The Patrick Melrose Novels (60 page)

‘I can't believe this fucking letter.'

‘What letter?' asked his mother.

‘That scumbag Seamus Dourke is trying to get Eleanor to make the gift of this property absolute during her lifetime. I had arranged for the solicitor to put it on an elastic band of debt. In her will the debt is waived and the house is transferred irrevocably to the charity, but during her lifetime the charity has been lent the value of this property, and if she recalls the debt the place returns to her. She agreed to set things up that way on the grounds that she might get ill and need the money to look after herself, but needless to say, I also hoped she would come to her senses and realize that this joke charity was doing a lot of harm to us and no good to anyone else, except Seamus. Talk about the luck of the Irish. There he was, a National Health nurse changing bedpans in County Meath, until my mother airlifted him from the Emerald Isle and made him the sole beneficiary of an enormous tax-free income from a New Age hotel masquerading as a charity. It makes me sick, completely sick.'

His father was shouting by now.

‘Sweetheart, you're ranting,' said his mother. ‘Thomas is getting upset.'

‘I have to rant,' said his father, ‘I've just seen this letter. She was always a lousy mother, but I thought she might take a holiday towards the end of her life, feel that she'd achieved enough by way of betrayal and neglect, and that it was time to have a break, play with her grandchildren, let us stay in the house, that sort of thing. What really terrifies me is realizing how much I loathe her. When I read this letter, I tried to loosen my shirt so that I could breathe, but then I realized it was already loose enough, I just felt as if a noose was tightening around my neck, a noose of loathing.'

‘She's a confused old woman,' said Robert's mother.

‘I know.'

‘And we're seeing her later today.'

‘I know,' said his father, much more quietly now, almost inaudibly. ‘What I really loathe is the poison dripping from generation to generation. My mother felt disinherited because of her stepfather getting all her mother's money, and now, after thirty years of consciousness-raising workshops and personal-growth programmes, she has found Seamus Dourke to stand in for her stepfather. He's really just the incredibly willing instrument of her unconscious. It's the monotony that drives me mad. I'd rather cut my throat than inflict the same thing on my children.'

‘You won't,' his mother answered.

‘If you can imagine anything…'

Robert had leant closer to the monitor, trying to make out his father's fading voice, only to hear it growing louder behind him as his parents made their way downstairs.

‘… the result would be my mother,' his father was saying.

‘King Lear and Mrs Jellyby,' his mother laughed.

‘On the heath,' said his father, ‘a quick rut between the feeble tyrant and the fanatical philanthropist.'

He had run from the kitchen, not wanting his parents to know that he had heard their conversation on the monitor. He sat on the knowledge all morning, but when his grandmother had stared at his father, as if she was talking about him, and asked, ‘Does he like me?' Robert couldn't help having the mad idea that she had overheard the same conversation as him.

Although he didn't understand everything his father had said that morning, he understood enough to feel cracks opening in the ground. And now, in the silence that followed his grandmother's shrewd unintentional question, he could feel her misery, and he could feel his mother's desire for harmony, and he could feel the strain in his father's self-restraint. He wanted to do something to make everything all right.

His grandmother was taking about half an hour to ask if Thomas had been christened yet.

‘No,' said his mother, ‘we're not having a formal christening. The trouble is that we don't really think that children are steeped in sin, and a lot of the ceremony seems to be based on the idea that they're fallen and need to be saved.'

‘Yes,' said his grandmother. ‘No.'

Thomas started to shake the tiny silver dumbbell he had rediscovered in the creases of his chair. It made a strange high tinkling sound as he waved it jerkily around his head. Soon enough, he banged it against his forehead. After a delay in which he seemed to be trying to work out what had happened, he started to cry.

‘He doesn't know whether he hit himself or whether the dumbbell hit him,' said Robert's father.

His mother took sides against the dumbbell and said, ‘Naughty dumbbell,' kissing Thomas's forehead.

Robert hit himself on the side of the head and fell off his grandmother's bed theatrically. Thomas wasn't as amused as he had hoped he would be.

His grandmother held her arms out in pleading sympathy, as if Thomas was expressing something that she felt as well, but didn't want to be reminded of. Robert's mother lifted Thomas gently into his grandmother's lap. Seduced by the novelty of his position, Thomas stopped crying and looked searchingly at his grandmother. She seemed to be calmed by his presence. He sat on her lap, giving her what she needed, and they sank together into speechless solidarity. The rest of the family fell silent as well, not wanting to show up the non-speakers. Robert felt his father hovering over his grandmother, resisting saying what was on his mind. In the end it was his grandmother who spoke, not quite fluently but much better than before, as if her speech, abandoning the hopelessly blocked highway of longing, had stolen out under cover of darkness and silence.

‘I want you to know,' she said, ‘that I'm very … unhappy … at not being able to communicate.'

His mother reached out and touched her knee.

‘It must be horrible for you,' said his father.

‘Yes,' said his grandmother, staring at the faraway floor.

Robert didn't know what to do. His father hated his own mother. He couldn't join him and he couldn't condemn him. His grandmother had done her family some wrong, but she was suffering horribly. Robert could only fall back on how things were before they had been darkened by his father's disappointment. Those cloudless days when he was just meant to love his grandmother; he was not sure they had ever existed, but he was sure they didn't exist now. It was still too unfair to gang up against his frightened grandmother, even if she was leaving the house to Seamus.

He hopped down from the bed and sat on the arm of his grandmother's chair, taking her hand in his, like he used to when she first fell ill. That way she could tell him things without having to speak, her thoughts flooding into him in pictures.

The bridges were burnt and broken and everything his grandmother wanted to say got banked up on one side of a ravine, never taking form, never moving on. She felt a perpetual pressure, a scratching behind her eyeballs, like a dog pleading to be let in, a fullness that could only escape in tears and sighs and jagged gestures.

Under the bruise of feeling there was a brutal instinct to stay alive, like a run-over snake thrashing on a hot road, or blind roots pumping sap into a bleeding stump.

Why was she being tortured? They had sewn her into a sack and thrown her into the bottom of a boat, chains wrapped around her feet. She must have done something very bad to be teased by the oarsmen as they rowed her out into the bay. Something very bad which she couldn't remember.

He tried to break off. It was too much. He didn't let go of her hand, he just tried to close down, but it was impossible to break the connection completely.

He noticed that his grandmother was crying. She gave his hand a squeeze.

‘I am … no.' She couldn't say it. A carefully threaded thought unstrung itself and scattered across the floor. She couldn't get it back. Something opaque clung to her all the time. Her head had been sealed in a dirty plastic bag; she wanted to tear it off but her hands were tied.

‘I … am,' she tried again. ‘Brave. Yes.'

The evening light was on the other side of the building and the room was growing dimmer. They were all lost for words, except for Thomas who had none to lose. He leant against his grandmother's arms, looking at her with his cool objective gaze. His example balanced the atmosphere. They sat in the fading light of the almost peaceful room, feeling sympathetic and a little bored. Robert's grandmother sank into a quieter anguish, like someone deep in the broken springs of a chair, watching a dust storm coat the world in a blunt grey film.

After knocking on the door and not waiting for a reply, a nurse squeaked in with a trolley of food and slid a clattering tray onto the mobile table next to the bed. Robert's mother lifted Thomas back into her arms, while his father wheeled the table into position and removed the tin hood from the main dish. The sweaty grey fish and leaky ratatouille might have made a greedy man pause, but for his grandmother, who would rather have starved to death anyway, all food was equally unwelcome, and so she gave Robert's hand a last squeeze and broke the circuit which had introduced so many violent pictures into his imagination, and picked up her fork with the strange flat obedience of despair. She manoeuvred a flake of fish onto her fork and began to lift it towards her mouth. Then she stopped and lowered the fork again, staring at his father.

‘I can't … find my mouth,' she said with emergency precision.

His father looked frustrated, as if his mother had found a trick to stop him from being angry with her, but Robert's mother immediately picked up the fork and smiled and said, ‘Can I help you, Eleanor?' in the most natural way.

His grandmother's shoulders crumpled a little further at the thought that it had come to that. She nodded and his mother started to feed her, still holding Thomas on her other arm. His father, temporarily frozen, came to his senses and took Thomas from Robert's mother.

After a few more mouthfuls his grandmother shook her head and said, ‘No,' and leant back in her chair exhausted. In the silence that followed, his father handed Thomas back to his mother and sat down next to his grandmother.

‘I hesitate to mention this,' said his father, pulling a letter out of his pocket.

‘I think you should keep on hesitating,' said his mother quickly.

‘I can't,' he said to her, ‘hesitate any longer.' He turned back to Robert's grandmother. ‘Brown and Stone have written to me saying that you intend to make an outright gift of Saint-Nazaire to the Foundation. I just want to say that I think that leaves you very exposed. You can barely afford to stay here and if you needed any more medical care you would go broke very quickly.'

Robert hadn't thought his grandmother could look any more unhappy, but somehow her features managed to yield a fresh impression of horror.

‘I … really … I … really … no.'

She covered her face with her hands and screamed.

‘I really do object…' she wailed.

His mother put her arm around his grandmother without glancing at his father. His father put the letter back in his pocket and looked at his shoes with perfect contempt.

‘It's all right,' said his mother. ‘Patrick just wants to help you, he's worried that you may give too much away too soon, but nobody's questioning that you can do what you like with the Foundation. The lawyers only told him because you've asked him to help you in the past.'

‘I … need … to rest now,' said his grandmother.

‘We'll leave, then,' said his mother.

‘Yes.'

‘I'm sorry I've upset you,' sighed his father. ‘I just don't see what the hurry is: Saint-Nazaire is going to the Foundation in your will anyway.'

‘I think we should drop this subject,' said his mother.

‘Fine,' he agreed.

Robert's grandmother allowed herself to be kissed by each of them in turn. Robert was the last to say goodbye to her.

‘Don't … leave me,' she said.

‘Now?' he asked, confused.

‘No … don't … no.' She gave up.

‘I won't,' he said.

Any discussion of their visit to the nursing home seemed too hazardous, and they started the drive home in silence. Soon enough, though, his father's determination to talk took over. He tried to keep things general, he tried to keep away from the subject of his mother.

‘Hospitals are very shocking places,' he said, ‘full of poor deluded fools who aren't looking for groundless celebrity or obscene quantities of money, but think the point of life is to help other people. Where do they get these ideas from? We must send them on an empowerment weekend workshop with the Packers.'

Robert's mother smiled.

‘I'm sure Seamus could organize it, give it a shamanic angle,' said his father, dragged irresistibly out of his orbit. ‘Mind you, although hospitals may be awash with cheerful saints, I would rather shoot myself in the head than experience the erosion of self we witnessed this afternoon.'

‘I thought Eleanor did very well,' said his mother. ‘I was very moved when she said that she was brave.'

‘What can drive a man mad is being forced to have the emotion which he is forbidden to have at the same time,' said his father. ‘My mother's treachery forced me to be angry, but then her illness forced me to feel pity instead. Now her recklessness makes me angry again but her bravery is supposed to smother my anger with admiration. Well, I'm a simple sort of a fellow, and the fact is that I remain
fucking angry
,' he shouted, banging the steering wheel.

‘Who is King Lear?' asked Robert from the back seat.

‘Did you overhear our conversation this morning?' asked his mother.

‘Yes.'

‘Eavesdropping,' said his father.

‘No I wasn't,' he objected. ‘You left the monitor on.'

‘Oh, yes,' said his mother, ‘so I did. Anyway, it hardly matters now, does it, darling?' she asked his father sweetly. ‘Since you're screaming that you're “fucking angry” at the top of your voice.'