The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (61 page)

‘I’m not surprised, you’ve had him for a minute and a half.’

Thomas hurtled towards his mother, buckling at the last minute. Mary caught him before his head hit the floor and put him back on his feet.

‘I don’t know how you cope without a nanny,’ said Julia.

‘I don’t know how I would cope with one. I’ve always wanted to look after the children myself.’

‘Motherhood takes some people that way,’ said Julia. ‘I must say, it didn’t in my case, but then I was so
young
when I had Lucy.’

To show that she too went mad in the sun-drenched south, Kettle had come down to dinner wearing a turquoise silk jacket and a pair of lemon-yellow linen trousers. The rest of the household, still wearing their sweat-stained shirts and khaki trousers, left her just where she wanted to be, the lonely martyr to her own high standards.

Thomas slapped his hands over his face as she came in.

‘Oh, it’s too sweet,’ said Kettle. ‘What’s he doing?’

‘Hiding,’ said Mary.

Thomas whipped his hands away and stared at the others with his mouth wide open. Patrick reeled back, thunderstruck by his reappearance. It was Thomas’s new game. It seemed to Patrick the oldest game in the world.

‘It’s so relaxing having him hide where we can all see him,’ said Patrick. ‘I dread the moment when he feels he has to leave the room.’

‘He thinks we can’t see him because he can’t see us,’ said Mary.

‘I must say, I do sympathize,’ said Kettle. ‘I rather wish people saw things exactly as I do.’

‘But you know that they don’t,’ said Mary.

‘Not always, darling,’ said Kettle.

‘I’m not sure that it’s a story of the self-centred child and the well-adjusted adult,’ Patrick had made the mistake of theorizing. ‘Thomas knows that we don’t see things as he does, otherwise he wouldn’t be laughing. The joke is the shift in perspective. He expects us to flow into his point of view when he covers his face, and back into our own when he whips his hands away. We’re the ones who are stuck.’

‘Honestly, Patrick, you always make everything so intellectual,’ Kettle complained. ‘He’s just a little boy playing a game. Apropos of hiding,’ she said, in the manner of someone taking the wheel from a drunken driver, ‘I remember going to Venice with Daddy before we were married. We were trying to be discreet because one was expected to make an effort in those days. Well, of course the first thing that happened was that we ran into Cynthia and Ludo at the airport. We decided to behave rather like Thomas and pretend that if we didn’t look at them they couldn’t see us.’

‘Was it a success?’ asked Patrick.

‘Not at all. They shouted our names across the airport at the top of their voices. I would have thought it was perfectly obvious that we didn’t want to be spotted, but tact was never Ludo’s forte. Anyway, we made all the right noises.’

‘But Thomas does want to be spotted, that’s his big moment,’ said Mary.

‘I’m not saying it’s exactly the same situation,’ said Kettle, with a little splutter of irritation.

‘What are the “right noises”?’ Robert had asked Patrick on the way into dinner.

‘Anything that comes out of Kettle,’ he replied, half hoping she would hear.

It didn’t help that Julia was so unfriendly to Mary, not that it would have helped if she had been friendly. His loyalty to Mary was not in question (or was it?); what was in question was whether he could last without sex for one more second. Unlike the riotous appetites of adolescence, his present cravings had a tragic tinge, they were cravings for the appetites, metacravings, wanting to want. The question now was whether he would be able to sustain an erection, rather than whether he could ever get rid of the damn thing. At the same time the cravings had to cultivate simplicity, they had to collapse into an object of desire, in order to hide their tragic nature. They were not cravings for things which he could get, but for capacities which he would never have back. What would he do if he did get Julia? Apologize for being exhausted, of course. Apologize for being tied up. He was having (get it off your chest, dear, it’ll do you good) a midlife crisis, and yet he wasn’t, because a midlife crisis was a cliché, a verbal Tamazepam made to put an experience to sleep, and the experience he was having was still wide awake – at three thirty in the fucking morning.

He didn’t accept any of it: the reduced horizons, the fading faculties. He refused to buy the pebble spectacles his Magoo-standard eyesight pleaded for. He loathed the fungus which seemed to have invaded his bloodstream, blurring everything. The impression of sharpness which he still sometimes gave was a simulation. His speech was like a jigsaw puzzle he had done a hundred times, he was just remembering what he had done before. He didn’t make fresh connections any more. All that was over.

From down the corridor, he heard Thomas starting to cry. The sound sandpapered his nerves. He wanted to console Thomas. He wanted to be consoled by Julia. He wanted Mary to be consoled by consoling Thomas. He wanted everyone to be all right. He couldn’t bear it any longer. He threw the bedclothes aside and paced the room.

Thomas soon settled down, but his cries had set off a reaction which Patrick could no longer control. He was going to go to Julia’s room. He was going to turn the narrow allotment of his life into a field of blazing poppies. He opened the door slowly, lifting it on its hinges so that it didn’t whine. He pulled it closed again with the handle held down so that it didn’t click. He released the tongue slowly into the groove. The corridor was glowing with child-friendly light. It was as bright as a prison yard. He walked down it, heel-to-toe, all the way to the end, to Lucy’s partially open door. He wanted to check first that she was still in her room. Yes. Fine. He doubled back to Julia’s door. His heart was thumping. He felt terrifyingly alive. He leant close to the door and listened.

What was he going to do next? What would Julia do if he went into her room? Call the police? Pull him into bed whispering, ‘What took you so long?’ Perhaps it was a little tactless to wake her at four in the morning. Maybe he should make an appointment for the following evening. His feet were getting cold, standing on the hexagonal tiles.

‘Daddy.’

He turned around and saw Robert, pale and frowning in the doorway of his bedroom.

‘Hi,’ whispered Patrick.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Good question,’ said Patrick. ‘Well, I heard Thomas crying…’ That much was true. ‘And I wondered if he was all right.’

‘But why are you standing outside Julia’s room?’

‘I didn’t want to disturb Thomas if he had gone back to sleep,’ Patrick explained. Robert was too intelligent for this rubbish, but perhaps he was a shade too young to be told the truth. In a couple of years Patrick could offer him a cigar and say, ‘I’m having this rather awkward
mezzo del camin
thing, and I need a quick affair to buck me up.’ Robert would slap him on the back and say, ‘I completely understand, old man. Good luck and happy hunting.’ In the meantime, he was six years old and the truth had to be hidden from him.

As if to save Patrick from his predicament, Thomas let out another wail of pain.

‘I think I’d better go in,’ said Patrick. ‘Poor Mummy has been up all night.’

He smiled stoically at Robert. ‘You’d better get some sleep,’ he said, kissing him on the forehead.

Robert turned back into his room, unconvinced.

The safety plug in Thomas’s cluttered room cast a faint orange glow across the floor. Patrick picked his way towards the bed into which Mary carried Thomas every night out of his hated cot, and lowered himself onto the mattress, pushing half a dozen soft toys onto the floor. Thomas writhed and twisted, trying to find a comfortable position. Patrick lay on his side, teetering on the edge of the bed. He certainly wasn’t going to get any sleep in this precarious sardine tin, but if he could just let his mind glide along, he might get some rest; if he could go omnogogic, gaining the looseness of dreams without their tyranny, that would be something. He was just going to forget about the Julia incident. What Julia incident?

Perhaps Thomas wouldn’t be a wreck when he grew up. What more could one ask?

He was beginning to glide along in half-thoughts … quarter-thoughts, counting down … down.

Patrick felt a violent kick land on his face. The warm metallic rush of blood flooded his nose and the roof of his mouth.

‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘I think I’ve got a nosebleed.’

‘Poor you,’ mumbled Mary.

‘I’d better go back to my room,’ he whispered, rolling backwards onto the floor. He replaced Thomas’s velveteen bodyguards and clambered to his feet. His knees hurt. He probably had arthritis. He might as well move into his mother’s nursing home. Wouldn’t that be cosy?

He slouched back down the corridor, pressing his nostril with the knuckle of his index finger. There were spots of blood on his pyjamas: so much for the field of poppies. It was five in the morning now, too late for one half of life and too early for the other. No prospect of sleep. He might as well go downstairs, drink a gallon of healthy, organic coffee and pay some bills.

7

KETTLE
,
WEARING DARK GLASSES
and an enormous straw hat, was already sitting at the stone table. Using her expired boarding pass as a bookmark, she closed her copy of James Pope-Hennessy’s biography of Queen Mary and put it down next to her plate.

‘It’s like a dream,’ said Patrick, easing his mother’s wheelchair into position, ‘having you both here at the same time.’

‘Like … a … dream,’ said Eleanor, generalizing.

‘How are you, my dear?’ asked Kettle, bristling with indifference.

‘Very…’

The effort that Eleanor put into producing, after some time, a high-pitched ‘well’ gave an impression of something quite different, as if she had seen herself heading towards ‘mad’ or ‘miserable’ and just managed to swerve at the last moment. Her radiant smile uncovered the dental bomb site Patrick had so often begged her to repair. It was no use: she was not about to waste money on herself while she could still draw a charitable breath. The tiny amount of spare income she had left was being saved up for Seamus’s sensory-deprivation tanks. In the meantime she was well on her way to depriving herself of the sensation of eating. Her tongue curled and twisted among shattered crags, searching forlornly for a whole tooth. There were several no-go areas too sensitive for food to enter.

‘I’m going to help with the lunch,’ said regretful, duty-bound Patrick, bolting across the lawn like a swimmer hurrying to the surface after too long a dive.

He knew that it was not really his mother he needed to escape but the poisonous combination of boredom and rage he felt whenever he thought about her. That, however, was a long-term project. ‘It may take more than one lifetime,’ he warned himself in a voice of simpering tenderness. Just looking at the next few minutes, he needed to put as many literal-minded yards between himself and his mother as he could manage. That morning, in the nursing home, he had found her sitting by the door with her bag on her knees, looking as if she had been ready for hours. She handed him a faint pencil-written note. It said that she wanted to transfer Saint-Nazaire to the Foundation straight away and not, as things stood, after her death. He had managed to postpone things last year, but could he manage it again? The note said she ‘needed closure’ and wanted his help and his ‘blessing’. Seamus’s rhetoric had left its fingerprints all over the prose. No doubt he had a closure ritual lined up, a Native American trance dance which would close its own closure with a macrocosmic and microcosmic, a father sky and mother earth, a symbolic and actual, an immediate and eternal booting out of Patrick and his family from Saint-Nazaire. At the centre of a dogfight of contradictory emotions, Patrick could sometimes glimpse his longing to get rid of the fucking place. At some point he was going to have to drop the whole thing, he was going to have to come back to Saint-Nazaire for a healing-drum weekend, to ask Seamus to help him let go of his childhood home, to put the ‘trans’ into what seemed so terribly personal.

As he crossed from the terrace into the olive grove, Patrick imagined himself extolling to a group of neo-shamen and neo-shawomen the appropriateness, the challenge, and ‘I never would have believed this possible, but I have to use the word “beauty”, of coming back to this property in order to achieve closure in the letting-go process (sighs of appreciation). There was a time when I resented and, yes, I must admit, hated Seamus and the Foundation and my own mother, but my loathing has been miraculously transformed into gratitude, and I can honestly say (little catch in his throat) that Seamus has been not only a wonderful teacher and drum guide, but also my truest friend (the pitter-patter of applause and rattles).’

Patrick ditched his little fantasy with a sarcastic yelp and sat down on the ground with his back to the house, leaning against the knotted grey trunk of an old bifurcating olive tree that he had used all his life to hide and to think. He had to keep reminding himself that Seamus was not a straightforward crook who had cheated a little old lady out of her money. Eleanor and Seamus had corrupted each other with the extravagance of their good intentions. Seamus might have continued to do some good, changing bedpans in Navan – the only town in Ireland to be spelt the same way backwards – and Eleanor could have lived on Ryvita and given her income to the blind, or to medical research, or to the victims of torture, but instead they had joined forces to produce a monument of pretension and betrayal. Together they were going to save the world. Together they were going to heighten consciousness by dumbing down an already dangerously dumb constituency. Whatever good there was in Seamus was being destroyed by Eleanor’s pathological generosity, and whatever good had been in Eleanor was being destroyed by Seamus’s inane vision.

What had turned Eleanor into such a goody-goody? Patrick felt that Eleanor’s loathing for her own mother was at the root of her overambitious altruism. Eleanor had told him the story of being taken by her mother to her first big party. It took place in Rome just after the Second World War. Eleanor was a fifteen-year-old girl back for the holidays from her boarding school in Switzerland. Her mother, a rich American and a dedicated snob, had divorced Eleanor’s dissolute, charming and untitled father and married a dwarfish and ill-tempered French duke, Jean de Valencay, obsessed with questions of rank and genealogy. On the tattered stage of a near-communist Republic, and entirely subsidized by his wife’s recent industrial wealth, he was all the keener to insist on the antiquity of his bloodline. On the night of the party, Eleanor sat in her mother’s immense Hispano-Suiza, parked next to a bombed-out building, round the corner from the glowing windows of Princess Colonna’s house. Her stepfather had been taken ill but, languishing in an ornate Renaissance bed which had been in his family since his wife bought it for him the month before, he made his wife swear that she wouldn’t enter the Princess’s house until after the Duchessa di Dino, over whom she had precedence. Precedence, it turned out, meant that her mother had to arrive late. They waited in the car. In the front, next to the driver, was a footman, periodically sent round to check if the inferior Duchessa had arrived. Eleanor was a shy and idealistic girl, happier talking to the cook than to the guests who were being cooked for, but she was still quite impatient and curious about the party.