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

‘Yes,’ said Robert’s mother instantly, as if this was the most natural question in the world.

‘Yes,’ said his grandmother, the pool of despair in her eyes flooding back into the rest of her face. It wasn’t what she had meant to ask, but a question which had broken through. She sank back into her chair.

After what he had heard that morning Robert was struck by her question, and by the fact that it seemed to be addressed to his father. On the other hand, he was not surprised that his mother had answered it instead of him.

That morning he had been playing in the kitchen while his mother was upstairs packing a bag for Thomas. He hadn’t noticed that the monitor was still on, until he heard Thomas waking up with a few short cries, and his mother going into Thomas’s bedroom and talking to him soothingly. Before he could gauge whether she was even sweeter to Thomas when he was not around, his father’s voice came blasting over the receiver.

‘I can’t believe this fucking letter.’

‘What letter?’ asked his mother.

‘That scumbag Seamus Dourke is trying to get Eleanor to make the gift of this property absolute during her lifetime. I had arranged for the solicitor to put it on an elastic band of debt. In her will the debt is waived and the house is transferred irrevocably to the charity, but during her lifetime the charity has been lent the value of this property, and if she recalls the debt the place returns to her. She agreed to set things up that way on the grounds that she might get ill and need the money to look after herself, but needless to say, I also hoped she would come to her senses and realize that this joke charity was doing a lot of harm to us and no good to anyone else, except Seamus. Talk about the luck of the Irish. There he was, a National Health nurse changing bedpans in County Meath, until my mother airlifted him from the Emerald Isle and made him the sole beneficiary of an enormous tax-free income from a New Age hotel masquerading as a charity. It makes me sick, completely sick.’

His father was shouting by now.

‘Sweetheart, you’re ranting,’ said his mother. ‘Thomas is getting upset.’

‘I have to rant,’ said his father, ‘I’ve just seen this letter. She was always a lousy mother, but I thought she might take a holiday towards the end of her life, feel that she’d achieved enough by way of betrayal and neglect, and that it was time to have a break, play with her grandchildren, let us stay in the house, that sort of thing. What really terrifies me is realizing how much I loathe her. When I read this letter, I tried to loosen my shirt so that I could breathe, but then I realized it was already loose enough, I just felt as if a noose was tightening around my neck, a noose of loathing.’

‘She’s a confused old woman,’ said Robert’s mother.

‘I know.’

‘And we’re seeing her later today.’

‘I know,’ said his father, much more quietly now, almost inaudibly. ‘What I really loathe is the poison dripping from generation to generation. My mother felt disinherited because of her stepfather getting all her mother’s money, and now, after thirty years of consciousness-raising workshops and personal-growth programmes, she has found Seamus Dourke to stand in for her stepfather. He’s really just the incredibly willing instrument of her unconscious. It’s the monotony that drives me mad. I’d rather cut my throat than inflict the same thing on my children.’

‘You won’t,’ his mother answered.

‘If you can imagine anything…’

Robert had leant closer to the monitor, trying to make out his father’s fading voice, only to hear it growing louder behind him as his parents made their way downstairs.

‘… the result would be my mother,’ his father was saying.

‘King Lear and Mrs Jellyby,’ his mother laughed.

‘On the heath,’ said his father, ‘a quick rut between the feeble tyrant and the fanatical philanthropist.’

He had run from the kitchen, not wanting his parents to know that he had heard their conversation on the monitor. He sat on the knowledge all morning, but when his grandmother had stared at his father, as if she was talking about him, and asked, ‘Does he like me?’ Robert couldn’t help having the mad idea that she had overheard the same conversation as him.

Although he didn’t understand everything his father had said that morning, he understood enough to feel cracks opening in the ground. And now, in the silence that followed his grandmother’s shrewd unintentional question, he could feel her misery, and he could feel his mother’s desire for harmony, and he could feel the strain in his father’s self-restraint. He wanted to do something to make everything all right.

His grandmother was taking about half an hour to ask if Thomas had been christened yet.

‘No,’ said his mother, ‘we’re not having a formal christening. The trouble is that we don’t really think that children are steeped in sin, and a lot of the ceremony seems to be based on the idea that they’re fallen and need to be saved.’

‘Yes,’ said his grandmother. ‘No.’

Thomas started to shake the tiny silver dumbbell he had rediscovered in the creases of his chair. It made a strange high tinkling sound as he waved it jerkily around his head. Soon enough, he banged it against his forehead. After a delay in which he seemed to be trying to work out what had happened, he started to cry.

‘He doesn’t know whether he hit himself or whether the dumbbell hit him,’ said Robert’s father.

His mother took sides against the dumbbell and said, ‘Naughty dumbbell,’ kissing Thomas’s forehead.

Robert hit himself on the side of the head and fell off his grandmother’s bed theatrically. Thomas wasn’t as amused as he had hoped he would be.

His grandmother held her arms out in pleading sympathy, as if Thomas was expressing something that she felt as well, but didn’t want to be reminded of. Robert’s mother lifted Thomas gently into his grandmother’s lap. Seduced by the novelty of his position, Thomas stopped crying and looked searchingly at his grandmother. She seemed to be calmed by his presence. He sat on her lap, giving her what she needed, and they sank together into speechless solidarity. The rest of the family fell silent as well, not wanting to show up the non-speakers. Robert felt his father hovering over his grandmother, resisting saying what was on his mind. In the end it was his grandmother who spoke, not quite fluently but much better than before, as if her speech, abandoning the hopelessly blocked highway of longing, had stolen out under cover of darkness and silence.

‘I want you to know,’ she said, ‘that I’m very … unhappy … at not being able to communicate.’

His mother reached out and touched her knee.

‘It must be horrible for you,’ said his father.

‘Yes,’ said his grandmother, staring at the faraway floor.

Robert didn’t know what to do. His father hated his own mother. He couldn’t join him and he couldn’t condemn him. His grandmother had done her family some wrong, but she was suffering horribly. Robert could only fall back on how things were before they had been darkened by his father’s disappointment. Those cloudless days when he was just meant to love his grandmother; he was not sure they had ever existed, but he was sure they didn’t exist now. It was still too unfair to gang up against his frightened grandmother, even if she was leaving the house to Seamus.

He hopped down from the bed and sat on the arm of his grandmother’s chair, taking her hand in his, like he used to when she first fell ill. That way she could tell him things without having to speak, her thoughts flooding into him in pictures.

The bridges were burnt and broken and everything his grandmother wanted to say got banked up on one side of a ravine, never taking form, never moving on. She felt a perpetual pressure, a scratching behind her eyeballs, like a dog pleading to be let in, a fullness that could only escape in tears and sighs and jagged gestures.