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

‘It’s so difficult because your will is what gets you through life,’ Sally had said last night. ‘Why would you want to break your child’s will? That’s what our mothers wanted to do. That’s what it meant to be “good” – being broken.’

Sally, Mary’s American friend, was her greatest ally; also a mother showered in useless advice, also determined to give her children uncompromised support, to roll the boulder of her own upbringing out of the way so that they could run free. This task was surrounded by hostile commentary: stop being a doormat; don’t be a slave to your children; get your figure back; keep your husband happy; get back ‘out there’; go to a party, spending your whole time with your children drives you literally mad; increase your self-esteem by handing your children over to someone else and writing an article saying that women should not feel guilty about handing their children over to someone else; don’t spoil your children by giving them what they want; let the little tyrants cry themselves to sleep, when they realize that crying is useless they’ll stop; anyway, children love boundaries. Below this layer came the confusing rumours: never use paracetamol, always use paracetamol, paracetamol stops homeopathy from working, homeopathy doesn’t work, homeopathy works for some things but not for others; an amber necklace stops their teeth hurting; that rash could be an allergy to cow’s milk, it could be an allergy to wheat, it could be an allergy to the air quality, London has become five times more polluted in the last ten years; nobody really knows, it’ll probably just go away. Then there were the invidious comparisons and the plain lies: my daughter sleeps all through the night; she hasn’t needed nappies since she was three weeks old; his mother breast-fed him till he was five; we’re so lucky, they’ve both got guaranteed places at the Acorn; her best friend at school is Cilla Black’s granddaughter.

When all these distractions could be ignored, Mary tried to hack through the dead wood of her own conditioning, through the overcompensation, through the exhaustion and the irritation and the terror, through the tension between dependency and independence which was alive in her as well as her children, which she had to recognize but could give no time to, and get back, perhaps, to the root of an instinct for love, and try to stay there and to act from there.

She felt that Sally was roped to the same cliff face as her, and that they could rely on each other. Sally had sent through a fax last night but Mary hadn’t had time to read it yet. She had torn it from the fax machine and squeezed it into her rucksack. Perhaps when Thomas had a sleep – when he had a sleep, that moment into which the rest of life was supposed to be artfully crammed. By the time it came around, she was usually too desperate for sleep herself to break away from his rhythm and do anything different.

The chips had already lost their power to hold Thomas and he was climbing back down the chairs. Mary took his hand and let him lead her back to the steps he had dashed up earlier. They wandered down the Promenade Rose together hand in hand.

‘It’s lovely and smooth on my feet,’ said Thomas. ‘Oh,’ he suddenly stopped in front of a row of wilted cactuses, ‘what’s that called?’

‘It’s some kind of cactus, darling. I don’t know the specific name.’

‘But I want to know the specific name,’ said Thomas.

‘We’ll have to look it up in my book when we get home.’

‘Yes, Mama, we’ll … Oh! What’s that boy doing?’

‘He’s got a water pistol.’

‘For watering the flowers.’

‘Well, yes, that would be a good use for it.’

‘It’s for watering the flowers,’ he informed her.

He loosened his hand and walked ahead of her. Although they were constantly together, she often didn’t get to look at him for hours on end. He was either too close for her to see the whole of him, or she was focused on the dangerous elements in the situation and had no time to appreciate the rest. Now she could see him whole, without anxiety, looking adorable with his hooped blue T-shirt and khaki trousers and his determined walk. His face was astonishingly beautiful. She sometimes worried about the kind of attention it would attract, and the kind of impact he would get used to having. She could remember when he had first opened his eyes in the hospital. They were blazing with an inexplicably strong sense of intention; a drive to make sense of the world, in order to house another kind of knowledge which he already had. Robert had arrived with a completely different atmosphere, a sense of emotional intensity, of trouble that needed working out.

‘Oh,’ said Thomas pointing, ‘what’s that funny man doing?’

‘He’s putting on his mask and snorkel.’

‘It’s my mask and snorkel.’

‘Well, it’s very nice of you to let him use it.’

‘I let him use it,’ said Thomas. ‘He can use it, Mama.’

‘Thank you, darling.’

He marched on. He was being munificent now, but in about ten minutes his energy would collapse and everything would start to go wrong.

‘Shall we go back to the beach and have a little rest?’

‘I don’t want a little rest. I want to go to the playground. I love the playground so much,’ he said, breaking into a run.

The playground was uninhabitable at this time of day, its dangerous climbing frame led to a metal slide hot enough to fry an egg on. Next to it, a plastic pony squeaked unbearably on a coiled spring. When they arrived at the wooden gate, Mary reached out and swung it open for Thomas.

‘No, Mama, I do it,’ he said with a sudden wail of misery.

‘OK, OK,’ said Mary.

‘No, I do it,’ said Thomas, pulling open with some difficulty the gate, made heavier by a metal plaque displaying eight playground rules, four times as many rules as rides. They made the transition to a pink rubber surface masquerading as tarmac. Thomas climbed the curved bars up to the platform above the slide, and then dashed over to the other opening, opposite a fireman’s pole which he couldn’t possibly get down on his own. Mary hurried around the climbing frame to meet him. Would he really jump? Was he really going to misjudge his capacities to that extent? Was she pumping fear into a situation where only play was needed? Was it an instinct to anticipate disaster, or was every other mother in the world more relaxed than her? Was it worth pretending to be relaxed, or was pretence always a bad thing? Once Mary was standing beside the pole, Thomas moved back to the slide and quickly pulled himself down. He tipped over at the end of his run and banged his head on the edge. The shock fused with his exhaustion to produce a long moment of silence; his face flushed and he let out a long scream, his pink tongue quivering in his mouth, and his eyes thickly glazed with tears. Mary felt, as usual, that a javelin had been flung into her chest. She picked him up in her arms and held him close, reassuring them both.

‘Raggie with a label,’ he sobbed. She handed him a Harrington square with the label still on it. A raggie without a label was not just unconsoling but doubly upsetting because of its tantalizing resemblance to the ones which still had labels.

She walked back swiftly to the beach, carrying him in her arms. He shuddered and grew quiet, clasping Raggie and sucking his thumb with the same hand. The adventure was over, the exploration had gone to its limit and ended the only way it could, involuntarily. She laid him down on a mattress under a parasol and curled up next to him, closing her eyes and lying completely still. She heard him suck his thumb more intensely as he settled, and then she could tell from the change in his breathing that he had fallen asleep. She opened her eyes.