Patrick walked away from his mother’s coffin, aware that unless he rushed back hysterically, he had stood beside her for the last time. He had seen the cold damp contents of the coffin the night before, when he paid a visit to Bunyon’s funeral parlour. A friendly, blue-suited woman with short white hair had greeted him at the door.
‘Hello, love, I heard a taxi and I thought it was you.’
She guided him downstairs. Pink and brown diamond carpet like the bar of a country house hotel. Discreet advertisements for special services. A framed photograph of a woman kneeling by a black box from which a dove was only too pleased to be set free. Bolting upwards in a blur of white wings. Did it return to the Bunyon’s dovecote and get recycled? Oh, no, not the black box again. ‘We can release a dove for you on the day of your funeral’. Gothic script seemed to warp every letter that passed through the door of the funeral parlour, as if death were a German village. There were stained-glass windows, electrically lit, on the stairs down to the basement.
‘I’ll leave you with her. If there’s anything you need, don’t hesitate. I’ll be upstairs.’
‘Thank you,’ said Patrick, waiting for her to turn the corner before stepping into the Willow Chapel.
He closed the door behind him and glanced hurriedly into the coffin, as though his mother had told him it was rude to stare. Whatever he was looking at, it was not the ‘her’ he had been promised with solemn cosiness a few minutes before. The absence of life in that familiar body, the rigid and rectified features of the face he had known before he even knew his own, made all the difference. Here was a transitional object for the far end of life. Instead of the soft toy or raggie that a child uses to cope with its mother’s absence, he was being offered a corpse, its scrawny fingers clutching an artificial white rose whose stiff silk petals were twisted into position over an unbeating heart. It had the sarcasm of a relic, as well as the prestige of a metonym. It stood for his mother and for her absence with equal authority. In either case, it was her final appearance before she retired into other people’s memory.
He had better take another look, a longer look, a less theoretical look, but how could he concentrate in this disconcerting basement? The Willow Chapel turned out to be under a busy pavement, pierced by the declamatory brightness of mobile-phone talk and tattooed by clicking heels. A rumbling taxi emerged from the general traffic and splashed a puddle onto the paving stones above the far corner of the ceiling. He was reminded of the Tennyson poem he hadn’t thought of for decades, ‘Dead, long dead, / Long dead! / And my heart is a handful of dust, / And the wheels go over my head, / And my bones are shaken with pain, / For in a shallow grave they are thrust, / Only a yard beneath the street, / And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat, / The hoofs of the horses beat, / Beat into my scalp and my brain, / With never an end to the stream of passing feet.’ He could see why Bunyon’s had chosen to call this room the Willow Chapel rather than the Coal Cellar or the Shallow Grave. ‘Hello, love, your Mum’s in the Coal Cellar,’ muttered Patrick. ‘We could release a dove in the Shallow Grave, but it would have no chance whatever of escape.’ He sat down and rocked his torso over his folded arms. His entrails were in torment, as they had been since hearing about his mother’s death three days ago. No need for ten years of psychoanalysis to work out that he felt ‘gutted’. He was doing what he always did under pressure, observing everything, chattering to himself in different voices, circling the unacceptable feelings, in this case conveniently embedded in his mother’s coffin.
She had left the world with screeching slowness, sliding inch by inch into oblivion. At first he could not help enjoying the comparative quiet of her presence, but then he noticed that he was clinging to the urban noises outside in order not to be drawn into the deep pit of silence at the centre of the room. He must take a closer look, but first he really had to turn down the lights that were glaring through chrome grids in the low polystyrene ceiling. They bleached the glow of the four stout candles impaled on brass stands at the corners of the coffin. He dimmed the spotlights and restored some of the ecclesiastical pomposity to the candles. There was one more thing he had to check. A pink velvet curtain partitioned the room; he had to know what was behind it before he could pay attention to his mother. It turned out to hide a storage area packed with equipment: a grey metal trolley with sensible wheels, some no-nonsense rubber tubes and a huge gold crucifix. Everything needed to embalm a Christian. Eleanor had expected to meet Jesus at the end of a tunnel after she died. The poor man was a slave to his fans, waiting to show crowds of eager dead the neon countryside that lay beyond the rebirth canal of earthly annihilation. It must be hard to be chosen as optimism’s master cliché, the Light at the End of the Tunnel, ruling over a glittering army of half-full glasses and silver-lined clouds.
Patrick let the curtain drop reluctantly, acknowledging that he had run out of distractions. He edged towards the coffin, like a man approaching a cliff. At least he knew that this coffin contained his mother’s corpse. Twenty years ago, when he had been to see his father’s remains in New York, he was shown into the wrong room. ‘In loving memory of Hermann Newton’. He had done everything he could to opt out of that bereavement process, but he was not going to evade this one. A cool dry part of his mind was trying to bring his emotions under its aphoristic sway, but the stabbing pain in his guts undermined its ambitions, and confused his defences.
As he stared into the coffin, he felt the encroachment of an agitated animal sadness. He wanted to linger incredulously by the body, still giving it some of the attention it had commanded in life: a shake, a touch, a word, an enquiring gaze. He reached out and put his hand on her chest and felt the shock of its thinness. He leant over and kissed her on the forehead and felt the shock of its coldness. These sharp sensations lowered his defences further, and he was overwhelmed by an expanding rush of sympathy for the ruined human being in front of him. During its fleeting life, this vast sense of tenderness reduced his mother’s personality to a detail, and his relationship with her to a detail within a detail.
He sat down again and leant forward over his crossed legs and folded arms to give himself some faint relief from the pain in his stomach. And then he suddenly made a connection. Of course, how strange – how determined. Aged seven, going on his first trip alone abroad with his mother, a few months after his parents’ divorce. His first flash of Italy: the white number plates, the blue bay, the ochre churches. They were staying at the Excelsior in Naples, on a waterfront buzzing with waspish motorcycles and humming with crowded trams. From the balcony of their magnificent room, his mother pointed to the street urchins crouched on the roofs, or clinging to the backs of the trams. Patrick, who thought they were in Naples on holiday, was alarmed to hear that Eleanor had come there to save these poor children. There was a marvellous man, a priest called Father Tortelli, who never tired of picking up lost Neapolitan boys and giving them shelter in the refuge that Eleanor had been bankrolling from London. She was now going to see it for the first time. Wasn’t it exciting? Wasn’t it a good thing to be doing? She showed Patrick a photograph of Father Tortelli: a small, tough, fifty-year-old man in a black shirt who looked as if he was no stranger to the boxing ring. His bearish arms were locked around the fragile, sharp-boned shoulders of two sun-tanned boys in white vests. Father Tortelli was protecting them from the streets, but who was protecting them from Father Tortelli? Not Eleanor. She was providing him with the means to fill his refuge with ever-growing numbers of orphans and runaways. After lunch that day, Patrick had an attack of violent gastro-enteritis, and instead of leaving him in luxurious neglect while she went to look after the other children, his mother was made to stay with him and hold his hand while he screamed with pain in the green marble bathroom.
No amount of stomach ache could make her stay now. Not that he wanted her to stay, but his body had a memory of its own which it continued to narrate without any reference to his current wishes. What was it that had driven Eleanor to furnish children for her husband and for Father Tortelli, and why was the drive so strong that, after the collapse of her marriage, she immediately replaced a father with a Father, a doctor with a priest? Patrick had no doubt that her motives were unconscious, as unconscious as the somatic memory that had taken him over in the last three days. What could he do but drag these fragments out of the dark and acknowledge them?
After a quiet knock, the door opened and the attendant leant into the room.
‘Just to make sure everything is all right,’ she whispered.
‘Maybe it is,’ said Patrick.
The journey back to his flat had a mildly hallucinatory quality, surging through the rainy night in a fluorescent bus, freshly flooded by so many fierce impressions and remote memories. There were two Jehovah’s Witnesses on board, a black man handing out leaflets and a black woman preaching at the top of her voice. ‘Repent of your sins and take Jesus into your heart, because when you die it will be too late to repent in the grave and you’ll burn in the fires of Hell…’
A red-eyed Irishman in a threadbare tweed jacket started shouting in counterpoint from a back seat. ‘Shut up, you fuckin’ bitch. Go suck Satan’s cock. You’re not allowed to do this, whether you’re Muslim, or Christian, or Satanic.’ When the man with the leaflets headed for the upper deck, he persisted, investing his accent with a sadistic Southern twang, ‘I can see you, Boy. How do you think you’d look with your head under your arm, Boy. If you don’t shut that bitch up, I’ll adjust your face for you, Boy.’
‘Oh, do shut up yourself,’ said an exasperated commuter.
Patrick noticed that his stomach pains had gone. He watched the Irishman sway in his seat, his lips continuing to argue silently with the Jehovah’s Witness, or with some Jesuit from his youth. Give us a boy till the age of seven and we’ll have him for life. Not me, thought Patrick, you won’t have me.
As the bus pushed haltingly towards his destination, he thought about those brief but pivotal nights in the Suicide Observation Room, unpeeling one sweat-soaked T-shirt after another, throwing off the sauna of the bedclothes only to shudder in the freezer of their absence; turning the light on and off, pained by the brightness, alarmed by the dark; a poisonous headache lurching around his skull like the lead in a jumping bean. He had brought nothing to read except The Tibetan Book of the Dead, hoping to find its exotic iconography ridiculous enough to purge any fantasies he might still cling to about consciousness continuing after death. As it turned out, he found his imagination seduced by a passage from the introduction to the Chonyid Bardo, ‘O nobly born, when thy body and thy mind were separating, thou must have experienced a glimpse of the Pure Truth, subtle, sparkling, bright, dazzling, glorious, and radiantly awesome, in appearance like a mirage moving across a landscape in springtime in one continuous stream of vibrations. Be not daunted thereby, nor terrified, nor awed. That is the radiance of thine own true nature. Recognize it.’
The words had a psychedelic authority that overpowered the materialist annihilation he longed to believe in. He struggled to restore his faith in the finality of death, but couldn’t help seeing it as a superstition among superstitions, no more bracingly rational than the rest. The idea that an afterlife had been invented to reassure people who couldn’t face the finality of death was no more plausible than the idea that the finality of death had been invented to reassure people who couldn’t face the nightmare of endless experience. His delirium tremens collaborated with the poets of the Bardo to produce a sensation of seething electrocution as he was goaded towards the abattoir of sleep, terrified that the slaughter of his rational mind would present him with a ‘glimpse of the Pure Truth’.
Memories and phrases loomed and flitted like fog banks on a night road. Thoughts threatened him from a distance, but disappeared as he approached them. ‘Drowned in dreams and burning to be gone’. Who had said that? Other people’s words. Had he already thought ‘other people’s words’? Things seemed far away and then, a moment later, repetitious. Was it like fog, or was it more like hot sand, something he was labouring through and trying not to touch at the same time? Cold and wet, hot and dry. How could it be both? How could it be other than both? Similes of dissimilarities – another phrase that seemed to chase itself like a miniature train around a tight circuit. Please make it stop.
A scene that kept tumbling back into his delirious thoughts was his visit to the philosopher Victor Eisen after Victor’s near-death experience. He had found his old Saint-Nazaire neighbour in the London clinic, still strapped to the machines that had flat-lined a few days earlier. Victor’s withered yellow arms emerged limply from an institutional dressing gown, but as he described what had happened his speech was as rapid and emphatic as ever, saturated by a lifetime of confident opinions.
‘I came to a riverbank and on the other side was a red light which controlled the universe. There were two figures either side of it, who I knew to be the Lord of Time and the Lord of Space. They communicated to me directly through their thoughts, without using any speech. They told me that the fabric of Time-Space was torn and that I had to repair it, that the fate of the universe depended on me. I had a tremendous sense of urgency and purpose and I was on my way to fulfil my task when I felt myself being dragged back into my body and I very reluctantly returned.’
For three weeks Victor was won over by the feeling of authenticity that accompanied his vision, but then the habits of his public atheism and the fear that the logical reductions enshrined in his philosophical work might be invalidated made him squeeze his new sense of openness back into the biological crisis he was suffering at the time. He decided that the pressing mission he had been sent on by the controller of the universe was an allegory of a brain running out of oxygen. His mind had been failing, not expanding.
As he lay sweating in that narrow room, thinking about Victor’s need to decide what everything meant, Patrick wondered if he could ever make his ego light enough to relax in not having to settle the meaning of things. What would that feel like?
In the meantime, the Suicide Observation Room lived up to its majestic name. In it, he saw that suicide had always formed the unquestioned backdrop to his existence. Even before he had taken to carrying around a copy of The Myth of Sisyphus in his overcoat pocket, making its first sentence the mantra of his early twenties, Patrick had greeted the day with the basic question, ‘Can anyone think of a good reason not to kill himself?’ Since he lived at the time in a theatrical solitude, crowded with mad and mocking voices, he was not likely to get an affirmative answer. Elaborate postponement was the best he could hope for, and in the end the obligation to talk proved stronger than the desire to die. During the next twenty years the suicidal chatter died down to an occasional whisper on a coastal path, or in a quiet chemist. When it returned in full force, it took the form of a grim monologue rather than a surreal chorus. The comparative simplicity of the most recent assault made him realize that he had only ever been superficially in love with easeful death and was much more deeply enthralled by his own personality. Suicide wore the mask of self-rejection; but in reality nobody took their personality more seriously than the person who was planning to kill himself on its instructions. Nobody was more determined to stay in charge at any cost, to force the most mysterious aspect of life into their own imperious schedule.
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.