‘Were you thinking about her?’ said a soft Irish voice. Annette rested a healing hand on Patrick’s forearm and tilted her understanding head to one side.
‘I was thinking that a life is just the history of what we give our attention to,’ said Patrick. ‘The rest is packaging.’
‘Oh, I think that’s too stark,’ said Annette. ‘Maya Angelou says that the meaning of our lives is the impact we have on other people, whether we make them feel good or not. Eleanor always made people feel good, it was one of her gifts to the world. Oh,’ she added with sudden excitement, gripping Patrick’s forearm, ‘I only made this connection on the way in: we’re in Mortlake crematorium to say farewell to Eleanor, and guess what I took to read to her on the last occasion I saw her. You’ll never guess. The Lady of the Lake. It’s an Arthurian whodunit, not very good actually. But that says it all, doesn’t it? Lady of the lake — Mortlake. Given Eleanor’s connection with water and her love of the Arthurian legends.’
Patrick was stunned by Annette’s confidence in the consoling power of her words. He felt irritation being usurped by despair. To think that his mother had chosen to live among these resolute fools. What knowledge was she so determined to avoid?
‘Who can say why a crematorium and a bad novel should have vaguely similar names?’ said Patrick. ‘It’s tantalizing to be taken so far beyond the rational mind. I tell you who would be very receptive to that sort of connection: you see the old man over there with the walking stick. Do tell him. He loves that kind of thing. His name is Nick.’ Patrick dimly remembered that Nicholas loathed this abbreviation.
‘Seamus sends his best,’ said Annette, accepting her dismissal cheerfully.
‘Thank you.’ Patrick bowed his head, trying not to lose control of his exaggerated deference.
What was he doing? It was all so out of date. The war with Seamus and his mother’s Foundation was over. Now that he was an orphan everything was perfect. He seemed to have been waiting all his life for this sense of completeness. It was all very well for the Oliver Twists of this world, who started out in the enviable state it had taken him forty-five years to achieve, but the relative luxury of being brought up by Bumble and Fagin, rather than David and Eleanor Melrose, was bound to have a weakening effect on the personality. Patient endurance of potentially lethal influences had made Patrick the man he was today, living alone in a bedsit, only a year away from his latest visit to the Suicide Observation Room in the Depression Wing of the Priory Hospital. It had felt so ancestral to have delirium tremens, to bow down, after his disobedient youth as a junkie, to the shattering banality of alcohol. As a barrister he was reluctant nowadays to kill himself illegally. The alcohol felt deep, humming down the bloodline. He could still remember, when he was five, taking a donkey ride among the palm trees and the packed red and white flowerbeds of Monte Carlo’s Casino Gardens, while his grandfather sat on a green bench shaking uncontrollably, clamped by sunlight, a stain spreading slowly through the pearl-grey trousers of his perfectly cut suit.
Lack of insurance forced Patrick to pay for his own stay in the Priory, exhausting all his funds in a thirty-day gamble on recovery. Unhelpfully short from a psychiatric point of view, a month was still long enough for him to become immediately infatuated with a twenty-year-old patient called Becky. She looked like Botticelli’s Venus, improved by a bloody trellis of razor cuts crisscrossing its way up her slender white arms. When he first saw her in the lounge of the Depression Wing, her radiant unhappiness sent a flaming arrow into the powder keg of his frustration and emptiness.
‘I’m a self-harming resistant depressive,’ she told him. ‘They’ve got me on eight different kinds of pills.’
‘Eight,’ said Patrick admiringly. He was down to three himself: the daytime antidepressant, the nighttime antidepressant, and the thirty-two oxazepam tranquillizers a day he was taking to deal with the delirium tremens.
In so far as he could think at all on such a high dose of oxazepam, he could think only of Becky. The next day, he heaved himself off his crackling mattress and slouched to the Depression Support Group in the hope of seeing her again. She was not there, but Patrick could not escape from joining the circle of tracksuited depressives. ‘As to sports, let our wear do it for us,’ he sighed, slumping down in the nearest chair.
An American called Gary kicked off the sharing with the words, ‘Let me give you a scenario: suppose you were sent to Germany for work, and suppose a friend you hadn’t heard from in a long time called you up and came to visit with you from the States…’ After a tale of shocking exploitation and ingratitude, he asked the group what he should say to this friend. ‘Cut them out of your life,’ said the bitter and abrasive Terry, ‘with friends like that, who needs enemies?’
‘Okay,’ said Gary, relishing his moment, ‘and suppose I told you that this “friend” was my mother, what would you say then? Why would that be so different?’
Consternation raced through the Group. A man, who had been feeling ‘completely euphoric’ since his mother had come over on Sunday and taken him out to buy a new pair of trousers, said that Gary should never abandon his mother. On the other hand, there was a woman called Jill who had been ‘for a long walk by the river I wasn’t supposed to come back from — well, put it this way, I did come back very wet, and I said to Dr Pagazzi, who I love to bits, that I thought it had something to do with my mother and he said, “We’re not even going to go there.”’ Jill said that, like her, Gary should have nothing to do with his mother. At the end of the session, the wise Scottish moderator tried to shield the group from this downpour of self-centred advice.
‘Someone once asked me why mothers are so good at pushing our buttons,’ he said, ‘and the answer I gave was, “Because they put them there in the first place.”’
Everyone nodded gloomily, and Patrick asked himself, not for the first time, but with renewed desperation, what it would mean to be free, to live beyond the tyranny of dependency and conditioning and resentment.
After the Support Group, he saw a caved-in, illicitly smoking, barefooted Becky go down the staircase beyond the laundry. He followed her and found her crumpled on the stairs, her giant pupils swimming in a pool of tears. ‘I hate this place,’ she said. ‘They’re going to throw me out because they say I’ve got a bad attitude. But I only stayed in bed because I’m so depressed. I don’t know where I’m going to go, I can’t face going back to my parents.’
She was screaming to be saved. Why not run away with her to the bedsit? She was one of the few people alive who was more suicidal than him. They could lie on the bed together, Priory refugees, one convulsing while the other slashed. Why not take her back and let her finish the job for him? Her bluest veins to bandage, her whitening lips to kiss. No no no no no. He was too well, or at least too old.
These days he could only remember Becky with deliberate effort. He often watched his obsessions pass over him like so many blushes, and by doing nothing about them, watched them fade. Becoming an orphan was a thermal on which this new sense of freedom might continue to rise, if only he had the courage not to feel guilty about the opportunity it presented.
Patrick drifted towards Nicholas and Annette, curious to see the outcome of his matchmaking.
‘Stand by the graveside or the furnace,’ he heard Nicholas instructing Annette, ‘and repeat these words, “Goodbye, old thing. One of us was bound to die first and I’m delighted it was you!” That’s my spiritual practice, and you’re welcome to adopt it and put it into your hilarious “spiritual tool box”.’