The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (54 page)

‘Much as I’d love to join you outside,’ said his father, ‘I have a million important letters to answer.’

‘Ooh, Daddy’s going to be answering his important letters,’ said Margaret, breathing the red smell into Thomas’s face. ‘You’ll just have to content yourself with Margaret and Mummy.’

She swung her way towards the front door. The lozenge of light disappeared from the ceiling and then flickered back. Robert’s parents stared at each other silently.

As they stepped outside, he imagined his brother feeling the vast space around him.

He stole halfway down the stairs and looked through the doorway. A golden light was claiming the tops of the pines and the bone-white stones of the olive grove. His mother, still barefoot, walked over the grass and sat under their favourite pepper tree. Crossing her legs and raising her knees slightly, she placed his brother in the hammock formed by her skirt, still holding him with one hand and stroking his side with the other. Her face was dappled by the shadow of the small bright leaves that dangled around them.

Robert wandered hesitantly outside, not sure where he belonged. Nobody called him and so he turned round the corner of the house as if he had always meant to go down to the second pond and look at the goldfish. Glancing back, he saw the stick with sparkly wheels that Margaret had bought his brother at the little carousel in Lacoste. The stub of the stick had been planted in the ground near the pepper tree. The wheels spun in the wind, gold and pink and blue and green. ‘It’s the colour and the movement,’ said Margaret when she bought it, ‘they love that.’ He had snatched it from the corner of his brother’s pram and run around the carousel, making the wheels turn. When he was swishing it through the air he somehow broke the stick and everyone got upset on his brother’s behalf because he never really got the chance to enjoy his sparkly windmill before it was broken. Robert’s father had asked him a lot of questions, or rather the same question in a lot of different ways, as if it would do him good to admit that he had broken it on purpose. Do you think you’re jealous? Do you think you’re angry that he’s getting all the attention and the new toys? Do you? Do you? Do you? Well, he had just said it was an accident and wouldn’t budge. And it really was an accident, but it so happened that he did hate his brother, and he wished that he didn’t. Couldn’t his parents remember what it was like when it was just the three of them? They loved each other so much that it hurt when one of them left the room. What had been wrong with having just him on his own? Wasn’t he enough? Wasn’t he good enough? They used to sit on the lawn, where his brother was now, and throw each other the red ball (he had hidden it; Thomas wasn’t going to get that as well) and whether he caught it or dropped it, they had all laughed and everything was perfect. How could they want to spoil that?

Maybe he was too old. Maybe babies were better. Babies were impressed by pretty well anything. Take the fish pond he was throwing pebbles into. He had seen his mother carrying Thomas to the edge of the pond and pointing to the fish, saying, ‘Fish.’ It was no use trying that sort of thing with Robert. What he couldn’t help wondering was how his brother was supposed to know whether she meant the pond, the water, the weeds, the clouds reflected on the water, or the fish, if he could see them. How did he even know that ‘Fish’ was a thing rather than a colour or something that you do? Sometimes, come to think of it, it was something to do.

Once you got words you thought the world was everything that could be described, but it was also what couldn’t be described. In a way things were more perfect when you couldn’t describe anything. Having a brother made Robert wonder what it had been like when he only had his own thoughts to guide him. Once you locked into language, all you could do was shuffle the greasy pack of a few thousand words that millions of people had used before. There might be little moments of freshness, not because the life of the world has been successfully translated but because a new life has been made out of this thought stuff. But before the thoughts got mixed up with words, it wasn’t as if the dazzle of the world hadn’t been exploding in the sky of his attention.

Suddenly, he heard his mother scream.

‘What have you done to him?’ she shouted.

He sprinted round the corner of the terrace and met his father running out of the front door. Margaret was lying on the lawn, holding Thomas sprawled on her bosom.

‘It’s all right, dear, it’s all right,’ said Margaret. ‘Look, he’s even stopped crying. I took the fall, you see, on my bottom. It’s my training. I think I may have broken my finger, but there’s no need to worry about silly old Margaret as long as no harm has come to the baby.’

‘That’s the first sensible thing I’ve ever heard you say,’ said his mother, who never said anything unkind. She lifted Thomas out of Margaret’s arms and kissed his head again and again. She was taut with anger, but as she kissed him tenderness started to drown it out.

‘Is he all right?’ asked Robert.

‘I think so,’ said his mother.

‘I don’t want him to be hurt,’ Robert said, and they walked back into the house together, leaving Margaret talking on the ground.

*   *   *

The next morning, they were all hiding from Margaret in his parents’ bedroom. Robert’s father had to drive Margaret to the airport that afternoon.

‘I suppose we ought to go down,’ said his mother, closing the poppers of Thomas’s jumpsuit, and lifting him into her arms.

‘No,’ howled his father, throwing himself onto the bed.

‘Don’t be such a baby.’

‘Having a baby makes you more childish, haven’t you noticed?’

‘I haven’t got time to be more childish, that’s a privilege reserved for fathers.’

‘You would have time if you were getting any competent help.’

‘Come on,’ said Robert’s mother, reaching out to his father with her spare hand.

He clasped it lightly but didn’t move.

‘I can’t decide which is worse,’ he said, ‘talking to Margaret, or listening to her.’

‘Listening to her,’ Robert voted. ‘That’s why I’m going to do my Margaret imitation all the time after she’s gone.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ said his mother. ‘Look, even Thomas is smiling at such a mad idea.’

‘That’s not smiling, dear,’ grumbled Robert, ‘that’s wind tormenting his little insides.’

They all started laughing and then his mother said, ‘Shhh, she might hear us,’ but it was too late, Robert was determined to entertain them. Swinging his body sideways to lubricate the forward motion, he rocked over to his mother’s side.

‘It’s no use trying to blind me with science, dear,’ he said, ‘I can tell he doesn’t like that formula you’re giving him, even if it is made by organic goats. When I was in Saudi Arabia – she was a princess, actually – I said to them, “I can’t work with this formula, I have to have the Cow and Gate Gold Standard,” and they said to me, “With all your experience, Margaret, we trust you completely,” and they had some flown out from England in their private jet.’

‘How do you remember all this?’ asked his mother. ‘It’s terrifying. I told her that we didn’t have a private jet.’

‘Oh, money was no object to them,’ Robert went on, with a proud little toss of his head. ‘One day I remarked, you know, quite
casually
, on how nice the Princess’s slippers were, and the next thing I knew there was a pair waiting for me in my bedroom. The same thing happened with the Prince’s camera. It was quite embarrassing, actually. Every time I did it, I’d say to myself, “Margaret, you must learn to keep your mouth shut.’”

Robert wagged his finger in the air, and then sat down on the bed next to his father and carried on with a sad sigh.

‘But then it would just pop out, you know: “Ooh, that’s a lovely shawl, dear; lovely soft fabric,” and sure enough I’d find one spread out on my bed that evening. I had to get a new suitcase in the end.’

His parents were trying not to make too much noise but they had hopeless giggles. As long as he was performing they hardly paid any attention to Thomas at all.

‘Now it’s even harder for us to go down,’ said his mother, joining them on the bed.

‘It’s impossible,’ said his father, ‘there’s a force field around the door.’

Robert ran up to the door and pretended to bounce back. ‘Ah,’ he shouted, ‘it’s the Margaret field. There’s no way through, Captain.’

He rolled around on the floor for a while and then climbed back onto the bed with his parents.

‘We’re like the dinner guests in
The Exterminating Angel
,’ said his father. ‘We might be here for days. We might have to be rescued by the army.’

‘We’ve got to pull ourselves together,’ said his mother. ‘We must try to end her visit on a kind note.’

None of them moved.

‘Why do you think it’s so hard for us to leave?’ asked his father. ‘Do you think we’re using Margaret as a scapegoat? We feel guilty that we can’t protect Thomas from the basic suffering of life, so we pretend that Margaret is the cause – something like that.’

‘Let’s not complicate it, darling,’ said his mother. ‘She’s the most boring person we’ve ever met and she’s no good at looking after Thomas. That’s why we don’t want to see her.’

Silence. Thomas had fallen asleep, and so there was a general agreement to keep quiet. They all settled comfortably on the bed. Robert stretched out and rested his head on his folded hands, scanning the beams of the ceiling. Familiar patterns of stains and knots emerged from the woodwork. At first he could take or leave the profile of the man with the pointed nose and the helmet, but soon the figure refused to be dissolved back into the grain, acquiring wild eyes and hollow cheeks. He knew the ceiling well, because he used to lie underneath it when it was his grandmother’s bedroom. His parents had moved in after his grandmother was taken to the nursing home. He still remembered the old silver-framed photograph that used to be on her desk. He had been curious about it because it was taken when his grandmother had been only a few days old. The baby in the picture was smothered in pelts and satin and lace, her head bound in a beaded turban. Her eyes had a fanatical intensity that looked to him like panic at being buried in the immensity of her mother’s shopping.

‘I keep it here,’ his grandmother had told him, ‘to remind me of when I had just come into the world and I was closer to the source.’

‘What source?’ he asked.

‘Closer to God,’ she said shyly.

‘But you don’t look very happy,’ he said.

‘I think I look as if I haven’t forgotten yet. But in a way you’re right, I don’t think I’ve ever really got used to being on the material plane.’

‘What material plane?’

‘The Earth,’ she said.

‘Would you rather live on the moon?’ he had asked.

She smiled and stroked his cheek and said, ‘You’ll understand one day.’

Instead of the photograph, there was a changing mat on the desk now, with a stack of nappies next to it and a bowl of water.

He still loved his grandmother, even if she was not leaving them the house. Her face was a cobweb of creases earned from trying so hard to be good, from worrying about really huge things like the planet, or the universe, or the millions of suffering people she had never met, or God’s opinion of what she should do next. He knew his father didn’t think she was good, and discounted how badly she wanted to be. He kept telling Robert that they must love his grandmother ‘despite everything’. That was how Robert knew that his father didn’t love her any more.

‘Will he remember that fall for the rest of his life?’ Robert asked, staring at the ceiling.

‘Of course not,’ said his father. ‘You can’t remember what happened to you when you were a few weeks old.’

‘Yes I can,’ said Robert.

‘We must all reassure him,’ said his mother, changing the subject as if she didn’t want to point out that Robert was lying. But he wasn’t lying.

‘He doesn’t need reassuring,’ said his father. ‘He wasn’t actually hurt, and so he can’t tell that he shouldn’t be bouncing off Margaret’s floundering body. We’re the ones who are freaked out, because we know how dangerous it was.’

‘That’s why he needs reassuring,’ said his mother, ‘because he can tell that we’re upset.’

‘Yes, at that level,’ his father agreed, ‘but in general babies live in a democracy of strangeness. Things happen for the first time all the time – what’s surprising is things happening again.’

Babies are great, thought Robert. You can invent more or less anything about them because they never answer back.

‘It’s twelve o’clock,’ his father sighed.

They all struggled with their reluctance, but the effort to escape seemed to drag them deeper into the quicksand of the mattress. He wanted to delay his parents just a little longer.

‘Sometimes,’ he began dreamily in his Margaret voice, ‘when I’m stopped at home for a couple of weeks between jobs, I get itchy fingers. I’m that keen to lay my hands on another baby.’ He grabbed hold of Thomas’s feet and made a devouring sound.

‘Gently,’ said Robert’s mother.

‘He’s right, though,’ said his father, ‘she’s got a baby habit. She needs them more than they need her. Babies are allowed to be unconscious and greedy, so she uses them for camouflage.’

After all the moral effort they had put in to conceding another hour of their lives to Margaret, they felt cheated when they found that she wasn’t waiting for them downstairs. His mother went off to the kitchen and he sat with his father on the sofa with Thomas between them. Thomas fell silent and became absorbed in staring at the picture on the wall immediately above the sofa. Robert moved his head down beside Thomas’s and as he looked up he could tell from the angle that Thomas couldn’t see the picture itself, because of the glass that protected it. He remembered being fascinated by the same thing when he was a baby. As he looked at the image reflected in the glass, it drew him deeper into the space behind him. In the reflection was the doorway, a brilliant and perfect miniature, and through the doorway the still smaller, but in fact larger, oleander bush outside, its flowers tiny pink lights on the surface of the glass. His attention was funnelled towards the vanishing point of sky between the oleander branches, and then his imagination expanded into the real sky beyond it, so that his mind was like two cones tip to tip. He was there with Thomas, or rather, Thomas was there with him, riding to infinity on that little patch of light. Then he noticed that the flowers had disappeared and a new image filled the doorway.