The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (76 page)

‘You always know everything. No wonder you felt you could miss dinner.’

Everything she said was wrong. No matter what she did, Patrick felt abandoned. She tried again.

‘I mean, I just had a feeling before dinner that North Korea would be next.’

‘That’s what Henry thinks: North Korea is next. You should form a coalition.’

‘Did you argue with him, or are you going to have to argue with me instead?’

‘We relied heavily on the democratic miracle of agreeing to disagree. Henry hates free speech but, partly as a result of that, he isn’t free to say so. He banged on about how lucky we were not to live in a country where you could be shot for holding the wrong opinions.’

‘He wants to shoot you.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Great. That’ll make our holiday more fun.’

‘More fun? Don’t you have to be having fun in the first place to have more fun?’

‘I think the children are having fun.’

‘Oh, well, that’s all that matters,’ said Patrick with rigid piety. ‘I did hint to Henry,’ he continued, pacing up and down at the end of the bed, ‘that I felt the present administration’s foreign policy was made up of projection. That America is the rogue state with a fundamentalist president, and several thousand times the weapons of mass destruction of all other nations combined, et cetera, et cetera.’

‘How did that go down?’ Mary wanted to keep him going, keep the aggression political.

‘Incredulous laughter. A lot of neck-craning. False smiles. Reminded me of “a certain event which played no small part in our lives over here”. I said that 9/11 was one of the most shocking things in history, but that its exploitation, what I’d like to call 9/12, was just as shocking in its own way. The tracer bullet was the use of the word “war” on the following day. War is an activity between nation states. A word the British government spent thirty years carefully avoiding in its struggle with the IRA. Why give the standing of a nation state to a few hundred homicidal maniacs, unless you’re going to use them as the pretext to make war with some real nation states? Henry said, “I think that’s a distinction that would be lost on Joe Six-Pack. We had a war to sell to the American public.” That was the trouble with our conversation – my accusations are his assumptions, selling war to the American public, testing new weapons, stimulating the military-industrial complex, using public money to demolish a country which the cabinet’s pet corporations benefit from rebuilding and so forth. He loves it all, so he can’t be caught making hollow apologies.’

‘How was Robert?’

‘An excellent junior counsel,’ said Patrick. ‘He made the no-proven-links point and played pretty skilfully with the idea of “innocent lives”. He asked Henry whether innocence was exclusively American. Again, the trouble is that for Henry the answer is really “Yes”, so it’s hard to get him on the run. He didn’t bother to pretend much, except about free speech.’

‘How did he answer Robert?’

‘Oh, he just said that he could see that I’d “trained” him. He obviously thought we were the tag team from hell. The thing that ruffled him was my last bombing mission, in which I said that a really “developed” nation, as opposed to a merely powerful one, might bother to imagine the impact of two per cent of the world’s population consuming fifty per cent of its resources, of the rapid extinction of every species of non-American culture and so forth. I got a little bit carried away and also said that the death of nature was a high price to pay for adding the few last curlicues of convenience to the lives of the very rich.’

‘It’s amazing he didn’t throw us out,’ said Mary.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll try again tomorrow. I’ll get him in the end. I can see now what upsets him. Politics is an exciting game, but money is sacred.’

She could tell that Patrick was serious. His sense of tension was so extreme that he had to destroy something, and this time it wasn’t going to be himself.

‘Do you mind not getting us thrown out for a couple of days? I’ve only just finished unpacking.’ She tried to sound breezy.

‘And you’re comfortably installed with your lover as usual,’ said Patrick.

‘God, for a man who claims not to suffer from jealousy…’

‘I don’t suffer from jealousy, I suffer from rage. It’s more fundamental. Loss produces anger first, possessiveness afterwards.’

‘Before the rage, there’s anxiety,’ said Mary, feeling she knew what she was talking about. ‘Anyway, I think you move through all three, even if one is usually dominant. It’s not like shopping, you can’t just opt for rage.’

‘You’d be surprised.’

‘I know you prefer anger because you think it’s less humiliating.’

‘I don’t prefer anger,’ shouted Patrick, ‘but I get it anyway.’

‘I mean prefer it to the neighbouring emotions.’

Thomas, disturbed by Patrick’s shouting, shifted in the bed and muttered to himself inaudibly.

‘You’re straying from the point,’ said Patrick, more quietly. ‘As usual we can’t sleep together because you’re in bed with our three-year-old son.’

‘We can sleep together,’ sighed Mary, ‘I’ll move him over to the side.’

‘I want to make love to a woman, not a sighing heap of guilt and resignation,’ hissed Patrick, in an ineffective whisper.

Thomas sat up blearily.

‘No, Dada, you stop talking nonsense!’ he shouted. ‘And Mama, stop upsetting Dada!’

He collapsed back on the pillow and fell asleep again, his work done. A silence fell over the room, which Patrick was the first to interrupt.

‘I wasn’t talking nonsense…’ he began.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Mary. ‘You don’t have to win an argument with him as well. Can’t you hear what he’s saying? He wants us to stop arguing, not for you to start arguing with him.’

‘Sure,’ said Patrick in his suddenly bored way. ‘I’ll go to his bed, although I don’t know why I call it “his” bed. I might as well stop pretending and call it mine.’

‘You don’t have to…’

‘No – I do have to,’ said Patrick and ducked out of the room.

He had abandoned her abruptly, but failed to transfer his sense of abandonment to her. She felt relieved, angry, guilty, mournful. The cloudscape of her emotional life was so rolling and rapid that she couldn’t help marvelling at, sometimes envying, people who were ‘out of touch with their feelings’. How did they do it? Right now she wouldn’t mind knowing.

Her bedroom had a terrace built above the bay window of the drawing room where she had been sitting before dinner. She walked up to the French windows and imagined herself throwing them open, contemplating the stars, having an epiphany.

It wasn’t going to happen. Her body had started its landslide towards sleep. She took one last glance out of the window and wished she hadn’t. A thin streak of cloud was crossing the moon in a way that reminded her of the elision in
Un Chien Andalou
between the same image and a razor blade slicing open an eyeball. Her vision was the end of vision. Was she blinded by something she couldn’t see, or blinded by seeing something she couldn’t bear to look at? She was too tired to work anything out. Her thoughts were just threats, sleep just the rubble of wakefulness.

She got into bed and was covered by a thin layer of broken rest. Soon afterwards, she was disturbed by hearing Patrick slink back into the room. She could feel him staring at her to see if she was awake. She gave nothing away. He eventually settled on the other side of Thomas, who lay in the middle like the sword placed between the unmarried in a medieval bed. Why couldn’t she reach out to Patrick? Why couldn’t she make a nest of pillows for Thomas on one side of the bed and stay with Patrick on the other? She had no charity left for Patrick. In fact, for the first time in her marriage she could picture herself and the children living alone in the flat while Patrick was off somewhere, anywhere, being miserable.

The next day she was shocked by her coldness, but she soon got used to it.

She had always known it was there, the alternative to the warmth which struck everyone as so typical. Now she took it up like a hermit moving into a cave. She resisted Patrick’s rashes of nervous charm without effort. It was too tiring to move back and forth to the jumpy rhythm of his moods. She might as well stay where she was. He was going to ruin their holiday, but first he wanted to make her agree that fighting with Henry was a sign of his splendid integrity rather than his uncontrollable irritation. She refused. By that evening it was clear that Patrick’s agreement to disagree with Henry was in peril.

‘It’s going to be tough to make conversation if you don’t stop attacking everything I say,’ said plain-speaking Henry. ‘Let’s stick to talking family.’

‘That proven formula for goodwill and unity,’ said Patrick with one of his short barking laughs.

‘You’re as bad as Yasser Arafat,’ said Henry. ‘You think peace and defeat are the same thing. I’m just trying to extend some hospitality here. You don’t have to accept it, if you’ve got an ideological problem with that.’ Henry chuckled at the word ‘ideological’, which for him was as inherently comic as the word ‘bottom’ to an exuberant four-year-old.

‘That’s right,’ said Patrick, ‘we don’t.’

‘But we’d like to,’ said Mary quickly.

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Patrick.

‘I am,’ she said, ‘and unlike you I’m also trying to speak for the children.’

‘Are you? Only this morning Thomas was saying that Henry is “a very funny man” and, as you know, Robert’s nickname for him is “Hitler”. I doubt you’re even speaking for yourself after you were thrown out of lunch yesterday.’

That had been that. They left the next morning. She expected Patrick to be stubborn and proud and destructive, but she hadn’t yet forgiven him for including the children in his final explosive charge.

The ice machine in the motel corridor produced another juddering emission of cubes just the other side of the thin bedroom wall. The interstate’s mosquito whine had given way to a hornet drone. Thomas stirred beside her and then, with his usual prompt transition to full desire, he sat up and said, ‘I want you to read me a story.’ She obediently picked up the copy of
The Wind in the Willows
which they had started reading in Maine.

‘Do you remember where we were?’ asked Mary.

‘Ratty was saying to Moley that he was a plain pig,’ said Thomas, rounding his eyes in amazement. ‘But, actually, he’s a rat.’

‘That’s right,’ laughed Mary. Rat and Mole were on their way back to River Bank in the gathering darkness of a December afternoon. Mole had just smelt the traces of his old home and was overwhelmed by longing and nostalgia. Rat had pressed on to River Bank, his own home, assuming Mole would want to go there as well. Then Mole broke down and told Rat about his homesickness. Mary reread the sentence they had finished with the night before.

‘The Rat stared straight in front of him, saying nothing, only patting Mole gently on the shoulder. After a time he muttered gloomily, “I see it all now! What a pig I’ve been! A pig – that’s me! Just a pig – a plain pig!”’

‘I mean…’ Thomas began.

There was a knock on the door. Mary put the book down and asked who it was.

‘Bobby!’ said Thomas. ‘I knew it was you because – well, because it is you!’

Robert sat down on the bed with his shoulders slumped, ignoring his brother’s reasoning.

‘I hate this place,’ he said.

‘I know,’ said Mary, ‘but we’ll move on this morning.’

‘Again,’ groaned Robert. ‘We’ve been to three motels since the Prosecuting Attorney got us thrown off that brilliant island. We might as well get a mobile home.’

‘I’m going to ring Sally after breakfast and ask her if we could go to Long Island a few days earlier than planned.’

‘I don’t want to go to Long Island, I want to go home,’ said Robert.

‘Moley smells his home and he wants it,’ said Thomas, leaning forward to support his brother’s case.

They agreed that if they couldn’t go straight to Long Island, they would tell Patrick they wanted to go back to England.

‘No more magic of the open road,’ said Robert. ‘Please.’

When she rang Sally there was no answer in Long Island. Eventually she found her in New York.

‘We had to come back to the city because our water tank burst and flooded the apartment downstairs. Our neighbours are suing us, so we’re suing the plumbers who only put the tank in last year. The plumbers are suing the tank company for defective design. And the residents are suing the building, even though they’re all on vacation, because the water was cut off for two days instead of two hours, which caused them a lot of mental stress in Tuscany and Nantucket.’

‘Gosh,’ said Mary. ‘What’s wrong with mopping up and getting a new water tank?’

‘That is
so
English,’ said Sally, delighted by Mary’s quaint stoicism.

Mary explained at breakfast that there wasn’t really room in the New York apartment, but Sally said they were welcome to all squeeze in somehow.

‘I don’t want to squeeze in,’ said Robert, ‘I want to fly out.’

‘We’re on an aeroplane now,’ said Thomas, thrusting his arms out like wings, ‘and Alabala is in the cockpit!’

‘Oh-oh,’ said Robert, ‘we’d better catch the next flight.’

‘He’s on the next flight as well,’ said Thomas, as surprised as anyone by Alabala’s resourcefulness.

‘How did he manage that?’ said Robert.

Thomas glanced sideways for a moment to look for the explanation.

‘He used his ejector seat,’ he said, making an ejector-seat noise, ‘and then Felan stopped the next plane and Alabala got on!’

‘There’s the little matter of our unrefundable tickets,’ said Patrick.

‘We could have bought new ones with the money we’ve spent in these disgusting motels,’ said Robert.

‘You’ve taught him to argue too well,’ said Mary.

‘There’s no one to argue with, is there?’ said Patrick. ‘I think we’re all sick of America by now.’

16

AFTER HER FALL
,
ELEANOR
’
S
ceaseless pleas for death had forced Patrick to look into the legalities of euthanasia and assisted suicide. Once again, as with his own disinheritance, he became the legal servant of his mother’s repulsive demands. Superficially, there was something more attractive about getting rid of Eleanor than there had been about losing Saint-Nazaire, but then the obscenity of what he was being asked to do would break through the stockade of practicalities with Jacobean vigour. Even if a nursing home was not the usual setting for a
Revenger’s Tragedy
, he felt the perils of usurping God’s monopoly on vengeance just as keenly as he would have in the catacombs of an Italian castle. He tried to pull himself together, to examine his motives scrupulously. The dead were not dogged enough to make ghosts without the guilt of the living. His mother was like a rock fall blocking a mountain pass. Perhaps he could clear her out of the way, but if his intentions were murderous, her ghost would haunt the pass for ever.