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

Mary made out the faint words, in pencil-written block capitals, ‘WHY SEAMUS DOES NOT COME?’

Mary suspected the reason, but could hardly believe it. She hadn’t expected Seamus to be so flagrant. His opportunism always seemed to be blended with the genuine delusion that he was a good man, or at least a strong desire to be mistaken for one. And yet here he was, only a fortnight after the final transfer of Saint-Nazaire to the Foundation, dropping his benefactor like a sack on a skip.

She remembered what Patrick had said when he finally used the power of attorney his mother had given him to sign over the house: ‘These people who want to crawl unburdened to their graves just don’t make it. There is no second childhood, no licence for irresponsibility.’ He then got blind drunk.

Mary looked at Eleanor’s face. It was impacted with misery. Her eyes were veiled like the eyes of a recently dead fish, but in her case the dullness seemed to stem from the effort of staying disconnected from reality. Mary could see now that her missing teeth were really a suicidal gesture, with the violent passivity of a hunger strike. They could so easily have been replaced, it must have taken great stubbornness to stay in the vortex of self-neglect, week after week, as they fell out, one by one, ignoring the medical profession, the antidepressants, the nursing home and the remains of her own will to live.

Mary felt pierced by a sense of tragedy. Here was a woman who had abandoned her family for a vision and for a man, and now the man and the vision had abandoned her. She could remember Eleanor telling her, when she could still speak adequately, that she and Seamus had known each other in ‘previous lifetimes’. One of these previous lifetimes had taken place on something called a ‘skelig’, some kind of Irish seaside mound, which Seamus had taken Eleanor to see early in his financial courtship, on that unforgettable, blustery day when he took her hand and said, ‘Ireland needs you.’ Once Eleanor realized, in a ‘past-life recall’, that she had lived as Seamus’s wife on the very skelig they visited, during the Dark Ages, when Ireland was a beacon of Christianity in that muddle of pillage and migration, her immediate family, with whom she had a relatively shallow past, began to slip from view. And once Seamus visited Saint-Nazaire, he realized that France needed him even more than Ireland needed Eleanor. The house had been a convent in the seventeenth century, and a second ‘past-life recall’ established that Eleanor was (it seemed obvious once you were told) the mother superior. The noun, Mary remembered thinking, had stayed stuck in front of the adjective ever since. Seamus, amazingly, was the abbot of a local monastery at exactly the same time. And so they had been thrown together again, this time in a ‘spiritual friendship’ which had been misinterpreted and caused a great scandal in the area.

When Eleanor told her all this, in an oppressive parody of girls’ talk, Mary decided not to argue. Eleanor believed more or less anything, as long as it was untrue. It was part of her charitable nature to rush belief to the unbelievable, like emergency aid. She clearly needed to inhabit these historical novels to make up for the disappointment of a passion which was not being acted out in the bedroom (it had evolved too much for that) but was having a thrilling enough time at the Land Registry. It had all seemed so ridiculous to Mary at the time; now she wished she could stick back the peeling wallpaper of Eleanor’s credulity. Under the dreadful sincerity of the original confession was that need to be needed which Mary recognized so well.

‘I’ll ask him,’ she said, covering Eleanor’s hand gently with her own. Although she hadn’t seen him yet, she knew that Seamus was in his cottage. ‘Perhaps he’s been ill, or in Ireland.’

‘Ireland,’ Eleanor whispered.

When they were walking back to the car, Thomas stopped and shook his head. ‘Oh, dear,’ he said. ‘Eleanor is not very well.’

Mary loved his straightforward sympathy for suffering. He hadn’t yet learned to pretend that it wasn’t going on, or to blame the person who was having it. He fell asleep in the car and she decided she might as well go straight to Seamus’s cottage.

‘Well, now, that’s a terrible thing,’ said Seamus. ‘I thought with the family being here and everything, that Eleanor wouldn’t want to see me so much. And, to be honest with you Mary, the Pegasus Press have been breathing down my neck. They want to put my book in their spring catalogue. I’ve got so many ideas, it’s just getting them down. Do you think Drumbeat of my Heart or Heartbeat of my Drum is better?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mary. ‘It depends which one you mean, I suppose.’

‘That’s good advice,’ said Seamus. ‘Talking of drums, we’re very pleased with your mother’s progress. She’s taken to the soul-retrieval work like a duck to water. I just got an email from her saying she wants to come to the autumn intensive.’

‘Amazing,’ said Mary. She was nervous that the monitor wouldn’t work. The green light seemed to be winking in the usual way, but she had never used it in the car before.

‘Soul retrieval is something I think Eleanor could benefit from immensely. I’m just thinking aloud now,’ said Seamus, swivelling excitedly in his chair and blocking Mary’s view of a leathery old Inuit woman, with a pipe dangling from her mouth, that radiated from his computer screen. ‘If your mother were to lead a ceremony with Eleanor at the centre of the circle, that could be hugely powerful with all the, you know, connections.’ He spread the fingers of both his hands and intermeshed them tenderly.

Poor Seamus, thought Mary, he wasn’t really a bad man, he was just a complete idiot. She sometimes became a little competitive with Patrick about who had the most annoying mother. Kettle gave nothing away, Eleanor gave everything away; the results were indistinguishable for the family, except that Mary had ‘expectations’, made fantastically remote by the robustness of her meticulously selfish mother, who thought of nothing but her own comfort, rushed to the doctor every time she sneezed and ‘treated’ herself to a holiday once a month to get over the disappointment of the last one. Patrick’s disinheritance had nudged him ahead in the bad-mother stakes, but perhaps Seamus was planning to eliminate that advantage by taking Kettle’s money as well. Was he, after all, really a bad man doing a brilliant impersonation of an idiot? It was hard to tell. The connections between stupidity and malice were so tangled and so dense.

‘I’m seeing more and more connections,’ said Seamus, twisting his fingers around each other. ‘To be honest with you, Mary, I don’t think I’ll write another book. It can do your head in.’

‘I bet,’ said Mary. ‘I couldn’t even begin to write a book.’

‘Oh, I’ve done the beginning,’ said Seamus. ‘In fact, I’ve done several beginnings. Perhaps it’s all beginnings, do you know what I mean?’

‘With each new heartbeat,’ said Mary. ‘Or drumbeat.’

‘That’s right, that’s right,’ said Seamus.

Thomas’s waking cry burst through the monitor. Mary was relieved to know that she was in range.

‘Oh, dear, I’m going to have to leave.’

‘I’ll definitely try to see Eleanor in the next few days,’ said Seamus, accompanying her to the door of his cottage. ‘I really appreciate what you said about the heartbeat and being in the moment – it’s given me a lot of ideas.’

He opened the door, setting off a tinkling of chimes. Mary looked up and saw three Chinese pictographs clustered around a dangling brass rod.

‘Happiness, Peace and Prosperity,’ said Seamus. ‘They’re inseparable.’