At Last Read online

  ‘That’s the last thing anyone would expect at this party,’ said Mary, with a cheerful laugh. ‘Do ask Patrick first if it’s Eleanor you’ve got in mind.’

  ‘Oh, I’d love to see Eleanor again,’ said Fleur, as if endorsing Mary’s candidate for resurrection and about to perform the necessary operation.

  ‘Will you excuse me?’ said Mary. ‘I’ve got to go and talk to Patrick’s cousin. He’s come all the way from America and we didn’t even know he was coming.’

  ‘I’d love to go to America,’ said Fleur, ‘in fact, I might fly there later this afternoon.’

  ‘In a plane?’ said Mary.

  ‘Yes, of course…Oh!’ Fleur interrupted herself. ‘I see what you mean.’

  She stuck out her arms, thrust her head forwards and swayed from side to side, with an explosion of laughter so loud that Mary could sense everyone in the room looking in her direction.

  She reached out and touched Fleur’s outstretched arm, smiling at her to show how much she had enjoyed sharing their delightful joke, but turning away firmly to join Henry, who stood alone in the corner of the room.

  ‘That woman’s laugh packs quite a punch,’ said Henry.

  ‘Everything about her packs a punch, that’s what I’m worried about,’ said Mary. ‘I feel she may do something very crazy before we all get home.’

  ‘Who is she? She’s kind of exotic.’

  Mary noticed how distinct Henry’s eyelashes were against the pale translucence of his eyes.

  ‘None of us has ever met her. She just turned up unexpectedly.’

  ‘Like me,’ said Henry, with egalitarian gallantry.

  ‘Except that we know who you are and we’re very pleased to see you,’ said Mary, ‘especially since not a lot of people have turned up. Eleanor lost touch with people; her social life was very disintegrated. She had a few little pockets of friendship, each assuming that there was something more central, but in fact there was nothing in the middle. For the last two years, I was the only person who visited her.’

  ‘And Patrick?’

  ‘No, he didn’t go. She became so unhappy when she saw him. There was something she was dying to say but couldn’t. I don’t just mean in the mechanical sense that she couldn’t speak in the last two years. I mean that she never could have said what she wanted to tell him, even if she had been the most articulate person in the world, because she didn’t know what it was, but when she became ill she could feel the pressure of it.’

  ‘Just horrible,’ said Henry. ‘It’s what we all dread.’

  ‘That’s why we must drop our defences while it’s still a voluntary act,’ said Mary, ‘otherwise they’ll be demolished and we’ll be flooded with nameless horror.’

  ‘Poor Eleanor, I feel so sorry for her,’ said Henry.

  They both fell silent for a while.

  ‘At this point the English usually say, “Well, this is a cheerful subject!” to cover their embarrassment at being serious,’ said Mary.

  ‘Let’s just stick with the sorrow,’ said Henry with a kind smile.

  ‘I’m really pleased you came,’ she said. ‘Your love for Eleanor was so uncomplicated, unlike everyone else’s.’

  ‘Cabbage,’ said Nancy, grabbing Henry’s arm, with the exaggerated eagerness of a shipwrecked passenger who discovers that she is not the only member of her family left alive, ‘thank God! Save me from that dreadful woman in the green sweater! I can’t believe my sister ever knew her – socially. I mean, this really is the most extraordinary gathering. I don’t feel it’s really a Jonson occasion at all. When I think of Mummy’s funeral, or Aunt Edith’s. Eight hundred people turned up at Mummy’s, half the French cabinet, and the Aga Khan, and the Windsors; everybody was there.’

  ‘Eleanor chose a different path,’ said Henry.

  ‘More like a goat track,’ said Nancy, rolling her eyes.

  ‘Personally, I don’t give a damn who comes to my funeral,’ said Henry.

  ‘That’s only because you know that it’ll be solid with senators and glamorous people and sobbing women!’ said Nancy. ‘The trouble with funerals is that they’re so last-minute. That’s where memorials come in, of course, but they’re not the same. There’s something so dramatic about a funeral, although I can’t abide those open caskets. Do you remember Uncle Vlad? I still have nightmares about him lying there in that gold and white uniform looking all gaunt. Oh, God, wagon formation,’ cried Nancy, ‘the green goblin is staring at me again!’

  Fleur was feeling a sense of irrepressible pleasure and potency as she scanned the room for someone who had not yet had the benefit of her conversation. She could understand all the currents flowing through the room; she only had to glance at a person to see into the depths of their soul. Thanks to Patrick Melrose, who was distracting the waitress by getting her telephone number, Fleur had been able to mix her own drink, a glass full of gin with a splash of tonic, rather than the other way round. What did it matter? Mere alcohol could not degrade her luminous awareness. After taking a gulp from her lipstick-smudged tumbler, she walked up to Nicholas Pratt, determined to help him understand himself.

  ‘Have you had mental-health problems?’ she asked Nicholas, fixing him with an intrepid stare.

  ‘Have we met?’ said Nicholas, gazing icily at the stranger who stood in his path.

  ‘I only ask because I have a feeling for these things,’ Fleur went on.

  Nicholas hesitated between the impulse to utterly destroy this batty old woman in a moth-eaten sweater, and the temptation to boast about his robust mental health.

  ‘Well, have you?’ insisted Fleur.

  Nicholas raised his walking stick briefly, as if about to nudge Fleur aside, only to replant it more firmly in the carpet and lean into its full support. He inhaled the frosty, invigorating air of contempt flooding in from the window smashed by Fleur’s impertinent question; contempt that always made him, though he said it himself, even more articulate than usual.

  ‘No, I have not had “mental-health problems”,’ he thundered. ‘Even in this degenerate age of confession and complaint we have not managed to turn reality entirely on its head. When the vocabulary of Freudian mumbo-jumbo is emptied onto every conversation, like vinegar onto a newspaper full of sodden chips, some of us choose not to tuck in.’ Nicholas craned his head forward as he spat out the homely phrase.

  ‘The sophisticated cherish their “syndromes”,’ he continued, ‘and even the most simple-minded fool feels entitled to a “complex”. As if it weren’t ludicrous enough for every child to be “gifted”, they now have to be ill as well: a touch of Asperger’s, a little autism; dyslexia stalks the playground; the poor little gifted things have been “bullied” at school; if they can’t confess to being abused, they must confess to being abusive. Well, my dear woman,’ Nicholas laughed threateningly, ‘– I call you “my dear” from what is no doubt known as Sincerity Deficit Disorder, unless some ambitious quack, landing on the scalding, sarcastic beaches of the great continent of irony, has claimed the inversion of surface meaning as Potter’s Disease or Jones’s Jaundice – no, my dear woman, I have not suffered from the slightest taint of mental illness. The modern passion for pathology is a landslide that has been forced to come to a halt at some distance from my eminently sane feet. I have only to walk towards that heap of refuse for it to part, making way for the impossible man, the man who is entirely well; psychotherapists scatter in my presence, ashamed of their sham profession!’

  ‘You’re completely off your rocker,’ said Fleur, discerningly. ‘I thought as much. I’ve developed what I call “my little radar” over the years. Put me in a room full of people and I can tell straight away who has had that sort of problem.’

  Nicholas experienced a moment of despair as he realized that his withering eloquence had made no impact, but like an expert tango dancer who turns abruptly on the very edge of the dance floor, he changed his approach and shouted, ‘Bugger off!’ at the top of his voice.

  Fleur
looked at him with deepening insight.

  ‘A month in the Priory would get you back on your feet,’ she concluded, ‘re-clothe you in your rightful mind, as the hymn says. Do you know it?’ Fleur closed her eyes and started to sing rapturously, ‘“Dear Lord and Father of mankind / Forgive our foolish ways / Re-clothe us in our rightful minds…” Marvellous stuff. I’ll have a word with Dr Pagazzi, he’s quite the best. He can be rather severe at times, but only for one’s own good. Look at me: I was mad as a hatter and now I’m on top of the world.’

  She leant forward to whisper confidentially to Nicholas.

  ‘I feel very, very well, you see.’

  There were professional reasons for Johnny not to engage with Nicholas Pratt, whose daughter had been a patient of his, but the sight of that monstrous man bellowing at a dishevelled old woman pushed his restraint beyond the limits he had imposed on himself until now. He approached Fleur and, with his back turned to Nicholas, asked her quietly if she was all right.

  ‘All right?’ laughed Fleur. ‘I’m extremely well, better than ever.’ She struggled to express her sense of abundance. ‘If there were such a thing as being too well, I’d be it. I was just trying to help this poor man who’s had more than his fair share of mental-health problems.’

  Reassured that she was unharmed, Johnny smiled at Fleur and started to withdraw tactfully, but Nicholas was by now too enraged to let such an opportunity pass.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘here he is! Like an exhibit in a courtroom drama, brought on at the perfect moment: a practising witch-doctor, a purveyor of psycho-paralysis, a guide to the catacombs, a guide to the sewers; he promises to turn your dreams into nightmares and he keeps his promises religiously,’ snarled Nicholas, his face flushed and the corners of his mouth flecked with tired saliva. ‘The ferryman of Hell’s second river won’t accept a simple coin, like his proletarian colleague on the Styx. You’ll need a fat cheque to cross the Lethe into that forgotten under-world of dangerous gibberish where toothless infants rip the nipples from their mothers’ milkless breasts.’

  Nicholas seemed to be labouring for breath, as he unrolled his vituperative sentences.

  ‘No fantasy that you invent,’ he struggled on, ‘could be as repulsive as the fantasy on which his sinister art is based, polluting the human imagination with murderous babies and incestuous children…’

  Nicholas suddenly stopped speaking, his mouth working to take in enough air. He rocked sideways on his walking stick before staggering backwards a couple of steps and crashing down against the table and onto the floor. He caught the tablecloth as he fell and dragged half a dozen glasses after him. A bottle of red wine toppled sideways and its contents gurgled over the edge of the table and splashed onto his black suit. The waitress lunged forward and caught the bucket of half-melted ice that was sliding towards Nicholas’s supine body.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Fleur, ‘he got himself too worked up. “Hoisted by his own petard”, as the saying goes. This is what happens to people who won’t ask for help,’ she said, as if discussing the case with Dr. Pagazzi.

  Mary leant over to the waitress, her mobile phone already open.

  ‘I’m going to call an ambulance,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks,’ said the waitress. ‘I’ll go downstairs and warn reception.’

  Everyone in the room gathered around the fallen figure and looked on with a mixture of curiosity and alarm.

  Patrick knelt down beside Nicholas and started to loosen his tie. Long after it could have been helpful, he continued to loosen the knot until he had removed the tie altogether. Only then did he undo the top button of Nicholas’s shirt. Nicholas tried to say something but winced from the effort and closed his eyes instead, disgusted by his own vulnerability.

  Johnny acknowledged a feeling of satisfaction at having played no active part in Nicholas’s collapse. And then he looked down at his fallen opponent, sprawled heavily on the carpet, and somehow the sight of his old neck, no longer festooned with an expensive black silk tie, but wrinkled and sagging and open at the throat, as if waiting for the final dagger thrust, filled him with pity and renewed his respect for the conservative powers of an ego that would rather kill its owner than allow him to change.

  ‘Johnny?’ said Robert.

  ‘Yes,’ said Johnny, seeing Robert and Thomas looking up at him with great interest.

  ‘Why was that man so angry with you?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ said Johnny, ‘and one that I’m not really allowed to tell.’

  ‘Has he got psycho-paralysis?’ said Thomas. ‘Because paralysis means you can’t move.’

  Johnny couldn’t help laughing, despite the solemn murmur surrounding Nicholas’s collapse.

  ‘Well, personally, I think that would be a brilliant diagnosis; but Nicholas Pratt invented that word in order to make fun of psychoanalysis, which is what I do for a job.’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Thomas.

  ‘It’s a way of getting access to hidden truths about your feelings,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Like hide and seek?’ said Thomas.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Johnny, ‘but instead of hiding in cupboards and behind curtains and under beds, this kind of truth hides in symptoms and dreams and habits.’

  ‘Can we play?’ said Thomas.

  ‘Can we stop playing?’ said Johnny, more to himself than to Thomas and Robert.

  Julia came up and interrupted Johnny’s conversation with the children.

  ‘Is this the end?’ she said. ‘It’s enough to put one off having a temper tantrum. Oh, God, that religious fanatic is cradling his head. That would definitely finish me off.’

  Annette was sitting on her heels next to Nicholas, with her hands cupped around his head, her eyes closed and her lips moving very slightly.

  ‘Is she praying?’ said Julia, flabbergasted.

  ‘That’s nice of her,’ said Thomas.

  ‘They say one should never speak ill of the dead,’ said Julia, ‘and so I’d better get a move on. I’ve always thought that Nicholas Pratt was perfectly ghastly. I’m not a particular friend of Amanda’s, but he seems to have ruined his daughter’s life. Of course you’d know more about that than I do.’

  Johnny had no trouble staying silent.

  ‘Why don’t you stop being so horrible?’ said Robert passionately. ‘He’s an old man who’s really ill and he might hear what you’re saying, and he can’t even answer back.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Thomas, ‘it’s not fair because he can’t answer back.’

  Julia at first seemed more bewildered than annoyed, and when she finally spoke it was with a wounded sigh.

  ‘Well, you know it’s time to leave a party when the children start to mount a joint attack on your moral character.’

  ‘Could you say goodbye to Patrick for me?’ she said, kissing Johnny abruptly on both cheeks and ignoring the two boys. ‘I can’t quite face it after what’s happened – to Nicholas, I mean.’

  ‘I hope we didn’t make her angry,’ said Robert.

  ‘She made herself angry, because it was easier for her than being upset,’ said Johnny.

  Only seconds after her departure, Julia was forced back into the room by the urgent arrival of the waitress, two ambulance men, and an array of equipment.

  ‘Look!’ said Thomas. ‘An oxygen tank and a stretcher. I wish I could have a go!’

  ‘He’s over here,’ said the waitress unnecessarily.

  Nicholas felt his wrist being lifted. He knew his pulse was being taken. He knew it was too fast, too slow, too weak, too strong, everything wrong. A rip in his heart, a skewer through his chest. He must tell them he was not an organ donor, or they would steal his organs before he was dead. He must stop them! Call Withers! Tell them to put a stop to it at once. He couldn’t speak. Not his tongue, they mustn’t take his tongue. Without speech, thoughts plough on like a train without tracks, buckling, crashing, ripping everything apart. A man asks him to open his eyes. He opens his eyes. Show them he’s sti
ll compos mentis, compost mentis, recycled parts. No! Not his brain, not his genitals, not his heart, not fit to transplant, still writhing with self in an alien body. They were shining a light in his eyes, no, not his eyes; please don’t take his eyes. So much fear. Without a regiment of words, the barbarians, the burning roofs, the horses’ hooves beating down on fragile skulls. He was not himself any more; he was under the hooves. He could not be helpless; he could not be humiliated; it was too late to become somebody he didn’t know – the intimate horror of it.

  ‘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.’