At Last Page 5

  Emily complained about Cambridge, she complained about her husband and about her sons, she complained about her house, she complained about France and the sun and the clouds and the leaves and the wind and the bottle tops. She couldn’t stop; she had to bail out the flooding dinghy of her discontent. Sometimes she set false targets with her complaining: Cambridge was hell, London was great, but when Erasmus applied for a job at London University, she made him withdraw. At the time, she had said that he was too cowardly to apply, but on holiday with the Melroses she admitted the truth, ‘I only wanted to move to London so I could complain about the air quality and the schools.’

  Patrick was momentarily jolted out of his stupor by the challenge of Emily’s personality.

  ‘She could be the centrepiece of a Kleinian Conference – “Talk About Bad Breasts”.’ He giggled sweatily on the bed while Mary cultivated patience. ‘She had a difficult start in life,’ he sighed. ‘Her mother wouldn’t let her use the biros in their house, in case they ran out of ink.’ He fell off the bed laughing, knocked his head on the bedside table and had to take a handful of codeine to deal with the bump.

  When Mary abandoned tolerance, she did it vehemently. She could feel Emily’s underlying sense of privation like the blast from a furnace, but she somehow made the decision to put aside her characteristic empathy, to stay with the annoying consequences and not to feel the distressing causes of Emily’s behaviour, especially after Erasmus’s clumsy pass, which she hadn’t entirely rejected, on the second evening of their endless conversation about marital failure. For a week, they kept each other afloat with the wreckage from their respective marriages. On their return to England it took them two months to admit the futility of trying to build an affair out of these sodden fragments – just long enough for Mary to struggle loyally through Erasmus’s latest work, None the Wiser: Developments in the Philosophy of Consciousness.

  It was the presence of None the Wiser on Mary’s bedside table that alerted Patrick to his wife’s laborious romance.

  ‘You couldn’t be reading that book unless you were having an affair with the author,’ he guessed through half-closed eyes.

  ‘Believe me, it’s virtually impossible even then.’

  He gave in to the relief of closing his eyes completely, a strange smile on his lips. She realized with vague disgust that he was pleased to have the huge weight of his infidelity alleviated by her trivial contribution to the other side of the scales.

  After that, there was what her mother would have called an ‘absolutely maddening’ period, when Patrick only emerged from his new blackout bedsit in order to lecture or interrogate her about consciousness studies, sometimes with the slow sententious precision of drunkenness, sometimes with its visionary fever, all delivered with the specious fluency of a man used to pleading a case in public.

  ‘The subject of consciousness, in order to enter the realm of science, must become the object of consciousness, and that is precisely what it cannot do, for the eye cannot perceive itself, cannot vault from its socket fast enough to glimpse the lens. The language of experience and the language of experiment hang like oil and water in the same test tube, never mingling except from the violence of philosophy. The violence of philosophy. Would you agree? Whoops. Don’t worry about that lamp, I’ll get you a new one.

  ‘Seriously, though, where do you stand on microtubules? Micro-tubular bells. Are you For or Against? Do you think that a theory of extended mind can base itself confidently in quantum non-locality? Do you believe that two linked particles conceived in the warm spiralling quantum womb of a microtubule could continue to inform each other as they rush through vast fields of interstellar darkness; still communicating despite the appearance of icy separation? Are you For, or Against? And what difference would it make to experience if these particles did continue to resonate with each other, since it is not particles that we experience?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake shut up.’

  ‘Who will rid us of the Explanatory Gap?’ he shouted, like Henry II requesting an assassin for his troublesome priest. ‘And is that gap just a product of our misconstrued discourse?’ He ploughed on, ‘Is reality a consensual hallucination? And is a nervous breakdown in fact a refusal to consent? Go on, don’t be shy, tell me what you think?’

  ‘Why don’t you go back to your flat and pass out there? I don’t want the children seeing you in this state.’

  ‘What state? A state of philosophical enquiry? I thought you would approve.’

  ‘I’ve got to collect the boys. Please go home.’

  ‘How sweet that you think of it as my home. I’m not in that happy position.’

  He would leave, abandoning the consciousness debate for a slamming door. Even ‘fucking bitch’ had a welcome directness after the twisted use he made of abstract phrases like ‘property dualism’ to express his shattered sense of home. She felt less and less guilty about his stormy departures. She dreaded Robert and Thomas asking her about their father’s moods, his glaring silences, his declamatory introversion, the spectacle of his clumsiness and misery. The children in fact saw very little of him. He was ‘away on business’ for the last two months of his drinking and for his month in the Priory. With his unusual talent for mimicry, Robert still managed to impersonate the concerns that Erasmus wrote books about and Patrick used to make veiled attacks on his wife.

  ‘Where do thoughts come from?’ he muttered, pacing up and down pensively. ‘Before you decide to move your hand where does the decision live?’

  ‘Honestly, Bobby,’ said Thomas, letting out a short giggle. ‘I expect Brains would know.’

  ‘Well, Mr Tracy,’ stammered Robert, bobbing up and down on imaginary strings, ‘when you move your hand, your…your brain tells you to move your hand, but what tells your brain to tell your hand?’

  ‘That’s a real puzzle, Brains,’ said Robert, switching to Mr Tracy’s basso profundo.

  ‘Weh-well, Mr Tracy,’ he returned to the stammering scientist, ‘I’ve invented a machine that may be able to s-solve that puzzle. It’s called the Thinkatron.’

  ‘Switch it on, switch it on!’ shouted Thomas, swishing his raggie in the air.

  Robert made a loud humming sound that gradually grew more threatening.

  ‘Oh, no, it’s going to blow up!’ warned Thomas. ‘The Thinkatron is going to blow up!’

  Robert flung himself on the floor with the sound of a huge explosion.

  ‘Gee, Mr Tracy, I guess I must have o-overloaded the primary circuits.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Brains,’ said Thomas magnanimously, ‘I’m sure you’ll work it out. But seriously,’ he added to Mary, ‘what is the “consciousness debate” that Dada gets so angry about?’

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Mary, desperate for someone close to her who didn’t want to talk about consciousness. She thought she could put Thomas off by making the subject sound impenetrably learned. ‘It’s really the philosophical and scientific debate about whether the brain and the mind are identical.’

  ‘Well, of course not,’ said Thomas taking his thumb out of his mouth and rounding his eyes, ‘I mean, the brain is part of the body and the mind is the outer soul.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Mary, amazed.

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ said Thomas, ‘is why things exist.’

  ‘What do you mean? Why there’s something rather than nothing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I have no idea, but it’s probably worth staying surprised by that.’

  ‘I am surprised by it, Mama. I’m really surprised.’

  When she told Erasmus what Thomas had said about the mind being the ‘outer soul’, he didn’t seem as impressed as she had been.

  ‘It’s rather an old-fashioned view,’ he commented, ‘although the more modern point of view, that the soul is the inner mind, can’t be said to have got us anywhere by simply inverting the relationship between two opaque signifiers.’

  ‘Right,’ said Mary. ‘Still, don’t you think it’
s rather extraordinary for a six-year-old to be so clear about that famously tricky subject?’

  ‘Children often say things that seem extraordinary to us precisely because the big questions are not yet “famously tricky” for them. Oliver is obsessed with death at the moment and he’s also only six. He can’t bear it, it hasn’t become part of How it Is; it’s still a scandal, a catastrophic design flaw; it ruins everything. We’ve got used to the fact of death – although the experience is irreducibly strange. He hasn’t found the trick of putting a hood on the executioner, of hiding the experience with the fact. He still sees it as pure experience. I found him crying over a dead fly lying on the windowsill. He asked me why things have to die and all I could offer him was tautology: because nothing lasts for ever.’

  Erasmus’s need to take a general and theoretical view of every situation sometimes infuriated Mary. All she had wanted was a little compliment for Thomas. Even when she finally told him that she felt there was no point in carrying on with their affair, he accepted her position with insulting equanimity, and then went on to admit that he had ‘recently been toying with the Panpsychist approach’, as if this unveiling of the wild side of his intellect might tempt her to change her mind.

  Mary had decided not to take the children to Eleanor’s funeral, but to leave them with her mother. Thomas had no memory of Eleanor and Robert was so steeped in his father’s sense of betrayal that the occasion would be more likely to revive faded hostility than to relieve a natural sense of sadness and loss. They had all been together for the last time about two years before in Kew Gardens, during the bluebell season, soon after Eleanor had come back from Saint-Nazaire to live in England. On their way to the Woodland Walk, Mary pushed Eleanor’s wheelchair through the twisting Rhododendron Dell, hemmed in by walls of outrageous colour. Patrick hung back, gulping down the odd miniature of Johnnie Walker Black Label in moments of feigned fascination with a sprawling pink or orange blossom, while Robert and Thomas explored the gigantic bushes ranged against the slopes on either side. When a golden pheasant emerged onto the path, its saffron-yellow and blood-red feathers shining like enamel, Mary stopped the wheelchair, astonished. The pheasant crossed the hot cinder with the bobbing majesty of an avian gait, the price of a strained talent, like the high head of a swimming dog. Eleanor, crumpled in her seat, wearing old baby-blue flannel trousers and a maroon cardigan with big flat buttons and holes at the elbow, stared at the bird with the alarmed distaste that had taken up residence in her frozen features. Patrick, determined not to talk to his mother, hurried past muttering that he’d ‘better keep an eye on the boys’.

  Eleanor gestured frantically to Mary to come closer and then produced one of her rare whole sentences.

  ‘I can never forget that he’s David’s son.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s his father who haunts him these days,’ said Mary, surprised by her own sharpness.

  ‘Haunts…’ said Eleanor.

  Mary was thrusting the wheelchair through the dappled potholes of the Woodland Walk by the time Eleanor was able to speak again.

  ‘Are…you…all…right?’

  She asked the same question again and again, with mounting agitation, ignoring the haze of bluebells, mingled with the yellow stalks of wild garlic, under the shifting and swelling shade of the oaks. She was trying to save Mary from Patrick, not out of any insight into her circumstances, but in order to save herself, by some retroactive magic, from David. Mary’s attempts to give an affirmative answer tormented Eleanor, since the only answer she could accept was: ‘No, I’m not all right! I’m living in hell with a tyrannical madman, just as you did, my poor darling. On the other hand, I sincerely believe that the universe will save us, thanks to the awesome shamanic powers of the wounded healer that you truly are.’

  For some reason Mary couldn’t quite bring herself to say this, and yet there was still a troubling sisterhood between the two women. Mary recognized certain features of Eleanor’s upbringing all too easily: the intense shyness, the all-important nanny, the diffident sense of self, the masochistic attraction to difficult men. Eleanor was the cautionary tale of these forces, a warning against the worthlessness of self-sacrifice when there was almost no self to sacrifice, of dealing with being lost by getting more lost. Above all, she was a baby, not a ‘big baby’ like so many adults, but a small baby perfectly preserved in the pickling jar of money, alcohol and fantasy.

  Since that colourful day in Kew, neither of the boys had been taken to see their grandmother in her nursing home. Patrick stopped visiting her as well, after her excruciating flirtation with assisted suicide two years before. Only Mary persevered, sometimes with the scant dutiful reminder that Eleanor was, after all, her mother-in-law; sometimes with the more obscure conviction that Eleanor was out of balance with her family and that the work of redressing that balance must start straight away, whether Eleanor was able to participate or not. It was certainly strange, as the months wore on, to be talking into space, hoping that she was doing some good, while Eleanor stared ever more rigidly and blankly at the ceiling. And in the absence of any dialogue, she often ran aground on her contempt for Eleanor’s failure to protect her child.

  She could remember Eleanor describing the first few weeks after she returned from hospital with the infant Patrick. David was so tormented by his son’s crying that he ordered her to take the noisy brat to the remotest room in the attic. Eleanor already felt exiled enough in David’s beloved Cornwall, at the end of a headland overlooking an impenetrably wooded estuary, and she could hardly believe, as she was thrown out of her bedroom too suddenly to put on her slippers, or to collect a blanket for the baby, that there was a further exile available, a small cold room in the big cold house. For her the building was already sodden with melancholy horror. She had married David in the Truro registry office when she was heavily pregnant with their first child. Overestimating his medical skills, he had encouraged her to have the child at home. Without the incubator that she needed, Georgina died two days later. David sailed his boat out into the estuary, buried her at sea, and then disappeared for three days to get drunk. Eleanor stayed in bed, bleeding and abandoned, staring at the grey water through the bay window of her bedroom. After Georgina’s death, she had refused to go to bed with David. One evening he punched her in the back of the knees as she was going upstairs. When she fell, he twisted her arm behind her back and raped her on the staircase. Just as she thought she was finally disgusted enough to leave him, she found that she was pregnant.

  Up in the attic with the new rape-born baby in her arms, she felt hysterically unconfident. Looking at the narrow bed she was gripped by the fear that if they lay down on it together, she would roll over and asphyxiate him, and so she chose the wooden chair in the corner, next to the empty fireplace, and sat up all night, clutching him in her arms. During those nights in the wooden chair, she was sucked down into sleep again and again, and then woken abruptly by sensing the baby’s body sliding down her nightdress towards the precipice of her knees. She would catch him at the last moment, terrified that his soft head was about to crash onto the hard floor; and yet unable to go to the bed they both longed for, in case she crushed him to death.

  The days were a little better. The maternity nurse came in to help, the housekeeper bustled about in the kitchen, and with David out sailing and drinking, the house took on a superficially cheerful atmosphere. The three women fussed over Patrick and when Eleanor was resting back in her own bedroom she almost forgot about the dreadful nights; she almost forgot about the death of Georgina when she closed her eyes and could no longer see the stretch of grey water outside her window, and when she fed the baby from her breasts and they fell asleep together, she almost forgot about the violence that had brought him into the world.

  But then one day, three weeks after they came back from hospital, David stayed behind. He was in a dangerous mood from the start; she could smell the brandy in his coffee and see the furious jealousy in his looks. By lunchtime, he h
ad wounded everyone in the house with his cutting remarks, and all the women were anxious, feeling him pacing around, waiting for the chance to hurt and humiliate them. Nevertheless, they were surprised when he strode into the kitchen, carrying a battered leather bag and wearing a surgeon’s ill-fitting green pyjamas. He ordered them to clear a space on the scrubbed oak table, unfolded a towel, took out a wooden case of surgical instruments from the bag and opened it next to the towel. He asked for a saucepan of boiling water, as if everything had already been agreed and everyone knew what was going on.

  ‘What for?’ said the housekeeper, the first to wake from the trance.

  ‘To sterilize the instruments,’ David answered in the tone of a man explaining something very obvious to someone very stupid. ‘The time has come to perform a circumcision. Not, I assure you,’ he added, as if to allay their innermost fears, ‘for religious reasons,’ he allowed himself a fleeting smile, ‘but for medical ones.’

  ‘You’ve been drinking,’ Eleanor blurted out.

  ‘Only a beaker of surgical spirit,’ he quipped, a little giddy from the prospect of the operation; and then, no longer in the mood for fun, ‘Bring me the boy.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s for the best?’ asked the maternity nurse.

  ‘Do not question my authority,’ said David, throwing everything into it: the older man, the doctor, the employer, the centuries of command, but also the paralysing dart of his psychological presence, which made it seem life-threatening to oppose him.

  His credentials as a murderer were well established in Eleanor’s imagination. Late at night, when he was down to one listener, amongst the empty bottles and crushed cigars, David was fond of telling the story of an Indian pig-sticking hunt he had been on in the late nineteen-twenties. He was thrilled by the danger of galloping through the high grass with a lance, chasing a wild boar whose tusks could ruin a horse’s legs, throw a rider to the ground and gore him to death. Impaling one of these fast, tough pigs was also a terrific pleasure, more involving than a long-distance kill. The only blemish on the expedition was that one of the party was bitten by a wild dog and developed the symptoms of rabies. Three days from the nearest hospital, it was already too late to help, and so the hunters decided to truss up their foaming and thrashing friend in one of the thick nets originally intended for transporting the bodies of the dead pigs, and to hoist him off the ground, tying the corners of the net to the branches of a big jacaranda tree. It was challenging, even for these hard men, to enjoy the sense of deep relaxation that follows a day of invigorating sport with this parcel of hydrophobic anguish dangling from a nearby tree. The row of lanterns down the dinner table, the quiet gleam of silver, the well-trained servants, the triumph of imposing civilization on the wild vastness of the Indian night, seemed to have been thrown into question. David could only just make out, against a background of screams, the splendid tale of Archie Montcrieff driving a pony and trap into the Viceroy’s ballroom. Archie had worn an improvised toga and shouted obscenities in ‘an outlandish kind of Cockney Latin’, while the pony manured the dance floor. If his father hadn’t been such a friend of the Viceroy’s he might have had to resign his commission, but as it was, the viceroy admitted, privately of course, that Archie had raised his spirits during ‘another damned dull dance’.