Edward Aubyn - At Last

‘Doesn’t everybody?’

‘Quite.’

‘I’ll see you afterwards at the Onslow,’ said Johnny, leaving Patrick to the usher who had come up to him and was standing by expectantly.

‘We can start whenever you’re ready, sir,’ said the usher, somehow hinting at the queue of corpses that would pile up unless the ceremony got going right away.

Patrick scanned the room. There were a few dozen people sitting in the pews facing Eleanor’s coffin.

‘Fine,’ he said, ‘let’s begin in ten minutes.’

‘Ten minutes?’ said the usher, like a young child who has been told he can do something really exciting when he’s twenty-one.

‘Yes, there are still people arriving,’ said Patrick, noticing Julia standing in the doorway, a spiky effusion of black against the dull morning: black veil, black hat, stiff black silk dress and, he imagined, softer black silk beneath. He immediately felt the impact of her mentality, that intense but exclusive sensitivity. She was like a spider’s web, trembling at the slightest touch, but indifferent to the light that made its threads shine in the wet grass.

‘You’re just in time,’ said Patrick, kissing Julia through her scratchy black veil.

‘You mean late as usual.’

‘No; just in time. We’re about to kick off, if that’s the phrase I’m looking for.’

‘It’s not,’ she said, with that short husky laugh that always got to him.

The last time they had seen each other was in the French hotel where their affair had ended. Despite their communicating rooms, they could think of nothing to say to each other. Sitting through long meals, under the vault of an artificial sky, painted with faint clouds and garlands of tumbling roses, they stared at a flight of steps that led down to the slapping keels of a private harbour, ropes creaking against bollards, bollards rusting into stone quays; everything longing to leave.

‘Now that you’re not with Mary, you don’t need me. I was…structural.’

‘Exactly.’

The single word was perhaps too bare and could only be outstripped by silence. She had stood up and walked away without further comment. A gull launched itself from the soiled balustrade and clapped its way out to sea with a piercing cry. He had wanted to call her back, but the impulse died in the thick carpet lengthening between them.

Looking at him now, the freshly bereaved son, Julia decided she felt utterly detached from Patrick, apart from wanting him to find her irresistible.

‘I haven’t seen you for such a long time,’ said Patrick, looking down at Julia’s lips, red under the black net of her veil. He remained inconveniently attracted to almost all the women he had ever been to bed with, even when he had a strong aversion to a revival on all other grounds.

‘A year and a half,’ said Julia. ‘Is it true that you’ve given up drinking? It must be hard just now.’

‘Not at all: a crisis demands a hero. The ambush comes when things are going well, or so I’m told.’

‘If you can’t speak personally about things going well, they haven’t changed that much.’

‘They have changed, but my speech patterns may take a while to catch up.’

‘I can’t wait.’

‘If there’s an opportunity for irony…’

‘You’ll take it.’

‘It’s the hardest addiction of all,’ said Patrick. ‘Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, that deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.’

‘Don’t!’ said Julia, ‘I’m having enough trouble wearing nicotine patches and still smoking at the same time. Don’t take away my irony,’ she pleaded, clasping him histrionically, ‘leave me with a little sarcasm.’

‘Sarcasm doesn’t count. It only means one thing: contempt.’

‘You always were a quality freak,’ said Julia. ‘Some of us like sarcasm.’

Julia noticed that she was playing with Patrick. She felt a small tug of nostalgia, but reminded herself sternly that she was well rid of him. Besides, she had Gunther now, a charming German banker who spent the middle of the week in London. It was true that he was married, as Patrick had been, but in every other way he was the opposite: slick, fit, rich and disciplined. He had opera tickets, and bookings in caviar bars and membership of nightclubs, organized by his personal assistant. Sometimes he threw caution to the winds and put on his ironed jeans and his zip-up suede jacket and took her to jazz clubs in unusual parts of town, always, of course, with a big, reassuring, silent car waiting outside to take them back to Hays Mews, just behind Berkeley Square, where Gunther, like all his friends, was having a swimming pool put into the subbasement of his triple mews house lateral conversion. He collected hideous contemporary art with the haphazard credulity of a man who has friends in the art world. There were artistic black-and-white photographs of women’s nipples in his dressing room. He made Julia feel sophisticated, but he didn’t make her want to play. The thought simply didn’t enter her head when she was with Gunther. He had never struggled to give up irony. He knew, of course, that it existed and he pursued it doggedly with all the silliness at his command.

‘We’d better find a seat,’ said Patrick. ‘I’m not quite sure what’s going on; I haven’t even had time to look at the order of service.’

‘But didn’t you organize it?’

‘No. Mary did.’

‘Sweet!’ said Julia. ‘She’s always so helpful, more like a mother than your own mother really.’

Julia felt her heart rate accelerate; perhaps she had gone too far. She was amazed that her old competition with that paragon of self-sacrifice had suddenly burst out, now that it was so out of date.

‘She was, until she had children of her own,’ said Patrick amiably. ‘That rather blew my cover.’

From fearing that he would take offence, Julia found herself wishing he would stop being so maddeningly calm.

Organ music purred into life.

‘Well, real or not, I have to burn the remains of the only mother I’ll ever have,’ said Patrick, smiling briskly at Julia and setting off down the aisle to the front row where Mary was keeping a seat for him.

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.