At Last Read online

  Joe Rich and Peter Zirkovsky met him in one of the smaller oval-tabled, glass-sided conference rooms of Brown and Stone’s offices on Lexington Avenue. Instead of the sulphurous yellow legal pads he was expecting, he found lined cream paper with the name of the firm printed elegantly on the top of each page. An assistant photocopied Patrick’s passport, while Joe examined the doctor’s letter testifying to Eleanor’s incapacity.

  ‘I had no idea about this trust,’ said Patrick.

  ‘Your mother must have been keeping it as a nice surprise,’ said Peter with a big lazy smile.

  ‘It might be that,’ said Patrick tolerantly. ‘Where does the income go?’

  ‘Currently we’re sending it to…’ Peter flicked over a sheet of paper, ‘the Association Transpersonel at the Banque Populaire de la Côte d’Azur in Lacoste, France.’

  ‘Well, you can stop that straight away,’ said Patrick.

  ‘Whoa, slow down,’ said Joe. ‘We’re going to have to get you a power of attorney first.’

  ‘That’s why she didn’t tell me about it,’ said Patrick, ‘because she’s continuing to subsidize her pet charity in France while I pay for her nursing-home fees in London.’

  ‘She may have lost her competence before she had a chance to change the instructions,’ said Peter, who seemed determined to furnish Patrick with a loving mother.

  ‘This letter is fine,’ said Joe. ‘We’re going to have to get you to sign some documents and get them notarized.’

  ‘How much money are we talking about?’ asked Patrick.

  ‘It’s not a large Jonson trust and it’s suffered in the recent stock-market corrections,’ said Joe.

  ‘Let’s hope it behaves incorrigibly from now on,’ said Patrick.

  ‘The latest valuation we have,’ said Peter, glancing down at his notes, ‘is two point three million dollars, with an estimated income of eighty thousand.’

  ‘Oh, well, still a useful sum,’ said Patrick, trying to sound slightly disappointed.

  ‘Enough to buy a country cottage!’ said Peter in an absurd impersonation of an English accent. ‘I gather house prices are pretty crazy over there.’

  ‘Enough to buy a second room,’ said Patrick, eliciting a polite guffaw from Peter, although Patrick could in fact think of nothing he wanted more than to separate the bed from the sit.

  Walking down Lexington Avenue towards his hotel in Gramercy Park, Patrick began adjusting to his strange good fortune. The long arm of his great-grandfather, who had died more than half a century before Patrick was born, was going to pluck him out of his cramped living quarters and get him into a place where there might be room for his children to stay and his friends to visit. In the meantime it would pay for his mother’s nursing home. It was puzzling to think that this complete stranger was going to have such a powerful influence on his life. Even his benefactor had inherited his money. It had been his father who had founded the Jonson Candle Company in Cleveland, in 1832. By 1845 it was one of the most profitable candle companies in the country. Patrick could remember reading the founder’s uninspiring explanation for his success: ‘We had a new process of distilling cheap greases. Our competitors were using costly tallow and lard. Candles were high and our profits were large for a number of years.’ Later, the candle factory diversified into paraffin, oil treatment and hardening processes, and developed a patented compound that became an indispensable ingredient in dry cleaning around the world. The Jonsons also bought buildings and building sites in San Francisco, Denver, Kansas City, Toledo, Indianapolis, Chicago, New York, Trinidad and Puerto Rico, but the original fortune rested on the hard-headedness of the founder who had ‘died on the job’, falling through a hatchway in one of his own factories, and also on those ‘cheap greases’ which were still lubricating the life of one of his descendants a hundred and seventy years after their discovery.

  John J. Jonson, Jr., Eleanor’s grandfather, was already sixty by the time he finally married. He had been travelling the world in the service of his family’s burgeoning business, and was only recalled from China by the death of his nephew Sheldon in a sledging accident at St Paul’s School. His eldest nephew, Albert, had already died from pneumonia at Harvard the year before. There were no heirs to the Jonson fortune and Sheldon’s grieving father, Thomas, told his brother it was his duty to marry. John accepted his fate and, after a brief courtship of a general’s daughter, got married and moved to New York. He fathered three daughters in rapid succession, and then dropped dead, but not before creating a multitude of trusts, one of which was meandering its way down to Patrick, as he had discovered that afternoon.

  What did this long-range goodwill mean, and what did it say about the social contract that allowed a rich man to free all of his descendents from the need to work over the course of almost two centuries? There was something disreputable about being saved by increasingly remote ancestors. When he had exhausted the money given to him by a grandmother he scarcely knew, money arrived from a great-grandfather he could never have known. He could only feel an abstract gratitude towards a man whose face he would not have been able to pick out from a heap of sepia daguerreotypes. The ironies of the dynastic drive were just as great as the philanthropic ironies generated by Eleanor, or her Great-Aunt Virginia. No doubt his grandmother and his great-grandfather had hoped to empower a senator, enrich a great art collection or encourage a dazzling marriage, but in the end they had mainly subsidized idleness, drunkenness, treachery and divorce. Were the ironies of taxation any better: raising money for schools and hospitals and roads and bridges, and spending it on blowing up schools and hospitals and roads and bridges in self-defeating wars? It was hard to choose between these variously absurd methods of transferring wealth, but just for now he was going to cave in to the pleasure of having benefited from this particular form of American capitalism. Only in a country free from the funnelling of primogeniture and the levelling of égalité could the fifth generation of a family still be receiving parcels of wealth from a fortune that had essentially been made in the 1830s. His pleasure coexisted peacefully with his disapproval, as he walked into his dim and scented hotel, which resembled the film set of an expensive Spanish brothel, with the room numbers sewn into the carpet, on the assumption that the guests were on all fours after some kind of near overdose and could no longer find their rooms as they crawled down the obscure corridors.

  The phone was ringing when he arrived in the velvet jewel box of his room, bathed in the murky urine light of parchment lampshades and presumptive hangover. He groped his way to the bedside table, clipping his shin on the bowed legs of a chair designed to resemble the virile effeminacy of a matador’s jacket, with immense epaulettes jutting out proudly from the top of its stiff back.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said as he answered the phone.

  ‘Are you all right?’ said Mary.

  ‘Oh, hi, sorry, it’s you. I just got impaled on this fucking matador chair. I can’t see anything in this hotel. They ought to hand out miner’s helmets at the reception.’

  ‘Listen, I’ve got some bad news.’ She paused.

  Patrick lay back on the pillows with a clear intuition of what she was going to say.

  ‘Eleanor died last night. I’m sorry.’

  ‘What a relief,’ said Patrick defiantly. ‘Amongst other things…’

  ‘Yes, other things as well,’ said Mary and she gave the impression of accepting them all in advance.

  They agreed to talk in the morning. Patrick had a fervent desire to be left alone matched only by his fervent desire not to be left alone. He opened the minibar and sat on the floor cross-legged, staring at the wall of miniatures on the inside of the door, shining in the dazzling light of the little white fridge. On shelves next to the tumblers and wine glasses were chocolates, jellybeans, salted nuts, treats and bribes for tired bodies and discontented children. He closed the fridge and closed the cupboard door and climbed carefully onto the red velvet sofa, avoiding the matador chair as best he could.

>   He must try not to forget that only a year ago hallucinations had been crashing into his helpless mind like missiles into a besieged city. He lay down on the sofa, clutching a heavily embroidered cushion to his already aching stomach, and slipped effortlessly into the delirious mentality of his little room in the Priory. He remembered how he used to hear the scratch of a metal nib, or the flutter of moth wings on a screen door, or the swish of a carving knife being sharpened, or the pebble clatter of a retreating wave, as if they were in the same room with him, or rather as if he was in the same place as them. There was a broken rock streaked with the hectic glitter of quartz that quite often lay at the foot of his bed. Blue lobsters explored the edges of the skirting board with their sensitive antennae. Sometimes it was whole scenes that took him over. He would picture, for instance, brake lights streaming across a wet road, the smoky interior of a car, the throb of familiar music, a swollen drop of water rushing down the windscreen, consuming the other drops in its path, and feel that this atmosphere was the deepest thing he had ever known. The absence of narrative in these compulsory waking dreams ushered in a more secretive sense of connection. Instead of trudging across the desert floor of ordinary succession, he was plunged into an oceanic night lit by isolated flares of bioluminescence. He surfaced from these states, unable to imagine how he could describe their haunting power to his Depression Group and longing for his breakfast oxazepam.

  He could have all that back with a few months of hard drinking, not just the quicksilver swamps of early withdrawal with their poisonous, fugitive, shattering reflections, and the discreet delirium of the next two weeks, but all the group therapy as well. He could still remember, on his third day in the Alcohol and Addiction Group, wanting to dive out of the window when an old-timer had dropped in to share his experience, strength and hope with the trembling foals of early recovery. A well-groomed ex-meths drinker, with white hair and a smoker’s orange fingers, he had quoted the wisdom of an even older-timer who was ‘in the rooms’ when he first ‘came round’: ‘Fear knocked at the door!’ (Pause) ‘Courage answered the door!’ (Pause) ‘And there was nobody there!’ (Long pause). He could also have more of the Scottish moderator from the Depression Group, with his cute mnemonic for the power of projection: ‘you’ve got what you spot and you spot what you’ve got’. And then there were the ‘rock bottoms’ of the other patients to reconsider, the man who woke next to a girlfriend he couldn’t remember slashing with a kitchen knife the night before; the weekend guest surrounded by the hand-painted wallpaper he couldn’t remember smearing with excrement; the woman whose arm was amputated when the syringe she picked up from the concrete floor of a friend’s flat turned out to be infected with a flesh-eating superbug; the mother who abandoned her terrified children in a remote holiday cottage in order to return to her dealer in London and countless other stories of less demonstrative despair – moments of shame that precipitated ‘moments of clarity’ in the pilgrim’s progress of recovery.

  All in all, the minibar was out. His month in the Priory had worked. He knew as deeply as he knew anything that sedation was the prelude to anxiety, stimulation the prelude to exhaustion and consolation the prelude to disappointment, and so he lay on the red velvet sofa and did nothing to distract himself from the news of his mother’s death. He stayed awake through the night feeling unconvincingly numb. At five in the morning, when he calculated that Mary would be back from the school run in London, he called her flat and they agreed that she would take over the arrangements for the funeral.

  The organ fell silent, interrupting Patrick’s daydream. He picked up the booklet again from the narrow shelf in front of him, but before he had time to look inside, music burst out from the speakers in the corners of the room. He recognized the song just before the deep black cheerful voice rang out over the crematorium.

  Oh, I got plenty o’ nuthin’,

  An’ nuthin’s plenty fo’ me.

  I got no car, got no mule, I got no misery.

  De folks wid plenty o’ plenty

  Got a lock on dey door,

  ’Fraid somebody’s a-goin’ to rob ’em

  While dey’s out a-makin’ more.

  What for?

  Patrick looked round and smiled mischievously at Mary. She smiled back. He suddenly felt irrationally guilty that he hadn’t yet told her about the trust, as if he were no longer entitled to enjoy the song, now that he didn’t have quite as much nuthin’ as before. More. / What for? was a rhyme that deserved to be made more often.

  Oh, I got plenty o’ nuthin’,

  An’ nuthin’s plenty fo’ me.

  I got de sun, got de moon,

  Got de deep blue sea.

  De folks wid plenty o’ plenty,

  Got to pray all de day.

  Seems wid plenty you sure got to worry

  How to keep de debble away,

  A-way.

  Patrick was entertained by Porgy’s insistence on the sinfulness of riches. He felt that Eleanor and aunt Virginia would have approved. After all, before they became masters of the universe, usurers were consigned to the seventh circle of Hell. Under a rain of fire, their perpetually restless hands were a punishment for hands that had made nothing useful or good in their lifetime, just exploited the labour of others. Even from the less breezy position of being one of the folks wid plenty o’ plenty, and at the cost of buying into the fantasy that folks with plenty o’ nuttin’ didn’t also have to worry about keeping the Debble away, Eleanor would have endorsed Porgy’s views. Patrick renewed his concentration for the final part of the song.

  Never one to strive

  To be good, to be bad—

  What the hell! I is glad

  I’s alive!

  Oh, I got plenty o’ nuthin’,

  An’ nuthin’s plenty fo’ me.

  I got my gal, got my song,

  Got Hebben de whole day long.

  (No use complainin’!)

  Got my gal, got my Lawd, got my song!

  ‘Great choice,’ Patrick whispered to Mary with a grateful nod. He picked up the order of service again, finally ready to look inside.

  7

  How nauseating, thought Nicholas, a Jew being sentimental on behalf of a Negro: you lucky fellows, you’ve got plenty o’ nuthin’, whereas we’re weighed down with all this international capital and these wretched Broadway musical hits. When an idea is floundering, Nicholas said to himself, practising for later, songwriters always wheel out the celestial bodies. De things dat I prize, / Like de stars in de skies, / All are free. No surprises there – one couldn’t expect to get much rent from a hydrogen bomb several million light-years away. It was hard enough persuading a merchant banker to cough up a decent rent for one’s lovely Grade II listed Queen Anne dower house in Shrop-shire, without asking him to drive to the moon for the weekend. Talk about too far from London, and nothing to do when one got there, except bounce around while the oxygen runs out. There was such a thing as the way of the world. Sixty per cent of the Titanic’s first-class passengers survived; twenty-five per cent of the second-class passengers, and no one from steerage. That was the way of the world. ‘Sure is grateful, boss,’ simpered Nicholas under his breath, ‘I got de deep blue sea.’

  Oh, God, what was going on now? The ghastly ‘Spiritual Tool Box’ was going up to the lectern. He could hardly bear it. What was he doing here? In the end, he was just as sentimental as silly old Ira Gershwin. He had come for David Melrose. In many ways David had been an obscure failure, but his presence had possessed a rare and precious quality: pure contempt. He bestrode middle-class morality like a colossus. Other people laboured through the odd bigoted remark, but David had embodied an absolute disdain for the opinion of the world. One could only do one’s best to keep up the tradition.

  For Erasmus the most interesting lines were undoubtedly, Never one to strive / To be good, to be bad—/ What the hell! I is glad / I’s alive! Nietzsche was there, of course, and Rousseau (inevitably), but also the Diamond Sutra. Porgy
was unlikely to have read any of them. Nevertheless, it was legitimate to think in terms of the pervasive influence of a certain family of ideas, of nonstriving and of a natural state that preceded rule-based morality and in some sense made it redundant. Maybe he could see Mary after the funeral. She had always been so receptive. He sometimes thought about that.

  Thank goodness there were people who were happy with nothing, thought Julia, so that people like her (and everyone else she had ever met), could have more. It was virtually impossible to think of a sentence that made a positive use of that dreadful word ‘enough’, let alone one that started raving about ‘nothing’. Still, the song was rather perfect for Patrick’s dotty mother, as well as being an upbeat disinheritance anthem. Hats off to Mary, as usual. Julia sighed with admiration. She assumed that Patrick had been feeling too ‘mad’ to do anything practical, and that Mother Mary had been asked to step in.

  Really, thought Nancy, it was too ridiculous to turn to the Gershwin brothers when one’s own godfather was the divine Cole Porter. Why had Mummy wasted him on indifferent Eleanor when Nancy, who really appreciated his glamour and wit, might have had him all to herself? Not that Porgy and Bess didn’t have its glamorous side. She had gone to a big New York opening with Hansie and Dinkie Guttenburg and had the best time ever, going backstage to congratulate everybody. The real stars weren’t at all overawed by meeting a ferociously handsome German prince with a severe stutter, but you could tell that some of the little chorus girls didn’t know whether to curtsy, start a revolution, or poison his wife. She would definitely include that scene in her book, it was such a coming together of everything fun, unlike this drab funeral. Really, Eleanor was letting the family down and letting herself down as well.