He stopped at Le Dauphin. Coffee, cognac, cigar. Just as well to get these chores out of the way, then he’d be free to enjoy the rest of the day. He lit his cigar and as the thick smoke trickled back out of his mouth he felt he was being shown a pattern, like a rug unrolling in a rug shop. He had taken Mary, a good woman, and made her into an instrument of torture, a weird echo of Eleanor forty years ago: never available, always exhausted by her dedication to an altruistic project which didn’t include him. He had achieved this by the ironic device of rejecting the sort of woman who would have made a bad mother, like Eleanor, and choosing one who was such a good mother that she was incapable of letting one drop of her love escape from her children. He could see that his obsession with not having enough money was only the material form of his emotional privation. He had known these facts for years, but just at that moment he felt that his grasp of them was especially subtle and clear and that his understanding gave him complete mastery of the situation. A second mouthful of heavy blue Cuban smoke drifted into the air. He was entranced by the sense of his own detachment, as if he had been set free by an instinctual expertise, like a seabird that breaks into flight just before a wave crashes onto the rock where it was perched.
The feeling passed. With only orange juice for breakfast, the six espressos and four glasses of brandy were having a bar brawl in his stomach. What was he doing? He had given up smoking. He flung the cigar towards the gutter. Whoops. ‘Pardon, Madame.’ My God, it was the same woman, or almost the same woman. He might have set fire to her poodle. The newspaper headlines didn’t bear thinking about … Anglais intoxiqué … incendie de caniche …
He must call Julia. He could live without her as long as he knew that she couldn’t live without him. That was the deal the furiously weak made between their permanent disappointment and their temporary consolations. He looked at it with some disgust but knew that he would sign the contract anyway. He must make sure she was waiting for him, missing him, longing for him and expecting him in her flat on Monday night.
The nearest phone booth, a doorless and piss-scented wastepaper basket, was smouldering in full sunlight on the next corner. The blue plastic burnt his hand as he dialled the number.
‘I can’t come to the phone at the moment, but please leave a message…’
‘Hello? Hello? It’s Patrick. Are you hiding behind your machine?… OK, I’ll call you tomorrow. I love you.’ He’d almost forgotten to say that.
So, she wasn’t in. Unless she was in bed with another man, sniggering at his tentative phone message. If he had one thing to say to the world, it was this: never, never have a child without first getting a reliable mistress. And don’t be deceived by the false horizons – ‘when the breastfeeding is over; when he spends the whole night in his own bed; when he goes to university’. Like a team of run-away horses, the empty promises hauled a man over shattered stone and giant cactuses while he prayed for the tangled reins to snap. It was all over, there was no comfort in marriage, just duty and obligation. He sank down on the nearest bench, needing to pause before he saw his family again. The cerulean huts and parasols of the Tahiti Beach were already in view, tunnelling deep into his memory. He had been Thomas’s age when he first went there and Robert’s when his memories became most intense: those pedalo rides which he expected to grind up on African beaches; jumping up and down on the sandcastles carefully assembled for him by foreign au pairs; being allowed to order his own drinks and ice creams as his chin cleared the wooden counter for the first time. As a teenager, he had taken books to the beach. They helped to hide his bulging trunks while he stared from behind his wraparound shades at the first blush of topless sunbathing to pass over the pale sands of Les Lecques. Since then the Tahiti had grown thinner and thinner, until the whole beach was nearly abolished by the sea. In his twenties, he had watched the municipality rebuild it with thousands of tons of imported pebbles. Every Easter, sand was dredged from the bay and spread over the artificial beach by teams of bulldozers, and every winter storms clawed it back into the bay.
He leant forward and rested his chin on his hands. The initial impact of the coffee and brandy was dying out, leaving him only with a doomed nervous energy, like a flung stone bouncing over the water a few times before sinking beneath its surface. He looked wearily at the simulacrum of the original beach, if ‘original’ was the word for the beach he had known when he was the same age as his children were now. He let this pitifully local definition melt away, and tumbled back through geological time to the perfect boredom of the first beach, with its empty rock pools and its simple molecules not knowing what to do with themselves for billions of years on end. Can anyone think of anything to do other than jostle around? Rows of blank faces, like asking a group of old friends to suggest a new restaurant on a Sunday night. Seen from this primal shore, the emergence of human life looked like Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, greenish ghosts drowning in a frigid ocean of time.
He really needed another drink to recover from the chaos of his imagination. And some food. And some sex. He needed to get grounded, as Seamus would say. He needed to rejoin his own species, the rows and rows of belching animals on the beach with only a razor blade or a wax job between them and a great thick pelt; paying with agonizing back pains for their pretentious upright posture, but secretly longing to hobble along with their knuckles dragging in the sand, squealing and grunting, fighting and fucking. Yes, he needed to get real. Only consideration for the white-haired old lady with swollen ankles further down the bench prevented him from raining punches on his clenched pectorals and letting out a territorial bellow. Consideration and, of course, his growing sense of liverish gloom and midday hangover.
He hauled himself up and scraped his way along the last few hundred yards to the Tahiti. Swaying towards him over the smooth pink concrete, an almost naked girl with overpoweringly perfect breasts and a diamond nestling in her navel, locked her eyes onto his and smiled, raising both her arms, ostensibly to wrap her long blonde hair into a loose coil above her head, but really to simulate the way her limbs would be arranged if she were lying on a bed with her arms thrown back. Oh, God, why was life so badly organized? Why couldn’t he just hoist her onto a hot car bonnet and tear off that turquoise excuse for a bikini bottom? She wanted it, he wanted it. Well, anyway, he wanted it. She probably wanted exactly what she had, the power to disturb every heterosexual man – and let’s not forget our lesbian colleagues, he added with mayoral unction – who she scythed through as she strolled back and forth between her depressing boyfriend and her nippy little car. She walked by, he staggered on. She might as well have chopped off his genitals and chucked them in the sand. He could feel the blood running down his legs, hear the dogs squabbling over the unexpected meat. He wanted to sit down again, to lie down, to bury himself deep underground. He was finished as a man. He envied the male spider who was eaten straight after fertilizing the female, rather than consumed bit by bit like his human counterpart.
He paused at the head of the broad white ladder that led down to the Tahiti Beach. He could see Robert running back and forth with a bucket, trying to fill a leaking moat. Thomas was lying in his mother’s arms, sucking his thumb, holding his raggie and watching Robert with his strange objective gaze. They were happy because they had the undivided attention of their mother, and he was unhappy because he had her undivided inattention. That, at least, was the local reason, but hardly the original beach of his unhappiness. Never mind the original beach. He had to step down onto this one and be a father.
‘Hello, darling,’ said Mary, with that permanently exhausted smile in which her eyes didn’t participate. They inhabited a harder world in which she was trying to survive the ceaseless demands of her sons, and the destructive effect on a solitary nature of spending years without a moment of solitude.
‘Hi,’ said Patrick. ‘Shall we have lunch?’
‘I think Thomas is about to fall asleep.’
‘Right,’ said Patrick, sinking down onto his lou
nger. There was always a good reason to frustrate his desires.
‘Look,’ said Robert, showing Patrick a swelling on his eyelid, ‘I got a mosquito bite.’
‘Don’t be too hard on mosquitoes,’ sighed Patrick, ‘only the pregnant females whine, whereas women never stop whining, even after they’ve had several children.’
Why had he said that? He seemed to be full of zoological misogyny today. If anyone was whining it was him. It certainly wasn’t true of Mary. He was the one who suffered from a seething distrust of women. His sons had no reason to share it. He must try to pull himself together. The least he could do was contain his depression.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t know why I said that. I’m feeling awfully tired.’
He smiled apologetically all round.
‘It looks as if you need some help with that moat,’ he suggested to Robert, picking up a second bucket.
They walked back and forth, pouring sea water into the sand until Thomas fell asleep in his mother’s arms.
AUGUST 2002
10
FROM THE BLUE PADDLING pool where he had been playing contentedly a moment before, Thomas suddenly dashed across the sand, glancing over his shoulder to see if his mother was following him. Mary pushed her chair back and bolted after him. He was so fast now, faster every day. He was already on the top step and only had to cross the Promenade Rose to reach the traffic. She leapt up three steps at a time and just caught him as he reached the corner of the parked car that hid him from the drivers cruising along the seaside road. He kicked and wriggled as she lifted him in the air.
‘Never do that,’ she said, almost in tears. ‘Never do that. It’s so dangerous.’
Thomas gurgled with laughter and excitement. He had discovered this new game yesterday when they arrived back at the Tahiti Beach. Last year he used to double back if he got more than three yards away from her.
As Mary carried him from the road to the parasol he shifted into another mode, sucking his thumb and patting her face affectionately with his palm.
‘Are you all right, Mama?’
‘I’m upset that you ran into the road.’
‘I’m going to do something so dangerous,’ said Thomas proudly. ‘Yes, I am.’
Mary couldn’t help smiling. Thomas was so charming.
How could she say she was sad when she was happy the next minute? How could she say she was happy when a minute later she wanted to scream? She had no time to draw up a family tree of every emotion that rushed through her. She had spent too long in a state of shattering empathy, tuned in to her children’s vagrant moods. She sometimes felt she was about to forget her own existence completely. She had to cry to reclaim herself. People who didn’t understand thought that her tears were the product of a long-suppressed and mundane catastrophe, her terminal exhaustion, her huge overdraft or her unfaithful husband, but they were in fact a crash course in the necessary egotism of someone who needed to get a self back in order to sacrifice it again. She had always been like that. Even as a child she only had to see a bird land on a branch in order for its wild heartbeat to replace her own. She sometimes wondered if her selflessness was a distinction or a pathology. She had no final answer to that either. Patrick was the one who worked in a world where judgements and opinions had to be given with an air of authority.
She sat Thomas down in the stacked plastic chairs of his place at the table.
‘No, Mama, I don’t want to sit in the double chairs,’ said Thomas, climbing down and smiling mischievously as he set off towards the steps again. Mary recaptured him immediately and lifted him back into the chairs.
‘No, Mama, don’t pick me up, it’s really unbearable.’
‘Where do you pick up these phrases?’ Mary laughed.
Michelle, the owner, came over with their grilled dorade and looked at Thomas reproachfully.
‘C’est dangereux, ça,’ she scolded him.
Yesterday Michelle had said she would have spanked her children for running towards the road like that. Mary was always getting useless advice. She couldn’t spank Thomas under any circumstances. Apart from the nausea she felt at the idea, she thought that punishment was the perfect way of masking the lesson it was supposed to enforce; all the child remembered was the violence, replacing the parent’s justified distress with his own.
Kettle was a supreme source of useless advice, fed by the deep wells of her own uselessness as a mother. She had always tried to smother Mary’s independent identity. It was not that she had treated Mary as a doll – she was too busy being one herself to do that – but as a kind of venture-capital fund: someone who was initially worthless, but who might one day pay off, if she married a big house or a big name. She had made it clear that marrying a barrister who was about to lose a medium-sized house abroad fell short of the bonanza she had in mind. Kettle’s disappointment in the adult Mary was only the sequel to the disappointment she felt at her birth. Mary was not a boy. Girls who weren’t boys were such a let-down. Kettle pretended that Mary’s father was desperate for a boy, whereas the desperation had really belonged to her own father, a soldier who preferred trench warfare to female company and only agreed to the minimum necessary contact with the weaker sex in the hope of producing a male heir. Three daughters later he retired to his study.
Mary’s father, on the contrary, had been delighted with her just as she was. His shyness intermeshed with hers in a way that set them both free. Mary, who hardly spoke for the first twenty years of her life, loved him for never making her feel that her silence was a failure. He understood that it came from a kind of over-intensity, a superabundance of impressions. The gap between her emotional life and social convention was too wide for her to cross. He had been the same way when he was young, but gradually learnt to present something that was not quite himself to the world. Mary’s violent authenticity brought him back to his own core.
Mary remembered him vividly but her memories were embalmed by his early death. She was fourteen when he died of cancer. She was ‘protected’ from his illness by an ineffectual secrecy which made the situation more worrying than it was anyway. The secrecy had been Kettle’s contribution, her substitute for sympathy. After Henry died, Kettle told Mary to ‘be brave’. Being brave meant not asking for sympathy now either. There would have been no point in asking for it, even if the opportunity had not been blocked. Their experiences were essentially so different. Mary was utterly lost in loss, lost in imagining her father’s suffering, lost in the madness of knowing that only he could have understood her feelings about his death. At the same time, confusingly, so much of their relationship had been spent in silent communion that there seemed to be no reason for it to stop. Kettle only appeared to be sharing the same bereavement. She was in fact suffering from the latest instalment of her inevitable disappointment. It was so unfair. She was too young to be a widow, and too old to start again on acceptable terms. It was in the wake of her father’s death that Mary had got the full measure of her mother’s emotional sterility and learnt to despise her. The crust of pity which she had formed since then had grown thinner when she had children of her own. It was now in constant danger of being torn apart by fresh eruptions of fury.
Kettle’s most recent contribution had been to apologize for not getting Thomas a present for his second birthday. She had searched ‘high and low’ (translation: rung Harrods) ‘for some of those marvellous reins you used to have as a child’. After Harrods let her down, she was too tired to look for anything else. ‘They’re bound to come back into fashion,’ she said, as if she might give Thomas a pair when he was twenty or thirty, or whenever the world came to its senses and started stocking child reins again.
‘I suppose Granny’s a great disappointment to you, not getting you any reins,’ she said to Thomas.
‘No, I don’t want any reins,’ said Thomas, who had taken to ritually contradicting the latest statement he heard. Kettle, not knowing this, was astonished.
‘Nanny used to swe
ar by them,’ she resumed.
‘And I used to swear at them,’ said Mary.
‘You didn’t, as a matter of fact,’ said Kettle. ‘Unlike Thomas, you weren’t encouraged to swear like a drunken sailor.’
It was true that the last time they had visited Kettle in London, Thomas had said, ‘Oh, no! Bloody fucking hell, my washing machine is on again,’ and then pretended to turn it off by pressing the disconnected bell next to Kettle’s fireplace.
He had heard Patrick say ‘bloody fucking hell’ that morning, after reading a letter from Sotheby’s. The Boudins, it turned out, were fakes.
‘What a waste of moral effort,’ said Patrick.
‘It wasn’t a waste. You didn’t know they were fakes before you decided not to steal them.’
‘I know, that’s just it: it would have been such an easy decision if I had known. “Steal from my own mother? Never!” I could have thundered right at the beginning, instead of spending a year wondering whether to be some kind of intergenerational Robin Hood, correcting an imbalance with my virtuous crime. My mother managed to make me hate myself for being honourable,’ said Patrick, clasping his head between his hands. ‘How conflicted was that? And how unnecessary.’
‘What’s Dada talking about?’ asked Thomas.
‘I’m talking about your fucking grandmother’s fake paintings.’
‘No, she’s not my fucking grandmother,’ said Thomas, shaking his head solemnly.
‘Seamus is not the first person to have bamboozled her into parting with the little money that my fucking grandmother left her. Some art dealer in Paris pulled off that facile trick thirty years ago.’
‘No, she’s not your fucking grandmother,’ said Thomas, ‘she’s my fucking grandmother.’
Property was another thing Thomas had taken up recently. For a long time he had no sense of owning things, now everything belonged to him.
The Patrick Melrose Novels Page 52