At Last Read online

  ‘The golden address book,’ purred Nicholas, gripping his walking stick more tightly as she sagged against him.

  ‘Yes,’ said Nancy, ‘the golden address book.’

  2

  Nancy watched her infuriating nephew drift towards his mother’s coffin. Patrick would never understand the fabulous way that she and Eleanor had been brought up. Eleanor had stupidly rebelled against it, whereas it had been ripped from Nancy’s prayerfully clasped hands.

  ‘The golden address book,’ she sighed again, locking arms with Nicholas. ‘I mean, for example, Mummy only ever had one car accident in her entire life, but even then, when she was hanging upside down in the buckled metal, she had the Infanta of Spain dangling next to her.’

  ‘That’s very in-depth, I must say,’ said Nicholas. ‘A car accident can get one tangled up with all sorts of obscure people. Picture the commotion at the College of Heralds if a drop of one’s blood landed on the dashboard of a lorry and mingled with the bodily fluids of the brute whose head had been dashed against the steering wheel.’

  ‘Do you always have to be so facetious?’ snapped Nancy.

  ‘I do my best,’ said Nicholas. ‘But you can’t pretend that your mother was a fan of the common man. Didn’t she buy the entire village street that ran along the boundary wall of the Pavillon Colombe, in order to demolish it and expand the garden? How many houses was that?’

  ‘Twenty-seven,’ said Nancy, cheering up. ‘They weren’t all demolished. Some of them were turned into exactly the right kind of ruin to go with the house. There were follies and grottos, and Mummy had a replica made of the main house, only fifty times smaller. We used to have tea there, it was like something out of Alice in Wonderland.’ Nancy’s face clouded over. ‘There was a horrible old man who refused to sell, although Mummy offered him far too much for his poky little house, and so there was an inward bulge following the line of the old wall, if you see what I’m saying.’

  ‘Every paradise demands a serpent,’ said Nicholas.

  ‘He did it just to annoy us,’ said Nancy. ‘He put a French flag on the roof and used to play Edith Piaf all day long. We had to smother him in vegetation.’

  ‘Maybe he liked Edith Piaf,’ said Nicholas.

  ‘Oh, don’t be funny! Nobody could like Edith Piaf at that volume.’

  Nicholas sounded sour to Nancy’s sensitive ear. So what if Mummy hadn’t wanted ordinary people pressing up against her property? It was hardly surprising when everything else was so divine. Fragonard had painted Les Demoiselles Colombe in that garden, hence the necessity for having Fragonards in the house. The original owners had hung a pair of big Guardis in the drawing room, hence the authenticity of getting them back.

  Nancy couldn’t help being haunted by the splendour and the wreckage of her mother’s family. One day she was going to write a book about her mother and her aunts, the legendary Jonson Sisters. She had been collecting material for years, fascinating bits and pieces that just needed to be organized. Only last week, she had sacked a hopeless young researcher – the tenth in a succession of greedy egomaniacs who wanted to be paid in advance – but not before her latest slave had discovered a copy of her grandmother’s birth certificate. According to this wonderfully quaint document, Nancy’s grandmother had been ‘Born in Indian Country’. How could the daughter of a young army officer, born at this unlikely address, have guessed, as she tottered about among the creaky pallet beds and restless horses of an adobe fort in the Western Territories, that her own daughters would be tottering along the corridors of European castles and filling their houses with the debris of failed dynasties – splashing about in Marie-Antoinette’s black marble bath, while their yellow Labradors dozed on carpets from the throne room of the imperial palace in Peking? Even the lead garden tubs on the terrace of the Pavillon Colombe had been made for Napoleon. Gold bees searching through silver blossoms, dripping in the rain. She always thought that Jean had made Mummy buy those tubs to take an obscure revenge on Napoleon for saying that his ancestor, the great duc de Valençay, was ‘a piece of shit in a silk stocking’. What she liked to say was that Jean kept up the family tradition, minus the silk stocking. Nancy gripped Nicholas’s arm even more tightly, as if her horrid stepfather might try to steal him as well.

  If only Mummy hadn’t divorced Daddy. They had such a glamorous life in Sunninghill Park, where she and Eleanor were brought up. The Prince of Wales used to drop in all the time, and there were never fewer used to drop in all the time, and there were never less than twenty people staying in the house, having the best fun ever. It was true that Daddy had the bad habit of buying Mummy extremely expensive presents, which she had to pay for. When she said, ‘Oh, darling, you shouldn’t have,’ she really meant it. She grew nervous of commenting on the garden. If she said that a border needed a little more blue, a couple of days later she would find that Daddy had flown in some impossible flower from Tibet which bloomed for about three minutes and cost as much as a house. But before the drink took over, Daddy was handsome and warm and so infectiously funny that the food often arrived shaking at the table, because the footmen were laughing too much to hold the platters steadily.

  When the Crash came, lawyers flew in from America to ask the Craigs to rack their brains for something they could do without. They thought and thought. They obviously couldn’t sell Sunninghill Park. They had to go on entertaining their friends. It would be too cruel and too inconvenient to sack any of the servants. They couldn’t do without the house in Bruton Street for overnight stays in London. They needed two Rolls-Royces and two chauffeurs because Daddy was incorrigibly punctual and Mummy was incorrigibly late. In the end they sacrificed one of the six newspapers that each guest received with their breakfast. The lawyers relented. The pools of Jonson money were too deep to pretend there was a crisis; they were not stock-market speculators, they were industrialists and owners of great blocks of urban America. People would always need hardened fats and dry-cleaning fluids and somewhere to live.

  Even if Daddy had been too extravagant, Mummy’s marriage to Jean was a folly that could be explained only by the resulting title – she was definitely jealous of Aunt Gerty being married to a grand duke. Jean’s role in the Jonson story was to disgrace himself, as a liar and a thief, a lecherous stepfather and a tyrannical husband. While Mummy lay dying of cancer, Jean threw one of his tantrums, screaming that doubt was being cast on his honour by her will. She was leaving him her houses and paintings and furniture only for his lifetime and then on to her children, as if he couldn’t be trusted to leave them to the children himself. He knew perfectly well that they were Jonson possessions…and on and on; the morphine, the pain, the screaming, the indignant promises. She changed her will and Jean went back on his word and left everything to his nephew.

  God, how Nancy loathed Jean! He had died almost forty years ago, but she wanted to kill him every day. He had stolen everything and ruined her life. Sunninghill, the Pavillon, the Palazzo Arichele, all lost. She even regretted the loss of some of the Jonson houses she would never have inherited, not unless lots of people had died, that is, which would have been a tragedy, except that at least she would have known how to live in them properly, which was more than could be said of some people she could name.

  ‘All the lovely things, all the lovely houses,’ said Nancy, ‘where have they all gone?’

  ‘Presumably the houses are where they’ve always been,’ said Nicholas, ‘but they’re being lived in by people who can afford them.’

  ‘But that’s just it, I should be able to afford them!’

  ‘Never use a conditional tense when it comes to money.’

  Really, Nicholas was being impossible. She certainly wasn’t going to tell him about her book. Ernest Hemingway had told Daddy that he really ought to write a book, because he told such funny stories. When Daddy protested that he couldn’t write, Hemingway sent a tape-recorder. Daddy forgot to plug the thing in, and when the spools didn’t go round, he lost his temper a
nd threw it out of the window. Luckily, the woman it landed on didn’t take any legal action and Daddy had another marvellous story, but the whole incident had made Nancy superstitious about tape-recorders. Maybe she should hire a ghost writer. Exorcized by a ghost! That would be original. Still, she had to give the poor ghost an idea of how she wanted it done. It could be theme by theme, or decade by decade, but that seemed to her a stuffy egghead bookworm kind of approach. She wanted it done sister by sister; after all, the rivalry between them was quite the dynamic force.

  Gerty, the youngest and most beautiful of the three Jonson Sisters, was definitely the one Mummy was most competitive with. She married the Grand Duke Vladimir, nephew of the last Tsar of Russia. ‘Uncle Vlad’, as Nancy called him, had helped to assassinate Rasputin, lending his Imperial revolver to Prince Yussopov for what was supposed to be the final kill, but turned out to be only the middle stage between poisoning the energetic priest with arsenic and drowning him in the Neva. Despite many pleas, the Tsar exiled Vladimir for his part in the assassination, making him miss the Russian Revolution and the chance to get bayoneted, strangled or shot by Russia’s new Bolshevik masters. Once in exile, Uncle Vlad went on to assassinate himself by drinking twenty-three dry martinis before lunch every day. Thanks to the Russian whimsy of smashing a glass after drinking from it, there was hardly a moment’s silence in the house. Nancy had Daddy’s copy of a forgotten memoir by Uncle Vlad’s sister, the Grand Duchess Anna. It was inscribed in purple ink to ‘my dear brother-in-law’, although he was in fact her brother’s sister-in-law’s husband. The inscription seemed to Nancy somehow typical of the generous inclusiveness that had enabled that amazing family to straddle two continents, from Kiev to Vladivostok. Before Uncle Vlad’s marriage to Gerty in Biarritz, his sister had to perform the blessing that would traditionally have been performed by their parents. It was a moment they dreaded because it reminded them of the horrifying reason for the absence of their family. The grand duchess described her feelings in The Palace of Memory:

  Through the window I could see the great waves pounding the rocks; the sun had gone down. The grey ocean at that moment looked to me as ruthless and indifferent as fate, and infinitely lonely.

  Gerty decided to convert to the Russian Orthodox religion, in order to be closer to Vladimir’s people. Anna went on:

  Our cousin, the Duke of Leuchtenberg, and I were her sponsors. The ceremony was a long and wearisome one, and I felt sorry for Gerty, who did not understand a word of it.

  If her pet ghost could write as well as that, Nancy felt sure she would have a bestseller on her hands. The eldest Jonson Sister was the richest of all: bossy, practical Aunt Edith. While her flighty younger sisters jumped into the pages of an illustrated history book, holding hands with the remnants of some of the world’s greatest families, sensible Aunt Edith, who preferred her antiques to arrive in a crate, made a consolidating marriage to a man whose father, like her own, had been on the list of the hundred richest men in America in 1900. Nancy spent the first two years of the war living with Edith, while Mummy tried to get some of her really valuable things into storage in Switzerland before joining her daughters in America. Edith’s husband, Uncle Bill, struck an original note by paying with his own money for the presents he gave his wife. One birthday present was a white clapboard house with dark green shutters and two gently curved wings, on a slope of lawn above a lake, at the centre of a ten-thousand-acre plantation. She loved it. That was the sort of useful tip that they never gave you in books called The Art of Giving.

  Patrick glanced at his unhappy aunt, still complaining to Nicholas by the entrance. He couldn’t help thinking of the favourite dictum of the moderator from his Depression Group, ‘Resentment is drinking the poison, and hoping that someone else will die’. All the patients had impersonated this sentence in more or less convincing Scottish accents at least once a day.

  If he was now standing beside his mother’s coffin with uneasy detachment, it was not because he had cherished his aunt’s ‘golden address book’. As far as Patrick was concerned, the past was a corpse waiting to be cremated, and although his wish was about to be granted in the most literal fashion, in a furnace only a few yards from where he was standing, another kind of fire was needed to incinerate the attitudes which haunted Nancy; the psychological impact of inherited wealth, the raging desire to get rid of it and the raging desire to hang on to it; the demoralizing effect of already having what almost everyone else was sacrificing their precious lives to acquire; the more or less secret superiority and the more or less secret shame of being rich, generating their characteristic disguises: the philanthropy solution, the alcoholic solution, the mask of eccentricity, the search for salvation in perfect taste; the defeated, the idle, and the frivolous, and their opponents, the standard-bearers, all living in a world that the dense glitter of alternatives made it hard for love and work to penetrate. If these values were in themselves sterile, they looked all the more ridiculous after two generations of disinheritance. Patrick wanted to distance himself from what he thought of as his aunt’s virulent irrelevance, and yet there was a fascination with status running down the maternal line of his family that he had to understand.

  He remembered going to see Eleanor just after she had launched her last philanthropic project, the Transpersonal Foundation. She had decided to renounce the frustration of being a person in favour of the exciting prospect of becoming a Transperson; denying part of what she was, the daughter of one bewildered family and the mother of another, and claiming to be what she was not, a healer and a saint. The impact of this adolescent project on her ageing body was to produce the first of the dozen strokes which eventually demolished her. When Patrick went down to see her in Lacoste after that first stroke, she was still able to speak fluently enough, but her mind had become entirely suspicious. The moment they were alone together in her bedroom, with the tattered curtains under full sail in the evening breeze, she clasped his arm and hissed to him urgently. ‘Don’t tell anybody my mother was a duchess.’

  He nodded conspiratorially. She relaxed her grasp and searched the ceiling for the next worry.

  Nancy’s instructions, without even a stroke to justify them, would have been the exact opposite. Tell nobody? Tell everybody! Behind the cartoon contrasts of Nancy’s worldliness and Eleanor’s otherworldliness, Nancy’s bulk and Eleanor’s emaciation, there was a common cause, a past that had to be falsified, whether by suppression or selective glorification. What was that? Were Eleanor and Nancy individuals at all, or were they just part of the characteristic debris of their class and family?

  Eleanor had taken Patrick to stay with her Aunt Edith in the early 1970s when he was twelve. While the rest of the world was worrying about the OPEC crisis, stagflation, carpet bombing, and whether the effects of LSD were permanent, eternal or temporary, they found Edith living in a style which made no concession whatsoever to the fifty years since Live Oak had been given to her. The forty black servants made the slaves in Gone With the Wind look like extras on a film set. On the evening that Patrick and Eleanor arrived, Moses, one of the footmen, asked if he could be excused in order to go to his brother’s funeral. Edith said no. There were four people at dinner and Moses was needed to serve the hominy grits. Patrick didn’t mind if the servant who brought the quail, or the one who took the vegetables around, served the hominy grits as well, but there was a system in place and Edith was not going to allow it to be disrupted. Moses, in white gloves and a white coat, stepped forward silently, tears pouring down his cheeks, and offered Patrick his first taste of grits. He never knew if he would have liked them.

  Later, beside a crackling fire in her bedroom, Eleanor raged against her aunt’s cruelty. The scene over dinner had been too resonant for her; she could never disentangle the taste of the grits from Moses’s tears, or indeed her mother’s perfect taste from her own childhood tears. Eleanor’s sense that her sanity was rooted in the kindness of servants meant that she would always be on Moses’ side
. If she had been articulate, this loyalty might have made her political; as it was it made her charitable. Most of all she raged against the way her aunt made her feel as if she were still twelve years old, as she had been when she was a passionate but mute guest at the beginning of the war, staying at Fairley, Bill and Edith’s place on Long Island. His mother was hypnotized by the memory of being Patrick’s age. Her arrested development always rigorously shadowed his efforts to grow up. In his early childhood she had been preoccupied by how much her nanny meant to her, while failing to provide him with a similar paragon of warmth and trustworthiness.

  Looking up from his mother’s coffin, Patrick saw that Nancy and Nicholas were planning to approach him again, their instinct for social hierarchy turning a bereaved son into the temporary top dog at his mother’s funeral. He rested a hand on Eleanor’s coffin, forming a secret alliance against misunderstanding.

  ‘My dear,’ said Nicholas, apparently refreshed by some important news, ‘I hadn’t realized, until Nancy enlightened me, what a serious partygoer your Mama used to be, before she took up her “good works”.’ He seemed to poke the phrase aside with his walking stick, clearing it from his path. ‘To think of shy, religious little Eleanor at the Beistegui Ball! I didn’t know her then, or I would have felt compelled to shield her from that stampede of ravenous harlequins.’ Nicholas moved his free hand artistically through the air. ‘It was a magical occasion, as if the gilded layabouts in one of Watteau’s paintings had been released from their enchanted prison and given an enormous dose of steroids and a fleet of speedboats.’

  ‘Oh, she wasn’t all that shy, if you know what I’m saying,’ Nancy corrected him. ‘She had any number of beaux. You know your mother could have made a dazzling marriage.’