Edward Aubyn - At Last

The car was turning into Queensbury Place, next to the Lycée Français de Londres, where Patrick had spent a year of bilingual delinquency when he was seven years old. At the prize-giving ceremony in the Royal Albert Hall, there was a copy of La Chèvre de Monsieur Seguin on his red plush seat. He soon became obsessed with the story of the doomed and heroic little goat, lured into the high mountains by the riot of Alpine flowers (‘Je me languis, je me languis, je veux aller à la montagne’). Monsieur Seguin, who has already lost six goats to the wolf, is determined not to lose another and locks the hero in the woodshed, but the little goat climbs out through the window and escapes, spending a day of ecstasy on slopes dotted with red and blue and yellow and orange flowers. Then, as the sun begins to set, he suddenly notices among the lengthening shadows the silhouette of the lean and hungry wolf, sitting complacently in the tall grass, contemplating his prey. Knowing he is going to die, the goat nevertheless determines to fight until the dawn (‘pourvu que je tienne jusqu’à l’aube’), lowers his head and charges at the wolf’s chest. He fights all night, charging again and again, until finally, as the sun rises over the grey crags of the mountain opposite, he collapses on the ground and is destroyed. This story never failed to move Patrick to tears as he read it every night in his bedroom in Victoria Road.

That was it! Last night’s strange dream: a hooded figure striding among a herd of goats, pulling their heads back and slitting their throats. Patrick had been one of the goats on the outer edge of the herd and with a sense of doom and defiance worthy of his childhood hero he reached up and tore out his own larynx so as not to give the assassin the satisfaction of hearing him scream. Here was another form of violent silence. If only he had time to work it all out. If only he could be alone, this knot of impressions and connections would untangle at his feet. His psyche was on the move; things that had wanted to be hidden now wanted to be revealed. Wallace Stevens was right: ‘Freedom is like a man who kills himself / Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife / Grows sharp in blood.’ He was longing for the splendours of silence and solitude, but instead he was going to a party.

Johnny turned into Onslow Gardens and sped along the suddenly empty stretch of street.

‘Here we are,’ he said, slowing down to look for a parking space close to the club.

Kettle had explained to Mary her principled stand against attending Eleanor’s funeral.

‘It would be sheer hypocrisy,’ she told her daughter. ‘I despise disinheritance, and I think it’s wrong to go to someone’s funeral boiling with rage. The party’s a different matter: it’s about supporting you and Patrick. I’m not pretending it doesn’t help that it’s just round the corner.’

‘In that case you could look after the boys,’ said Mary. ‘We feel exactly the same way about their coming to the cremation as you feel about going. Robert disconnected from Eleanor years ago and Thomas never really knew her, but we still want them to come to the party, to mark the occasion for them in a lighter way.’

‘Oh, well, of course, I’d be delighted to help,’ said Kettle, immediately determined to get her revenge for being burdened with an even more troublesome responsibility than the one she had been trying to evade.

As soon as Mary had dropped the boys off at her flat, Kettle got to work on Robert.

‘Personally,’ she said, ‘I can’t ever forgive your other grandmother for giving away your lovely house in France. You must miss it terribly; not being able to go there in the holidays. It was really more of a home than London, I suppose, being in the countryside and all that.’

Robert looked rather more upset than she had intended.

‘How can you say that? That’s a horrible thing to say,’ said Robert.

‘I was just trying to be sympathetic,’ said Kettle.

Robert walked out of the kitchen and went to sit alone in the drawing room. He hated Kettle for making him think that he should still have Saint-Nazaire. He didn’t cry about missing it any more, but he still remembered every detail. They could take away the place but they couldn’t take away the images in his mind. Robert closed his eyes and thought about walking back home late one evening with his father through the Butterfly Wood in a high wind. The sound of creaking branches and calling birds was torn away and dissolved among the hissing pines. When they came out of the wood it was nearly night, but he could still make out the gleaming vine shoots snaking through the ploughed earth, and he saw his first shooting star incinerated on the edge of the clear black sky.

Kettle was right: it was more of a home than London. It was his first home and there could only ever be one, but he held it now in his imagination and it was even more beautiful than ever. He didn’t want to go back and he didn’t want to have it back, because it would be such a disappointment.

Robert had started to cry when Kettle came briskly into the drawing room with Thomas behind her.

‘I asked Amparo to get a film for you. If you’ve got over your tantrum you could watch it with Thomas; she says her grandchildren absolutely love it.’

‘Look, Bobby,’ said Thomas, running over to show Robert the DVD case, ‘it’s a flying carpet.’

Robert was furious at the injustice of the word ‘tantrum’, but he quite wanted to see the film.

‘We’re not allowed to watch films in the morning,’ he said.

‘Well,’ said Kettle, ‘you’ll just have to tell your father you were playing Scrabble, or something frightfully intellectual that he would approve of.’

‘But it’s not true,’ said Thomas, ‘because we’re going to see the film.’

‘Oh, dear, I can’t get anything right, can I?’ said Kettle. ‘You’ll be pleased to hear that silly old Granny is going out for a while. If you can face the treat I’ve gone to the trouble of organizing, just tell Amparo and she’ll put it on for you. If not, there’s a copy of the Telegraph in the kitchen — I’m sure you can get the crossword puzzle done by the time I’m back.’

With this triumphant sarcasm, Kettle left her flat, a martyr to her spoilt and oversensitive grandsons. She was going to the Pâtisserie Valerie to have coffee with the widow of our former ambassador to Rome. If the truth be told, Natasha was a frightful bore, always going on about what James would have said, and what James would have thought, as if that mattered any more. Still, it was important to stay in touch with old friends.

Transport by Ford limousine was all part of the Bunyon’s Bronze Service package that Mary had selected for the funeral. Neither the four vintage Rolls-Royces of the Platinum Service, nor the four plumed black horses and glass-sided carriage of the High Victorian Service, offered any serious competition. There was room for three other people in the Ford limo. Nancy had been Mary’s first dutiful choice but Nicholas Pratt had a car and driver of his own and had already offered Nancy a lift. In the end, Mary shared the car with Julia, Patrick’s ex-lover; Erasmus, her own ex-lover; and Annette, Seamus’s ex-lover. Nobody spoke until the car was turning, at a mournful pace, onto the main road.

‘I hate bereavement,’ said Julia, looking at the mirror in her small powder compact, ‘it ruins your eyeliner.’

‘Were you fond of Eleanor?’ asked Mary, knowing that Julia had never bothered with her.

‘Oh, it’s nothing to do with her,’ said Julia, as if stating the obvious. ‘You know the way that tears spring on you, in a silly film, or at a funeral, or when you read something in the paper: not really brought on by the thing that triggers them, but from accumulated grief, I suppose, and life just being so generally maddening.’