Aunt Judith was sniffling into a handkerchief. I was shocked how grey and old the four surviving siblings looked — even from the back.
‘O teach us to number our days,’ my father went on, ‘that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.’
*
The reception was held at Patrick’s house, which meant catching the ferry to Ionia after the service. A few people didn’t have time to make the extra trip. Patrick’s mother, my nonagenarian grandmother, wasn’t considered strong enough to go. As I kissed her cheek and said goodbye, I could hear my voice reverberating tinnily through the amplifier in her hearing aid.
Ionia sits in the Atlantic a few miles off the coast of Massachusetts. It’s less than an hour from the mainland, but in the middle of the sound the sea floor drops off sharply. The water there is as blue-black as open ocean, and for a couple of minutes you are out of sight of either shore.
I went up to the top deck to get away from the funeral party. Sitting together in their dark clothes on the orange plastic seats of the ferry, they looked like a group of missionaries.
The breeze from the island carried the scent of pine trees. A small boy clattered up the stairs hugging a box of Crackerjack popcorn, eager for a first glimpse of land. And suddenly, Ionia’s low hump had broken the straight line of the horizon. From the lee of the shore, a gust of wind blew through me like the draught from an open window.
We reached Patrick’s house in taxis from Westwich. A catering company had laid out tables on the lawn by the summer kitchen and were serving a sickly seafood chowder.
The house stood alone at the top of a slope that rolled down to a tidal marsh and the sand dunes beyond it. It was built of wood, with white sides and jet-black shutters. Inside, it smelled of timber and books and wax polish. I was startled by familiar details — the stone in the library with the woman’s face painted on it in coloured ink; the narwhal’s tusk; the sky-blue velvet love seat in the sitting room; an idealised self-portrait of Patrick like a languid Byron, with high cheekbones and lots of hair. Seeing them again I felt the exhilaration of the lucid dreamer: as though by remembering them I had brought them into existence.
I felt a kind of reverence for the place — it was full of relics, after all. The house was Patrick’s life’s work. In the absence of a family, it was all he had to project himself into the future. It was the sum total of his life’s choices. And what choices!
Patrick had hoarded all sorts of junk: records, books, ice-cream scoops, mechanical banks, marbles, playing cards. But among the worthless detritus that had accumulated over decades were some treasures. For every twenty battered old cookery books, there might be a first edition of Vile Bodies; for every fifty records by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, you would find an original Sun pressing of Elvis Presley; for every gimcrack scrimshaw, a netsuke, or a Victorian doll. And the confusion, the clutter, the mixture of art and trash reflected him exactly. The house was Patrick.
I went upstairs and found my cousin Tricia rummaging through one of the upstairs cupboards. I wanted to see what was in there too, but I had a vision of Patrick bristling with anger: he was intensely private, and the sight of Tricia digging through his possessions, and almost sweating with excitement, would have undoubtedly hastened the myocardial infarction that killed him. She pounced on an antique shawl and wrapped herself in it. She said she wanted it to remember him by; but there was a fuck-you in her voice. It occurred to me that Patrick’s family had all been slightly afraid of him. He had consistently excluded and offended them. If any one of us had turned up while Patrick was alive, he would probably have hidden in one of the upstairs rooms and not bothered coming down. And people had grown fearful of him. By returning to the house, by gawping at it like tourists, by taking his things — and by the end of the day, everyone had something — his family were saying: You don’t scare us any more. But it was a boast: they were slightly jumpy — a group of children striking poses by a dead tiger.
Patrick’s study took up one end of the top floor of the house. The ceiling was open to the eaves and a library ladder on casters led up to a gallery where Patrick kept his reference volumes. I pulled out books in no particular order: something about knots, one on seamanship, another on phrenology, an Esperanto grammar.
A forbidding wall of black filing cabinets lined one side of the lower room — these held his record collection. Beside them, a hatch in the floor concealed a narrow set of stairs down to the kitchen.
I sat on Patrick’s leather swivel chair and admired the view.
The room’s only windows faced north. A ribbon of sea was visible glittering beyond the dark band of trees. Through a telescope, the surface of the ocean seemed to snap and ripple like a flag in the wind. Direct sunlight rarely entered the room. It was cool and dim, like a cavern, or a wine cellar, and haunted with the smell of books and wood. A potbellied stove warmed the study in winter.
Snatches of conversation drifted up from the gathering beneath the window.
What I was hoping to find was a fountain pen. I had a picture of myself back in London, keeping a diary and using a relic of Patrick’s life to record the minutiae of mine, but the only objects on top of the desk were a row of green box files and a human skull with pencils in its noseholes.
The leather chair creaked and yawed back as I leaned over to open the drawers. I looked in a couple — with the prickling selfconsciousness of a man walking knowingly into the ladies’ toilets. They held only stationery and bundled letters.
I slipped a box of Dixon Ticonderogas into my jacket pocket and almost as an afterthought added two small notebooks — nice ones, with creamy pages and all-weather covers. The pencils rattled in my pocket as I went downstairs: a faint noise like the misgivings of my feeble conscience.
I left the house to get away from the funeral party milling around the garden and walked down the wooden boardwalk over the sand dunes towards the beach. The wind was blowing hard. The tips of the dune grass had bent over and inscribed hieroglyphs in the sand around them. I stepped onto the beach and sank in up to my ankles, so I took off my shoes and socks and walked down to the water barefoot. The sea was as green and sweet as peppermint mouthwash — and so cold it made the bones in my feet ache. I had the whole beach to myself — not unusual there even in summer. The only person I could see was a man throwing a Frisbee for his dog to retrieve from the tiny waves which burbled up the beach, and he was half a mile away, beyond the jetty of black rocks that marked the end of Patrick’s patch of sand dunes. Much farther out, a fisherman in a small boat with an outboard motor was checking lobster pots. For all the strangeness of his life and death, Patrick really hadn’t had it too bad here, I was thinking.
But my father seemed to think otherwise. I could hear his voice booming over the garden as I walked back up to the house.
‘I would never use the word “failure” of anyone,’ he was saying. ‘I don’t consider that to apply to him at all. He lacked purpose. You know what he lacked? You really want to know what he lacked? He lacked hunger.’
‘Maybe you’re right,’ said Judith. ‘It just makes me so sad to think of him here on his own. I’d get so lonesome. Do you think we let him down?’
‘None of us let him down,’ my father said.
I had my shoes in my hand. The spiky lawn was prickling the soles of my bare feet. ‘Post-mortem?’ I said, cheerily.
A wary look came over my father’s face, but he said nothing.
I caught the ferry back to the mainland that evening. I almost regretted leaving when I looked behind us and saw the lights of the harbour being eclipsed by the black edge of the horizon. I felt like I was saying goodbye to it for ever. I decided then that that was the reason I had come. That had been the meaning of my climacteric. The last person in my family that meant anything to me had died. There was no one left for me in this country of a quarter of a billion people. I was heading back to my poky flat on my own draughty island and I would be staying there until my three-score years and ten were up. So long, New World.