The Patrick Melrose Novels

by Edward St. Aubyn

His parents were trying not to make too much noise but they had hopeless giggles. As long as he was performing they hardly paid any attention to Thomas at all.

  ‘Now it’s even harder for us to go down,’ said his mother, joining them on the bed.

  ‘It’s impossible,’ said his father, ‘there’s a force field around the door.’

  Robert ran up to the door and pretended to bounce back. ‘Ah,’ he shouted, ‘it’s the Margaret field. There’s no way through, Captain.’

  He rolled around on the floor for a while and then climbed back onto the bed with his parents.

  ‘We’re like the dinner guests in The Exterminating Angel,’ said his father. ‘We might be here for days. We might have to be rescued by the army.’

  ‘We’ve got to pull ourselves together,’ said his mother. ‘We must try to end her visit on a kind note.’

  None of them moved.

  ‘Why do you think it’s so hard for us to leave?’ asked his father. ‘Do you think we’re using Margaret as a scapegoat? We feel guilty that we can’t protect Thomas from the basic suffering of life, so we pretend that Margaret is the cause – something like that.’

  ‘Let’s not complicate it, darling,’ said his mother. ‘She’s the most boring person we’ve ever met and she’s no good at looking after Thomas. That’s why we don’t want to see her.’

  Silence. Thomas had fallen asleep, and so there was a general agreement to keep quiet. They all settled comfortably on the bed. Robert stretched out and rested his head on his folded hands, scanning the beams of the ceiling. Familiar patterns of stains and knots emerged from the woodwork. At first he could take or leave the profile of the man with the pointed nose and the helmet, but soon the figure refused to be dissolved back into the grain, acquiring wild eyes and hollow cheeks. He knew the ceiling well, because he used to lie underneath it when it was his grandmother’s bedroom. His parents had moved in after his grandmother was taken to the nursing home. He still remembered the old silver-framed photograph that used to be on her desk. He had been curious about it because it was taken when his grandmother had been only a few days old. The baby in the picture was smothered in pelts and satin and lace, her head bound in a beaded turban. Her eyes had a fanatical intensity that looked to him like panic at being buried in the immensity of her mother’s shopping.

  ‘I keep it here,’ his grandmother had told him, ‘to remind me of when I had just come into the world and I was closer to the source.’

  ‘What source?’ he asked.

  ‘Closer to God,’ she said shyly.

  ‘But you don’t look very happy,’ he said.

  ‘I think I look as if I haven’t forgotten yet. But in a way you’re right, I don’t think I’ve ever really got used to being on the material plane.’

  ‘What material plane?’

  ‘The Earth,’ she said.

  ‘Would you rather live on the moon?’ he had asked.

  She smiled and stroked his cheek and said, ‘You’ll understand one day.’

  Instead of the photograph, there was a changing mat on the desk now, with a stack of nappies next to it and a bowl of water.

  He still loved his grandmother, even if she was not leaving them the house. Her face was a cobweb of creases earned from trying so hard to be good, from worrying about really huge things like the planet, or the universe, or the millions of suffering people she had never met, or God’s opinion of what she should do next. He knew his father didn’t think she was good, and discounted how badly she wanted to be. He kept telling Robert that they must love his grandmother ‘despite everything’. That was how Robert knew that his father didn’t love her any more.

  ‘Will he remember that fall for the rest of his life?’ Robert asked, staring at the ceiling.

  ‘Of course not,’ said his father. ‘You can’t remember what happened to you when you were a few weeks old.’

  ‘Yes I can,’ said Robert.

  ‘We must all reassure him,’ said his mother, changing the subject as if she didn’t want to point out that Robert was lying. But he wasn’t lying.

  ‘He doesn’t need reassuring,’ said his father. ‘He wasn’t actually hurt, and so he can’t tell that he shouldn’t be bouncing off Margaret’s floundering body. We’re the ones who are freaked out, because we know how dangerous it was.’

  ‘That’s why he needs reassuring,’ said his mother, ‘because he can tell that we’re upset.’

  ‘Yes, at that level,’ his father agreed, ‘but in general babies live in a democracy of strangeness. Things happen for the first time all the time – what’s surprising is things happening again.’

  Babies are great, thought Robert. You can invent more or less anything about them because they never answer back.

  ‘It’s twelve o’clock,’ his father sighed.

  They all struggled with their reluctance, but the effort to escape seemed to drag them deeper into the quicksand of the mattress. He wanted to delay his parents just a little longer.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he began dreamily in his Margaret voice, ‘when I’m stopped at home for a couple of weeks between jobs, I get itchy fingers. I’m that keen to lay my hands on another baby.’ He grabbed hold of Thomas’s feet and made a devouring sound.

  ‘Gently,’ said Robert’s mother.

  ‘He’s right, though,’ said his father, ‘she’s got a baby habit. She needs them more than they need her. Babies are allowed to be unconscious and greedy, so she uses them for camouflage.’

  After all the moral effort they had put in to conceding another hour of their lives to Margaret, they felt cheated when they found that she wasn’t waiting for them downstairs. His mother went off to the kitchen and he sat with his father on the sofa with Thomas between them. Thomas fell silent and became absorbed in staring at the picture on the wall immediately above the sofa. Robert moved his head down beside Thomas’s and as he looked up he could tell from the angle that Thomas couldn’t see the picture itself, because of the glass that protected it. He remembered being fascinated by the same thing when he was a baby. As he looked at the image reflected in the glass, it drew him deeper into the space behind him. In the reflection was the doorway, a brilliant and perfect miniature, and through the doorway the still smaller, but in fact larger, oleander bush outside, its flowers tiny pink lights on the surface of the glass. His attention was funnelled towards the vanishing point of sky between the oleander branches, and then his imagination expanded into the real sky beyond it, so that his mind was like two cones tip to tip. He was there with Thomas, or rather, Thomas was there with him, riding to infinity on that little patch of light. Then he noticed that the flowers had disappeared and a new image filled the doorway.

  ‘Margaret’s here,’ he said.

  His father turned around while Robert watched her plaintive bulk roll towards them. She came to a halt a few feet away from them.

  ‘No harm done,’ she said, half asking.

  ‘He seems OK,’ said his father.

  ‘This won’t affect my reference, will it?’

  ‘What reference?’ asked his father.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Margaret, half wounded, half angry, all dignified.

  ‘Shall we have lunch?’ said his father.

  ‘I shan’t be needing any lunch, thank you very much,’ said Margaret.

  She turned towards the staircase and began her laborious climb.

  Suddenly, Robert couldn’t bear it any longer.

  ‘Poor Margaret,’ he said.

  ‘Poor Margaret,’ said his father. ‘What will we do without her?’

  3

  ROBERT WAS WATCHING AN ant disappear behind the sweating bottle of white wine on the stone table. The condensation suddenly streaked down the side of the bottle, smoothing the beaded surface in its wake. The ant reappeared, magnified through the pale green glass, its legs knitting frantically as it sampled a glittering grain of sugar spilt by Julia when she had sweetened her coffee after lunch. The sound of the cicadas billowed around
them in and out of time with the limp flapping of the canvas awning over their heads. His mother was having a siesta with Thomas, and Lucy was watching a video, but he had stayed behind, despite Julia almost forcing him to join Lucy.

  ‘Most people wait for their parents to die with a mixture of tremendous sadness and plans for a new swimming pool,’ his father was saying to Julia. ‘Since I’m going to have to renounce the swimming pool, I thought I might ditch the sadness as well.’

  ‘But couldn’t you pretend to be a shaman and keep this place?’ said Julia.

  ‘Alas, I’m one of the few people on the planet with absolutely no healing powers. I know that everyone else has just discovered their inner shaman, but I remain trapped in my materialistic conception of the universe.’

  ‘There’s such a thing as hypocrisy, you know,’ said Julia. ‘There’s a shop round the corner from me called the Rainbow Path, I could get you a drum and some feathers.’

  ‘I can already feel the power surging into my fingertips,’ said his father, yawning. ‘I, too, have a special gift to offer the tribe. I didn’t realize until now that I have incredible psychic powers.’

  ‘There you go,’ said Julia encouragingly, ‘you’ll be running the place in no time.’

  ‘I have enough trouble looking after my family without saving the world.’

  ‘Looking after children can be a subtle way of giving up,’ said Julia, smiling at Robert sternly. ‘They become the whole ones, the well ones, the postponement of happiness, the ones who won’t drink too much, give up, get divorced, become mentally ill. The part of oneself that’s fighting against decay and depression is transferred to guarding them from decay and depression. In the meantime one decays and gets depressed.’

  ‘I disagree,’ said his father, ‘when you’re just fighting for yourself it’s defensive and grim.’

  ‘Very useful qualities,’ Julia interrupted him. ‘That’s why it’s important not to treat children too well – they won’t be able to compete in the real world. If you want your children to become television producers, for instance, or chief executives, it’s no use filling their little heads with ideas of trust and truth-telling and reliability. They’ll just end up being somebody’s secretary.’

  Robert decided to ask his mother whether this was true, or whether Julia was being – well, like Julia. She came to stay every year with Lucy, her quite stuck-up daughter a year older than Robert. He knew his mother wasn’t wild about Julia, because she was an old girlfriend of his father’s. She felt a little bit jealous of her, but also a little bit bored. Julia didn’t know how to stop wanting people to think she was clever. ‘Really clever people are just thinking aloud,’ his mother had told him, ‘Julia is thinking about what she sounds like.’

  Julia was always trying to throw Robert and Lucy together. The day before, Lucy had tried to kiss him. That was why he didn’t want to watch a video with her. He doubted that his front teeth would survive another collision like that. The theory that it was good for him to spend time with children of his own age, even if he didn’t like them, ground on. Would his father ask a woman to tea just because she was forty?

  Julia was playing with the sugar again, spooning it back and forth in the bowl.

  ‘Since divorcing Richard,’ she said, ‘I get these horrible moments of vertigo. I suddenly feel as if I don’t exist.’

  ‘I get that!’ said Robert, excited that they had chosen a subject he knew something about.

  ‘At your age,’ said Julia, ‘I think that’s very pretentious. Are you sure you haven’t just heard grown-ups talking about it?’

  ‘No,’ he said, in his dazed by injustice voice, ‘I get it all on my own.’

  ‘I think you’re being unfair,’ said his father to Julia. ‘Robert has always had a capacity for horror well beyond his years. It doesn’t interfere with his being a happy child.’

  ‘Well, it does, actually,’ he corrected his father, ‘when it’s going on.’

  ‘Ah, when it’s going on,’ his father conceded with a gentle smile.

  ‘I see,’ said Julia, resting her hand on Robert’s. ‘In that case, welcome to the club, darling.’

  He didn’t want to be a member of Julia’s club. He felt prickly all over his body because he wanted to take his hand away but didn’t want to be rude.

  ‘I always thought children were simpler than us,’ said Julia, removing her hand and placing it on his father’s forearm. ‘We’re like ice-breakers crashing our way towards the next object of desire.’

  ‘What could be simpler than crashing one’s way towards the next object of desire?’ asked his father.

  ‘Not crashing one’s way towards it.’

  ‘That’s renunciation – not as simple as it looks.’

  ‘It’s only renunciation if you have the desire in the first place,’ said Julia.

  ‘Children have plenty of desire in the first place,’ said his father, ‘but I think you’re right, it’s essentially one desire: to be close to the people they love.’

  ‘The normal ones want to watch Raiders of the Lost Ark as well,’ said Julia.

  ‘We’re more easily distracted,’ said his father, ignoring her last remark, ‘more used to a culture of substitution, more easily confused about exactly who we do love.’

  ‘Are we?’ said Julia, smiling. ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Up to a point,’ said his father.

  He didn’t really know what they were talking about now, but Julia seemed to have cheered up. Substitution must be something pretty wonderful. Before he got the chance to ask what it meant, a voice, a caring Irish voice, called out.

  ‘Hello? Hello?’

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ muttered his father, ‘it’s the boss.’

  ‘Patrick!’ said Seamus warmly, walking towards them in a shirt covered in palm trees and rainbows. ‘Robert,’ he greeted him, ruffling his hair vigorously. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said to Julia, fixing her with his candid blue eyes and his firm handshake. Nobody could accuse him of not being friendly.

  ‘Oh, it’s a lovely spot here,’ he said, ‘lovely. We often sit out here after a session, with everyone laughing or crying, or just being with themselves, you know. This is definitely a power point, a place of tremendous release. That’s right,’ he sighed, as if agreeing with someone else’s wise insight, ‘I’ve seen people let go of a lot of stuff here.’

  ‘Talking of “letting go of a lot of stuff ”,’ his father handed the phrase back to Seamus, held by the corner like someone else’s used handkerchief, ‘when I opened the drawer of my bedside table I found it so full of “Healing Drum” brochures that there was no room for my passport. There are also several hundred copies of The Way of the Shaman in my wardrobe which are getting in the way of the shoes.’

  ‘The Way of the Shoes,’ said Seamus, letting out a great roar of healthy laughter, ‘now that would be a good title for a book about, you know, staying grounded.’

  ‘Do you think that these signs of institutional life,’ continued his father coldly, rapidly, ‘could be removed before we come down here on holiday? After all, my mother does want the house to return each August to its incarnation as a family home.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ said Seamus. ‘I apologize, Patrick. That’ll be Kevin and Anette. They were going through a very powerful personal process, you know, before going back to Ireland on holiday, and they obviously weren’t thorough enough in getting things ready for you.’

  ‘Are you also going back to Ireland?’ his father asked.

  ‘No, I’ll be in the cottage through August,’ said Seamus. ‘The Pegasus Press have asked me to write a short book about the shamanic work.’

  ‘Oh, really,’ said Julia, ‘how fascinating. Are you a shaman yourself?’

  ‘I had a look at the book that was in the way of my shoes,’ said his father, ‘and some obvious questions spring to mind. Have you spent twenty years being the disciple of a Siberian witch doctor? Have you gathered rare plants under the f
ull moon during the brief summer? Have you been buried alive and died to the world? Have your eyes watered in the smoke of campfires while you muttered prayers to the spirits who might help you to save a dying man? Have you drunk the urine of caribou who have grazed on outcrops of Amanita muscaria and journeyed into other worlds to solve the mystery of a difficult diagnosis? Or did you study in Brazil with the ayahuascaras of the Amazon basin?’

  ‘Well,’ said Seamus, ‘I trained as a nurse with the Irish National Health.’

  ‘I’m sure that was an adequate substitute for being buried alive,’ said his father.

  ‘I worked in a nursing home for many years, doing the basics, you know: washing patients who were covered in their own faeces and urine; spoon-feeding old people who couldn’t feed themselves any more.’

  ‘Please,’ said Julia, ‘we’ve only just finished our lunch.’

  ‘That was my reality at the time,’ said Seamus. ‘I sometimes wondered why I hadn’t gone on to university and got the medical qualifications, but looking back I’m grateful for those years in the nursing home – they’ve helped to keep me grounded. When I discovered the Holotropic Breathwork and went to California to study with Stan Grof, I met some pretty out-there people, you know. I remember one particular lady, wearing a sunset-coloured dress, and she stood up and said, “I am Tamara from the Vega system, and I have come to the Earth to heal and to teach.” Well, at that point, I thought about the old people in the home in Ireland and I was grateful to them for keeping my feet firmly planted on the ground.’

  ‘Is holo … whatever you called it, a shamanic thing?’ asked Julia.

  ‘No, not really. That’s what I was doing before I got into the shamanic work, but it all ties in, you know. It gets people in touch with that something beyond, that other dimension. When people touch that, it can trigger a radical change in their lives.’

  ‘But I don’t understand why this counts as a charity. People pay to come here, don’t they?’ said Julia.

  ‘They do, they do,’ said Seamus, ‘but we recycle the profits, you see, so as to give scholarships to students like Kevin and Anette who are learning the shamanic work. And they’ve started to bring groups of inner-city kids from the estates in Dublin. We let them attend the courses for free, you know, and it’s a wonderful thing to see the transformations. They love the trance music and the drumming. They come up to me and say, “Seamus, this is incredible, it’s like tripping without the drugs,” and they take that message back to the inner city and start up shamanic groups of their own.’