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

‘What source?’ he asked.

‘Closer to God,’ she said shyly.

‘But you don’t look very happy,’ he said.

‘I think I look as if I haven’t forgotten yet. But in a way you’re right, I don’t think I’ve ever really got used to being on the material plane.’

‘What material plane?’

‘The Earth,’ she said.

‘Would you rather live on the moon?’ he had asked.

She smiled and stroked his cheek and said, ‘You’ll understand one day.’

Instead of the photograph, there was a changing mat on the desk now, with a stack of nappies next to it and a bowl of water.

He still loved his grandmother, even if she was not leaving them the house. Her face was a cobweb of creases earned from trying so hard to be good, from worrying about really huge things like the planet, or the universe, or the millions of suffering people she had never met, or God’s opinion of what she should do next. He knew his father didn’t think she was good, and discounted how badly she wanted to be. He kept telling Robert that they must love his grandmother ‘despite everything’. That was how Robert knew that his father didn’t love her any more.

‘Will he remember that fall for the rest of his life?’ Robert asked, staring at the ceiling.

‘Of course not,’ said his father. ‘You can’t remember what happened to you when you were a few weeks old.’

‘Yes I can,’ said Robert.

‘We must all reassure him,’ said his mother, changing the subject as if she didn’t want to point out that Robert was lying. But he wasn’t lying.

‘He doesn’t need reassuring,’ said his father. ‘He wasn’t actually hurt, and so he can’t tell that he shouldn’t be bouncing off Margaret’s floundering body. We’re the ones who are freaked out, because we know how dangerous it was.’

‘That’s why he needs reassuring,’ said his mother, ‘because he can tell that we’re upset.’

‘Yes, at that level,’ his father agreed, ‘but in general babies live in a democracy of strangeness. Things happen for the first time all the time – what’s surprising is things happening again.’

Babies are great, thought Robert. You can invent more or less anything about them because they never answer back.

‘It’s twelve o’clock,’ his father sighed.

They all struggled with their reluctance, but the effort to escape seemed to drag them deeper into the quicksand of the mattress. He wanted to delay his parents just a little longer.

‘Sometimes,’ he began dreamily in his Margaret voice, ‘when I’m stopped at home for a couple of weeks between jobs, I get itchy fingers. I’m that keen to lay my hands on another baby.’ He grabbed hold of Thomas’s feet and made a devouring sound.

‘Gently,’ said Robert’s mother.

‘He’s right, though,’ said his father, ‘she’s got a baby habit. She needs them more than they need her. Babies are allowed to be unconscious and greedy, so she uses them for camouflage.’

After all the moral effort they had put in to conceding another hour of their lives to Margaret, they felt cheated when they found that she wasn’t waiting for them downstairs. His mother went off to the kitchen and he sat with his father on the sofa with Thomas between them. Thomas fell silent and became absorbed in staring at the picture on the wall immediately above the sofa. Robert moved his head down beside Thomas’s and as he looked up he could tell from the angle that Thomas couldn’t see the picture itself, because of the glass that protected it. He remembered being fascinated by the same thing when he was a baby. As he looked at the image reflected in the glass, it drew him deeper into the space behind him. In the reflection was the doorway, a brilliant and perfect miniature, and through the doorway the still smaller, but in fact larger, oleander bush outside, its flowers tiny pink lights on the surface of the glass. His attention was funnelled towards the vanishing point of sky between the oleander branches, and then his imagination expanded into the real sky beyond it, so that his mind was like two cones tip to tip. He was there with Thomas, or rather, Thomas was there with him, riding to infinity on that little patch of light. Then he noticed that the flowers had disappeared and a new image filled the doorway.

‘Margaret’s here,’ he said.

His father turned around while Robert watched her plaintive bulk roll towards them. She came to a halt a few feet away from them.

‘No harm done,’ she said, half asking.

‘He seems OK,’ said his father.

‘This won’t affect my reference, will it?’

‘What reference?’ asked his father.

‘Oh, I see,’ said Margaret, half wounded, half angry, all dignified.

‘Shall we have lunch?’ said his father.

‘I shan’t be needing any lunch, thank you very much,’ said Margaret.

She turned towards the staircase and began her laborious climb.

Suddenly, Robert couldn’t bear it any longer.

‘Poor Margaret,’ he said.

‘Poor Margaret,’ said his father. ‘What will we do without her?’

ROBERT WAS WATCHING AN ant disappear behind the sweating bottle of white wine on the stone table. The condensation suddenly streaked down the side of the bottle, smoothing the beaded surface in its wake. The ant reappeared, magnified through the pale green glass, its legs knitting frantically as it sampled a glittering grain of sugar spilt by Julia when she had sweetened her coffee after lunch. The sound of the cicadas billowed around them in and out of time with the limp flapping of the canvas awning over their heads. His mother was having a siesta with Thomas, and Lucy was watching a video, but he had stayed behind, despite Julia almost forcing him to join Lucy.

‘Most people wait for their parents to die with a mixture of tremendous sadness and plans for a new swimming pool,’ his father was saying to Julia. ‘Since I’m going to have to renounce the swimming pool, I thought I might ditch the sadness as well.’

‘But couldn’t you pretend to be a shaman and keep this place?’ said Julia.

‘Alas, I’m one of the few people on the planet with absolutely no healing powers. I know that everyone else has just discovered their inner shaman, but I remain trapped in my materialistic conception of the universe.’

‘There’s such a thing as hypocrisy, you know,’ said Julia. ‘There’s a shop round the corner from me called the Rainbow Path, I could get you a drum and some feathers.’

‘I can already feel the power surging into my fingertips,’ said his father, yawning. ‘I, too, have a special gift to offer the tribe. I didn’t realize until now that I have incredible psychic powers.’

‘There you go,’ said Julia encouragingly, ‘you’ll be running the place in no time.’

‘I have enough trouble looking after my family without saving the world.’

‘Looking after children can be a subtle way of giving up,’ said Julia, smiling at Robert sternly. ‘They become the whole ones, the well ones, the postponement of happiness, the ones who won’t drink too much, give up, get divorced, become mentally ill. The part of oneself that’s fighting against decay and depression is transferred to guarding them from decay and depression. In the meantime one decays and gets depressed.’

‘I disagree,’ said his father, ‘when you’re just fighting for yourself it’s defensive and grim.’

‘Very useful qualities,’ Julia interrupted him. ‘That’s why it’s important not to treat children too well – they won’t be able to compete in the real world. If you want your children to become television producers, for instance, or chief executives, it’s no use filling their little heads with ideas of trust and truth-telling and reliability. They’ll just end up being somebody’s secretary.’