He rang Switzerland, his pulse racing. The calm voice which answered the phone in German turned out to speak English as well, and promised to send some information. When Patrick pressed him on the legal points, he said that it was not a matter of euthanasia, administered by the doctor, but of assisted suicide administered by the patient. The barbiturate would be prescribed if a Swiss doctor was convinced that it was warranted and that the suicide was entirely voluntary. If Patrick wanted to make progress while he waited for the membership forms to arrive, he should get a letter of consent from Eleanor and a doctor’s report on her condition. Patrick pointed out that his mother could no longer write and he doubted that she could give herself an injection either.
‘Can she sign?’
‘Just.’
‘Can she swallow?’
‘Just.’
‘So, maybe we can help.’
Patrick felt a surge of excitement after his telephone call to Switzerland. Signing and swallowing, those were the keys to the kingdom, the code for the missile launch. There wasn’t much time before Eleanor lost them. He dreaded the precious barbiturate dribbling uselessly down her shining chin. As to her signature, it now formed an Alpine silhouette reminiscent of Thomas’s earliest stabs at writing. Patrick paced up and down the drawing room of his flat. He was ‘working at home’, and had waited for Robert to go to school and for Mary to take Thomas to Holland Park before carrying on with his secret research. Now the whole flat was his to bounce around; there was nobody to be efficient for, nobody to be friendly to. Just as well, since he couldn’t stop pacing, couldn’t stop repeating, ‘Sign and swallow, sign and swallow,’ like a chained parrot in the corner of an overstuffed room. He felt increasingly tense, having to pause and breathe out slowly to expel the feeling that he was about to faint. There was a sinister, knife-grinding quality to his excitement. He was going to give Eleanor exactly what she wanted. But should he be wanting it quite so much as well?
He recognized the signature of his murderous longings and felt duly troubled. What seemed new, but then admitted that it had been there all along, was his own desire for a glass of barbiturate. ‘To cease upon the midnight with no pain’ – rearranged a little, it might almost be the chemical name for that final drink: Sismidnopin.
‘Oh, my God! You’ve got a bottle of Sismidnopin! Can I have some?’ he suddenly squealed as he reached the end of the corridor and spun round to pace back again. His thoughts were all over the place, or rather they were in one place dragging everything towards them. He imagined a modest little protest march, starting out in Hampstead with a few ethical types trying to ban unnecessary suffering, and then swelling rapidly as it flowed down to Swiss Cottage, until soon every shop was closed and every restaurant empty and all the trains stood still and the petrol pumps were unattended, and the whole population of London was flowing towards Whitehall and Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square, cursing unnecessary suffering and screaming for Sismidnopin.
‘Why should a dog, a cat have death,’ he wailed front stage, ‘and she…’. He forced himself to stop. ‘Oh, shut up,’ he said, collapsing on a sofa.
‘I’m just trying to help my old mum,’ he cajoled himself in a new voice. ‘She’s a bit past her sell-by date, to be honest. Not enjoying life as much as she used to. Can’t even watch the old goggle box. Eyes gone. No use reading to her, just gets her agitated. Every little thing frightens her, even her own happy memories. Terrible situation, really.’
Who was talking? Who was he talking to? He felt taken over.
He breathed out slowly. He was feeling way too tense. He was going to give himself a heart attack, finishing off the wrong person by mistake. He could see that he was breaking into fragments because the simplicity of his situation – son asked to kill mother – was unbearable; and the simplicity of her situation – person dreads every second of her existence – was more unbearable still. He tried to stay with it, to think about what didn’t bear thinking about: Eleanor’s experience. He felt her writhing on the bed, begging for death. He suddenly burst into tears, all his evasions exhausted.
The rivalry between revenge and compassion ended during that morning in his flat, and he was left with a more straightforward longing for everyone in his family to be free, including his mother. He decided to press ahead with getting a medical report before his trip to America. There was little point in applying to the nursing home’s doctor, whose entire mission was to keep patients alive despite their craving for a lethal injection. Dr Fenelon was Patrick’s family doctor, but he had not taken care of Eleanor before. He was a sympathetic and intelligent man whose Catholicism had not yet stood in the way of useful prescriptions and rapid specialist appointments. Patrick was used to thinking of him as grown up and was bewildered to hear him speak of his ethics classes at Ampleforth, as if he had allowed a priest to spray his teenage sketch of the world with an Infallible fixative.
‘I still believe that suicide is a sin,’ said Dr Fenelon, ‘but I no longer believe that people who want to commit suicide are being tempted by the Devil, because we now know that they’re suffering from a disease called depression.’
‘Listen,’ said Patrick, trying to recover as unobtrusively as possible from finding the Devil on the guest list, ‘when you can’t move, can’t speak, can’t read, and know that you’re losing control of your mind, depression is not a disease, it’s the only reasonable response. It’s cheerfulness that would require a glandular dysfunction, or a supernatural force to explain it.’
‘When people are depressed, we give them antidepressants,’ Dr Fenelon persevered.
‘She’s already on them. It’s true that they gave a certain enthusiasm to her loathing of life. It was only after she started taking them that she asked me to kill her.’
‘It can be a great privilege to work with the dying,’ Dr Fenelon began.
‘I don’t think she’s going to start working with the dying,’ Patrick interrupted. ‘She can’t even stand up. If you mean that it’s a great privilege for you, I have to say that I’m more concerned about her quality of life than yours.’
‘I mean,’ said the doctor, with more equanimity than Patrick’s sarcasm might have deserved, ‘that suffering can have a transfiguring effect. One sees people, after an enormous struggle, breaking through to a kind of peacefulness they’ve never known before.’
‘There has to be some sense of self to experience the peacefulness – that’s precisely what my mother is losing.’