At Last: A Novel

by Edward St. Aubyn

  His credentials as a murderer were well established in Eleanor’s imagination. Late at night, when he was down to one listener, amongst the empty bottles and crushed cigars, David was fond of telling the story of an Indian pig-sticking hunt he had been on in the late nineteen-twenties. He was thrilled by the danger of galloping through the high grass with a lance, chasing a wild boar whose tusks could ruin a horse’s legs, throw a rider to the ground and gore him to death. Impaling one of these fast, tough pigs was also a terrific pleasure, more involving than a long-distance kill. The only blemish on the expedition was that one of the party was bitten by a wild dog and developed the symptoms of rabies. Three days from the nearest hospital, it was already too late to help, and so the hunters decided to truss up their foaming and thrashing friend in one of the thick nets originally intended for transporting the bodies of the dead pigs, and to hoist him off the ground, tying the corners of the net to the branches of a big jacaranda tree. It was challenging, even for these hard men, to enjoy the sense of deep relaxation that follows a day of invigorating sport with this parcel of hydrophobic anguish dangling from a nearby tree. The row of lanterns down the dinner table, the quiet gleam of silver, the well-trained servants, the triumph of imposing civilization on the wild vastness of the Indian night, seemed to have been thrown into question. David could only just make out, against a background of screams, the splendid tale of Archie Montcrieff driving a pony and trap into the Viceroy’s ballroom. Archie had worn an improvised toga and shouted obscenities in ‘an outlandish kind of Cockney Latin’, while the pony manured the dance floor. If his father hadn’t been such a friend of the Viceroy’s he might have had to resign his commission, but as it was, the viceroy admitted, privately of course, that Archie had raised his spirits during ‘another damned dull dance’.

  When the story was finished, David rose from the table muttering, ‘This noise is intolerable,’ and went into his tent to fetch his pistol. He walked over to the rabies victim and shot him in the head. Returning to the dumbfounded table, he sat down with a ‘feeling of absolute calm’ and said, ‘Much the kindest thing to do.’ Gradually, the word spread around the table: much the kindest thing to do. Rich and powerful men, some of them quite high up in government, and one of them a judge, couldn’t help agreeing with him. With the silencing of the screams and a few pints of whisky and soda, it became the general view by the end of the evening that David had done something exceptionally courageous. David would almost smile as he described how he had brought everyone at the table round, and then in a fit of piety, he would sometimes finish by saying that although at the time he had not yet set eyes on a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, he really thought of that pistol shot as the beginning of his ‘love affair with medicine’.

  Eleanor felt obliged to hand over the baby to him in the kitchen in Cornwall. The baby screamed and screamed. Eleanor thought there must be dogs whimpering in their kennels a hundred miles away, the screams were so loud and high. All the women huddled together crying and begging David to stop and to be careful and to give the baby some local anaesthetic. They knew this was no operation, it was an attack by a furious old man on his son’s genitals; but like the chorus in a play, they could only comment and wail, without being able to alter the action.

  ‘I wanted to say, “You’ve already killed Georgina and now you want to kill Patrick,”’ Eleanor told Mary, to show how bold she would have been if she had said anything at all. ‘I wanted to call the police!’

  Well, why didn’t you? was all that Mary could think, but she said nothing about Eleanor saying nothing; she just nodded and went on being a good listener.

  ‘It was like…’ said Eleanor, ‘it was like that Goya painting of Saturn devouring his son.’ Brought up surrounded by great paintings, Eleanor had experienced a late-adolescent crush on the History of Art, rudely guillotined by her disinheritance, and replaced by a proclivity for bright dollops of optimistic symbolism. Nevertheless, she could still remember, when she was twenty, driving through Spain in her first car, and being shocked, on a visit to the Prado, by the black vision of those late Goyas.

  Mary was struck by the comparison, because it was unusual for Eleanor to make that sort of connection, and also because she knew the painting well, and could easily visualize the gaping mouth, the staring eyes and the ragged white hair of the old god of melancholy, mad with jealousy and the fear of usurpation, as he fed on the bleeding corpse of his decapitated child. Watching Eleanor plead for exoneration made Mary realize that her mother-in-law could never have protected anyone else when she was so entranced by her own vulnerability, so desperate to be saved. Later in her marriage, Eleanor did manage to get police protection for herself. It was in Saint-Nazaire, just after she learned about her mother’s death and, not yet knowing the content of the will, was expecting to get control of a world-class fortune. She had to fly to Rome later that morning for the funeral, and David sat opposite her at the breakfast table, brooding about the possible consequences of his wife’s increased independence.

  ‘You’re looking forward to getting your hands on all that lovely money,’ he said, walking round to her side of the table. She got up, sensing danger. ‘But you’re not going to,’ he added, grabbing her and pressing his thumbs expertly into her throat, ‘because I’m going to kill you.’

  Almost unconscious, she had managed to knee him in the balls with all her remaining strength. In the reflex of pain, he let go long enough for her to slide across the table and bolt out of the house. He pursued her for a while, but the twenty-three-year age difference took its toll on his tired body and she escaped into the woods. Convinced that he would follow by car, she struggled through the undergrowth to the local police station, and arrived scratched, bleeding and in tears. The two gendarmes who drove her back to the house stood guard over a proud and sulky David while she packed her bags for Rome. She left with relief, but without Patrick, who stayed behind with only the flimsy protection of yet another terrified nanny – they lasted, on average, about six weeks. Eleanor might have been out of reach, but once he had given the nanny a munificent day out, and sent Yvette home, David had the consolation of torturing his son without any interference from the gendarmerie.

  In the end, Eleanor’s betrayal of the maternal instinct that ruled Mary’s own life formed an absolute barrier to the liking she could feel for her. She could remember her own sons at three weeks old: their hot silky heads burrowing their way back into the shelter of her body to soften the shock of being born. The thought of handing them over, before their skin could bear the roughness of wool, to be hacked at with knives by a cruel and sinister man required a level of treachery that blinded her imagination.

  No doubt David had searched hard among the foolish and the meek to find a woman who could put up with his special tastes, but once his depravity was on full display, how could Eleanor escape the charge of colluding with a sadist and a paedophile? She had invited children from other families to spend their holidays in the South of France and, like Patrick, they had been raped and inducted into an underworld of shame and secrecy, backed by convincing threats of punishment and death. Just before her first stroke, Eleanor received a letter from one of those children, saying that after a lifetime of insomnia, self-harm, frigidity, promiscuity, perpetual anxiety and suicide attempts, she had started to lead a more normal life, thanks to seven years of therapy, and had finally been able to forgive Eleanor for not protecting her during the summer she stayed with the Melroses. When she showed the letter to Mary, Eleanor dwelt on the injustice of being made to feel guilty about a category of behaviour she had not even known existed, although it was going on in the bedroom next to hers.

  And yet how ignorant could she really have been? The year before the arrival of the letter that so dismayed Eleanor, Patrick had received a letter from Sophie, an old au pair, who had heroically stayed with the Melroses for more than two years, more than twenty times the average endurance shown by the parade of incredulous young foreign women who pass
ed through the house. In her letter, Sophie confessed to decades of guilt about the time she had spent looking after Patrick. She used to hear screams down the corridor of the house in Lacoste, and she knew that Patrick was being tormented, not merely punished or frustrated, but she was only nineteen at the time and she hesitated to intervene. She also confessed that she was terrified of David and, despite being genuinely fond of Patrick and feeling some pity for Eleanor, longed to get away from his grotesque family.

  If Sophie knew that something was terribly wrong, how could Eleanor not have known? It was common enough to ignore what was seemingly impossible to ignore, but Eleanor stuck to her blindness with uncommon tenacity. Through all her programmes of self-discovery and shamanic healing, she avoided acknowledging her passion for avoidance. If she had ever discovered her real ‘power animals’, Mary suspected they would have been the Three Monkeys: See no Evil, Hear no Evil, Speak no Evil. Mary also suspected that these grim vigilantes had been killed off by one of her strokes, flooding her all at once with the fragments of knowledge that she had kept sealed off from each other, like the cells of a secret organization. In a parody of wholeness, the fragments converged when it was too late to make them cohere.

  Eleanor was entirely confined to the nursing home for the last two years of her life, rarely leaving her bed. For the first year, Mary went on assuming that at least one of the threads holding Eleanor to her tormented existence was concern for her family, and she continued to reassure her that they were well. Later, she began to see that what really trapped Eleanor was not the strength of her attachments, but rather their weakness: without anything substantial to ‘let go’ of, she was left with only the volatility of her guilt and confusion. Part of her was aching to die, but she could never find the time; there was no gap between the proliferating anxieties; the desire to die collided instantly with the dread of dying, which in turn gave birth to a renewed desire.

  For the second year, Mary was largely silent. She went into the room and wished Eleanor well. What else was there to do?

  The last time she had seen her mother-in-law was two weeks ago. By then Eleanor had achieved a tranquillity indistinguishable from pure absence. Gaunt and drawn, her face seemed incapable of any deliberate change. Mary could remember Eleanor telling her, in one of those alienating confidential chats, that she knew exactly when she was going to die. The mysterious source of this information (Astrology? Channelling? A morbid guru? A drumming session? A prophetic dream?) was never unveiled, but the news was delivered with the slightly boastful serenity of pure fantasy. Mary felt that the certainty of death and the uncertainty of both its timing and its meaning were fundamental facts of life. Eleanor, on the other hand, knew exactly when she was going to die and that her death was not final. By the end, as far as Mary could tell, this conviction had deserted Eleanor, along with all the other features of her personality, as if a sandstorm had raged through her, ripping away every sign of comfort, and leaving a smooth and sterile landscape under a dry blank sky.

  Still, Eleanor had died on Easter Sunday, and Mary knew that nothing could have pleased her more. Or would have pleased her more, had she known. Perhaps she did know, even though her mind appeared to be fixed in a realm removed from anything as mundane as a calendar. Even then there was still no way of knowing whether that was the day she had been expecting to die.

  Mary adjusted her position on the uncomfortable crematorium bench. Where was a convincing and practical theory of consciousness when you really needed it? She glanced back a few rows at Erasmus, but he appeared to have fallen asleep. As she turned back to the coffin a few feet in front of her, Mary’s speculations collapsed abruptly. She found herself imagining, with a vividness she couldn’t sustain while it was still going on, how it had felt for Eleanor during those two last brutal years, having her individuality annihilated, faculty by faculty, memory by memory.

  Her eyes blurred with tears.

  ‘Are you all right?’ whispered Patrick, as he sat down next to her.

  ‘I was thinking about your mother,’ she said.

  ‘A highly suitable choice,’ Patrick murmured, in the voice of a sycophantic shopkeeper.

  For some reason Mary started to laugh uncontrollably, and Patrick started laughing too, and they both had to bite their lower lips and keep their shoulders from shaking too wildly.

  5

  Hoping to master his fit of grief-stricken laughter, Patrick breathed out slowly and concentrated on the dull tension of waiting to begin. The organ sighed, as if bored of searching for a decent tune, and then meandered on resignedly. He must pull himself together: he was here to mourn his mother’s death, a serious business.

  There were various obstructions in his way. For a long time the feeling of madness brought on by the loss of his French home had made it impossible to get over his resentment of Eleanor. Without Saint-Nazaire, a primitive part of him was deprived of the imaginary care that had kept him sane as a child. He was certainly attached to the beauty of the place, but much more deeply to a secret protection that he dare not renounce in case it left him utterly destroyed. The shifting faces formed by the cracks, stains and hollows shifting faces formed by the cracks, stains and hollows of the limestone mountain opposite the house used to keep him company. The line of pine trees along its ridge was like a column of soldiers coming to his rescue. There were hiding places where nobody had ever found him; and vine terraces to jump down, giving him the feeling he could fly when he had to flee. There was a dangerous well where he could drown rocks and clods of earth, without drowning himself. The most heroic connection of all was with the gecko that had taken custody of his soul in a moment of crisis and dashed out onto the roof, to safety and to exile. How could it ever find him again, if Patrick wasn’t there any more?

  On his last night in Saint-Nazaire there was a spectacular storm. Sheet lightning flickered behind ribbed banks of cloud, making the dark bowl of the valley tremble with light. At first, fat tropical raindrops dented the dusty ground, but soon enough, rivulets guttered down the steep paths, and little waterfalls flowed from step to step. Patrick wandered outside into the warm heavy rain, feeling mad. He knew that he had to end his magical contract with this landscape, but the electric air and the violent protest of the storm renewed the archaic mentality of a child, as if the same thick piano wires, hammered by thunder and pelting rain, ran through his body and the land. With water streaming down his face there was no need for tears, no need to scream with the sky cracking overhead. He stood in the drive, among the milky puddles and the murmur of new steams and the smell of the wet rosemary, until he sank to the ground, weighed down by what he was unable to give up, and sat motionless in the gravel and the mud. Forked lightning landed like antlers on the limestone mountain. In that sudden flash, he made out a shape on the ground between him and the wall that ran along the edge of the drive. Concentrating in the murky light, he saw that a toad had ventured out into the watery world beyond the laurel bushes, where Patrick imagined it had been waiting all summer for the rain, and was now resting gratefully on a bar of muddy ground between two puddles. They sat in front of each other, perfectly still.

  Patrick pictured the white corpses of the toads he used to see each spring, at the bottom of the stone pools. Around their spent bodies, hundreds of soft black tadpoles clung to the grey-green algae on the walls, or wriggled across the open pond, or overflowed into the runnels that carried the water from pool to pool, between the source and the stream in the crease of the valley. Some of the tadpoles slipped limply down the slope, others swam frantically against the current. Robert and Thomas spent hours each Easter holiday, removing the little dams that formed overnight, and when the covered part of the channel was blocked and the grass around the lower pond flooded, airlifting the stranded tadpoles in their cupped hands. Patrick could remember doing the same thing as a child, and the sense of giant compassion that he used to feel as he released them back into the safety of the pond through his flooding fingers.


  In those days there had been a chorus of frogs during the spring nights, and during the day, sitting on the lily pads in the crescent pond, bullfrogs blowing their insides out like bubble gum; but in the system of imaginary protection that the land used to allow him, it was the lucky tree frogs that really counted. If only he could touch one of them, everything would be all right. They were hard to find. The round suckers on the tips of their feet meant that they could hang anywhere in the tree, camouflaged by the bright green of a new leaf or an unripe fig. When he did see one of these tiny frogs, fixed to the smooth grey bark, its brilliant skin stretched over a sharp skeleton, it looked to him like pulsing jewellery. He would reach out his index finger and touch it lightly for good luck. It might have only happened once, but he had thought about it a thousand times.

  Remembering that charged and tentative gesture, he now looked with some scepticism at the warty head of the sodden toad in front of him. At the same time, he remembered his A-level Arden edition of King Lear with its footnote about the jewel in the head of the toad, the emblem of the treasure hidden in the midst of ugly, muddy, repulsive experience. One day he would live without superstition, but not yet. He reached out and touched the head of the toad. He felt some of the same awe he had felt as a child, but the resurgence of what he was about to lose gave the feeling a self-cancelling intensity. The mad fusion of mythologies created an excess of meaning that might at any moment flip into a world with no meaning at all. He drew away and, like someone returning to the familiar compromises of his city flat after a long exotic journey, recognized that he was a middle-aged man, sitting eccentrically in his muddy driveway in the middle of a thunderstorm, trying to communicate with a toad. He got up stiffly and slouched back to the house, feeling realistically miserable, but still kicking the puddles in defiance of his useless maturity.