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

‘Don’t you want the tongs?’ she asked coaxingly.

Patrick hoped he would handle things more wisely with Thomas than he had with Robert, not infuse him with his own anxieties and preoccupations. The hurdles were always raised at the last moment. He was so tired now. The hurdles always raised … of course … he would think that … he was chasing his tail now … the dog was barking on the other side of the valley … the inner and outer worlds ploughing into each other … he was almost falling asleep … perchance to dream … fuck that. He sat up and finished the thought. Yes, even the most enlightened care carried a shadow. Even Johnny (but then, he was a child psychologist) reproached himself for making his children feel that he really understood them, that he knew what they were feeling before they knew themselves, that he could read their unconscious impulses. They lived in the panoptic prison of his sympathy and expertise. He had stolen their inner lives. Perhaps the kindest thing Patrick could do was to break up his family, to offer his children a crude and solid catastrophe. All children had to break free in the end. Why not give them a hard wall to kick against, a high board to jump from. Christ, he really must get some rest.

After midnight, the wonderful Dr Zemblarov was never far from his thoughts. A Bulgarian who practised in the local village, he spoke in extremely rapid, heavily accented English. ‘In our culture, we have only this,’ he would say, signing an elaborate prescription, ‘ la pharmacologie. If we lived in the Pacifique , maybe we could dance, but for us there is only the chemical manipulation. When I go back to Bulgaria, for example, I take de l’amphetamine. I drive I drive I drive, I see my family, I drive I drive I drive, and I come back to Lacoste.’ The last time Patrick had hesitantly asked for more Tamazepam, Dr Zemblarov reproached him for being so shy. ‘ Mais il faut toujours demander. I take it myself when I travel. L’administration want to limit us to thirty days, so I will put “one in the evening and one at night”, which naturally is not true, but it will avoid you to come here so often. I will also give you Stilnox, which is from another family – the hypnotics! We also have the barbiturate family,’ he added with an appreciative smile, his pen hovering over the page.

No wonder Patrick was always tired, and could only offer short bursts of child care. Today, Thomas had been in pain. Some more teeth were bullying their way through his sore gums, his cheeks were red and swollen and he was rushing about looking for distractions. In the evening, Patrick had finally contributed a quick tour of the house. Their first stop was the socket in the wall under the mirror. Thomas looked at it longingly and then anticipated his father by saying, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ He shook his head earnestly, piling up as many ‘no’s as he could between him and the socket, but desire soon washed away the little dam of his conscience, and he lunged towards the socket, improvising a plug with his small wet fingers. Patrick swept him off his feet and hauled him further down the corridor. Thomas shouted in protest, planting a couple of sharp kicks in his father’s testicles.

‘Let’s go and see the ladder,’ gasped Patrick, feeling it would be unfair to offer him anything much less dangerous than electrocution. Thomas recognized the word and calmed down, knowing that the frail, paint-spattered aluminium ladder in the boiler room had its own potential for injury and death. Patrick held him lightly by the waist while he monkeyed up the steps, almost pulling the ladder back on them. As he was lowered to the ground, Thomas burst into a drunken run, reeling his way towards the boiler. Patrick caught him and prevented him from crashing into the water tank. He was completely exhausted by now. He’d had enough. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t contributed to the baby care. Now he needed a holiday. He staggered back into the drawing room, carrying his wriggling son.

‘How are you?’ asked Mary.

‘Done in,’ said Patrick.

‘I’m not surprised, you’ve had him for a minute and a half.’

Thomas hurtled towards his mother, buckling at the last minute. Mary caught him before his head hit the floor and put him back on his feet.

‘I don’t know how you cope without a nanny,’ said Julia.

‘I don’t know how I would cope with one. I’ve always wanted to look after the children myself.’

‘Motherhood takes some people that way,’ said Julia. ‘I must say, it didn’t in my case, but then I was so young when I had Lucy.’

To show that she too went mad in the sun-drenched south, Kettle had come down to dinner wearing a turquoise silk jacket and a pair of lemon-yellow linen trousers. The rest of the household, still wearing their sweat-stained shirts and khaki trousers, left her just where she wanted to be, the lonely martyr to her own high standards.

Thomas slapped his hands over his face as she came in.

‘Oh, it’s too sweet,’ said Kettle. ‘What’s he doing?’

‘Hiding,’ said Mary.

Thomas whipped his hands away and stared at the others with his mouth wide open. Patrick reeled back, thunderstruck by his reappearance. It was Thomas’s new game. It seemed to Patrick the oldest game in the world.

‘It’s so relaxing having him hide where we can all see him,’ said Patrick. ‘I dread the moment when he feels he has to leave the room.’

‘He thinks we can’t see him because he can’t see us,’ said Mary.

‘I must say, I do sympathize,’ said Kettle. ‘I rather wish people saw things exactly as I do.’

‘But you know that they don’t,’ said Mary.

‘Not always, darling,’ said Kettle.

‘I’m not sure that it’s a story of the self-centred child and the well-adjusted adult,’ Patrick had made the mistake of theorizing. ‘Thomas knows that we don’t see things as he does, otherwise he wouldn’t be laughing. The joke is the shift in perspective. He expects us to flow into his point of view when he covers his face, and back into our own when he whips his hands away. We’re the ones who are stuck.’

‘Honestly, Patrick, you always make everything so intellectual,’ Kettle complained. ‘He’s just a little boy playing a game. Apropos of hiding,’ she said, in the manner of someone taking the wheel from a drunken driver, ‘I remember going to Venice with Daddy before we were married. We were trying to be discreet because one was expected to make an effort in those days. Well, of course the first thing that happened was that we ran into Cynthia and Ludo at the airport. We decided to behave rather like Thomas and pretend that if we didn’t look at them they couldn’t see us.’

‘Was it a success?’ asked Patrick.

‘Not at all. They shouted our names across the airport at the top of their voices. I would have thought it was perfectly obvious that we didn’t want to be spotted, but tact was never Ludo’s forte. Anyway, we made all the right noises.’

‘But Thomas does want to be spotted, that’s his big moment,’ said Mary.

‘I’m not saying it’s exactly the same situation,’ said Kettle, with a little splutter of irritation.

‘What are the “right noises”?’ Robert had asked Patrick on the way into dinner.

‘Anything that comes out of Kettle,’ he replied, half hoping she would hear.

It didn’t help that Julia was so unfriendly to Mary, not that it would have helped if she had been friendly. His loyalty to Mary was not in question (or was it?); what was in question was whether he could last without sex for one more second. Unlike the riotous appetites of adolescence, his present cravings had a tragic tinge, they were cravings for the appetites, metacravings, wanting to want. The question now was whether he would be able to sustain an erection, rather than whether he could ever get rid of the damn thing. At the same time the cravings had to cultivate simplicity, they had to collapse into an object of desire, in order to hide their tragic nature. They were not cravings for things which he could get, but for capacities which he would never have back. What would he do if he did get Julia? Apologize for being exhausted, of course. Apologize for being tied up. He was having (get it off your chest, dear, it’ll do you good) a midlife crisis, and yet he wasn’t, because a midlife crisis was a cliché, a verbal Tamazepam made to put an experience to sleep, and the experience he was having was still wide awake – at three thirty in the fucking morning.