Sorrow and Bliss(30)
On the street again, Peregrine brushed his coatsleeves then said alright, well, and we started walking. ‘Let us think. My wife had just given me the boot, having found out that my tastes ran in a different direction and while Diana set about making sure I’d get none of our money or see the children again, I moved to London, into the awfulest room in Soho, became partial to various substances and was, in consequence, given the heave-ho by my magazine at the time. I was out of money in a day and forced to return to my family seat in Gloucestershire, where I was very much unwelcome, both personally and as one of my kind, and there followed the nervous collapse. What do you think?’
I told him it was quite a grim picture and I was sorry that he had been through it, and sorry that I had never asked him about any life he’d lived before the present one.
He said yes. ‘However, the benefit of exile – one was forced to clean up one’s act because Quaaludes simply could not be got in Tewkesbury in 1970.’
I said, ‘Like pesto,’ and put my shoulders back. Peregrine took my arm and we kept going.
*
Usually we parted outside the Gare du Nord but I did not want him to leave, and asked if I could go inside with him and wait until his train. We stood at a café counter and I told him that, although I was ashamed about it, sometimes I missed Jonathan. I hadn’t told anyone else.
He said there was no shame in it, none at all. ‘Even now I find myself recalling the years I was married to Diana with immense nostalgia.’ He sipped the coffee, set it down and said, ‘Per the original Greek definition of course, which is utterly unrelated to the way members of the public use it to describe how they feel recounting their school days.’ Peregrine looked at the clock and put money from his breast pocket on the counter. ‘Nostos, Martha, returning home. Algos, pain. Nostalgia is the suffering caused by our unappeased yearning to return.’ Whether or not, he said, the home we long for ever existed. At the gate to his platform, Peregrine kissed me on both cheeks and said, ‘November,’ and I knew it would be my birthday.
*
In between: I loved Paris, the view out of the pied-à-terre window, of zinc roofs and terracotta chimneys and tangled power lines. I loved living alone after the months at Goldhawk Road. I spoke to my father on weekends and Ingrid every morning as I walked to a café on the corner to get breakfast. I started writing a different novel.
And I hated Paris, the pied-à-terre’s red linoleum floor and the communal bathroom at the end of a dark passage. I was so lonely without my father, without the noise of Nicholas and Oliver and Patrick to listen to as I tried to sleep, without Ingrid. I hadn’t been there very long when she called and told me that Patrick had started dating Jessamine, which she found hilarious and I didn’t for reasons I couldn’t explain. But afterwards, the novel kept setting itself at Goldhawk Road and the protagonist, who I had made a man so it couldn’t be me, kept becoming Patrick instead. And then there was a girl. Everything that happened to her happened unexpectedly, and no matter what I did, she never seemed to be anywhere except on the stairs.
When I told Peregrine I was writing a book that was constantly turning into a love story set in an ugly house, he said, ‘First novels are autobiography and wish fulfilment. Evidently, one’s got to push all one’s disappointments and unmet desires through the pipes before one can write anything useful.’
I threw the pages out when I got home. But I tried in other ways, and kept trying per Peregrine’s wish for his daughters to be Zelda Fitzgerald, all the time. I walked along the river and spent money, and went to markets and ate cheese out of the paper with my fingers while I wandered around. I painted the pied-à-terre’s walls and covered its floors. I went to the cinema alone and bought dress rehearsal tickets for the ballet. I taught myself to smoke and like snails and went out with any man who asked me.
But I Wikipedia’d the other writer he had mentioned that day at the Orangery – I had not heard of her then – and I read her book, the one set in Paris. More often I was its main character, a woman who lies in a darkened studio thinking about her divorce for 192 pages. Wikipedia said ‘critics thought it well written, but ultimately too depressing’.
And – and so – I learned medical French, by immersion. Je suis très misérable. Un antidépresseur s’il vous pla?t. Ma prescription has run out et c’est le weekend. Le docteur: How often do you feel triste, sans a bonne raison? Toujours, parfois, rarement, jamais? Parfois, parfois. As time wore on, toujours.
*
I went home once, a month or so before I returned to London for good. It was January, wet and dark in Paris when I got back, the shop deserted like it always was between Christmas and Valentine’s Day. The American had gone home for a holiday and I worked there by myself, sitting catatonic behind the counter for hours and hours with a book unread in my lap.
The American came back, unexpectedly betrothed to a man, and fired me because I could not pay for all the books I had made unsaleable by cracking their spines and wetting the pages. I did not want to be in Paris any more. The reason I had gone to London was for Peregrine’s funeral.
He had fallen down the central staircase at the Wallace Collection and died when he struck his head on a marble newel post at the bottom. One of his daughters gave the eulogy and looked earnest when she said it was exactly how he would have wanted to go. I wept, realising how much I loved him, that he was my truest friend, and that his daughter was right. If it hadn’t been him, Peregrine would have been acutely jealous of anyone who got to die dramatically, in public, surrounded by gilt furniture.