‘It’s going to be tough to make conversation if you don’t stop attacking everything I say,’ said plain-speaking Henry. ‘Let’s stick to talking family.’
‘That proven formula for goodwill and unity,’ said Patrick with one of his short barking laughs.
‘You’re as bad as Yasser Arafat,’ said Henry. ‘You think peace and defeat are the same thing. I’m just trying to extend some hospitality here. You don’t have to accept it, if you’ve got an ideological problem with that.’ Henry chuckled at the word ‘ideological’, which for him was as inherently comic as the word ‘bottom’ to an exuberant four-year-old.
‘That’s right,’ said Patrick, ‘we don’t.’
‘But we’d like to,’ said Mary quickly.
‘Speak for yourself,’ said Patrick.
‘I am,’ she said, ‘and unlike you I’m also trying to speak for the children.’
‘Are you? Only this morning Thomas was saying that Henry is “a very funny man” and, as you know, Robert’s nickname for him is “Hitler”. I doubt you’re even speaking for yourself after you were thrown out of lunch yesterday.’
That had been that. They left the next morning. She expected Patrick to be stubborn and proud and destructive, but she hadn’t yet forgiven him for including the children in his final explosive charge.
The ice machine in the motel corridor produced another juddering emission of cubes just the other side of the thin bedroom wall. The interstate’s mosquito whine had given way to a hornet drone. Thomas stirred beside her and then, with his usual prompt transition to full desire, he sat up and said, ‘I want you to read me a story.’ She obediently picked up the copy of The Wind in the Willows which they had started reading in Maine.
‘Do you remember where we were?’ asked Mary.
‘Ratty was saying to Moley that he was a plain pig,’ said Thomas, rounding his eyes in amazement. ‘But, actually, he’s a rat.’
‘That’s right,’ laughed Mary. Rat and Mole were on their way back to River Bank in the gathering darkness of a December afternoon. Mole had just smelt the traces of his old home and was overwhelmed by longing and nostalgia. Rat had pressed on to River Bank, his own home, assuming Mole would want to go there as well. Then Mole broke down and told Rat about his homesickness. Mary reread the sentence they had finished with the night before.
‘The Rat stared straight in front of him, saying nothing, only patting Mole gently on the shoulder. After a time he muttered gloomily, “I see it all now! What a pig I’ve been! A pig – that’s me! Just a pig – a plain pig!”’
‘I mean…’ Thomas began.
There was a knock on the door. Mary put the book down and asked who it was.
‘Bobby!’ said Thomas. ‘I knew it was you because – well, because it is you!’
Robert sat down on the bed with his shoulders slumped, ignoring his brother’s reasoning.
‘I hate this place,’ he said.
‘I know,’ said Mary, ‘but we’ll move on this morning.’
‘Again,’ groaned Robert. ‘We’ve been to three motels since the Prosecuting Attorney got us thrown off that brilliant island. We might as well get a mobile home.’
‘I’m going to ring Sally after breakfast and ask her if we could go to Long Island a few days earlier than planned.’
‘I don’t want to go to Long Island, I want to go home,’ said Robert.
‘Moley smells his home and he wants it,’ said Thomas, leaning forward to support his brother’s case.
They agreed that if they couldn’t go straight to Long Island, they would tell Patrick they wanted to go back to England.
‘No more magic of the open road,’ said Robert. ‘Please.’
When she rang Sally there was no answer in Long Island. Eventually she found her in New York.
‘We had to come back to the city because our water tank burst and flooded the apartment downstairs. Our neighbours are suing us, so we’re suing the plumbers who only put the tank in last year. The plumbers are suing the tank company for defective design. And the residents are suing the building, even though they’re all on vacation, because the water was cut off for two days instead of two hours, which caused them a lot of mental stress in Tuscany and Nantucket.’
‘Gosh,’ said Mary. ‘What’s wrong with mopping up and getting a new water tank?’
‘That is so English,’ said Sally, delighted by Mary’s quaint stoicism.
Mary explained at breakfast that there wasn’t really room in the New York apartment, but Sally said they were welcome to all squeeze in somehow.
‘I don’t want to squeeze in,’ said Robert, ‘I want to fly out.’
‘We’re on an aeroplane now,’ said Thomas, thrusting his arms out like wings, ‘and Alabala is in the cockpit!’
‘Oh-oh,’ said Robert, ‘we’d better catch the next flight.’
‘He’s on the next flight as well,’ said Thomas, as surprised as anyone by Alabala’s resourcefulness.
‘How did he manage that?’ said Robert.
Thomas glanced sideways for a moment to look for the explanation.
‘He used his ejector seat,’ he said, making an ejector-seat noise, ‘and then Felan stopped the next plane and Alabala got on!’
‘There’s the little matter of our unrefundable tickets,’ said Patrick.
‘We could have bought new ones with the money we’ve spent in these disgusting motels,’ said Robert.
‘You’ve taught him to argue too well,’ said Mary.
‘There’s no one to argue with, is there?’ said Patrick. ‘I think we’re all sick of America by now.’
16
AFTER HER FALL, ELEANOR’S ceaseless pleas for death had forced Patrick to look into the legalities of euthanasia and assisted suicide. Once again, as with his own disinheritance, he became the legal servant of his mother’s repulsive demands. Superficially, there was something more attractive about getting rid of Eleanor than there had been about losing Saint-Nazaire, but then the obscenity of what he was being asked to do would break through the stockade of practicalities with Jacobean vigour. Even if a nursing home was not the usual setting for a Revenger’s Tragedy, he felt the perils of usurping God’s monopoly on vengeance just as keenly as he would have in the catacombs of an Italian castle. He tried to pull himself together, to examine his motives scrupulously. The dead were not dogged enough to make ghosts without the guilt of the living. His mother was like a rock fall blocking a mountain pass. Perhaps he could clear her out of the way, but if his intentions were murderous, her ghost would haunt the pass for ever.
He decided to have nothing to do with organizing her death. Asking him to help her die was the last and nastiest trick of a woman who had always insisted, from the moment he was born, that she was the one who needed cheering up. And then he would visit Eleanor again and see that the cruellest thing he could do was to leave her exactly where she was. He tried to remain angry so he could forbid himself to help, but compassion tortured him as well. The compassion was far harder to bear and he came to think of his vengefulness as a relatively frivolous state of mind.
‘Go on, do yourself a favour, get homicidal,’ he muttered to himself as he dialled the number of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society.
Before going to America, he kept his research secret. He didn’t tell Mary because they never discussed anything important without having a row. He didn’t tell Julia because his affair with her was in the final stages of its decay. In any case, secrecy was essential in a country where helping someone to die could be punished with fourteen years’ imprisonment. He read articles in the papers about nurses sent to jail for generous injections. The Voluntary Euthanasia Society, despite its promising name, was unable to help. It was a campaigning organization trying to change the legislation. Patrick could remember reading about Arthur Koestler and his wife using the plastic bags provided by Exit to asphyxiate themselves in their house in Montpelier Square. The lady who answered the phone at the Voluntary Euthanasia Society had no knowledge of an organization called Exit. She couldn’t even comment on most of his questions, because her advice might be construed as suicide ‘counselling’, an offence under the same statute that punished assisting and aiding. She hadn’t heard of an organization called Dignitas either and couldn’t tell him how to get in touch with it. The Everlasting was not the only one to have ‘fixed his canon ’gainst self-slaughter’, Patrick couldn’t help thinking as the fruitless conversation dragged to a close. Directory Inquiries, careless of the legal consequences, gave him the number of Dignitas a few minutes later.