The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (73 page)

The day after she had settled into her thickly carpeted, overheated, nursing tomb in Kensington, Patrick was rung by the director.

‘Your mother would like to see you straight away. She thinks she’s going to die today.’

‘Is there any reason to believe she’s right?’

‘There’s no medical reason as such, but she is very insistent.’

Patrick hauled himself out of his chambers and went over to see Eleanor. He found her crying from the unspeakable frustration of having something so important to say. After half an hour, she finally gave birth to, ‘Die today,’ delivered with all the stunned wonder of recent motherhood. After that, hardly a day passed without a death promise emerging from half an hour’s gibbering, weeping struggle.

When Patrick complained to Kathleen, the perky Irish nurse in charge of Eleanor’s floor, she clasped his forearm and hooted, ‘She’ll probably outlive us all. Take Dr MacDougal on the next floor. When he was seventy, he married a lady half his age – she was a lovely lady, so friendly. Well, the next year, it was quite tragic really, he got the Alzheimer’s and moved in here. She was ever so devoted, came to see him every day. Anyway, if she didn’t get breast cancer the following year. She was dead three years after marrying him, and he’s still upstairs,
going strong.
’

After a final hoot of laughter, she left him standing alone in the airless corridor next to the locked dispensary.

What depressed him even more than the inaccuracy of Eleanor’s predictions was the doggedness of her self-deception and her spiritual vanity. The idea that she had any special insight into the exact time of her death was typical of the daydreams that ruled her life. It was only in June, after she had fallen over and broken her hip, that she began to take a more realistic attitude about the degree of control she could have over her death.

Patrick went to visit her in the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital after her fall.

Eleanor had been given morphine for breakfast, but her restlessness was unsubdued. The desperate need to get out of bed, which had produced several falls, bruising her right temple purple-black, leaving her nose swollen and red, staining her right eyelid yellow and eventually fracturing her hip, made her, even now, reach for the bar on the side of her Evans Nesbit Jubilee bed and try to pull herself up with those flabby white arms bruised by fresh puncture marks Patrick could not help envying. A few clear phrases reared up like Pacific islands from a mumbling moaning ocean of meaningless syllables.

‘I have a rendezvous,’ she said, making a renewed surge towards the end of the bed.

‘I’m sure whoever you have to meet will come here,’ said Patrick, ‘knowing that you can’t move.’

‘Yes,’ she said, collapsing back on the bloodstained pillows for a moment, but lurching forwards again and wailing, ‘I have a rendezvous.’

She was not strong enough to stay up for long, and soon resumed a slow writhing motion on the bed, and the long haul through another stretch of murmurous, urgent nonsense. And then ‘No longer’ appeared, not attached to anything else. She ran her hands down her face in exasperation, looking as if she wanted to cry but was being let down by her body in that respect as well.

At last she managed it.

‘I want you to kill me,’ she said, gripping his hand surprisingly hard.

‘I’d love to help,’ said Patrick, ‘but unfortunately it’s against the law.’

‘No longer,’ shouted Eleanor.

‘We’re doing all we can,’ he said vaguely.

Looking for solace in practicality, Patrick tried to give his mother a sip of pineapple juice from the plastic glass on her bedside table. He eased his hand under the top pillow and lifted her head, tipping the juice gently towards her peeling lips. He felt himself being transformed by the tenderness of the act. He had never treated anyone so carefully except his own children. The flow of generations was reversed and he found himself holding his useless, treacherous, confused mother with exquisite anxiety. How to lift her head, how to make sure she didn’t choke. He watched her roll the sip of juice around her mouth, an alarmed and disconnected look on her face, and he willed her to succeed while she tried to remind her throat how to swallow.

Poor Eleanor, poor little Eleanor, she wasn’t well at all, she needed help, she needed protection. There was no obstacle, no interruption to his desire to help her. He was amazed to see his argumentative, disappointed mind overwhelmed by a physical act. He leant over further and kissed her on the forehead.

A nurse came in and saw the glass in Patrick’s hand.

‘Did you give her some of the Thicken Up?’ she asked.

‘Some what?’

‘Thicken Up,’ she said, tapping a tin of that name.

‘I don’t think my mother wants to thicken up,’ said Patrick. ‘You haven’t got a tin called “Waste Away”, have you?’

The nurse looked shocked, but Eleanor smiled.

‘Aste way,’ she echoed.

‘She had a very good breakfast this morning,’ the nurse persevered.

‘Orce,’ said Eleanor.

‘Forced?’ Patrick suggested.

She turned her wild-eyed face towards him and said, ‘Yes.’

‘When you get back to the nursing home, you can stop eating if you want to,’ said Patrick. ‘You’ll have more control over your fate.’

‘Yes,’ she whispered, smiling.

She seemed to relax for the first time. And so did Patrick. He was going to guard his mother from having more horrible life imposed on her. Here at last was a filial role he could throw himself into.

Patrick looked at Nancy’s other photograph albums, over a hundred identical red-leather volumes dated from 1919 to 2001, ranged in the shelves directly in front of him. The rest of the room was lined with decorative blocks of leather books and, lower down, glossy books on the art of decoration. Even the two doors, one into the hall and the other into the study where Nancy was talking on the phone, did not interrupt the library theme. Their backs were crowded with the spines of false books resting on trompe l’œil shelves perfectly aligned with the real shelves, so that when the doors were closed the room generated an impressive claustrophobia. The blast of resentment and nostalgia coming from Nancy, undiminished since he last saw her eight years before, made Patrick all the more determined not to live in the has-been world enshrined in the wall of albums – let alone in the might-have-been realm where Nancy’s imagination burnt even more ferociously. There seemed little point in trying to give her a bracing lecture on the value of staying contemporary when she wouldn’t even stick to the past as it was, but preferred a version cleansed of the injustice which had been done to her nearly forty years earlier. The afterglow of plutocracy was no more alluring to him than a pile of dirty dishes after a dinner party. Something had died, and its death was tied in with the tenderness he had felt for Eleanor when he helped her drink that glass of pineapple juice in hospital.

Seeing his aunt made him marvel again at how different she was from her sister. And yet their attitudes of extreme worldliness and extreme unworldliness had a common origin in a sense of maternal betrayal and financial disappointment. The blame had been reattributed to her stepfather by Nancy, while Eleanor had tried to unload the sense of betrayal onto Patrick. Unsuccessfully, he now liked to think, although after only a few hours with his aunt he felt like a recovering alcoholic who has been given a cocktail shaker for his birthday.

The tall clear windows looked onto a broad lawn sloping down to an ornamental pond and spanned by a wooden Japanese bridge. From where he sat he could see Thomas trying to hang over the side of the bridge, gently restrained by Mary while he pointed at the exotic waterfowl rippling across the bright coin of water. Or perhaps there were koi carp giving depth to the Japanese theme. Or some samurai armour gleaming in the mud. It was dangerous to underestimate Nancy’s decorative thoroughness. Robert was writing his diary in the little pond-side pagoda.

Several shelves of unreadable classics creaked open and Nancy strode back into the room.

‘That was our rich cousin,’ she said, as if invigorated by contact with money.

‘Which one?’

‘Henry. He says you’re going to his island next week.’

‘That’s right,’ said Patrick. ‘We’re just paw whi-te trash throwin’ oursef on the cha-ri-tee of our American kin.’

‘He wanted to know if your children were well behaved. I told him they hadn’t broken anything yet. “How long have they been there?” he asked. When I said you arrived about two hours ago, he said, “Oh, for God sakes, Nancy, what kind of a sample is that? I’m ringing back tomorrow for a full report.” I guess not everybody has the world’s most important collection of Meissen figurines.’

‘I don’t suppose he will either, after Thomas has been to stay.’

‘Don’t say that!’ said Nancy. ‘Now you’re making me nervous.’

‘I didn’t know Henry had become so pompous. I haven’t seen him in at least twenty years; it was really very hospitable of him to let us come. As a teenager he belonged to that familiar type, the complacent rebel. I suppose the rebel was defeated by the army of Meissen figurines. Who can blame him for surrendering? Imagine the gleaming hordes of porcelain milkmaids clearing the brow of the hill and flooding the bowl of the valley, and poor Henry with only a rolled-up portfolio statement to beat them off.’

‘You get awfully carried away by your imagination,’ said Nancy.

‘Sorry,’ said Patrick. ‘I haven’t been in court for three weeks. The speeches pile up…’

‘Well, your ancient aunt is going to have a rest now. We’re going to Walter’s and Beth’s for tea, and I’d better be on top form for that. Don’t let the children walk on the grass barefoot, or go into the woods at all. I’m afraid this part of Connecticut is a Lyme disease hot spot, and the ticks are just dreadful this year. The gardener tries to keep the poison ivy out of the garden, but he can’t control the woods. Lyme disease is just horrible. It’s recurring and if it goes untreated it can destroy your life. There’s a little boy who lives in the village here and he’s really not at all well. He has psychotic fits and things. Beth just takes the antibiotics round the clock. She “self-medicates”. She says it’s safer to assume you’re always in danger.’

‘Grounds for perpetual war,’ said Patrick. ‘
Tout ce qu’il y a de plus chic.
’

‘Well, if you want to put it that way.’

‘I think I do. Not necessarily to her face.’

‘Necessarily
not
to her face,’ Nancy flared up. ‘She’s one of my oldest friends and besides, she’s the most powerful of the Park Avenue women and it’s not a good idea to cross her.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ said Patrick.

After Nancy had left, Patrick walked over to the drinks tray and, so as not to leave a dirty glass, drank several gulps of bourbon from a bottle of Maker’s Mark. He sank back into an armchair and stared out of the window. The impenetrable New England countryside looked pretty enough, but was in fact packed with more dangers than a Cambodian swamp. Mary already had several pamphlets on Lyme disease – named after a Connecticut town only a few miles away – and so there was no need to rush out and tell the family.

‘It’s safer to assume you’re always in danger.’ Some verbal tic made him want to say, ‘It’s safer to assume you’re safe unless you’re in danger’, but he was quickly won over by the plausibility of paranoia. In any case, he now felt in danger all the time. Danger of liver collapse, marital breakdown, terminal fear. Nobody ever died of a feeling, he would say to himself, not believing a word of it, as he sweated his way through the feeling that he was dying of fear. People died of feelings all the time, once they had gone through the formality of materializing them into bullets and bottles and tumours. Someone who was organized like him, with utterly chaotic foundations, a quite strongly developed intellect and almost nothing in between desperately needed to develop the middle ground. Without it, he split into a vigilant day mind, a bird of prey hovering over a landscape, and a helpless night mind, a jellyfish splattered on the deck of a ship. ‘The Eagle and the Jellyfish’, a fable Aesop just couldn’t be bothered to write. He guffawed with abrupt, slightly deranged laughter and got up to take another gulp of bourbon from the bottle. Yes, the middle ground was now occupied by a lake of alcohol. The first drink centred him for about twenty minutes and then the rest brought his night mind rushing over the landscape like the dark blade of an eclipse.

The whole thing, he knew, was a humiliating Oedipal drama. Despite the superficial revolution in his relations with Eleanor, a local victory of compassion over loathing, the underlying impact she had made on his life remained undisturbed. His fundamental sense of being was a kind of free fall, a limitless dread, a claustrophobic agoraphobia. Doubtless there was something universal about fear. His sons, despite their lavish treatment from Mary, had moments of fear, but these were temporary afflictions, whereas Patrick felt that fear was the ground he stood on, or the groundlessness he fell into, and he couldn’t help connecting this conviction with his mother’s absolute inability to concentrate on another human being. He had to remind himself that the defining characteristic of Eleanor’s life was her incompetence. She wanted to have a child and became a lousy mother; she wanted to write children’s stories and became a lousy writer; she wanted to be a philanthropist and gave all her money to a self-serving charlatan. Now she wanted to die and she couldn’t do that either. She could only communicate with people who presented themselves as the portals to some bombastic generalization, like ‘humanity’ or ‘salvation’, something the mewling, puking Patrick must have been unable to do. One of the troubles with being an infant was the difficulty of distinguishing incompetence from malice, and this difficulty sometimes returned to him in the drunken middle of the night. It was now beginning to invade his view of Mary as well.

Mary had been a devoted mother to Robert, but after the absorption of the first year she had resurfaced as a wife, if only because she wanted another child. With Thomas, perhaps because she knew that he was her last child, she seemed to be trapped in a Madonna and Child force field, preserving a precinct of purity, including her own rediscovered virginity. Patrick was in the unenviable role of Joseph in this enduring, unendurable Bethlehem. Mary had completely withdrawn her attention from him and the more he requested it the more he appeared in the light of an imposturous rival to his younger son. He had turned elsewhere, to Julia, and once that had collapsed, to the oblivious embrace of alcohol. He must stop. At his age he either had to join the resistance or become a collaborator with death. There was no room to play with self-destruction once the juvenile illusion of indestructibility had evaporated.