‘I’m riding on a flying carpet,’ said Thomas.
‘In that case, you won’t need the silly old taxi I’ve got for us to go to the party.’
‘No,’ said Thomas serenely, ‘I’ll find my own way.’
He leant forward and grabbed the front corners of the cushion, tilting sideways to go into a steep left turn.
‘Let’s get a move on,’ said Kettle, clapping her hands together impatiently. ‘It’s costing me a fortune to keep this taxi waiting. What are you doing staring at the ceiling?’ she snapped at Robert.
‘Thinking.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
The two boys followed Kettle into the frail old-fashioned cage of a lift that took them to the ground floor of her building. She seemed to calm down once she told the taxi driver to take them to the Onslow Club, but by then both Robert and Thomas felt too upset to talk. Sensing their reluctance, Kettle started to interrogate them about their schools. After dashing some dull questions against their proud silence, she gave in to the temptation of reminiscing about her own schooldays: Sister Bridget’s irresistible charm towards the parents, especially the grander ones, and her high austerity towards the girls; the hilarious report in which Sister Anna had said that it would take ‘divine intervention’ to make Kettle into a mathematician.
Kettle carried on with her complacent self-deprecation as the taxi rumbled down the Fulham Road. The brothers withdrew into their private thoughts, only emerging when they stopped outside the club.
‘Oh, look, there’s Daddy,’ said Robert, lunging out ‘Oh, look, there’s Daddy,’ said Robert, lunging out of the taxi ahead of his grandmother.
‘Don’t wait for me,’ said Kettle archly.
‘Okay,’ said Thomas, following his brother into the street and running up to his father.
‘Hello, Dada,’ he said, jumping into Patrick’s arms. ‘Guess what I’ve been doing? I’ve been watching Aladdin! Not Bin Laden but A-laddin.’ He chuckled mischievously, patting both Patrick’s cheeks at once.
Patrick burst out laughing and kissed him on the forehead.
11
As he arrived at the entrance of the Onslow Club, with Thomas still in his arms and Robert walking by his side, Patrick heard the distant but distinct sound of Nicholas Pratt disgorging his opinions on the pavement behind him.
‘A celebrity these days is somebody you’ve never heard of,’ Nicholas boomed, ‘just as “j’arrive” is what a French waiter says as he hurries away from you in a Paris cafe. Margot’s fame belongs to a bygone era: one actually knows who she is! Nevertheless, to write five autobiographies is going too far. Life is life and writing is writing and if you write as Margot does, like a glass of water on a rainy day it can only dilute the effect of whatever it was you used to do well.’
‘You are awful,’ said Nancy’s admiring voice.
Patrick turned around and saw Nancy, her arm locked in Nicholas’s, with a rather demoralized-looking Henry walking on her other side.
‘Who is that funny man?’ asked Thomas.
‘He’s called Nicholas Pratt,’ said Patrick.
‘He’s like Toady in a very grumpy mood,’ said Thomas.
Patrick and Robert both laughed as much as Nicholas’s proximity allowed.
‘She said to me,’ Nicholas continued in his coy simpering voice, ‘“I know it’s my fifth book, but there always seems to be more to say.” If one says nothing in the first place, there always is more to say: there’s everything to say. Ah, Patrick,’ Nicholas checked himself, ‘how thrilling to be introduced, at my advanced age, to a new club.’ He peered with exaggerated curiosity at the brass plaque on a white stucco pillar. ‘The Onslow Club, I don’t remember ever hearing it mentioned.’
He’s the last one, thought Patrick, watching Nicholas’s performance with cold detachment, the last of my parents’ friends left alive, the last of the guests who used to visit Saint-Nazaire when I was a child. George Watford and Victor Eisen and Anne Eisen are dead, even Bridget, who was so much younger than Nicholas, is dead. I wish he would drop dead as well.
Patrick lazily retracted his murderous desire to get rid of Nicholas. Death was the kind of boisterous egomaniac that needed no encouragement. Besides, being free, whatever that might mean, couldn’t depend on Nicholas’s death, or even on Eleanor’s.
Still, her death pointed to a post-parental world that Nicholas’s presence was obstructing. His perfectly rehearsed contempt was a frayed cable connecting Patrick to the social atmosphere of his childhood. Patrick’s one great ally during his troubled youth had always loathed Nicholas. Victor Eisen’s wife, Anne, felt that the nimbus of insanity surrounding David Melrose’s corruption had made it seem inevitable, whereas Nicholas’s decadence was more like a stylistic choice.
Nicholas straightened up and took in the children.
‘Are these your sons?’
‘Robert and Thomas,’ said Patrick, noticing a strong reluctance to put the increasingly burdensome Thomas down on the pavement next to his father’s last living friend.
‘What a pity David isn’t here to enjoy his grandsons,’ said Nicholas. ‘He would have ensured at the very least that they didn’t spend the whole day in front of the television. He was very worried about the tyranny of the cathode-ray tube. I remember vividly when we had seen some children who were practically giving birth to a television set, he said to me, “I dread to think what all that radiation is doing to their little genitals.”’
Patrick was lost for words.
‘Let’s go inside,’ said Henry firmly. He smiled at the two boys and led the party indoors.
‘I’m your cousin Henry,’ he said to Robert. ‘You came to stay with me in Maine a few years back.’
‘On that island,’ said Robert. ‘I remember. I loved it there.’
‘You must come again.’
Patrick pressed ahead with Thomas, while Nicholas, like a lame pointer following a wounded bird, hobbled after him across the black-and-white tiles of the entrance hall. He could tell that he had unsettled Patrick and didn’t want to lose the chance to consolidate his work.
‘I can’t help thinking how much your father would have enjoyed this occasion,’ panted Nicholas. ‘Whatever his drawbacks as a parent, you must admit that he never lost his sense of humour.’
‘Easy not to lose what you never had,’ said Patrick, too relieved that he could speak again to avoid the mistake of engaging with Nicholas.
‘Oh, I disagree,’ said Nicholas. ‘He saw the funny side of everything.’
‘He only saw the funny side of things that didn’t have one,’ said Patrick. ‘That’s not a sense of humour, just a form of cruelty.’
‘Well, cruelty and laughter,’ said Nicholas, struggling to take off his overcoat next to the row of brass hooks on the far side of the hall, ‘have always been close neighbours.’
‘Close without being incestuous,’ said Patrick. ‘In any case, I have to deal with the people who have come to mourn my mother, however much you may miss my other amazing parent.’
Taking advantage of the tangle that had briefly turned Nicholas’s overcoat into a straitjacket, Patrick doubled back to the entrance of the club.
‘Ah, look, there’s Mummy,’ he said, at last releasing Thomas onto the chequerboard floor and following him as he ran towards Mary.
‘I hate to sound like Greta Garbo, but “I want to be alone”,’ said Patrick in a ludicrous Swedish accent.