Edward Aubyn - At Last

‘Your friend is absolutely priceless,’ said Annette, seeing Patrick approaching. ‘What he doesn’t realize is that we live in a loving universe. And it loves you too, Nick,’ she assured Nicholas, resting her hand on his recoiling shoulder.

‘I’ve quoted Bibesco before,’ snapped Nicholas, ‘and I’ll quote him again: “To a man of the world, the universe is a suburb”.’

‘Oh, he’s got an answer to everything, hasn’t he?’ said Annette. ‘I expect he’ll joke his way into heaven. St. Peter loves a witty man.’

‘Does he?’ said Nicholas, surprisingly appeased. ‘That’s the best thing I’ve heard yet about that bungling social secretary. As if the Supreme Being would consent to spend eternity surrounded by a lot of nuns and paupers and par-boiled missionaries, having his lovely concerts ruined by the rattle of spiritual tool boxes and the screams of the faithful, boasting about their crucifixions! What a relief that an enlightened command has finally reached the concierge at the Pearly Gates: “For Heaven’s sake, send Me a conversationalist!”’

Annette looked at Nicholas with humorous reproach.

‘Ah,’ he said, nodding at Patrick, ‘I never thought I’d be so grateful to see your impossible aunt.’ He lifted his stick and waved it at Nancy. She stood in the doorway looking exhausted by her own haughtiness, as if her raised eyebrows might not be able to stand the strain much longer.

‘Help!’ she said to Nicholas. ‘Who are these peculiar people?’

‘Zealots, Moonies, witch-doctors, would-be terrorists, every variety of religious lunatic,’ explained Nicholas, offering Nancy his arm. ‘Avoid eye contact, stick close to me and you may live to tell the tale.’

Nancy flared up when she saw Patrick. ‘Of all the days not to have the funeral,’ she said.

‘Why?’ he asked, confused.

‘It’s Prince Charles’s wedding. The only other people who might have come will be at Windsor.’

‘I’m sure you’d be there as well, if you’d been invited,’ said Patrick. ‘Don’t hesitate to nip down with a Union Jack and a cardboard periscope if you think you’d find it more entertaining.’

‘When I think how we were brought up,’ wailed Nancy, ‘it’s too ridiculous to think what my sister did with…’ She was lost for words.

‘The golden address book,’ purred Nicholas, gripping his walking stick more tightly as she sagged against him.

‘Yes,’ said Nancy, ‘the golden address book.’

Nancy watched her infuriating nephew drift towards his mother’s coffin. Patrick would never understand the fabulous way that she and Eleanor had been brought up. Eleanor had stupidly rebelled against it, whereas it had been ripped from Nancy’s prayerfully clasped hands.

‘The golden address book,’ she sighed again, locking arms with Nicholas. ‘I mean, for example, Mummy only ever had one car accident in her entire life, but even then, when she was hanging upside down in the buckled metal, she had the Infanta of Spain dangling next to her.’

‘That’s very in-depth, I must say,’ said Nicholas. ‘A car accident can get one tangled up with all sorts of obscure people. Picture the commotion at the College of Heralds if a drop of one’s blood landed on the dashboard of a lorry and mingled with the bodily fluids of the brute whose head had been dashed against the steering wheel.’

‘Do you always have to be so facetious?’ snapped Nancy.

‘I do my best,’ said Nicholas. ‘But you can’t pretend that your mother was a fan of the common man. Didn’t she buy the entire village street that ran along the boundary wall of the Pavillon Colombe, in order to demolish it and expand the garden? How many houses was that?’

‘Twenty-seven,’ said Nancy, cheering up. ‘They weren’t all demolished. Some of them were turned into exactly the right kind of ruin to go with the house. There were follies and grottos, and Mummy had a replica made of the main house, only fifty times smaller. We used to have tea there, it was like something out of Alice in Wonderland .’ Nancy’s face clouded over. ‘There was a horrible old man who refused to sell, although Mummy offered him far too much for his poky little house, and so there was an inward bulge following the line of the old wall, if you see what I’m saying.’

‘Every paradise demands a serpent,’ said Nicholas.

‘He did it just to annoy us,’ said Nancy. ‘He put a French flag on the roof and used to play Edith Piaf all day long. We had to smother him in vegetation.’

‘Maybe he liked Edith Piaf,’ said Nicholas.

‘Oh, don’t be funny! Nobody could like Edith Piaf at that volume.’

Nicholas sounded sour to Nancy’s sensitive ear. So what if Mummy hadn’t wanted ordinary people pressing up against her property? It was hardly surprising when everything else was so divine. Fragonard had painted Les Demoiselles Colombe in that garden, hence the necessity for having Fragonards in the house. The original owners had hung a pair of big Guardis in the drawing room, hence the authenticity of getting them back.

Nancy couldn’t help being haunted by the splendour and the wreckage of her mother’s family. One day she was going to write a book about her mother and her aunts, the legendary Jonson Sisters. She had been collecting material for years, fascinating bits and pieces that just needed to be organized. Only last week, she had sacked a hopeless young researcher — the tenth in a succession of greedy egomaniacs who wanted to be paid in advance — but not before her latest slave had discovered a copy of her grandmother’s birth certificate. According to this wonderfully quaint document, Nancy’s grandmother had been ‘Born in Indian Country’. How could the daughter of a young army officer, born at this unlikely address, have guessed, as she tottered about among the creaky pallet beds and restless horses of an adobe fort in the Western Territories, that her own daughters would be tottering along the corridors of European castles and filling their houses with the debris of failed dynasties — splashing about in Marie-Antoinette’s black marble bath, while their yellow Labradors dozed on carpets from the throne room of the imperial palace in Peking? Even the lead garden tubs on the terrace of the Pavillon Colombe had been made for Napoleon. Gold bees searching through silver blossoms, dripping in the rain. She always thought that Jean had made Mummy buy those tubs to take an obscure revenge on Napoleon for saying that his ancestor, the great duc de Valençay, was ‘a piece of shit in a silk stocking’. What she liked to say was that Jean kept up the family tradition, minus the silk stocking. Nancy gripped Nicholas’s arm even more tightly, as if her horrid stepfather might try to steal him as well.

If only Mummy hadn’t divorced Daddy. They had such a glamorous life in Sunninghill Park, where she and Eleanor were brought up. The Prince of Wales used to drop in all the time, and there were never fewer used to drop in all the time, and there were never less than twenty people staying in the house, having the best fun ever. It was true that Daddy had the bad habit of buying Mummy extremely expensive presents, which she had to pay for. When she said, ‘Oh, darling, you shouldn’t have,’ she really meant it. She grew nervous of commenting on the garden. If she said that a border needed a little more blue, a couple of days later she would find that Daddy had flown in some impossible flower from Tibet which bloomed for about three minutes and cost as much as a house. But before the drink took over, Daddy was handsome and warm and so infectiously funny that the food often arrived shaking at the table, because the footmen were laughing too much to hold the platters steadily.