The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (58 page)

‘Why don’t you stay here with us, Robert?’ she suggested. ‘Jo could drive you back tomorrow. You’d have more fun playing with Josh than going home and being dead jealous of your baby brother.’

He squeezed his mother’s leg desperately.

Eventually Gaston returned, distracting Jilly with the dessert, a slimy mound of custard in a puddle of caramel.

‘Gaston, you’re ruining us,’ wailed Jilly, slapping his incorrigible, egg-beating wrist.

Robert leant in close to his mother. ‘
Please
can we go now,’ he whispered in her ear.

‘Right after lunch,’ she whispered back.

‘Is he pleading with you?’ said Jilly, wrinkling her nose.

‘As a matter of fact he is,’ said his mother.

‘Go on, let him have a sleep-over,’ insisted Jilly.

‘He’ll be well looked after,’ said Jo, as if this was some kind of novelty.

‘I’m afraid we can’t. We have to go and see his grandmother in her nursing home,’ said his mother, not mentioning that they were going there in three days’ time.

‘It’s funny,’ said Christine, ‘Megan doesn’t seem to feel any jealousy yet.’

‘Give her a chance,’ said his father, ‘she’s only just discovered rage.’

‘Yeah,’ laughed Christine. ‘Maybe it’s because I’m not really owning my pregnancy.’

‘That must help,’ sighed his father. Robert could tell that his father was now viciously bored. Immediately after lunch, they left the Packers with an urgency rarely seen outside a fire brigade.

‘I’m starving,’ he said, as their car climbed up the driveway.

They all burst out laughing.

‘I wouldn’t dream of criticizing your choice of friend,’ said his father, ‘but couldn’t we just get the video instead.’

‘I didn’t choose him,’ Robert protested, ‘he just … stuck to me.’

He spotted a restaurant by the roadside where they had a late lunch of extremely excellent pizzas and salad and orange juice. Poor Thomas had to have milk again. That was all he ever got, milk, milk, milk.

‘My favourite was the London house speech,’ said Robert’s father. He put on a very silly voice, not particularly like Jilly’s but like her attitude. ‘“It looked huge when we bought it, but by the time we put in the guest suite and the exercise room and the sauna and the home office and the cinema, you know, there really wasn’t that much room.”

‘Room for what?’ asked his father, amazed. ‘Room for room. This is the room room, for having room in. Next time we climb onto our coat hangers in London to sleep like a family of bats, let’s appreciate that we’re not just a few bedrooms away from real civilization, but a room room away.

‘“I said to Jim,”’ his father continued imitating Jilly, ‘“I hope we can afford this, because I like the lifestyle – the restaurants, the holidays, the shopping – and I’m not going to give them up. Jim assures me that we can afford both.”

‘And this was the killer,’ said his father – ‘“He knows that if we can’t afford it, I’ll divorce him.” She’s unfucking-believable. She isn’t even attractive.’

‘She is amazing,’ said his mother. ‘But I felt in their own quiet way that Christine and Roger had a lot to offer too. When I said that I used to talk to my children when I was pregnant, she said’ – his mother put on a shrill Australian accent – ‘“Hang on! A baby is after the birth. I’m not going to talk to my pregnancy. Roger would have me committed.”’

Robert imagined his mother talking to him when he had been sealed up in her womb. Of course he wouldn’t have known what her blunted syllables were meant to mean, but he was sure he would have felt a current flowing between them, the contraction of a fear, the stretch of an intention. Thomas was still close to those transfusions of feeling; Robert was getting explanations instead. Thomas still knew how to understand the silent language which Robert had almost lost as the wild margins of his mind fell under the sway of the verbal empire. He was standing on a ridge, about to surge downhill, getting faster, getting taller, getting more words, getting bigger and bigger explanations, cheering all the way. Now Thomas had made him glance backwards and lower his sword for a moment while he noticed everything that he had lost as well. He had become so caught up in building sentences that he had almost forgotten the barbaric days when thinking was like a splash of colour landing on a page. Looking back, he could still see it: living in what would now feel like pauses: when you first open the curtains and see the whole landscape covered in snow and you catch your breath and pause before breathing out again. He couldn’t get the whole thing back, but maybe he wouldn’t rush down the slope quite yet, maybe he would sit down and look at the view.

‘Let’s get out of this sorry town,’ said his father, chucking back his small cup of coffee.

‘I’ve just got to change him first,’ said his mother, gathering up a bulging bag covered in sky-blue rabbits.

Robert looked down at Thomas, slumped in his chair, staring at a picture of a sailing boat, not knowing what a picture was and not knowing what a sailing boat was, and he could feel the drama of being a giant trapped in a small incompetent body.

5

WALKING DOWN THE LONG
, easily washed corridors of his grandmother’s nursing home, the squeak of the nurse’s rubber soles made his family’s silence seem more hysterical than it was. They passed the open door of a common room where a roaring television masked another kind of silence. The crumpled, paper-white residents sat in rows. What could be making death take so long? Some looked more frightened than bored, some more bored than frightened. Robert could still remember from his first visit the bright geometry decorating the walls. He remembered imagining the apex of a long yellow triangle stabbing him in the chest, and the sharp edge of that red semicircle slicing through his neck.

This year they were taking Thomas to see his grandmother for the first time. She wouldn’t be able to say much, but then neither would Thomas. They might get on really well.

When they went into the room, his grandmother was sitting in an armchair by the window. Outside, too close to the window, was the thick trunk of a slightly yellowing poplar tree and beyond it, the bluish cypress hedge that hid part of the car park. Noticing the arrival of her family, his grandmother organized her face into a smile, but her eyes remained detached from the process, frozen in bewilderment and pain. As her lips broke open he saw her blackened and broken teeth. They didn’t look as if they could manage anything solid. Perhaps that was why her body seemed so much more wasted than when he had last seen her.

They all kissed his grandmother’s soft, rather hairy face. Then his mother held Thomas close to his grandmother and said, ‘This is Thomas.’

His grandmother’s expression wavered as she tried to negotiate between the strangeness and the intimacy of his presence. Her eyes made Robert feel as if she was scudding through an overcast sky, breaking briefly into clear space and then rushing back through thickening veils into the milky blindness of a cloud. She didn’t know Thomas and he didn’t know her, but she seemed to have a sense of her connection with him. It kept disappearing, though, and she had to fight to get it back. When she was about to speak, the effort of working out what to say in these particular circumstances wiped her out. She couldn’t remember who she was in relation to all the people in the room. Tenacity didn’t work any more; the harder she grasped at an idea, the faster it shot away.

Finally, uncertainly, she wrapped her fingers around something, looked up at his father and said, ‘Does … he … like me?’

‘Yes,’ said Robert’s mother instantly, as if this was the most natural question in the world.

‘Yes,’ said his grandmother, the pool of despair in her eyes flooding back into the rest of her face. It wasn’t what she had meant to ask, but a question which had broken through. She sank back into her chair.

After what he had heard that morning Robert was struck by her question, and by the fact that it seemed to be addressed to his father. On the other hand, he was not surprised that his mother had answered it instead of him.

That morning he had been playing in the kitchen while his mother was upstairs packing a bag for Thomas. He hadn’t noticed that the monitor was still on, until he heard Thomas waking up with a few short cries, and his mother going into Thomas’s bedroom and talking to him soothingly. Before he could gauge whether she was even sweeter to Thomas when he was not around, his father’s voice came blasting over the receiver.

‘I can’t believe this fucking letter.’

‘What letter?’ asked his mother.

‘That scumbag Seamus Dourke is trying to get Eleanor to make the gift of this property absolute during her lifetime. I had arranged for the solicitor to put it on an elastic band of debt. In her will the debt is waived and the house is transferred irrevocably to the charity, but during her lifetime the charity has been lent the value of this property, and if she recalls the debt the place returns to her. She agreed to set things up that way on the grounds that she might get ill and need the money to look after herself, but needless to say, I also hoped she would come to her senses and realize that this joke charity was doing a lot of harm to us and no good to anyone else, except Seamus. Talk about the luck of the Irish. There he was, a National Health nurse changing bedpans in County Meath, until my mother airlifted him from the Emerald Isle and made him the sole beneficiary of an enormous tax-free income from a New Age hotel masquerading as a charity. It makes me sick, completely sick.’

His father was shouting by now.

‘Sweetheart, you’re ranting,’ said his mother. ‘Thomas is getting upset.’

‘I have to rant,’ said his father, ‘I’ve just seen this letter. She was always a lousy mother, but I thought she might take a holiday towards the end of her life, feel that she’d achieved enough by way of betrayal and neglect, and that it was time to have a break, play with her grandchildren, let us stay in the house, that sort of thing. What really terrifies me is realizing how much I loathe her. When I read this letter, I tried to loosen my shirt so that I could breathe, but then I realized it was already loose enough, I just felt as if a noose was tightening around my neck, a noose of loathing.’

‘She’s a confused old woman,’ said Robert’s mother.

‘I know.’

‘And we’re seeing her later today.’

‘I know,’ said his father, much more quietly now, almost inaudibly. ‘What I really loathe is the poison dripping from generation to generation. My mother felt disinherited because of her stepfather getting all her mother’s money, and now, after thirty years of consciousness-raising workshops and personal-growth programmes, she has found Seamus Dourke to stand in for her stepfather. He’s really just the incredibly willing instrument of her unconscious. It’s the monotony that drives me mad. I’d rather cut my throat than inflict the same thing on my children.’

‘You won’t,’ his mother answered.

‘If you can imagine anything…’

Robert had leant closer to the monitor, trying to make out his father’s fading voice, only to hear it growing louder behind him as his parents made their way downstairs.

‘… the result would be my mother,’ his father was saying.

‘King Lear and Mrs Jellyby,’ his mother laughed.

‘On the heath,’ said his father, ‘a quick rut between the feeble tyrant and the fanatical philanthropist.’

He had run from the kitchen, not wanting his parents to know that he had heard their conversation on the monitor. He sat on the knowledge all morning, but when his grandmother had stared at his father, as if she was talking about him, and asked, ‘Does he like me?’ Robert couldn’t help having the mad idea that she had overheard the same conversation as him.

Although he didn’t understand everything his father had said that morning, he understood enough to feel cracks opening in the ground. And now, in the silence that followed his grandmother’s shrewd unintentional question, he could feel her misery, and he could feel his mother’s desire for harmony, and he could feel the strain in his father’s self-restraint. He wanted to do something to make everything all right.

His grandmother was taking about half an hour to ask if Thomas had been christened yet.

‘No,’ said his mother, ‘we’re not having a formal christening. The trouble is that we don’t really think that children are steeped in sin, and a lot of the ceremony seems to be based on the idea that they’re fallen and need to be saved.’

‘Yes,’ said his grandmother. ‘No.’

Thomas started to shake the tiny silver dumbbell he had rediscovered in the creases of his chair. It made a strange high tinkling sound as he waved it jerkily around his head. Soon enough, he banged it against his forehead. After a delay in which he seemed to be trying to work out what had happened, he started to cry.

‘He doesn’t know whether he hit himself or whether the dumbbell hit him,’ said Robert’s father.

His mother took sides against the dumbbell and said, ‘Naughty dumbbell,’ kissing Thomas’s forehead.

Robert hit himself on the side of the head and fell off his grandmother’s bed theatrically. Thomas wasn’t as amused as he had hoped he would be.

His grandmother held her arms out in pleading sympathy, as if Thomas was expressing something that she felt as well, but didn’t want to be reminded of. Robert’s mother lifted Thomas gently into his grandmother’s lap. Seduced by the novelty of his position, Thomas stopped crying and looked searchingly at his grandmother. She seemed to be calmed by his presence. He sat on her lap, giving her what she needed, and they sank together into speechless solidarity. The rest of the family fell silent as well, not wanting to show up the non-speakers. Robert felt his father hovering over his grandmother, resisting saying what was on his mind. In the end it was his grandmother who spoke, not quite fluently but much better than before, as if her speech, abandoning the hopelessly blocked highway of longing, had stolen out under cover of darkness and silence.

‘I want you to know,’ she said, ‘that I’m very … unhappy … at not being able to communicate.’

His mother reached out and touched her knee.