The Patrick Melrose Novels

by Edward St. Aubyn

  Mary was alone with Thomas for the first week of August. Patrick was detained in London by a difficult case which she suspected should be called Julia versus Mary, but was pretending to be called something else. How could she say she was jealous of Julia when the next moment she was not? Sometimes, in fact, she was grateful to her. She didn’t want Patrick to be taken away, nor did she think he would be. Mary was both naturally jealous and naturally permissive, and the only way these two sides of her could collaborate was by cultivating the permissiveness. That way Patrick never really wanted to leave her, and so her jealousy was satisfied as well. The flow chart looked simple enough, except for two immediate complications. First, there were the times when she was overwhelmed with nostalgia for the erotic life they had shared before she became a mother. Her passion had peaked, naturally, when it was organizing its own extinction, during the time when she was trying to get pregnant. Secondly, she was angered when she felt that Patrick was deliberately worsening their relations in order to invigorate his adultery. There it was: he needed sex, she couldn’t provide it, he was going to look elsewhere. Infidelity was a technicality, but disloyalty introduced a fundamental doubt, a terminal atmosphere.

  It was the first time Robert had been away from home for more than a night. He was devastatingly relaxed on his first evening at his friend Jeremy’s when they spoke on the telephone. Of course she was pleased, of course it was a sign of his confidence in his parents’ love that he felt the love was there even when they were not. Still, it was strange to be without him. She could remember him at Thomas’s age, when he still ran away in order to be chased and still hid in order to be found. Even then he had been more introspective than Thomas, more burdened. He had been, on the one hand, the inhabitant of a pristine paradise that Thomas would never know, and on the other hand, a prototype. Thomas had benefited from learned mistakes and the more precise hopes that followed them.

  ‘I’ve had enough now,’ said Thomas, starting to climb down from his chairs.

  Mary waved at Michelle but she was serving another customer. She held back a plate of chips for this moment. If Thomas saw them earlier he ate no fish, if he saw them now he stayed for a second five-minute sitting. Mary couldn’t catch Michelle’s attention and Thomas continued his descent.

  ‘Do you want some chips, darling?’

  ‘No, Mama, I don’t. Yes, I do want some chips,’ Thomas corrected himself.

  He slipped and bumped his chin against the table top.

  ‘Mama take you,’ he said, spreading his arms out.

  She lifted him up and sat him on her lap, rocking him gently. Whenever he was hurt he reverted to calling himself ‘you’, although he had discovered the proper use of the first person singular six months ago. Until then, he had referred to himself as ‘you’ on the perfectly logical grounds that everyone else did. He also referred to others as ‘I’, on the perfectly logical grounds that that was how they referred to themselves. Then one week ‘you want it’ turned into ‘I want it’. Everything he did at the moment – the fascination with danger, the assertion of ownership, the ritual contradiction, the desire to do things for himself – was about this explosive transition from being ‘you’ to being ‘I’, from seeing himself through his parents’ eyes to looking through his own. Just for now, though, he was having a grammatical regression, he wanted to be ‘you’ again, his mother’s creature.

  ‘It’s so difficult because your will is what gets you through life,’ Sally had said last night. ‘Why would you want to break your child’s will? That’s what our mothers wanted to do. That’s what it meant to be “good” – being broken.’

  Sally, Mary’s American friend, was her greatest ally; also a mother showered in useless advice, also determined to give her children uncompromised support, to roll the boulder of her own upbringing out of the way so that they could run free. This task was surrounded by hostile commentary: stop being a doormat; don’t be a slave to your children; get your figure back; keep your husband happy; get back ‘out there’; go to a party, spending your whole time with your children drives you literally mad; increase your self-esteem by handing your children over to someone else and writing an article saying that women should not feel guilty about handing their children over to someone else; don’t spoil your children by giving them what they want; let the little tyrants cry themselves to sleep, when they realize that crying is useless they’ll stop; anyway, children love boundaries. Below this layer came the confusing rumours: never use paracetamol, always use paracetamol, paracetamol stops homeopathy from working, homeopathy doesn’t work, homeopathy works for some things but not for others; an amber necklace stops their teeth hurting; that rash could be an allergy to cow’s milk, it could be an allergy to wheat, it could be an allergy to the air quality, London has become five times more polluted in the last ten years; nobody really knows, it’ll probably just go away. Then there were the invidious comparisons and the plain lies: my daughter sleeps all through the night; she hasn’t needed nappies since she was three weeks old; his mother breast-fed him till he was five; we’re so lucky, they’ve both got guaranteed places at the Acorn; her best friend at school is Cilla Black’s granddaughter.

  When all these distractions could be ignored, Mary tried to hack through the dead wood of her own conditioning, through the overcompensation, through the exhaustion and the irritation and the terror, through the tension between dependency and independence which was alive in her as well as her children, which she had to recognize but could give no time to, and get back, perhaps, to the root of an instinct for love, and try to stay there and to act from there.

  She felt that Sally was roped to the same cliff face as her, and that they could rely on each other. Sally had sent through a fax last night but Mary hadn’t had time to read it yet. She had torn it from the fax machine and squeezed it into her rucksack. Perhaps when Thomas had a sleep – when he had a sleep, that moment into which the rest of life was supposed to be artfully crammed. By the time it came around, she was usually too desperate for sleep herself to break away from his rhythm and do anything different.

  The chips had already lost their power to hold Thomas and he was climbing back down the chairs. Mary took his hand and let him lead her back to the steps he had dashed up earlier. They wandered down the Promenade Rose together hand in hand.

  ‘It’s lovely and smooth on my feet,’ said Thomas. ‘Oh,’ he suddenly stopped in front of a row of wilted cactuses, ‘what’s that called?’

  ‘It’s some kind of cactus, darling. I don’t know the specific name.’

  ‘But I want to know the specific name,’ said Thomas.

  ‘We’ll have to look it up in my book when we get home.’

  ‘Yes, Mama, we’ll … Oh! What’s that boy doing?’

  ‘He’s got a water pistol.’

  ‘For watering the flowers.’

  ‘Well, yes, that would be a good use for it.’

  ‘It’s for watering the flowers,’ he informed her.

  He loosened his hand and walked ahead of her. Although they were constantly together, she often didn’t get to look at him for hours on end. He was either too close for her to see the whole of him, or she was focused on the dangerous elements in the situation and had no time to appreciate the rest. Now she could see him whole, without anxiety, looking adorable with his hooped blue T-shirt and khaki trousers and his determined walk. His face was astonishingly beautiful. She sometimes worried about the kind of attention it would attract, and the kind of impact he would get used to having. She could remember when he had first opened his eyes in the hospital. They were blazing with an inexplicably strong sense of intention; a drive to make sense of the world, in order to house another kind of knowledge which he already had. Robert had arrived with a completely different atmosphere, a sense of emotional intensity, of trouble that needed working out.

  ‘Oh,’ said Thomas pointing, ‘what’s that funny man doing?’

  ‘He’s putting on his mask and snorkel
.’

  ‘It’s my mask and snorkel.’

  ‘Well, it’s very nice of you to let him use it.’

  ‘I let him use it,’ said Thomas. ‘He can use it, Mama.’

  ‘Thank you, darling.’

  He marched on. He was being munificent now, but in about ten minutes his energy would collapse and everything would start to go wrong.

  ‘Shall we go back to the beach and have a little rest?’

  ‘I don’t want a little rest. I want to go to the playground. I love the playground so much,’ he said, breaking into a run.

  The playground was uninhabitable at this time of day, its dangerous climbing frame led to a metal slide hot enough to fry an egg on. Next to it, a plastic pony squeaked unbearably on a coiled spring. When they arrived at the wooden gate, Mary reached out and swung it open for Thomas.

  ‘No, Mama, I do it,’ he said with a sudden wail of misery.

  ‘OK, OK,’ said Mary.

  ‘No, I do it,’ said Thomas, pulling open with some difficulty the gate, made heavier by a metal plaque displaying eight playground rules, four times as many rules as rides. They made the transition to a pink rubber surface masquerading as tarmac. Thomas climbed the curved bars up to the platform above the slide, and then dashed over to the other opening, opposite a fireman’s pole which he couldn’t possibly get down on his own. Mary hurried around the climbing frame to meet him. Would he really jump? Was he really going to misjudge his capacities to that extent? Was she pumping fear into a situation where only play was needed? Was it an instinct to anticipate disaster, or was every other mother in the world more relaxed than her? Was it worth pretending to be relaxed, or was pretence always a bad thing? Once Mary was standing beside the pole, Thomas moved back to the slide and quickly pulled himself down. He tipped over at the end of his run and banged his head on the edge. The shock fused with his exhaustion to produce a long moment of silence; his face flushed and he let out a long scream, his pink tongue quivering in his mouth, and his eyes thickly glazed with tears. Mary felt, as usual, that a javelin had been flung into her chest. She picked him up in her arms and held him close, reassuring them both.

  ‘Raggie with a label,’ he sobbed. She handed him a Harrington square with the label still on it. A raggie without a label was not just unconsoling but doubly upsetting because of its tantalizing resemblance to the ones which still had labels.

  She walked back swiftly to the beach, carrying him in her arms. He shuddered and grew quiet, clasping Raggie and sucking his thumb with the same hand. The adventure was over, the exploration had gone to its limit and ended the only way it could, involuntarily. She laid him down on a mattress under a parasol and curled up next to him, closing her eyes and lying completely still. She heard him suck his thumb more intensely as he settled, and then she could tell from the change in his breathing that he had fallen asleep. She opened her eyes.

  Now she had an hour, perhaps two, in which to answer letters, pay her taxes, keep in touch with her friends, revive her intellect, take some exercise, read a good book, think of a brilliant money-making scheme, take up yoga, see an osteopath, go to the dentist and get some sleep. Sleep, remember sleep? The word had once referred to great haunches of unconsciousness, six, eight, nine-hour slabs; now she fought for twenty-minute scraps of disturbing rest, rest which reminded her that she was fundamentally done in. Last night she was kept awake by an overwhelming terror that some harm would come to Thomas if she fell asleep. She was rigid with resistance all night, like a sentry who knows that death is the penalty for nodding off on his watch. Now she really had to get some muddling, hangover-like afternoon sleep, soaked in unpleasant dreams, but first she was going to read Sally’s fax, as a sign of her independence, which she often felt was even less well established than Thomas’s, since she couldn’t test its limits as wildly as he could. It was a practical fax, as Sally had warned her, with the dates and times of her arrival at Saint-Nazaire, but then at the end Sally added, ‘I came across this quotation yesterday, from Alexander Herzen. “We think the purpose of a child is to grow up because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of life is death.”’

  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 h
ardly 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.