Edward Aubyn - The Patrick Melrose Novels - Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk

‘We quite like looking after them ourselves,’ said his mother.

‘Jo!’ shouted Jilly. ‘Jo-o-euh!’

‘Tell them it’s a mixed leisure portfolio,’ said Roger. ‘Don’t give them any more details at this stage.’

‘Jo!’ Jilly called again. ‘Lazy bitch. She spends the whole day gawping at Hello! magazine and eating Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. A bit like her employer, you might say, hem-hem, but it’s costing me a fortune, whereas she’s getting paid.’

‘I don’t care what they told Nigel,’ said Roger, ‘it’s none of their bloody business. They can keep their noses out of it.’

Jim came striding down the lawn, glowing with successful shopping. Tubby Josh followed behind, a tangle of dragging feet. Jim got out a foot-pump and unfolded the plastic skin of another inflatable on the flagstones next to the pool.

‘What did you get him?’ asked Jilly, staring furiously at the house.

‘You know he had his heart set on the ice-cream cone,’ said Jim, pumping up a strawberry Cornetto. ‘And I got him the Lion King.’

‘And the machine gun,’ said Josh pedantically.

‘Inland Revenue,’ said Jim to Robert’s father, jerking his chin towards Roger, ‘breathing down his neck. He may want some legal advice over lunch.’

‘I don’t work when I’m on holiday,’ said his father.

‘You don’t work much when you’re not on holiday,’ said Robert’s mother.

‘Oh dear, do I detect marital conflict?’ said Jim, filming the strawberry Cornetto as it unwrinkled on the ground.

‘Jo!’ screamed Jilly.

‘I’m here,’ called a big freckly girl in khaki shorts emerging from the house. The words ‘Up For It’ danced on the front of her T-shirt as she bobbed down the lawn.

Thomas woke up screaming. Who could blame him? The last thing he knew he had been in the car with his lovely family, and now he was surrounded by shouting strangers with blacked-out eyes; a nervous herd of monsters jostling brightly in the chlorinated air, another one swelling at his feet. Robert couldn’t stand it either.

‘Who’s a hungry young man?’ said Jo, leaning in on Thomas. ‘Oh, he’s beautiful, isn’t he?’ she said to Robert’s mother. ‘He’s an old soul, you can tell.’

‘Get these two parked in front of a video,’ said Jilly, ‘so we can have a bit of peace and quiet. And send Gaston down with a bottle of rosé. You’ll love Gaston,’ she told Robert’s mother. ‘He’s a genius. A real old-fashioned French chef. I’ve put on about three stone since we arrived, and that was only a week ago. Never mind. We’ve got Heinrich coming to the rescue this afternoon – he’s the personal trainer, great big German hunk, gives you a proper old workout. You should join me, help to get your figure back after the pregnancy. Not that you don’t look great.’

‘Is that what you want,’ his mother asked Robert, ‘to watch a video?’

‘Yeah, sure,’ he said, desperate to get away.

‘It’s difficult to see how he could swim,’ admitted his father, ‘with all the inflatable food in the pool.’

‘Come on!’ said Jo, sticking a hand out on each side. She seemed to think that Josh and Robert were going to take a hand each and skip up the hill with her.

‘Isn’t anybody going to hold my hand?’ howled Jo, in a fit of mock blubbing.

Josh joined his pudgy palm with hers, but Robert managed to stay free, following at a little distance, fascinated by Jo’s pouting khaki bottom.

‘We’re entering the video cave,’ said Jo, making spooky noises. ‘Right! What are you two going to watch? And I don’t want any fighting.’

‘ The Adventures of Sinbad ,’ shouted Josh.

‘Again! Crikey!’ said Jo, and Robert couldn’t help agreeing with her. He liked to watch a good video five or six times, but when he knew all the dialogue by heart and each shot was like a drawer full of identical socks, he started to feel a twinge of reluctance. Josh was different. He started out with a sort of sullen greed for a new video and only developed real enthusiasm somewhere around the twentieth viewing. Love, an emotion he didn’t throw around lightly, was reserved for The Adventures of Sinbad , now seen over a hundred times, far too many of them with Robert. Videos were Josh’s daydreams, Robert’s daydream was solitude. How could he escape from the video cave? When you’re a child nobody leaves you alone. If he ran away now, they would send out a search party, round him up and entertain him to death. Maybe he could just lie there and think while Josh’s borrowed imagination flickered on the wall. The whine of the rewind was slowing down and Josh had collapsed back into the dent already made by his breakfast viewing and resumed munching the bright orange cheese puffs scattered on the table next to him. Jo started the tape, switched off the light and left discreetly. Josh was no fast-forward vandal: the warning about video piracy, the previews of films he had already seen, the plugs for merchandised toys he had already discarded and the message from the Video Standards Authority were not allowed to rush past like so many ugly suburbs before a train breaks out into the bovine melancholy of true countryside; they were appreciated in their own right, granted their own dignity, which suited Robert fine, since the rubbish now pouring from the screen was too familiar to make any impact on his attention at all.

He closed his eyes and let the pool-side inferno dissipate. After a few hours of other people, he had to get the pile-up of impressions out of him one way or another; by doing impersonations, or working out how things worked, or just trying to empty his mind. Otherwise the impressions built up to a critical density and he felt as if he was going to explode.

Sometimes, when he was lying in bed, a single word like ‘fear’ or ‘infinity’ flicked the roof off the house and sucked him into the night, past the stars that had been bent into bears and ploughs, and into a pure darkness where everything was annihilated except the feeling of annihilation. As the little capsule of his intelligence disintegrated, he went on feeling its burning edges, its fragmenting hull, and when the capsule flew apart he was the bits flying apart, and when the bits turned into atoms he was the flying apart itself, growing stronger instead of fading, like an evil energy defying the running out of everything and feeding on waste, and soon enough the whole of space was a waste-fuelled rush and there was no place in it for a human mind; but there he was, still feeling.

He would reel down the corridor to his parents’ bedroom, choking. He would do anything to make it stop, sign any contract, take any vow, but he knew it was useless, he knew that he had seen something true, that he couldn’t change it, only ignore it for a while, cry in his mother’s arms, and let her put the roof back on and introduce him to some kinder words.

It was not that he was unhappy. It was just that he had seen something and sometimes it was truer than anything else. He first saw it when his grandmother had a stroke. He hadn’t wanted to abandon her but she could hardly speak and so he had spent a lot of time imagining what she was feeling. Everybody said you had to be loyal, so he stuck at it. He held her hand for a long time and she gripped his. He didn’t like it but he didn’t let go. He could tell that she was frightened. Her eyes were dimmed. Part of her was relieved: she had always had trouble communicating, now nobody expected her to make the effort. Part of her was already gone, back to the source, perhaps, or at least far from the material plane about which she had such chronic doubts. What he could get close to was the part of her that was left behind wondering, now that she couldn’t help keeping them, if she wanted all those secrets after all. Illness had blown her apart like a dandelion clock. He had wondered if he would end up like that, a few seeds sticking to a broken stem.