Sorrow and Bliss(32)

*

At the reception, Jessamine told me and Nicholas and Oliver a story about the first time she went into town at night, as a teenager. Winsome was supposed to pick her up at nine but she wasn’t there. By nine-thirty all Jessamine’s friends had gone home and she was alone in a crowd at Leicester Square, embarrassed, then angry, then afraid because the only reason Winsome would be late was if she was dead.

Oliver said, ‘Yeah, even then she would have made it.’

Jessamine said exactly. ‘But then, at like ten, I saw her shoving through a group of drunk people, I honestly felt like I was going to vomit and cry, I was so relieved. It’s like, one second you can be alone and terrified in a crowd of scary idiots and the next you know you’re completely safe.’

Oliver asked where their mother had been.

Jessamine said she didn’t know. ‘That isn’t the point of the story.’

‘What was the point? It was bloody long.’

‘Oliver, shut up. I don’t know.’ She flicked her hair. ‘Just that feeling of like, thank God when you see that person. Martha, do you know what I’m talking about?’

I said yes. Thank God is how I felt when I saw Patrick that day. Not a thrill or affection or pleasure. Visceral relief.

*

Later, once Ingrid and Hamish had gone, the guests left, the staff quietly finished, Winsome and Rowland went to bed, and it was just my cousins, me and Patrick, sitting in the garden, in the dark, at a table that hadn’t been cleared of bottles and empty glasses. Apart from Patrick, we were all half-drunk, in wedding clothes and jackets found inside.

Lighting a cigarette, Oliver asked Patrick why in all the Christmases he came to when we were teenagers, he never drank the alcohol we stole from Rowland’s liquor cabinet or climbed out onto the roof to try Nicholas’s joints and why, when we were ordered out of the house during the Queen’s Speech, he’d still walk all the way around the gardens while we just sat on a park bench for an hour before going home. Why he felt like he had to be such a good boy when we were a pack of shits.

Patrick said, ‘You weren’t trying to be invited back.’

Three of us at once said God, very quietly.

*

Because it was early in the morning but still dark when I wanted to leave, Patrick said he would drive me home and for the minutes it took him to go back inside and get his coat, I was by myself in his car. If I could have called my sister just then, I would have asked if she wanted a rundown of its interior because she would have said yes and ‘I am dying’ when I told her about Patrick’s pocket tissues and pound coins in a little console tray, the roll of wine gums that he had opened without tearing the foil and closed carefully after eating one. ‘Martha, literally. Who eats one?’ ‘And,’ I would have said, ‘instead of the earth’s layers of shit in the footwell you would expect of a twenty-seven-year-old single man, there is nothing down here except vacuum lines in the carpet.’

I got out my phone and started a text, but didn’t send it because she was somewhere with Hamish and I did not want her to know that I was sitting in a car at four o’clock in the morning, alone and tired, and trying to fend off my rising sadness at the thought that she had chosen Hamish over me, by going through Patrick’s glovebox.

He opened the door and got in while I was looking at his hospital photo-card. ‘Can I just say I had been awake for twenty-six hours when that was taken? That’s why I look like that. Sorry I took so long.’

The light came on when he started the car and Patrick glanced down for the gearstick. My gaze had followed his and in the second before it was dark again, I noticed his hand and his wrist, and the way the tendons moved as he tightened his grip, and as he let go and moved it to the wheel, the run of his forearm below his rolled-up shirtsleeve. When he became aware of it and went to say something, I reached forward and pushed all the buttons on the radio until music started playing. It was a country song, fading towards its finish.

I said, ‘Oh my gosh, Patrick. What station is this?’

He said, looking straight ahead, ‘It’s a CD,’ and tried to turn it off because I was laughing.

‘No don’t. Don’t. It’s amazing.’

After it finished, I told him we were going to need to have it again because we had missed its emotional apogee. Patrick said fine and skipped back.

I loved it and did not let the fact that I had never heard it before stop me from singing. Patrick claimed not to be enjoying my extemporaneous lyrics but he kept laughing. It finished and I tried to play it again but could not find the button. I was surprised by Patrick reaching for my hand and transferring it back to my lap. I asked if I could have a wine gum, already picking up the packet and tearing it open, the sensation of contact still on my skin.

He did not want one and with my mouth full I said, ‘Are you exclusively into country, or do you like other kinds of music as well?’

‘I don’t like country. I just like that song.’

‘Why?’

He told me he appreciated the key change. Later I found out it was because, at an airport once when he was young, it started playing over the speakers and hearing it, his father said casually, ‘This was your mother’s favourite song.’ Personally, he said he’d never understood how such an intelligent woman could bear its cloying sentimentality and over-egged melody. At some point, before it finished, it occurred to Patrick that he was listening to words his mother would have known off by heart. He had already lost his memory of her voice but from then on, whenever he listened to the song, Patrick felt as though he could hear her. That is why he still played it whenever he was by himself in the car.