The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (77 page)

He decided to have nothing to do with organizing her death. Asking him to help her die was the last and nastiest trick of a woman who had always insisted, from the moment he was born, that she was the one who needed cheering up. And then he would visit Eleanor again and see that the cruellest thing he could do was to leave her exactly where she was. He tried to remain angry so he could forbid himself to help, but compassion tortured him as well. The compassion was far harder to bear and he came to think of his vengefulness as a relatively frivolous state of mind.

‘Go on, do yourself a favour, get homicidal,’ he muttered to himself as he dialled the number of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society.

Before going to America, he kept his research secret. He didn’t tell Mary because they never discussed anything important without having a row. He didn’t tell Julia because his affair with her was in the final stages of its decay. In any case, secrecy was essential in a country where helping someone to die could be punished with fourteen years’ imprisonment. He read articles in the papers about nurses sent to jail for generous injections. The Voluntary Euthanasia Society, despite its promising name, was unable to help. It was a campaigning organization trying to change the legislation. Patrick could remember reading about Arthur Koestler and his wife using the plastic bags provided by Exit to asphyxiate themselves in their house in Montpelier Square. The lady who answered the phone at the Voluntary Euthanasia Society had no knowledge of an organization called Exit. She couldn’t even comment on most of his questions, because her advice might be construed as suicide ‘counselling’, an offence under the same statute that punished assisting and aiding. She hadn’t heard of an organization called Dignitas either and couldn’t tell him how to get in touch with it. The Everlasting was not the only one to have ‘fixed his canon ’gainst self-slaughter’, Patrick couldn’t help thinking as the fruitless conversation dragged to a close. Directory Inquiries, careless of the legal consequences, gave him the number of Dignitas a few minutes later.

He rang Switzerland, his pulse racing. The calm voice which answered the phone in German turned out to speak English as well, and promised to send some information. When Patrick pressed him on the legal points, he said that it was not a matter of euthanasia, administered by the doctor, but of assisted suicide administered by the patient. The barbiturate would be prescribed if a Swiss doctor was convinced that it was warranted and that the suicide was entirely voluntary. If Patrick wanted to make progress while he waited for the membership forms to arrive, he should get a letter of consent from Eleanor and a doctor’s report on her condition. Patrick pointed out that his mother could no longer write and he doubted that she could give herself an injection either.

‘Can she sign?’

‘Just.’

‘Can she swallow?’

‘Just.’

‘So, maybe we can help.’

Patrick felt a surge of excitement after his telephone call to Switzerland. Signing and swallowing, those were the keys to the kingdom, the code for the missile launch. There wasn’t much time before Eleanor lost them. He dreaded the precious barbiturate dribbling uselessly down her shining chin. As to her signature, it now formed an Alpine silhouette reminiscent of Thomas’s earliest stabs at writing. Patrick paced up and down the drawing room of his flat. He was ‘working at home’, and had waited for Robert to go to school and for Mary to take Thomas to Holland Park before carrying on with his secret research. Now the whole flat was his to bounce around; there was nobody to be efficient for, nobody to be friendly to. Just as well, since he couldn’t stop pacing, couldn’t stop repeating, ‘Sign and swallow, sign and swallow,’ like a chained parrot in the corner of an overstuffed room. He felt increasingly tense, having to pause and breathe out slowly to expel the feeling that he was about to faint. There was a sinister, knife-grinding quality to his excitement. He was going to give Eleanor exactly what she wanted. But should he be wanting it quite so much as well?

He recognized the signature of his murderous longings and felt duly troubled. What seemed new, but then admitted that it had been there all along, was his own desire for a glass of barbiturate. ‘To cease upon the midnight with no pain’ – rearranged a little, it might almost be the chemical name for that final drink: Sismidnopin.

‘Oh, my God! You’ve got a bottle of Sismidnopin! Can I have some?’ he suddenly squealed as he reached the end of the corridor and spun round to pace back again. His thoughts were all over the place, or rather they were in one place dragging everything towards them. He imagined a modest little protest march, starting out in Hampstead with a few ethical types trying to ban unnecessary suffering, and then swelling rapidly as it flowed down to Swiss Cottage, until soon every shop was closed and every restaurant empty and all the trains stood still and the petrol pumps were unattended, and the whole population of London was flowing towards Whitehall and Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square, cursing unnecessary suffering and screaming for Sismidnopin.

‘Why should a dog, a cat have death,’ he wailed front stage, ‘and she…’. He forced himself to stop. ‘Oh, shut up,’ he said, collapsing on a sofa.

‘I’m just trying to help my old mum,’ he cajoled himself in a new voice. ‘She’s a bit past her sell-by date, to be honest. Not enjoying life as much as she used to. Can’t even watch the old goggle box. Eyes gone. No use reading to her, just gets her agitated. Every little thing frightens her, even her own happy memories. Terrible situation, really.’

Who was talking? Who was he talking to? He felt taken over.

He breathed out slowly. He was feeling way too tense. He was going to give himself a heart attack, finishing off the wrong person by mistake. He could see that he was breaking into fragments because the simplicity of his situation – son asked to kill mother – was unbearable; and the simplicity of her situation – person dreads every second of her existence – was more unbearable still. He tried to stay with it, to think about what didn’t bear thinking about: Eleanor’s experience. He felt her writhing on the bed, begging for death. He suddenly burst into tears, all his evasions exhausted.

The rivalry between revenge and compassion ended during that morning in his flat, and he was left with a more straightforward longing for everyone in his family to be free, including his mother. He decided to press ahead with getting a medical report before his trip to America. There was little point in applying to the nursing home’s doctor, whose entire mission was to keep patients alive despite their craving for a lethal injection. Dr Fenelon was Patrick’s family doctor, but he had not taken care of Eleanor before. He was a sympathetic and intelligent man whose Catholicism had not yet stood in the way of useful prescriptions and rapid specialist appointments. Patrick was used to thinking of him as grown up and was bewildered to hear him speak of his ethics classes at Ampleforth, as if he had allowed a priest to spray his teenage sketch of the world with an Infallible fixative.

‘I still believe that suicide is a sin,’ said Dr Fenelon, ‘but I no longer believe that people who want to commit suicide are being tempted by the Devil, because we now know that they’re suffering from a disease called depression.’

‘Listen,’ said Patrick, trying to recover as unobtrusively as possible from finding the Devil on the guest list, ‘when you can’t move, can’t speak, can’t read, and know that you’re losing control of your mind, depression is not a disease, it’s the only reasonable response. It’s cheerfulness that would require a glandular dysfunction, or a supernatural force to explain it.’

‘When people are depressed, we give them antidepressants,’ Dr Fenelon persevered.

‘She’s already on them. It’s true that they gave a certain enthusiasm to her loathing of life. It was only after she started taking them that she asked me to kill her.’

‘It can be a great privilege to work with the dying,’ Dr Fenelon began.

‘I don’t think she’s going to start working with the dying,’ Patrick interrupted. ‘She can’t even stand up. If you mean that it’s a great privilege for you, I have to say that I’m more concerned about her quality of life than yours.’

‘I mean,’ said the doctor, with more equanimity than Patrick’s sarcasm might have deserved, ‘that suffering can have a transfiguring effect. One sees people, after an enormous struggle, breaking through to a kind of peacefulness they’ve never known before.’

‘There has to be some sense of self to experience the peacefulness – that’s precisely what my mother is losing.’

Dr Fenelon sat back in his buttoned leather chair with a sympathetic nod, exposing the crucifix he kept on the shelf behind him. Patrick had often noticed it before, but it now seemed to be mocking him with its brilliant inversion of glory and suffering, making the thing it was natural to be disgusted by into the central meaning of life, not just the mundane meaning of forcing a person to reflect more deeply, but the entirely mysterious meaning of the world being redeemed from sin because Jesus got on the wrong side of the law two thousand years ago. What did it mean that the world had been redeemed from sin? It obviously didn’t mean that there was any less sin. And how was Christ’s nasty, kinky execution supposed to be responsible for this redemption which, as far as Patrick could tell, hadn’t taken place? Until then he had only been dazzled by the irrelevance of Christianity in his own life, but now he found himself loathing it for threatening to cheat Eleanor of a punctual death. After some more schoolboy reminiscences, Dr Fenelon agreed to compile a report on Eleanor’s condition. What use was made of it was none of his affair, he assured himself, and made an appointment to meet Patrick at the nursing home two days later.

Patrick went to tell his mother the good news and prepare her for the doctor’s visit.

‘I want…’ she howled, and then half an hour later, ‘Swiss … land.’

Patrick braced himself for his impatience with his mother’s impatience.

‘Everything is going as fast as possible,’ he answered smoothly.

‘You … ook … like … my … son,’ Eleanor managed eventually.

‘There’s a simple explanation for that,’ said Patrick. ‘I am your son.’

‘No!’ said Eleanor, sure of her ground at last.

Patrick left with the even more pressing sense that Eleanor would soon be too senile to consent.

When he took Dr Fenelon into Eleanor’s fetid room the next day, she was in a state of hysterical cheerfulness which Patrick had never seen before but immediately understood. She thought that she had to be on best behaviour, to win the doctor over, to show him that she was a good girl who deserved a favour. She stared at him adoringly. He was her liberator, her angel of death. Dr Fenelon asked Patrick to stay, to help him understand Eleanor’s incoherent speech. He was impressed by the good quality of her reflexes, the absence of bed sores and the general condition of her skin. Patrick looked away from the white wrinkled expanse of her belly, feeling that he really shouldn’t be allowed to see so much of his mother, and certainly didn’t want to. He was driven mad by her eagerness. Why couldn’t she manifest the misery he had spent the last week labouring to put into words? She never tired of letting him down. He imagined the unbearably upbeat report that Dr Fenelon would be dictating on his return to the surgery. That evening he composed a letter of consent but he couldn’t face seeing his mother again straight away. In any case, Fenelon’s report wouldn’t arrive before the family left on their American holiday and so Patrick resolved to let the whole thing drop until his return.

In America he tried not to think about a situation he could make no progress with, but he knew that the secret of his macabre project was alienating him from the rest of his family. After sobering up, he clung to his somewhat drunken vision of Zone Three in Walter and Beth’s garden. Whenever he tried to define Zone Three, he could only think of it as a generosity that was not based on compensation or duty. Even though he could not quite describe it, he clung to this fragile intuition of what it might mean to be well.

It was only on the plane back to England that he finally told Mary what was going on. Thomas was asleep and Robert was watching a movie. At first Mary said nothing beyond sympathizing with the trouble Patrick had been through. She didn’t know whether to voice her suspicion that Patrick had been so busy examining his own motives that he might not have looked carefully enough at Eleanor’s. Wanting to die was one of the most commonplace things about life, but dying was something else. Eleanor’s demands for help were not an offer to clear herself out of the way, but the only way she had left to keep herself at the centre of her family’s attention. And did she really understand that she would have to do the killing herself? Mary felt sure that Eleanor was imagining an infinitely wise doctor with a gaze as deep as a mountain lake, leaning over to give her a fatal good-night kiss, not a tumbler of bitter barbiturates she had to hoist to her own lips. Eleanor was the most childish person Mary knew, including Thomas.

‘She won’t do it,’ she finally said to Patrick. ‘She won’t swallow. You’ll have to get some special air ambulance, and take her to see the Swiss doctors, and get the prescription, and then she won’t do it.’

‘If she makes me take her to Switzerland for nothing, I’ll kill her,’ said Patrick.

‘I’m sure that would suit her perfectly,’ said Mary. ‘She wants death taken out of her hands, not put into them.’

‘Whatever,’ said Patrick with an impatient sigh. ‘But I have to treat her as if she really meant the only thing she ever manages to say.’

‘I’m sure she’s sincere about wanting to die,’ said Mary. ‘I’m just not sure she’s up to it.’

From within the hub of his headphones, Robert sensed that his parents were having a heated conversation. He took off his headset and asked them what they were talking about.

‘Just about Granny – how we can help her,’ said Mary.

Robert put his headphones back on. As far as he was concerned Eleanor was just someone who was not yet dead. His parents no longer took him or Thomas to see her because they said it was too disturbing. It was an effort for him to remember, ages ago, being close to her, and it wasn’t an effort that seemed worth making. Sometimes, in the presence of his other grandmother, his indifference to Eleanor was taken by surprise and, in contrast to the tight little knot of Kettle’s selfishness, he would remember Eleanor’s softness and the great aching bruise of her good intentions. Then he would forget how unfair it was that Eleanor had cheated them of Saint-Nazaire and feel how unfair it was for Eleanor being Eleanor – not just her dire circumstances, but being who she was. In the end it was unfair on everyone being who they were because they couldn’t be anyone else. It wasn’t even that he wanted to be anybody else, it was just a horrible thought that he couldn’t be, in an emergency. He took off his headphones again, as if they were the thing that was limiting him. The comedy about the talking dog who became President of the United States wasn’t that good anyway. Robert switched channels to the map. It showed their plane hovering near the Irish coast, south of Cork. Then it expanded to show London and Paris and the Bay of Biscay. The next scale included Casablanca and Djibouti and Warsaw. How long was this informational feast going to go on? Where were they in relation to the moon? The only thing anybody wanted to know finally came up: 52 minutes to arrival. They were flying through seven fat hours, pumped full of darkening time zones. Speed; height; temperature; local time in New York; local time in London. They told you everything, except the local time on the plane. Watches just couldn’t keep up with those warped, enriched minutes. They ought to flip their dials round and say NOW until they could get back on the ground and start counting distinctly again.