‘Jellyby. She’s a compulsive do-gooder who writes indignant letters about orphans in Africa, while her own children fall into the fireplace at the other end of the drawing room.’
‘And what’s a rut?’
‘Well, the idea is that if you combined these two characters you would get someone like Eleanor.’
‘Oh,’ said Robert, ‘it’s quite complicated.’
‘Yes,’ said his father. ‘The thing is that Eleanor is trying to buy herself a front-row seat in heaven by giving all her money to “charity” but, as you can see, she has in fact bought herself a ticket to hell.’
‘I don’t think it’s that clever to turn Robert against his grandmother,’ said his mother.
‘I don’t think it was that clever of her to make it inevitable.’
‘You’re the one who feels betrayed – she’s your mother.’
‘She’s lied to all of us,’ his father insisted. ‘At every stage she told me that such and such a thing was destined for Robert, but one by one these little concessions to family feeling were ripped from their pedestals and sucked into the black hole of the Foundation.’
Robert’s mother let some time pass in silence and then said, ‘Well, at least we didn’t have my mother to stay this year.’
‘Yes, you’re right,’ said his father, ‘we must cultivate gratitude.’
The atmosphere settled down a little after this moment of harmony. They climbed the lane towards the house. The sunset was simple that evening, without clouds to make mountains and chambers and staircases, just a clear pink light around the hill tops, and an edge of moon hanging in the darkening sky. As they rumbled down the rough drive, Robert felt a sense of home which he knew he must learn to set aside. Why was his grandmother causing so much trouble? The scramble for a front-row seat in heaven seemed unbearably expensive. He looked at Thomas in his baby chair and wondered if he was closer to ‘the source’ than the rest of them, and whether it was a good thing if he was. His grandmother’s impatience to be reabsorbed into a luminous anonymity suddenly filled him with the opposite impatience: to live as distinctively as he could before time nailed him to a hospital bed and cut out his tongue.
AUGUST 2001
6
BY DAY, WHEN PATRICK heard the echoing bark of the unhappy dog on the other side of the valley, he imagined his neighbour’s shaggy Alsatian running back and forth along the split-cane fence of the yard in which he was trapped, but now, in the middle of the night, he thought instead of all the space into which the rings of yelping howling sound were expanding and dissipating. The crowded house compressed his loneliness. There was no one he could go to, except possibly, or rather impossibly (or, perhaps, possibly), Julia, back again after a year.
As usual, he was too tired to read and too restless to sleep. The tower of books on his bedside table seemed to provide for every mood, except the mood of agitated despair he was invariably in. The Elegant Universe made him nervous. He didn’t want to read about the curvature of space when he was already watching the ceiling shift and warp under his exhausted gaze. He didn’t want to think about the neutrinos streaming through his flesh – it seemed vulnerable enough already. He had started but finally had to abandon Rousseau’s Confessions. He had all the persecution mania he could handle without importing any more. A novel pretending to be the diary of one of Captain Cook’s officers on his first voyage to Hawaii was too well researched to bear any resemblance to life. Weighed down by the tiny variations of emblems on the Victualling Board’s biscuits, Patrick had started to feel thoroughly depressed, but when a second narrative, written by a descendant of the first narrator, living in twenty-first-century Plymouth and taking a holiday in Honolulu, had set up a ludic counterpoint with the first narrative, he thought he was going to go mad. Two works of history, one a history of salt and the other a history of the entire world since 1500 BC, competed for a place at the bottom of the pile.
Also as usual, Mary had gone to sleep with Thomas, leaving Patrick split between admiration and abandonment. Mary was such a devoted mother because she knew what it felt like not to have one. Patrick also knew what it felt like, and as a former beneficiary of Mary’s maternal overdrive, he sometimes had to remind himself that he wasn’t an infant any more, to argue that there were real children in the house, not yet horror-trained; he sometimes had to give himself a good talking-to. Nevertheless, he waited in vain for the maturing effects of parenthood. Being surrounded by children only brought him closer to his own childishness. He felt like a man who dreads leaving harbour, knowing that under the deck of his impressive yacht there is only a dirty little twin-stroke engine: fearing and wanting, fearing and wanting.
Kettle, Mary’s mother, had arrived that afternoon and, as usual, immediately found a source of friction with her daughter.
‘How was your flight?’ asked Mary politely.
‘Ghastly,’ said Kettle. ‘There was an awful woman next to me on the plane who was terribly proud of her breasts, and kept sticking them in her child’s face.’
‘It’s called breast-feeding, Mummy,’ said Mary.
‘Thank you, darling,’ said Kettle. ‘I know it’s all the rage now, but when I was having children the talk was of getting one’s figure back. A clever woman was the one who went to a party looking as if she’d never been pregnant, not the one with her breasts hanging out, at least not for breast-feeding.’
As usual, the bottle of Tamazepam squatted on his bedside table. He definitely had a Tamazepam problem, namely, that it wasn’t strong enough. The side effects, the memory loss, the dehydration, the hangover, the menace of nightmarish withdrawals, all that worked beautifully. It was just the sleep that was missing. He went on swallowing the pills in order not to confront the withdrawal. He remembered, in the distant past, a leaflet saying not to take Tamazepam for more than thirty consecutive days. He had been taking it every night for three years in larger and larger doses. He would be ‘perfectly happy’, as people said when they meant the opposite, to suffer horribly, but he never seemed to find the time. Either it was one of the children’s birthdays, or he was appearing in court, already hung-over, or some other enormous duty required the absence of hallucination and high anxiety. Tomorrow, for instance, his mother was coming to lunch. Both mothers at once: not an occasion for bringing on any additional psychosis.
And yet he still cherished the days when additional psychosis had been his favourite pastime. His second year at Oxford was spent watching the flowers pulse and spin. It was during that summer of alarming experiments that he had met Julia. She was the younger sister of a dull man on the same staircase in Trinity. Patrick, already in the early stages of a mushroom trip, had been hurriedly refusing his invitation to tea, when he saw through the half-open door a neck-twistingly pretty girl hugging her knees in the window seat. He veered towards a ‘quick cup of tea’ and spent the next two hours staring idiotically at the unfairly lovely Julia, with her rose-pink cheeks and dark blue eyes. She wore a raspberry T-shirt which showed her nipples, and faded blue jeans frayed open a few inches under the back pocket and above her right knee. He swore to himself that when she was old enough he would seduce her, but she pre-empted his timid resolution by seducing him the same evening. They had made time-lapse, slow-motion and technically illegal (she was only sixteen the following week) love. They had fallen upwards, disappeared down rabbit holes, watched clocks go anticlockwise and run away from policemen who weren’t chasing them. When they went to Greece he helped to stash the acid in his favourite hiding place: between her legs. He thought that things would cascade from one adventure to another, but now the stammering ecstasy of their love-making seemed like a miracle of freedom belonging to a lost world. Nothing had ever been as spontaneously intimate again, especially not, he kept reminding himself, conversation with the harder, drier Julia who was staying with him now. And yet, there she was, just down the corridor, bruised but still pretty. Should he go? Should he risk it? Should they mount a joint retrospective? Woul
d the intensity come back once their bodies intertwined? The idea was insane. He would have to walk past Robert, the insomniac observation-freak, past the ferocious Kettle, past Mary, who hovered like a dragonfly over the surface of sleep in case she missed the slightest inflection of her baby’s distress, and then into Julia’s room (the corner of her door scraped the floor), which had probably already been invaded by her daughter Lucy anyway. He was paralysed, as usual, by equal and opposite forces.
Everything was as usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself. During the day, when he played with the children, he was very close to being what he appeared to be, a father playing with his children, but at night he was either aching with nostalgia or writhing with self-rejection. His youth had sprinted away in its Nike Air Max trainers (only Kettle’s youth still wore winged sandals), leaving a swirl of dust and a collection of fake antiques. He tried to remind himself what his youth had really been like, but all he could remember was the abundance of sex and the sense of potential greatness, replaced, as his view closed in on the present, by the disappearance of sex and the sense of wasted potential. Fearing and wanting, fearing and wanting. Perhaps he should take another twenty milligrams of Tamazepam. Forty milligrams, as long as he drank a lot of red wine for dinner, sometimes purchased a couple of hours of sleep; not the gorgeous oblivion which he craved, but a sweaty, turbulent sleep laced with nightmares. Sleep, in fact, was the last thing he wanted if it was going to usher in those dreams: strapped to a chair in the corner of the room watching his children being tortured while he screamed curses at the torturer, or begged him to stop. There was also a diet version, the Nightmare Lite, in which he threw himself in front of his sons just in time to have his body shredded by gunfire, or dismembered by ravenous traffic. When he wasn’t woken by these shocking images, he dozed off dreamlessly, only to wake a few minutes later, gasping for air. The price he paid for the sedation he needed to drop off, was that his breathing seized up, until an emergency unit in his back brain sent a screaming ambulance to his frontal lobes and jolted him back into consciousness.
His dreams, dreadful enough in their own right, were almost always accompanied by a defensive analytic sequel. Johnny, his child-psychologist friend, had said this was ‘lucid dreaming’, in which the dreamer acknowledged that he was dreaming. What was he protecting his children from? His own sense of being tortured, of course. The in-dream dream seminars always reached such reasonable conclusions.
He was obsessed, it was true, with stopping the flow of poison from one generation to the next, but he already felt that he had failed. Determined not to inflict the causes of his suffering on his children, he couldn’t protect them from the consequences. Patrick had buried his own father twenty years ago and hardly ever thought about him. At the peak of his kindness David had been rude, cold, sarcastic, easily bored; compulsively raising the hurdle at the last moment to make sure that Patrick cracked his shins. It would have been too flagrant for Patrick to become a disastrous father, or to get a divorce, or to disinherit his children; instead they had to live with the furious, sleepless consequence of those things. He knew that Robert had inherited his midnight angst and refused to believe that there was a midnight-angst gene which furnished the explanation. He remembered talking endlessly about his insomnia at a time when Robert had wanted to copy everything about him. He also saw, with a mixture of guilt and satisfaction and guilt about the satisfaction, the gradual shift in Robert from empathy and loyalty towards hatred and contempt for Eleanor and her philanthropic cruelty.
One great relief was that they wouldn’t be seeing the Packers this year. Josh had been taken out of school for three weeks and lost the habit of pretending that he and Robert were best friends. During that period of heady freedom, Patrick and Robert had run into Jilly in Holland Park and found out that she was getting a divorce from Jim.
‘The glitter’s off the diamond,’ she admitted. ‘But at least I get to keep the diamond,’ she added with a triumphant little hoot. ‘It’s awful about Roger being sent to prison. Hadn’t you heard? It’s an open prison, one of the posh ones. Still, it isn’t great, is it? They got him for fraud and tax evasion. Basically, for doing what everyone else does, but not getting away with it. Christine’s in bits, with the two kids and everything. She can’t even afford a nanny. I said to her, “Get a divorce, it really bucks you up.” Mind you, I forgot she wouldn’t be getting a huge settlement. I don’t know how much it does buck you up without a fortune thrown in. I sound awful, don’t I? But you’ve got to be realistic. The doctor’s put me on these pills; I can’t stop talking. You’d better just walk away, or I’ll have you pinned down here all day listening to me wittering on. It’s funny, though, thinking of us last year, all sat around the pool in St Trop, having the time of our lives, and now everyone going their separate ways. Still, we’ve got the children, haven’t we? That’s the main thing. Don’t forget that Josh is still your best friend,’ she shouted at Robert as they left.
Thomas had started speaking over the last year. His first word was ‘light’, followed soon afterwards by ‘no’. All those atmospheres evaporated and got so convincingly replaced, it was hard to remember the beginning, when he was speaking not so much to tell a story as to see what it was like to come out of silence into words. Amazement was gradually replaced by desire. He was no longer amazed by seeing, for instance, but by seeing what he wanted. He spotted a broom hundreds of yards down the street, before the rest of them could even see the sweeper’s fluorescent jacket. Hoovers hid behind doors in vain; desire had given him X-ray vision. Nobody could wear a belt for long if he was in the room, it was commandeered for an obscure game in which Thomas, looking solemn, waved the buckle around, humming like a machine. If they ever made it out of London, his parents sniffed the flowers and admired the view, Robert looked for good climbing trees, and Thomas, who wasn’t yet far enough from nature to have turned it into a cult, hurtled across the lawn towards the limp coils of a hose lying almost invisibly in the uncut grass.
At his first birthday party last week, Thomas had been attacked for the first time, by a boy called Eliot. A commotion suddenly drew Patrick’s attention to the other side of the drawing room. Thomas, who was walking along unsteadily with his wooden rabbit on a string, had just been pushed over by a bruiser from his playgroup, and had the string wrenched from his hand. He let out a cry of indignation and then burst into tears. The thug wandered off triumphantly with the undulating rabbit clattering behind him on uneven wheels.
Mary swooped down and lifted Thomas off the ground. Robert went over to check that he was all right, on the way to recapture the rabbit.
Thomas sat on Mary’s lap and soon stopped crying. He looked thoughtful, as if he was trying to introduce the novelty of being attacked into his frame of reference. Then he wriggled off Mary’s knee and back down to the ground.
‘Who was that dreadful child?’ said Patrick. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a sinister face. He looks like Chairman Mao on steroids.’
Before Mary could answer, the bruiser’s mother came over.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ she said. ‘Eliot is so competitive, just like his dad. I hate to repress all that drive and energy.’
‘You’re relying on the penal system for that,’ said Patrick.
‘He should try knocking me over,’ said Robert, practising his martial arts moves.
‘Let’s not go global with this rabbit thing,’ said Patrick.
‘Eliot,’ said the bruiser’s mother, in a special false voice, ‘give Thomas his rabbit back.’
‘No,’ growled Eliot.
‘Oh, dear,’ said his mother, delighted by his tenacity.
Thomas had transferred his focus to the fire tongs which he was dragging noisily out of their bucket. Eliot, convinced that he must have stolen the wrong thing, abandoned the rabbit and headed for the tongs. Mary picked up the string of the rabbit and handed it to Thomas, leaving Eliot revolving next to
the bucket, unable to decide what he should be fighting for. Thomas offered the rabbit string to Eliot who refused it and waddled over to his mother with a cry of pain.
‘Don’t you want the tongs?’ she asked coaxingly.
Patrick hoped he would handle things more wisely with Thomas than he had with Robert, not infuse him with his own anxieties and preoccupations. The hurdles were always raised at the last moment. He was so tired now. The hurdles always raised … of course … he would think that … he was chasing his tail now … the dog was barking on the other side of the valley … the inner and outer worlds ploughing into each other … he was almost falling asleep … perchance to dream … fuck that. He sat up and finished the thought. Yes, even the most enlightened care carried a shadow. Even Johnny (but then, he was a child psychologist) reproached himself for making his children feel that he really understood them, that he knew what they were feeling before they knew themselves, that he could read their unconscious impulses. They lived in the panoptic prison of his sympathy and expertise. He had stolen their inner lives. Perhaps the kindest thing Patrick could do was to break up his family, to offer his children a crude and solid catastrophe. All children had to break free in the end. Why not give them a hard wall to kick against, a high board to jump from. Christ, he really must get some rest.
After midnight, the wonderful Dr Zemblarov was never far from his thoughts. A Bulgarian who practised in the local village, he spoke in extremely rapid, heavily accented English. ‘In our culture, we have only this,’ he would say, signing an elaborate prescription, ‘la pharmacologie. If we lived in the Pacifique, maybe we could dance, but for us there is only the chemical manipulation. When I go back to Bulgaria, for example, I take de l’amphetamine. I drive I drive I drive, I see my family, I drive I drive I drive, and I come back to Lacoste.’ The last time Patrick had hesitantly asked for more Tamazepam, Dr Zemblarov reproached him for being so shy. ‘Mais il faut toujours demander. I take it myself when I travel. L’administration want to limit us to thirty days, so I will put “one in the evening and one at night”, which naturally is not true, but it will avoid you to come here so often. I will also give you Stilnox, which is from another family – the hypnotics! We also have the barbiturate family,’ he added with an appreciative smile, his pen hovering over the page.
The Patrick Melrose Novels Page 47
