At Last: A Novel

by Edward St. Aubyn

  ‘Don’t worry, Nick, I’ll be with you in the ambulance,’ a voice whispered in his ear.

  It was the Irish woman. With him in the ambulance! Gouging his eyes out, fishing around for his kidneys with her nimble fingers, taking a hacksaw out of her spiritual tool box. He wanted to be saved. He wanted his mother; not the one he had actually had, but the real one he had never met. He felt a pair of hands grip his feet and another pair of hands slip around his shoulders. Hung, drawn, and quartered: publicly executed for all his crimes. He deserved it. Lord have mercy on his soul. Lord have mercy.

  The two ambulance men looked at each other and on a nod lifted both ends of Nicholas at once and placed him on the stretcher they had spread out beside him.

  ‘I’m going with him in the ambulance,’ said Annette.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Patrick. ‘Will you call me from the hospital if there’s any news?’

  ‘Surely,’ said Annette. ‘Oh, it’s a terrible shock for you,’ she said, giving Patrick an unexpected hug. ‘I’d better go.’

  ‘Is that woman going with him?’ asked Nancy.

  ‘Yes, isn’t it kind of her?’

  ‘But she doesn’t even know him. I’ve known Nicholas forever. First it’s my sister and now it’s practically my oldest friend. It’s too impossible.’

  ‘Why don’t you follow her?’ said Patrick.

  ‘There is one thing I could do for him,’ said Nancy, with a hint of indignation, as if it was a bit much to expect her to be the only person to show any real consideration. ‘Miguel, his poor driver, is waiting outside without the least idea of what’s happened. I’ll go and break the news to him, and take the car on to the hospital, so it’s there if Nicholas needs it.’

  Nancy could think of at least three places she might stop on the way. The examination was bound to take ages, in fact Nicholas might already be dead, and it would help to take poor Miguel’s mind off the dreadful situation if he drove her around all afternoon. She had no cash for taxis, and her swollen feet were already bulging out of the ruthlessly elegant inside edges of her two-thousand-dollar shoes. People said she was incorrigibly extravagant, but the shoes would have cost two thousand dollars each, if she hadn’t bought them parsimoniously in a sale. She had no prospect of getting any cash for the rest of the month, punished by her beastly bankers for her ‘credit history’. Her credit history, as far as she was concerned, was that Mummy had written a lousy will that allowed her evil stepfather to steal all of Nancy’s money. Her heroic response had been to spend as if justice had been done, as if she were restoring the natural order of the world by cheating shopkeepers, landlords, decorators, florists, hairdressers, butchers, jewellers, and garage owners, by withholding tips from coatcheck girls, and by engineering rows with staff so that she could sack them without pay.

  On her monthly trip to the Morgan Guaranty – where Mummy had opened an account for her on her twelfth birthday – she collected fifteen thousand dollars in cash. In her reduced circumstances, the walk to Sixty-Ninth Street was a Venus flytrap flushed with colour and shining with adhesive dew. She often arrived home with half her month’s money spent; sometimes she counted out the entire sum and, seeming mystified by the missing two or three thousand, managed to walk away with a pink marble obelisk or a painting of a monkey in a velvet jacket, promising to come back that afternoon, marking another black spot in the complex maze of her debt, another detour on her city walks. She always gave her real telephone number, with one digit changed, her real address, one block uptown or downtown, and an entirely false name – obviously. Sometimes she called herself Edith Jonson, or Mary de Valençay, to remind herself that she had nothing to be ashamed of, that there had been a time when she could have bought a whole city block, never mind a bauble in one of its shops.

  By the middle of the month she was invariably flat broke. At that point she fell back on the kindness of her friends. Some had her to stay, some let her add her lunches and her dinners to their tabs at Jimmy’s or Le Jardin, and others simply wrote her a large cheque, reflecting that Nancy had barged to the front of the queue again and that the victims of floods, tsunamis and earthquakes would simply have to wait another year. Sometimes she created a crisis that forced her trustees to release more capital in order to keep her out of prison, driving her income inexorably lower. For Eleanor’s funeral, she was staying with her great friends the Tescos, in their divine apartment in Belgrave Square, a lateral conversion across five buildings on two floors. Harry Tesco had already paid for her air ticket – first class – but she was going to have to break down sobbing in Cynthia’s little sitting room before going to the opera tonight, and tell her the terrible pressure she was under. The Tescos were as rich as God and it really made Nancy quite angry that she had to do anything so humiliating to get more money out of them.

  ‘You couldn’t drop me off on the way, could you?’ Kettle asked Nancy.

  ‘It’s Nicholas’s private car, dear, not a limo service,’ said Nancy, appalled by the indecency of the suggestion. ‘It’s really too upsetting when he’s so ill.’

  Nancy kissed Patrick and Mary goodbye and hurried away.

  ‘It’s St Thomas’ Hospital, by the way,’ Patrick called after her. ‘The ambulance man told me it’s the best place for “clot-busters”.’

  ‘Has he had a stroke?’ asked Nancy.

  ‘Heart attack, they could tell from the cold nose – the extremities go cold.’

  ‘Oh, don’t,’ said Nancy, ‘I can’t bear to think about it.’

  She set off down the stairs with no time to waste: Cynthia had made her an appointment at the hairdresser’s using the magic words, ‘charge it to me’.

  When Nancy had left, Henry offered the aggrieved Kettle a lift. After only a few minutes of complaint about the rudeness of Patrick’s aunt, she accepted, and said goodbye to Mary and the children. Henry promised to call Patrick the next day, and accompanied Kettle downstairs. To their surprise they found Nancy still standing on the pavement outside the club.

  ‘Oh, Cabbage,’ she said with a wail of childish frustration, ‘Nicholas’s car has gone.’

  ‘You can come with us,’ said Henry simply.

  Kettle and Nancy sat in the back of the car in hostile silence. Up in front Henry told the driver to go to Princes Gate first, then on to St Thomas’ Hospital and finally back to the hotel. Nancy suddenly realized what she had done by accepting a ride. She had forgotten about Nicholas altogether. Now she was going to have to borrow money from Henry to catch a taxi back to the hairdresser’s from some godforsaken hospital in the middle of nowhere. It was enough to make you scream.

  Nicholas’s fall, the commotion that followed, the arrival of the ambulance men and the dispersal of some of the guests had all eluded Erasmus’s attention. When Fleur had burst into song in the middle of her conversation with Nicholas, the words ‘re-clothe us in our rightful minds’ sent a little shock through him, like a piercing dog whistle, inaudible to the others but pitched perfectly for his own preoccupations, it recalled him to his true master, insisting that he leave the muddy fields of inter-subjectivity and the intriguing traces of other minds for the cool ledge of the balcony where he might be allowed, for a few moments, to think about thinking. Social life had a tendency to press him up against his basic rejection of the proposition that an individual identity was defined by turning experience into an ever more patterned and coherent story. It was in reflection and not in narrative that he found authenticity. The pressure to render his past in anecdote, or indeed to imagine the future in terms of passionate aspirations, made him feel clumsy and false. He knew that his inability to be excited by the memory of his first day at school, or to project a cumulative and increasingly solid self that wanted to learn the harpsichord, or longed to live in the Chilterns, or hoped to see Christ’s blood streaming in the firmament, made his personality seem unreal to other people, but it was precisely the unreality of the personality that was so clear to him. His authentic self was the attentive
witness to a variety of inconstant impressions that could not, in themselves, enhance or detract from his sense of identity.

  Not only did he have an ontological problem with the generally unquestioned narrative assumptions of ordinary social life but he also, at this particular party, found himself questioning the ethical assumption, shared by everyone except Annette (and not shared by Annette for reasons that were in themselves problematic), that Eleanor Melrose had been wrong to disinherit her son. Setting aside for a moment the difficulties of judging the usefulness of the Foundation she had endowed, there was an undeniable potential Utilitarian merit to the wider distribution of her resources. Mrs Melrose might at least count on John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham and Peter Singer and R. M. Hare to look sympathetically on her case. If a thousand people, over the years, emerged from the Foundation having discovered, by whatever esoteric means, a sense of purpose that made them into more altruistic and conscientious citizens, would the benefit to society not outweigh the distress caused to a family of four people (with one barely conscious of the loss) who had expected to own a house and turned out not to? In the maelstrom of perspectives could a sound moral judgment be made from any other point of view but that of the strictest impartiality? Whether such a point of view could ever be established was another question to which the answer was almost certainly negative. Nevertheless, even if Utilitarian arithmetic, based on the notion of an unobtainable impartiality, were set aside on the grounds that motivation was desire-based, as Hume had argued, the autonomy of an individual’s preferences for one kind of good over another still offered a strong ethical case for Eleanor’s philanthropic choice.

  There had been a widespread sense of relief when Fleur accompanied Nicholas’s stretcher downstairs and appeared to have left the party, but ten minutes later she reappeared resolutely in the doorway. Seeing Erasmus leaning on the balustrade staring pensively down at the gravel path, she immediately expressed her alarm to Patrick.

  ‘What’s that man doing on the balcony?’ she asked sharply, like a nanny who despairs of leaving the nursery for even a few minutes. ‘Is he going to jump?’

  ‘I don’t think he was planning to,’ said Patrick, ‘but I’m sure you could persuade him.’

  ‘The last thing we need is another death on our hands,’ said Fleur.

  ‘I’ll go and check,’ said Robert.

  ‘Me too,’ said Thomas, dashing through the French windows.

  ‘You mustn’t jump,’ he explained, ‘because the last thing we need is another death on our hands.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of jumping,’ said Erasmus.

  ‘What were you thinking about?’ asked Robert.

  ‘Whether doing some good to a lot of people is better than doing a lot of good to a few,’ Erasmus replied.

  ‘The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one,’ said Robert solemnly, making a strange gesture with his right hand.

  Thomas, recognizing the allusion to the Vulcan logic of Star Trek II, made the same gesture with his hand.

  ‘Live long and prosper,’ he said, smiling uncontrollably at the thought of growing pointed ears.

  Fleur strode onto the balcony and addressed Erasmus without any trivial preliminaries.

  ‘Have you tried Amitriptyline?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve never heard of him,’ said Erasmus. ‘What’s he written?’

  Fleur realized that Erasmus was much more confused than she had originally imagined.

  ‘You’d better come inside,’ she said coaxingly.

  Glancing into the room Erasmus noticed that the majority of the guests had left and assumed that Fleur was hinting tactfully that he should be on his way.

  ‘Yes, you’re probably right,’ said Erasmus.

  Fleur reflected that she had a real talent for dealing with people in extreme mental states and that she should probably be put in charge of the depression wing of a psychiatric hospital, or indeed of a national policy unit.

  As he went indoors, Erasmus decided not to get entangled in more incoherent social life, but simply to say goodbye to Mary and then leave immediately. As he leant over to kiss her, he wondered if a person of the predominantly narrative type would desire Mary because he had desired her in the past, and whether he would be imagining that fragment of the past being transported, as it were, in a time machine to the present moment. This fantasy reminded him of Wittgenstein’s seminal remark that ‘nothing is more important in teaching us to understand the concepts we have than constructing fictitious ones’. In his own case, his desire, such as it was, had the character of an inconsequential present-tense fact, like the scent of a flower.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ said Mary.

  ‘Not at all,’ mumbled Erasmus, and after squeezing Mary’s shoulder lightly, he left without saying goodbye to anyone else.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Fleur to Patrick, ‘I’ll follow him at a discreet distance.’

  ‘You’re his guardian angel,’ said Patrick, struggling to disguise his relief at getting rid of Fleur so easily.

  Mary followed Fleur politely onto the landing.

  ‘I haven’t got time to chat,’ said Fleur, ‘that poor man’s life is in danger.’

  Mary knew better than to contradict a woman of Fleur’s strong convictions. ‘Well, it’s been a pleasure to meet such an old friend of Eleanor’s.’

  ‘I’m sure she’s guiding me,’ said Fleur. ‘I can feel the connection. She was a saint; she’ll show me how to help him.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ said Mary.

  ‘God bless you,’ Fleur called out as she set off down the stairs at a cracking pace, determined not to lose track of Erasmus’s suicidal progress through the streets of London.

  ‘What a woman!’ said Johnny, watching through the doorway as Fleur left. ‘I can’t help feeling that somebody should be following her rather than the other way round.’

  ‘Count me out,’ said Patrick, ‘I’ve had an overdose of Fleur. It’s a wonder she was ever allowed out of the Priory.’

  ‘She looks to me as if she’s just at the beginning of a manic episode,’ said Johnny. ‘I imagine she was enjoying it too much and decided not to take her pills.’

  ‘Well, let’s hope she changes her mind before she “saves” Erasmus,’ said Patrick. ‘He might not survive if she rugby tackles him on a bridge, or leaps on him while he’s trying to cross the road.’

  ‘God!’ said Mary, laughing with relief and amazement. ‘I wasn’t sure she was ever going to leave. I hope Erasmus made it round the corner before she got outside.’

  ‘I’m going to have to leave myself,’ said Johnny. ‘I’ve got a patient at four o’clock.’

  He said goodbye to everyone, kissing Mary, hugging the boys, and promising to call Patrick later.

  Suddenly the family was alone, apart from the waitress, who was clearing up the glasses and putting the unopened bottles back into a cardboard box in the corner.

  Patrick felt a familiar combination of intimacy and desolation, being together and knowing they were about to part.

  ‘Are you coming back with us?’ asked Thomas.

  ‘No,’ said Patrick, ‘I have to go and work.’

  ‘Please,’ said Thomas, ‘I want you to tell me a story like you used to.’

  ‘I’ll see you at the weekend,’ said Patrick.

  Robert stood by, knowing more than his brother but not enough to understand.

  ‘You can come and have dinner with us if you like,’ said Mary.

  Patrick wanted to accept and wanted to refuse, wanted to be alone and wanted company, wanted to be close to Mary and to get away from her, wanted the lovely waitress to think that he led an independent life and wanted his children to feel that they were part of a harmonious family.

  ‘I think I’ll just…crash out,’ he said, buried under the debris of contradictions and doomed to regret any choice he made. ‘It’s been a long day.’

  ‘Don’t worry if you change your mind,’ said Mary. />
  ‘In fact,’ said Thomas, ‘you should change your mind, because that’s what it’s for!’

  14

  As he laboured up to his bedsit, a miniature roof conversion with sloping walls on the fifth floor of a narrow Victorian building in Kensington, Patrick seemed to regress through evolutionary history, growing more stooped with each flight, until he was resting his knuckles on the carpet of the top landing, like an early hominid that has not yet learned to stand upright on the grasslands of Africa and only makes rare and nervous expeditions down from the safety of the trees.

  ‘Fuck,’ he muttered, as he got his breath back and raised himself to the level of the keyhole.

  It was out of the question to invite that adorable waitress back to his hovel, although her telephone number was nestling in his pocket, next to his disturbingly thumping heart. She was too young to have to squeeze herself out from under the corpse of a middle-aged man who had died in the midst of trying to justify her wearisome climb to his inadequate flat. Patrick collapsed onto the bed and embraced a pillow, imagining its tired feathers and yellowing pillowcase transformed into her smooth warm neck. The anxious aphrodisiac of a recent death; the long gallery of substitutes substituting for substitutes; the tantalizing thirst for consolation: it was all so familiar, but he reminded himself grimly that he had come back to his non-home, now that he was alone at last, in order to be unconsoled. This flat, the bachelor pad of a nonbachelor, the student digs of a non-student, was as good a place as he could wish for to practise being unconsoled. The lifelong tension between dependency and independence, between home and adventure, could only be resolved by being at home everywhere, by learning to cast an equal gaze on the raging self-importance of each mood and incident. He had some way to go. He only had to run out of his favourite bath oil to feel like taking a sledgehammer to the bath and begging a doctor for a Valium script.