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.’
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 had 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’.
When the story was finished, David rose from the table muttering, ‘This noise is intolerable,’ and went into his tent to fetch his pistol. He walked over to the rabies victim and shot him in the head. Returning to the dumbfounded table, he sat down with a ‘feeling of absolute calm’ and said, ‘Much the kindest thing to do.’ Gradually, the word spread around the table: much the kindest thing to do. Rich and powerful men, some of them quite high up in government, and one of them a judge, couldn’t help agreeing with him. With the silencing of the screams and a few pints of whisky and soda, it became the general view by the end of the evening that David had done something exceptionally courageous. David would almost smile as he described how he had brought everyone at the table round, and then in a fit of piety, he would sometimes finish by saying that although at the time he had not yet set eyes on a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, he really thought of that pistol shot as the beginning of his ‘love affair with medicine’.
Eleanor felt obliged to hand over the baby to him in the kitchen in Cornwall. The baby screamed and screamed. Eleanor thought there must be dogs whimpering in their kennels a hundred miles away, the screams were so loud and high. All the women huddled together crying and begging David to stop and to be careful and to give the baby some local anaesthetic. They knew this was no operation, it was an attack by a furious old man on his son’s genitals; but like the chorus in a play, they could only comment and wail, without being able to alter the action.
‘I wanted to say, “You’ve already killed Georgina and now you want to kill Patrick,”’ Eleanor told Mary, to show how bold she would have been if she had said anything at all. ‘I wanted to call the police!’
Well, why didn’t you? was all that Mary could think, but she said nothing about Eleanor saying nothing; she just nodded and went on being a good listener.
‘It was like…’ said Eleanor, ‘it was like that Goya painting of Saturn devouring his son.’ Brought up surrounded by great paintings, Eleanor had experienced a late-adolescent crush on the History of Art, rudely guillotined by her disinheritance, and replaced by a proclivity for bright dollops of optimistic symbolism. Nevertheless, she could still remember, when she was twenty, driving through Spain in her first car, and being shocked, on a visit to the Prado, by the black vision of those late Goyas.
Mary was struck by the comparison, because it was unusual for Eleanor to make that sort of connection, and also because she knew the painting well, and could easily visualize the gaping mouth, the staring eyes and the ragged white hair of the old god of melancholy, mad with jealousy and the fear of usurpation, as he fed on the bleeding corpse of his decapitated child. Watching Eleanor plead for exoneration made Mary realize that her mother-in-law could never have protected anyone else when she was so entranced by her own vulnerability, so desperate to be saved. Later in her marriage, Eleanor did manage to get police protection for herself. It was in Saint-Nazaire, just after she learned about her mother’s death and, not yet knowing the content of the will, was expecting to get control of a world-class fortune. She had to fly to Rome later that morning for the funeral, and David sat opposite her at the breakfast table, brooding about the possible consequences of his wife’s increased independence.
‘You’re looking forward to getting your hands on all that lovely money,’ he said, walking round to her side of the table. She got up, sensing danger. ‘But you’re not going to,’ he added, grabbing her and pressing his thumbs expertly into her throat, ‘because I’m going to kill you.’
Almost unconscious, she had managed to knee him in the balls with all her remaining strength. In the reflex of pain, he let go long enough for her to slide across the table and bolt out of the house. He pursued her for a while, but the twenty-three-year age difference took its toll on his tired body and she escaped into the woods. Convinced that he would follow by car, she struggled through the undergrowth to the local police station, and arrived scratched, bleeding and in tears. The two gendarmes who drove her back to the house stood guard over a proud and sulky David while she packed her bags for Rome. She left with relief, but without Patrick, who stayed behind with only the flimsy protection of yet another terrified nanny – they lasted, on average, about six weeks. Eleanor might have been out of reach, but once he had given the nanny a munificent day out, and sent Yvette home, David had the consolation of torturing his son without any interference from the gendarmerie.
In the end, Eleanor’s betrayal of the maternal instinct that ruled Mary’s own life formed an absolute barrier to the liking she could feel for her. She could remember her own sons at three weeks old: their hot silky heads burrowing their way back into the shelter of her body to soften the shock of being born. The thought of handing them over, before their skin could bear the roughness of wool, to be hacked at with knives by a cruel and sinister man required a level of treachery that blinded her imagination.
No doubt David had searched hard among the foolish and the meek to find a woman who could put up with his special tastes, but once his depravity was on full display, how could Eleanor escape the charge of colluding with a sadist and a paedophile? She had invited children from other families to spend their holidays in the South of France and, like Patrick, they had been raped and inducted into an underworld of shame and secrecy, backed by convincing threats of punishment and death. Just before her first stroke, Eleanor received a letter from one of those children, saying that after a lifetime of insomnia, self-harm, frigidity, promiscuity, perpetual anxiety and suicide attempts, she had started to lead a more normal life, thanks to seven years of therapy, and had finally been able to forgive Eleanor for not protecting her during the summer she stayed with the Melroses. When she showed the letter to Mary, Eleanor dwelt on the injustice of being made to feel guilty about a category of behaviour she had not even known existed, although it was going on in the bedroom next to hers.
And yet how ignorant could she really have been? The year before the arrival of the letter that so dismayed Eleanor, Patrick had received a letter from Sophie, an old au pair, who had heroically stayed with the Melroses for more than two years, more than twenty times the average endurance shown by the parade of incredulous young foreign women who passed through the house. In her letter, Sophie confessed to decades of guilt about the time she had spent looking after Patrick. She used to hear screams down the corridor of the house in Lacoste, and she knew that Patrick was being tormented, not merely punished or frustrated, but she was only nineteen at the time and she hesitated to intervene. She also confessed that she was terrified of David and, despite being genuinely fond of Patrick and feeling some pity for Eleanor, longed to get away from his grotesque family.
If Sophie knew that something was terribly wrong, how could Eleanor not have known? It was common enough to ignore what was seemingly impossible to ignore, but Eleanor stuck to her blindness with uncommon tenacity. Through all her programmes of self-discovery and shamanic healing, she avoided acknowledging her passion for avoidance. If she had ever discovered her real ‘power animals’, Mary suspected they would have been the Three Monkeys: See no Evil, Hear no Evil, Speak no Evil. Mary also suspected that these grim vigilantes had been killed off by one of her strokes, flooding her all at once with the fragments of knowledge that she had kept sealed off from each other, like the cells of a secret organization. In a parody of wholeness, the fragments converged when it was too late to make them cohere.
Eleanor was entirely confined to the nursing home for the last two years of her life, rarely leaving her bed. For the first year, Mary went on assuming that at least one of the threads holding Eleanor to her tormented existence was concern for her family, and she continued to reassure her that they were well. Later, she began to see that what really trapped Eleanor was not the strength of her attachments, but rather their weakness: without anything substantial to ‘let go’ of, she was left with only the volatility of her guilt and confusion. Part of her was aching to die, but she could never find the time; there was no gap between the proliferating anxieties; the desire to die collided instantly with the dread of dying, which in turn gave birth to a renewed desire.
For the second year, Mary was largely silent. She went into the room and wished Eleanor well. What else was there to do?
The last time she had seen her mother-in-law was two weeks ago. By then Eleanor had achieved a tranquillity indistinguishable from pure absence. Gaunt and drawn, her face seemed incapable of any deliberate change. Mary could remember Eleanor telling her, in one of those alienating confidential chats, that she knew exactly when she was going to die. The mysterious source of this information (Astrology? Channelling? A morbid guru? A drumming session? A prophetic dream?) was never unveiled, but the news was delivered with the slightly boastful serenity of pure fantasy. Mary felt that the certainty of death and the uncertainty of both its timing and its meaning were fundamental facts of life. Eleanor, on the other hand, knew exactly when she was going to die and that her death was not final. By the end, as far as Mary could tell, this conviction had deserted Eleanor, along with all the other features of her personality, as if a sandstorm had raged through her, ripping away every sign of comfort, and leaving a smooth and sterile landscape under a dry blank sky.
Still, Eleanor had died on Easter Sunday, and Mary knew that nothing could have pleased her more. Or would have pleased her more, had she known. Perhaps she did know, even though her mind appeared to be fixed in a realm removed from anything as mundane as a calendar. Even then there was still no way of knowing whether that was the day she had been expecting to die.
Mary adjusted her position on the uncomfortable crematorium bench. Where was a convincing and practical theory of consciousness when you really needed it? She glanced back a few rows at Erasmus, but he appeared to have fallen asleep. As she turned back to the coffin a few feet in front of her, Mary’s speculations collapsed abruptly. She found herself imagining, with a vividness she couldn’t sustain while it was still going on, how it had felt for Eleanor during those two last brutal years, having her individuality annihilated, faculty by faculty, memory by memory.
Her eyes blurred with tears.
‘Are you all right?’ whispered Patrick, as he sat down next to her.
‘I was thinking about your mother,’ she said.
‘A highly suitable choice,’ Patrick murmured, in the voice of a sycophantic shopkeeper.
For some reason Mary started to laugh uncontrollably, and Patrick started laughing too, and they both had to bite their lower lips and keep their shoulders from shaking too wildly.