At Last Read online

  The idea of a voluntary life had always struck him as extravagant. Everything was conditioned by what had gone before; even his fanatical desire for some margin of freedom was conditioned by the drastic absence of freedom in his early life. Perhaps only a kind of bastard freedom was available: in the acceptance of the inevitable unfolding of cause and effect there was at least a freedom from delusion. The truth was that he didn’t really know. In any case he had to start by recognizing the degree of his unfreedom, anchored in this inarticulate core that he was now at last embracing, and look on it with a kind of charitable horror. Most of his time had been spent in reaction to his conditioning, leaving little room to respond to the rest of life. What would it be like to react to nothing and respond to everything? He might at least inch in that direction. As he had been trying to tell an unreceptive Julia, he was less persuaded than ever by final judgements or conclusions. He had long suffered from Negative Incapability, the opposite of that famous Keatsian virtue of being in mysteries, uncertainties and doubts without reaching out for facts and explanations – or whatever the exact phrase was – but now he was ready to stay open to questions that could not necessarily be answered, rather than rush to answers that he refused to question. Maybe he could respond to everything only if he experienced the world as a question, and perhaps he continually reacted to it because he thought that its nature was fixed.

  The phone on the little table next to him started to ring and Patrick, dragged out of his thoughts, stared at it for a while as if he had never seen one before. He hesitated and then finally picked it up just before his answerphone message cut in.

  ‘Hello,’ he said wearily.

  ‘It’s me, Annette.’

  ‘Oh, hi. How are you? How’s Nicholas?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve got terrible news,’ said Annette. ‘Nicholas didn’t make it. I’m so sorry, Patrick, I know he was an old family friend. He actually stopped breathing in the ambulance. They tried to revive him when we got to the hospital, but they couldn’t get him back. I think all those electrodes and adrenalin are so frightening. When a soul is ready to go, we should let it go gently.’

  ‘It’s difficult to find a legal formulation for that approach,’ said Patrick. ‘Doctors have to pretend that they think more life is always worth having.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right, legally,’ sighed Annette. ‘Anyway, it must be overwhelming for you, and on the day of your mother’s funeral.’

  ‘I hadn’t seen Nicholas for years,’ said Patrick. ‘I suppose I was lucky to get a last glimpse of him when he was on top form.’

  ‘Oh, he was an amazing man,’ said Annette. ‘I’ve never met anyone quite like him.’

  ‘He was unique,’ said Patrick, ‘at least I hope so. It would be rather terrifying to find a village full of Nicholas Pratts. Anyhow, Annette,’ Patrick went on, realizing that his tone was not quite right for the occasion, ‘it was very good of you to go with him. He was lucky to be with someone spontaneously kind at the time of his death.’

  ‘Oh, now you’re making me cry,’ said Annette.

  ‘And thank you for what you said at the funeral. You reminded me that Eleanor was a good person as well as an imperfect mother. It’s very helpful to see her from other points of view than the one I’ve been trapped in.’

  ‘You’re welcome. You know that I loved her.’

  ‘I do. Thank you,’ said Patrick again.

  They ended the conversation with the improbable promise to talk soon. Annette was flying back to France the next day and Patrick was certainly not going to call her in Saint-Nazaire. Nevertheless he said goodbye with a strange fondness. Did he really think that Eleanor was a good person? He felt that she had made the question of what it meant to be good central – and for that he was grateful.

  Patrick took in the news that Nicholas was dead. He pictured him, back in the sixties, in a Mr Fish shirt, making venomous conversation under the plane trees in Saint-Nazaire. He imagined himself as the little boy he had been at that time, shattered and mad at heart, but with a ferocious heroic persona, which had eventually stopped his father’s abuses with a single determined refusal. He knew that if he was going to understand the chaos that was invading him, he would have to renounce the protection of that fragile hero, just as he had to renounce the illusion of his mother’s protection by acknowledging that his parents had been collaborators as well as antagonists.

  Patrick sank deeper into the armchair, wondering how much of all this he could stand. Just how unconsoled was he prepared to be? He covered his stomach with a cushion as if he expected to get hit. He wanted to leave, to drink, to dive out of the window into a pool made of his own blood, to cease to feel anything for ever straight away, but he mastered his panic enough to sit back up and let the cushion drop to the floor.

  Perhaps whatever he thought he couldn’t stand was made up partly or entirely of the thought that he couldn’t stand it. He didn’t really know, but he had to find out, and so he opened himself up to the feeling of utter helplessness and incoherence that he supposed he had spent his life trying to avoid, and waited for it to dismember him. What happened was not what he had expected. Instead of feeling the helplessness, he felt the helplessness and compassion for the helplessness at the same time. One followed the other swiftly, just as a hand reaches out instinctively to rub a hit shin, or relieve an aching shoulder. He was after all not an infant, but a man experiencing the chaos of infancy welling up in his conscious mind. As the compassion expanded he saw himself on equal terms with his supposed persecutors, saw his parents, who appeared to be the cause of his suffering, as unhappy children with parents who appeared to be the cause of their suffering: there was no one to blame and everyone to help, and those who appeared to deserve the most blame needed the most help. For a while he stayed level with the pure inevitability of things being as they were, the ground zero of events on which skyscrapers of psychological experience were built, and as he imagined not taking his life so personally, the heavy impenetrable darkness of the inarticulacy turned into a silence that was perfectly transparent, and he saw that there was a margin of freedom, a suspension of reaction, in that clarity.

  Patrick slid back down in his chair and sprawled in front of the view. He noticed how his tears cooled as they ran down his cheeks. Washed eyes and a tired and empty feeling. Was that what people meant by peaceful? There must be more to it than that, but he didn’t claim to be an expert. He suddenly wanted to see his children, real children, not the ghosts of their ancestors’ childhoods, real children with a reasonable chance of enjoying their lives. He picked up the phone and dialled Mary’s number. He was going to change his mind. After all, that’s what Thomas said it was for.

  Also by Edward St. Aubyn

  Mother’s Milk

  Some Hope

  A Clue to the Exit

  On the Edge

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2011 by Edward St. Aubyn

  All rights reserved

  Originally published in 2011 by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, Great Britain

  Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following:

  ‘Fly Me to the Moon (In Other Words)’, words and music by Bart Howard. TRO –©– Copyright 1954 (renewed) by Hampshire House Publishing Corp., New York, NY. Used by permission.

  ‘I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’, words and music by George Gershwin, Du Bose Heyward and Ira Gershwin. Copyright © 1935 (renewed) by Chappell & Co., Inc. (ASCAP). All rights administered by Warner/ Chappell North America Ltd.

  Excerpt from ‘Burnt Norton’, Part I of Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1936 by Harcourt, Inc., and renewed © 1964 by T. S. Eliot, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  ‘Dutch Graves in Bucks County’ from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wal
lace Stevens, copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed © 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  St. Aubyn, Edward, 1960–

  At last / Edward St. Aubyn.—1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-4668-0148-6

  1. Psychological fiction. 2. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PR6069.T134 A93 2012

  823'.914—dc23

  2011034964

  www.fsgbooks.com