The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (53 page)

‘He wouldn’t settle in his cot.’

‘They never will if you take them into the bed.’

‘“Never” is a long time. He was inside me until Wednesday evening; my instinct is to have him next to me for a while – do things gradually.’

‘Well, I don’t like to question your instincts, dear,’ said Margaret, spitting the word out the moment it formed in her mouth, ‘but in my forty years of
experience
I’ve had mothers thank me again and again for putting the baby down and leaving it in the cot. I had one mother, she’s an Arab lady, actually, nice enough, rang me only the other day in Botley and said, “I wish I’d listened to you, Margaret, and not taken Yasmin into the bed with me. I can’t do anything with her now.” She wanted me back, but I said, “I’m sorry, dear, but I’m starting a new job next week, and I shall be going to the south of France for July to stay with the baby’s grandmother.”’

Margaret tossed her head and strutted about the kitchen, a downpour of crumbs tickling Robert’s face. His mother said nothing, but Margaret rumbled on.

‘I don’t think it’s fair on the baby, apart from anything else – they like to have their own little cot. Of course, I’m used to having sole charge. It’s usually
me
has them during the night.’

His father came into the room and kissed Robert on the forehead.

‘Good morning, Margaret,’ he said. ‘I hope you got some sleep, because none of the rest of us did.’

‘Yes, thank you, your sofa’s quite comfortable, actually; not that I shall be complaining when I have a room of my own at your mother’s.’

‘I should hope not,’ said his father. ‘Are you all packed and ready to go? Our taxi is coming any minute now.’

‘Well, I haven’t exactly had time to
un
pack, have I? Except for my sun hat. I got that out in case it’s blazing at the other end.’

‘It’s always blazing at the other end. My mother wouldn’t stand for anything less than catastrophic global warming.’

‘Hmmm, we could do with a bit of global warming in Botley.’

‘I wouldn’t make that sort of remark if you want a good room at the Foundation.’

‘What’s that, dear?’

‘Oh, my mother’s made a “Transpersonal Foundation”.’

‘Is the house not going to be yours, then?’

‘No.’

‘Do you hear that?’ said Margaret, her waxen pallor looming over Robert and spraying shortbread in his face with renewed vigour.

Robert could sense his father’s irritation.

‘He’s far too cool to be worried about all that,’ said his mother.

Everyone started to move about at the same time. Margaret, wearing her sun hat, took the lead, Robert’s parents struggling behind with the luggage. They were taking him outside, where the light came from. He was amazed. The world was a birth room screaming with ambitious life. Branches climbing, leaves flickering, cumulonimbus mountains drifting, their melting edges curling in the light-flooded sky. He could feel his mother’s thoughts, he could feel his father’s thoughts, he could feel Margaret’s thoughts.

‘He loves the clouds,’ said his mother.

‘He can’t see the clouds, dear,’ said Margaret. ‘They can’t focus at his age.’

‘He might still be looking at them without seeing them as we do,’ said his father.

Margaret grunted as she got into the humming taxi.

He was lying still in his mother’s lap, but the land and sky were slipping by outside the window. If he got involved in the moving scene he thought he was moving too. Light flashed on the windowpanes of passing houses, vibrations washed over him from all directions, and then the canyon of buildings broke open and a wedge of sunlight drifted across his face, turning his eyelids orange-pink.

They were on their way to his grandmother’s house, the same house they were staying in now, a week after his brother’s birth.

2

ROBERT WAS SITTING IN
the window sill of his bedroom, playing with the beads he had collected on the beach. He had been arranging them in every possible combination. Beyond his mosquito net (with its bandaged cut) was a mass of ripe leaves belonging to the big plane tree on the terrace. When the wind moved through the leaves it made a sound like lips smacking. If a fire broke out, he could climb out of the window and down those convenient branches. On the other hand, a kidnapper could climb up them. He never used to think about the other hand; now he thought about it all the time. His mother had told him that when he was a baby he loved lying under that plane tree in his cot. Thomas was lying there now, bracketed by his parents.

Margaret was leaving the next day – thank God, as his father said. His parents had given her an extra day off, but she was already back from the village, bearing down on them with a deadly bulletin. Robert waddled across the room pretending to be Margaret and circled back to the window. Everyone said he did amazing imitations; his headmaster went further and said that it was a ‘thoroughly sinister talent which I hope he will learn to channel constructively.’ It was true that once he was intrigued by a situation, as he was by Margaret being back with his family, he could absorb everything he wanted. He pressed against the mosquito net to get a better view.

‘Ooh, it’s that hot,’ said Margaret, fanning herself with a knitting magazine. ‘I couldn’t find any of the cottage cheese in Bandol. They didn’t speak a word of English in the supermarket. “Cottage cheese,” I said, pointing to the house on the other side of the street, “cottage, you know, as in house, only smaller,” but they still couldn’t make head or tail of what I was saying.’

‘They sound incredibly stupid,’ said his father, ‘with so many helpful clues.’

‘Hmmm. I had to get some of the French cheeses in the end,’ said Margaret, sitting down on the low wall with a sigh. ‘How’s the baby?’

‘He seems very tired,’ said his mother.

‘I’m not surprised in this heat,’ said Margaret. ‘I think I must have got sunstroke on that boat, frankly. I’m done to a crisp. Give him plenty of water, dear. It’s the only way to cool them down. They can’t sweat at that age.’

‘Another amazing oversight,’ said his father. ‘Can’t sweat, can’t walk, can’t talk, can’t read, can’t drive, can’t sign a cheque. Foals are standing a few hours after they’re born. If horses went in for banking, they’d have a credit line by the end of the week.’

‘Horses don’t have any use for banking,’ said Margaret.

‘No,’ said his father, exhausted.

In a moment of ecstatic song the cicadas drowned out Margaret’s voice, and Robert felt he could remember exactly what it was like being in that cot, lying under the plane trees in a cool green shade, listening to the wall of cicada song collapse to a solitary call and escalate again to a dry frenzy. He let things rest where they fell, the sounds, the sights, the impressions. Things resolved themselves in that cool green shade, not because he knew how they worked, but because he knew his own thoughts and feelings without needing to explain them. And if he wanted to play with his thoughts, nobody could stop him. Just lying there in his cot, they couldn’t tell whether he was doing anything dangerous. Sometimes he imagined he was the thing he was looking at, sometimes he imagined he was in the space in between, but the best was when he was just looking, without being anyone in particular or looking at anything in particular, and then he floated in the looking, like the breeze blowing without needing cheeks to blow or having anywhere particular to go.

His brother was probably floating right now in Robert’s old cot. The grown-ups didn’t know what to make of floating. That was the trouble with grown-ups: they always wanted to be the centre of attention, with their battering rams of food, and their sleep routines and their obsession with making you learn what they knew and forget what they had forgotten. Robert dreaded sleep. He might miss something: a beach of yellow beads, or grasshopper wings like sparks flying from his feet as he crunched through the dry grass.

He loved it down here at his grandmother’s house. His family only came once a year, but they had been every year since he was born. Her house was a Transpersonal Foundation. He didn’t really know what that was, and nobody else seemed to know either, even Seamus Dourke, who ran it.

‘Your grandmother is a wonderful woman,’ he had told Robert, looking at him with his dim twinkly eyes. ‘She’s helped a lot of people to connect.’

‘With what?’ asked Robert.

‘With the other reality.’

Sometimes he didn’t ask grown-ups what they meant because he thought it would make him seem stupid; sometimes it was because he knew they were being stupid. This time it was both. He thought about what Seamus had said and he didn’t see how there could be more than one reality. There could only be different states of mind with reality housing all of them. That’s what he had told his mother, and she said, ‘You’re so brilliant, darling,’ but she wasn’t really paying attention to his theories like she used to. She was always too busy now. What they didn’t understand was that he really wanted to know the answer.

Back under the plane tree, his brother had started screaming. Robert wished someone would make him stop. He could feel his brother’s infancy exploding like a depth charge in his memory. Thomas’s screams reminded Robert of his own helplessness: the ache of his toothless gums, the involuntary twitching of his limbs, the softness of the fontanelle, only a thumb’s thrust away from his growing brain. He felt that he could remember objects without names and names without objects pelting down on him all day long, but there was something he could only dimly sense: a world before the wild banality of childhood, before he had to be the first to rush out and spoil the snow, before he had even assembled himself into a viewer gazing at the white landscape through a bedroom window, when his mind had been level with the fields of silent crystal, still waiting for the dent of a fallen berry.

He had seen Thomas’s eyes expressing states of mind which he couldn’t have invented for himself. They reared up from the scrawny desert of his experience like brief pyramids. Where did they come from? Sometimes he was a snuffling little animal and then, seconds later, he was radiating an ancient calm, at ease with everything. Robert felt that he was definitely not making up these complex states of mind, and neither was Thomas. It was just that Thomas wouldn’t know what he knew until he started to tell himself a story about what was happening to him. The trouble was that he was a baby, and he didn’t have the attention span to tell himself a story yet. Robert was just going to have to do it for him. What was an older brother for? Robert was already caught in a narrative loop, so he might as well take his little brother along with him. After all, in his way, Thomas was helping Robert to piece his own story together.

Outside, he could hear Margaret again, taking on the cicadas and getting the upper hand.

‘With the breast-feeding you’ve got to build yourself up,’ she started out reasonably enough. ‘Have you not got any Digestive biscuits? Or Rich Tea? We could have a few of those right away, actually. And then you want to have a nice big lunch, with lots of carbohydrates. Not too many vegetables, they’ll give him wind. Nice bit of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding is good, with some roast potatoes, and then a slice or two of sponge cake at tea time.’

‘Good God, I don’t think I can manage all that. In my book it says grilled fish and grilled vegetables,’ said his tired, thin, elegant mother.

‘
Some
vegetables are all right,’ grumbled Margaret. ‘Not onions or garlic, though, or anything too spicy. I had one mother had a curry on my day off! The baby was howling its head off when I got back. “Save me, Margaret! Mummy’s set my little digestive system on fire!” Personally, I always say, “I’ll have the meat and two veg, but don’t worry too much about the veg.”’

Robert had stuffed a cushion under his T-shirt and was tottering around the room pretending to be Margaret. Once his head was jammed full of someone’s words he had to get them out. He was so involved in his performance that he didn’t notice his father coming into the room.

‘What are you doing?’ asked his father, half knowing already.

‘I was just being Margaret.’

‘That’s all we need – another Margaret. Come down and have some tea.’

‘I’m that stuffed already,’ said Robert, patting his cushion. ‘Daddy, when Margaret leaves, I’ll still be here to give Mummy bad advice about how to look after babies. And I won’t charge you anything.’

‘Things are looking up,’ said his father, holding out his hand to pull Robert up. Robert groaned and staggered across the floor and the two of them headed downstairs, sharing their secret joke.

After tea Robert refused to join the others outside. All they did was talk about his brother and speculate about his state of mind. Walking up the stairs, his decision grew heavier with each step, and by the time he reached the landing he was in two minds. Eventually, he sank to the floor and looked down through the banisters, wondering if his parents would notice his sad and wounded departure.

In the hall, angular blocks of evening light slanted across the floor and stretched up the walls. One piece of light, reflected in the mirror, had broken away and trembled on the ceiling. Thomas was trying to comment. His mother, who understood his thoughts, took him over to the mirror and showed him where the light bounced off the glass.

His father came into the hall and handed a bright red drink to Margaret.

‘Ooh, thank you very much,’ said Margaret. ‘I shouldn’t really get tipsy on top of my sunstroke. Frankly, this is more of a holiday for me than a job, with you being so involved and that. Oh, look, Baby’s admiring himself in the mirror.’ She leant the pink shine of her face towards Thomas.

‘You can’t tell whether you’re over here or over there, can you?’

‘I think he knows that he’s in his body rather than stuck to a piece of glass,’ said Robert’s father. ‘He hasn’t read Lacan’s essay on the mirror stage yet, that’s when the real confusion sets in.’

‘Ooh, well, you’d better stick to Peter Rabbit, then,’ chuckled Margaret, taking a gulp of the red liquid.