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

‘What are you muttering about?’ said Nancy, who was clearly annoyed that Patrick had underperformed as an admiring guest.

‘Oh, nothing,’ said Patrick.

‘Isn’t this hen house divine?’ she prompted him.

‘It would be a privilege to live here,’ said Patrick, catching up abruptly with his social duties.

When the garden tour ended, with a gift of eggs, the visit ended as well. On the way back to Nancy’s, Patrick was confronted by his decision not to go on drinking. It was all very well to decide not to drink when he had no choice, but in a few minutes he would be able to climb into the Buick’s private liquor store. What did it matter if he started stopping tomorrow? He knew that it somehow mattered completely. If he went on now he would be hung over tomorrow morning and the whole day would begin with a poisonous legacy. But more than that, he wanted to cultivate the faint hope he had felt in the garden. If he stopped tomorrow it would be from an excess of shame, a nastier and less reliable motivation. What, on the other hand, was Zone Three? His mind was occluded by tension; he couldn’t reconstruct the hope.

Back in Nancy’s library, he stared out of the window, feeling that he was being stared at in turn by the bottle of bourbon he had replaced on the drinks tray. It would be so much neater to bring it down to the level the empty one had started at. Just as he was about to give in, Nancy came into the room and sank with a theatrical sigh into the armchair opposite him.

‘I feel we haven’t really talked about Eleanor,’ she said. ‘I think I’m frightened of asking because I was so shocked when I last saw her.’

‘You heard about the fall?’

‘No!’

‘She broke her hip and went into hospital. When I went to see her she started asking me to kill her. She hasn’t stopped asking me since. Every time I go…’

‘Oh, come on,’ said Nancy, ‘I really don’t think that’s fair! I mean, it’s all too Greek. There must be some special Furies for children who kill their parents.’

‘Yeah,’ said Patrick. ‘Wormwood Scrubs.’

‘Oh, God,’ said Nancy, twisting in her chair. ‘It’s so complicated. I mean, I know I wouldn’t want to go on living if I couldn’t speak, or move, or read, or watch a movie.’

‘I have no doubt that helping her to die would be the most loving thing to do.’

‘Well, I don’t want you to misinterpret me, but maybe we should rent an ambulance and drive her to Holland.’

‘Arriving in Holland isn’t in itself fatal,’ said Patrick.

‘Oh, please, let’s not talk about it any more. I find it too upsetting. I really couldn’t bear it if I ended up like that.’

‘Do you want a drink?’ asked Patrick.

‘Oh, no. I don’t drink,’ said Nancy. ‘Didn’t you know? I watched it destroy Daddy’s life. But do help yourself if you want one.’

Patrick imagined one of his children saying, ‘I watched it destroy Daddy’s life.’ He noticed that he was leaning forward in his chair.

‘I might help myself by not having one,’ he said, sinking back and closing his eyes.

MARY COULD HARDLY BELIEVE that Patrick and Robert were in one thinly carpeted motel room and she and Thomas were in another, with plastic wraps on the plastic glasses, and Sanitized For Your Protection sashes on the plastic loo seats, and a machine down the corridor whose shuddering ejaculations of ice reminded her unwillingly of the state of her marriage. She could hear the steady hum of the freeway thickening in the early morning. It was the perfect soundtrack to the quick, slick flow of her anxiety. At about four in the morning a phrase had started clicking like a metronome she was too tired to reach out and stop: ‘Interstate–inner state, interstate–inner state.’ Sleeplessness was the breeding ground of these sardonic harmonies; ice machine–marriage; interstate–inner state. It was enough to drive you mad. Or was it enough to stop you from going mad? Making connections. She could hardly believe that her family was haemorrhaging more money in order to have a horrible time in one of America’s migratory nowheres. So much road and so few places, so much friendliness and so little intimacy, so much flavour and so little taste. She longed to get the children back home to London, away from the thin rush of America and back to the density of their ordinary lives.

Patrick had kept up the tradition of getting them thrown out of somewhere rather lovely quite a long time before the end of the holidays. Saint-Nazaire last year, Henry’s island this year. Of course she was delighted that he had stopped drinking, but the effect in the first week was to make him behave like other people when they were blind drunk: explosive, irascible, despairing. All the boils were being lanced at once, the kidney dishes overflowing. Henry was certainly a nightmare, but he was also some sort of relation and, above all, a host who was providing a playground for the children, with its own harbour and beaches and sailing boats and motor boats and, to Thomas’s undying amazement, its own petrol pump.

‘I mean, it’s unbelievable, Henry has his own petrol pump!’ Thomas said several times a day, opening his palms and shaking his head. Robert was in a statistical frenzy of acres and bedrooms, totting up the immensity of Henry’s domain, but both boys were mainly having a wonderful time dashing briefly into the freezing water and going out in Henry’s speedboats, riding the wake behind the big ferries which served the public islands.

The only thing which went wrong was everything else. During the first lunch Henry asked Mary to remove Thomas from the dining room when his monologue on the moral necessity of increasing Israel’s nuclear-strike capacity was interrupted by Thomas’s impersonation of a petrol pump.

‘The Syrians are filling their pants right now and they’re right to be…’ Henry was saying gleefully.

‘Bvvvv,’ said Thomas. ‘Bvvvv…’

‘I’m sure you’re familiar with the phrase, “Children should be seen and not heard”,’ said Henry.

‘Who isn’t?’ said Mary.

‘I’ve always thought it was too liberal,’ said Henry, craning his neck out of his shirt to emphasize his bon mot.

‘You’d rather not see him either?’ said Mary, suddenly furious. She picked Thomas up and carried him out of the room rapidly, Henry’s unmolested monologue resuming its flow behind her.

‘When Admiral Yamamoto had finished his attack on Pearl Harbor, he had the wisdom to be more apprehensive than triumphant. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we have roused a sleeping dragon.” It is that thought that should be uppermost in the minds of the world’s international terrorists and their state sponsors. With an arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons, not just a deterrent nuclear shield, Israel will send a clear message to the region that it stands shoulder to shoulder…’

She burst onto the lawn picturing Henry as one of those unknotted balloons Thomas liked to watch swirling flatulently around the room until it suddenly flopped to the ground in wrinkled exhaustion.

‘I’m letting go of a balloon, Mama,’ said Thomas, spinning his hand in tight circles.

‘How did you know I was thinking about a balloon?’ said Mary.

‘I did know that,’ said Thomas, tilting his head to one side and smiling.

These borderless moments happened often enough for Mary to get used to them, but she couldn’t quite shake off her surprise at how precise they were.

By silent agreement the two of them walked away from the house to the little rocky beach at the foot of the lawn. Mary sat down on a small patch of silvery white sand among rocks festooned with beaded black seaweed.

‘Will you look after me for a long time?’ asked Thomas.