Why would anyone allow himself to be annihilated by such shallowness, unless a buried image of a careless woman was longing for outward form? Lateness, let-down, longing for the unobtainable: these were the mechanisms that turned a powerful matriarchal stimulant into a powerful maternal depressant. Bewildering lateness, especially, took him directly into an early despair, waiting in vain on the stairs for his mother to come, terrified that she was dead.
Patrick suddenly experienced these old emotions as a physical oppression. He ran his fingers along the inside of his collar to make sure that it was not concealing a tightening noose. He couldn’t bear the lure of disappointment any longer, or for that matter the lure of consolation, its Siamese twin. He must somehow get beyond both of them, but first he had to mourn his mother. In a sense he had been missing her all his life. It was not the end of closeness but the end of the longing for closeness that he had to mourn. How futile his longing must have been for him to disperse himself into the land at Saint-Nazaire. If he tried to imagine anything deeper than his old home, he just pictured himself standing there, straining to see something elusive, shielding his eyes to watch a dragonfly dip into the burning water at noon, or starlings twisting against the setting sun.
He could now see that the loss of Saint-Nazaire was not an obstacle to mourning his mother but the only possible means to do so. Letting go of the imaginary world he had put in her place released him from that futile longing and took him into a deeper grief. He was free to imagine how terrified Eleanor must have been, for a woman of such good intentions, to have abandoned her desire to love him, which he did not doubt, and be compelled to pass on so much fear and panic instead. At last he could begin to mourn her for herself, for the tragic person she had been.
6
Patrick had little idea what to expect from the ceremony. He had been on a business trip to America at the time of his mother’s death and pleaded the impossibility of preparing anything to say or read, leaving Mary to take over the arrangements. He had only arrived back from New York yesterday, just in time to go to Bunyon’s funeral parlour, and now that he was sitting in a pew next to Mary, picking up the order of service for the first time, he realized how unready he was for this exploration of his mother’s confusing life. On the front of the little booklet was a photograph of Eleanor in the sixties, throwing her arms out as if to embrace the world, her dark glasses firmly on and no breathalyser test results available. He hesitated to look inside; this was the muddle, the pile-up of fact and feeling he had been trying to outmanoeuvre since the end of Eleanor’s flirtation with assisted suicide two years ago. She had died as a person before her body died, and he had tried to pretend that her life was over before it really was, but no amount of anticipation could cheat the demands of an actual death and now, with a combination of embarrassment and fear and evasiveness, he leant forward and slipped the order of service back onto the shelf in front of him. He would find out what was in it soon enough.
He had gone to America after receiving a letter from Brown and Stone LLP, the lawyers for the JohnJ. Jonson Corporation, known affectionately as ‘Triple J’. They had been informed by ‘the family’ — Patrick now suspected that it was Henry who had told them — that Eleanor Melrose was incompetent to administer her own affairs, and since she was the beneficiary of a trust created by her grandfather, of which Patrick was the ultimate beneficiary, measures should be taken to procure him a US power of attorney in order to administer the money on his mother’s behalf. All this was news to Patrick and he was freshly astonished by his mother’s capacity for secrecy. In his amazement he failed to ask how much the trust contained and he got onto the plane to New York not knowing whether he would be put in charge of twenty thousand dollars or two hundred thousand.
Joe Rich and Peter Zirkovsky met him in one of the smaller oval-tabled, glass-sided conference rooms of Brown and Stone’s offices on Lexington Avenue. Instead of the sulphurous yellow legal pads he was expecting, he found lined cream paper with the name of the firm printed elegantly on the top of each page. An assistant photocopied Patrick’s passport, while Joe examined the doctor’s letter testifying to Eleanor’s incapacity.
‘I had no idea about this trust,’ said Patrick.
‘Your mother must have been keeping it as a nice surprise,’ said Peter with a big lazy smile.
‘It might be that,’ said Patrick tolerantly. ‘Where does the income go?’
‘Currently we’re sending it to…’ Peter flicked over a sheet of paper, ‘the Association Transpersonel at the Banque Populaire de la Côte d’Azur in Lacoste, France.’
‘Well, you can stop that straight away,’ said Patrick.
‘Whoa, slow down,’ said Joe. ‘We’re going to have to get you a power of attorney first.’
‘That’s why she didn’t tell me about it,’ said Patrick, ‘because she’s continuing to subsidize her pet charity in France while I pay for her nursing-home fees in London.’
‘She may have lost her competence before she had a chance to change the instructions,’ said Peter, who seemed determined to furnish Patrick with a loving mother.
‘This letter is fine,’ said Joe. ‘We’re going to have to get you to sign some documents and get them notarized.’
‘How much money are we talking about?’ asked Patrick.
‘It’s not a large Jonson trust and it’s suffered in the recent stock-market corrections,’ said Joe.
‘Let’s hope it behaves incorrigibly from now on,’ said Patrick.
‘The latest valuation we have,’ said Peter, glancing down at his notes, ‘is two point three million dollars, with an estimated income of eighty thousand.’
‘Oh, well, still a useful sum,’ said Patrick, trying to sound slightly disappointed.
‘Enough to buy a country cottage!’ said Peter in an absurd impersonation of an English accent. ‘I gather house prices are pretty crazy over there.’
‘Enough to buy a second room,’ said Patrick, eliciting a polite guffaw from Peter, although Patrick could in fact think of nothing he wanted more than to separate the bed from the sit.
Walking down Lexington Avenue towards his hotel in Gramercy Park, Patrick began adjusting to his strange good fortune. The long arm of his great-grandfather, who had died more than half a century before Patrick was born, was going to pluck him out of his cramped living quarters and get him into a place where there might be room for his children to stay and his friends to visit. In the meantime it would pay for his mother’s nursing home. It was puzzling to think that this complete stranger was going to have such a powerful influence on his life. Even his benefactor had inherited his money. It had been his father who had founded the Jonson Candle Company in Cleveland, in 1832. By 1845 it was one of the most profitable candle companies in the country. Patrick could remember reading the founder’s uninspiring explanation for his success: ‘We had a new process of distilling cheap greases. Our competitors were using costly tallow and lard. Candles were high and our profits were large for a number of years.’ Later, the candle factory diversified into paraffin, oil treatment and hardening processes, and developed a patented compound that became an indispensable ingredient in dry cleaning around the world. The Jonsons also bought buildings and building sites in San Francisco, Denver, Kansas City, Toledo, Indianapolis, Chicago, New York, Trinidad and Puerto Rico, but the original fortune rested on the hard-headedness of the founder who had ‘died on the job’, falling through a hatchway in one of his own factories, and also on those ‘cheap greases’ which were still lubricating the life of one of his descendants a hundred and seventy years after their discovery.