Then, more than I ever had at Patrick’s funeral or living in his house, I felt I had lost Patrick, and with him a chunk of my own past. It was strange that only a few months earlier my reaction to the news of his death had been: Patrick who? But in answering, or trying to answer, that question, I had indirectly found a new enthusiasm for my own life. I felt it was an insight that depended on understanding who Patrick had been, how unhappy he had been, and how close I had come to turning into him. That recognition was a relief. I felt I understood that I had to live and trust people, not because people were innately trustworthy, but because the alternative was to turn into Patrick.
My father had said he lacked ambition. It was a characteristically obtuse observation. I didn’t believe it. I thought Patrick had been wounded in some way, and had surrendered to despair because he lacked the faith that anyone could help him out of it. It was how I felt about myself. Discovering that he’d saved my letters seemed to confirm our kinship.
But my reaction to his story, I realised, was a howl of incomprehension. Where did it come from, this violence? This violence that he tried so hard to legitimise.
If Patrick wasn’t who I thought he was, my optimism was founded on deceit. The empathy I felt with him was wishful thinking. And just when I should have been happy and excited about leaving, I felt as though the dark wing of some nightmare bird had come between me and the sun.
The reason I didn’t give up, then, and wash my hands of the whole business, was that I thought the truth might be more complicated. It was characteristic of me, and Patrick — and Mycroft — to know everything in advance. In my life, I have been trying to commemorate Patrick by becoming more unlike him. It’s an ongoing and never wholly successful undertaking, but a key part of it is the effort to renounce damaging certainties, to try to know a little less every day.
TWENTY-SIX
MRS DIAZ WAS VAST, like a tiny planet — Mercury, maybe. She was standing on a chair holding a small green watering can up to a tier of hanging baskets. The fact that she was raised up into the atmosphere of the room — a conservatory that had obviously been added to the house — made her seem even rounder and bigger. She cut short the watering when she saw me come in. After stepping down with a nimbleness that belied her size, she sank into a huge wicker chair. She was squeezed into the seat like a coconut at a coconut shy.
‘Don’t tell my husband you saw me up there,’ she said, ‘but if I have to wait for him to water them, they’ll be nothing but potpourri!’
She fanned her face with her hand. ‘I can’t bear this weather. There’s nowhere for the heat to go.’ She was very pale, except for her cheeks, where the red was unhealthily intense, as though they had been scrubbed too hard. Her light brown hair was very fine, like a toddler’s, and had been cut short.
By way of small talk I mentioned that the bookshelf in her living room included two copies of Peanut Gatherers.
‘Your uncle gave me one of those. I forget which.’ She had the island accent, a pleasant low voice, and a fat woman’s throaty chuckle. ‘I was a big fan.’
‘Of him, or the work?’
‘Both. I used to run an auction house in Westwich — this is before I met Tony. Your uncle would be there every week. We had the auctions on Wednesdays. That’s how I got to know him. His taste was very … eclectic.’ She coughed. ‘Excuse me. Could you slide that stool over?’
She propped her feet up on to the stool with audible relief. ‘I used to put bids in myself for certain things, so I’d notice who bought them. Books mainly, and cup-plates. We liked some of the same stuff.’
It turned out that Mr Diaz — or Tony, as she Anglicised him — was her second husband. Her first husband had been older, a hard-drinking Ionian, who had run off, leaving her to bring up three kids. She began telling me how she had scratched a living from a restaurant she opened on the island. She sold it for a profit with which she bought a bigger restaurant, made a success of that, and then bought the auction house. It was an impressive story: she couldn’t resist a digression on the hardships they’d all undergone along the way: eating scrapple, wearing homemade clothes — and a long account of her fifteen-year-old son’s stepping in as auctioneer on the opening night when the real one showed up drunk. After twenty minutes I was starting to wonder how I could bring the conversation around to the Fernshaws without seeming rude. But the good thing about people who talk a lot is that sooner or later they touch on everything.
‘My first husband was from an old island family like the Fernshaws. He was a Cullity. They all came from up-island. Do you know what that means?’
I said I didn’t.
‘That’s the west of the island — it’s from sailing. Because it’s “up” in terms of longitude. Harriet Fernshaw was from up-island, too. Now she was a Tregeser and a lot of them were deaf. I guess they carried the gene for it. Here, pass me that.’
It was a high-school yearbook from 1970 bound in rubbery dark blue plastic. A mortarboard and a quill pen were raised in relief on the cover.
‘My brother’s yearbook,’ she said. ‘I loaned it to your uncle. He got interested in the Fernshaws, too.’
I felt a momentary excitement at the thought that my uncle had passed this way: it was like coming across his footprint in a forest. ‘What did you tell him?’ I asked her. She was flipping through the glossy pages of the yearbook.
‘I asked him which Fernshaw he wanted to know about.’
‘How many are there?’
‘Funnily enough, that’s what he said.’ She paused. ‘Here we are. Dick Fernshaw.’
He was square-jawed, with a smart crew cut. Not much like Nathan, maybe a little like Terry in the eyes.
‘Looks like the all-American boy, doesn’t he? He was a nasty piece of work, though. My brother once saw him stuffing a kid into a gym locker. You know—’ She mimed it with uncharacteristic ferocity. It sent her fine hair flying around her head. ‘He stopped — at least this is how my brother tells it — he stopped and said: “You don’t see anything, do you?” My brother just nodded and got the hell out of there. He was a bad kid. Grew up to be a bad man. No one was sorry to see you go.’ This last sentence she said to the photograph itself. ‘He’s the father of Harriet’s eldest.’
‘He was lost at sea?’
‘Him? Oh no, he was killed in Vietnam. Brave soldier too, by all accounts.’
‘Killed in Vietnam?’ I was confused. ‘I’ve had it from two or three different people that Mrs Fernshaw lost her husband in an accident at sea.’
‘That’s right.’ She took the book from me and turned the page. There was no photo here, just an entry and a list of the school associations of which Zachary Fernshaw had been a member.
‘There’s no photo,’ I said.
‘He didn’t turn up for it, I guess. A few people didn’t. It was a way of saying screw you to the school authorities. Zac wouldn’t have meant it like that. He was a good kid. I guess he was ill or something. This one photo does for the two of them.’ She turned back to the previous page. ‘Their mother couldn’t tell them apart.’
‘Twins?’
‘Yup. Zac was the elder by a couple of hours. A nicer guy you could never hope to meet anywhere. He was an angel.’
The story Mrs Diaz then told me was like all stories — full of what Patrick called ‘pavanes and divagations’. I couldn’t remember her every digression, even if I wanted to, or the way my questions prompted her to clarify and elaborate her original narrative. I’m sure there are more artful ways of relating what she said — my uncle’s story was, in a very lateral way, one of them — but I’m more comfortable with a digest of the facts.