Mary smiled at Henry from across the room and started to move in his direction, but before she could reach his side Fleur surged up in front of her.
‘I hope I haven’t offended your husband,’ she said. ‘He walked away from me very abruptly and now he seems to have stormed out of the room altogether.’
‘It’s a difficult day for him,’ said Mary, fascinated by Fleur’s lipstick, which had been reapplied, mostly to the old lopsided track around her mouth but also to her front teeth.
‘Has he had mental-health problems?’ said Fleur. ‘I only ask because – God knows! – I’ve had my fair share and I’ve grown rather good at telling when other people have a screw loose.’
‘You seem quite well now,’ said Mary, lying virtuously.
‘It’s funny you should say that,’ said Fleur, ‘because this morning I thought, “There’s no point in taking your pills when you feel so well.” I feel very, very well, you see.’
Mary recoiled instinctively. ‘Oh, good,’ she said.
‘I feel as if something amazing is going to happen to me today,’ Fleur went on. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever achieved my full potential – I feel as if I could do anything – as if I could raise the dead!’
‘That’s the last thing anyone would expect at this party,’ said Mary, with a cheerful laugh. ‘Do ask Patrick first if it’s Eleanor you’ve got in mind.’
‘Oh, I’d love to see Eleanor again,’ said Fleur, as if endorsing Mary’s candidate for resurrection and about to perform the necessary operation.
‘Will you excuse me?’ said Mary. ‘I’ve got to go and talk to Patrick’s cousin. He’s come all the way from America and we didn’t even know he was coming.’
‘I’d love to go to America,’ said Fleur, ‘in fact, I might fly there later this afternoon.’
‘In a plane?’ said Mary.
‘Yes, of course…Oh!’ Fleur interrupted herself. ‘I see what you mean.’
She stuck out her arms, thrust her head forwards and swayed from side to side, with an explosion of laughter so loud that Mary could sense everyone in the room looking in her direction.
She reached out and touched Fleur’s outstretched arm, smiling at her to show how much she had enjoyed sharing their delightful joke, but turning away firmly to join Henry, who stood alone in the corner of the room.
‘That woman’s laugh packs quite a punch,’ said Henry.
‘Everything about her packs a punch, that’s what I’m worried about,’ said Mary. ‘I feel she may do something very crazy before we all get home.’
‘Who is she? She’s kind of exotic.’
Mary noticed how distinct Henry’s eyelashes were against the pale translucence of his eyes.
‘None of us has ever met her. She just turned up unexpectedly.’
‘Like me,’ said Henry, with egalitarian gallantry.
‘Except that we know who you are and we’re very pleased to see you,’ said Mary, ‘especially since not a lot of people have turned up. Eleanor lost touch with people; her social life was very disintegrated. She had a few little pockets of friendship, each assuming that there was something more central, but in fact there was nothing in the middle. For the last two years, I was the only person who visited her.’
‘And Patrick?’
‘No, he didn’t go. She became so unhappy when she saw him. There was something she was dying to say but couldn’t. I don’t just mean in the mechanical sense that she couldn’t speak in the last two years. I mean that she never could have said what she wanted to tell him, even if she had been the most articulate person in the world, because she didn’t know what it was, but when she became ill she could feel the pressure of it.’
‘Just horrible,’ said Henry. ‘It’s what we all dread.’
‘That’s why we must drop our defences while it’s still a voluntary act,’ said Mary, ‘otherwise they’ll be demolished and we’ll be flooded with nameless horror.’
‘Poor Eleanor, I feel so sorry for her,’ said Henry.
They both fell silent for a while.
‘At this point the English usually say, “Well, this is a cheerful subject!” to cover their embarrassment at being serious,’ said Mary.
‘Let’s just stick with the sorrow,’ said Henry with a kind smile.
‘I’m really pleased you came,’ she said. ‘Your love for Eleanor was so uncomplicated, unlike everyone else’s.’
‘Cabbage,’ said Nancy, grabbing Henry’s arm, with the exaggerated eagerness of a shipwrecked passenger who discovers that she is not the only member of her family left alive, ‘thank God! Save me from that dreadful woman in the green sweater! I can’t believe my sister ever knew her – socially. I mean, this really is the most extraordinary gathering. I don’t feel it’s really a Jonson occasion at all. When I think of Mummy’s funeral, or Aunt Edith’s. Eight hundred people turned up at Mummy’s, half the French cabinet, and the Aga Khan, and the Windsors; everybody was there.’
‘Eleanor chose a different path,’ said Henry.
‘More like a goat track,’ said Nancy, rolling her eyes.
‘Personally, I don’t give a damn who comes to my funeral,’ said Henry.
‘That’s only because you know that it’ll be solid with senators and glamorous people and sobbing women!’ said Nancy. ‘The trouble with funerals is that they’re so last-minute. That’s where memorials come in, of course, but they’re not the same. There’s something so dramatic about a funeral, although I can’t abide those open caskets. Do you remember Uncle Vlad? I still have nightmares about him lying there in that gold and white uniform looking all gaunt. Oh, God, wagon formation,’ cried Nancy, ‘the green goblin is staring at me again!’
Fleur was feeling a sense of irrepressible pleasure and potency as she scanned the room for someone who had not yet had the benefit of her conversation. She could understand all the currents flowing through the room; she only had to glance at a person to see into the depths of their soul. Thanks to Patrick Melrose, who was distracting the waitress by getting her telephone number, Fleur had been able to mix her own drink, a glass full of gin with a splash of tonic, rather than the other way round. What did it matter? Mere alcohol could not degrade her luminous awareness. After taking a gulp from her lipstick-smudged tumbler, she walked up to Nicholas Pratt, determined to help him understand himself.
‘Have you had mental-health problems?’ she asked Nicholas, fixing him with an intrepid stare.
‘Have we met?’ said Nicholas, gazing icily at the stranger who stood in his path.
‘I only ask because I have a feeling for these things,’ Fleur went on.
Nicholas hesitated between the impulse to utterly destroy this batty old woman in a moth-eaten sweater, and the temptation to boast about his robust mental health.
‘Well, have you?’ insisted Fleur.
Nicholas raised his walking stick briefly, as if about to nudge Fleur aside, only to replant it more firmly in the carpet and lean into its full support. He inhaled the frosty, invigorating air of contempt flooding in from the window smashed by Fleur’s impertinent question; contempt that always made him, though he said it himself, even more articulate than usual.
‘No, I have not had “mental-health problems”,’ he thundered. ‘Even in this degenerate age of confession and complaint we have not managed to turn reality entirely on its head. When the vocabulary of Freudian mumbo-jumbo is emptied onto every conversation, like vinegar onto a newspaper full of sodden chips, some of us choose not to tuck in.’ Nicholas craned his head forward as he spat out the homely phrase.
‘The sophisticated cherish their “syndromes”,’ he continued, ‘and even the most simple-minded fool feels entitled to a “complex”. As if it weren’t ludicrous enough for every child to be “gifted”, they now have to be ill as well: a touch of Asperger’s, a little autism; dyslexia stalks the playground; the poor little gifted things have been “bullied” at school; if they can’t confess to being abused, they must confess to being abusive. Well, my dear woman,’ Nicholas laughed threateningly, ‘– I call you “my dear” from what is no doubt known as Sincerity Deficit Disorder, unless some ambitious quack, landing on the scalding, sarcastic beaches of the great continent of irony, has claimed the inversion of surface meaning as Potter’s Disease or Jones’s Jaundice – no, my dear woman, I have not suffered from the slightest taint of mental illness. The modern passion for pathology is a landslide that has been forced to come to a halt at some distance from my eminently sane feet. I have only to walk towards that heap of refuse for it to part, making way for the impossible man, the man who is entirely well; psychotherapists scatter in my presence, ashamed of their sham profession!’
‘You’re completely off your rocker,’ said Fleur, discerningly. ‘I thought as much. I’ve developed what I call “my little radar” over the years. Put me in a room full of people and I can tell straight away who has had that sort of problem.’
Nicholas experienced a moment of despair as he realized that his withering eloquence had made no impact, but like an expert tango dancer who turns abruptly on the very edge of the dance floor, he changed his approach and shouted, ‘Bugger off!’ at the top of his voice.
Fleur looked at him with deepening insight.
‘A month in the Priory would get you back on your feet,’ she concluded, ‘re-clothe you in your rightful mind, as the hymn says. Do you know it?’ Fleur closed her eyes and started to sing rapturously, ‘“Dear Lord and Father of mankind / Forgive our foolish ways / Re-clothe us in our rightful minds…” Marvellous stuff. I’ll have a word with Dr Pagazzi, he’s quite the best. He can be rather severe at times, but only for one’s own good. Look at me: I was mad as a hatter and now I’m on top of the world.’
She leant forward to whisper confidentially to Nicholas.
‘I feel very, very well, you see.’
There were professional reasons for Johnny not to engage with Nicholas Pratt, whose daughter had been a patient of his, but the sight of that monstrous man bellowing at a dishevelled old woman pushed his restraint beyond the limits he had imposed on himself until now. He approached Fleur and, with his back turned to Nicholas, asked her quietly if she was all right.
‘All right?’ laughed Fleur. ‘I’m extremely well, better than ever.’ She struggled to express her sense of abundance. ‘If there were such a thing as being too well, I’d be it. I was just trying to help this poor man who’s had more than his fair share of mental-health problems.’
Reassured that she was unharmed, Johnny smiled at Fleur and started to withdraw tactfully, but Nicholas was by now too enraged to let such an opportunity pass.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘here he is! Like an exhibit in a courtroom drama, brought on at the perfect moment: a practising witch-doctor, a purveyor of psycho-paralysis, a guide to the catacombs, a guide to the sewers; he promises to turn your dreams into nightmares and he keeps his promises religiously,’ snarled Nicholas, his face flushed and the corners of his mouth flecked with tired saliva. ‘The ferryman of Hell’s second river won’t accept a simple coin, like his proletarian colleague on the Styx. You’ll need a fat cheque to cross the Lethe into that forgotten under-world of dangerous gibberish where toothless infants rip the nipples from their mothers’ milkless breasts.’
Nicholas seemed to be labouring for breath, as he unrolled his vituperative sentences.
‘No fantasy that you invent,’ he struggled on, ‘could be as repulsive as the fantasy on which his sinister art is based, polluting the human imagination with murderous babies and incestuous children…’
Nicholas suddenly stopped speaking, his mouth working to take in enough air. He rocked sideways on his walking stick before staggering backwards a couple of steps and crashing down against the table and onto the floor. He caught the tablecloth as he fell and dragged half a dozen glasses after him. A bottle of red wine toppled sideways and its contents gurgled over the edge of the table and splashed onto his black suit. The waitress lunged forward and caught the bucket of half-melted ice that was sliding towards Nicholas’s supine body.
‘Oh, dear,’ said Fleur, ‘he got himself too worked up. “Hoisted by his own petard”, as the saying goes. This is what happens to people who won’t ask for help,’ she said, as if discussing the case with Dr. Pagazzi.
Mary leant over to the waitress, her mobile phone already open.
‘I’m going to call an ambulance,’ she said.
‘Thanks,’ said the waitress. ‘I’ll go downstairs and warn reception.’
Everyone in the room gathered around the fallen figure and looked on with a mixture of curiosity and alarm.
Patrick knelt down beside Nicholas and started to loosen his tie. Long after it could have been helpful, he continued to loosen the knot until he had removed the tie altogether. Only then did he undo the top button of Nicholas’s shirt. Nicholas tried to say something but winced from the effort and closed his eyes instead, disgusted by his own vulnerability.
Johnny acknowledged a feeling of satisfaction at having played no active part in Nicholas’s collapse. And then he looked down at his fallen opponent, sprawled heavily on the carpet, and somehow the sight of his old neck, no longer festooned with an expensive black silk tie, but wrinkled and sagging and open at the throat, as if waiting for the final dagger thrust, filled him with pity and renewed his respect for the conservative powers of an ego that would rather kill its owner than allow him to change.
‘Johnny?’ said Robert.
‘Yes,’ said Johnny, seeing Robert and Thomas looking up at him with great interest.
‘Why was that man so angry with you?’
‘It’s a long story,’ said Johnny, ‘and one that I’m not really allowed to tell.’
‘Has he got psycho-paralysis?’ said Thomas. ‘Because paralysis means you can’t move.’
Johnny couldn’t help laughing, despite the solemn murmur surrounding Nicholas’s collapse.
‘Well, personally, I think that would be a brilliant diagnosis; but Nicholas Pratt invented that word in order to make fun of psychoanalysis, which is what I do for a job.’
‘What’s that?’ said Thomas.
‘It’s a way of getting access to hidden truths about your feelings,’ said Johnny.
‘Like hide and seek?’ said Thomas.
‘Exactly,’ said Johnny, ‘but instead of hiding in cupboards and behind curtains and under beds, this kind of truth hides in symptoms and dreams and habits.’
‘Can we play?’ said Thomas.
‘Can we stop playing?’ said Johnny, more to himself than to Thomas and Robert.
Julia came up and interrupted Johnny’s conversation with the children.
‘Is this the end?’ she said. ‘It’s enough to put one off having a temper tantrum. Oh, God, that religious fanatic is cradling his head. That would definitely finish me off.’
Annette was sitting on her heels next to Nicholas, with her hands cupped around his head, her eyes closed and her lips moving very slightly.
‘Is she praying?’ said Julia, flabbergasted.
‘That’s nice of her,’ said Thomas.
‘They say one should never speak ill of the dead,’ said Julia, ‘and so I’d better get a move on. I’ve always thought that Nicholas Pratt was perfectly ghastly. I’m not a particular friend of Amanda’s, but he seems to have ruined his daughter’s life. Of course you’d know more about that than I do.’
Johnny had no trouble staying silent.
‘Why don’t you stop being so horrible?’ said Robert passionately. ‘He’s an old man who’s really ill and he might hear what you’re saying, and he can’t even answer back.’
‘Yes,’ said Thomas, ‘it’s not fair because he can’t answer back.’
Julia at first seemed more bewildered than annoyed, and when she finally spoke it was with a wounded sigh.
‘Well, you know it’s time to leave a party when the children start to mount a joint attack on your moral character.’
‘Could you say goodbye to Patrick for me?’ she said, kissing Johnny abruptly on both cheeks and ignoring the two boys. ‘I can’t quite face it after what’s happened – to Nicholas, I mean.’
‘I hope we didn’t make her angry,’ said Robert.
‘She made herself angry, because it was easier for her than being upset,’ said Johnny.
Only seconds after her departure, Julia was forced back into the room by the urgent arrival of the waitress, two ambulance men, and an array of equipment.
‘Look!’ said Thomas. ‘An oxygen tank and a stretcher. I wish I could have a go!’
‘He’s over here,’ said the waitress unnecessarily.
Nicholas felt his wrist being lifted. He knew his pulse was being taken. He knew it was too fast, too slow, too weak, too strong, everything wrong. A rip in his heart, a skewer through his chest. He must tell them he was not an organ donor, or they would steal his organs before he was dead. He must stop them! Call Withers! Tell them to put a stop to it at once. He couldn’t speak. Not his tongue, they mustn’t take his tongue. Without speech, thoughts plough on like a train without tracks, buckling, crashing, ripping everything apart. A man asks him to open his eyes. He opens his eyes. Show them he’s still compos mentis, compost mentis, recycled parts. No! Not his brain, not his genitals, not his heart, not fit to transplant, still writhing with self in an alien body. They were shining a light in his eyes, no, not his eyes; please don’t take his eyes. So much fear. Without a regiment of words, the barbarians, the burning roofs, the horses’ hooves beating down on fragile skulls. He was not himself any more; he was under the hooves. He could not be helpless; he could not be humiliated; it was too late to become somebody he didn’t know – the intimate horror of it.
‘Don’t worry, Nick, I’ll be with you in the ambulance,’ a voice whispered in his ear.
It was the Irish woman. With him in the ambulance! Gouging his eyes out, fishing around for his kidneys with her nimble fingers, taking a hacksaw out of her spiritual tool box. He wanted to be saved. He wanted his mother; not the one he had actually had, but the real one he had never met. He felt a pair of hands grip his feet and another pair of hands slip around his shoulders. Hung, drawn, and quartered: publicly executed for all his crimes. He deserved it. Lord have mercy on his soul. Lord have mercy.
The two ambulance men looked at each other and on a nod lifted both ends of Nicholas at once and placed him on the stretcher they had spread out beside him.
‘I’m going with him in the ambulance,’ said Annette.
‘Thank you,’ said Patrick. ‘Will you call me from the hospital if there’s any news?’
‘Surely,’ said Annette. ‘Oh, it’s a terrible shock for you,’ she said, giving Patrick an unexpected hug. ‘I’d better go.’
‘Is that woman going with him?’ asked Nancy.
‘Yes, isn’t it kind of her?’
‘But she doesn’t even know him. I’ve known Nicholas forever. First it’s my sister and now it’s practically my oldest friend. It’s too impossible.’
‘Why don’t you follow her?’ said Patrick.
‘There is one thing I could do for him,’ said Nancy, with a hint of indignation, as if it was a bit much to expect her to be the only person to show any real consideration. ‘Miguel, his poor driver, is waiting outside without the least idea of what’s happened. I’ll go and break the news to him, and take the car on to the hospital, so it’s there if Nicholas needs it.’
Nancy could think of at least three places she might stop on the way. The examination was bound to take ages, in fact Nicholas might already be dead, and it would help to take poor Miguel’s mind off the dreadful situation if he drove her around all afternoon. She had no cash for taxis, and her swollen feet were already bulging out of the ruthlessly elegant inside edges of her two-thousand-dollar shoes. People said she was incorrigibly extravagant, but the shoes would have cost two thousand dollars each, if she hadn’t bought them parsimoniously in a sale. She had no prospect of getting any cash for the rest of the month, punished by her beastly bankers for her ‘credit history’. Her credit history, as far as she was concerned, was that Mummy had written a lousy will that allowed her evil stepfather to steal all of Nancy’s money. Her heroic response had been to spend as if justice had been done, as if she were restoring the natural order of the world by cheating shopkeepers, landlords, decorators, florists, hairdressers, butchers, jewellers, and garage owners, by withholding tips from coatcheck girls, and by engineering rows with staff so that she could sack them without pay.
On her monthly trip to the Morgan Guaranty – where Mummy had opened an account for her on her twelfth birthday – she collected fifteen thousand dollars in cash. In her reduced circumstances, the walk to Sixty-Ninth Street was a Venus flytrap flushed with colour and shining with adhesive dew. She often arrived home with half her month’s money spent; sometimes she counted out the entire sum and, seeming mystified by the missing two or three thousand, managed to walk away with a pink marble obelisk or a painting of a monkey in a velvet jacket, promising to come back that afternoon, marking another black spot in the complex maze of her debt, another detour on her city walks. She always gave her real telephone number, with one digit changed, her real address, one block uptown or downtown, and an entirely false name – obviously. Sometimes she called herself Edith Jonson, or Mary de Valençay, to remind herself that she had nothing to be ashamed of, that there had been a time when she could have bought a whole city block, never mind a bauble in one of its shops.
By the middle of the month she was invariably flat broke. At that point she fell back on the kindness of her friends. Some had her to stay, some let her add her lunches and her dinners to their tabs at Jimmy’s or Le Jardin, and others simply wrote her a large cheque, reflecting that Nancy had barged to the front of the queue again and that the victims of floods, tsunamis and earthquakes would simply have to wait another year. Sometimes she created a crisis that forced her trustees to release more capital in order to keep her out of prison, driving her income inexorably lower. For Eleanor’s funeral, she was staying with her great friends the Tescos, in their divine apartment in Belgrave Square, a lateral conversion across five buildings on two floors. Harry Tesco had already paid for her air ticket – first class – but she was going to have to break down sobbing in Cynthia’s little sitting room before going to the opera tonight, and tell her the terrible pressure she was under. The Tescos were as rich as God and it really made Nancy quite angry that she had to do anything so humiliating to get more money out of them.
‘You couldn’t drop me off on the way, could you?’ Kettle asked Nancy.
‘It’s Nicholas’s private car, dear, not a limo service,’ said Nancy, appalled by the indecency of the suggestion. ‘It’s really too upsetting when he’s so ill.’
Nancy kissed Patrick and Mary goodbye and hurried away.
‘It’s St Thomas’ Hospital, by the way,’ Patrick called after her. ‘The ambulance man told me it’s the best place for “clot-busters”.’
‘Has he had a stroke?’ asked Nancy.
‘Heart attack, they could tell from the cold nose – the extremities go cold.’
‘Oh, don’t,’ said Nancy, ‘I can’t bear to think about it.’
She set off down the stairs with no time to waste: Cynthia had made her an appointment at the hairdresser’s using the magic words, ‘charge it to me’.
When Nancy had left, Henry offered the aggrieved Kettle a lift. After only a few minutes of complaint about the rudeness of Patrick’s aunt, she accepted, and said goodbye to Mary and the children. Henry promised to call Patrick the next day, and accompanied Kettle downstairs. To their surprise they found Nancy still standing on the pavement outside the club.
‘Oh, Cabbage,’ she said with a wail of childish frustration, ‘Nicholas’s car has gone.’
‘You can come with us,’ said Henry simply.
Kettle and Nancy sat in the back of the car in hostile silence. Up in front Henry told the driver to go to Princes Gate first, then on to St Thomas’ Hospital and finally back to the hotel. Nancy suddenly realized what she had done by accepting a ride. She had forgotten about Nicholas altogether. Now she was going to have to borrow money from Henry to catch a taxi back to the hairdresser’s from some godforsaken hospital in the middle of nowhere. It was enough to make you scream.
Nicholas’s fall, the commotion that followed, the arrival of the ambulance men and the dispersal of some of the guests had all eluded Erasmus’s attention. When Fleur had burst into song in the middle of her conversation with Nicholas, the words ‘re-clothe us in our rightful minds’ sent a little shock through him, like a piercing dog whistle, inaudible to the others but pitched perfectly for his own preoccupations, it recalled him to his true master, insisting that he leave the muddy fields of inter-subjectivity and the intriguing traces of other minds for the cool ledge of the balcony where he might be allowed, for a few moments, to think about thinking. Social life had a tendency to press him up against his basic rejection of the proposition that an individual identity was defined by turning experience into an ever more patterned and coherent story. It was in reflection and not in narrative that he found authenticity. The pressure to render his past in anecdote, or indeed to imagine the future in terms of passionate aspirations, made him feel clumsy and false. He knew that his inability to be excited by the memory of his first day at school, or to project a cumulative and increasingly solid self that wanted to learn the harpsichord, or longed to live in the Chilterns, or hoped to see Christ’s blood streaming in the firmament, made his personality seem unreal to other people, but it was precisely the unreality of the personality that was so clear to him. His authentic self was the attentive witness to a variety of inconstant impressions that could not, in themselves, enhance or detract from his sense of identity.
Not only did he have an ontological problem with the generally unquestioned narrative assumptions of ordinary social life but he also, at this particular party, found himself questioning the ethical assumption, shared by everyone except Annette (and not shared by Annette for reasons that were in themselves problematic), that Eleanor Melrose had been wrong to disinherit her son. Setting aside for a moment the difficulties of judging the usefulness of the Foundation she had endowed, there was an undeniable potential Utilitarian merit to the wider distribution of her resources. Mrs Melrose might at least count on John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham and Peter Singer and R. M. Hare to look sympathetically on her case. If a thousand people, over the years, emerged from the Foundation having discovered, by whatever esoteric means, a sense of purpose that made them into more altruistic and conscientious citizens, would the benefit to society not outweigh the distress caused to a family of four people (with one barely conscious of the loss) who had expected to own a house and turned out not to? In the maelstrom of perspectives could a sound moral judgment be made from any other point of view but that of the strictest impartiality? Whether such a point of view could ever be established was another question to which the answer was almost certainly negative. Nevertheless, even if Utilitarian arithmetic, based on the notion of an unobtainable impartiality, were set aside on the grounds that motivation was desire-based, as Hume had argued, the autonomy of an individual’s preferences for one kind of good over another still offered a strong ethical case for Eleanor’s philanthropic choice.
There had been a widespread sense of relief when Fleur accompanied Nicholas’s stretcher downstairs and appeared to have left the party, but ten minutes later she reappeared resolutely in the doorway. Seeing Erasmus leaning on the balustrade staring pensively down at the gravel path, she immediately expressed her alarm to Patrick.
‘What’s that man doing on the balcony?’ she asked sharply, like a nanny who despairs of leaving the nursery for even a few minutes. ‘Is he going to jump?’
‘I don’t think he was planning to,’ said Patrick, ‘but I’m sure you could persuade him.’
‘The last thing we need is another death on our hands,’ said Fleur.
‘I’ll go and check,’ said Robert.
‘Me too,’ said Thomas, dashing through the French windows.
‘You mustn’t jump,’ he explained, ‘because the last thing we need is another death on our hands.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of jumping,’ said Erasmus.
‘What were you thinking about?’ asked Robert.
‘Whether doing some good to a lot of people is better than doing a lot of good to a few,’ Erasmus replied.
‘The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one,’ said Robert solemnly, making a strange gesture with his right hand.
Thomas, recognizing the allusion to the Vulcan logic of Star Trek II, made the same gesture with his hand.
‘Live long and prosper,’ he said, smiling uncontrollably at the thought of growing pointed ears.
Fleur strode onto the balcony and addressed Erasmus without any trivial preliminaries.
‘Have you tried Amitriptyline?’ she asked.
‘I’ve never heard of him,’ said Erasmus. ‘What’s he written?’
Fleur realized that Erasmus was much more confused than she had originally imagined.
‘You’d better come inside,’ she said coaxingly.
Glancing into the room Erasmus noticed that the majority of the guests had left and assumed that Fleur was hinting tactfully that he should be on his way.
‘Yes, you’re probably right,’ said Erasmus.
Fleur reflected that she had a real talent for dealing with people in extreme mental states and that she should probably be put in charge of the depression wing of a psychiatric hospital, or indeed of a national policy unit.
As he went indoors, Erasmus decided not to get entangled in more incoherent social life, but simply to say goodbye to Mary and then leave immediately. As he leant over to kiss her, he wondered if a person of the predominantly narrative type would desire Mary because he had desired her in the past, and whether he would be imagining that fragment of the past being transported, as it were, in a time machine to the present moment. This fantasy reminded him of Wittgenstein’s seminal remark that ‘nothing is more important in teaching us to understand the concepts we have than constructing fictitious ones’. In his own case, his desire, such as it was, had the character of an inconsequential present-tense fact, like the scent of a flower.
‘Thank you for coming,’ said Mary.
‘Not at all,’ mumbled Erasmus, and after squeezing Mary’s shoulder lightly, he left without saying goodbye to anyone else.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Fleur to Patrick, ‘I’ll follow him at a discreet distance.’
‘You’re his guardian angel,’ said Patrick, struggling to disguise his relief at getting rid of Fleur so easily.
Mary followed Fleur politely onto the landing.
‘I haven’t got time to chat,’ said Fleur, ‘that poor man’s life is in danger.’
Mary knew better than to contradict a woman of Fleur’s strong convictions. ‘Well, it’s been a pleasure to meet such an old friend of Eleanor’s.’
‘I’m sure she’s guiding me,’ said Fleur. ‘I can feel the connection. She was a saint; she’ll show me how to help him.’
‘Oh, good,’ said Mary.
‘God bless you,’ Fleur called out as she set off down the stairs at a cracking pace, determined not to lose track of Erasmus’s suicidal progress through the streets of London.
‘What a woman!’ said Johnny, watching through the doorway as Fleur left. ‘I can’t help feeling that somebody should be following her rather than the other way round.’
‘Count me out,’ said Patrick, ‘I’ve had an overdose of Fleur. It’s a wonder she was ever allowed out of the Priory.’
‘She looks to me as if she’s just at the beginning of a manic episode,’ said Johnny. ‘I imagine she was enjoying it too much and decided not to take her pills.’
‘Well, let’s hope she changes her mind before she “saves” Erasmus,’ said Patrick. ‘He might not survive if she rugby tackles him on a bridge, or leaps on him while he’s trying to cross the road.’
‘God!’ said Mary, laughing with relief and amazement. ‘I wasn’t sure she was ever going to leave. I hope Erasmus made it round the corner before she got outside.’
‘I’m going to have to leave myself,’ said Johnny. ‘I’ve got a patient at four o’clock.’
He said goodbye to everyone, kissing Mary, hugging the boys, and promising to call Patrick later.
Suddenly the family was alone, apart from the waitress, who was clearing up the glasses and putting the unopened bottles back into a cardboard box in the corner.
Patrick felt a familiar combination of intimacy and desolation, being together and knowing they were about to part.
‘Are you coming back with us?’ asked Thomas.
‘No,’ said Patrick, ‘I have to go and work.’
‘Please,’ said Thomas, ‘I want you to tell me a story like you used to.’
‘I’ll see you at the weekend,’ said Patrick.
Robert stood by, knowing more than his brother but not enough to understand.
‘You can come and have dinner with us if you like,’ said Mary.
Patrick wanted to accept and wanted to refuse, wanted to be alone and wanted company, wanted to be close to Mary and to get away from her, wanted the lovely waitress to think that he led an independent life and wanted his children to feel that they were part of a harmonious family.
‘I think I’ll just…crash out,’ he said, buried under the debris of contradictions and doomed to regret any choice he made. ‘It’s been a long day.’
‘Don’t worry if you change your mind,’ said Mary.
‘In fact,’ said Thomas, ‘you should change your mind, because that’s what it’s for!’