The Patrick Melrose Novels (53 page)

‘No, thank you, I don't like to have more than two. Anyway, I'm on a diet.'

‘A diet?' asked Monsieur d'Alantour, seeing an opportunity to prove to the world that his diplomatic skills were not dead. ‘A diet?' he repeated with bewilderment and incredulity. ‘But w-h-y?' he lingered on the word, to emphasize his astonishment.

‘The same reason as everyone else, I suppose,' said Virginia drily.

Monsieur d'Alantour sat down next to her, grateful to get the weight off his legs. Jacqueline was right, he'd drunk too much champagne. But the campaign must continue!

‘When a lady tells me she is on a diet,' he said, his gallantry a little slurred, but his fluency, from years of making the same speech (which had been a great success with the German Ambassador's wife in Paris) undiminished, ‘I always clasp her breast so,' he held his cupped hand threateningly close to Virginia's alarmed bosom, ‘and say, “But now I think you are exactly the right weight!” If I were to do this to you,' he continued, ‘you would not be shocked, would you?'

‘Shocked,' gulped Virginia, ‘isn't the word. I'd be—'

‘You see,' Monsieur d'Alantour interrupted, ‘it's the most natural thing in the world!'

‘Oh, goodness,' said Virginia, ‘there's my daughter.'

‘Come on, Mummy,' said Bridget, ‘Belinda's already in the car, and I'd rather not run into Sonny.'

‘I know, darling, I'm just coming. I can't say it's been a pleasure,' she said to the ambassador stiffly, hurrying after her daughter.

Monsieur d'Alantour was too slow to catch up with the hastening women, but stood mumbling, ‘I can't express sufficiently … my deepest sentiments … a most distinguished gathering.'

Bridget moved so much faster than her guests that they had no time to compliment her or waylay her. Some thought that she was following George Watford to hospital, everyone could tell that she was on important business.

When she got into the car, a four-wheel-drive Subaru that Caroline Porlock had persuaded her to buy, and saw Belinda asleep and seatbelted in the back, and her mother sitting beside her with a warm and reassuring smile, Bridget felt a wave of relief and remorse.

‘I've treated you dreadfully sometimes,' she suddenly said to her mother. ‘Snobbishly.'

‘Oh no, darling, I understand,' said her mother, moved but practical.

‘I don't know what came over me sending you to dinner with those dreadful people. Everything gets turned upside down. I've been so anxious to fit in with Sonny's stupid, pompous life that everything else got squeezed out. Anyway, I'm glad the three of us are together.'

Virginia glanced back at Belinda to make sure she was asleep.

‘We can have a good long talk tomorrow,' she said, squeezing Bridget's hand, ‘but we should probably get started now, we've got a long way to go.'

‘You're right,' said Bridget who suddenly felt like crying but busied herself with starting the car and joining the queue of departing guests who choked up her drive.

*   *   *

There was still a gentle snowfall as Patrick left the house behind him, steaming breath twisting around the upturned collar of his overcoat. Footprints crisscrossed his path, and the gravel's black and brown chips shone wetly among the bright patches of snow. Patrick's ears rang from the noise of the party and his eyes, bloodshot from smoke and tiredness, watered in the cold air, but when he reached his car he wanted to go on walking a little longer, and so he climbed over a nearby gate and jumped into a field of unbroken snow. A pewter-coloured ornamental lake lay at the end of the field, its far bank lost in a thick fog.

His thin shoes grew wet as he crunched across the field and his feet soon felt cold, but with the compelling and opaque logic of a dream the lake drew him to its shore.

As he stood in front of the reeds which pierced the first few yards of water, shivering and wondering whether to have his last cigarette, he heard the sound of beating wings emerging from the other side of the lake. A pair of swans rose out of the fog, concentrating its whiteness and giving it shape, the clamour of their wings muffled by the falling snow, like white gloves on applauding hands.

Vicious creatures, thought Patrick.

The swans, indifferent to his thoughts, flew over fields renewed and silenced by the snow, curved back over the shore of the lake, spread their webbed feet, and settled confidently onto the water.

Standing in sodden shoes Patrick smoked his last cigarette. Despite his tiredness and the absolute stillness of the air, he felt his soul, which he could only characterize as the part of his mind that was not dominated by the need to talk, surging and writhing like a kite longing to be let go. Without thinking about it he picked up the dead branch at his feet and sent it spinning as far as he could into the dull grey eye of the lake. A faint ripple disturbed the reeds.

After their useless journey the swans drifted majestically back into the fog. Nearer and noisier, a group of gulls circled overhead, their squawks evoking wilder water and wider shores.

Patrick flicked his cigarette into the snow, and not quite knowing what had happened, headed back to his car with a strange feeling of elation.

 

MOTHER'S MILK

 

AUGUST
2000

 

1

WHY HAD THEY PRETENDED
to kill him when he was born? Keeping him awake for days, banging his head again and again against a closed cervix; twisting the cord around his throat and throttling him; chomping through his mother's abdomen with cold shears; clamping his head and wrenching his neck from side to side; dragging him out of his home and hitting him; shining lights in his eyes and doing experiments; taking him away from his mother while she lay on the table, half-dead. Maybe the idea was to destroy his nostalgia for the old world. First the confinement to make him hungry for space, then pretending to kill him so that he would be grateful for the space when he got it, even this loud desert, with only the bandages of his mother's arms to wrap around him, never the whole thing again, the whole warm thing all around him, being everything.

The curtains were breathing light into their hospital room. Swelling from the hot afternoon, and then flopping back against the French windows, easing the glare outside.

Someone opened the door and the curtains leapt up and rippled their edges; loose paper rustled, the room whitened, and the shudder of the roadworks grew a little louder. Then the door clunked and the curtains sighed and the room dimmed.

‘Oh, no, not more flowers,' said his mother.

He could see everything through the transparent walls of his fish-tank cot. He was looked over by the sticky eye of a splayed lily. Sometimes the breeze blew the peppery smell of freesias over him and he wanted to sneeze it away. On his mother's nightgown spots of blood mingled with streaks of dark orange pollen.

‘It's so nice of people…' She was laughing from weakness and frustration. ‘I mean, is there any room in the bath?'

‘Not really, you've got the roses in there already and the other things.'

‘Oh, God, I can't bear it. Hundreds of flowers have been cut down and squeezed into these white vases, just to make us happy.' She couldn't stop laughing. There were tears running down her face. ‘They should have been left where they were, in a garden somewhere.'

The nurse looked at the chart.

‘It's time for you to take your Voltarol,' she said. ‘You've got to control the pain before it takes over.'

Then the nurse looked at Robert and he locked on to her blue eyes in the heaving dimness.

‘He's very alert. He's really checking me out.'

‘He is going to be all right, isn't he?' said his mother, suddenly terrified.

Suddenly Robert was terrified too. They were not together in the way they used to be, but they still had their helplessness in common. They had been washed up on a wild shore. Too tired to crawl up the beach, they could only loll in the roar and the dazzle of being there. He had to face facts, though: they had been separated. He understood now that his mother had already been on the outside. For her this wild shore was a new role, for him it was a new world.

The strange thing was that he felt as if he had been there before. He had known there was an outside all along. He used to think it was a muffled watery world out there and that he lived at the heart of things. Now the walls had tumbled down and he could see what a muddle he had been in. How could he avoid getting in a new muddle in this hammeringly bright place? How could he kick and spin like he used to in this heavy atmosphere where the air stung his skin?

Yesterday he had thought he was dying. Perhaps he was right and this was what happened. Everything was open to question, except the fact that he was separated from his mother. Now that he realized there was a difference between them, he loved his mother with a new sharpness. He used to be close to her. Now he longed to be close to her. The first taste of longing was the saddest thing in the world.

‘Oh, dear, what's wrong?' said the nurse. ‘Are we hungry, or do we just want a cuddle?'

The nurse lifted him out of the fish-tank cot, over the crevasse that separated it from the bed and delivered him into his mother's bruised arms.

‘Try giving him a little time on the breast and then try to get some rest. You've both been through a lot in the last couple of days.'

He was an inconsolable wreck. He couldn't live with so much doubt and so much intensity. He vomited colostrum over his mother and then in the hazy moment of emptiness that followed, he caught sight of the curtains bulging with light. They held his attention. That's how it worked here. They fascinated you with things to make you forget about the separation.

Still, he didn't want to exaggerate his decline. Things had been getting cramped in the old world. Towards the end he was desperate to get out, but he had imagined himself expanding back into the boundless ocean of his youth, not exiled in this harsh land. Perhaps he could revisit the ocean in his dreams, if it weren't for the veil of violence that hung between him and the past.

He was drifting into the syrupy borders of sleep, not knowing whether it would take him into the floating world or back to the butchery of the birth room.

‘Poor Baba, he was probably having a bad dream,' said his mother, stroking him. His crying started to break up and fade.

She kissed him on the forehead and he realized that although they didn't share a body any more, they still had the same thoughts and the same feelings. He shuddered with relief and stared at the curtains, watching the light flow.

He must have been asleep for a while, because his father had arrived and was already locked on to something. He couldn't stop talking.

‘I looked at some more flats today and I can tell you, it's really depressing. London property is completely out of control. I'm leaning back towards plan C.'

‘What's plan C? I've forgotten.'

‘Stay where we are and squeeze another bedroom out of the kitchen. If we divide it in half, the broom cupboard becomes his toy cupboard and the bed goes where the fridge is.'

‘Where do the brooms go?'

‘I don't know – somewhere.'

‘And the fridge?'

‘It could go in the cupboard next to the washing machine.'

‘It won't fit.'

‘How do you know?'

‘I just know.'

‘Anyway … we'll work it out. I'm just trying to be practical. Everything changes when you have a baby.'

His father leant closer, whispering, ‘There's always Scotland.'

He had come to be practical. He knew that his wife and son were drowning in a puddle of confusion and sensitivity and he was going to save them. Robert could feel what he was feeling.

‘God, his hands are so tiny,' said his father. ‘Just as well, really.'

He raised Robert's hand with his little finger and kissed it. ‘Can I hold him?'

She lifted him towards his father. ‘Watch out for his neck, it's very floppy. You have to support it.'

They all felt nervous.

‘Like this?' His father's hand edged up his spine, took over from his mother, and slipped under Robert's head. Robert tried to keep calm. He didn't want his parents to get upset.

‘Sort of. I don't really know either.'

‘Ahh … how come we're allowed to do this without a licence? You can't have a dog or a television without a licence. Maybe we can learn from the maternity nurse – what's her name?'

‘Margaret.'

‘By the way, where is Margaret going to sleep on the night before we go to my mother's?'

‘She says she's perfectly happy on the sofa.'

‘I wonder if the sofa feels the same way.'

‘Don't be mean, she's on a “chemical diet”.'

‘How exciting. I hadn't seen her in that light.'

‘She's had a lot of experience.'

‘Haven't we all?'

‘With babies.'

‘Oh, babies.' His father scraped Robert's cheek with his stubble and made a kissing sound in his ear.

‘But we adore him,' said his mother, her eyes swimming with tears. ‘Isn't that enough?'

‘Being adored by two trainee parents with inadequate housing? Thank goodness he's got the backup of one grandmother who's on permanent holiday, and another who's too busy saving the planet to be entirely pleased by this additional strain on its resources. My mother's house is already too full of shamanic rattles and “power animals” and “inner children” to accommodate anything as grown-up as a child.'

‘We'll be all right,' said his mother. ‘We're not children any more, we're parents.'

‘We're both,' said his father, ‘that's the trouble. Do you know what my mother told me the other day? A child born in a developed nation will consume two hundred and forty times the resources consumed by a child born in Bangladesh. If we'd had the self-restraint to have two hundred and thirty-nine Bangladeshi children, she would have given us a warmer welcome, but this gargantuan Westerner, who is going to take up acres of landfill with his disposable nappies, and will soon be clamouring for a personal computer powerful enough to launch a Mars flight while playing tic-tac-toe with a virtual buddy in Dubrovnik, is not likely to win her approval.' His father paused. ‘Are you all right?' he asked.