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

‘Is Felan in there too?’

‘Yes, he is. He’s the co-pilot.’

‘Really? And who’s the pilot?’

‘Scott Tracy.’

‘So this is an International Rescue plane?’

‘Yes. We have to rescue a pentatenton.’

‘What’s a pentatenton?’

‘Well, it’s a hedgehog, actually, and it’s fallen in the river!’

‘In the Thames?’

‘Yes! And it doesn’t know how to swim, so Gordon Tracy has to rescue it with Thunderbird 4.’

Thomas thrust out his hand and moved the submarine through the muddy waters of the Thames.

Robert hummed the theme tune from Thunderbirds , drumming on the armrest between them.

‘Perhaps you could get her to sign the letter of consent,’ said Patrick.

‘OK,’ said Mary.

‘At least we can assemble all the elements…’

‘What elements?’ asked Robert.

‘Never mind,’ said Mary. ‘Look, we’re about to land,’ she said, trying to infuse the glinting fields, congested roads and small crowds of reddish houses with an excitement they were unlikely to generate on their own.

On the day of their arrival, the Dignitas membership form and Dr Fenelon’s report emerged from the heap of letters in the hall. Sprawled exhausted on the black sofa, Patrick read through the Dignitas brochures.

‘All the people in the cases they quote have agonizing terminal diseases or can only move one eyelid,’ he commented. ‘I’m worried she may just not be ill enough.’

‘Let’s get everything together and see what they think about her case,’ said Mary.

Patrick gave her the letter of consent he had written before leaving for America and she set off with it to the nursing home. In the upper corridor the cleaners had wedged open the doors to air the rooms. Through the doorway Eleanor looked quite calm, until she detected another presence entering the room and stared with a kind of furious blankness in the direction of the newcomer. When Mary announced who she was, Eleanor grabbed the side rail of her barred bed and tried to heave herself up, making desperate mumbling sounds. Mary felt that she had interrupted Eleanor’s communion with some other realm in which things were not quite as bad as they were on planet Earth. She suddenly felt that both ends of life were absolutely terrifying, with a quite frightening stretch in between. No wonder people did what they could to escape.

There was no point in asking Eleanor how she was, no point in trying to make conversation, and so Mary plunged in with a summary of what had been going on with the rest of them. Eleanor seemed horrified to be placed within the coordinates of her family. Mary quickly moved on to the purpose of her visit, suggesting that she read the letter out loud.

‘If you feel it’s what you want to say, you can sign it,’ she said.

Eleanor nodded.

Mary got up and closed the door, glancing down the corridor to check that there were no nurses on their way. She pulled her chair close to Eleanor’s bed and placed her chin over the hand rail, holding the letter on Eleanor’s side of the bars. She began to read with surprising nervousness.

I have had several strokes over the last few years, each one leaving me more shattered than the last. I can hardly move and I can hardly speak. I am bedridden and incontinent. I feel uninterrupted anguish and terror and frustration at my own immobility and uselessness. There is no prospect of improvement, only of drifting into dementia, the thing I dread most. I can already feel my faculties betraying me. I do not look on death with fear but with longing. There is no other liberation from the daily torture of my existence. Please help me if you can.

yours sincerely,

‘Do you think that’s fair?’ asked Mary, trying not to cry.

‘No … es,’ said Eleanor with great difficulty.

‘I mean a fair description.’

‘Es.’

They gripped each other’s hands for a while, saying nothing. Eleanor looked at her with a kind of dry-eyed hunger.

‘Do you want to sign it?’

‘Sign,’ said Eleanor, swallowing hard.

When Mary broke out into the streets, along with her sense of physical relief at getting away from the smell of urine and boiled cabbage, and the waiting-room atmosphere in which death was the delayed train, she felt grateful that there had been a moment of communication with Eleanor. In that gripped hand she had felt not just an appeal but a determination that made her wonder if she was right to doubt Eleanor’s preparedness to commit suicide. And yet there was something fundamentally lost about Eleanor, a sense that she had neither engaged in the mundane realm of family and friendship and politics and property, nor had she engaged with the realm of contemplation and spiritual fulfilment; she had simply sacrificed one to the other. If she belonged to the tribe who always heard the siren call of the choice they were about to lose, she was bound to feel an absolute need to stay alive once suicide had been perfectly organized for her. Salvation would always be elsewhere. Suddenly it would be more spiritual to stay alive – to learn patience, remain in the refining fires of suffering, whatever. More dreadful life would be imposed on her and it would inevitably seem more spiritual to die – to be reunited with the source, stop being a burden, meet Jesus at the end of a tunnel, whatever. The spiritual, because she had never committed herself to it any more effectively than to the rest of life, was subject to endless metamorphosis without losing its theoretical centrality.

When Mary got home, Thomas ran out into the hall to greet her. He wrapped his arms around her thigh with some difficulty, due to the Hoberman sphere, a multicoloured collapsible dodecahedron frame, which he had allowed to close around his neck and wore as a spiky helmet. His hands were clad in a pair of socks and he was holding a battery-operated propeller fan of fairy lights acquired on a visit to the Chinese State Circus on Blackheath.

‘We’re on Earth, aren’t we, Mama?’

‘Most of us,’ said Mary, thinking of the look she had glimpsed on Eleanor’s face through the open door of her room.

‘Yes, I did know that,’ said Thomas wisely. ‘Except astronauts who are in outer space. And they just float about because there’s no gravity!’

‘Did she sign?’ said Patrick, appearing in the doorway.

‘Yes,’ said Mary, handing him the letter.

Patrick sent the letter and membership form and doctor’s report to Switzerland and waited for a couple of days before ringing to find out if his mother’s application was likely to be successful.

‘In this case I think we will be able to help,’ was the answer he received. He stubbornly refused to get involved with his emotions, letting panic and elation and solemnity lean on the doorbell while he only glanced at them from behind closed curtains, pretending not to be at home. He was helped by the storm of practical demands which enveloped the family during the next week. Mary told Eleanor the news and was answered with a radiant smile. Patrick arranged a flight for the following Thursday. The nursing home was told that Eleanor was moving, without being told where. A consultation was booked with a doctor in Zurich.

‘We could all go on Wednesday to say goodbye,’ said Patrick.

‘Not Thomas,’ said Mary. ‘It’s been too long since he’s seen her and the last time he made it very clear that he was upset. Robert can still remember her when she was well.’

None of Mary’s close friends could look after Thomas on Wednesday afternoon and she was finally forced to ask her mother.

‘Of course I’ll do anything I can to help,’ said Kettle, feeling that if ever there was a time to make all the right noises, it was now. ‘Why don’t you drop him off at lunchtime? Amparo can make him some lovely fish fingers and you can all come to tea after you’ve said goodbye to poor old Eleanor.’