‘Great. That’ll make our holiday more fun.’
‘More fun? Don’t you have to be having fun in the first place to have more fun?’
‘I think the children are having fun.’
‘Oh, well, that’s all that matters,’ said Patrick with rigid piety. ‘I did hint to Henry,’ he continued, pacing up and down at the end of the bed, ‘that I felt the present administration’s foreign policy was made up of projection. That America is the rogue state with a fundamentalist president, and several thousand times the weapons of mass destruction of all other nations combined, et cetera, et cetera.’
‘How did that go down?’ Mary wanted to keep him going, keep the aggression political.
‘Incredulous laughter. A lot of neck-craning. False smiles. Reminded me of “a certain event which played no small part in our lives over here”. I said that 9/11 was one of the most shocking things in history, but that its exploitation, what I’d like to call 9/12, was just as shocking in its own way. The tracer bullet was the use of the word “war” on the following day. War is an activity between nation states. A word the British government spent thirty years carefully avoiding in its struggle with the IRA. Why give the standing of a nation state to a few hundred homicidal maniacs, unless you’re going to use them as the pretext to make war with some real nation states? Henry said, “I think that’s a distinction that would be lost on Joe Six-Pack. We had a war to sell to the American public.” That was the trouble with our conversation – my accusations are his assumptions, selling war to the American public, testing new weapons, stimulating the military-industrial complex, using public money to demolish a country which the cabinet’s pet corporations benefit from rebuilding and so forth. He loves it all, so he can’t be caught making hollow apologies.’
‘How was Robert?’
‘An excellent junior counsel,’ said Patrick. ‘He made the no-proven-links point and played pretty skilfully with the idea of “innocent lives”. He asked Henry whether innocence was exclusively American. Again, the trouble is that for Henry the answer is really “Yes”, so it’s hard to get him on the run. He didn’t bother to pretend much, except about free speech.’
‘How did he answer Robert?’
‘Oh, he just said that he could see that I’d “trained” him. He obviously thought we were the tag team from hell. The thing that ruffled him was my last bombing mission, in which I said that a really “developed” nation, as opposed to a merely powerful one, might bother to imagine the impact of two per cent of the world’s population consuming fifty per cent of its resources, of the rapid extinction of every species of non-American culture and so forth. I got a little bit carried away and also said that the death of nature was a high price to pay for adding the few last curlicues of convenience to the lives of the very rich.’
‘It’s amazing he didn’t throw us out,’ said Mary.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll try again tomorrow. I’ll get him in the end. I can see now what upsets him. Politics is an exciting game, but money is sacred.’
She could tell that Patrick was serious. His sense of tension was so extreme that he had to destroy something, and this time it wasn’t going to be himself.
‘Do you mind not getting us thrown out for a couple of days? I’ve only just finished unpacking.’ She tried to sound breezy.
‘And you’re comfortably installed with your lover as usual,’ said Patrick.
‘God, for a man who claims not to suffer from jealousy…’
‘I don’t suffer from jealousy, I suffer from rage. It’s more fundamental. Loss produces anger first, possessiveness afterwards.’
‘Before the rage, there’s anxiety,’ said Mary, feeling she knew what she was talking about. ‘Anyway, I think you move through all three, even if one is usually dominant. It’s not like shopping, you can’t just opt for rage.’
‘You’d be surprised.’
‘I know you prefer anger because you think it’s less humiliating.’
‘I don’t prefer anger,’ shouted Patrick, ‘but I get it anyway.’
‘I mean prefer it to the neighbouring emotions.’
Thomas, disturbed by Patrick’s shouting, shifted in the bed and muttered to himself inaudibly.
‘You’re straying from the point,’ said Patrick, more quietly. ‘As usual we can’t sleep together because you’re in bed with our three-year-old son.’
‘We can sleep together,’ sighed Mary, ‘I’ll move him over to the side.’
‘I want to make love to a woman, not a sighing heap of guilt and resignation,’ hissed Patrick, in an ineffective whisper.
Thomas sat up blearily.
‘No, Dada, you stop talking nonsense!’ he shouted. ‘And Mama, stop upsetting Dada!’
He collapsed back on the pillow and fell asleep again, his work done. A silence fell over the room, which Patrick was the first to interrupt.
‘I wasn’t talking nonsense…’ he began.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Mary. ‘You don’t have to win an argument with him as well. Can’t you hear what he’s saying? He wants us to stop arguing, not for you to start arguing with him.’
‘Sure,’ said Patrick in his suddenly bored way. ‘I’ll go to his bed, although I don’t know why I call it “his” bed. I might as well stop pretending and call it mine.’
‘You don’t have to…’
‘No – I do have to,’ said Patrick and ducked out of the room.
He had abandoned her abruptly, but failed to transfer his sense of abandonment to her. She felt relieved, angry, guilty, mournful. The cloudscape of her emotional life was so rolling and rapid that she couldn’t help marvelling at, sometimes envying, people who were ‘out of touch with their feelings’. How did they do it? Right now she wouldn’t mind knowing.
Her bedroom had a terrace built above the bay window of the drawing room where she had been sitting before dinner. She walked up to the French windows and imagined herself throwing them open, contemplating the stars, having an epiphany.
It wasn’t going to happen. Her body had started its landslide towards sleep. She took one last glance out of the window and wished she hadn’t. A thin streak of cloud was crossing the moon in a way that reminded her of the elision in Un Chien Andalou between the same image and a razor blade slicing open an eyeball. Her vision was the end of vision. Was she blinded by something she couldn’t see, or blinded by seeing something she couldn’t bear to look at? She was too tired to work anything out. Her thoughts were just threats, sleep just the rubble of wakefulness.
She got into bed and was covered by a thin layer of broken rest. Soon afterwards, she was disturbed by hearing Patrick slink back into the room. She could feel him staring at her to see if she was awake. She gave nothing away. He eventually settled on the other side of Thomas, who lay in the middle like the sword placed between the unmarried in a medieval bed. Why couldn’t she reach out to Patrick? Why couldn’t she make a nest of pillows for Thomas on one side of the bed and stay with Patrick on the other? She had no charity left for Patrick. In fact, for the first time in her marriage she could picture herself and the children living alone in the flat while Patrick was off somewhere, anywhere, being miserable.
The next day she was shocked by her coldness, but she soon got used to it.
She had always known it was there, the alternative to the warmth which struck everyone as so typical. Now she took it up like a hermit moving into a cave. She resisted Patrick’s rashes of nervous charm without effort. It was too tiring to move back and forth to the jumpy rhythm of his moods. She might as well stay where she was. He was going to ruin their holiday, but first he wanted to make her agree that fighting with Henry was a sign of his splendid integrity rather than his uncontrollable irritation. She refused. By that evening it was clear that Patrick’s agreement to disagree with Henry was in peril.