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

Mary’s father, on the contrary, had been delighted with her just as she was. His shyness intermeshed with hers in a way that set them both free. Mary, who hardly spoke for the first twenty years of her life, loved him for never making her feel that her silence was a failure. He understood that it came from a kind of over-intensity, a superabundance of impressions. The gap between her emotional life and social convention was too wide for her to cross. He had been the same way when he was young, but gradually learnt to present something that was not quite himself to the world. Mary’s violent authenticity brought him back to his own core.

Mary remembered him vividly but her memories were embalmed by his early death. She was fourteen when he died of cancer. She was ‘protected’ from his illness by an ineffectual secrecy which made the situation more worrying than it was anyway. The secrecy had been Kettle’s contribution, her substitute for sympathy. After Henry died, Kettle told Mary to ‘be brave’. Being brave meant not asking for sympathy now either. There would have been no point in asking for it, even if the opportunity had not been blocked. Their experiences were essentially so different. Mary was utterly lost in loss, lost in imagining her father’s suffering, lost in the madness of knowing that only he could have understood her feelings about his death. At the same time, confusingly, so much of their relationship had been spent in silent communion that there seemed to be no reason for it to stop. Kettle only appeared to be sharing the same bereavement. She was in fact suffering from the latest instalment of her inevitable disappointment. It was so unfair. She was too young to be a widow, and too old to start again on acceptable terms. It was in the wake of her father’s death that Mary had got the full measure of her mother’s emotional sterility and learnt to despise her. The crust of pity which she had formed since then had grown thinner when she had children of her own. It was now in constant danger of being torn apart by fresh eruptions of fury.

Kettle’s most recent contribution had been to apologize for not getting Thomas a present for his second birthday. She had searched ‘high and low’ (translation: rung Harrods) ‘for some of those marvellous reins you used to have as a child’. After Harrods let her down, she was too tired to look for anything else. ‘They’re bound to come back into fashion,’ she said, as if she might give Thomas a pair when he was twenty or thirty, or whenever the world came to its senses and started stocking child reins again.

‘I suppose Granny’s a great disappointment to you, not getting you any reins,’ she said to Thomas.

‘No, I don’t want any reins,’ said Thomas, who had taken to ritually contradicting the latest statement he heard. Kettle, not knowing this, was astonished.

‘Nanny used to swear by them,’ she resumed.

‘And I used to swear at them,’ said Mary.

‘You didn’t, as a matter of fact,’ said Kettle. ‘Unlike Thomas, you weren’t encouraged to swear like a drunken sailor.’

It was true that the last time they had visited Kettle in London, Thomas had said, ‘Oh, no! Bloody fucking hell, my washing machine is on again,’ and then pretended to turn it off by pressing the disconnected bell next to Kettle’s fireplace.

He had heard Patrick say ‘bloody fucking hell’ that morning, after reading a letter from Sotheby’s. The Boudins, it turned out, were fakes.

‘What a waste of moral effort,’ said Patrick.

‘It wasn’t a waste. You didn’t know they were fakes before you decided not to steal them.’

‘I know, that’s just it: it would have been such an easy decision if I had known. “Steal from my own mother? Never!” I could have thundered right at the beginning, instead of spending a year wondering whether to be some kind of intergenerational Robin Hood, correcting an imbalance with my virtuous crime. My mother managed to make me hate myself for being honourable,’ said Patrick, clasping his head between his hands. ‘How conflicted was that? And how unnecessary.’

‘What’s Dada talking about?’ asked Thomas.

‘I’m talking about your fucking grandmother’s fake paintings.’

‘No, she’s not my fucking grandmother,’ said Thomas, shaking his head solemnly.

‘Seamus is not the first person to have bamboozled her into parting with the little money that my fucking grandmother left her. Some art dealer in Paris pulled off that facile trick thirty years ago.’

‘No, she’s not your fucking grandmother,’ said Thomas, ‘she’s my fucking grandmother.’

Property was another thing Thomas had taken up recently. For a long time he had no sense of owning things, now everything belonged to him.

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.