Anne went into the kitchen, switched on the kettle, and sprinkled some tea leaves into the Japanese teapot with the wobbly overarching rattan handle.
The doorbell interrupted her and she hurried out of the kitchen to open the front door. Patrick was standing with his back to her in a long black overcoat.
‘Hello, Patrick,’ she said.
‘Hello,’ he mumbled, trying to squeeze past her. But she took him by the shoulders and embraced him warmly.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.
Patrick would not yield to this embrace, but slid away like a wrestler breaking an opponent’s grip.
‘I’m sorry too,’ he said, bowing slightly. ‘Being late is a bore, but arriving early is unforgivable. Punctuality is one of the smaller vices I’ve inherited from my father; it means I’ll never really be chic.’ He paced up and down the drawing room with his hands in his overcoat pockets. ‘Unlike this apartment,’ he sneered. ‘Who was lucky enough to swap this place for your nice house in London?’
‘Victor’s opposite number at Columbia, Jim Wilson.’
‘God, imagine having an opposite number instead of always being one’s own opposite number,’ said Patrick.
‘Do you want some tea?’ asked Anne with a sympathetic sigh.
‘Hum,’ said Patrick. ‘I wonder if I could have a real drink as well? For me it’s already nine in the evening.’
‘For you it’s always nine in the evening,’ said Anne. ‘What do you want? I’ll fix it for you.’
‘No, I’ll do it,’ he said, ‘you won’t make it strong enough.’
‘OK,’ said Anne, turning towards the kitchen, ‘the drinks are on the Mexican millstone.’
The millstone was engraved with feathered warriors, but it was the bottle of Wild Turkey which commanded Patrick’s attention. He poured some into a tall glass and knocked back another Quaalude with the first gulp, refilling the glass immediately. After seeing his father’s corpse, he had gone to the Forty-fourth Street branch of the Morgan Guaranty Bank and collected three thousand dollars in cash which now bulged inside an orange-brown envelope in his pocket.
He checked the pills again (lower right pocket) and then the envelope (inside left) and then the credit cards (outer left). This nervous action, which he sometimes performed every few minutes, was like a man crossing himself before an altar – the Drugs; the Cash; and the Holy Ghost of Credit.
He had already taken a second Quaalude after the visit to the bank, but he still felt groundless and desperate and overwrought. Perhaps a third one was overdoing it, but overdoing it was his occupation.
‘Does this happen to you?’ asked Patrick, striding into the kitchen with renewed energy. ‘You see a millstone, and the words “round my neck” ring up like the price on an old cash register. Isn’t it humiliating,’ he said, taking some ice cubes, ‘God, I love these ice machines, they’re the best thing about America so far – humiliating that one’s thoughts have all been prepared in advance by these idiotic mechanisms?’
‘The idiotic ones aren’t good,’ Anne agreed, ‘but there’s no need for the cash register to come up with something cheap.’
‘If your mind works like a cash register, anything you come up with is bound to be cheap.’
‘You obviously don’t shop at Le Vrai Pâtisserie,’ said Ann, carrying the cakes and tea into the drawing room.
‘If we can’t control our conscious responses, what chance do we have against the influences we haven’t recognized?’
‘None at all,’ said Anne cheerfully, handing him a cup of tea.
Patrick let loose a curt laugh. He felt detached from what he had been saying. Perhaps the Quaaludes were beginning to make a difference.
‘Do you want a cake?’ said Anne. ‘I bought them to remind us of Lacoste. They’re as French as … as French letters.’
‘That French,’ gasped Patrick, taking one of the millefeuilles out of politeness. As he picked it up, the cake oozed cream from its flanks, like pus dribbling from a wound. Christ, he thought, this cake is completely out of control.
‘It’s alive!’ he said out loud, squeezing the millefeuille rather too hard. Cream spurted out and dropped on to the elaborate brass surface of the Moroccan table. His fingers were sticky with icing. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he mumbled, putting the cake down.
Anne handed him a napkin. She noticed that Patrick was becoming increasingly clumsy and slurred. Before he had arrived she was dreading the inevitable conversation about his father; now she was worried that it might not take place.
‘Have you been to see your father yet?’ she asked outright.
‘I did see him,’ said Patrick without hesitation. ‘I thought he was at his best in a coffin – so much less difficult than usual.’ He grinned at her disarmingly.
Anne smiled at him faintly, but Patrick needed no encouragement.
‘When I was young,’ he said, ‘my father used to take us to restaurants. I say “restaurants” in the plural, because we never stormed in and out of less than three. Either the menu took too long to arrive, or a waiter struck my father as intolerably stupid, or the wine list disappointed him. I remember he once held a bottle of red wine upside down while the contents gurgled out onto the carpet. “How dare you bring me this filth?” he shouted. The waiter was so frightened that instead of throwing him out, he brought more wine.’
‘So you liked being with him in a place he didn’t complain about.’
‘Exactly,’ said Patrick. ‘I couldn’t believe my luck, and for a while I expected him to sit up in his coffin, like a vampire at sunset, and say, “The service here is intolerable.” Then we would have had to go to three or four other funeral parlours. Mind you, the service was intolerable. They sent me to the wrong corpse.’
‘The wrong corpse!’ exclaimed Anne.
‘Yes, I wound up at a jaunty Jewish cocktail party given for a Mr Hermann Newton. I wish I could have stayed; they seemed to be having such fun…’
‘What an appalling story,’ said Anne, lighting a cigarette. ‘I’ll bet they give courses in Bereavement Counselling.’
‘Of course,’ said Patrick, letting out another quick hollow laugh and sinking back into his armchair. He could definitely feel the influence of the Quaaludes now. The alcohol had brought out the best in them, like the sun coaxing open the petals of a flower, he reflected tenderly.
‘I’m sorry?’ he said. He had not heard Anne’s last question.
‘Is he being cremated?’ she repeated.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Patrick. ‘I gather that when people are cremated one never really gets their ashes, just some communal rakings from the bottom of the oven. As you can imagine, I regard that as good news. Ideally, all the ashes would belong to somebody else, but we don’t live in a perfect world.’
Anne had given up wondering whether he was sorry about his father’s death, and had started wishing he was a little sorrier. His venomous remarks, although they could not affect David, made Patrick look so ill he might have been waiting to die from a snakebite.
Patrick closed his eyes slowly and, after a very long time, slowly opened them again. The whole operation took about half an hour. Another half an hour elapsed while he licked his dry and fascinatingly sore lips. He was really getting something off that last Quaalude. His blood was hissing like a television screen after closedown. His hands were like dumbbells, like dumbbells in his hands. Everything folding inward and growing heavier.
‘Hello there!’ Anne called.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Patrick, leaning forward with what he imagined was a charming smile. ‘I’m awfully tired.’