The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (78 page)

He longed to get back on the ground as well, back home to London. Losing Saint-Nazaire had made London into his total home. He had heard about children who pretended they had been adopted and that their real parents were much more glamorous than the dreary people they lived with. He had done something similar with Saint-Nazaire, pretending it was his real home. After the shock of losing it, he had gradually relaxed into the knowledge that he really belonged among the sodden billboards and giant plane trees of his native city. Compared to the density of New York, London’s backward glance at the countryside and the rambling privacy of its streets seemed to be the opposite of what a city was for, and yet he longed to get back to the greasy black mud of the parks, the rained-out playgrounds and paddocks of dead leaves, the glance at his scratchy school uniform in the hall mirror, the clunk of the car door on the way to school. Nothing seemed more exotic than the depth of those feelings.

A stewardess told Mary she must wake Thomas for the landing. Thomas woke up and Mary gave him a bottle of milk. Halfway through, he unplugged the bottle and said, ‘Alabala is in the cockpit!’ His eyes rounded as he looked up at his brother. ‘He’s going to land the plane!’

‘Oh-oh,’ said Robert, ‘we’re in trouble.’

‘The captain says, “No, Alabala, you are
not
allowed to land the plane,” said Thomas, thumping his thigh, “but Felan is allowed to land the plane.”

‘Is Felan in there too?’

‘Yes, he is. He’s the co-pilot.’

‘Really? And who’s the pilot?’

‘Scott Tracy.’

‘So this is an International Rescue plane?’

‘Yes. We have to rescue a pentatenton.’

‘What’s a pentatenton?’

‘Well, it’s a hedgehog, actually, and it’s fallen in the river!’

‘In the Thames?’

‘Yes! And it doesn’t know how to swim, so Gordon Tracy has to rescue it with Thunderbird 4.’

Thomas thrust out his hand and moved the submarine through the muddy waters of the Thames.

Robert hummed the theme tune from
Thunderbirds
, drumming on the armrest between them.

‘Perhaps you could get her to sign the letter of consent,’ said Patrick.

‘OK,’ said Mary.

‘At least we can assemble all the elements…’

‘What elements?’ asked Robert.

‘Never mind,’ said Mary. ‘Look, we’re about to land,’ she said, trying to infuse the glinting fields, congested roads and small crowds of reddish houses with an excitement they were unlikely to generate on their own.

On the day of their arrival, the Dignitas membership form and Dr Fenelon’s report emerged from the heap of letters in the hall. Sprawled exhausted on the black sofa, Patrick read through the Dignitas brochures.

‘All the people in the cases they quote have agonizing terminal diseases or can only move one eyelid,’ he commented. ‘I’m worried she may just not be ill enough.’

‘Let’s get everything together and see what they think about her case,’ said Mary.

Patrick gave her the letter of consent he had written before leaving for America and she set off with it to the nursing home. In the upper corridor the cleaners had wedged open the doors to air the rooms. Through the doorway Eleanor looked quite calm, until she detected another presence entering the room and stared with a kind of furious blankness in the direction of the newcomer. When Mary announced who she was, Eleanor grabbed the side rail of her barred bed and tried to heave herself up, making desperate mumbling sounds. Mary felt that she had interrupted Eleanor’s communion with some other realm in which things were not quite as bad as they were on planet Earth. She suddenly felt that both ends of life were absolutely terrifying, with a quite frightening stretch in between. No wonder people did what they could to escape.

There was no point in asking Eleanor how she was, no point in trying to make conversation, and so Mary plunged in with a summary of what had been going on with the rest of them. Eleanor seemed horrified to be placed within the coordinates of her family. Mary quickly moved on to the purpose of her visit, suggesting that she read the letter out loud.

‘If you feel it’s what you want to say, you can sign it,’ she said.

Eleanor nodded.

Mary got up and closed the door, glancing down the corridor to check that there were no nurses on their way. She pulled her chair close to Eleanor’s bed and placed her chin over the hand rail, holding the letter on Eleanor’s side of the bars. She began to read with surprising nervousness.

I have had several strokes over the last few years, each one leaving me more shattered than the last. I can hardly move and I can hardly speak. I am bedridden and incontinent. I feel uninterrupted anguish and terror and frustration at my own immobility and uselessness. There is no prospect of improvement, only of drifting into dementia, the thing I dread most. I can already feel my faculties betraying me. I do not look on death with fear but with longing. There is no other liberation from the daily torture of my existence. Please help me if you can.

yours sincerely,

‘Do you think that’s fair?’ asked Mary, trying not to cry.

‘No … es,’ said Eleanor with great difficulty.

‘I mean a fair description.’

‘Es.’

They gripped each other’s hands for a while, saying nothing. Eleanor looked at her with a kind of dry-eyed hunger.

‘Do you want to sign it?’

‘Sign,’ said Eleanor, swallowing hard.

When Mary broke out into the streets, along with her sense of physical relief at getting away from the smell of urine and boiled cabbage, and the waiting-room atmosphere in which death was the delayed train, she felt grateful that there had been a moment of communication with Eleanor. In that gripped hand she had felt not just an appeal but a determination that made her wonder if she was right to doubt Eleanor’s preparedness to commit suicide. And yet there was something fundamentally lost about Eleanor, a sense that she had neither engaged in the mundane realm of family and friendship and politics and property, nor had she engaged with the realm of contemplation and spiritual fulfilment; she had simply sacrificed one to the other. If she belonged to the tribe who always heard the siren call of the choice they were about to lose, she was bound to feel an absolute need to stay alive once suicide had been perfectly organized for her. Salvation would always be elsewhere. Suddenly it would be more spiritual to stay alive – to learn patience, remain in the refining fires of suffering, whatever. More dreadful life would be imposed on her and it would inevitably seem more spiritual to die – to be reunited with the source, stop being a burden, meet Jesus at the end of a tunnel, whatever. The spiritual, because she had never committed herself to it any more effectively than to the rest of life, was subject to endless metamorphosis without losing its theoretical centrality.

When Mary got home, Thomas ran out into the hall to greet her. He wrapped his arms around her thigh with some difficulty, due to the Hoberman sphere, a multicoloured collapsible dodecahedron frame, which he had allowed to close around his neck and wore as a spiky helmet. His hands were clad in a pair of socks and he was holding a battery-operated propeller fan of fairy lights acquired on a visit to the Chinese State Circus on Blackheath.

‘We’re on Earth, aren’t we, Mama?’

‘Most of us,’ said Mary, thinking of the look she had glimpsed on Eleanor’s face through the open door of her room.

‘Yes, I did know that,’ said Thomas wisely. ‘Except astronauts who are in outer space. And they just float about because there’s no gravity!’

‘Did she sign?’ said Patrick, appearing in the doorway.

‘Yes,’ said Mary, handing him the letter.

Patrick sent the letter and membership form and doctor’s report to Switzerland and waited for a couple of days before ringing to find out if his mother’s application was likely to be successful.

‘In this case I think we will be able to help,’ was the answer he received. He stubbornly refused to get involved with his emotions, letting panic and elation and solemnity lean on the doorbell while he only glanced at them from behind closed curtains, pretending not to be at home. He was helped by the storm of practical demands which enveloped the family during the next week. Mary told Eleanor the news and was answered with a radiant smile. Patrick arranged a flight for the following Thursday. The nursing home was told that Eleanor was moving, without being told where. A consultation was booked with a doctor in Zurich.

‘We could all go on Wednesday to say goodbye,’ said Patrick.

‘Not Thomas,’ said Mary. ‘It’s been too long since he’s seen her and the last time he made it very clear that he was upset. Robert can still remember her when she was well.’

None of Mary’s close friends could look after Thomas on Wednesday afternoon and she was finally forced to ask her mother.

‘Of course I’ll do anything I can to help,’ said Kettle, feeling that if ever there was a time to make all the right noises, it was now. ‘Why don’t you drop him off at lunchtime? Amparo can make him some lovely fish fingers and you can all come to tea after you’ve said goodbye to poor old Eleanor.’

When Wednesday came round Mary brought Thomas to the door of her mother’s flat.

‘Your mother is not here,’ said Amparo.

‘Oh,’ said Mary, surprised and at the same time wondering why she was surprised.

‘She go out to buy the cakes for tea.’

‘But she’ll be back soon…’

‘She has lunch with a friend and then she come back, but don’t you worry, I look after the little boy.’

Amparo reached out her child-greedy, ingratiating hands. Thomas had met her only once before and Mary handed him over with some reluctance but above all with a sense of terminal boredom. Never again, she would never ask her mother to help again. The decision seemed as irrevocable and overdue as a slab of cliff falling into the sea. She smiled at Amparo and handed over Thomas, not reassuring him too much in case it made him think there was something troubling about his situation.

The thing to do is the thing to do, thought Thomas, heading towards the disconnected bell beside the fireplace in the drawing room. He liked to stand on the small chair and press the bell and then let in whoever came to the fireplace-door. By the time Amparo had said goodbye to Mary and caught up with him, he was welcoming a visitor.

‘It’s Badger!’ he said.

‘Who is this Badger?’ said Amparo with precautionary alarm.

‘Mr Badger is not in the habit of smoking cigarettes,’ said Thomas, ‘because they make him grow bigger and smaller. So he smokes cigars!’

‘Oh, no, my darling, you must not smoke,’ said Amparo. ‘It’s very bad for you.’

Thomas climbed onto the small chair and pressed the bell again.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘there’s somebody at the door.’

He leapt down and ran around the table. ‘I’m running to open the door,’ he explained, coming back to the fireplace.

‘Be careful,’ said Amparo.

‘It’s Lady Penelope,’ said Thomas. ‘You be Lady Penelope!’

‘Would you like to help me with the hoovering?’ said Amparo.

‘Yes, m’lady,’ said Thomas in his Parker voice. ‘You’ll find a thermos of hot chocolate in your hat box.’ He howled with pleasure and flung himself on the cushions of the sofa.

‘Oh, my God, I just tidy this,’ wailed Amparo.

‘Build me a house,’ said Thomas, pulling the cushions onto the floor. ‘Build me a house!’ he shouted when she started to put them back. He lowered his head and frowned severely. ‘Look, Amparo, this is my grumpy face.’

Amparo caved in to his desire for a house and Thomas crawled into the space between two cushions and underneath the roof of a third.

‘Unfortunately,’ he remarked once he had settled into position, ‘Beatrix Potter died a long time ago.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, darling,’ said Amparo.

Thomas hoped that his parents would live for a very long time. He wanted them to be immortalized. That was a word he had learnt in his
Children’s Book of Greek Myths.
Ariadne was immortalized when she was turned into a star by Dionysus. Immortalized meant that she lived for ever – except that she was a star. He didn’t want his parents to turn into stars. What would be the point of that? Just twinkling away.

‘Just twinkling away,’ he said sceptically.

‘Oh, my God, you come with Amparo to the bathroom.’

He couldn’t understand why Amparo stood him by the loo and tried to pull his trousers down.

‘I don’t want to do peepee,’ he said flatly and started to walk away. The truth was that Amparo was quite difficult to have a conversation with. She didn’t seem to understand anything. He decided to go on an expedition. She trailed behind him, wittering on.

‘No, Amparo,’ he said, turning on her, ‘leave me alone!’

‘I can’t leave you, darling. You have to have an adult with you.’

‘No! I!’ said Thomas. ‘You are frustrating me!’

Amparo bent double with laughter. ‘Oh, my God,’ she said. ‘You know so many words.’

‘I have to talk, otherwise my mouth gets clogged up with bits and pieces of words,’ said Thomas.

‘How old are you now, darling?’

‘I’m three,’ said Thomas. ‘How old did you think I was?’

‘I thought you were at least five, you’re such a grown-up boy.’

‘Hum,’ said Thomas.

He saw that there was no prospect of shaking her off and so he decided to treat her the way his parents treated him when they wanted to bring him under control.

‘Shall I tell you an Alabala story?’ he said.

They were back in the drawing room. He sat Amparo down on an armchair and climbed into his cushion cave.

‘Once upon a time,’ he began, ‘Alabala was in California and he was driving along with his mummy and there was an earthquake!’

‘I hope this story has a happy ending,’ said Amparo.

‘No!’ said Thomas. ‘You don’t interrupt me!’ He sighed and began again. ‘And the ground opened up and California fell into the sea, which was not very convenient, as you can imagine. And there was a huge tidal wave, and Alabala said to his mummy, “We can surf to Australia!” And so they did, and Alabala was allowed to drive the car.’ He searched the ceiling for inspiration and then added with all the naturalness of suddenly remembering. ‘When they arrived on the beach in Australia, Alan Razor was there giving a concert!’