The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (59 page)

‘It must be horrible for you,’ said his father.

‘Yes,’ said his grandmother, staring at the faraway floor.

Robert didn’t know what to do. His father hated his own mother. He couldn’t join him and he couldn’t condemn him. His grandmother had done her family some wrong, but she was suffering horribly. Robert could only fall back on how things were before they had been darkened by his father’s disappointment. Those cloudless days when he was just meant to love his grandmother; he was not sure they had ever existed, but he was sure they didn’t exist now. It was still too unfair to gang up against his frightened grandmother, even if she was leaving the house to Seamus.

He hopped down from the bed and sat on the arm of his grandmother’s chair, taking her hand in his, like he used to when she first fell ill. That way she could tell him things without having to speak, her thoughts flooding into him in pictures.

The bridges were burnt and broken and everything his grandmother wanted to say got banked up on one side of a ravine, never taking form, never moving on. She felt a perpetual pressure, a scratching behind her eyeballs, like a dog pleading to be let in, a fullness that could only escape in tears and sighs and jagged gestures.

Under the bruise of feeling there was a brutal instinct to stay alive, like a run-over snake thrashing on a hot road, or blind roots pumping sap into a bleeding stump.

Why was she being tortured? They had sewn her into a sack and thrown her into the bottom of a boat, chains wrapped around her feet. She must have done something very bad to be teased by the oarsmen as they rowed her out into the bay. Something very bad which she couldn’t remember.

He tried to break off. It was too much. He didn’t let go of her hand, he just tried to close down, but it was impossible to break the connection completely.

He noticed that his grandmother was crying. She gave his hand a squeeze.

‘I am … no.’ She couldn’t say it. A carefully threaded thought unstrung itself and scattered across the floor. She couldn’t get it back. Something opaque clung to her all the time. Her head had been sealed in a dirty plastic bag; she wanted to tear it off but her hands were tied.

‘I … am,’ she tried again. ‘Brave. Yes.’

The evening light was on the other side of the building and the room was growing dimmer. They were all lost for words, except for Thomas who had none to lose. He leant against his grandmother’s arms, looking at her with his cool objective gaze. His example balanced the atmosphere. They sat in the fading light of the almost peaceful room, feeling sympathetic and a little bored. Robert’s grandmother sank into a quieter anguish, like someone deep in the broken springs of a chair, watching a dust storm coat the world in a blunt grey film.

After knocking on the door and not waiting for a reply, a nurse squeaked in with a trolley of food and slid a clattering tray onto the mobile table next to the bed. Robert’s mother lifted Thomas back into her arms, while his father wheeled the table into position and removed the tin hood from the main dish. The sweaty grey fish and leaky ratatouille might have made a greedy man pause, but for his grandmother, who would rather have starved to death anyway, all food was equally unwelcome, and so she gave Robert’s hand a last squeeze and broke the circuit which had introduced so many violent pictures into his imagination, and picked up her fork with the strange flat obedience of despair. She manoeuvred a flake of fish onto her fork and began to lift it towards her mouth. Then she stopped and lowered the fork again, staring at his father.

‘I can’t … find my mouth,’ she said with emergency precision.

His father looked frustrated, as if his mother had found a trick to stop him from being angry with her, but Robert’s mother immediately picked up the fork and smiled and said, ‘Can I help you, Eleanor?’ in the most natural way.

His grandmother’s shoulders crumpled a little further at the thought that it had come to that. She nodded and his mother started to feed her, still holding Thomas on her other arm. His father, temporarily frozen, came to his senses and took Thomas from Robert’s mother.

After a few more mouthfuls his grandmother shook her head and said, ‘No,’ and leant back in her chair exhausted. In the silence that followed, his father handed Thomas back to his mother and sat down next to his grandmother.

‘I hesitate to mention this,’ said his father, pulling a letter out of his pocket.

‘I think you should keep on hesitating,’ said his mother quickly.

‘I can’t,’ he said to her, ‘hesitate any longer.’ He turned back to Robert’s grandmother. ‘Brown and Stone have written to me saying that you intend to make an outright gift of Saint-Nazaire to the Foundation. I just want to say that I think that leaves you very exposed. You can barely afford to stay here and if you needed any more medical care you would go broke very quickly.’

Robert hadn’t thought his grandmother could look any more unhappy, but somehow her features managed to yield a fresh impression of horror.

‘I … really … I … really … no.’

She covered her face with her hands and screamed.

‘I really do object…’ she wailed.

His mother put her arm around his grandmother without glancing at his father. His father put the letter back in his pocket and looked at his shoes with perfect contempt.

‘It’s all right,’ said his mother. ‘Patrick just wants to help you, he’s worried that you may give too much away too soon, but nobody’s questioning that you can do what you like with the Foundation. The lawyers only told him because you’ve asked him to help you in the past.’

‘I … need … to rest now,’ said his grandmother.

‘We’ll leave, then,’ said his mother.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sorry I’ve upset you,’ sighed his father. ‘I just don’t see what the hurry is: Saint-Nazaire is going to the Foundation in your will anyway.’

‘I think we should drop this subject,’ said his mother.

‘Fine,’ he agreed.

Robert’s grandmother allowed herself to be kissed by each of them in turn. Robert was the last to say goodbye to her.

‘Don’t … leave me,’ she said.

‘Now?’ he asked, confused.

‘No … don’t … no.’ She gave up.

‘I won’t,’ he said.

Any discussion of their visit to the nursing home seemed too hazardous, and they started the drive home in silence. Soon enough, though, his father’s determination to talk took over. He tried to keep things general, he tried to keep away from the subject of his mother.

‘Hospitals are very shocking places,’ he said, ‘full of poor deluded fools who aren’t looking for groundless celebrity or obscene quantities of money, but think the point of life is to help other people. Where do they get these ideas from? We must send them on an empowerment weekend workshop with the Packers.’

Robert’s mother smiled.

‘I’m sure Seamus could organize it, give it a shamanic angle,’ said his father, dragged irresistibly out of his orbit. ‘Mind you, although hospitals may be awash with cheerful saints, I would rather shoot myself in the head than experience the erosion of self we witnessed this afternoon.’

‘I thought Eleanor did very well,’ said his mother. ‘I was very moved when she said that she was brave.’

‘What can drive a man mad is being forced to have the emotion which he is forbidden to have at the same time,’ said his father. ‘My mother’s treachery forced me to be angry, but then her illness forced me to feel pity instead. Now her recklessness makes me angry again but her bravery is supposed to smother my anger with admiration. Well, I’m a simple sort of a fellow, and the fact is that I remain
fucking angry
,’ he shouted, banging the steering wheel.

‘Who is King Lear?’ asked Robert from the back seat.

‘Did you overhear our conversation this morning?’ asked his mother.

‘Yes.’

‘Eavesdropping,’ said his father.

‘No I wasn’t,’ he objected. ‘You left the monitor on.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said his mother, ‘so I did. Anyway, it hardly matters now, does it, darling?’ she asked his father sweetly. ‘Since you’re screaming that you’re “fucking angry” at the top of your voice.’

‘King Lear,’ said his father, ‘is a petulant tyrant in Shakespeare who gives everything away and is then surprised when Goneril and Regan – or Seamus Dourke, as I prefer to think of them – refuse him the care he requires and boot him out.’

‘And who’s Mrs Jellybean?’

‘Jellyby. She’s a compulsive do-gooder who writes indignant letters about orphans in Africa, while her own children fall into the fireplace at the other end of the drawing room.’

‘And what’s a rut?’

‘Well, the idea is that if you combined these two characters you would get someone like Eleanor.’

‘Oh,’ said Robert, ‘it’s quite complicated.’

‘Yes,’ said his father. ‘The thing is that Eleanor is trying to buy herself a front-row seat in heaven by giving all her money to “charity” but, as you can see, she has in fact bought herself a ticket to hell.’

‘I don’t think it’s that clever to turn Robert against his grandmother,’ said his mother.

‘I don’t think it was that clever of her to make it inevitable.’

‘You’re the one who feels betrayed – she’s your mother.’

‘She’s lied to all of us,’ his father insisted. ‘At every stage she told me that such and such a thing was destined for Robert, but one by one these little concessions to family feeling were ripped from their pedestals and sucked into the black hole of the Foundation.’

Robert’s mother let some time pass in silence and then said, ‘Well, at least we didn’t have
my
mother to stay this year.’

‘Yes, you’re right,’ said his father, ‘we must cultivate gratitude.’

The atmosphere settled down a little after this moment of harmony. They climbed the lane towards the house. The sunset was simple that evening, without clouds to make mountains and chambers and staircases, just a clear pink light around the hill tops, and an edge of moon hanging in the darkening sky. As they rumbled down the rough drive, Robert felt a sense of home which he knew he must learn to set aside. Why was his grandmother causing so much trouble? The scramble for a front-row seat in heaven seemed unbearably expensive. He looked at Thomas in his baby chair and wondered if he was closer to ‘the source’ than the rest of them, and whether it was a good thing if he was. His grandmother’s impatience to be reabsorbed into a luminous anonymity suddenly filled him with the opposite impatience: to live as distinctively as he could before time nailed him to a hospital bed and cut out his tongue.

AUGUST
2001

6

BY DAY
,
WHEN
PATRICK
heard the echoing bark of the unhappy dog on the other side of the valley, he imagined his neighbour’s shaggy Alsatian running back and forth along the split-cane fence of the yard in which he was trapped, but now, in the middle of the night, he thought instead of all the space into which the rings of yelping howling sound were expanding and dissipating. The crowded house compressed his loneliness. There was no one he could go to, except possibly, or rather impossibly (or, perhaps, possibly), Julia, back again after a year.

As usual, he was too tired to read and too restless to sleep. The tower of books on his bedside table seemed to provide for every mood, except the mood of agitated despair he was invariably in.
The Elegant Universe
made him nervous. He didn’t want to read about the curvature of space when he was already watching the ceiling shift and warp under his exhausted gaze. He didn’t want to think about the neutrinos streaming through his flesh – it seemed vulnerable enough already. He had started but finally had to abandon Rousseau’s
Confessions
. He had all the persecution mania he could handle without importing any more. A novel pretending to be the diary of one of Captain Cook’s officers on his first voyage to Hawaii was too well researched to bear any resemblance to life. Weighed down by the tiny variations of emblems on the Victualling Board’s biscuits, Patrick had started to feel thoroughly depressed, but when a second narrative, written by a descendant of the first narrator, living in twenty-first-century Plymouth and taking a holiday in Honolulu, had set up a ludic counterpoint with the first narrative, he thought he was going to go mad. Two works of history, one a history of salt and the other a history of the entire world since 1500
BC,
competed for a place at the bottom of the pile.

Also as usual, Mary had gone to sleep with Thomas, leaving Patrick split between admiration and abandonment. Mary was such a devoted mother because she knew what it felt like not to have one. Patrick also knew what it felt like, and as a former beneficiary of Mary’s maternal overdrive, he sometimes had to remind himself that he wasn’t an infant any more, to argue that there were real children in the house, not yet horror-trained; he sometimes had to give himself a good talking-to. Nevertheless, he waited in vain for the maturing effects of parenthood. Being surrounded by children only brought him closer to his own childishness. He felt like a man who dreads leaving harbour, knowing that under the deck of his impressive yacht there is only a dirty little twin-stroke engine: fearing and wanting, fearing and wanting.

Kettle, Mary’s mother, had arrived that afternoon and, as usual, immediately found a source of friction with her daughter.

‘How was your flight?’ asked Mary politely.

‘Ghastly,’ said Kettle. ‘There was an awful woman next to me on the plane who was terribly proud of her breasts, and kept sticking them in her child’s face.’

‘It’s called breast-feeding, Mummy,’ said Mary.

‘Thank you, darling,’ said Kettle. ‘I know it’s all the rage now, but when I was having children the talk was of getting one’s figure back. A clever woman was the one who went to a party looking as if she’d never been pregnant, not the one with her breasts hanging out, at least not for breast-feeding.’

As usual, the bottle of Tamazepam squatted on his bedside table. He definitely had a Tamazepam problem, namely, that it wasn’t strong enough. The side effects, the memory loss, the dehydration, the hangover, the menace of nightmarish withdrawals, all that worked beautifully. It was just the sleep that was missing. He went on swallowing the pills in order not to confront the withdrawal. He remembered, in the distant past, a leaflet saying not to take Tamazepam for more than thirty consecutive days. He had been taking it every night for three years in larger and larger doses. He would be ‘perfectly happy’, as people said when they meant the opposite, to suffer horribly, but he never seemed to find the time. Either it was one of the children’s birthdays, or he was appearing in court, already hung-over, or some other enormous duty required the absence of hallucination and high anxiety. Tomorrow, for instance, his mother was coming to lunch. Both mothers at once: not an occasion for bringing on any additional psychosis.