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

He turned towards the sea, but the harsh glitter of the water blinded him and, while he shielded his eyes from the sun, he found himself imagining all the people on that body-packed curve of blond sand, shining with protective lotions, playing with bats and balls, lolling in the placid bay, reading on their towels and mattresses, all being blasted by a fierce wind and blown into a fine veil of sparkling sand, and the collective murmur, pierced by louder shouts and sharper cries, falling silent.

He must rush down that beach to shelter Mary and the children from ruin, give them a few more seconds of life with the decomposing shield of his own body. He struggled so hard to get away from his roles as a father and a husband, only to miss them the moment he succeeded. There was no better antidote to his enormous sense of futility than the enormous sense of purpose which his children brought to the most obviously futile tasks, such as pouring buckets of sea water into holes in the sand. Before he managed to break away from his family, he liked to imagine that once he was alone he would become an open field of attention, or a solitary observer training his binoculars on some rare species of insight usually obscured by the mass of obligations that swayed before him like a swarm of twittering starlings. In reality solitude generated its own roles, not based on duty but on hunger. He became a cafe voyeur, drunk with desire, or a calculating machine compulsively assessing the inadequacy of his income.

Was there any activity which didn’t freeze into a role? Could he listen without being a listener, think without being a thinker? No doubt there was a flowing world of present participles, of listening and thinking, rushing along beside him, but it was part of the grim allegorical tinge of his mentality that he sat with his back to this glittering torrent, staring at a world of stone. Even his affair with Julia seemed to have The Sorrows of Adultery carved on its plinth. Instead of thrilling him with his own audacity, it reminded him of how little he had left. After they had started sleeping together, his days were spent sprawled on a pool-side lounger, feeling that he might as well have been splayed in a roadside ditch, discouraging the excitement of some hungry rats, rather than turning down the demands of his adorable children. His guilt-fuelled bouts of charm towards Mary were as flagrant as his row-picking arguments. The margin of freedom he had gained with Julia was soon filled with the concrete of another role. She was his mistress, he was her married man. She would struggle to get him away, he would struggle to keep her in the mistress slot without tearing his family apart. They were already in a perfectly structured situation, with ultimately opposed interests. Its currency was deception: of Mary, of each other, and of themselves. It was only in the immediate greed of a bed that they could find any common ground. He was amazed by the amount of defeat and inconvenience that already surrounded his affair with Julia. The only sane action would be to end it straight away, to define it as a summer fling and not try to elaborate it into a love affair. The terrible thing was that he had already lost control of the situation. He only felt well when he was in bed with her, when he was inside her, when he was coming inside her. Kneeling on the floor, that had been good, when she had sat in the armchair with her knees up and her legs spread. And the night of the thunder storm, the air awash with free ions, when she stood in the window, gasping at the lightning, and he stood behind her and … and here came his brandy, thank God.

He smiled at the waitress. What was the French for ‘How about it, darling?’ Something, something, something, chérie . He’d better stick to the French for ‘Same again’ – stay on safe ground. Yes, he was lost because he liked everything about Julia: the smell of tobacco on her breath, the taste of her menstrual blood. He couldn’t rely on revulsion of any sort to set him free. She was kind, she was careful, she was accommodating. He was going to have to rely on the machine of their situation to grind them down, as he knew it would.

‘ Encore la même chose ,’ he called to the waitress, swirling his finger over his empty glass while she unloaded her tray at a nearby table. She nodded. She was the waitress, and he was the waiter waiting for the waitress. Everyone had their role.

He could feel the fin de saison , the lassitude of the beaches and restaurants, the sense that it was time to get back to school and to work, back to the big cities; and among the residents, relief at the subsiding numbers, the fading heat. All his guests had left Saint-Nazaire. Kettle had left in triumph, knowing she would be the first to return. She had signed up for Seamus’s Basic Shaman workshop and then, in a kind of shopper’s euphoria, decided to stay on for the Chi Gong course given by a pony-tailed martial artist whose photograph she pored over whenever there was someone to watch her. Seamus had given her a book called The Power of Now , which she kept face down beside her deck chair, not as reading material, obviously, but as a badge of allegiance to the power that now ran Saint-Nazaire. She had taken him up for the simple reason that it was the most annoying thing she could think of doing. It occupied the time when she was not criticizing Mary for the way she brought up the children. Mary had learned to walk away, to make herself unavailable for half-days at a time. Kettle had never known what to do with those fallow periods until she decided to become a fan of Seamus’s Transpersonal Foundation. The Power of Now only disappeared when Anne Whitling, an old friend of Kettle’s, wearing her own vast straw hat with an Isadora Duncan-length scarf trailing dangerously behind it, talked her way down the coast from one of the fashionable Caps. Her profound inability to listen to anyone else was unhappily married to a hysterical concern about what other people thought of her. When Thomas started babbling excitedly to Mary about the hose that was coiled next to the pool house, Anne said, ‘What’s he saying? What’s he saying? If he’s saying my nose is too big, I’m going to commit.’ This charming abbreviation, which Patrick had never heard before, made him imagine bloodstained articles about men’s fear of commitment. Should he commit to his marriage? Or commit to Julia? Or just commit?

How could he go on feeling so awful? And how could he stop? Stealing a picture from his senile mother was one obvious way to cheer himself up. The last two valuable paintings she owned were a pair of Boudins, making up complementary views of the beach at Deauville, and worth approximately two hundred thousand pounds. He had to rap himself over the knuckles for assuming that he would inherit the Boudins in ‘the normal course of events’. Only three days ago, just after waving an exhilarating farewell to Kettle, he had received another of Eleanor’s faint, painstaking, pencil-written notes, saying that she wanted the Boudins sold and the money used to build Seamus’s sensory-deprivation annex. Things just weren’t moving along fast enough for the Kubla Khan of the mindless realms.

He could imagine himself in some distant past thinking he ought to ‘keep the Boudins in the family’, feeling sentimental about those banked-up clouds, the atmosphere of a lost yet vividly present world, the cultural threads radiating from those Normandy beaches. Now they might as well have been two cash dispensers in the wall of his mother’s nursing home. If he was going to have to walk away from Saint-Nazaire, it would put a spring in his step to know that the sale of the Boudins and the sale of the London flat and a preparedness to move to Queen’s Park would allow him to save Thomas from the converted cupboard in which he now slept and offer him an ordinary-sized children’s bedroom in a terraced house on a main road, no more than a two-hour traffic jam from his brother’s school. Anyway, the last thing he needed was a view of a beach at the other end of France when he could so easily admire the carcinogenic inferno of Les Lecques through the amber lens of his second cognac. ‘The sea meets the sky here as well, thank you very much, Monsieur Boudin,’ he muttered to himself, already a little light-headed.