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

Maybe he was too old. Maybe babies were better. Babies were impressed by pretty well anything. Take the fish pond he was throwing pebbles into. He had seen his mother carrying Thomas to the edge of the pond and pointing to the fish, saying, ‘Fish.’ It was no use trying that sort of thing with Robert. What he couldn’t help wondering was how his brother was supposed to know whether she meant the pond, the water, the weeds, the clouds reflected on the water, or the fish, if he could see them. How did he even know that ‘Fish’ was a thing rather than a colour or something that you do? Sometimes, come to think of it, it was something to do.

Once you got words you thought the world was everything that could be described, but it was also what couldn’t be described. In a way things were more perfect when you couldn’t describe anything. Having a brother made Robert wonder what it had been like when he only had his own thoughts to guide him. Once you locked into language, all you could do was shuffle the greasy pack of a few thousand words that millions of people had used before. There might be little moments of freshness, not because the life of the world has been successfully translated but because a new life has been made out of this thought stuff. But before the thoughts got mixed up with words, it wasn’t as if the dazzle of the world hadn’t been exploding in the sky of his attention.

Suddenly, he heard his mother scream.

‘What have you done to him?’ she shouted.

He sprinted round the corner of the terrace and met his father running out of the front door. Margaret was lying on the lawn, holding Thomas sprawled on her bosom.

‘It’s all right, dear, it’s all right,’ said Margaret. ‘Look, he’s even stopped crying. I took the fall, you see, on my bottom. It’s my training. I think I may have broken my finger, but there’s no need to worry about silly old Margaret as long as no harm has come to the baby.’

‘That’s the first sensible thing I’ve ever heard you say,’ said his mother, who never said anything unkind. She lifted Thomas out of Margaret’s arms and kissed his head again and again. She was taut with anger, but as she kissed him tenderness started to drown it out.

‘Is he all right?’ asked Robert.

‘I think so,’ said his mother.

‘I don’t want him to be hurt,’ Robert said, and they walked back into the house together, leaving Margaret talking on the ground.

* * *

The next morning, they were all hiding from Margaret in his parents’ bedroom. Robert’s father had to drive Margaret to the airport that afternoon.

‘I suppose we ought to go down,’ said his mother, closing the poppers of Thomas’s jumpsuit, and lifting him into her arms.

‘No,’ howled his father, throwing himself onto the bed.

‘Don’t be such a baby.’

‘Having a baby makes you more childish, haven’t you noticed?’

‘I haven’t got time to be more childish, that’s a privilege reserved for fathers.’

‘You would have time if you were getting any competent help.’

‘Come on,’ said Robert’s mother, reaching out to his father with her spare hand.

He clasped it lightly but didn’t move.

‘I can’t decide which is worse,’ he said, ‘talking to Margaret, or listening to her.’

‘Listening to her,’ Robert voted. ‘That’s why I’m going to do my Margaret imitation all the time after she’s gone.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ said his mother. ‘Look, even Thomas is smiling at such a mad idea.’

‘That’s not smiling, dear,’ grumbled Robert, ‘that’s wind tormenting his little insides.’

They all started laughing and then his mother said, ‘Shhh, she might hear us,’ but it was too late, Robert was determined to entertain them. Swinging his body sideways to lubricate the forward motion, he rocked over to his mother’s side.

‘It’s no use trying to blind me with science, dear,’ he said, ‘I can tell he doesn’t like that formula you’re giving him, even if it is made by organic goats. When I was in Saudi Arabia – she was a princess, actually – I said to them, “I can’t work with this formula, I have to have the Cow and Gate Gold Standard,” and they said to me, “With all your experience, Margaret, we trust you completely,” and they had some flown out from England in their private jet.’

‘How do you remember all this?’ asked his mother. ‘It’s terrifying. I told her that we didn’t have a private jet.’

‘Oh, money was no object to them,’ Robert went on, with a proud little toss of his head. ‘One day I remarked, you know, quite casually , on how nice the Princess’s slippers were, and the next thing I knew there was a pair waiting for me in my bedroom. The same thing happened with the Prince’s camera. It was quite embarrassing, actually. Every time I did it, I’d say to myself, “Margaret, you must learn to keep your mouth shut.’”

Robert wagged his finger in the air, and then sat down on the bed next to his father and carried on with a sad sigh.

‘But then it would just pop out, you know: “Ooh, that’s a lovely shawl, dear; lovely soft fabric,” and sure enough I’d find one spread out on my bed that evening. I had to get a new suitcase in the end.’

His parents were trying not to make too much noise but they had hopeless giggles. As long as he was performing they hardly paid any attention to Thomas at all.

‘Now it’s even harder for us to go down,’ said his mother, joining them on the bed.

‘It’s impossible,’ said his father, ‘there’s a force field around the door.’

Robert ran up to the door and pretended to bounce back. ‘Ah,’ he shouted, ‘it’s the Margaret field. There’s no way through, Captain.’

He rolled around on the floor for a while and then climbed back onto the bed with his parents.

‘We’re like the dinner guests in The Exterminating Angel ,’ said his father. ‘We might be here for days. We might have to be rescued by the army.’

‘We’ve got to pull ourselves together,’ said his mother. ‘We must try to end her visit on a kind note.’

None of them moved.

‘Why do you think it’s so hard for us to leave?’ asked his father. ‘Do you think we’re using Margaret as a scapegoat? We feel guilty that we can’t protect Thomas from the basic suffering of life, so we pretend that Margaret is the cause – something like that.’

‘Let’s not complicate it, darling,’ said his mother. ‘She’s the most boring person we’ve ever met and she’s no good at looking after Thomas. That’s why we don’t want to see her.’

Silence. Thomas had fallen asleep, and so there was a general agreement to keep quiet. They all settled comfortably on the bed. Robert stretched out and rested his head on his folded hands, scanning the beams of the ceiling. Familiar patterns of stains and knots emerged from the woodwork. At first he could take or leave the profile of the man with the pointed nose and the helmet, but soon the figure refused to be dissolved back into the grain, acquiring wild eyes and hollow cheeks. He knew the ceiling well, because he used to lie underneath it when it was his grandmother’s bedroom. His parents had moved in after his grandmother was taken to the nursing home. He still remembered the old silver-framed photograph that used to be on her desk. He had been curious about it because it was taken when his grandmother had been only a few days old. The baby in the picture was smothered in pelts and satin and lace, her head bound in a beaded turban. Her eyes had a fanatical intensity that looked to him like panic at being buried in the immensity of her mother’s shopping.

‘I keep it here,’ his grandmother had told him, ‘to remind me of when I had just come into the world and I was closer to the source.’