Chrissie, in sombre, stylish black, had staked her position in the front
pew as First, Most Suffering and Most Enduring Widow. Nick lay there in his
coffin, covered in rubbishy wreaths from grieving cast-offs, and she could se
the rest of the motley congregation through the red eyes in the back of her
proud head. She reached for her daughter in Faro's hand, and clutched it, as
the music stopped. She knew that somebody was about to stand up and say
something unutterably silly, unforgivably stupid. She felt it in her bones.
Faro squeezed her mother's hand in return. We two against the world.
The ranks were full. There were Gaulden brothers and sisters, a rackety,
impossible, Circean, good-looking, foreign, dissolute crew; none of them had
come to much good. Nick hadn't been the one black sheep of the flock. They
had
been prodigals all. However had Chrissie Barron got herself mixed up with
this
lot? Nick's father Gyorgy Gaulden had died a decade earlier, but Nick's
mother
Eva was still alive, and present, and sharply surveying the chaos she had
engendered. Was it for this that Eva and Gyorgy had escaped from the death
throes of Europe to the safety of Finchley Road? To bring forth this
feckless,
wastrel, decadent Bohemian host? This ragged army, this forlorn hope?
Unfair, unkind, said Chrissie to herself, a she tried to block out the
valedictory words of Eric Mendelsson, old schoolmate, old drinking partner
and
poker player, failed poet, failed scrounger, failed failure. Balliol scholar,
chess player, charmer, wit. One of the cleverest men of his generation. Could
have been a chess grandmaster, could have been a poet, could have been a man.
One of the cleverest, but certainly not one of the best-looking: he had
always
been a big-nosed freak, and now, in his early sixties, he was a scarecrow.
His
lazy, lopsided, voluptuous, terrible smile illuminated his carrion face, as
he
spoke from the pulpit of his old friend Nick's schooldays, of the happy
hospitable home of Gyorgy and Eva, of the culture and the music and the
poetry
of the Gauldens…please god let him not start going on about me, thought
Chrissie, but how could he avoid her She had been Nick's first conquest, and
how desperately they had loved one another, in those long-ago innocent days.
Chrissie and nick had dropped out together, eloped together, and disappeared
together from the face of the unknown earth. They had fallen don a volcanic
fissure into the molten underworld. Would that they had at that instant been
transformed together into a fountain, into a reed, into a tree with
interwoven
boughs, into a breeze or a bird! They had believed that the violence of their
love would burn away mortality, would purify and transfix them into an
attitude
of everlasting devotion. Chrissie, ho had preserved her chastity through so
many assaults in the suburban undergrowth and on the late night train back
to
Farnleigh from Charing Cross, had abandoned herself without restraint to the
embraces and assurances of Nicholas Gaulden, and had run away with him in the
fullness of her heart and her youth. And now he lay in a narrow box, waiting
to
be incinerated. What was left of that bright boy, apart from a trail of
devastation?
His children, his grandchildren. He had been prolific.
Seven known children
and two grandchildren could have attended his funeral,
had the roll-call been
complete, and who knows how many unacknowledged offspring lurked in the
wings,
or had never known their parentage? Chrissie, even as she listened to Eric
praising (and quite wittily, she had to concede) her own early attempts at
soup-making, at running a soup-kitchen, in the flat in Barlby Road, could not
resist trying to do a headcount of the numbers of Nick's women whom she had
already greeted or spotted that day. There was Moira, down-trodden First
Mistress whom he had never married, and who bore him two children; then
Sarafina, mother of Aurelius; then Fiona, who had, after Chrissie's divorce,
for a brief spell become a legal Mrs Gaulden; then Stella, mother of Tiger;
and
finally Jessica, who was rumoured to have been on the verge of a death-bed
shotgun wedding, but who was thought not to have made it. Jessica had drawn
the
short straw, by common consent. Hers had been the hospitalisation, the
rejected
transplant, the catheters, the plastic bags, the death rattle. Jessica had
never known Nick in his golden days.
But Jessica had probably been
convinced that Nick had loved her only, her
only and her ever. That was his
trick. That was how he pulled it. And no doubt
he'd still been able to manage it, a sick man in his sixties, in need of a
new
liver. Still the most handsome man in London, in the eyes of far too
many.
Whom had she missed? Furtively, Chrissie counted again, on the
fingers of
the hand that Faro was not clutching. The children: there was
Faro, his
first-born: Moira's daughters, Iona and Arethusa, who for a long time had
lived
upstairs: then the boys - Serafina's Aurelius and Stella's Tiger. There were
supposed to be two more boys, somewhere, and another woman - where was Jenny,
with her boys Sam and Derwent? Or was it Derwent and Sam? Chrissie had never
met Jenny Pargiter and her sons, and had been unable to locate her earlier in
the proceedings, as the funeral party had loitered in the
academic-ecclesiastical re-brick cloisters, making uneasy conversation and
trying furtively to read the messages on the bouquets that perspired
inelegantly in cellophane wraps. Chrissie had been assured, by Stella, that
Jenny Pargiter was there, but she looked in vain for a young mother
emblematically accompanied, like a martyr, by two identifying Gaulden sons.
Perhaps Jenny Pargiter had come without them? Perhaps she had thought them
too
young or too ill disciplined for such an outing? Warning notices advised that
the spacious cemetery lawns, where mourners from other unknown funerals
strayed
in the middle distance, were out of bounds to noisy children. Perhaps Jenny
Pargiter had decided not to risk it?
But, in that case, which was
unattended Jenny Pargiter, the penultimate
mistress? Chrissie had formed no
very clear picture of her, but had assumed, as
an outdated ex-wife will, that this latter rival must be possessed of grace,
style, beauty and probably (though not necessarily) youth. Brooding on a
possible Jenny Pargiter, Chrissie now realized that she had managed to summon
up little more than a vague assembly of floating attributes, most of them
detached from on or another of Nick's death-convened harem - the slenderness
of
Moira when young, the stateliness of Serafina the sharpness of Fiona, the
blonde fey English countryside calm of Stella, the unblemished white
all-American teeth of young Jessica. These incompatible features had not
begun
to form a coherent whole, and Identikit Gaulden bride, for none of these
women
much resembled one another, and had no evident common denominator. Jenny
Pargiter might be, indeed almost certainly was, somebody quite other, who
would, when correctly identified, add some quite shocking or revealing new
ingredient to the retrospective assessment of Nick Gaulden's amorous tastes.
Jenny Pargiter was no chimera, no harpy, no composite ghost: she was a solid
and unique woman, and somewhere in this chapel she stood, waiting to identify
herself as the object of Chrissie's envy and contempt. Or would she, like
Stella, prove in the long run, a true friend? Unlikely, now. Chrissie no
longer
had need of such friends. She could suffer no more, as she had once suffered,
the torments of obscure and unallocated resentment and suspicion. Let Jenny
Pargiter reveal herself as Helen of Troy, Chrissie need suffer no more. It
was
all one to her now. Curiosity was all that remained to her.