Sorrow and Bliss(31)
On my final day in Paris, I ate oysters at the out-of-favour restaurant he had taken me to on my thirtieth birthday. Walking, afterwards, from the Tuileries to the Picasso Museum, I thought about a time we had said goodbye at the Gare du Nord. It was evening, the sky was violet. Peregrine was wearing a long coat and a silk scarf and after the kiss on both cheeks, he dropped his hat on his head and turned towards the station. The impression of him, walking towards its blackened fa?ade, the crowd of ordinary people parting in front of him, was so sublime I called out his name and he glanced back. Regretting it, even as I spoke, I said, ‘You are very beautiful.’ Peregrine touched the brim of his hat and the last thing he ever said to me was, ‘One does one’s best.’
At the museum, I sat for a long time in front of a painting that was his favourite because, he said, it wasn’t typical and therefore the masses didn’t understand it. Before I left, I wrote on the back of my ticket and when the guard was not looking, I posted it behind the painting. I hope it is still there. It said, ‘A Better Companion Didn’t Exist For Girls, Heartbroken etc. etc.’
The daughters sold the pied-à-terre.
14
INGRID MET ME at the airport, said ‘Bonjour Tristesse,’ and hugged me for a long time. ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve been sitting on that forever.’ She let me go. ‘Hamish is in the car.’ On the way home she told me now that they had picked a date, fucking finally, I had two months to put on, preferably a stone, but even half a one would do. ‘You don’t have to get me a gravy boat as well.’
According to a subsequent visit to conceptioncalculator.com, Ingrid got pregnant for the first time between her April wedding and the cocktail reception that followed at Belgravia. Winsome had every bathroom in the house renovated immediately afterwards, despite only walking in on Ingrid and Hamish in one of them.
Before, in the moment of waiting to go into the church, my sister turned back to me and said, ‘I’m going to do Princess Diana walking.’
‘Really?’
‘I’ve come this far Martha.’
*
Ingrid had told me he was coming and even though the entire congregation turned around as we entered and my sister and I walked up the aisle watched by two hundred people, even though I did not find him until the final feet of it, I was only conscious of myself in terms of Patrick; whether I was, just then, being looked at by him, if so how he perceived me. My bearing and my expression, the direction of my gaze – it was all for Patrick.
Because. Over time, I’d thought less and less about Jonathan, realising after two years in Paris that I only thought about him when prompted by some external stimulus. And now, not even when a man in the street walked past me trailing Acqua di Parma.
But I did not think less about Patrick. I was right that it was in association with Jonathan to begin with and solely to replay, and compare and contrast, their separate methods of rejection. Then he dated Jessamine, and invaded my novel, and it wasn’t only then any more. Considered on its own, disconnected from Jonathan’s, Patrick’s crime no longer seemed like one and when I replayed it, I could see his goodness. And I was alone so much, there was comfort in remembering Patrick as good, in imagining his sameness, imagining he was with me as I walked along an unpopulated street or marked hours in an uncustomered shop. Reassurance and company, the relief of boredom, whenever I wanted to be at home – I thought about him more and more and could not sustain the belief that it was still in association with Jonathan, realising, after those two years, that it was instead of him altogether.
He was standing in the middle of the family row, next to Jessamine, visible when a couple cleaved to talk to the people on either side of them. He was wearing a dark suit. That was the only thing that was identifiably different from the various pictures of Patrick I held in my mind, which featured him always in jeans and a shirt, ironed badly and partially untucked. His face was the same; his hair was still black and still needed cutting. He was in those ways unchanged. But he had a different air, discernible even at a distance.
As the first hymn began, he passed an order of service to Oliver who was on the other side of Jessamine. The transaction required Patrick to reach behind her and retreating, he put his hand on the small of her back. He said something, which she inclined her head to hear and appeared to find very funny. Then with the same hand he reached into his breast pocket and took out a pair of glasses, opening them with some sort of unconscious flicking action, before casually taking up his own order of service. Patrick did nothing casually. No practice of his ever seemed innate. As I knew him, being physically proximate to a woman made him so nervous he could appear unwell. As the hymn was finishing, I was dismissed from the altar, and required to walk past him on the way to where I was meant to stand. He acknowledged me, smiling and adjusting his cuff at the same time. I’m not sure I smiled back or not as I continued to my place, trying to locate a description for the way he looked, self-conscious when it came to mind as though I’d spoken it aloud to the congregation. Patrick looked intensely masculine.
And the way I felt, seeing him for the first time in four years, was the way I felt every time I saw him in public all the years we were together. If I arrived somewhere and saw him already waiting for me, or walking in my direction, if he was talking to someone on the other side of a room – it wasn’t a thrill, a rush of affection, or pleasure. Then, in the church, I didn’t know what it was and spent all of the service trying to diagnose it. At the end of the service, Patrick smiled at me once more as I moved back to the altar and I felt it again, so much from my core that it was difficult to keep going, to follow Ingrid and Hamish out, Patrick further and further behind me.