These borderless moments happened often enough for Mary to get used to them, but she couldn’t quite shake off her surprise at how precise they were.
By silent agreement the two of them walked away from the house to the little rocky beach at the foot of the lawn. Mary sat down on a small patch of silvery white sand among rocks festooned with beaded black seaweed.
‘Will you look after me for a long time?’ asked Thomas.
‘Yes, darling.’
‘Until I’m fourteen?’
‘As long as you want me to,’ she said. ‘As long as I can…’ she added. He had asked her the other day if she was going to die and she had said, ‘Yes, but not for a long time, I hope.’ His discovery of her mortality blew away the dust which had dimmed the menace of it in her own mind and made it glare at her again with all its root horror restored. She loathed death for making her let him down. Why couldn’t he play a little longer? Why couldn’t he feel safe a little longer? She had recovered her balance to some extent, attributing his interest in death to the transition from infancy to childhood, but also wondering if Patrick’s impatience with that transition was making it happen sooner than necessary. Robert had been through the same sort of crisis when he was five; Thomas was only three.
Thomas sat down on her lap and sucked his thumb, fingering the smooth label of his raggie with the other hand. He was minutes away from sleep. Mary sat back on her heels and made herself calm. She could do things for Thomas that she couldn’t do for herself or anyone else, not even Robert. Thomas needed her for his protection, that was obvious enough, but she needed him for her sense of virtue. When she felt gloomy he made her want to be cheerful, when she was drained he made her find new wells of energy, when she was exasperated she searched for a deeper patience. She sat there as still as the rocks around her and waited while he dropped off.
However hot the day became, the sea here was a refrigerator throwing off a sceptical little breeze. She liked the feeling that Maine was basically inhospitable, that it would soon shake out its summer visitors, like a dog on a beach. In the chink between two winters the northern light sparkled hungrily on the sea. She imagined it stretched out like a gaunt El Greco saint. The thought made her want to paint again. She wanted to make love again. She wanted to think again, if she was going to start making lists, but somehow she had lost her independence. Her being was fused with Thomas’s. She was like someone whose clothes had been stolen while she was having a swim, and now she didn’t know how to get out of this tiring beautiful pool.
After Thomas had been asleep for five minutes she was able to move to a more comfortable position. She sat against the bank at the bottom of the lawn and placed him lengthwise between her legs, as if he was still being born, still the wrong way round. She formed a canopy with his raggie to protect him from the sun, and leant back and closed her eyes and tried to rest, but her thoughts looped back tightly enough onto Kettle’s remote style of mothering and the part it played in producing her own fanatical availability. She thought of her nanny, her kind, dedicated nanny, solving one little problem after the next, inhabiting a nursery world without sex or art or intoxicants or conversation, just practical kindness and food. Of course looking after a child made her feel like the nanny who had looked after her when she was a child. And of course it made her determined to be unlike Kettle who had failed to look after her. Personality seemed to her at once absurd and compulsive: she remained trapped inside it even when she could see through it. Her thoughts on mothers and mothering twisted around, following the thread of a knot they couldn’t untie.
For some reason, sitting by this black sea with its slightly chill breeze made her feel she could see everything very clearly. Thomas was asleep and nobody else knew exactly where she was. For the first time in months nobody knew how to make any demands on her and in that sudden absence of pressure she could appreciate the family’s tropical atmosphere of unresolved dependency. Eleanor like a sick child pleading with Patrick to ‘make it stop’; Thomas like a referee pushing his parents apart if Patrick ever tried to get close to her indifferent body; Robert keeping his diary, keeping his distance. She was at the eye of the storm, with her need to be needed making her appear more self-sufficient than she really was. In reality she couldn’t survive on the glory of satisfying other people’s unreasonable demands. Her passion for self-sacrifice sometimes made her feel like a prisoner who meekly digs the trench for her own execution. Patrick needed a revolution against the tyranny of dependency, but she needed one against the tyranny of self-sacrifice. Although she was overstretched and monopolized, an appeal to her best instincts only drove her further into the trap. The protests which might be expected to come from Robert’s sibling rivalry came instead from the relatively unstable Patrick. It was bad luck that she had become disgusted by the slightest sign of need in Patrick at a time when he had Thomas as well as Eleanor to stimulate his own sense of helplessness. Patrick accused her of overindulging Thomas, but if Thomas was ready to do without certain maternal comforts, Patrick must be even readier. Perhaps he was no longer ripe but rotten. Perhaps a psychic gangrene had set in and it was the smell of corruption that revolted her.
That evening she excused herself from dinner and stayed with Thomas, leaving Patrick and Robert to face the roused dragon of Henry’s table talk on their own. Even before dinner, as she sat on the faded pink cushions of the window seat, the panes of the bay window around her bleeding and glittering in the sea-reflected evening light, with the children behaving beautifully and Patrick smiling over a glass of mineral water, she knew she couldn’t stand more than a few minutes of Henry’s address to the nation. He was on a whirlwind tour of foreign policy, heading east from Israel, through the Stans and the Formers, and on his way to the People’s Republics. She had a dreadful feeling that he intended to get to North Korea before bedtime. No doubt he had a cunning plan to nuke North Korea before it nuked South Korea and Japan. She didn’t want to hear it.
After his bath, Thomas wanted to climb into her bed and she didn’t have the heart to refuse him. They snuggled up together reading The Wind in the Willows. Thomas fell asleep as Rat and Mole started to drift down the river after their picnic. When Patrick came into the room she realized that she had also dropped off with the book on her lap and her reading glasses still on.
‘I so nearly had a fight with Henry,’ said Patrick, striding into the room with his clenched fists still looking for a destination.
‘Oh dear, what was it this evening?’ she asked.
Patrick was always saying that their erotic, conversational and social lives were over, that they were just parental bureaucrats. Well, here she was, shattered and abruptly woken, but ready for a lively conversation.
‘North Korea.’
‘I knew it.’
‘You always know everything. No wonder you felt you could miss dinner.’
Everything she said was wrong. No matter what she did, Patrick felt abandoned. She tried again.
‘I mean, I just had a feeling before dinner that North Korea would be next.’
‘That’s what Henry thinks: North Korea is next. You should form a coalition.’
‘Did you argue with him, or are you going to have to argue with me instead?’
‘We relied heavily on the democratic miracle of agreeing to disagree. Henry hates free speech but, partly as a result of that, he isn’t free to say so. He banged on about how lucky we were not to live in a country where you could be shot for holding the wrong opinions.’
‘He wants to shoot you.’
‘Exactly.’