13
Mary smiled at Henry from across the room and started to move in his direction, but before she could reach his side Fleur surged up in front of her.
‘I hope I haven’t offended your husband,’ she said. ‘He walked away from me very abruptly and now he seems to have stormed out of the room altogether.’
‘It’s a difficult day for him,’ said Mary, fascinated by Fleur’s lipstick, which had been reapplied, mostly to the old lopsided track around her mouth but also to her front teeth.
‘Has he had mental-health problems?’ said Fleur. ‘I only ask because — God knows! — I’ve had my fair share and I’ve grown rather good at telling when other people have a screw loose.’
‘You seem quite well now,’ said Mary, lying virtuously.
‘It’s funny you should say that,’ said Fleur, ‘because this morning I thought, “There’s no point in taking your pills when you feel so well.” I feel very, very well, you see.’
Mary recoiled instinctively. ‘Oh, good,’ she said.
‘I feel as if something amazing is going to happen to me today,’ Fleur went on. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever achieved my full potential — I feel as if I could do anything — as if I could raise the dead!’
‘That’s the last thing anyone would expect at this party,’ said Mary, with a cheerful laugh. ‘Do ask Patrick first if it’s Eleanor you’ve got in mind.’
‘Oh, I’d love to see Eleanor again,’ said Fleur, as if endorsing Mary’s candidate for resurrection and about to perform the necessary operation.
‘Will you excuse me?’ said Mary. ‘I’ve got to go and talk to Patrick’s cousin. He’s come all the way from America and we didn’t even know he was coming.’
‘I’d love to go to America,’ said Fleur, ‘in fact, I might fly there later this afternoon.’
‘In a plane?’ said Mary.
‘Yes, of course…Oh!’ Fleur interrupted herself. ‘I see what you mean.’
She stuck out her arms, thrust her head forwards and swayed from side to side, with an explosion of laughter so loud that Mary could sense everyone in the room looking in her direction.
She reached out and touched Fleur’s outstretched arm, smiling at her to show how much she had enjoyed sharing their delightful joke, but turning away firmly to join Henry, who stood alone in the corner of the room.
‘That woman’s laugh packs quite a punch,’ said Henry.
‘Everything about her packs a punch, that’s what I’m worried about,’ said Mary. ‘I feel she may do something very crazy before we all get home.’
‘Who is she? She’s kind of exotic.’
Mary noticed how distinct Henry’s eyelashes were against the pale translucence of his eyes.
‘None of us has ever met her. She just turned up unexpectedly.’
‘Like me,’ said Henry, with egalitarian gallantry.
‘Except that we know who you are and we’re very pleased to see you,’ said Mary, ‘especially since not a lot of people have turned up. Eleanor lost touch with people; her social life was very disintegrated. She had a few little pockets of friendship, each assuming that there was something more central, but in fact there was nothing in the middle. For the last two years, I was the only person who visited her.’
‘And Patrick?’
‘No, he didn’t go. She became so unhappy when she saw him. There was something she was dying to say but couldn’t. I don’t just mean in the mechanical sense that she couldn’t speak in the last two years. I mean that she never could have said what she wanted to tell him, even if she had been the most articulate person in the world, because she didn’t know what it was, but when she became ill she could feel the pressure of it.’
‘Just horrible,’ said Henry. ‘It’s what we all dread.’
‘That’s why we must drop our defences while it’s still a voluntary act,’ said Mary, ‘otherwise they’ll be demolished and we’ll be flooded with nameless horror.’
‘Poor Eleanor, I feel so sorry for her,’ said Henry.
They both fell silent for a while.
‘At this point the English usually say, “Well, this is a cheerful subject!” to cover their embarrassment at being serious,’ said Mary.
‘Let’s just stick with the sorrow,’ said Henry with a kind smile.
‘I’m really pleased you came,’ she said. ‘Your love for Eleanor was so uncomplicated, unlike everyone else’s.’
‘Cabbage,’ said Nancy, grabbing Henry’s arm, with the exaggerated eagerness of a shipwrecked passenger who discovers that she is not the only member of her family left alive, ‘thank God! Save me from that dreadful woman in the green sweater! I can’t believe my sister ever knew her — socially. I mean, this really is the most extraordinary gathering. I don’t feel it’s really a Jonson occasion at all. When I think of Mummy’s funeral, or Aunt Edith’s. Eight hundred people turned up at Mummy’s, half the French cabinet, and the Aga Khan, and the Windsors; everybody was there.’
‘Eleanor chose a different path,’ said Henry.
‘More like a goat track,’ said Nancy, rolling her eyes.
‘Personally, I don’t give a damn who comes to my funeral,’ said Henry.
‘That’s only because you know that it’ll be solid with senators and glamorous people and sobbing women!’ said Nancy. ‘The trouble with funerals is that they’re so last-minute. That’s where memorials come in, of course, but they’re not the same. There’s something so dramatic about a funeral, although I can’t abide those open caskets. Do you remember Uncle Vlad? I still have nightmares about him lying there in that gold and white uniform looking all gaunt. Oh, God, wagon formation,’ cried Nancy, ‘the green goblin is staring at me again!’
Fleur was feeling a sense of irrepressible pleasure and potency as she scanned the room for someone who had not yet had the benefit of her conversation. She could understand all the currents flowing through the room; she only had to glance at a person to see into the depths of their soul. Thanks to Patrick Melrose, who was distracting the waitress by getting her telephone number, Fleur had been able to mix her own drink, a glass full of gin with a splash of tonic, rather than the other way round. What did it matter? Mere alcohol could not degrade her luminous awareness. After taking a gulp from her lipstick-smudged tumbler, she walked up to Nicholas Pratt, determined to help him understand himself.
‘Have you had mental-health problems?’ she asked Nicholas, fixing him with an intrepid stare.
‘Have we met?’ said Nicholas, gazing icily at the stranger who stood in his path.
‘I only ask because I have a feeling for these things,’ Fleur went on.
Nicholas hesitated between the impulse to utterly destroy this batty old woman in a moth-eaten sweater, and the temptation to boast about his robust mental health.
‘Well, have you?’ insisted Fleur.
Nicholas raised his walking stick briefly, as if about to nudge Fleur aside, only to replant it more firmly in the carpet and lean into its full support. He inhaled the frosty, invigorating air of contempt flooding in from the window smashed by Fleur’s impertinent question; contempt that always made him, though he said it himself, even more articulate than usual.
‘No, I have not had “mental-health problems”,’ he thundered. ‘Even in this degenerate age of confession and complaint we have not managed to turn reality entirely on its head. When the vocabulary of Freudian mumbo-jumbo is emptied onto every conversation, like vinegar onto a newspaper full of sodden chips, some of us choose not to tuck in.’ Nicholas craned his head forward as he spat out the homely phrase.