Her irritation was further blunted when a second backward glance yielded a grave smile from Erasmus Price, her own tiny concession to the consolations of adultery. She had started her affair with him in the South of France, where Patrick had insisted on renting a house during the final disintegration of their marriage, compulsively circling back to the area around his childhood home in Saint-Nazaire. Mary protested against this extravagance in vain; Patrick was in the last phase of his drinking, stumbling around the labyrinth of his unconscious, unavailable for discussion.
The Prices, whose own marriage was falling apart, had sons roughly the same age as Robert and Thomas. Despite these promising symmetries, harmony eluded the two families.
‘Anybody who is amazed that “a week is a long time in politics”,’ said Patrick on the second day, ‘should try having the Prices to stay. It turns out to be a fucking eternity. Do you know how he got his wacky name? His father was in the middle of editing the sixty-five-volume Oxford University Press Complete Works of Erasmus when his mother interrupted him with the news that she had given birth to a son. “Let’s call him Erasmus,” he cried, like a man inspired, “or Luther, whose crucial letter to Erasmus I was re-reading only this morning.” Given the choice…’ Patrick subsided.
Mary ignored him, knowing that he was just setting up that day’s pretext for more senseless drinking. After Patrick had passed out and Emily Price had gone to bed, Mary sat up late, listening to Erasmus’s troubles.
‘Some people think that the future belongs to them and that they can lose it,’ he said on the first evening, staring into his wine-dark glass, ‘but I don’t have that sense at all. Even when the work is going well, I wouldn’t mind if I could painlessly and instantly expire.’
Why was she drawn to these gloomy men? As a philosopher, at least Erasmus, like Schopenhauer, could make his pessimism into a world view. He cheered up at the mention of the German philosopher.
‘My favourite remark of his was the advice he gave to a dying friend: “You are ceasing to be something you would have done better never to become.”’
‘That must have helped,’ said Mary.
‘A real nostalgia-buster,’ he whispered admiringly.
According to Erasmus his marriage was irreparable; the puzzle for Mary was that it existed at all. As a guest, Emily Price had three main drawbacks: she was incapable of saying please, incapable of saying thank you, and incapable of saying sorry, all the while creating a surge in the demand for these expressions. When she saw Mary applying sunblock to Thomas’s sharp pale shoulders, she hurried over and scooped the white cream out of Mary’s cupped hand, saying, ‘I can’t see it without wanting to take some.’ By her own account, the same hunger had haunted the birth of her eldest son, ‘The moment I saw him, I thought: I want another one.’
Emily complained about Cambridge, she complained about her husband and about her sons, she complained about her house, she complained about France and the sun and the clouds and the leaves and the wind and the bottle tops. She couldn’t stop; she had to bail out the flooding dinghy of her discontent. Sometimes she set false targets with her complaining: Cambridge was hell, London was great, but when Erasmus applied for a job at London University, she made him withdraw. At the time, she had said that he was too cowardly to apply, but on holiday with the Melroses she admitted the truth, ‘I only wanted to move to London so I could complain about the air quality and the schools.’
Patrick was momentarily jolted out of his stupor by the challenge of Emily’s personality.
‘She could be the centrepiece of a Kleinian Conference — “Talk About Bad Breasts”.’ He giggled sweatily on the bed while Mary cultivated patience. ‘She had a difficult start in life,’ he sighed. ‘Her mother wouldn’t let her use the biros in their house, in case they ran out of ink.’ He fell off the bed laughing, knocked his head on the bedside table and had to take a handful of codeine to deal with the bump.
When Mary abandoned tolerance, she did it vehemently. She could feel Emily’s underlying sense of privation like the blast from a furnace, but she somehow made the decision to put aside her characteristic empathy, to stay with the annoying consequences and not to feel the distressing causes of Emily’s behaviour, especially after Erasmus’s clumsy pass, which she hadn’t entirely rejected, on the second evening of their endless conversation about marital failure. For a week, they kept each other afloat with the wreckage from their respective marriages. On their return to England it took them two months to admit the futility of trying to build an affair out of these sodden fragments — just long enough for Mary to struggle loyally through Erasmus’s latest work, None the Wiser: Developments in the Philosophy of Consciousness.
It was the presence of None the Wiser on Mary’s bedside table that alerted Patrick to his wife’s laborious romance.
‘You couldn’t be reading that book unless you were having an affair with the author,’ he guessed through half-closed eyes.
‘Believe me, it’s virtually impossible even then.’
He gave in to the relief of closing his eyes completely, a strange smile on his lips. She realized with vague disgust that he was pleased to have the huge weight of his infidelity alleviated by her trivial contribution to the other side of the scales.
After that, there was what her mother would have called an ‘absolutely maddening’ period, when Patrick only emerged from his new blackout bedsit in order to lecture or interrogate her about consciousness studies, sometimes with the slow sententious precision of drunkenness, sometimes with its visionary fever, all delivered with the specious fluency of a man used to pleading a case in public.
‘The subject of consciousness, in order to enter the realm of science, must become the object of consciousness, and that is precisely what it cannot do, for the eye cannot perceive itself, cannot vault from its socket fast enough to glimpse the lens. The language of experience and the language of experiment hang like oil and water in the same test tube, never mingling except from the violence of philosophy. The violence of philosophy. Would you agree? Whoops. Don’t worry about that lamp, I’ll get you a new one.
‘Seriously, though, where do you stand on microtubules? Micro-tubular bells. Are you For or Against? Do you think that a theory of extended mind can base itself confidently in quantum non-locality? Do you believe that two linked particles conceived in the warm spiralling quantum womb of a microtubule could continue to inform each other as they rush through vast fields of interstellar darkness; still communicating despite the appearance of icy separation? Are you For, or Against? And what difference would it make to experience if these particles did continue to resonate with each other, since it is not particles that we experience?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake shut up.’
‘Who will rid us of the Explanatory Gap?’ he shouted, like Henry II requesting an assassin for his troublesome priest. ‘And is that gap just a product of our misconstrued discourse?’ He ploughed on, ‘Is reality a consensual hallucination? And is a nervous breakdown in fact a refusal to consent? Go on, don’t be shy, tell me what you think?’
‘Why don’t you go back to your flat and pass out there? I don’t want the children seeing you in this state.’