When Patrick’s childhood had ended and the inarticulate echoes of her own childhood faded, Eleanor stopped supporting children’s charities, and embarked on the second adolescence of her New Age quest. She showed the same genius for generalization that had characterized her rescue of children, except that her identity crisis was not merely global, but interplanetary and cosmic as well, without sinking one millimetre into the resistant bedrock of self-knowledge. No stranger to ‘the energy of the universe’, she remained a stranger to herself. Patrick could not pretend that he would have applauded any charitable gift involving all of his mother’s property, but once that became inevitable, it was a further pity that it had all gone to the Transpersonal Foundation.
Aunt Virginia would not have approved either. She wanted to bring real benefits to fellow human beings. Her influence on Eleanor had been indirect but strong and, like all the other strong influences, matriarchal. The Jonson men sometimes seemed to Patrick like those diminutive male spiders that quickly discharge their only important responsibility before being eaten by the much larger females. The founder’s two sons left two widows: Virginia, the widow of good works, and Eleanor’s grandmother, the widow of good marriages, whose second marriage to the son of an English earl launched her three daughters on their dazzling social and matrimonial careers. Patrick knew that Nancy had been intending to write a book about the Jonsons for the last twenty years. Without any tiresome show of false modesty, she had said to him, ‘I mean, it would be much better than Henry James and Edith Wharton and those sort of people, because it really happened.’
Men who married Jonson women didn’t fare much better than the founder’s sons. Eleanor’s father and her Uncle Vladimir were both alcoholics, emasculated by getting the heiress they thought they wanted. They ended up sitting together in White’s, nursing their wounds over a luxurious drink; divorced, discarded, cut off from their children. Eleanor was brought up wondering how an heiress could avoid destroying the man she married, unless he was already too corrupt to be destroyed, or rich enough to be immune. She had chosen from the first category in marrying David, and yet his malice and pride, which were impressive enough to begin with, were still magnified by the humiliation of depending on his wife’s money.
Patrick was not one of the Jonson castrati by marriage, but he knew what it was to be born into a matriarchal world, given money by a grandmother he scarcely knew, and cut off by a mother who still expected him to look after her. The psychological impact of these powerful women, generous from an impersonal distance, treacherous up close, had furnished him with one basic model of what a woman should look like and how she would in fact turn out to be. The object of desire generated by this combination was the Hiso Bitch — Hiso was an acronym for high society invented by a Japanese friend of his. The Hiso Bitch had to be a reincarnation of a Jonson Sister: glamorous, intensely social, infinitely rich in the pursuit of pleasure, embedded among beautiful possessions. As if this was not enough (as if this was not too much) she also had to be sexually voracious and morally disoriented. His first girlfriend had been an embryonic version of the type. He still thought sometimes about kneeling in front of her, in the pool of light from the reading lamp, the shining folds of her black silk pyjamas gathered between her splayed legs, a trickle of blood running down her proffered arm, the gasp of pleasure, whispering, ‘Too much too much,’ the film of sweat on her angular face, the syringe in his hand, her first fix of cocaine. He did his best to addict her, but she was a vampire of a different sort, feeding off the despairing obsession of the men who surrounded her, draining ever more socially assured admirers in the hope of acquiring their sense of belonging, even as she trivialized it in their eyes by making herself seem the only thing worth having and then walking away.
In his early thirties his compulsive search for disappointment brought him Inez, the Sistine Chapel of the Hiso Bitch. She insisted that every one of her cartload of lovers was exclusive to her, a condition she failed to secure from her husband, but successfully extorted from Patrick, who left the relatively sane and generous woman he was living with in order to plunge into the hungry vacuum of Inez’s love. Her absolute indifference to the feelings of her lovers made her sexual receptiveness into a kind of free-fall. In the end the cliff he fell off was as flat as the one Gloucester was made to leap off by his devoted son: a cliff of blindness and guilt and imagination, with no beetling rocks at its base. But she did not know that and neither did he.
With her curling blonde hair and her slender limbs and her beautiful clothes, Inez was alluring in an obvious way, and yet it was easy enough to see that her slightly protruding blue eyes were blank screens of self-love on which a small selection of fake emotions was allowed to flicker. She made rather haphazard impersonations of someone who has relationships with others. Based on the gossip of her courtiers, a diet of Hollywood movies and the projection of her own cunning calculations, these guesses might be sentimental or nasty, but were always vulgar and melodramatic. Since she hadn’t the least interest in the answer, she was inclined to ask, ‘How are you?’ with great gravity, at least half a dozen times. She was often exhausted by the thought of how generous she was, whereas the exhaustion really stemmed from the strain of not giving away anything at all. ‘I’m going to buy six thoroughbred Arab stallions for the Queen of Spain’s birthday,’ she announced one day. ‘Don’t you think it’s a good idea?’
‘Is six enough?’ asked Patrick.
‘You don’t think six is enough? Do you have any idea how much they cost?’
He was amazed when she did buy the horses, less surprised when she kept them for herself and bored when she sold them back to the man she had bought them from. However maddening she was as a friend, it was in the cut and thrust of romance that her talents excelled.
‘I’ve never felt this way before,’ she would say with troubled profundity. ‘I don’t think anybody has really understood me until now. Do you know that? Do you know how important you are to me?’ Tears would well up in her eyes as she hardly dared to whisper, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever felt at home until now,’ nestling in his strong manly arms.
Soon afterwards he would be left waiting for days in some foreign hotel where Inez never bothered to show up. Her social secretary would call twice a day to say that she had been delayed but was really on her way now. Inez knew that this tantalizing absence was the most efficient way to ensure that he would think of nothing but her, while leaving her free to do the same thing at a safe distance. His mind might wander almost anywhere if she was lying in his arms talking nonsense, whereas if he was nailed to the telephone, haemorrhaging money and abandoning all his other responsibilities, he was bound to think of her constantly. When they did eventually meet up, she would hurry to point out how unbearable it had all been for her, ruthlessly monopolizing the suffering generated by her endlessly collapsing plans.