‘I remember those shops,’ said Patrick, noticing that Fleur was gathering momentum and didn’t want to be interrupted.
‘I was thought by some people,’ Fleur motored on, ‘well, by everyone except your mother really, to be unemployable, because of my episodes, but I simply had to get out of the house and do something, so your mother was an absolute godsend. She had me packing up second-hand clothes in no time. We used to send them off to the shop we thought they’d do best in, keeping the really good ones for our shop in Launceston Place, just round the corner from your house.’
‘Yes,’ said Patrick quickly.
‘We used to have such fun,’ Fleur reminisced, ‘we were like a couple of schoolgirls, holding up the clothes and saying, “Richmond, I think,” or “Very Cheltenham.” Sometimes we’d both shout, “Rochdale!” or, “Hemel Hempstead!” at exactly the same time. Oh, how we laughed. Eventually your mother trusted me enough to put me on the till and let me run the shop for the whole day, and that, I’m afraid, is when I had one of my episodes. We had a fur coat in that morning — it was the time when people started to get paint thrown at them if they wore one — an amazing sable coat — I think that’s what tipped me over the edge. I was gripped by a need to do something really glamorous, so I shut up the shop and took all the money from the till and put on the sable coat — it wasn’t very suitable at the height of June, but I had to wear it. Anyway, I went out and hailed a cab and said, “Take me to the Ritz!”’
Patrick looked around the room anxiously, wondering if he would ever get away.
‘They tried to take my coat off me,’ Fleur accelerated, ‘but I wouldn’t hear of it, and so I sat in the Palm Court in a heap of sable, drinking champagne cocktails and talking to anyone who would listen, until a frightfully pompous head waiter asked me to leave because I was being “a nuisance to the other guests”! Can you imagine the rudeness of it? Well, anyway, the money I’d taken from the till turned out not to be enough for the enormous bill and so the wretched hotel insisted on keeping the coat, which turned out to be very inconvenient because the lady who had given it to us came back and said she’d changed her mind…’
By now Fleur was falling over herself to keep up with her thoughts. Patrick tried to catch Mary’s eye, but she seemed to be deliberately ignoring him.
‘All I can say is that your mother was absolutely marvellous. She went and paid the bill and rescued the coat. She said she was used to it because she was always clearing her father’s bar bills in grand places, and she didn’t mind at all. She was an absolute saint and let me go on running the shop when she was away, saying that she was sure I wouldn’t do it again — which I’m afraid to say I did, more than once.’
‘Would you like a drink?’ asked Patrick, turning back towards the waitress with renewed longing. Perhaps he should run away with her after all. He wanted to kiss the pulse in her long neck.
‘I shouldn’t really but I’ll have a gin and tonic,’ said Fleur, hardly pausing before she continued. ‘You must be very proud of your mother. She did an enormous amount of practical good, the only sort of good there is really — touched on hundreds of lives, threw herself into those shops with tremendous energy — I firmly believe she could have been an entrepreneur, if she had needed the money — the way she used to set off to the Harrogate Trade Fair with a spring in her step.’
Patrick smiled at the waitress and then looked down at the tablecloth bashfully. When he looked up again she was smiling at him with sympathy and laughter in her eyes. She clearly understood everything. She was wonderfully intelligent as well as impossibly lovely. The more Fleur talked about Eleanor, the more he wanted to start a new life with the waitress. He took the gin and tonic from her tenderly and handed it on to the loquacious Fleur, who seemed to be saying, ‘Well, do you?’ for reasons he couldn’t fathom.
‘Do I what?’ he asked.
‘Feel proud of your mother?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Patrick.
‘What do you mean, you “suppose so”? You’re worse than my children. Absolute monsters.’
‘Listen, it’s been a great pleasure to meet you,’ said Patrick, ‘and I expect we’ll talk again, but I probably ought to circulate.’
He moved away from Fleur unceremoniously and, wanting to look as if he had a firm intention, walked towards Julia, who stood alone by the window drinking a glass of white wine.
‘Help!’ said Patrick.
‘Oh, hi,’ said Julia, ‘I was just staring out of the window vacantly, but not so vacantly that I didn’t see you flirting with that pretty waitress.’
‘Flirting? I didn’t say a word.’
‘You didn’t have to, darling. A dog doesn’t have to say a word when it sits next to us in the dining room making little whimpering sounds while strings of saliva dangle down to the carpet; we still know what it wants.’
‘I admit that I was vaguely attracted to her, but it was only after that grey-haired lunatic started talking to me that she began to look like the last overhanging tree before the roar of the rapids.’
‘How poetic. You’re still trying to be saved.’
‘Not at all; I’m trying not to want to be saved.’
‘Progress.’
‘Relentless forward motion,’ said Patrick.
‘So who is this lunatic who forced you to flirt with the waitress?’
‘Oh, she used to work in my mother’s charity shop years ago. Her experience of Eleanor was so different from mine, it made me realize that I’m not in charge of the meaning of my mother’s life, and that I’m deluded to think that I can come to some magisterial conclusion about it.’
‘Surely you could come to some conclusion about what it means to you.’
‘I’m not even sure if that’s true,’ said Patrick. ‘I’ve been noticing today how inconclusive I feel about both my parents. There isn’t any final truth; it’s more like being able to get off on different floors of the same building.’
‘It sounds awfully tiring,’ Julia complained. ‘Wouldn’t it be simpler to just loathe their guts?’
Patrick burst out laughing.
‘I used to think that I was detached about my father. I thought that detachment was the great virtue, without the moral condescension built into forgiveness, but the truth is that I feel everything: contempt, rage, pity, terror, tenderness, and detachment.’
‘Tenderness?’
‘At the thought of how unhappy he was. When I had sons of my own and felt the strength of my instinct to protect them, I was freshly shocked that he had deliberately inflicted harm on his son, and then the hatred returned.’
‘So you’ve pretty much abandoned detachment.’
‘On the contrary, I just recognize how many things there are to be detached about. The incandescent hatred and the pure terror don’t invalidate the detachment, they give it a chance to expand.’
‘The StairMasters of detachment,’ said Julia.
‘Exactly.’
‘I wonder if I’m allowed to smoke out here,’ said Julia, opening the French windows and stepping outside. Patrick followed her onto the narrow balcony and sat on the edge of the white stucco balustrade. As she took out her packet of Camel Blue, his eyes traced the elegant profile he had often studied from a neighbouring pillow, now set against the restrained promise of the still-leafless trees. He watched Julia kiss the filter of her cigarette and suck the swaying flame of her lighter into the tightly packed tobacco. After the first immense drag, smoke flowed over her upper lip, only to be drawn back through her nose into her expanding lungs and eventually released, at first in a single thick stream and then in the little puffs and misshapen rings and drifting walls formed by her smoky words.