best of popular fiction as well. She made life for both of them exclusive and amusing. She took him to the Hamptons and Palm Beach for the vacations, and to Broad-way every other week – together they had seen Oedipus Rex and Rent, The Boyfriend and Dorothy After Kansas. She let him read her copies of Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar. They had pillow fights to the accompaniment of Leroy Anderson tunes. Eleanor had the most fantastical costumes ordered for their dressing-up sessions. They had played games unknown anywhere else on the planet Earth! They had applied the principle of those bizarre multiple-choice teenage books (‘If you want to venture into the Lair of the Giant Dragonfly, go to page 23’) to the works of Proust and had come up with entries like, ‘If you wish to slip into bed with Marcel, go to page 6. If, however, you want to attend the Germantes’ dinner party, go at once to page
546.’
Eleanor remembered another rather complicated game, which they had called ‘Abominating Abraxas’, Abraxas being an unpredictable pagan deity with a chanticleer’s head and a serpent’s tail. Griff had done the most wonderfully scary drawing of Abraxas. The interesting – the really remarkable – thing was that Abraxas had since acquired a life outside the game – he had managed to break through its confines somehow – Eleanor kept seeing him!
Why was the waiter looking at her again? What did he want? Hadn’t his mother taught him it was extremely rude to stare at strangers? Eleanor stuck out her tongue at him, then looked out of the window once more.
She had been so happy that day… She had spent three hours shopping at Bloomingdale’s, had coffee and the most delicious chocolate cheesecake, then went for a stroll in Central Park. She fed the ducks, then sat on a bench, basking in the warm sunshine. It was the first day of spring. She had been full of hope. She had decided to look Griff up and try to reach some kind of reconciliation.
They hadn’t been in touch for a couple of months, there had been an estrangement of sorts, the silliest of spats, really. She thought it was ridiculous that they should have fallen out and still be at loggerheads over a remark she had made concerning one of his friends. Griff was morbidly sensitive about his friends, but then he was sensitive about most things. She had bought him two sugared doughnuts, which she carried in a paper bag by way of a peace offering. (Griff adored doughnuts.)
Griff had a flat on the tenth floor of an art deco building in the fashionable district of West Chelsea. Eleanor believed she was humming a tune – ‘Top of the World’? – as she let herself in with the key Griff had given her while they had still been on good terms. She stood in the hall, admiring the wonderful matt red walls painted with Muslim-style arches supported by slender columns of dull gold – Griff had always had such good taste. She called out Griff’s name. Her hands felt a bit sticky, so she went to the bathroom to wash them -
‘Sticky,’ Eleanor said. ‘It’s so hard to keep the line between past and present.’
The next moment she had to bite her lip to stop herself from crying out. A flashback – she’d had a flashback! She had seen it all again. The redness. The stickiness. You mustn’t do it, the doctor had told her.
‘It is at that point that my life stops and the nightmare takes over,’ Eleanor said, her voice soft and hushed as if she were talking in church. ‘I haven’t been the same since.’
The face that stared back at her from the mirror these days was a face she no longer recognized as her own. (She had never been a great beauty, but she had been attractive in an unconventional kind of way. Griff always said she had the face of an expensive cat.) Her skin was not too lined, but it was shockingly sallow and it had a ‘battered’ appearance. The despoiling power of grief! Eleanor spent ages making herself up and the effect was frequently disconcerting. Her eyes had lost their lustre; they looked empty and dull. Her mind kept getting into binds. She blamed the medication she had been prescribed for that – anti-depressants, stimulants, sleeping pills, painkillers, energy-boosters and she didn’t know what else. She was far from sure they did her any good but she continued taking them in bucketfuls. Sans souci, but I need to get my mouth round the Xanax – it helps me with my panics -
Covering her face with her hands, Eleanor began to rock backward and forward. She shook her head and moaned. She expected tears to start flowing from her eyes in unstoppable streams, but that didn’t happen. She had run out of tears. She had reached the most dreadful part of her letter – she knew what was coming and she dreaded it – she wanted to cut the scene out, the way scenes that were considered too shocking were edited out of films – but of course she couldn’t.
‘The razor, an old-fashioned one, with an ornate mother-of-pearl handle, the stateliest of objects, lay on the floor beside the bath,’ Eleanor whispered. ‘It had belonged to Griff’s grandfather. It was covered in blood. There was blood everywhere, bespattering the walls, on the floor, even on the ceiling – the small cassette player that stood on the little table beside the bath was sticky with blood. I keep seeing that bath – I only need to shut my eyes. There it is now – and again – and again.’
There had been no religious consolations for her in the aftermath of the appalling catastrophe. Eleanor had had a ‘God’ once, but after her husband had left her, she ceased to believe. She had been overcome by grief. She had imagined at first that she could draw on reserves of stoicism and imagination, on her sense of the absurd, but she had been wrong – she couldn’t. That was why she had ‘cracked up’ so fast. She’d gone right under. She had had a nervous breakdown. Her shrink had diagnosed something called ‘florid behaviour’. Eleanor had spent a month at a ‘rest home’, undergoing various therapies. She had only the haziest recollection of the things they did to her there. After she had come out, she had developed an interest in spiritualism. She had been keeping a psychic journal, in which she regularly recorded her attempts to reach her dead son.
‘Sticky,’ she said again.
The bath was full of Griff’s blood, only his head and part of his shoulders showed above it. It was all appallingly, indescribably, grotesquely Grand Guignol. A scene straight out of one of those old British Hammer horror films she and Griff had always found hilarious – they had revelled in anything high camp – only now it was for real. Eleanor knew at once that Griff had been drained of all his blood; that was why his face was so pale, bluish pale, painfully thin and haggard. His eyes had remained open…
Eleanor still did not remember going up to the cassette player, but she must have done. (There had been blood on her hands, as she had discovered afterwards.) She had rewound the tape and pressed the play button. She had expected to hear a final message from Griff, his last words, an explanation, an apologia, the sound of him sobbing or screaming or telling her that he had forgiven her, but what she heard instead was Corinne Coreille’s voice.
‘It came as a shock. Another shock. As though I hadn’t had enough! How I hated you at that moment,’ Eleanor recited from the letter. ‘There is something about your voice – a certain haunting quality. It’s like no other I have ever heard. Griff had played your songs all the time, that was what the neighbours said. They imagined he was French because of his taste in music, also on account of his “flamboyantly European lifestyle”, whatever that may mean. They sounded as though they too disapproved. I would have expected people living in that part of Manhattan to display a greater degree of sophistication, but there it is.’
She rubbed her hands together, Lady Macbeth fashion. ‘Sticky,’ she said. ‘After all this time.’
It was eight years earlier that Griff had fallen under Corinne Coreille’s spell. He was fourteen at the time. They had been watching television together. They had been lolling on a sofa upholstered in mauve velvet that was big enough for eight, under the Sargent portrait of Eleanor’s English great grandmother. They had been eating Hershey’s fudge ice-cream and drinking vanilla soda. It was high summer – late afternoon – Eleanor remembered clearly the golden glow that filtered into the room. All the windows were wide open and the filmy curtains fluttered in the delicate breeze. Earlier on they had had a cushion fight…
Eleanor had been wearing a tea-gown decorated with emeralds as big as quail eggs, 1920s style, and knee socks. Griff had a frilly Byronic shirt on, gleaming white. They had been watching an old Marx Brothers comedy, but got bored with it. Eleanor had started flicking idly through the channels, complaining how drab and tedious and passe everything looked. (That, as it happened, had been their catch phrase of the moment – passe.) ‘Wait, what was that, Eleanor? Go back,’ Griff said. (He always called her ‘Eleanor’, never ‘Mother’.)
That had been his first glimpse of Corinne Coreille. It had been Corinne Coreille’s Palais de Congres concert of 1989.
