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

‘With the other reality.’

Sometimes he didn’t ask grown-ups what they meant because he thought it would make him seem stupid; sometimes it was because he knew they were being stupid. This time it was both. He thought about what Seamus had said and he didn’t see how there could be more than one reality. There could only be different states of mind with reality housing all of them. That’s what he had told his mother, and she said, ‘You’re so brilliant, darling,’ but she wasn’t really paying attention to his theories like she used to. She was always too busy now. What they didn’t understand was that he really wanted to know the answer.

Back under the plane tree, his brother had started screaming. Robert wished someone would make him stop. He could feel his brother’s infancy exploding like a depth charge in his memory. Thomas’s screams reminded Robert of his own helplessness: the ache of his toothless gums, the involuntary twitching of his limbs, the softness of the fontanelle, only a thumb’s thrust away from his growing brain. He felt that he could remember objects without names and names without objects pelting down on him all day long, but there was something he could only dimly sense: a world before the wild banality of childhood, before he had to be the first to rush out and spoil the snow, before he had even assembled himself into a viewer gazing at the white landscape through a bedroom window, when his mind had been level with the fields of silent crystal, still waiting for the dent of a fallen berry.

He had seen Thomas’s eyes expressing states of mind which he couldn’t have invented for himself. They reared up from the scrawny desert of his experience like brief pyramids. Where did they come from? Sometimes he was a snuffling little animal and then, seconds later, he was radiating an ancient calm, at ease with everything. Robert felt that he was definitely not making up these complex states of mind, and neither was Thomas. It was just that Thomas wouldn’t know what he knew until he started to tell himself a story about what was happening to him. The trouble was that he was a baby, and he didn’t have the attention span to tell himself a story yet. Robert was just going to have to do it for him. What was an older brother for? Robert was already caught in a narrative loop, so he might as well take his little brother along with him. After all, in his way, Thomas was helping Robert to piece his own story together.

Outside, he could hear Margaret again, taking on the cicadas and getting the upper hand.

‘With the breast-feeding you’ve got to build yourself up,’ she started out reasonably enough. ‘Have you not got any Digestive biscuits? Or Rich Tea? We could have a few of those right away, actually. And then you want to have a nice big lunch, with lots of carbohydrates. Not too many vegetables, they’ll give him wind. Nice bit of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding is good, with some roast potatoes, and then a slice or two of sponge cake at tea time.’

‘Good God, I don’t think I can manage all that. In my book it says grilled fish and grilled vegetables,’ said his tired, thin, elegant mother.

‘ Some vegetables are all right,’ grumbled Margaret. ‘Not onions or garlic, though, or anything too spicy. I had one mother had a curry on my day off! The baby was howling its head off when I got back. “Save me, Margaret! Mummy’s set my little digestive system on fire!” Personally, I always say, “I’ll have the meat and two veg, but don’t worry too much about the veg.”’

Robert had stuffed a cushion under his T-shirt and was tottering around the room pretending to be Margaret. Once his head was jammed full of someone’s words he had to get them out. He was so involved in his performance that he didn’t notice his father coming into the room.

‘What are you doing?’ asked his father, half knowing already.

‘I was just being Margaret.’

‘That’s all we need – another Margaret. Come down and have some tea.’

‘I’m that stuffed already,’ said Robert, patting his cushion. ‘Daddy, when Margaret leaves, I’ll still be here to give Mummy bad advice about how to look after babies. And I won’t charge you anything.’

‘Things are looking up,’ said his father, holding out his hand to pull Robert up. Robert groaned and staggered across the floor and the two of them headed downstairs, sharing their secret joke.

After tea Robert refused to join the others outside. All they did was talk about his brother and speculate about his state of mind. Walking up the stairs, his decision grew heavier with each step, and by the time he reached the landing he was in two minds. Eventually, he sank to the floor and looked down through the banisters, wondering if his parents would notice his sad and wounded departure.

In the hall, angular blocks of evening light slanted across the floor and stretched up the walls. One piece of light, reflected in the mirror, had broken away and trembled on the ceiling. Thomas was trying to comment. His mother, who understood his thoughts, took him over to the mirror and showed him where the light bounced off the glass.

His father came into the hall and handed a bright red drink to Margaret.

‘Ooh, thank you very much,’ said Margaret. ‘I shouldn’t really get tipsy on top of my sunstroke. Frankly, this is more of a holiday for me than a job, with you being so involved and that. Oh, look, Baby’s admiring himself in the mirror.’ She leant the pink shine of her face towards Thomas.

‘You can’t tell whether you’re over here or over there, can you?’

‘I think he knows that he’s in his body rather than stuck to a piece of glass,’ said Robert’s father. ‘He hasn’t read Lacan’s essay on the mirror stage yet, that’s when the real confusion sets in.’

‘Ooh, well, you’d better stick to Peter Rabbit, then,’ chuckled Margaret, taking a gulp of the red liquid.

‘Much as I’d love to join you outside,’ said his father, ‘I have a million important letters to answer.’

‘Ooh, Daddy’s going to be answering his important letters,’ said Margaret, breathing the red smell into Thomas’s face. ‘You’ll just have to content yourself with Margaret and Mummy.’

She swung her way towards the front door. The lozenge of light disappeared from the ceiling and then flickered back. Robert’s parents stared at each other silently.

As they stepped outside, he imagined his brother feeling the vast space around him.

He stole halfway down the stairs and looked through the doorway. A golden light was claiming the tops of the pines and the bone-white stones of the olive grove. His mother, still barefoot, walked over the grass and sat under their favourite pepper tree. Crossing her legs and raising her knees slightly, she placed his brother in the hammock formed by her skirt, still holding him with one hand and stroking his side with the other. Her face was dappled by the shadow of the small bright leaves that dangled around them.

Robert wandered hesitantly outside, not sure where he belonged. Nobody called him and so he turned round the corner of the house as if he had always meant to go down to the second pond and look at the goldfish. Glancing back, he saw the stick with sparkly wheels that Margaret had bought his brother at the little carousel in Lacoste. The stub of the stick had been planted in the ground near the pepper tree. The wheels spun in the wind, gold and pink and blue and green. ‘It’s the colour and the movement,’ said Margaret when she bought it, ‘they love that.’ He had snatched it from the corner of his brother’s pram and run around the carousel, making the wheels turn. When he was swishing it through the air he somehow broke the stick and everyone got upset on his brother’s behalf because he never really got the chance to enjoy his sparkly windmill before it was broken. Robert’s father had asked him a lot of questions, or rather the same question in a lot of different ways, as if it would do him good to admit that he had broken it on purpose. Do you think you’re jealous? Do you think you’re angry that he’s getting all the attention and the new toys? Do you? Do you? Do you? Well, he had just said it was an accident and wouldn’t budge. And it really was an accident, but it so happened that he did hate his brother, and he wished that he didn’t. Couldn’t his parents remember what it was like when it was just the three of them? They loved each other so much that it hurt when one of them left the room. What had been wrong with having just him on his own? Wasn’t he enough? Wasn’t he good enough? They used to sit on the lawn, where his brother was now, and throw each other the red ball (he had hidden it; Thomas wasn’t going to get that as well) and whether he caught it or dropped it, they had all laughed and everything was perfect. How could they want to spoil that?