At Last Page 4

  His month in the Priory had been a crucial period of his life, transforming the crisis that had led to the breakdown of his marriage and the escalation of his drinking. It was disquieting to think how close he had come to running away after only three days, lured by Becky’s departure. Before leaving, she had found him in the lounge of the Depression Wing.

  ‘I was looking for you. I’m not meant to speak to anyone,’ she said in a mock whisper, ‘because I’m a bad influence.’

  She gave him a little folded note and a light kiss on the lips before hurrying out of the room.

  This is my sister’s address. She’s away in the States, so I’ll be there alone, if you feel like running away from this fucking place and doing something CRAZY. Love Becks.

  The note reminded him of the jagged CRAZYs he used to doodle in the margins of his O-level chemistry notes after smoking a joint during the morning break at school. It was out of the question to visit her, he told himself, as he called a minicab service listed in the payphone booth under the back stairs. Was this what they meant by powerless?

  ‘Just don’t!’ he muttered, closing the door of his minicab firmly to show how determined he was not to pursue a bloodstained festival of dysfunction. He gave the driver the address on Becky’s note.

  ‘Well, you must be all right if they let you out,’ said the jaunty driver.

  ‘I let myself out. I couldn’t afford it.’

  ‘Bit pricey, is it?’

  Patrick didn’t answer, glazed over with desire and conflict.

  ‘Have you heard the one about the man who goes into the psychiatrist’s office?’ asked the driver, setting off down the drive and smiling in the rear-view mirror. ‘He says, “It’s been terrible, Doctor, for three years I thought I was a butterfly, and that’s not all, it gets worse: for the last three months I thought I was a moth.” “Good God,” says the psychiatrist, “what a difficult time you’ve been having. So, what made you come here today and ask for help?” “Well,” says the man, “I saw the light in the window and I felt drawn to it, so I just flew in.”’

  ‘That’s a good one,’ said Patrick, sinking deeper into Becky’s imagined nakedness, while wondering how long his latest dose of oxazepam would last. ‘Do you specialize in Priory patients because of your sunny temperament?’

  ‘You say that,’ said the driver, ‘but last year for about four months I literally couldn’t get out of bed, literally couldn’t see the point in anything.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Patrick.

  From Hammersmith Broadway to the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, they talked about the causeless weeping, the suicidal daydreams, the excruciating slowness, the sleepless nights and the listless days. By the time they reached Bayswater, they were best friends and the driver turned round to Patrick and said with the full blast of his restored cheerfulness, ‘In a few months you’ll be looking back on what you’ve just been through and saying, “What was all that about? What was all that fuss and aggravation about?” That’s what happened to me.’

  Patrick looked back down at Becky’s note. She had signed herself with the name of a beer. Becks. He started to whisper hoarsely under his breath, in a Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone voice, ‘The one who comes to you and asks for a meeting, and has the same name as a well-known brand of beer – she’s the one that wants you to have a relapse…’

  Not the voices, he mustn’t let them kick off. ‘It starts off with a little Marlon Brando impersonation,’ sighed Mrs Mop, ‘and the next thing you know…’

  ‘Shut up!’ Patrick interrupted.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, not you. I’m sorry.’

  They turned into a big square with a central garden. The driver drew up to a white stucco building. Patrick leant sideways and looked out of the window. Becky was on the third floor, beautiful, available and mentally ill.

  To think of the things he’d done for a little intimacy; earth flying over his shoulder as he dug his own grave. There were the good women who gave him the care he had never had. They had to be tortured into letting him down, to show that they couldn’t really be trusted. And then there were the bad women who saved time by being untrustworthy straight away. He generally alternated between these two broad categories, enchanted by some variant which briefly masked the futility of defending the decaying fortress of his personality, while hoping that it would obligingly rearrange itself into a temple of peace and fulfilment. Hoping and moping, moping and hoping. With only a little detachment, his love life looked like a child’s wind-up toy made to march again and again over the precipice of a kitchen table. Romance was where love was most under threat, not where it was likely to achieve its highest expression. If a candidate was sufficiently hopeless, like Becky, she took on the magnetism of the obviously doomed. It was embarrassing to be so deluded, and even more embarrassing to react to the delusion, like a man running away from his own looming shadow.

  ‘I know this sounds a little bit crazy, for want of a better word,’ said Patrick with a snort of laughter, ‘but do you think you could drive me back? I’m not ready yet.’

  ‘Back to the Priory?’ said the driver, no longer quite as sympathetic to his passenger.

  He doesn’t want to know about those of us who have to go back, thought Patrick. He closed his eyes and stretched out in the back seat. ‘Talk would talk and go so far askance…something, something…You don’t want madhouse and the whole thing there.’ The whole thing there. The wonderful inarticulacy of it, expanding with threat and contracting with ostensive urgency.

  On the drive back, Patrick started to feel chest pains which even the violence of his longing for pathological romance could no longer explain. His hands were shaking and he could feel the sweat breaking out on his forehead. By the time he reached Dr Pagazzi’s office, he was hallucinating mildly and apparently trapped in a two-dimensional space with no depth, like an insect crawling around a window pane, looking for a way out. Dr Pagazzi scolded him for missing his four o’clock dose of oxazepam, saying that he might have a heart attack if he withdrew too fast. Patrick lifted the dull plastic tub in his shaking hand and knocked back three oxazepam.

  The next day he ‘shared’ his near escape with the Depression Group. It turned out that all of them had nearly run away, or had run away and come back, or thought about running away much of the time. Some, on the other hand, dreaded leaving, but they only seemed superficially opposite to the ones who wanted to run away: everyone was obsessed with how much therapy they needed before they could begin a ‘normal life’. Patrick was surprised by how grateful he felt for the sense of solidarity with the other patients. A lifelong habit of being set apart was briefly overturned by a wave of goodwill towards everyone in the group.

  Johnny Hall had taken an unassuming seat near the back of the room. Patrick worked his way round the far end of the pew to join his old friend.

  ‘How are you bearing up?’ said Johnny.

  ‘Pretty well,’ said Patrick, sitting down next to him. ‘I have a strange feeling of excitement which I wouldn’t admit to anyone except you and Mary. I felt rather knocked out for the first few days, but then I had what I think your profession would call an “insight”. I went to the funeral parlour yesterday evening and sat with Eleanor’s body. I connected…I’ll tell you later.’

  Johnny smiled encouragingly. ‘Christ,’ he said, after a pause, ‘Nicholas Pratt. I didn’t expect to see him.’

  ‘Neither did I. You’re so lucky to have an ethical reason not to talk to him.’

  ‘Doesn’t everybody?’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘I’ll see you afterwards at the Onslow,’ said Johnny, leaving Patrick to the usher who had come up to him and was standing by expectantly.

  ‘We can start whenever you’re ready, sir,’ said the usher, somehow hinting at the queue of corpses that would pile up unless the ceremony got going right away.

  Patrick scanned the room. There were a few dozen people sitting in the pews facing Eleanor’s
coffin.

  ‘Fine,’ he said, ‘let’s begin in ten minutes.’

  ‘Ten minutes?’ said the usher, like a young child who has been told he can do something really exciting when he’s twenty-one.

  ‘Yes, there are still people arriving,’ said Patrick, noticing Julia standing in the doorway, a spiky effusion of black against the dull morning: black veil, black hat, stiff black silk dress and, he imagined, softer black silk beneath. He immediately felt the impact of her mentality, that intense but exclusive sensitivity. She was like a spider’s web, trembling at the slightest touch, but indifferent to the light that made its threads shine in the wet grass.

  ‘You’re just in time,’ said Patrick, kissing Julia through her scratchy black veil.

  ‘You mean late as usual.’

  ‘No; just in time. We’re about to kick off, if that’s the phrase I’m looking for.’

  ‘It’s not,’ she said, with that short husky laugh that always got to him.

  The last time they had seen each other was in the French hotel where their affair had ended. Despite their communicating rooms, they could think of nothing to say to each other. Sitting through long meals, under the vault of an artificial sky, painted with faint clouds and garlands of tumbling roses, they stared at a flight of steps that led down to the slapping keels of a private harbour, ropes creaking against bollards, bollards rusting into stone quays; everything longing to leave.

  ‘Now that you’re not with Mary, you don’t need me. I was…structural.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  The single word was perhaps too bare and could only be outstripped by silence. She had stood up and walked away without further comment. A gull launched itself from the soiled balustrade and clapped its way out to sea with a piercing cry. He had wanted to call her back, but the impulse died in the thick carpet lengthening between them.

  Looking at him now, the freshly bereaved son, Julia decided she felt utterly detached from Patrick, apart from wanting him to find her irresistible.

  ‘I haven’t seen you for such a long time,’ said Patrick, looking down at Julia’s lips, red under the black net of her veil. He remained inconveniently attracted to almost all the women he had ever been to bed with, even when he had a strong aversion to a revival on all other grounds.

  ‘A year and a half,’ said Julia. ‘Is it true that you’ve given up drinking? It must be hard just now.’

  ‘Not at all: a crisis demands a hero. The ambush comes when things are going well, or so I’m told.’

  ‘If you can’t speak personally about things going well, they haven’t changed that much.’

  ‘They have changed, but my speech patterns may take a while to catch up.’

  ‘I can’t wait.’

  ‘If there’s an opportunity for irony…’

  ‘You’ll take it.’

  ‘It’s the hardest addiction of all,’ said Patrick. ‘Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, that deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.’

  ‘Don’t!’ said Julia, ‘I’m having enough trouble wearing nicotine patches and still smoking at the same time. Don’t take away my irony,’ she pleaded, clasping him histrionically, ‘leave me with a little sarcasm.’

  ‘Sarcasm doesn’t count. It only means one thing: contempt.’

  ‘You always were a quality freak,’ said Julia. ‘Some of us like sarcasm.’

  Julia noticed that she was playing with Patrick. She felt a small tug of nostalgia, but reminded herself sternly that she was well rid of him. Besides, she had Gunther now, a charming German banker who spent the middle of the week in London. It was true that he was married, as Patrick had been, but in every other way he was the opposite: slick, fit, rich and disciplined. He had opera tickets, and bookings in caviar bars and membership of nightclubs, organized by his personal assistant. Sometimes he threw caution to the winds and put on his ironed jeans and his zip-up suede jacket and took her to jazz clubs in unusual parts of town, always, of course, with a big, reassuring, silent car waiting outside to take them back to Hays Mews, just behind Berkeley Square, where Gunther, like all his friends, was having a swimming pool put into the subbasement of his triple mews house lateral conversion. He collected hideous contemporary art with the haphazard credulity of a man who has friends in the art world. There were artistic black-and-white photographs of women’s nipples in his dressing room. He made Julia feel sophisticated, but he didn’t make her want to play. The thought simply didn’t enter her head when she was with Gunther. He had never struggled to give up irony. He knew, of course, that it existed and he pursued it doggedly with all the silliness at his command.

  ‘We’d better find a seat,’ said Patrick. ‘I’m not quite sure what’s going on; I haven’t even had time to look at the order of service.’

  ‘But didn’t you organize it?’

  ‘No. Mary did.’

  ‘Sweet!’ said Julia. ‘She’s always so helpful, more like a mother than your own mother really.’

  Julia felt her heart rate accelerate; perhaps she had gone too far. She was amazed that her old competition with that paragon of self-sacrifice had suddenly burst out, now that it was so out of date.

  ‘She was, until she had children of her own,’ said Patrick amiably. ‘That rather blew my cover.’

  From fearing that he would take offence, Julia found herself wishing he would stop being so maddeningly calm.

  Organ music purred into life.

  ‘Well, real or not, I have to burn the remains of the only mother I’ll ever have,’ said Patrick, smiling briskly at Julia and setting off down the aisle to the front row where Mary was keeping a seat for him.

  4

  Mary sat in the front pew of the crematorium staring at Eleanor’s coffin, mastering a moment of rebellion. Wondering where Patrick was, she had looked back and seen him bantering flirtatiously with Julia. Now that nothing serious depended on her cultivated indifference, she felt a thud of exasperation. Here she was again, being helpful, while Patrick, in one of the more legitimate throes of his perpetual crisis, bestowed his attention on another woman. Not that she wanted more of his attention; all she wanted from Patrick was for him to be a little freer, a little less predictable. To be fair, and she sometimes wished she could stop being so fair, that’s what he wanted as well. She had to remind herself that separation had made them grow closer. No longer hurled together or driven apart by their habitual reactions, they had settled into a relatively stable orbit around the children and around each other.

  Her irritation was further blunted when a second backward glance yielded a grave smile from Erasmus Price, her own tiny concession to the consolations of adultery. She had started her affair with him in the South of France, where Patrick had insisted on renting a house during the final disintegration of their marriage, compulsively circling back to the area around his childhood home in Saint-Nazaire. Mary protested against this extravagance in vain; Patrick was in the last phase of his drinking, stumbling around the labyrinth of his unconscious, unavailable for discussion.

  The Prices, whose own marriage was falling apart, had sons roughly the same age as Robert and Thomas. Despite these promising symmetries, harmony eluded the two families.

  ‘Anybody who is amazed that “a week is a long time in politics”,’ said Patrick on the second day, ‘should try having the Prices to stay. It turns out to be a fucking eternity. Do you know how he got his wacky name? His father was in the middle of editing the sixty-five-volume Oxford University Press Complete Works of Erasmus when his mother interrupted him with the news that she had given birth to a son. “Let’s call him Erasmus,” he cried, like a man inspired, “or Luther, whose crucial letter to Erasmus I was re-reading only this morning.” Given the choice…’ Patrick subsided.

  Mary ignored him, knowing that he was just setting up that day’s pretext for more senseless drinking. After Patrick had passed out and Emily Price had gone to bed
, Mary sat up late, listening to Erasmus’s troubles.

  ‘Some people think that the future belongs to them and that they can lose it,’ he said on the first evening, staring into his wine-dark glass, ‘but I don’t have that sense at all. Even when the work is going well, I wouldn’t mind if I could painlessly and instantly expire.’

  Why was she drawn to these gloomy men? As a philosopher, at least Erasmus, like Schopenhauer, could make his pessimism into a world view. He cheered up at the mention of the German philosopher.

  ‘My favourite remark of his was the advice he gave to a dying friend: “You are ceasing to be something you would have done better never to become.”’

  ‘That must have helped,’ said Mary.

  ‘A real nostalgia-buster,’ he whispered admiringly.

  According to Erasmus his marriage was irreparable; the puzzle for Mary was that it existed at all. As a guest, Emily Price had three main drawbacks: she was incapable of saying please, incapable of saying thank you, and incapable of saying sorry, all the while creating a surge in the demand for these expressions. When she saw Mary applying sunblock to Thomas’s sharp pale shoulders, she hurried over and scooped the white cream out of Mary’s cupped hand, saying, ‘I can’t see it without wanting to take some.’ By her own account, the same hunger had haunted the birth of her eldest son, ‘The moment I saw him, I thought: I want another one.’