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

Now she had an hour, perhaps two, in which to answer letters, pay her taxes, keep in touch with her friends, revive her intellect, take some exercise, read a good book, think of a brilliant money-making scheme, take up yoga, see an osteopath, go to the dentist and get some sleep. Sleep, remember sleep? The word had once referred to great haunches of unconsciousness, six, eight, nine-hour slabs; now she fought for twenty-minute scraps of disturbing rest, rest which reminded her that she was fundamentally done in. Last night she was kept awake by an overwhelming terror that some harm would come to Thomas if she fell asleep. She was rigid with resistance all night, like a sentry who knows that death is the penalty for nodding off on his watch. Now she really had to get some muddling, hangover-like afternoon sleep, soaked in unpleasant dreams, but first she was going to read Sally’s fax, as a sign of her independence, which she often felt was even less well established than Thomas’s, since she couldn’t test its limits as wildly as he could. It was a practical fax, as Sally had warned her, with the dates and times of her arrival at Saint-Nazaire, but then at the end Sally added, ‘I came across this quotation yesterday, from Alexander Herzen. “We think the purpose of a child is to grow up because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of life is death.”’

Yes, that was what she had wanted to say to Patrick when they had been alone with Robert. Patrick had been so concerned with shaping Robert’s mind, with giving him a transfusion of scepticism, that he had sometimes forgotten to let him play, enjoy himself and be a child. He let Thomas follow his own course, partly because he was preoccupied with his own psychological survival, but also because Thomas’s desire for knowledge outstripped any parental ambition. With him she thought, as she closed her eyes after a last glance at Thomas’s sleeping face, it was so clear that playing and enjoying himself were identical with learning to master the world around him.

‘WHERE HAS MY WILLIE gone?’ said Thomas, lying on his blue towel after his bath.

‘It’s disappeared,’ said Mary.

‘Oh! There it is, Mama,’ he said, uncrossing his legs.

‘That’s a relief,’ said Mary.

‘It certainly is a relief,’ said Thomas.

After playing in his bath he was reluctant to get back into the padded cell of a nappy. Pyjamas, the dreadful sign that he was expected to go to sleep, sometimes had to wait until he was asleep to be put on. Any sense that Mary was in a hurry made him take twice as long to go to bed.

‘Oh, no! My willie’s disappeared again,’ said Thomas. ‘I really am upset about it.’

‘Are you, darling?’ said Mary, noticing him experiment with the phrase she had used yesterday when he threw a glass on the kitchen floor.

‘Yes, Mama, it’s driving me crazy.’

‘Where can it have gone?’ asked Mary.

‘I don’t believe it,’ he said, pausing for her to appreciate the gravity of the loss. ‘Oh, there it is!’ He gave a perfect imitation of the reassured cheerfulness with which she rediscovered a milk bottle or a lost shoe.

He started to jump up and down and then dropped onto the bed, rolling among the pillows.

‘Be careful,’ said Mary, watching him bounce too near the metal guards that surrounded the edge of the bed.

It was hard to stay ready for a sudden catch, to keep scanning for sharp corners and hard edges, to let him go to the limit of his adventure. She really wanted to lie down now, but the last thing she should do was to show any sign of exasperation or impatience.

‘I am an acrobat at the circus,’ said Thomas, trying to do a forward roll but keeling over. ‘Mama say, “Be careful, little monkey.”’

‘Be careful, little monkey,’ Mary repeated her line obediently. She must get him a director’s chair and a megaphone. He was always being told what to do, now it was his turn.

She felt drained by the long day, most of all by visiting Eleanor in her nursing home. Mary had tried to mask her sense of shock when she arrived with Thomas in Eleanor’s room. All of Eleanor’s upper teeth were missing from one side of her mouth and only three dangled like black stalactites from the other. Her hair, which she used to have washed every other day, was reduced to a greasy chaos stuck to her now visibly bumpy skull. As Mary leant over to kiss Eleanor, she was assailed by a stench that made her want to reach for the portable changing mat she carried in her rucksack. She must restrain her maternal drive, especially in the presence of a proven champion of maternal self-restraint.

Eleanor’s decay was underlined by her loss of equality with Thomas. Last year, neither of them could talk properly or walk steadily; Eleanor had lost enough teeth to leave her with roughly the same number as Thomas had gained; her new need for incontinence pads matched his established need for nappies. This year, everything had changed. Thomas wouldn’t need nappies for much longer, Eleanor needed more than she was currently using; only his back molars still had to work their way through, her back molars would soon be the only teeth she had left; he was getting so fast that his mother could hardly keep up, Eleanor could hardly keep herself up in her chair and would soon be bedridden. Mary paused on top of the icy slopes of potential conversation. The already strained assumption that they shared an enthusiasm for Thomas’s progress now looked like a covert insult. It was no use reminding her of Robert either, her former ally, now the disciple of his father’s hostility.

‘Oh, no!’ said Thomas to Eleanor. ‘Alabala stole my halumbalum.’

Thomas, who was so often stuck with adults in a traffic jam of incomprehensible syllables, sometimes answered back with a little private language of his own. Mary was used to this sweet revenge and also intrigued by the emergence of Alabala, a recent creation who seemed to be falling into the classic role of doing naughty things to and for Thomas, and was accompanied by his conscience, a character called Felan. He looked up at Eleanor with a smile. It was not returned. Eleanor stared at Thomas with horror and suspicion. What she saw was not the ingenuity of a child but the harbinger of her worst fear: that soon, on top of being unable to make herself understood, she would not be able to understand anybody else. Mary moved in quickly.

‘He doesn’t only talk nonsense,’ she said. ‘One of his favourite phrases at the moment – I think you’ll detect Patrick’s influence – ’ she tried another complicit smile, ‘is “absolutely unbearable”.’

Eleanor’s body lurched forward a couple of inches. She gripped the wooden arms of her chair and looked at Mary with furious concentration.

‘Absolute-ly un-bearable,’ she spat out, and then fell back, adding a high, faint, ‘Yes.’

Eleanor turned again towards Thomas, but this time she looked at him with a kind of greed. A moment ago, he seemed to be announcing the storm of gibberish that would soon enshroud her, but now he had given her a phrase which she understood perfectly, a phrase she couldn’t have managed on her own, describing exactly how she felt.

Something similar happened when Mary read out a list of audio books that Eleanor might want sent from England. Eleanor’s method for choosing the books bore no obvious relation to their authors or categories. Mary droned through the titles of works by Jane Austen and Proust, Jeffrey Archer and Jilly Cooper, without any signs of interest from Eleanor. Then she read out the title Ordeal of Innocence and Eleanor started nodding her head and flapping her hands acquisitively, as if she were splashing water onto her chest. Harvest of Dust elicited the same surges of excitement. Stimulated by these unexpected communications, Eleanor remembered the note she had written earlier, and handed it to Mary with her shaking, liver-spotted hand.