Edward Aubyn - At Last

‘Of course,’ said Mary, ‘but sometimes the trigger and the grief are connected.’

She turned away, trying to distance herself from the routine frivolity of Julia’s line on bereavement. She glimpsed the pink flowers of a magnolia protesting against the black-and-white half-timbered facade of a mock-Tudor side street. Why was the driver going by Kew Bridge? Was it considered more dignified to take the longer route?

‘I didn’t put on my eyeliner this morning,’ said Erasmus, with the studied facetiousness of an academic.

‘You can borrow mine if you like,’ said Annette, joining in.

‘Thank you for what you said about Eleanor,’ said Mary, turning to Annette with a smile.

‘I only hope I was able to do justice to a very special lady,’ said Annette.

‘God yes,’ said Julia, reapplying her eyeliner meticulously. ‘I do wish this car would stop moving.’

‘She was certainly someone who wanted to be good,’ said Mary, ‘and that’s rare enough.’

‘Ah, intentionality,’ said Erasmus, as if he were pointing out a famous waterfall that had just become visible through the car window.

‘Paving the road to Hell,’ said Julia, moving on to the other eye with her greasy black pencil.

‘Aquinas says that love is “desiring another’s good”,’ Erasmus began.

‘Just desiring another is good enough for me,’ interrupted Julia. ‘Of course one doesn’t want them to be run over or gunned down in the street — or not often, anyway. It seems to me that Aquinas is just stating the obvious. Everything is rooted in desire.’

‘Except conformity, convention, compulsion, hidden motivation, necessity, confusion, perversion, principle.’ Erasmus smiled sadly at the wealth of alternatives.

‘But they just create other kinds of desire.’

‘If you pack every meaning into a single word, you deprive it of any meaning at all,’ said Erasmus.

‘Well, even if you think Aquinas is a complete genius for saying that,’ said Julia, ‘I don’t see how “desiring another’s good” is the same as desiring others to think you’re a goody-goody.’

‘Eleanor didn’t just want to be good, she was good,’ said Annette. ‘She wasn’t just a dreamer like so many visionaries, she was a builder and a mover and shaker who made a practical difference to lots of lives.’

‘She certainly made a practical difference to Patrick’s life,’ said Julia, snapping her compact closed.

Mary was driven mad by Julia’s presumption that she was more loyal than anyone to Patrick’s interests. Her fidelity to his infidelity was an act of aggression towards Mary that Julia wouldn’t have allowed herself without Erasmus’s presence and Patrick’s absence. Mary decided to keep a cold silence. They were already in Hammersmith and she was easily furious enough to last until Chelsea.

When Nancy invited Henry to join her in Nicholas’s car, he pointed out that he had a car of his own.

‘Tell him to follow us,’ said Nicholas.

And so Henry’s empty car followed Nicholas’s full car from the crematorium to the club.

‘One knows so many more dead people than living ones,’ said Nicholas, relaxing into an abundance of padded black leather while electronically reclining the passenger seat towards Nancy’s knees so as to lecture his guests from a more convenient angle, ‘although, in terms of sheer numbers, all the people who have ever existed cannot equal the verminous multitude currently clutching at the surface of our once beautiful planet.’

‘That’s one of the problems with reincarnation: who is being reincarnated if there are more people now than the sum of the people who have ever existed?’ said Henry. ‘It doesn’t make any sense.’

‘It only makes sense if lumps of raw humanity are raining down on us for their first round of civilization. That, I’m afraid, is all too plausible,’ said Nicholas, arching his eyebrow at his driver and giving a warning glance to Henry. ‘It’s your first time here, isn’t it, Miguel?’

‘Yes, Sir Nicholas,’ said Miguel, with the merry laugh of a man who is used to being exotically insulted by his employer several times a day.

‘It’s no use telling you that you were Queen Cleopatra in a previous lifetime, is it?’

‘No, Sir Nicholas,’ said Miguel, unable to control his mirth.

‘What I don’t understand about reincarnation is why we all forget,’ complained Nancy. ‘Wouldn’t it have been be more fun, when we first met, to have said, “How are you? I haven’t seen you since that perfectly ghastly party Marie-Antoinette gave in the Petit Trianon!” Something like that, something fun. I mean, if it’s true, reincarnation is like having Alzheimer’s on a huge scale, with each lifetime as our little moment of vivid anxiety. I know that my sister believed in it, but by the time I wanted to ask her about why we forget, she really did have Alzheimer’s, and so it would have been tactless, if you know what I’m saying.’

‘Rebirth is just a sentimental rumour imported from the vegetable kingdom,’ said Nicholas wisely. ‘We’re all impressed by the resurgence of the spring, but the tree never died.’

‘You can get reborn in your own lifetime,’ said Henry quietly. ‘Die to something and go into a new phase.’

‘Spare me the spring,’ said Nicholas. ‘Ever since I was a little boy, I’ve been in the high summer of being me, and I intend to go on chasing butterflies through the tall grass until the abrupt and painless end. On the other hand, I do see that some people, like Miguel, for instance, are crying out for a complete overhaul.’

Miguel chuckled and shook his head in disbelief.

‘Oh, Miguel, isn’t he awful?’ said Nancy.

‘Yes, madam.’

‘You’re not supposed to agree with her, you moron,’ said Nicholas.

‘I thought Eleanor was a Christian,’ said Henry, who disliked Nicholas’s servant-baiting. ‘Where does all this Eastern stuff come from?’

‘Oh, she was just generally religious,’ said Nancy.

‘Most people who are Christian at least have the merit of not being Hindu or Sufi,’ said Nicholas, ‘just as Sufis have the merit of not being Christian, but religiously speaking, Eleanor was like one of those amazing cocktails that make you wonder what motorway collision could have first combined gin, brandy, tomato juice, crème de menthe, and Cointreau into a single drink.’

‘Well, she was always a nice kid,’ said Henry stoutly, ‘always concerned about other people.’

‘That can be a good thing,’ admitted Nicholas, ‘depending on who the other people are, of course.’

Nancy rolled her eyeballs slightly at her cousin in the back seat. She felt that families should be allowed to say horrible things to each other, but that outsiders should be more careful. Henry looked longingly back at his empty car. Even Nicholas needed to take a rest from himself. As his car sped past the Cromwell Hospital everyone fell silent by mutual consent and Nicholas closed his eyes, gathering his resources for the social ordeal that lay ahead.

After the film, Thomas sat on a cushion and pretended to be riding his own flying carpet. First of all he visited his mother and father, who were at his grandmother’s funeral. He had seen photographs of his dead grandmother that made him think he could remember her, but then his mother had told him that he last saw her when he was two and she was living in France and so he realized that he had made up the memory from the photograph. Unless in fact he had a very dim memory of her and the photograph had blown on the tiny little ember of his connection with his granny, like a faint orange glow in a heap of soft grey ash, and for a moment he really could remember when he had sat on his granny’s lap and smiled at her and patted her wrinkly old face — his mother said he smiled at her and she was really pleased.