The press had been quick to pick up the family connection and that was not the kind of publicity her niece craved. Eleanor’s sister and brother-in-law, who was the governor’s right-hand man, had been more restrained, respecting her grief, or rather observing the decencies. They hadn’t said a word about Griff – but Eleanor was sure they shared their daughter’s views on the subject.
Eleanor felt a sudden urge to rise to her feet and speak out – recite aloud – make the dining car ring with the sound of her voice – command everybody’s attention with her tragic tale. She fought the urge down. Her tale would be quite wasted. The common herd would think her unbalanced. Pity, really, because she had such a good voice. It was of the ‘cultured’ American variety – without a trace of a nasal twang. She sounded like the late British actress Margaret Leighton, she always imagined. In Paris, on several occasions, she had been taken for an Englishwoman of irreproachable birth and breeding. Well, she cut a most elegant and unusual figure. She had been aware of people actually staring at her, simple souls – in admiration, awe and wonder, she had no doubt – and she had brought joy into their drab lives by giving them the little see-saw of a royal wave. (The hand going up and down, up and down, the wrist held rigid.)
‘All my relatives disapproved of Griff and his lifestyle,’ Eleanor said with a sigh. Fury came over her in waves as she thought of her relatives’ low, narrow, bestial minds. ‘They wouldn’t have condemned him if they’d had the slightest understanding of the world and its tricks.’
Her relatives had considered Griff an embarrassment – no, an abomination. Not the kind of person you’d care to acknowledge as cousin or nephew. Her relatives would rather Griff had never existed at all… None of them came to the funeral. Nor did Griff’s father for that matter. Eleanor had no idea where her former husband was. Perhaps he was abroad – he might be dead – or in jail. Lyndon had left her when Griff was seven. That, her shrink had told her, was when the trouble started. Absentee fathers had a lot to answer for.
It was nonsense to suggest that she was in any way to blame for the way Griff had ‘turned out’… A mean, unpleasant creature, Alma. Her name should have been ‘Alice’ – then it would have rhymed with ‘malice’… Well, current rumour had it that her marriage wasn’t going at all satisfactorily – it was even suggested that Alma had been driving her husband to drink! Eleanor wasn’t the type to gloat, but she couldn’t help a little smile at the thought.
A terrible parent indeed! Eleanor hadn’t been a terrible parent. Quite the reverse. She had been a marvellous mother. She and Griff had got on extremely well. No, they had got on stupendously. Griff had been her companion, her confidant, her playmate. Why, they had adored each other!
Eleanor told Griff things she wouldn’t have dreamt of telling anyone else. She never bought a dress or a hat without asking his opinion first. (How many mothers did that?) She introduced Griff to great literature – to the very best of popular fiction as well. She made life for both of them exclusive and amusing. She took him to the Hamptons and Palm Beach for the vacations, and to Broad-way every other week – together they had seen Oedipus Rex and Rent, The Boyfriend and Dorothy After Kansas. She let him read her copies of Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar. They had pillow fights to the accompaniment of Leroy Anderson tunes. Eleanor had the most fantastical costumes ordered for their dressing-up sessions. They had played games unknown anywhere else on the planet Earth! They had applied the principle of those bizarre multiple-choice teenage books (‘If you want to venture into the Lair of the Giant Dragonfly, go to page 23’) to the works of Proust and had come up with entries like, ‘If you wish to slip into bed with Marcel, go to page 6. If, however, you want to attend the Germantes’ dinner party, go at once to page
546.’
Eleanor remembered another rather complicated game, which they had called ‘Abominating Abraxas’, Abraxas being an unpredictable pagan deity with a chanticleer’s head and a serpent’s tail. Griff had done the most wonderfully scary drawing of Abraxas. The interesting – the really remarkable – thing was that Abraxas had since acquired a life outside the game – he had managed to break through its confines somehow – Eleanor kept seeing him!
Why was the waiter looking at her again? What did he want? Hadn’t his mother taught him it was extremely rude to stare at strangers? Eleanor stuck out her tongue at him, then looked out of the window once more.
She had been so happy that day… She had spent three hours shopping at Bloomingdale’s, had coffee and the most delicious chocolate cheesecake, then went for a stroll in Central Park. She fed the ducks, then sat on a bench, basking in the warm sunshine. It was the first day of spring. She had been full of hope. She had decided to look Griff up and try to reach some kind of reconciliation.
They hadn’t been in touch for a couple of months, there had been an estrangement of sorts, the silliest of spats, really. She thought it was ridiculous that they should have fallen out and still be at loggerheads over a remark she had made concerning one of his friends. Griff was morbidly sensitive about his friends, but then he was sensitive about most things. She had bought him two sugared doughnuts, which she carried in a paper bag by way of a peace offering. (Griff adored doughnuts.)
Griff had a flat on the tenth floor of an art deco building in the fashionable district of West Chelsea. Eleanor believed she was humming a tune – ‘Top of the World’? – as she let herself in with the key Griff had given her while they had still been on good terms. She stood in the hall, admiring the wonderful matt red walls painted with Muslim-style arches supported by slender columns of dull gold – Griff had always had such good taste. She called out Griff’s name. Her hands felt a bit sticky, so she went to the bathroom to wash them -
‘Sticky,’ Eleanor said. ‘It’s so hard to keep the line between past and present.’
The next moment she had to bite her lip to stop herself from crying out. A flashback – she’d had a flashback! She had seen it all again. The redness. The stickiness. You mustn’t do it, the doctor had told her.
‘It is at that point that my life stops and the nightmare takes over,’ Eleanor said, her voice soft and hushed as if she were talking in church. ‘I haven’t been the same since.’
The face that stared back at her from the mirror these days was a face she no longer recognized as her own. (She had never been a great beauty, but she had been attractive in an unconventional kind of way. Griff always said she had the face of an expensive cat.) Her skin was not too lined, but it was shockingly sallow and it had a ‘battered’ appearance. The despoiling power of grief! Eleanor spent ages making herself up and the effect was frequently disconcerting. Her eyes had lost their lustre; they looked empty and dull. Her mind kept getting into binds. She blamed the medication she had been prescribed for that – anti-depressants, stimulants, sleeping pills, painkillers, energy-boosters and she didn’t know what else. She was far from sure they did her any good but she continued taking them in bucketfuls. Sans souci, but I need to get my mouth round the Xanax – it helps me with my panics -
Covering her face with her hands, Eleanor began to rock backward and forward. She shook her head and moaned. She expected tears to start flowing from her eyes in unstoppable streams, but that didn’t happen. She had run out of tears. She had reached the most dreadful part of her letter – she knew what was coming and she dreaded it – she wanted to cut the scene out, the way scenes that were considered too shocking were edited out of films – but of course she couldn’t.