‘She couldn’t understand why an English lawyer was born in France,’ he explained in the taxi. ‘She clasped her head and said, “I’m just trying to get a concept of your life, Mr Melrose.” I told her I was trying to do the same thing and that if I ever wrote an autobiography I’d send her a copy.’
‘Oh,’ said Robert’s mother, ‘so that’s why we waited an extra half-hour.’
‘Well, you know, when people hate officialdom, they either become craven or facetious.’
‘Try craven next time, it’s quicker.’
When the pizzas finally arrived Robert saw that they were hopeless. As thick as nappies, they hadn’t been adjusted to the ninety per cent reduction in ingredients. Robert scraped all the tomato and anchovy and olives into one corner and made two mouthfuls of miniature pizza. It was not at all like the delicious, thin, slightly burnt pizza in Les Lecques but somehow, because he had thought it might be, he had opened a trap door into the summers he used to have and would never have again.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked his mother.
‘I just want a pizza like the ones in Les Lecques.’ He was assailed by injustice and despair. He really didn’t want to cry.
‘Oh, darling, I so understand,’ she said, touching his hand. ‘I know it seems far-fetched in this mad restaurant, but we’re going to have a lovely time in America.’
‘Why is Bobby crying?’ said Thomas.
‘He’s upset.’
‘But I don’t want him to cry,’ said Thomas. ‘I don’t want him to!’ he screamed, and started crying himself.
‘Fucking hell,’ said Robert’s father. ‘I knew we should have gone to Ramsgate.’
On the way back to the hotel, Thomas fell asleep in his stroller.
‘Let’s cut to the chase,’ said Robert’s father, ‘and not pretend we’re going to sleep with each other. You take both of the boys into the bedroom and I’ll take the sofa bed.’
‘Fine,’ said Robert’s mother, ‘if that’s what you want.’
‘There’s no need to introduce exciting words like “want”. It’s what I’m realistically anticipating.’
Robert fell asleep immediately, but woke up again when the red digits on the bedside clock said 2:11. His mother and Thomas were still asleep but he could hear a muffled sound from the drawing room. He found his father on the floor in front of the television.
‘I put my back out unfolding that fucking sofa bed,’ he said, doing push-ups with his hips still pressed to the carpet.
The bottle of whiskey was on the glass table, three-quarters empty next to a ravaged sheet of Codis painkillers.
‘I’m sorry about the Venus Pizza,’ said his father. ‘After going there, and shopping at Carnegie Foods and watching a few hours of this delinquent network television, I’ve come to the conclusion that we should probably fast during our holiday here. Factory farming doesn’t stop in the slaughterhouse, it stops in our bloodstreams, after the Henry Ford food missiles have hurtled out of their cages into our open mouths and dissolved their growth hormones and their genetically modified feed into our increasingly wobbly bodies. Even when the food isn’t “fast”, the bill is instantaneous, dumping an idle eater back on the snack-crowded streets. In the end, we’re on the same conveyor belt as the featherless, electrocuted chickens.’
Robert found his father vaguely frightening, with his bloodshot eyes and the sweat stains on his shirt, twisting the corkscrew of his own talk. Robert knew that he wasn’t being communicated with, but allowed to listen to his father practising speeches. All this time while he had been asleep, his father had been pacing up and down a mental courtroom, prosecuting.
‘I liked the Park,’ said Robert.
‘The Park’s nice,’ his father conceded, ‘but the rest of the country is just people in huge cars wondering what to eat next. When we hire a car you’ll see that it’s really a mobile dining room, with little tables all over the place and cup holders. It’s a nation of hungry children with real guns. If you’re not blown up by a bomb, you’re blown up by a Vesuvio pizza. It’s absolutely terrifying.’
‘Please stop,’ said Robert.
‘I’m sorry. I just feel…’ His father suddenly seemed lost. ‘I just can’t sleep. The Park is great. The city is breathtakingly beautiful. It’s just me.’
‘Is whiskey going to be part of the fast?’
‘Unfortunately,’ said his father, imitating the mischievous way that Thomas liked to say that word, ‘the whiskey is something very pure and can’t reasonably be included in the war against corruption.’
‘Oh,’ said Robert.
‘Or war on corruption, as they would say here. War on terror; war on crime; war on drugs. I suppose if you’re a pacifist here you have to have a war on war, or nobody would notice.’
‘Daddy,’ Robert warned him.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ He grabbed the remote control. ‘Let’s turn off this mind-shattering rubbish and read a story.’
‘Excellent,’ said Robert, jumping onto the sofa bed. He felt he was pretending to be more cheerful than he was, a little bit like Karen. Perhaps it was infectious, or something in the food supply.
14
‘OH, PATRICK, WHY WEREN’T we told that the lovely life we had was going to end?’ said Aunt Nancy, turning the pages of the photograph album.
‘Weren’t you told that?’ said Patrick. ‘How maddening. But then again, it didn’t end for the people who might have told you. Your mother just ruined it by trusting your stepfather.’
‘Do you know the worst thing about that – I’m going to use the word “evil” – ’
‘Popular word these days,’ murmured Patrick.
‘– man?’ Nancy continued, only briefly closing her eyelids to refuse admittance to Patrick’s distracting remark. ‘He used to grope me in the back of Mummy’s car while she was at home dying of cancer. He had Parkinson’s by then, so he had a shaky grip, if you know what I’m saying. After Mummy died, he actually asked me to marry him. Can you believe that? I just laughed, but sometimes I think I should have accepted. He only lasted two more years, and I might have been spared the sight of the little nephew’s removal men carrying my dressing table out of my bedroom, while I lay in bed, on the morning of Jean’s death. I said to the brutes in blue overalls, “What are you doing? Those are my hairbrushes.” “We were told to take everything,” they grunted, and then they threw me out of bed, so they could load that on the van as well.’
‘It might have been even more traumatic to marry someone you loathed and found physically disgusting,’ said Patrick.
‘Oh, look,’ said Nancy, turning a page of the album, ‘here’s Fairley, where we spent the beginning of the war, while Mummy was still stuck in France. It was the most divine house on Long Island. Do you know that uncle Bill had a one-hundred-and-fifty-acre garden; I’m not talking about woods and fields, there were plenty of those as well. Nowadays people think they’re God almighty if they have a ten-acre garden on Long Island. There was the most beautiful pink marble throne in the middle of the topiary garden where we used to play grandmother’s footsteps. It used to belong to the Emperor of Byzantium…’ She sighed. ‘All lost, all the beautiful things.’
‘The thing about things is that they just keep getting lost,’ said Patrick. ‘The Emperor lost his throne before Uncle Bill lost his garden furniture.’
‘Well, at least Uncle Bill’s children got to sell Fairley,’ Nancy flared up. ‘They didn’t have it stolen.’
‘Listen, I’m the first to sympathize. After what Eleanor did, we’re the most financially withered branch of the family,’ said Patrick. ‘How long were you separated from your mother?’ he asked, as if to introduce a lighter note.
‘Four years.’
‘Four years!’
‘Well, we went to America two years before the war started. Mummy stayed in Europe trying to get the really good things out of France and England and Italy, and she only made it to America two years after the Germans i
nvaded. She and Jean escaped via Portugal and when they arrived I remember that her shoe trunk had fallen overboard from the fishing boat they hired to get them across to New York. I thought that if you could get away from the Germans and only lose a trunk with nothing in it but shoes, you weren’t having such a bad war.’
‘But how did you feel about not seeing her all that time?’
‘Well, you know, I had the oddest conversation with Eleanor a couple of years before she had her stroke. She told me that when Mummy and Jean arrived at Fairley, she rowed out to the middle of the lake and refused to talk to them because she was so angry that Mummy had abandoned us for four years. I was shocked because I couldn’t remember anything about it. I mean, that would have been a big deal in our young lives. But all I remember is Mummy’s shoes getting lost.’
‘I guess everybody remembers what’s important to them,’ said Patrick.
‘She told me that she hated Mummy,’ said Nancy. ‘I mean, I didn’t know that was genetically possible.’
‘Her genes probably just stood by horrified,’ said Patrick. ‘The story Eleanor always told me was that she hated your mother for sacking the two people she loved and depended on: her father and her nanny.’
‘I tied myself to the car when Nanny was being driven away,’ said Nancy competitively.
‘Well, there you have it – didn’t you feel a little gene-defying twinge…’
‘No! I blamed Jean. He was the one who persuaded Mummy that we were too old to have a nanny.’
‘And your father?’
‘Well, Mummy said that she just couldn’t afford to keep him any more. Every week he would drive her crazy with some new extravagance. In the run-up to Ascot, for instance, he didn’t just buy a racehorse, he bought a stable of racehorses. Do you know what I’m saying?’
‘Those were the days,’ said Patrick. ‘I’d love to be in a position to be irritated by Mary buying a couple of dozen racehorses, rather than getting in a blind panic when Thomas needs a new pair of shoes.’
‘You’re exaggerating.’
‘It’s the only extravagance I can still afford.’
The telephone rang, drawing Nancy into a study next to her library, and leaving Patrick on the soft sofa dented by the weight of the red leather album, with 1940 stamped in gold on its spine.
The image of Eleanor rowing out to the middle of the lake and refusing to talk to anyone fused in Patrick’s imagination with her present condition, bedridden and cut off from the rest of the world.
The day after she had settled into her thickly carpeted, overheated, nursing tomb in Kensington, Patrick was rung by the director.
‘Your mother would like to see you straight away. She thinks she’s going to die today.’
‘Is there any reason to believe she’s right?’
‘There’s no medical reason as such, but she is very insistent.’
Patrick hauled himself out of his chambers and went over to see Eleanor. He found her crying from the unspeakable frustration of having something so important to say. After half an hour, she finally gave birth to, ‘Die today,’ delivered with all the stunned wonder of recent motherhood. After that, hardly a day passed without a death promise emerging from half an hour’s gibbering, weeping struggle.
When Patrick complained to Kathleen, the perky Irish nurse in charge of Eleanor’s floor, she clasped his forearm and hooted, ‘She’ll probably outlive us all. Take Dr MacDougal on the next floor. When he was seventy, he married a lady half his age – she was a lovely lady, so friendly. Well, the next year, it was quite tragic really, he got the Alzheimer’s and moved in here. She was ever so devoted, came to see him every day. Anyway, if she didn’t get breast cancer the following year. She was dead three years after marrying him, and he’s still upstairs, going strong.’
After a final hoot of laughter, she left him standing alone in the airless corridor next to the locked dispensary.
What depressed him even more than the inaccuracy of Eleanor’s predictions was the doggedness of her self-deception and her spiritual vanity. The idea that she had any special insight into the exact time of her death was typical of the daydreams that ruled her life. It was only in June, after she had fallen over and broken her hip, that she began to take a more realistic attitude about the degree of control she could have over her death.
Patrick went to visit her in the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital after her fall.
Eleanor had been given morphine for breakfast, but her restlessness was unsubdued. The desperate need to get out of bed, which had produced several falls, bruising her right temple purple-black, leaving her nose swollen and red, staining her right eyelid yellow and eventually fracturing her hip, made her, even now, reach for the bar on the side of her Evans Nesbit Jubilee bed and try to pull herself up with those flabby white arms bruised by fresh puncture marks Patrick could not help envying. A few clear phrases reared up like Pacific islands from a mumbling moaning ocean of meaningless syllables.
‘I have a rendezvous,’ she said, making a renewed surge towards the end of the bed.
‘I’m sure whoever you have to meet will come here,’ said Patrick, ‘knowing that you can’t move.’
‘Yes,’ she said, collapsing back on the bloodstained pillows for a moment, but lurching forwards again and wailing, ‘I have a rendezvous.’
She was not strong enough to stay up for long, and soon resumed a slow writhing motion on the bed, and the long haul through another stretch of murmurous, urgent nonsense. And then ‘No longer’ appeared, not attached to anything else. She ran her hands down her face in exasperation, looking as if she wanted to cry but was being let down by her body in that respect as well.
At last she managed it.
‘I want you to kill me,’ she said, gripping his hand surprisingly hard.
‘I’d love to help,’ said Patrick, ‘but unfortunately it’s against the law.’
‘No longer,’ shouted Eleanor.
‘We’re doing all we can,’ he said vaguely.
Looking for solace in practicality, Patrick tried to give his mother a sip of pineapple juice from the plastic glass on her bedside table. He eased his hand under the top pillow and lifted her head, tipping the juice gently towards her peeling lips. He felt himself being transformed by the tenderness of the act. He had never treated anyone so carefully except his own children. The flow of generations was reversed and he found himself holding his useless, treacherous, confused mother with exquisite anxiety. How to lift her head, how to make sure she didn’t choke. He watched her roll the sip of juice around her mouth, an alarmed and disconnected look on her face, and he willed her to succeed while she tried to remind her throat how to swallow.
Poor Eleanor, poor little Eleanor, she wasn’t well at all, she needed help, she needed protection. There was no obstacle, no interruption to his desire to help her. He was amazed to see his argumentative, disappointed mind overwhelmed by a physical act. He leant over further and kissed her on the forehead.
A nurse came in and saw the glass in Patrick’s hand.
‘Did you give her some of the Thicken Up?’ she asked.
‘Some what?’
‘Thicken Up,’ she said, tapping a tin of that name.
‘I don’t think my mother wants to thicken up,’ said Patrick. ‘You haven’t got a tin called “Waste Away”, have you?’
The nurse looked shocked, but Eleanor smiled.
‘Aste way,’ she echoed.
‘She had a very good breakfast this morning,’ the nurse persevered.
‘Orce,’ said Eleanor.
‘Forced?’ Patrick suggested.
She turned her wild-eyed face towards him and said, ‘Yes.’
‘When you get back to the nursing home, you can stop eating if you want to,’ said Patrick. ‘You’ll have more control over your fate.’
‘Yes,’ she whispered, smiling.
She seemed to relax for the first time. And so did Patrick. He was going to guard his mother from hav
ing more horrible life imposed on her. Here at last was a filial role he could throw himself into.
Patrick looked at Nancy’s other photograph albums, over a hundred identical red-leather volumes dated from 1919 to 2001, ranged in the shelves directly in front of him. The rest of the room was lined with decorative blocks of leather books and, lower down, glossy books on the art of decoration. Even the two doors, one into the hall and the other into the study where Nancy was talking on the phone, did not interrupt the library theme. Their backs were crowded with the spines of false books resting on trompe l’œil shelves perfectly aligned with the real shelves, so that when the doors were closed the room generated an impressive claustrophobia. The blast of resentment and nostalgia coming from Nancy, undiminished since he last saw her eight years before, made Patrick all the more determined not to live in the has-been world enshrined in the wall of albums – let alone in the might-have-been realm where Nancy’s imagination burnt even more ferociously. There seemed little point in trying to give her a bracing lecture on the value of staying contemporary when she wouldn’t even stick to the past as it was, but preferred a version cleansed of the injustice which had been done to her nearly forty years earlier. The afterglow of plutocracy was no more alluring to him than a pile of dirty dishes after a dinner party. Something had died, and its death was tied in with the tenderness he had felt for Eleanor when he helped her drink that glass of pineapple juice in hospital.
The Patrick Melrose Novels Page 57
