel kept setting itself at Goldhawk Road and the protagonist, who I had made a man so it couldn’t be me, kept becoming Patrick instead. And then there was a girl. Everything that happened to her happened unexpectedly, and no matter what I did, she never seemed to be anywhere except on the stairs.
When I told Peregrine I was writing a book that was constantly turning into a love story set in an ugly house, he said, ‘First novels are autobiography and wish fulfilment. Evidently, one’s got to push all one’s disappointments and unmet desires through the pipes before one can write anything useful.’
I threw the pages out when I got home. But I tried in other ways, and kept trying per Peregrine’s wish for his daughters to be Zelda Fitzgerald, all the time. I walked along the river and spent money, and went to markets and ate cheese out of the paper with my fingers while I wandered around. I painted the pied-à-terre’s walls and covered its floors. I went to the cinema alone and bought dress rehearsal tickets for the ballet. I taught myself to smoke and like snails and went out with any man who asked me.
But I Wikipedia’d the other writer he had mentioned that day at the Orangery – I had not heard of her then – and I read her book, the one set in Paris. More often I was its main character, a woman who lies in a darkened studio thinking about her divorce for 192 pages. Wikipedia said ‘critics thought it well written, but ultimately too depressing’.
And – and so – I learned medical French, by immersion. Je suis très misérable. Un antidépresseur s’il vous plaît. Ma prescription has run out et c’est le week-end. Le docteur: How often do you feel triste, sans a bonne raison? Toujours, parfois, rarement, jamais? Parfois, parfois. As time wore on, toujours.
*
I went home once, a month or so before I returned to London for good. It was January, wet and dark in Paris when I got back, the shop deserted like it always was between Christmas and Valentine’s Day. The American had gone home for a holiday and I worked there by myself, sitting catatonic behind the counter for hours and hours with a book unread in my lap.
The American came back, unexpectedly betrothed to a man, and fired me because I could not pay for all the books I had made unsaleable by cracking their spines and wetting the pages. I did not want to be in Paris any more. The reason I had gone to London was for Peregrine’s funeral.
He had fallen down the central staircase at the Wallace Collection and died when he struck his head on a marble newel post at the bottom. One of his daughters gave the eulogy and looked earnest when she said it was exactly how he would have wanted to go. I wept, realising how much I loved him, that he was my truest friend, and that his daughter was right. If it hadn’t been him, Peregrine would have been acutely jealous of anyone who got to die dramatically, in public, surrounded by gilt furniture.
On my final day in Paris, I ate oysters at the out-of-favour restaurant he had taken me to on my thirtieth birthday. Walking, afterwards, from the Tuileries to the Picasso Museum, I thought about a time we had said goodbye at the Gare du Nord. It was evening, the sky was violet. Peregrine was wearing a long coat and a silk scarf and after the kiss on both cheeks, he dropped his hat on his head and turned towards the station. The impression of him, walking towards its blackened façade, the crowd of ordinary people parting in front of him, was so sublime I called out his name and he glanced back. Regretting it, even as I spoke, I said, ‘You are very beautiful.’ Peregrine touched the brim of his hat and the last thing he ever said to me was, ‘One doe
s one’s best.’
At the museum, I sat for a long time in front of a painting that was his favourite because, he said, it wasn’t typical and therefore the masses didn’t understand it. Before I left, I wrote on the back of my ticket and when the guard was not looking, I posted it behind the painting. I hope it is still there. It said, ‘A Better Companion Didn’t Exist For Girls, Heartbroken etc. etc.’
The daughters sold the pied-à-terre.
14
INGRID MET ME at the airport, said ‘Bonjour Tristesse,’ and hugged me for a long time. ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve been sitting on that forever.’ She let me go. ‘Hamish is in the car.’ On the way home she told me now that they had picked a date, fucking finally, I had two months to put on, preferably a stone, but even half a one would do. ‘You don’t have to get me a gravy boat as well.’
According to a subsequent visit to conceptioncalculator.com, Ingrid got pregnant for the first time between her April wedding and the cocktail reception that followed at Belgravia. Winsome had every bathroom in the house renovated immediately afterwards, despite only walking in on Ingrid and Hamish in one of them.
Before, in the moment of waiting to go into the church, my sister turned back to me and said, ‘I’m going to do Princess Diana walking.’
‘Really?’
‘I’ve come this far Martha.’
*
Ingrid had told me he was coming and even though the entire congregation turned around as we entered and my sister and I walked up the aisle watched by two hundred people, even though I did not find him until the final feet of it, I was only conscious of myself in terms of Patrick; whether I was, just then, being looked at by him, if so how he perceived me. My bearing and my expression, the direction of my gaze – it was all for Patrick.
Because. Over time, I’d thought less and less about Jonathan, realising after two years in Paris that I only thought about him when prompted by some external stimulus. And now, not even when a man in the street walked past me trailing Acqua di Parma.
But I did not think less about Patrick. I was right that it was in association with Jonathan to begin with and solely to replay, and compare and contrast, their separate methods of rejection. Then he dated Jessamine, and invaded my novel, and it wasn’t only then any more. Considered on its own, disconnected from Jonathan’s, Patrick’s crime no longer seemed like one and when I replayed it, I could see his goodness. And I was alone so much, there was comfort in remembering Patrick as good, in imagining his sameness, imagining he was with me as I walked along an unpopulated street or marked hours in an uncustomered shop. Reassurance and company, the relief of boredom, whenever I wanted to be at home – I thought about him more and more and could not sustain the belief that it was still in association with Jonathan, realising, after those two years, that it was instead of him altogether.
He was standing in the middle of the family row, next to Jessamine, visible when a couple cleaved to talk to the people on either side of them. He was wearing a dark suit. That was the only thing that was identifiably different from the various pictures of Patrick I held in my mind, which featured him always in jeans and a shirt, ironed badly and partially untucked. His face was the same; his hair was still black and still needed cutting. He was in those ways unchanged. But he had a different air, discernible even at a distance.
As the first hymn began, he passed an order of service to Oliver who was on the other side of Jessamine. The transaction required Patrick to reach behind her and retreating, he put his hand on the small of her back. He said something, which she inclined her head to hear and appeared to find very funny. Then with the same hand he reached into his breast pocket and took out a pair of glasses, opening them with some sort of unconscious flicking action, before casually taking up his own order of service. Patrick did nothing casually. No practice of his ever seemed innate. As I knew him, being physically proximate to a woman made him so nervous he could appear unwell. As the hymn was finishing, I was dismissed from the altar, and required to walk past him on the way to where I was meant to stand. He acknowledged me, smiling and adjusting his cuff at the same time. I’m not sure I smiled back or not as I continued to my place, trying to locate a description for the way he looked, self-conscious when it came to mind as though I’d spoken it aloud to the congregation. Patrick looked intensely masculine.
And the way I felt, seeing him for the first time in four years, was the way I felt every time I saw him in public all the years we were together. If I arrived somewhere and saw him already waiting for me, or walking in my direction, if he was talking to someone on the other side of a room – it wasn’t a thrill, a rush of affection, or pleasure. Then, in the church, I didn’t know what it was and spent all of the service trying to diagnose it. At the end of the service, Patrick smiled at me once more as I moved back to the altar and I felt it again, so much from my core that it was difficult to keep going, to follow Ingrid and Hamish out, Patrick further and further behind me.
*
At the reception, Jessamine told me and Nicholas and Oliver a story about the first time she went into town at night, as a teenager. Winsome was supposed to pick her up at nine but she wasn’t there. By nine-thirty all Jessamine’s friends had gone home and she was alone in a crowd at Leicester Square, embarrassed, then angry, then afraid because the only reason Winsome would be late was if she was dead.
Oliver said, ‘Yeah, even then she would have made it.’
Jessamine said exactly. ‘But then, at like ten, I saw her shoving through a group of drunk people, I honestly felt like I was going to vomit and cry, I was so relieved. It’s like, one second you can be alone and terrified in a crowd of scary idiots and the next you know you’re completely safe.’
Oliver asked where their mother had been.
Jessamine said she didn’t know. ‘That isn’t the point of the story.’
‘What was the point? It was bloody long.’
‘Oliver, shut up. I don’t know.’ She flicked her hair. ‘Just that feeling of like, thank God when you see that person. Martha, do you know what I’m talking about?’
I said yes. Thank God is how I felt when I saw Patrick that day. Not a thrill or affection or pleasure. Visceral relief.
*
Later, once Ingrid and Hamish had gone, the guests left, the staff quietly finished, Winsome and Rowland went to bed, and it was just my cousins, me and Patrick, sitting in the garden, in the dark, at a table that hadn’t been cleared of bottles and empty glasses. Apart from Patrick, we were all half-drunk, in wedding clothes and jackets found inside.
Lighting a cigarette, Oliver asked Patrick why in all the Christmases he came to when we were teenagers, he never drank the alcohol we stole from Rowland’s liquor cabinet or climbed out onto the roof to try Nicholas’s joints and why, when we were ordered out of the house during the Queen’s Speech, he’d still walk all the way around the gardens while we just sat on a park bench for an hour before going home. Why he felt like he had to be such a good boy when we were a pack of shits.
Patrick said, ‘You weren’t trying to be invited back.’
Three of us at once said God, very quietly.
*
Because it was early in the morning but still dark when I wanted to leave, Patrick said he would drive me home and for the minutes it took him to go back inside and get his coat, I was by myself in his car. If I could have called my sister just then, I would have asked if she wanted a rundown of its interior because she would have said yes and ‘I am dying’ when I told her about Patrick’s pocket tissues and pound coins in a little console tray, the roll of wine gums that he had opened without tearing the foil and closed carefully after eating one. ‘Martha, literally. Who eats one?’ ‘And,’ I would have said, ‘instead of the earth’s layers of shit in the footwell you would expect of a twenty-seven-year-old single man, there is nothing down here except vacuum lines in the carpet.’
I got out my phone and started a text, but didn’t send it because she was somewher
e with Hamish and I did not want her to know that I was sitting in a car at four o’clock in the morning, alone and tired, and trying to fend off my rising sadness at the thought that she had chosen Hamish over me, by going through Patrick’s glovebox.
He opened the door and got in while I was looking at his hospital photo-card. ‘Can I just say I had been awake for twenty-six hours when that was taken? That’s why I look like that. Sorry I took so long.’
The light came on when he started the car and Patrick glanced down for the gearstick. My gaze had followed his and in the second before it was dark again, I noticed his hand and his wrist, and the way the tendons moved as he tightened his grip, and as he let go and moved it to the wheel, the run of his forearm below his rolled-up shirtsleeve. When he became aware of it and went to say something, I reached forward and pushed all the buttons on the radio until music started playing. It was a country song, fading towards its finish.
I said, ‘Oh my gosh, Patrick. What station is this?’
He said, looking straight ahead, ‘It’s a CD,’ and tried to turn it off because I was laughing.
‘No don’t. Don’t. It’s amazing.’
After it finished, I told him we were going to need to have it again because we had missed its emotional apogee. Patrick said fine and skipped back.
I loved it and did not let the fact that I had never heard it before stop me from singing. Patrick claimed not to be enjoying my extemporaneous lyrics but he kept laughing. It finished and I tried to play it again but could not find the button. I was surprised by Patrick reaching for my hand and transferring it back to my lap. I asked if I could have a wine gum, already picking up the packet and tearing it open, the sensation of contact still on my skin.
