Early the next morning we drove to Patrick’s. My father struggled with the ignition of the rented car as Vivian and I shivered on its cold vinyl seats. It had started to snow again – tiny flakes of it this time, like salt. By the time we got to Patrick’s house, the path he had cleared across the porch had been dusted over again. His house seemed to disappear into the sky behind it, camouflaged like the black and white of ermine.
My father banged on the door and flapped his arms to keep warm. ‘Cold, huh?’
Patrick appeared. The whole of his nose was swathed in white bandages. Much later, my father explained that he had had an operation to straighten a deviated septum. Along with the dark glasses, the bandages made him look like the Invisible Man. He was easily the most frightening person I’d ever seen in my life.
‘What’s that in your hair?’ he asked.
I said nothing. I was speechless with terror. Vivian was looking at me, his face blotchy white and pink from the cold, swathed in his drugstore hat and muffler.
Patrick bent down and produced a Reese’s peanut butter cup from the air behind my left ear. I burst into tears.
Patrick was mortified. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you. It was just a trick.’ He unwrapped the chocolate. ‘Look, it’s candy!’
‘It’s the bandage,’ said my father. ‘He’s frightened of it.’
Patrick touched it. ‘This? Does it look terrible?’
‘It’s not so bad,’ said my father. Something about my father’s deep voice and the way frozen vapour came out of his mouth made me think of smoke pouring from a censer in church.
Vivian quacked: ‘Your nose looks like a big white doorknob.’
My father took my hand and we followed them over the threshold, me grizzling slightly, not so much from fear as from the feeling that I had disgraced myself with my tears.
The house must have been very different then. There would have been much less in it. It seems a trite thing to observe, but Patrick only began collecting things in earnest when he’d given up on human beings. In those days, the eccentricities that eventually made the kitchen useless were so far from conquering it that Patrick was able to cook Christmas dinner for five. The fifth person was Patrick’s girlfriend Lydia. She was frail-looking with a bun of blond hair. She called him Paddy and cracked open walnuts with the heel of her clog.
Together she and Patrick had cut down a tree which they had decorated with ribbons, and candy canes, and Christmas biscuits that were as hard as plywood.
It was a subdued occasion. We ate much of the dinner in silence. I was too young to understand fully, but I think I sensed it was a reconciliation of some sort between Patrick and my father.
My father insisted on going for a walk on the beach after lunch before we opened our presents. Patrick and Lydia sat drinking whisky by the fire.
The sea was grey and foamy, churning up the beach. Even the sand dunes had a grey, damp look, like heaps of aggregate at a building site.
‘I don’t want you to be disappointed if you don’t like what Patrick gives you,’ my father explained. ‘He doesn’t understand small children very well.’
‘But why not, Dad? Why doesn’t he?’ said Vivian.
Something foul and fishy had been deposited by the sea high up on the beach and half covered with sand. We were poking at it with sticks.
‘I want you both to behave very well,’ my father said, ‘so that when you leave Patrick will think to himself: What nice children!, I think I’d like to have some of those myself.’
It was a sensible warning. Patrick gave Vivian and me Harvard sweatshirts that were about eight sizes too big. If I still had mine, I would still be waiting to grow into it. But I heeded my father’s words and said nothing. Vivian couldn’t conceal his disappointment. ‘It’s a wearing present,’ he said. ‘I hate wearing presents.’
‘I love mine,’ I said smugly. ‘Dad, Vivian said he doesn’t like his sweatshirt.’
My father had given Patrick a miner’s helmet with a Davey lamp attached to it. Patrick put it on and mugged at Lydia, mocking the gift.
‘Dad, Uncle Patrick doesn’t like the hat!’ Vivian was thrilled.
‘Give it back, then,’ said my father. ‘You asshole!’ He was smiling. It was the first time I had ever heard him swear. They pretended to wrestle over the hat.
‘Dad, you said —’
‘Come on, give it a rest, Damien,’ my father said. ‘Lighten up.’
I think my lip must have trembled. I was being a tiresome goody-goody, but I was too close to my last fit of tears for me to take the comment in good spirit, and Patrick could see this.
‘Damien’s right,’ he said. ‘A gentleman should never swear or fart.’
‘I stand corrected,’ my father said.
‘Look at the parrot!’ screeched Patrick’s parrot.
Later on, Patrick showed off his toys to us. The board games, some of which he had designed himself, were too grown-up to arouse our interest. But I was captivated by a clockwork train and somehow got it into my head that Patrick had given it to me. My father quickly disabused me of this idea. He pointed out that I didn’t have room in my suitcase. I said I would leave my clothes behind.
‘It’s Patrick’s train,’ my father insisted. ‘And it will remain Patrick’s train.’ Patrick was sheepishly silent. Something he had said had sparked off the whole scene.
I threw a tantrum and was exiled to the summer kitchen until it was time to leave.
The rental car wouldn’t start, so Patrick drove us back to Westwich in his car – a white Triumph convertible with an eight-track tape player and an exhaust loud enough to announce the Last Judgement. He played Latin American pipe music at the highest possible volume to compete with the borborygmus of the engine.
I don’t remember much else about the trip. I was mortified not to keep the train, but in its place I had the inkling of something else: the distinct feeling that I was Patrick’s favourite; a feeling that was as small and steady as a pilot light – a feeling that I had begun to recall since I got the news of his death.
ELEVEN
MR DIAZ, PATRICK’S LAWYER, stopped by at about eight o’clock. Seeing him, I almost did a double take – he was boss-eyed: exactly as Mr Ricketts was in Patrick’s fragmentary story. In every other way, however, he couldn’t have been more different from a desiccated imperial administrator. He was a courteous man of around forty with olive skin. His jet-black hair was greying at the temples. The distinctive long vowels of his Boston accent sat oddly, I thought, with his suavely Mediterranean appearance. He refused my offer of a cup of Postum with humour. ‘Promised my wife I wouldn’t touch that stuff. I’ll take a glass of water, though.’
He apologised again for the mix-up over the key. ‘I sent one of my paralegals,’ he said. ‘It was the first time she’d been out to the house.’
I told him it wasn’t his fault.
‘I brought you these,’ he said, handing me the keys to Patrick’s car. ‘We brought it back from the high school and disconnected the battery. You shouldn’t have a problem getting it started. If you do, try scraping out the inside of the leads.’
He sipped his water slowly and looked out over the lawn towards the ocean with his one good eye. ‘Nice spot. How long are you planning to stay out here?’
‘At least the summer, possibly longer.’ It was the answer I’d been giving for months, but after one night and breakfast in my new home, it seemed like foolishness. Practical and well dressed, Mr Diaz was a physical reproach to the vagueness of my plans. I missed all the familiar indignities of work and life in London.
‘Mind if I look around?’ said Mr Diaz.
‘By all means.’ I opened the door for him.
As any visitor would be, he was struck by the mechanical banks arrayed on the shelf around the wall of the kitchen. ‘So these are the famous banks.’
‘Famous?’
‘Your uncle itemised them in the inventory. He gave each one a name.’
; There must have been fifty of the little machines. Several were in dubious taste: there was a ginger-haired Irishman who snuffled coins off the snout of a pig; a dicky-bowed black waiter who swallowed his penny off his own pink palm and rolled his eyes gratefully.
‘I guess he just wanted to be thorough.’ Mr Diaz seemed to smile to himself. ‘He was quite a character.’
Quite a character. It made Patrick sound endearingly strange, as though he was odd by choice, instead of the victim of his own compulsions. Among the vitamins in the bathroom was a whole pharmacy of antidepressants. Paranoid, lonely, chronically depressed: he was quite a character all right.
I gave Mr Diaz a quick tour. The house charmed him, as it charmed everyone, even though it was becoming obvious to me that living in it was going to be difficult. I was beginning to feel odd about my whole project, and to think that the principal intention behind my uncle’s will had been to found a museum in memory of him and make me its curator. And with Platon in my flat for at least six months, I couldn’t just get back on the plane and go home. Bolder than Mandingo, indeed.
Mr Diaz’s asymmetrical gaze was scanning the spines of the books in the library. It reminded me again of Mr Ricketts and I asked him if he knew what had happened to the files that had been on Patrick’s desk.
‘Box files,’ he said thoughtfully, rounding out the vowels in a jocular imitation of my accent. ‘I’ll have to ask at the office. Weren’t they on the inventory I sent you?’
I told him I had seen nothing since I had heard the news from my father.
‘I sent one to your address in London. I’ll get you another.’ He said I would have to come into his office in Westwich anyway to sign some of the paperwork relating to the will.
‘I meant to ask you something about that,’ I said. ‘Under the terms of the will, I understand I’m supposed to maintain the house as it was during Patrick’s lifetime. Now, I get that in principle. But in practice, can I alter things to make it more habitable? For instance, it needs a new fridge …’
‘Well, I’m afraid this is one of those “How long is a piece of string?” questions,’ said Mr Diaz. ‘I don’t see getting a new refrigerator as problematical, or moving a painting from one wall to another. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you wanted to put in a new bathroom. You’d have to persuade the trustees that it doesn’t conflict with the letter or the spirit of your uncle’s directions. Any alterations to the fabric of the house would have to be approved by the trustees.’
‘What if I want to sell the house?’ I said, trying to make it sound as hypothetical as possible.
‘Out of the question. But in the example of the bathroom … I mean, we have a certain latitude in the way we interpret the document. I would have no objections, nor do I think would Rosie Queenan, the trustee appointed by the bank. The only trustee who might object is Mr Blair, the guy from the churchmen’s fund, but I doubt it.’
I wanted to ridicule his careful, legalistic replies. Did the prohibition against altering things mean that I couldn’t throw away the jars of vitamin pills that cluttered the bathroom floor? What about the spider in the water jug, was it protected by the will?
I must have looked anxious, because Mr Diaz felt he had to reassure me. ‘I wouldn’t worry too much about it. I’m here to advise you. Let me do the worrying. You enjoy your break,’ he said.
He meant to be encouraging, but I was disheartened by the implicit assumption that no one would come to the house for longer than a holiday.
We went back to the kitchen and Mr Diaz took his glass of water off the sideboard and drank it in one go, with his hand pressed against his stomach. He smacked his lips. The gesture signalled the end of his visit. ‘You’ve got your own well, haven’t you,’ he said, dabbing at his moustache with a handkerchief. ‘I always prefer the taste of well water.’
I opened the screen door for him. It slapped shut behind us. The sun had burned off the early morning haze and it was getting hot. We set off across the lawn towards Mr Diaz’s car, which was parked in the driveway, about a hundred yards away. He said I should make an appointment to come see him about the paperwork. ‘Get yourself settled in first, then give me a call,’ he said.
I stooped to pick up a handful of dead twigs from the lawn as we walked: they were like a speck of fluff on a huge baize billiard table. ‘There’s no phone,’ I said, ‘but I think I can call from my neighbours’.’
‘The Fernshaws?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Real Ionians,’ he said. ‘Not wetbacks like me.’ He smiled, his teeth ivory in the sunlight under his clipped moustache.
‘They’re deaf,’ I said.
‘Sure are. Used to be a lot of deaf people on the islands.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Not so many of them now, but in the old days, I mean it’s a rural thing: small gene pool – lot of double yolkers.’
‘Inbreeding.’
‘That’s right. The islanders even evolved their own kind of sign language. My wife knows some actually. She’s a real islander.’
‘She’s not deaf though?’
‘Who?’
‘Your wife.’
‘Oh no. Everyone spoke sign language back then – everyone was related to someone who was deaf so it was the easiest thing for everybody.’
We reached Mr Diaz’s car. He shook my hand and got in, then rolled down the window. ‘I was sorry I couldn’t be at the funeral,’ he said. ‘My wife had to go into the hospital and I drove up to Boston to be with her.’
‘Nothing serious, I hope.’
‘It looks like she’s out of the woods now, but she’ll be taking it easy over the summer just to be sure. She was real sorry about Patrick, too. He wasn’t the most easygoing guy in the world, but he was a kind man.’
While not the whole truth, it was as accurate a eulogy as anything that had been said at the funeral.
‘His death came right out of the blue,’ he added.
‘Yeah, it was a shock to me, too,’ I said, but I thought it was probably better not to explain why.
TWELVE
PATRICK’S CAR WAS PARKED inside the shed. It didn’t look much like it had twenty-eight years before, but then neither did I. The bodywork was pitted with rust and a dent in the door on the passenger side had been mended with a piece of plywood. It wasn’t a car you would want to pick up a date in. And that was sad. Every summer, Patrick told us the same stories about the dating rituals of his teenage years. They were stories like Homeric myth with their own catchphrases and epithets, and they had undergone much embellishment over the years. They were peopled with bizarre characters: the Bubble brothers, Mrs Thornquist, one-eyed Captain Spadger, Tackaberry Mackadoo; and they covered the years of Patrick’s youth, as an altar boy, as a student, as a high-school basketball star, a lifeguard at Revere Beach. It was a life that I envisaged taking place in Technicolor; a life a hundred times more exciting than the life I led.
Mr Sandford – he of the gerbil’s-arse moustache – once told my father that the function of epics is to embody the cardinal virtues of their society and their historical moment. In the Aeneid, I gather it’s filial piety; in the lliad, it’s martial valour; in 1950s America as described by my Uncle Patrick, the most important qualities a young man could possess were the right car and a duck’s-arse hairstyle.
Patrick went into more detail about how he used Vitalis to sculpt his hair before a date than Homer did about the armour of the Trojan heroes. He really didn’t care whether it was of interest to us. He was in a state of what recovering alcoholics call euphoric recall: he wasn’t here, he was there, in the America of Eisenhower and Elvis and tailfinned cars, shaping and preening before the bathroom mirror; almost believing that his bald head was covered with lustrous black locks.
So, for Patrick to have allowed his car to fall into a state of such disrepair was a bit like Siegfried selling the ring of the Nibelungen for two dollars at a yard sale.
To make
matters worse, whoever had returned it from the other side of the island hadn’t bothered to disconnect the battery or even remove the towel from the passenger seat, which, presumably, Patrick had taken down to the running track to dry himself after the run which killed him.
The space behind the two front seats was so small that it seemed improbable that Vivian and I had ever fitted inside it, but we had. The two of us had been squashed in there as we drove back to Westwich that first Christmas.
When we got back to London at the beginning of January we had begun to correspond with Patrick. The two of us wrote long letters on my father’s yellow legal pads, and Patrick sent us drawings and silly poems back. I copied out the story of David and Goliath from a book I got from the library and told Patrick I had written it.
The following summer my father rented the house near Provincetown that became an annual fixture for the next ten years. We saw more of Patrick and Lydia, but to my recollection my father and Patrick never spent a night under the same roof. It was as though there was a tacit understanding that there were limits to their renewed friendship. If we stayed on Ionia, it was at a guest house in Westwich; and when Patrick stayed on the Cape, it was usually at a place in Provincetown. The only exception was the summer when we painted Patrick’s house. Vivian and I camped on Patrick’s lawn. As self-conscious adolescents, we didn’t feel comfortable sharing a bed.
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