The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (69 page)

‘Gosh,’ said Mary. ‘There’s not a lot I can do about the Irish in the 1840s. But I could give Thomas his “ultimate prosperity” – or can I go on calling it “lunch”?’

Seamus threw back his head and let out a guffaw of wholesome laughter.

‘I think that would be simpler,’ he said, giving Mary’s back an unwelcome rub.

She opened the door and took Thomas out of his car seat.

‘How is the little man?’ said Seamus.

‘He’s very well,’ said Mary. ‘He has a lovely time here.’

‘Well, I’m sure that’s down to your excellent mothering,’ said Seamus, his hand by now burning a hole in the back of her T-shirt. ‘But I’d also say that with the soul work, it’s very important to create a safe environment. That’s what we do here. Now, maybe Thomas is picking that up, you know, at some level.’

‘I expect he is,’ said Mary, reluctant to deny Thomas a compliment, even when it was really intended by Seamus for himself. ‘He’s very good at picking things up.’

She managed to stand out of Seamus’s range, holding Thomas in her arms.

‘Ah,’ said Seamus, framing the two of them with a large parenthetical gesture, ‘the mother-and-child archetype. It makes me think of my own mother. She had the eight of us to look after. At the time I think I was preoccupied with little ways of getting more than my fair share of the attention.’ He chuckled indulgently at the memory of this younger, less enlightened self. ‘That was definitely a big dynamic in my family; but looking back from where I’m standing now, what amazes me is how she went on giving and giving. And you know, Mary, I’ve come to the conclusion that she was tapping into a universal source, into that archetypal mother-and-child energy. Do you know what I mean? I want to put something about that in my book. It all ties in with the shamanic work – at some level. It’s just getting it down. I’d welcome any thoughts about that: moments when you’ve felt supported by something beyond the level of, you know, personal sacrifice.’

‘Let me think about it,’ said Mary, suddenly realizing where Seamus had learned his little ways of getting mothers to hand over their resources to him. ‘In the meantime, I really must make Thomas some lunch.’

‘Of course, of course,’ said Seamus. ‘Well, it’s been grand talking to you, Mary. I really feel that we’ve connected.’

‘I feel I’ve learned a lot as well,’ said Mary.

She now knew, for instance, that his feeble promise to ‘try to visit Eleanor in the next few days’ meant that he would not visit her today, or tomorrow, or the next day. Why would he waste his ‘little ways’ on a woman who only had a couple of fake Boudins to her name?

*   *   *

She carried Thomas into the kitchen and put him down on the counter. He took his thumb out of his mouth and looked at her with a subtle expression which hovered between seriousness and laughter.

‘Seamus is a very funny man, Mama,’ he said.

Mary burst out laughing.

‘He certainly is,’ she said, kissing him on the forehead.

‘He certainly is a very funny man!’ said Thomas, catching her laughter. He scrunched up his eyes in order to laugh more seriously.

*   *   *

No wonder she was tired after seeing Eleanor and Seamus on the same day, no wonder it was difficult to extort any more vigilance from her aching body and her blanched mind. Something had happened today; she hadn’t quite got the measure of it, but it was one of those sudden dam bursts which were the only way she ever ended a long period of conflict. She had no time to work it out while Thomas was still bouncing naked in the middle of the bed.

‘That was a very big jump,’ said Thomas, climbing to his feet again. ‘You certainly are impressed, Mama.’

‘Yes, darling. What would you like to read tonight?’

Thomas stopped in order to concentrate on a difficult task.

‘Let’s talk reasonably about lollipops,’ he said, retrieving a phrase from an old book of Patrick’s which had got stuck down in Saint-Nazaire.

‘Dr Upping and Dr Downing?’

‘No, Mama, I don’t want to read that.’

Mary took
Babar and Professor Grifiton
from the shelf and climbed over the guard onto the bed. They had a ritual of reviewing the day, and Mary threw out the usual question, ‘What did we do today?’ Thomas stopped bouncing as she had hoped.

Thomas lowered his voice and shook his head solemnly.

‘Peter Rabbit has been eating my grapes,’ he said.

‘No!’ said Mary, shocked.

‘Mr McGregor will be very angry with Seamus.’

‘Why Seamus? I thought it was Peter Rabbit who took the grapes.’

‘No, Mama, it was Seamus.’

Whatever it was that Thomas was ‘picking up’, it wasn’t the sense of a ‘safe environment’ that Seamus had boasted about creating for ‘the soul work’. It was the atmosphere of theft. If Seamus was prepared to treat Eleanor with so little ceremony, when she had set off the prosperity chime in his life with such a resounding tinkle, why would he bother to honour her promises to his defeated rivals? His imagination was teeming with competing siblings, and he had adopted Patrick and Mary for the purposes of triumphing over them in an archaic contest for which neither of them had received his commando training. What was the point of an old woman who couldn’t even buy him a sensory-deprivation tank? And what was the point of her descendants cluttering up his Foundation during August?

12

‘
BUT
I
DON
’
T UNDERSTAND
, said Robert, watching Mary pack. ‘Why do we have to leave?’

‘You know why,’ said Mary.

He sat on the edge of the bed, his shoulders rounded and his hands wedged under his thighs. If there had been time, she would have sat beside him and hugged him and let him cry again, but she had to get on with the packing while Thomas was sleeping.

Mary hadn’t slept for the last two days, equally tormented by the atmosphere of loss and the longing to leave. Houses, paintings, trees, Eleanor’s teeth, Patrick’s childhood and her children’s holidays: to her tired mind they all seemed to be piled up like the wreckage from a flood. She had spent the last seven years watching Patrick’s childhood like a rope inching through his clenched hands. Now she wanted to get the hell out. It was already too late to stop Robert from identifying with Patrick’s sense of injustice, but she could still save Thomas from getting tangled in the drama of disinheritance. The family was being split in half and it could only come back together if they left.

Patrick had gone to say goodbye to Eleanor. He had promised not to make any irrevocably bitter speeches in case he never saw her again. If he had enough warning of her death, he would doubtless fly down to hold her hand, but it was unrealistic to think that the rest of them would be checking into the Grand Hôtel des Bains to mount a deathbed vigil in the nursing home. Mary had to admit that she looked forward to Eleanor dropping out of their lives altogether.

‘Would we get the house if we killed Seamus?’ asked Robert.

‘No,’ said Mary, ‘it would go to the next director of the Foundation.’

‘That’s so unfair,’ said Robert. ‘Unless I became the director. Yes! I’m a genius!’

‘Except that you would have to direct the Foundation.’

‘Oh, yeah, that’s true,’ said Robert. ‘Well, maybe Seamus will repent.’ He adopted a thick Irish accent. ‘I can only apologize, Mary. I don’t know what came over me, trying to steal the house from you and the little ones, but I’ve come to moi senses now and I want you to know that even if you can find it in your heart to forgive me for the agony I’ve caused you, I shall never be able to forgive myself.’ He broke down sobbing.

She knew his fake sobbing was close to being real. For the first time since Thomas was born she felt that Robert was the one who needed her most. His great strength was that he was even more interested in playing with what was going on than he was in wasting his time trying to control it – although he did quite a lot of that as well. His playfulness had collapsed for a few days and been replaced entirely by wishing and longing and regretting. Now she saw it coming back. She could never quite get used to the way he pieced together impersonations out of the things he overheard. Seamus had become his latest obsession, and no wonder. She was too exhausted to do anything but give him a laborious smile and fold the swimming trunks she had unpacked for him less than a week before. Everything had happened so fast. On the day he arrived with Robert, Patrick had found a note asking if Kevin and Anette could have ‘some space’ in the house. Seamus had dropped in the next morning at breakfast to get his answer.

‘I hope I’m not interrupting,’ he called out.

‘Not at all,’ said Patrick. ‘It’s good of you to come so quickly. Would you like some coffee?’

‘I won’t, thank you, Patrick. I’ve really been abusing the caffeine lately in an attempt to get myself going with the writing, you know.’

‘Well, I hope you don’t mind if I go ahead and abuse some caffeine without you.’

‘Be my guest,’ said Seamus.

‘Is that what I am?’ asked Patrick, like a greyhound out of the slips. ‘Or are you in fact my guest during this one month of the year? That’s the crux of the matter. You know that the terms of my mother’s gift included letting us have the house for August, and we’re not going to put up with having your friends billeted on us.’

‘Well, now, “terms” is a very legalistic way of putting it,’ said Seamus. ‘There’s nothing in writing about the Foundation providing you with a free holiday. I have a genuine sympathy for the trouble you’ve had in accepting your mother’s wishes. That’s why I’ve been prepared to put up with a lot of negativity from your side.’

‘We’re not discussing the trouble I’ve had with my mother’s wishes, but the trouble you’re having with them. Let’s not stray from the subject.’

‘They’re inseparable.’

‘Everything looks inseparable to a moron.’

‘There’s no need to get personal. They’re inseparable because they both depend on knowing what Eleanor wanted.’

‘It’s obvious what she wanted. What isn’t clear is whether you can accept the part that doesn’t suit you.’

‘Well, I have a more global vision than that, Patrick. I see the problem in holistic terms. I think we all need to find a solution together, you and your family, and Kevin and Anette, and me. Perhaps we could do a ritual expressing what we bring to this community and what we expect to take from it.’

‘Oh, no, not another ritual. What is it with you people and rituals? What’s wrong with having a conversation? When I spent my teenage years in what has become your cottage, there were two bedrooms. Why don’t you put your friends up in your own spare room?’

‘That’s now my study and office space.’

‘God forbid they should invade your private space.’

Thomas wriggled down from Mary’s arms and started to explore. His desire to move made her even more aware of how paralysed the rest of them had become. She took no pleasure in seeing Patrick frozen in a kind of autumnal adolescence: dogmatic and sarcastic, resentful of his mother’s actions, still secretly thinking of Seamus’s cottage as the teenage den in which he spent half a dozen summers of semi-independence. Only Thomas, because he hadn’t been given any coordinates on this particular grid, could slip to the floor and let his mind flow wherever it wanted. Seeing him get away gave Mary a certain remoteness from the scene being played out by Patrick and Seamus, even though she could feel a sullen violence taking over from Seamus’s usual inane affability.

‘Did you know,’ said Patrick, addressing Seamus again, ‘that among the caribou herdsmen of Lapland, the top shaman gets to drink the urine of the reindeer that has eaten the magic mushrooms, and his assistant drinks the urine of the top shaman, and so on, all the way down to the lowest of the low who scramble in the snow, pleading for a splash of twelfth-generation caribou piss?’

‘I didn’t know that,’ said Seamus flatly.

‘I thought it was your special field,’ said Patrick, surprised. ‘Anyhow, the irony is that the premier cru, the first hit, is much the most toxic. Poor old top shaman is reeling and sweating, trying to get all the poison out, whereas a few damaged livers later, the urine is harmless without having lost its hallucinogenic power. Such is the human attachment to status that people will sacrifice their peace of mind and their precious time in order to pickaxe their way towards what turns out to be a thoroughly poisonous experience.’

‘That’s all very interesting,’ said Seamus, ‘but I don’t see what it has to do with our immediate problem.’

‘Only this: that out of what I admit is pride, I am not prepared to be at the bottom of the pissing hierarchy in this “community”.’

‘If you don’t want to be part of this community, you don’t have to stay,’ said Seamus quietly.

There was a pause.

‘Good,’ said Patrick. ‘Now at least we know what you really want.’

‘Why don’t
you
go away,’ shouted Robert. ‘Just leave us alone. This is my grandmother’s house, and we have more right to be here than you do.’

‘Let’s calm down,’ said Mary, resting a hand on Robert’s shoulder. ‘We aren’t going to leave in the middle of the children’s holidays, whether we come here next year or not. We could compromise over your friends, perhaps. If you sacrifice your office for a week, we could put them up for the last week of our stay. That seems fair enough.’

Seamus faltered between the momentum of his anger and his desire to look reasonable.

‘I’ll have to get back to you on that,’ he said. ‘To be honest with you, I’m going to have to process some of the negative feelings I’m having at the moment, before I can come to a decision.’

‘You process away,’ said Patrick, getting up to bring the conversation to an end. ‘Be my guest. Do a ritual.’

He moved round the table, and spread his arms as if to herd Seamus out of the house, but then he came to a halt.

‘By the way,’ he said, leaning close, ‘Mary tells me that you’ve dropped Eleanor now that she’s given you the house. Is that true? After all she’s done for you, you might pop in on her.’