At Last Read online

  ‘I mean,’ said Thomas, looking very philosophical, ‘I always think the trouble with God is: who created God? And,’ he added, getting into the swing of it, ‘who created whoever created God?’

  ‘Ah, an infinite regress,’ said Erasmus sadly.

  ‘Okay, then,’ said Thomas, ‘who created infinite regress?’ He looked up at his father to check that he was arguing philosophically.

  Patrick gave him an encouraging smile.

  ‘He’s frightfully clever, isn’t he?’ said Fleur. ‘Unlike my lot: they could hardly string a sentence together until they were well into their teens, and then it was only to insult me – and their father, who deserved it of course. Absolute monsters.’

  Mary slipped away with Thomas and Erasmus, leaving Patrick stranded with Fleur.

  ‘That’s teenagers for you,’ said Patrick, with resolute blandness. ‘So, how did you know Eleanor?’

  ‘I adored your mother. I think she was one of the very few good people I ever met. She saved my life really – I suppose it must have been thirty years ago – by giving me a job in one of the charity shops she used to run for the Save the Children Fund.’

  ‘I remember those shops,’ said Patrick, noticing that Fleur was gathering momentum and didn’t want to be interrupted.

  ‘I was thought by some people,’ Fleur motored on, ‘well, by everyone except your mother really, to be unemployable, because of my episodes, but I simply had to get out of the house and do something, so your mother was an absolute godsend. She had me packing up second-hand clothes in no time. We used to send them off to the shop we thought they’d do best in, keeping the really good ones for our shop in Launceston Place, just round the corner from your house.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Patrick quickly.

  ‘We used to have such fun,’ Fleur reminisced, ‘we were like a couple of schoolgirls, holding up the clothes and saying, “Richmond, I think,” or “Very Cheltenham.” Sometimes we’d both shout, “Rochdale!” or, “Hemel Hempstead!” at exactly the same time. Oh, how we laughed. Eventually your mother trusted me enough to put me on the till and let me run the shop for the whole day, and that, I’m afraid, is when I had one of my episodes. We had a fur coat in that morning – it was the time when people started to get paint thrown at them if they wore one – an amazing sable coat – I think that’s what tipped me over the edge. I was gripped by a need to do something really glamorous, so I shut up the shop and took all the money from the till and put on the sable coat – it wasn’t very suitable at the height of June, but I had to wear it. Anyway, I went out and hailed a cab and said, “Take me to the Ritz!”’

  Patrick looked around the room anxiously, wondering if he would ever get away.

  ‘They tried to take my coat off me,’ Fleur accelerated, ‘but I wouldn’t hear of it, and so I sat in the Palm Court in a heap of sable, drinking champagne cocktails and talking to anyone who would listen, until a frightfully pompous head waiter asked me to leave because I was being “a nuisance to the other guests”! Can you imagine the rudeness of it? Well, anyway, the money I’d taken from the till turned out not to be enough for the enormous bill and so the wretched hotel insisted on keeping the coat, which turned out to be very inconvenient because the lady who had given it to us came back and said she’d changed her mind…’

  By now Fleur was falling over herself to keep up with her thoughts. Patrick tried to catch Mary’s eye, but she seemed to be deliberately ignoring him.

  ‘All I can say is that your mother was absolutely marvellous. She went and paid the bill and rescued the coat. She said she was used to it because she was always clearing her father’s bar bills in grand places, and she didn’t mind at all. She was an absolute saint and let me go on running the shop when she was away, saying that she was sure I wouldn’t do it again – which I’m afraid to say I did, more than once.’

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ asked Patrick, turning back towards the waitress with renewed longing. Perhaps he should run away with her after all. He wanted to kiss the pulse in her long neck.

  ‘I shouldn’t really but I’ll have a gin and tonic,’ said Fleur, hardly pausing before she continued. ‘You must be very proud of your mother. She did an enormous amount of practical good, the only sort of good there is really – touched on hundreds of lives, threw herself into those shops with tremendous energy – I firmly believe she could have been an entrepreneur, if she had needed the money – the way she used to set off to the Harrogate Trade Fair with a spring in her step.’

  Patrick smiled at the waitress and then looked down at the tablecloth bashfully. When he looked up again she was smiling at him with sympathy and laughter in her eyes. She clearly understood everything. She was wonderfully intelligent as well as impossibly lovely. The more Fleur talked about Eleanor, the more he wanted to start a new life with the waitress. He took the gin and tonic from her tenderly and handed it on to the loquacious Fleur, who seemed to be saying, ‘Well, do you?’ for reasons he couldn’t fathom.

  ‘Do I what?’ he asked.

  ‘Feel proud of your mother?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Patrick.

  ‘What do you mean, you “suppose so”? You’re worse than my children. Absolute monsters.’

  ‘Listen, it’s been a great pleasure to meet you,’ said Patrick, ‘and I expect we’ll talk again, but I probably ought to circulate.’

  He moved away from Fleur unceremoniously and, wanting to look as if he had a firm intention, walked towards Julia, who stood alone by the window drinking a glass of white wine.

  ‘Help!’ said Patrick.

  ‘Oh, hi,’ said Julia, ‘I was just staring out of the window vacantly, but not so vacantly that I didn’t see you flirting with that pretty waitress.’

  ‘Flirting? I didn’t say a word.’

  ‘You didn’t have to, darling. A dog doesn’t have to say a word when it sits next to us in the dining room making little whimpering sounds while strings of saliva dangle down to the carpet; we still know what it wants.’

  ‘I admit that I was vaguely attracted to her, but it was only after that grey-haired lunatic started talking to me that she began to look like the last overhanging tree before the roar of the rapids.’

  ‘How poetic. You’re still trying to be saved.’

  ‘Not at all; I’m trying not to want to be saved.’

  ‘Progress.’

  ‘Relentless forward motion,’ said Patrick.

  ‘So who is this lunatic who forced you to flirt with the waitress?’

  ‘Oh, she used to work in my mother’s charity shop years ago. Her experience of Eleanor was so different from mine, it made me realize that I’m not in charge of the meaning of my mother’s life, and that I’m deluded to think that I can come to some magisterial conclusion about it.’

  ‘Surely you could come to some conclusion about what it means to you.’

  ‘I’m not even sure if that’s true,’ said Patrick. ‘I’ve been noticing today how inconclusive I feel about both my parents. There isn’t any final truth; it’s more like being able to get off on different floors of the same building.’

  ‘It sounds awfully tiring,’ Julia complained. ‘Wouldn’t it be simpler to just loathe their guts?’

  Patrick burst out laughing.

  ‘I used to think that I was detached about my father. I thought that detachment was the great virtue, without the moral condescension built into forgiveness, but the truth is that I feel everything: contempt, rage, pity, terror, tenderness, and detachment.’

  ‘Tenderness?’

  ‘At the thought of how unhappy he was. When I had sons of my own and felt the strength of my instinct to protect them, I was freshly shocked that he had deliberately inflicted harm on his son, and then the hatred returned.’

  ‘So you’ve pretty much abandoned detachment.’

  ‘On the contrary, I just recognize how many things there are to be detached about. The incandescent hatred and the pure terror don’t invalidate the detachmen
t, they give it a chance to expand.’

  ‘The StairMasters of detachment,’ said Julia.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I wonder if I’m allowed to smoke out here,’ said Julia, opening the French windows and stepping outside. Patrick followed her onto the narrow balcony and sat on the edge of the white stucco balustrade. As she took out her packet of Camel Blue, his eyes traced the elegant profile he had often studied from a neighbouring pillow, now set against the restrained promise of the still-leafless trees. He watched Julia kiss the filter of her cigarette and suck the swaying flame of her lighter into the tightly packed tobacco. After the first immense drag, smoke flowed over her upper lip, only to be drawn back through her nose into her expanding lungs and eventually released, at first in a single thick stream and then in the little puffs and misshapen rings and drifting walls formed by her smoky words.

  ‘So, have you been working out especially hard on your Inner StairMaster today?’

  ‘I’ve felt a strange mixture of elation and free-fall. There’s something cool and objective about death compared to the savage privacy of dying which my mother’s illness forced me to imagine over the last four years. In a sense I can think about her clearly for the first time, away from the vortex of an empathy that was neither compassionate nor salutary, but a kind of understudy to her own horror.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be even better not to think about her at all?’ said Julia with a second languorous gulp of cigarette smoke.

  ‘No, not today,’ said Patrick, suddenly repelled by Julia’s enamelled surface.

  ‘Oh, of course, not today – of all days,’ said Julia, sensing his defection. ‘I just meant eventually.’

  ‘The people who tell us to “get over it” and “get on with it” are the least able to have the direct experience that they berate navel-gazers for avoiding,’ said Patrick, in the prosecuting style he adopted when defending himself. ‘The “it” they’re “getting on with” is a ghostly re-enactment of unreflecting habits. Not thinking about something is the surest way to remain under its influence.’

  ‘It’s a fair cop, guv,’ said Julia, disconcerted by Patrick’s sincerity.

  ‘What would it mean to be spontaneous, to have an unconditioned response to things – to anything? Neither of us is in a position to know, but I don’t want to die without finding out.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Julia, clearly not tempted by Patrick’s obscure project.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said a voice behind them.

  Patrick looked round and saw the beautiful waitress. He had forgotten that he was in love with her, but now it all came back to him.

  ‘Oh, hi,’ he said.

  She scarcely acknowledged him, but kept her eyes fixed on Julia.

  ‘I’m sorry but you’re not allowed to smoke out here,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Julia, taking a drag on her cigarette, ‘I didn’t know. It’s funny, because it is outside.’

  ‘Well, technically it’s still part of the club and you can’t smoke anywhere in the club.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Julia, continuing to smoke. ‘Well, I’d better put it out then.’ She took another long suck on her almost finished cigarette, dropped it on the balcony and ground it underfoot before stepping back indoors.

  Patrick waited for the waitress to look at him with complicity and amusement, but she returned to her post behind the long table without glancing in his direction.

  The waitress was useless. Julia was useless. Eleanor was useless. Even Mary in the end was useless and would not prevent him from returning to his bedsit alone and without any consolation whatever.

  It was not the women who were at fault; it was his omnipotent delusion: the idea that they were there to be useful to him in the first place. He must make sure to remember that the next time one of the pointless bitches let him down. Patrick let out another bark of laughter. He was feeling a little bit mad. Casanova, the misogynist; Casanova, the hungry baby. The inadequacy at the rotten heart of exaggeration. He watched a modest veil of self-disgust settle on the subject of his relations with women, trying to prevent him from going deeper. Self-disgust was the easy way out, he must cut through it and allow himself to be unconsoled. He looked forward to the austere demands of that word, like a cool drink after the dry oasis of consolation. Back in his bedsit unconsoled, he could hardly wait.

  It was getting cold on the balcony and Patrick wanted to get back indoors, but he was prevented by his reluctance to join Kettle and Mary, who were standing just the other side of the French windows.

  ‘I see that you and Thomas are still practically glued to each other,’ said Kettle, casting an envious glance at her grandson draped comfortably around his mother’s neck.

  ‘Nobody can hope to ignore their children as completely as you did,’ sighed Mary.

  ‘What do you mean? We always…communicated.’

  ‘Communicated! Do you remember what you said to me when you telephoned me at school to tell me that Daddy had died?’

  ‘How awful it all was, I suppose.’

  ‘I couldn’t speak I was so upset, and you told me to cheer up. To cheer up! You never had any idea who I was and you still don’t.’

  Mary turned away with a growl of exasperation and walked towards the other end of the room. Kettle greeted the inevitable outcome of her spite with an expression of astonished incomprehension. Patrick hovered on the balcony waiting for her to move away, but watched instead as Annette came up to engage her in conversation.

  ‘Hello, dear,’ said Annette, ‘how are you?’

  ‘Well, I’ve just had my head bitten off by my daughter, and so just for the moment I’m in a state of shock.’

  ‘Mothers and children,’ said Annette wisely, ‘maybe we should have a workshop on that dynamic and tempt you back to the Foundation.’

  ‘A workshop on mothers and children would tempt me to stay away,’ said Kettle. ‘Not that I need much encouragement to stay away; I think I’ve finished with shamanism.’

  ‘Bless you,’ said Annette. ‘I won’t feel that I’ve finished until I’m totally connected to the source of unconditional love that inhabits every soul on this planet.’

  ‘Well, I’ve set my sights rather lower,’ said Kettle. ‘I think I’m just relieved not to be shaking a rattle, with my eyes watering from all that wretched wood smoke.’

  Annette let out a peal of tolerant laughter.

  ‘Well, I know Seamus would love to see you again and that he thought you’d especially benefit from our “Walking with the Goddess” workshop, “stepping into the power of the feminine”. I’m going to be participating myself.’

  ‘How is Seamus? I suppose he’s moved into the main house now.’

  ‘Oh, yes, he’s in Eleanor’s old bedroom, lording it over all of us.’

  ‘The bedroom Patrick and Mary used to be in, with the view of the olive groves?’

  ‘Oh, that’s a glorious view, isn’t it? Mind you, I love my room, looking out on the chapel.’

  ‘That’s my room,’ said Kettle. ‘I always used to stay in that room.’

  ‘Isn’t it funny how we get attached to things?’ laughed Annette. ‘And yet, in the end, even our bodies aren’t really our own; they belong to the Earth – to the Goddess.’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Kettle firmly.

  ‘I tell you what,’ said Annette, ‘if you come to the Goddess workshop, you can have your old room back. I don’t mind moving out; I’m happy anywhere. Anyway, Seamus is always talking about “moving from the property paradigm to the participation paradigm”, and if the facilitators at the Foundation don’t do it, we can’t expect anyone else to.’

  Patrick’s primary objective was to get off the balcony without drawing attention to himself, and so he suppressed the desire to point out that Seamus had been moving in the opposite direction, from participating in Eleanor’s charity to occupying her property.

  Kettle was clearly confused by Annette’s kind offer of her old bedroom. Her loyalt
y to her bad mood was not easily shaken and yet it was hard to see what she could do except thank Annette.

  ‘That’s unusually kind of you,’ she said dismissively.

  Patrick seized his chance and bolted off the balcony, passing behind Kettle’s back with such decisiveness that he knocked her into Annette’s clattering cup of tea.

  ‘Mind out,’ snapped Kettle before she could see who had barged into her. ‘Honestly, Patrick,’ she added when she saw the culprit.

  ‘Oh, dear, you’re covered in tea,’ said Annette.

  Patrick did not pause and only called, ‘Sorry,’ over his shoulder as he crossed the room at a quick pace. He continued out onto the landing and, without knowing where he was going, cantered down the staircase with a light hand on the banister, like a man who had been called away on urgent business.

  13

  Mary smiled at Henry from across the room and started to move in his direction, but before she could reach his side Fleur surged up in front of her.

  ‘I hope I haven’t offended your husband,’ she said. ‘He walked away from me very abruptly and now he seems to have stormed out of the room altogether.’

  ‘It’s a difficult day for him,’ said Mary, fascinated by Fleur’s lipstick, which had been reapplied, mostly to the old lopsided track around her mouth but also to her front teeth.

  ‘Has he had mental-health problems?’ said Fleur. ‘I only ask because – God knows! – I’ve had my fair share and I’ve grown rather good at telling when other people have a screw loose.’

  ‘You seem quite well now,’ said Mary, lying virtuously.

  ‘It’s funny you should say that,’ said Fleur, ‘because this morning I thought, “There’s no point in taking your pills when you feel so well.” I feel very, very well, you see.’

  Mary recoiled instinctively. ‘Oh, good,’ she said.

  ‘I feel as if something amazing is going to happen to me today,’ Fleur went on. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever achieved my full potential – I feel as if I could do anything – as if I could raise the dead!’