The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (68 page)

Yes, that was what she had wanted to say to Patrick when they had been alone with Robert. Patrick had been so concerned with shaping Robert’s mind, with giving him a transfusion of scepticism, that he had sometimes forgotten to let him play, enjoy himself and be a child. He let Thomas follow his own course, partly because he was preoccupied with his own psychological survival, but also because Thomas’s desire for knowledge outstripped any parental ambition. With him she thought, as she closed her eyes after a last glance at Thomas’s sleeping face, it was so clear that playing and enjoying himself were identical with learning to master the world around him.

11

‘
WHERE HAS MY WILLIE
gone?’ said Thomas, lying on his blue towel after his bath.

‘It’s disappeared,’ said Mary.

‘Oh! There it is, Mama,’ he said, uncrossing his legs.

‘That’s a relief,’ said Mary.

‘It certainly is a relief,’ said Thomas.

After playing in his bath he was reluctant to get back into the padded cell of a nappy. Pyjamas, the dreadful sign that he was expected to go to sleep, sometimes had to wait until he was asleep to be put on. Any sense that Mary was in a hurry made him take twice as long to go to bed.

‘Oh, no! My willie’s disappeared again,’ said Thomas. ‘I really am upset about it.’

‘Are you, darling?’ said Mary, noticing him experiment with the phrase she had used yesterday when he threw a glass on the kitchen floor.

‘Yes, Mama, it’s driving me crazy.’

‘Where can it have gone?’ asked Mary.

‘I don’t believe it,’ he said, pausing for her to appreciate the gravity of the loss. ‘Oh, there it is!’ He gave a perfect imitation of the reassured cheerfulness with which she rediscovered a milk bottle or a lost shoe.

He started to jump up and down and then dropped onto the bed, rolling among the pillows.

‘Be careful,’ said Mary, watching him bounce too near the metal guards that surrounded the edge of the bed.

It was hard to stay ready for a sudden catch, to keep scanning for sharp corners and hard edges, to let him go to the limit of his adventure. She really wanted to lie down now, but the last thing she should do was to show any sign of exasperation or impatience.

‘I am an acrobat at the circus,’ said Thomas, trying to do a forward roll but keeling over. ‘Mama say, “Be careful, little monkey.”’

‘Be careful, little monkey,’ Mary repeated her line obediently. She must get him a director’s chair and a megaphone. He was always being told what to do, now it was his turn.

She felt drained by the long day, most of all by visiting Eleanor in her nursing home. Mary had tried to mask her sense of shock when she arrived with Thomas in Eleanor’s room. All of Eleanor’s upper teeth were missing from one side of her mouth and only three dangled like black stalactites from the other. Her hair, which she used to have washed every other day, was reduced to a greasy chaos stuck to her now visibly bumpy skull. As Mary leant over to kiss Eleanor, she was assailed by a stench that made her want to reach for the portable changing mat she carried in her rucksack. She must restrain her maternal drive, especially in the presence of a proven champion of maternal self-restraint.

Eleanor’s decay was underlined by her loss of equality with Thomas. Last year, neither of them could talk properly or walk steadily; Eleanor had lost enough teeth to leave her with roughly the same number as Thomas had gained; her new need for incontinence pads matched his established need for nappies. This year, everything had changed. Thomas wouldn’t need nappies for much longer, Eleanor needed more than she was currently using; only his back molars still had to work their way through, her back molars would soon be the only teeth she had left; he was getting so fast that his mother could hardly keep up, Eleanor could hardly keep herself up in her chair and would soon be bedridden. Mary paused on top of the icy slopes of potential conversation. The already strained assumption that they shared an enthusiasm for Thomas’s progress now looked like a covert insult. It was no use reminding her of Robert either, her former ally, now the disciple of his father’s hostility.

‘Oh, no!’ said Thomas to Eleanor. ‘Alabala stole my halumbalum.’

Thomas, who was so often stuck with adults in a traffic jam of incomprehensible syllables, sometimes answered back with a little private language of his own. Mary was used to this sweet revenge and also intrigued by the emergence of Alabala, a recent creation who seemed to be falling into the classic role of doing naughty things to and for Thomas, and was accompanied by his conscience, a character called Felan. He looked up at Eleanor with a smile. It was not returned. Eleanor stared at Thomas with horror and suspicion. What she saw was not the ingenuity of a child but the harbinger of her worst fear: that soon, on top of being unable to make herself understood, she would not be able to understand anybody else. Mary moved in quickly.

‘He doesn’t only talk nonsense,’ she said. ‘One of his favourite phrases at the moment – I think you’ll detect Patrick’s influence – ’ she tried another complicit smile, ‘is “absolutely unbearable”.’

Eleanor’s body lurched forward a couple of inches. She gripped the wooden arms of her chair and looked at Mary with furious concentration.

‘Absolute-ly un-bearable,’ she spat out, and then fell back, adding a high, faint, ‘Yes.’

Eleanor turned again towards Thomas, but this time she looked at him with a kind of greed. A moment ago, he seemed to be announcing the storm of gibberish that would soon enshroud her, but now he had given her a phrase which she understood perfectly, a phrase she couldn’t have managed on her own, describing exactly how she felt.

Something similar happened when Mary read out a list of audio books that Eleanor might want sent from England. Eleanor’s method for choosing the books bore no obvious relation to their authors or categories. Mary droned through the titles of works by Jane Austen and Proust, Jeffrey Archer and Jilly Cooper, without any signs of interest from Eleanor. Then she read out the title
Ordeal of Innocence
and Eleanor started nodding her head and flapping her hands acquisitively, as if she were splashing water onto her chest.
Harvest of Dust
elicited the same surges of excitement. Stimulated by these unexpected communications, Eleanor remembered the note she had written earlier, and handed it to Mary with her shaking, liver-spotted hand.

Mary made out the faint words, in pencil-written block capitals, ‘WHY SEAMUS DOES NOT COME?’

Mary suspected the reason, but could hardly believe it. She hadn’t expected Seamus to be so flagrant. His opportunism always seemed to be blended with the genuine delusion that he was a good man, or at least a strong desire to be mistaken for one. And yet here he was, only a fortnight after the final transfer of Saint-Nazaire to the Foundation, dropping his benefactor like a sack on a skip.

She remembered what Patrick had said when he finally used the power of attorney his mother had given him to sign over the house: ‘These people who want to crawl unburdened to their graves just don’t make it. There is no second childhood, no licence for irresponsibility.’ He then got blind drunk.

Mary looked at Eleanor’s face. It was impacted with misery. Her eyes were veiled like the eyes of a recently dead fish, but in her case the dullness seemed to stem from the effort of staying disconnected from reality. Mary could see now that her missing teeth were really a suicidal gesture, with the violent passivity of a hunger strike. They could so easily have been replaced, it must have taken great stubbornness to stay in the vortex of self-neglect, week after week, as they fell out, one by one, ignoring the medical profession, the antidepressants, the nursing home and the remains of her own will to live.

Mary felt pierced by a sense of tragedy. Here was a woman who had abandoned her family for a vision and for a man, and now the man and the vision had abandoned her. She could remember Eleanor telling her, when she could still speak adequately, that she and Seamus had known each other in ‘previous lifetimes’. One of these previous lifetimes had taken place on something called a ‘skelig’, some kind of Irish seaside mound, which Seamus had taken Eleanor to see early in his financial courtship, on that unforgettable, blustery day when he took her hand and said, ‘Ireland needs you.’ Once Eleanor realized, in a ‘past-life recall’, that she had lived as Seamus’s wife on the very skelig they visited, during the Dark Ages, when Ireland was a beacon of Christianity in that muddle of pillage and migration, her immediate family, with whom she had a relatively shallow past, began to slip from view. And once Seamus visited Saint-Nazaire, he realized that France needed him even more than Ireland needed Eleanor. The house had been a convent in the seventeenth century, and a second ‘past-life recall’ established that Eleanor was (it seemed obvious once you were told) the mother superior. The noun, Mary remembered thinking, had stayed stuck in front of the adjective ever since. Seamus, amazingly, was the abbot of a local monastery at exactly the same time. And so they had been thrown together again, this time in a ‘spiritual friendship’ which had been misinterpreted and caused a great scandal in the area.

When Eleanor told her all this, in an oppressive parody of girls’ talk, Mary decided not to argue. Eleanor believed more or less anything, as long as it was untrue. It was part of her charitable nature to rush belief to the unbelievable, like emergency aid. She clearly needed to inhabit these historical novels to make up for the disappointment of a passion which was not being acted out in the bedroom (it had evolved too much for that) but was having a thrilling enough time at the Land Registry. It had all seemed so ridiculous to Mary at the time; now she wished she could stick back the peeling wallpaper of Eleanor’s credulity. Under the dreadful sincerity of the original confession was that need to be needed which Mary recognized so well.

‘I’ll ask him,’ she said, covering Eleanor’s hand gently with her own. Although she hadn’t seen him yet, she knew that Seamus was in his cottage. ‘Perhaps he’s been ill, or in Ireland.’

‘Ireland,’ Eleanor whispered.

When they were walking back to the car, Thomas stopped and shook his head. ‘Oh, dear,’ he said. ‘Eleanor is not very well.’

Mary loved his straightforward sympathy for suffering. He hadn’t yet learned to pretend that it wasn’t going on, or to blame the person who was having it. He fell asleep in the car and she decided she might as well go straight to Seamus’s cottage.

‘Well, now, that’s a terrible thing,’ said Seamus. ‘I thought with the family being here and everything, that Eleanor wouldn’t want to see me so much. And, to be honest with you Mary, the Pegasus Press have been breathing down my neck. They want to put my book in their spring catalogue. I’ve got so many ideas, it’s just getting them down. Do you think
Drumbeat of my Heart
or
Heartbeat of my Drum
is better?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mary. ‘It depends which one you mean, I suppose.’

‘That’s good advice,’ said Seamus. ‘Talking of drums, we’re very pleased with your mother’s progress. She’s taken to the soul-retrieval work like a duck to water. I just got an email from her saying she wants to come to the autumn intensive.’

‘Amazing,’ said Mary. She was nervous that the monitor wouldn’t work. The green light seemed to be winking in the usual way, but she had never used it in the car before.

‘Soul retrieval is something I think Eleanor could benefit from immensely. I’m just thinking aloud now,’ said Seamus, swivelling excitedly in his chair and blocking Mary’s view of a leathery old Inuit woman, with a pipe dangling from her mouth, that radiated from his computer screen. ‘If your mother were to lead a ceremony with Eleanor at the centre of the circle, that could be hugely powerful with all the, you know, connections.’ He spread the fingers of both his hands and intermeshed them tenderly.

Poor Seamus, thought Mary, he wasn’t really a bad man, he was just a complete idiot. She sometimes became a little competitive with Patrick about who had the most annoying mother. Kettle gave nothing away, Eleanor gave everything away; the results were indistinguishable for the family, except that Mary had ‘expectations’, made fantastically remote by the robustness of her meticulously selfish mother, who thought of nothing but her own comfort, rushed to the doctor every time she sneezed and ‘treated’ herself to a holiday once a month to get over the disappointment of the last one. Patrick’s disinheritance had nudged him ahead in the bad-mother stakes, but perhaps Seamus was planning to eliminate that advantage by taking Kettle’s money as well. Was he, after all, really a bad man doing a brilliant impersonation of an idiot? It was hard to tell. The connections between stupidity and malice were so tangled and so dense.

‘I’m seeing more and more connections,’ said Seamus, twisting his fingers around each other. ‘To be honest with you, Mary, I don’t think I’ll write another book. It can do your head in.’

‘I bet,’ said Mary. ‘I couldn’t even begin to write a book.’

‘Oh, I’ve done the beginning,’ said Seamus. ‘In fact, I’ve done several beginnings. Perhaps it’s all beginnings, do you know what I mean?’

‘With each new heartbeat,’ said Mary. ‘Or drumbeat.’

‘That’s right, that’s right,’ said Seamus.

Thomas’s waking cry burst through the monitor. Mary was relieved to know that she was in range.

‘Oh, dear, I’m going to have to leave.’

‘I’ll definitely try to see Eleanor in the next few days,’ said Seamus, accompanying her to the door of his cottage. ‘I really appreciate what you said about the heartbeat and being in the moment – it’s given me a lot of ideas.’

He opened the door, setting off a tinkling of chimes. Mary looked up and saw three Chinese pictographs clustered around a dangling brass rod.

‘Happiness, Peace and Prosperity,’ said Seamus. ‘They’re inseparable.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Mary. ‘I was rather hoping to get the first two on their own.’

‘Ah, but what is prosperity?’ said Seamus, walking with her towards the car. ‘Ultimately, it’s having something to eat when you’re hungry. That’s the prosperity that was denied to Ireland, for instance, during the 1840s, and that’s still denied to millions of people around the world.’