The View from Here (25 page)

EPILOGUE

I
KNOW NOW THAT
whimper or fanfare at the end of a romance is no indicator of its legacy, but I didn't know it then. I imagined my pain would linger dramatically, scar even. And so I was surprised when, almost twelve months later in London, I opened a letter, readdressed and dutifully sent on by my mother, and felt nothing. The letter was from Mason. His name, signed simply at the bottom of the single white sheet, failed to elicit any identifiable emotion in me. I did recall, with no rushing heart, telling him once about the part of Singapore where my parents were based. I imagined that a secretary had been charged with tracking down the details.

The letter was devoid of clear intention. He was just finding out, I suppose, whether I was still there. I was rather pleased to discover that I was not. I crumpled the thing and dropped it into a wastepaper basket. In the end, he had left no trace.

Perhaps I had not been aware of the totality of the fading because I often thought about the children, coaxing current images of them, a little older than they had been. I found myself wondering, too, from time to time, about Richard, or remembering, always sweetly, something about Ned. But it was none of these vague reminiscings, I knew, that had convinced me that my time in that grand house had carved something deep. It was Sally. Sally, who I could muster with absolute clarity at the close of my eyes. And it was Sally that the small, stiff knot at the bottom of the wastepaper basket made me think of now. I lifted the letter again, set it in the dark Victorian grate, and burned it. To be rid of her.

In casting Sally as villain I had not ignored my own crime, which is what it was. I did not think that my sins made Sally any less culpable. Accountability doesn't work that way. We like to think that it does; we like to imagine that because someone somewhere has committed a transgression equal to or worse than ours, that we are in some way, at least partially, absolved. But we are not. We are alone when the reckoning comes and measured against nobody but ourselves. Just as I am alone now, as alone as anyone can be.

These past weeks, since the party, my health has deteriorated markedly and will go on doing so. I am in pain, but it is not release from that particular distress I seek. Rather, I have decided that there is no advantage for Chloe in drawing this out. So I will begin the process tomorrow of finishing it. I have a store of suitable drugs, stockpiled over the months, and I understand how to administer them gradually to myself in order to maximize the chances of a swift and effective outcome. I will die by my own hand, just as Patsy did. But unlike Patsy, I will ensure that there is no one to witness the grisly particulars of my passing.

• • •

That night, the night that Sally raised the curtain so deftly on all the repugnant shenanigans, I ran back to my room after Christina had caught me out by the pool and stood, as I have said, with my blood pumping in my ears, trembling for fear of being followed. It is true that I was not followed; it is not true, as I have implied, that I climbed then, worn out and wretched, into my bed. That version comes easily to me, or did for a very long time, because it is the one that I wanted to be true.

Instead, while I waited for the sound of someone coming after me, the silence turned terrifying, and soon it came to me that the person to find, to talk to, was Patsy. If I could talk to Patsy, I could straighten a few things out. Get them clear in my head for later when I spoke to Mason. I still thought that I would be speaking to Mason. I still thought that speaking to Mason would make everything all right. I needed to believe it because at that moment I had no future without him; my life was a wasteland without him in it. It became urgent that I speak to Patsy. Patsy, once my friend and now suddenly, horribly, my rival. And so I went out again, into the empty corridor.

A few, blind moments later I knocked on the door to Patsy's and Richard's bedroom. There was no response, but I thought I heard her inside and I went in anyway. The room was even bigger than mine, with windows facing the sea as well as the poolside. The shutters were drawn, though, and the only light was cast by a single bedside lamp. Patsy was on the bed, her feet toward me and her head turned away.

“Patsy,” I said, though I do not know where my voice came from.

She ignored me.

“Patsy,” I repeated, with more vigor this time. I had come that far and I wanted it out. I did not believe, anyway, that she was really sleeping. Who could be in the midst of all that? But then, pathetically, it crossed my mind that if she had indeed gone to bed and fallen asleep despite the evening's events, well, she could not have been terribly affected by them. That would have been just like Patsy, to squeeze a drama from something that in fact meant very little to her. She had been drunk too. She was capable of anything when she was drunk. Noting now the way she was sprawled on the bed, one arm hanging adrift from the single sheet, I remembered the drunkenness. Maybe she had just been playing along with some grotesque game of Sally's. I think, for a few moments, this line of reasoning began to make some sense. I could see a whole new way of looking at things, a way that held a flicker of hope for me. I was keen to turn that flicker into a flame.

I approached the bed and called her name for the third time. That is when I saw the bottles. They were not bottles, in fact, but those small containers that prescription medicines come in. They were both empty, and next to them there was an empty tumbler lying on its side. The tumbler smelled of brandy. On the floor, beside the bed, some tablets had fallen and scattered. I leaned down and scooped them up. Then I righted the tumbler and picked up the containers and put them in a wastepaper bin in the corner of the room. I do not think I had a single coherent thought during this process. Maybe hysteria had given way to shock. Or something else.

As I say, at first I had no conscious understanding that Patsy had tried to kill herself. Nor did I make any attempt to ascertain whether or not she had succeeded. But slowly the idea began to dawn on me and I sat on a chair that was an exact replica of one I had in my room, and I thought about it. And what I thought was that, if Patsy died, Mason would naturally turn to me.

Can it be love that makes such dangerous fools of us? Does love descend like a lead bell and cut us off bluntly from the call of reason, of right? Or do we wantonly, selfishly give ourselves over to this delusion in order to avoid the tougher decisions demanded by dull decency?

I sat and watched Patsy, her sleek hair in a tangled mass on the pillow, her one bare shoulder very tanned against the white of the linen; I was watching her die. A fact that only truly came to me, only reached out and grabbed me by the throat and shook me when she actually did.

Some time close to dawn, after I had sat in that room for an hour or more, stupefied by my ludicrous musings, my pitiful longings, Patsy convulsed. And if I had thought I had known fear before that moment, I had not. Bile lurched to my throat as the body on the bed shuddered, electrified. A noise came from it that was part gargle and part animal cry, and Patsy's face twisted toward me, its color changing horribly, violet to blue. Eventually—after how long?—this unspeakable racking violence stopped and she seemed to collapse, to exhale, her soul releasing with a rattling sound. And then she was dead.

I do not think that I screamed, although perhaps I did. Certainly I leapt to my feet, but I just stood, rigid and immobile, rooted to the spot on which my limbs had planted me. By the time it was over I was shaking, shivering all over, like a small bird does before it dies in your hand. Then, appalled, terrified, I switched off Patsy's bedside light as if she were sleeping, which in fact she looked as if she was. Just as she had when I had first come in.

I left after that. And I ran, for the second time in eight hours, without stopping, without breathing.

For many years I expected the battering at the door that would signal exposure. But it did not come. Until now. And in a very different form from the one I had anticipated. Nevertheless, it is real enough, this call, this demand to lay bare my part in that death, my failure to act to prevent it. My willing of it. Could I have helped her? I can't be sure. What matters is that I did not try. I was the man on the bank offering not even a twig hopelessly stretched out to the drowning boy. And now the truth of that, the sin and burden of it, is all here, preserved in my sloping hand, in these three notebooks. They are the school exercise type, flimsy with thin cardboard covers. And at my back the fire rages.