Dr Fenelon sat back in his buttoned leather chair with a sympathetic nod, exposing the crucifix he kept on the shelf behind him. Patrick had often noticed it before, but it now seemed to be mocking him with its brilliant inversion of glory and suffering, making the thing it was natural to be disgusted by into the central meaning of life, not just the mundane meaning of forcing a person to reflect more deeply, but the entirely mysterious meaning of the world being redeemed from sin because Jesus got on the wrong side of the law two thousand years ago. What did it mean that the world had been redeemed from sin? It obviously didn’t mean that there was any less sin. And how was Christ’s nasty, kinky execution supposed to be responsible for this redemption which, as far as Patrick could tell, hadn’t taken place? Until then he had only been dazzled by the irrelevance of Christianity in his own life, but now he found himself loathing it for threatening to cheat Eleanor of a punctual death. After some more schoolboy reminiscences, Dr Fenelon agreed to compile a report on Eleanor’s condition. What use was made of it was none of his affair, he assured himself, and made an appointment to meet Patrick at the nursing home two days later.
Patrick went to tell his mother the good news and prepare her for the doctor’s visit.
‘I want…’ she howled, and then half an hour later, ‘Swiss … land.’
Patrick braced himself for his impatience with his mother’s impatience.
‘Everything is going as fast as possible,’ he answered smoothly.
‘You … ook … like … my … son,’ Eleanor managed eventually.
‘There’s a simple explanation for that,’ said Patrick. ‘I am your son.’
‘No!’ said Eleanor, sure of her ground at last.
Patrick left with the even more pressing sense that Eleanor would soon be too senile to consent.
When he took Dr Fenelon into Eleanor’s fetid room the next day, she was in a state of hysterical cheerfulness which Patrick had never seen before but immediately understood. She thought that she had to be on best behaviour, to win the doctor over, to show him that she was a good girl who deserved a favour. She stared at him adoringly. He was her liberator, her angel of death. Dr Fenelon asked Patrick to stay, to help him understand Eleanor’s incoherent speech. He was impressed by the good quality of her reflexes, the absence of bed sores and the general condition of her skin. Patrick looked away from the white wrinkled expanse of her belly, feeling that he really shouldn’t be allowed to see so much of his mother, and certainly didn’t want to. He was driven mad by her eagerness. Why couldn’t she manifest the misery he had spent the last week labouring to put into words? She never tired of letting him down. He imagined the unbearably upbeat report that Dr Fenelon would be dictating on his return to the surgery. That evening he composed a letter of consent but he couldn’t face seeing his mother again straight away. In any case, Fenelon’s report wouldn’t arrive before the family left on their American holiday and so Patrick resolved to let the whole thing drop until his return.
In America he tried not to think about a situation he could make no progress with, but he knew that the secret of his macabre project was alienating him from the rest of his family. After sobering up, he clung to his somewhat drunken vision of Zone Three in Walter and Beth’s garden. Whenever he tried to define Zone Three, he could only think of it as a generosity that was not based on compensation or duty. Even though he could not quite describe it, he clung to this fragile intuition of what it might mean to be well.
It was only on the plane back to England that he finally told Mary what was going on. Thomas was asleep and Robert was watching a movie. At first Mary said nothing beyond sympathizing with the trouble Patrick had been through. She didn’t know whether to voice her suspicion that Patrick had been so busy examining his own motives that he might not have looked carefully enough at Eleanor’s. Wanting to die was one of the most commonplace things about life, but dying was something else. Eleanor’s demands for help were not an offer to clear herself out of the way, but the only way she had left to keep herself at the centre of her family’s attention. And did she really understand that she would have to do the killing herself? Mary felt sure that Eleanor was imagining an infinitely wise doctor with a gaze as deep as a mountain lake, leaning over to give her a fatal good-night kiss, not a tumbler of bitter barbiturates she had to hoist to her own lips. Eleanor was the most childish person Mary knew, including Thomas.
‘She won’t do it,’ she finally said to Patrick. ‘She won’t swallow. You’ll have to get some special air ambulance, and take her to see the Swiss doctors, and get the prescription, and then she won’t do it.’
‘If she makes me take her to Switzerland for nothing, I’ll kill her,’ said Patrick.
‘I’m sure that would suit her perfectly,’ said Mary. ‘She wants death taken out of her hands, not put into them.’
‘Whatever,’ said Patrick with an impatient sigh. ‘But I have to treat her as if she really meant the only thing she ever manages to say.’
‘I’m sure she’s sincere about wanting to die,’ said Mary. ‘I’m just not sure she’s up to it.’
From within the hub of his headphones, Robert sensed that his parents were having a heated conversation. He took off his headset and asked them what they were talking about.
‘Just about Granny – how we can help her,’ said Mary.
Robert put his headphones back on. As far as he was concerned Eleanor was just someone who was not yet dead. His parents no longer took him or Thomas to see her because they said it was too disturbing. It was an effort for him to remember, ages ago, being close to her, and it wasn’t an effort that seemed worth making. Sometimes, in the presence of his other grandmother, his indifference to Eleanor was taken by surprise and, in contrast to the tight little knot of Kettle’s selfishness, he would remember Eleanor’s softness and the great aching bruise of her good intentions. Then he would forget how unfair it was that Eleanor had cheated them of Saint-Nazaire and feel how unfair it was for Eleanor being Eleanor – not just her dire circumstances, but being who she was. In the end it was unfair on everyone being who they were because they couldn’t be anyone else. It wasn’t even that he wanted to be anybody else, it was just a horrible thought that he couldn’t be, in an emergency. He took off his headphones again, as if they were the thing that was limiting him. The comedy about the talking dog who became President of the United States wasn’t that good anyway. Robert switched channels to the map. It showed their plane hovering near the Irish coast, south of Cork. Then it expanded to show London and Paris and the Bay of Biscay. The next scale included Casablanca and Djibouti and Warsaw. How long was this informational feast going to go on? Where were they in relation to the moon? The only thing anybody wanted to know finally came up: 52 minutes to arrival. They were flying through seven fat hours, pumped full of darkening time zones. Speed; height; temperature; local time in New York; local time in London. They told you everything, except the local time on the plane. Watches just couldn’t keep up with those warped, enriched minutes. They ought to flip their dials round and say NOW until they could get back on the ground and start counting distinctly again.
He longed to get back on the ground as well, back home to London. Losing Saint-Nazaire had made London into his total home. He had heard about children who pretended they had been adopted and that their real parents were much more glamorous than the dreary people they lived with. He had done something similar with Saint-Nazaire, pretending it was his real home. After the shock of losing it, he had gradually relaxed into the knowledge that he really belonged among the sodden billboards and giant plane trees of his native city. Compared to the density of New York, London’s backward glance at the countryside and the rambling privacy of its streets seemed to be the opposite of what a city was for, and yet he longed to get back to the greasy black mud of the parks, the rained-out playgrounds and paddocks of dead leaves, the glance at his scratchy school uniform in the hall mirror, the clunk of the car door on the way to school. Nothing seemed more exotic than the depth of those feelings.