At Last: A Novel

by Edward St. Aubyn

  Really, thought Nancy, it was too ridiculous to turn to the Gershwin brothers when one’s own godfather was the divine Cole Porter. Why had Mummy wasted him on indifferent Eleanor when Nancy, who really appreciated his glamour and wit, might have had him all to herself? Not that Porgy and Bess didn’t have its glamorous side. She had gone to a big New York opening with Hansie and Dinkie Guttenburg and had the best time ever, going backstage to congratulate everybody. The real stars weren’t at all overawed by meeting a ferociously handsome German prince with a severe stutter, but you could tell that some of the little chorus girls didn’t know whether to curtsy, start a revolution, or poison his wife. She would definitely include that scene in her book, it was such a coming together of everything fun, unlike this drab funeral. Really, Eleanor was letting the family down and letting herself down as well.

  Annette was stunned, as she walked down the aisle towards the lectern, by the appropriateness, the serendipity and the synchronicity of that wonderful, spiritual song. Only yesterday she had been sitting with Seamus at their favourite power point on the terrace at Saint-Nazaire (actually they had decided that it was the heart chakra of the entire property, which made perfect sense when you thought about it), celebrating Eleanor’s unique gifts with a glass of red wine, and Seamus had mentioned her incredibly strong connection with the African-American people. He had been privileged to be present at several of Eleanor’s past-life regressions and it turned out that she had been a runaway slave during the American Civil War, trying to make her way to the abolitionist North with a young baby in her arms. She’d had the most terrible time of it, apparently, only travelling at night, in the dead of winter, hiding in ditches and living in fear of her life. And now, the very next day, at Eleanor’s funeral, a man who was obviously the descendant of a slave was singing those marvellous lyrics. Perhaps – Annette almost came to a halt, overwhelmed by further horizons of magical coincidence – perhaps he was the very baby Eleanor had carried to freedom through the ditches and the night, grown into a splendid man with a deep and resonant voice. It was almost unbearably beautiful, but she had a task to perform and with a regretful tug she extracted herself from the amazing dimension to which her train of thought had transported her, and stood squarely at the lectern, unfolding the pages she had been carrying in the pocket of her dress. She fingered the amber necklace she had bought at the Mother Meera gift shop when she had gone for darshan with the avatar of Talheim. Feeling mysteriously empowered by the silent Indian woman whose gaze of unconditional love had X-rayed her soul and set her off on the healing path she was still following today, Annette addressed the group of mourners in a voice torn between an expression of pained tenderness and the need for an adequate volume.

  ‘I’m going to start by reading a poem that I know was close to Eleanor’s heart. I introduced her to it, actually, and I know how much it spoke to her. I am sure that many of you will be familiar with it. It’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats.’ She started reading in a loud lilting whisper.

  I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

  And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

  Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,

  And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

  Whereas it was sophisticated enough to order nine oysters, thought Nicholas, there was something utterly absurd about nine bean rows. Oysters naturally came in dozens and half-dozens – for all he knew, they grew on the seabed in dozens and half-dozens – and so there was something understandably elegant about ordering nine of them. Beans, on the other hand, came in vague fields and profuse heaps, making the prissy precision of nine ridiculous. At the very least it conjured up a dissonant vision of an urban allotment in which there was hardly likely to be room for a clay and wattle cabin and a bee-loud glade. No doubt the Spiritual Tool Box thought that ‘Innisfree’ was the climax of Yeats’s talent, and no doubt the Celtic Twilight, with its wilful innocence and its tawdry effects, was perfectly suited to Eleanor’s other-worldly worldview, but in reality the Irish Bard had only emerged from an entirely forgettable mauve mist when he became the mouthpiece for the aristocratic ideal. ‘Surely among a rich man’s flowering lawns, / Amid the rustle of his planted hills, / Life overflows without ambitious pains; / And rains down life until the basin spills.’ Those were the only lines of Yeats worth memorizing, which was just as well since they were the only ones he could remember. Those lines inaugurated a meditation on the ‘bitter and violent’ men who performed great deeds and built great houses, and of what happened to that greatness as it turned over time into mere privilege: ‘And maybe the great-grandson of that house, / For all its bronze and marble,’s but a mouse.’ A risky line if it weren’t for all the great mouse-infested houses one had known. That was why it was so essential, as Yeats was suggesting, to remain bitter and angry, in order to ward off the debilitating effects of inherited glory.

  Annette’s voice redoubled its excruciated gentleness for the second stanza.

  And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

  Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

  There midnight’s all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

  And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

  Peace comes dropping slow, thought Henry, how beautiful. The lines lengthening with the growing tranquillity, and the deepening jet lag, and his head dropping slow, dropping slow onto his chest. He needed an espresso, or the veils of morning were going to shroud his mind entirely. He was here for Eleanor, Eleanor on the lake at Fairley, alone in a rowing boat, refusing to come back in, everybody standing on the shore shouting, ‘Come back! Your mother’s here! Your mother’s arrived!’ For a girl who was too shy to look you in the eye, she could be as stubborn as a mule.

  Where the cricket sings, thought Patrick, is where you live with Seamus in my old home. He imagined the shrill grating coming from the grass and the gradual build-up, cicada by cicada, of pulsing waves of sound, like auditory heat shimmering over the dry land.

  Mary was relieved that plenty o’ nuthin’ seemed to have gone down well with Patrick, and she felt that the make-believe simplicity of ‘Innisfree’ was a charming reminder of Eleanor’s yearning to exclude the dark complexities of life at any price. What Mary couldn’t relax about was the address she had asked Annette to make. And yet what could she do? There was no point in denying that side of Eleanor’s life and Annette was better qualified than anyone else in the room to talk about it. At least it would give Patrick something to rant about for the next few days. She listened to Annette’s singsong, cradle-rocking delivery of the final stanza of ‘Innisfree’ with growing dread.

  I will arise and go now, for always night and day

  I hear the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

  While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

  I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

  Annette closed her eyes and reached again for her amber necklace. ‘Om namo Matta Meera,’ she murmured, re-empowering herself for the speech she was about to make.

  ‘All of you will have known Eleanor in different ways, and many of you for much longer than me,’ she began with an understanding smile. ‘I can only talk about the Eleanor that I knew, and while I try to do justice to the wonderful woman that she was, I hope you will hold the Eleanor that you knew in what Yeats calls the deep heart’s core. But at the same time, if I show you a side of her that you didn’t know, all I would ask is that you let her in, let her in and let her join the Eleanor that each of you is holding in your heart.’

  Oh, Jesus, thought Patrick, let me out of here. He imagined himself disappearing through the floor with a shovel and some bunk-bed slats, the theme music of The Great Escape humming in the air. He was crawling under the crematorium through fragile tunnels, when he felt himself being dragged backwards by Annette’s maddening voice.

  ‘I first met Eleanor w
hen a group of us from the Dublin Women’s Healing Drum Circle were invited down to Saint-Nazaire, her wonderful house in Provence, which I’m sure many of you are familiar with. As we were coming down the drive in our minibus, I caught my first glimpse of Eleanor sitting on the wall of the big pond, with her hands tucked under her thighs, for all the world like a lonely young child staring down at her dangling shoes. By the time we arrived in front of the pond she was literally greeting us with open arms, but I never lost that first impression of her, just as I think she never lost a connection to the child-like quality that made her believe so passionately that justice could be achieved, that consciousness could be transformed and that there was goodness to be found in every person and every situation, however hidden it might seem at first sight.’

  Of course consciousness can be transformed, thought Erasmus, but what is it? If I pass an electric current through my body, or bury my nose in the soft petals of a rose, or impersonate Greta Garbo, I transform my consciousness; in fact it is impossible to stop transforming consciousness. What I can’t do is describe what it is in itself: it’s too close to see, too ubiquitous to grasp, and too transparent to point to.

  ‘Eleanor was one of the most generous people it has been my privilege to know. You only had to hint that you needed something and if it was in her power to provide it, she would leap at the opportunity with an enthusiasm that made it look as if it was a relief to her rather than to the person who was asking.’

  Patrick imagined the simple charm of the dialogue.

  Seamus: I was thinking that it would be, eh, consciousness-raising, like, to own a private hamlet surrounded by vines and olive groves, somewhere sunny.

  Eleanor: Oh, how amazing! I’ve got one of those. Would you like it?

  Seamus: Oh, thank you very much, I’m sure. Sign here and here and here.

  Eleanor: What a relief. Now I have nothing.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Annette, ‘was too much trouble for her. Service to others was her life’s purpose, and it was awe-inspiring to see the lengths she would go to in her quest to help people achieve their dreams. A torrent of grateful letters and postcards used to arrive at the Foundation from all over the world. A young Croatian scientist who was working on a “zero-energy fuel cell” – don’t ask me what that is, but it’s going to save the planet – is one example. A Peruvian archaeologist who had uncovered amazing evidence that the Incas were originally from Egypt and continued to communicate with the mother civilization through what he called “solar language”. An old lady who had been working for forty years on a universal dictionary of sacred symbols and just needed a little extra help to bring this incredibly valuable book to completion. All of them had received a helping hand from Eleanor. But you mustn’t think that Eleanor was only concerned with the higher echelons of science and spirituality, she was also a marvellously practical person who knew the value of a kitchen extension for a growing family, or a new car for a friend living in the depths of the country.’

  What about a sister who was running out of cash? thought Nancy grumpily. First they had taken away her credit cards, and then they had taken away her chequebook, and now she had to go in person to the Morgan Guaranty in Fifth Avenue to collect her monthly pocket money. They said it was the only way to stop her running up debts, but the best way to stop her running up debts was to give her more money.

  ‘There was a wonderful Jesuit gentleman,’ Annette continued, ‘well, he was an ex-Jesuit actually, although we still called him Father Tim. He had come to believe that Catholic dogma was too narrow and that we should embrace all the religious traditions of the world. He eventually became the first Englishman to be accepted as an ayahuascera – a Brazilian shaman – among one of the most authentic tribes in Amazonia. Anyhow, Father Tim wrote to Eleanor, who had known him in his old Farm Street days, saying that his village needed a motor-boat to go down to the local trading post, and of course she responded with her usual impulsive generosity, and sent a cheque by return. I shall never forget the expression on her face when she received Father Tim’s reply. Inside the envelope were three brightly coloured toucan feathers and an equally colourful note explaining that in recognition of her gift to the Ayoreo people, a ritual had been performed in Father Tim’s far-away village inducting her into the tribe as a “Rainbow Warrior”. He said that he had refrained from mentioning that she was a woman, since the Ayoreo took a “somewhat unreconstructed view of the gentler sex, not unreminiscent of that taken by old Mother Church”, and that he would have “suffered the fate of St Sebastian” if he “admitted to his ruse”. He said that he intended to confess on his deathbed, so as to help move the tribe forward into a new era of harmony between the male and female principles, so necessary to the salvation of the world. Anyhow,’ sighed Annette, recognizing that she had drifted from her written text, but taking this to be a sign of inspiration, ‘the effect on Eleanor was quite literally magical. She wore the toucan feathers around her neck until they sadly disintegrated, and for a few weeks she told all and sundry that she was an Ayoreo Rainbow Warrior. She was for all the world like the little girl who goes to a new school and comes home one day transformed because she has made a new best friend.’

  Although arrested development was his stock in trade and he made a habit of shutting down his psychoanalytic ear when he was not working, Johnny could not help being struck by the ferocious tenacity of Eleanor’s resistance to growing up. He was as guilty as anyone of over-quoting good old Eliot’s ‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality’, but he felt that in this case the evasiveness had been uninterrupted. He could remember first meeting Eleanor when Patrick invited him to Saint-Nazaire for the school holidays. Even then she had a habit of lapsing into baby talk, very disconcerting for adolescents distancing themselves from childhood. The tragedy was that five or perhaps ten years of decent five-day-a-week analysis could have mitigated the problem significantly.

  ‘That was the sort of breadth that Eleanor showed in her kindness to others,’ said Annette, sensing that it would soon be time to draw her remarks to a conclusion. She put aside a couple of pages she had failed to read during her Amazonian improvisation, and looked down at the last page to remind herself what she had written. It struck her as a little formal now that she had entered into a more exploratory style, but there were one or two things embedded in the last paragraph that she must remember to say.

  Oh, please get on with it, thought Patrick. Charles Bronson was having a panic attack in a collapsing tunnel, Alsatians were barking behind the barbed wire, searchlights were weaving over the breached ground, but soon he would be running through the woods, dressed as a German bank clerk and heading for the railway station with some identity papers forged at the expense of Donald Pleasance’s eyesight. It would all be over soon, he just had to keep staring at his knees for a few minutes longer.

  ‘I would like to read you a short passage from the Rig Veda,’ said Annette. ‘It quite literally leapt at me from the shelf when I was in the library at the Foundation, looking for a book that would evoke something of Eleanor’s amazing spiritual depths.’ She resumed her sing-song reading voice.

  She follows to the goal of those who are passing on beyond, she is the first in the eternal succession of the dawns that are coming, – Usha widens bringing out that which lives, awakening someone who was dead…What is her scope when she harmonizes with the dawns that shone out before and those that now must shine? She desires the ancient mornings and fulfils their light; projecting forwards her illumination she enters into communion with the rest that are to come.

  ‘Eleanor was a firm believer in reincarnation, and not only did she regard suffering as the refining fire that would burn away the impediments to a still higher spiritual evolution, but she was also privileged to have something very rare indeed: a specific vision of how and where she would be reincarnated. At the Foundation we have what we call an “Ah-ha Box” for those little epiphanies and moments of insight when we think, “Ah-ha!” We all have the
m, don’t we? But the trouble is that they slip away during the course of a busy day and so Seamus, the Chief Facilitator of the Foundation, invented the “Ah-ha Box” so that we could write down our thoughts, pop them in the box and share them in the evening.’

  Annette felt the lure of anecdote and digression, resisted for a few seconds, and then caved in. ‘We used to have a trainee shaman with a shall I say “challenging” personality, and he was in the habit of having about a dozen Ah-ha moments a day. Many of them turned out to be covert, or not so covert, attacks on other people in the Foundation. Well, one evening when we had all waded through at least ten of his so-called epiphanies, Seamus said, in his incomparably humorous way, “You know, Dennis, one man’s Ah-ha moment is another man’s Ho-ho moment.” And I remember Eleanor simply cracking up. I can still see her now. She covered her mouth because she thought it would be unkind to laugh too much, but she couldn’t help herself. I don’t think any portrait of Eleanor would be complete without that naughty giggle and that quick, trusting smile.

  ‘Anyhow,’ said Annette, recovering her sense of direction for a final assault, ‘as I was saying: one day, after her first stroke but before she moved into the French nursing home, we found this amazing note from Eleanor in the Ah-ha Box. The note said that she had been on a vision quest and she had seen that she would be returning to Saint-Nazaire in her next lifetime. She would come back as a young shaman and Seamus and I would be very old by then, and we would hand the Foundation back to her as she had handed it to us in what she called a “seamless continuity”. And I would like to end by asking you to hold that phrase, “seamless continuity”, in your minds, while we sit here for a few moments in silence and pray for Eleanor’s swift return.’