‘Hello, darling,’ she said, with a desperate affection that sounded like a long-distance telephone call. ‘What did you do today?’
‘Nothing,’ said Patrick, looking down at the floor.
‘Did you go for a walk with Daddy?’ asked Eleanor bravely. She felt the inadequacy of her questions, but could not overcome the dread of having them scantily answered.
Patrick shook his head. A branch swayed outside the window, and he watched the shadow of its leaves flickering above the curtain pole. The curtains billowed feebly and collapsed again, like defeated lungs. Down the corridor a door slammed. Patrick looked at the clutter on his mother’s desk. It was covered in letters, envelopes, paper clips, rubber bands, pencils, and a profusion of different-coloured cheque-books. An empty champagne glass stood beside a full ashtray.
‘Shall I take the glass down?’ he asked.
‘What a thoughtful boy you are,’ gushed Eleanor. ‘You could take it down and give it to Yvette. That would be very kind.’
Patrick nodded solemnly and picked up the glass. Eleanor marvelled at how well her son had turned out. Perhaps people were just born one way or another and the main thing was not to interfere too much.
‘Thank you, darling,’ she said huskily, wondering what she was meant to have done, as she watched him walk out of the room, gripping the stem of the glass tightly in his right hand.
As Patrick was going down the staircase, he overheard his father and Nicholas talking at the other end of the corridor. Suddenly afraid of falling, he started to walk down the way he used to when he was little, leading with one foot, and then bringing the other down firmly beside it on the same step. He had to hurry in case his father caught up with him, but if he hurried he might fall. He heard his father saying, ‘We’ll put it to him at dinner, I’m sure he’ll agree.’
Patrick froze on the stairs. They were talking about him. They were going to make him agree. Squeezing the stem of the glass fiercely in his hand, he felt a rush of shame and terror. He looked up at the painting hanging on the stairs and imagined its frame hurtling through the air and embedding its sharp corner in his father’s chest; and another painting whistling down the corridor and chopping Nicholas’s head off.
‘I’ll see you downstairs in an hour or two,’ said Nicholas.
‘Right-ho,’ said his father.
Patrick heard Nicholas’s door close, and he listened intently to his father’s footsteps coming down the corridor. Was he going to his bedroom, or coming down the stairs? Patrick wanted to move, but the power to move had deserted him again. He held his breath as the footsteps stopped.
In the corridor David was torn between visiting Eleanor, with whom he was always furious on principle, and going to have a bath. The opium which had taken the edge off the perpetual ache in his body now weakened his desire to insult his wife. After a few moments spent considering the choice he went into his bedroom.
Patrick knew he was not visible from the top of the stairs, but when he heard the footsteps pause he had tried to push back the idea of his father with concentration like a flamethrower. For a long time after David had gone into his bedroom, Patrick did not accept that the danger was over. When he relaxed his grip on the glass, the base and half the stem slipped out of his hand and broke on the step below him. Patrick couldn’t understand how the glass had snapped. Removing the rest of the glass from his hand, he saw a small cut in the middle of his palm. Only when he saw it bleed did he understand what had happened and, knowing that he must be in pain, he at last felt the sharp sting of the cut.
He was terrified of being punished for dropping the glass. It had fallen apart in his hand, but they would never believe that, they would say that he’d dropped it. He stepped carefully among the scattered pieces of glass on the steps below and got to the bottom of the stairs, but he did not know what to do with the half glass in his hand, and so he climbed back up three of the steps and decided to jump. He threw himself forward as hard as he could, but tripped as he landed, letting the rest of the glass fly from his hand and shatter against the wall. He lay splayed and shocked on the floor.
When she heard Patrick’s screams, Yvette put down the soup ladle, wiped her hands quickly on her apron, and hurried into the hall.
‘Ooh-la-la,’ she said reproachfully, ‘tu vas te casser la figure un de ces jours.’ She was alarmed by Patrick’s helplessness, but as she drew closer she asked him more gently, ‘Où est-ce que ça te fait mal, pauvre petit?’
Patrick still felt the shock of being winded and pointed to his chest where he had taken the brunt of the fall. Yvette picked him up, murmuring, ‘Allez, c’est pas grave,’ and kissed him on the cheek. He went on crying, but less desperately. A tangled sensation of sweat and gold teeth and garlic mingled with the pleasure of being held, but when Yvette started to rub his back, he squirmed in her arms and broke free.
At her desk Eleanor thought, ‘Oh God, he’s fallen downstairs and cut himself on the glass I gave him. It’s my fault again.’ Patrick’s screaming impaled her on her chair like a javelin, while she considered the horror of her position.
Still dominated by guilt and the fear of David’s reprisals, she summoned up the courage to go out onto the landing. At the bottom of the stairs she found Yvette sitting beside Patrick.
‘Rien de cassé, Madame,’ said Yvette. ‘Il a eu peur en tombant, c’est tout.’
‘Merci, Yvette,’ said Eleanor.
It wasn’t practical to drink as much as she did, thought Yvette, going to fetch a dustpan and brush.
Eleanor sat down beside Patrick, but a fragment of glass cut into her bottom. ‘Ouch,’ she exclaimed, and got up again to brush the back of her dress.
‘Mummy sat on a piece of glass,’ she said to Patrick. He looked at her glumly. ‘But never mind about that, tell me about your terrible fall.’
‘I jumped down from very high up.’
‘With a glass in your hand, darling? That could have been very dangerous.’
‘It was dangerous,’ said Patrick angrily.
‘Oh, I’m sure it was,’ said Eleanor, reaching out self-consciously to brush back the fringe of light brown hair from his forehead. ‘I’ll tell you what we could do,’ she said, proud of herself for remembering, ‘we could go to the funfair tomorrow, to Le Wild Ouest, would you like that? I went there today with Anne to see if you would like it, and there were lots of cowboys and Indians and rides. Shall we go tomorrow?’
‘I want to go away,’ said Patrick.
* * *
Up in his monk’s suite, David hurried next door and turned the bath taps to their full volume, until the thundering water drowned the uncongenial sound of his son. He sprinkled bath salts into the water from a porcelain shell and thought how intolerable it was having no nanny this summer to keep the boy quiet in the evenings. Eleanor hadn’t the least idea of how to bring up a child.
After Patrick’s nanny had died, there had been a dim procession of foreign girls through the London house. Homesick vandals, they left in tears after a few months, sometimes pregnant, never any more fluent in the English they had come to learn. In the end Patrick was often entrusted to Carmen, the morose Spanish maid who could not be bothered to refuse him anything. She lived in the basement, her varicose veins protesting at every step of the five storeys she seldom climbed to the nursery. In a sense one had to be grateful that this lugubrious peasant had had so little influence on Patrick. Still, it was very tiresome to find him on the stairs night after night, escaped from behind his wooden gate, waiting for Eleanor.