The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (49 page)

‘The fact that you mention his not using anything you said against you is sinister enough.’

‘You can say what you like,’ said Bunny bluntly, ‘but your father probably saved my life.’ He made an inaudible excuse and moved away abruptly.

Alone in the press of the party, Patrick was suddenly anxious to avoid another conversation, and left the tent, preoccupied by what Bunny had said about his father. As he hurried into the now-crowded drawing room, he was spotted by Laura, who stood with China and a man Patrick did not recognize.

‘Hello, darling,’ said Laura.

‘Hi,’ said Patrick, who didn’t want to be waylaid.

‘Have you met Ballantine Morgan?’ said China.

‘Hello,’ said Patrick.

‘Hello,’ said Ballantine, giving Patrick an annoyingly firm handshake. ‘I was just saying,’ he continued, ‘that I’ve been lucky enough to inherit what is probably the greatest gun collection in the world.’

‘Well, I think,’ said Patrick, ‘I was lucky enough to see a book about it shown to me by your father.’

‘Oh, so you’ve read
The Morgan Gun Collection
,’ said Ballantine.

‘Well, not from cover to cover, but enough to know how extraordinary it was to own the greatest gun collection in the world and be such a good shot, as well as write about the whole thing in such beautiful prose.’

‘My father was also a very fine photographer,’ said Ballantine.

‘Oh, yes, I knew I’d forgotten something,’ said Patrick.

‘He was certainly a multitalented individual,’ said Ballantine.

‘When did he die?’ asked Patrick.

‘He died of cancer last year,’ said Ballantine. ‘When a man of my father’s wealth dies of cancer, you know they haven’t found a cure,’ he added with justifiable pride.

‘It does you great credit that you’re such a fine curator of his memory,’ said Patrick wearily.

‘Honour thy father and thy mother all thy days,’ said Ballantine.

‘That’s certainly been my policy,’ Patrick affirmed.

China, who felt that even Ballantine’s gargantuan income might be eclipsed by his fatuous behaviour, suggested that they dance.

‘I’d be pleased to,’ said Ballantine. ‘Excuse us,’ he added to Laura and Patrick.

‘What a ghastly man,’ said Laura.

‘You should have met his father,’ said Patrick.

‘If he could get that silver spoon out of his mouth—’

‘He would be even more pointless than he already is,’ said Patrick.

‘How are you, anyway, darling?’ Laura asked. ‘I’m pleased to see you. This party is really getting on my nerves. Men used to tell me how they used butter for sex, now they tell me how they’ve eliminated it from their diet.’

Patrick smiled. ‘You certainly have to kick a lot of bodies out there before you find a live one,’ he said. ‘There’s a blast of palpable stupidity that comes from our host, like opening the door of a sauna. The best way to contradict him is to let him speak.’

‘We could go upstairs,’ said Laura.

‘What on earth for?’ smiled Patrick.

‘We could just fuck. No strings.’

‘Well, it’s something to do,’ said Patrick.

‘Thanks,’ said Laura.

‘No, no, I’m really keen,’ said Patrick. ‘Although I can’t help thinking it’s a terrible idea. Aren’t we going to get confused?’

‘No strings, remember?’ said Laura, marching him towards the hall.

A security guard stood at the foot of the staircase. ‘I’m sorry, no one goes upstairs,’ he said.

‘We’re staying here,’ said Laura, and something indefinably arrogant about her tone made the security man step aside.

Patrick and Laura kissed, leaning against the wall of the attic room they had found.

‘Guess who I’m having an affair with?’ asked Laura as she detached herself.

‘I dread to think. Anyhow, why do you want to discuss it just now?’ Patrick mumbled as he bit her neck.

‘He’s someone you know.’

‘I give up,’ sighed Patrick who could feel his erection dwindling.

‘Johnny.’

‘Well, that’s put me right off,’ said Patrick.

‘I thought you might want to steal me back.’

‘I’d rather stay friends with Johnny. I don’t want more irony and more tension. You never really understood that, did you?’

‘You love irony and tension, what are you talking about?’

‘You just go round imagining everybody’s like you.’

‘Oh, fuck off,’ said Laura. ‘Or as Lawrence Harvey says in
Darling
, “Put away your Penguin Freud.”’

‘Look, we’d better just part now, don’t you think?’ said Patrick. ‘Before we have a row.’

‘God, you’re a pain,’ said Laura.

‘Let’s go down separately,’ said Patrick. The flickering flame of his lighter cast a dim wobbling light over the room. The lighter went out, but Patrick found the brass doorknob and, opening the door cautiously, allowed a wedge of light to cross the dusty floorboards.

‘You go first,’ he whispered, brushing the dust from the back of her dress.

‘Bye,’ she said curtly.

10

PATRICK CLOSED THE DOOR
gratefully and lit a cigarette. Since his conversation with Bunny there’d been no time to think, but now the disturbing quality of Bunny’s remarks caught up with him and kept him in the attic.

Even when he had gone to New York to collect his ashes, Patrick had not been completely convinced by the simple solution of loathing his father. Bunny’s loyalty to David made Patrick realize that his real difficulty might be in acknowledging the same feelings in himself.

What had there been to admire about his father? The music he had refused to take the risk of recording? And yet it had sometimes broken Patrick’s hearts to hear it. The psychological insight he had habitually used to torment his friends and family, but which Bunny claimed had saved his life? All of David’s virtues and talents had been double-edged, but however vile he had been he had not been deluded, most of the time, and had accepted with some stoicism his well-deserved suffering.

It was not admiration that would reconcile him to his father, or even the famously stubborn love of children for their parents, able to survive far worse fates than Patrick’s. The greenish faces of those drowning figures clinging to the edge of the
Medusa
’s raft haunted his imagination, and he did not always picture them
from
the raft, but often as enviably closer to it than he was. How many choked cursing? How many slipped under silently? How many survived a little longer by pressing on the shoulders of their drowning neighbours?

Something more practical made him rummage about for a reason to make peace. Most of Patrick’s strengths, or what he imagined were his strengths, derived from his struggle against his father, and only by becoming detached from their tainted origin could he make any use of them.

And yet he could never lose his indignation at the way his father had cheated him of any peace of mind, and he knew that however much trouble he put into repairing himself, like a once-broken vase that looks whole on its patterned surface but reveals in its pale interior the thin dark lines of its restoration, he could only produce an illusion of wholeness.

All Patrick’s attempts at generosity ran up against his choking indignation while, on the other hand, his hatred ran up against those puzzling moments, fleeting and always spoiled, when his father had seemed to be in love with life and to take pleasure in any expression of freedom, or playfulness, or brilliance. Perhaps he would have to settle for the idea that it must have been even worse being his father than being someone his father had attempted to destroy.

Simplification was dangerous and would later take its revenge. Only when he could hold in balance his hatred and his stunted love, looking on his father with neither pity nor terror but as another human being who had not handled his personality especially well; only when he could live with the ambivalence of never forgiving his father for his crimes but allowing himself to be touched by the unhappiness that had produced them as well as the unhappiness they had produced, could he be released, perhaps, into a new life that would enable him to live instead of merely surviving. He might even enjoy himself.

Patrick grunted nervously. Enjoy himself? He mustn’t let his optimism run away with him. His eyes had adjusted to the dark and he could now make out the chests and boxes that surrounded the small patch of floor he had been pacing around. A narrow half window giving onto the roof and gutter caught the murky brown glow of the floodlights at the front of the house. He lit another cigarette and smoked it, leaning against the windowsill. He felt the usual panic about needing to be elsewhere, in this case downstairs where he couldn’t help imagining the carpets being hoovered and the caterers’ vans loaded, although it had only been about one thirty when he came upstairs with Laura. But he stayed in the attic, intrigued by the slightest chance of release from the doldrums in which his soul had lain breathless for so long.

Patrick opened the window to throw his cigarette onto the damp roof. Taking a last gulp of smoke, he smiled at the thought that David probably would have shared his point of view about their relationship. It was the kind of trick that had made him a subtle enemy, but now it might help to end their battle. Yes, his father would have applauded Patrick’s defiance and understood his efforts to escape the maze into which he had placed him. The thought that he would have wanted him to succeed made Patrick want to cry.

Beyond bitterness and despair there was something poignant, something he found harder to admit than the facts about his father’s cruelty, the thing he had not been able to say to Johnny: that his father had wanted, through the brief interludes of his depression, to love him, and that he had wanted to be able to love his father, although he never would.

And why, while he was at it, continue to punish his mother? She had not done anything so much as failed to do anything, but he had put himself beyond her reach, clinging on to the adolescent bravado of pretending that she was a person he had nothing in common with at all, who just happened to have given birth to him; that their relationship was a geographical accident, like that of being someone’s neighbour. She had frustrated her husband by refusing to go to bed with him, but Patrick would be the last person to blame her for that. It would probably be better if women arrested in their own childhood didn’t have children with tormented misogynist homosexual paedophiles, but nothing was perfect in this sublunary world, thought Patrick, glancing up devoutly at the moon which was of course hidden, like the rest of the sky during an English winter, by a low swab of dirty cloud. His mother was really a good person, but like almost everybody she had found her compass spinning in the magnetic field of intimacy.

He really must go downstairs now. Obsessed by punctuality and dogged by a heart-compressing sense of urgency, Patrick was still incapable of keeping a watch. A watch might have soothed him by challenging his hysteria and pessimism. He would definitely get a watch on Monday. If he was not going to have an epiphany to take with him from the attic, the promise of a watch might at least represent a shimmering of hope. Wasn’t there a single German word meaning ‘shimmering of hope’? There was probably a single German word meaning, ‘Regeneration through Punctuality, Shimmering of Hope, and Taking Pleasure in the Misfortune of Others’. If only he knew what it was.

Could one have a time-release epiphany, an epiphany without realizing it had happened? Or were they always trumpeted by angels and preceded by temporary blindness, Patrick wondered, as he walked down the corridor in the wrong direction.

Turning the corner, he saw that he was in a part of the house he had never seen before. A threadbare brown carpet stretched down a corridor that ended in darkness.

‘How the fuck do you get out of this fucking house?’ he cursed.

‘You’re going the wrong way.’

Patrick looked to his right and saw a girl in a white nightie sitting on a short flight of stairs.

‘I didn’t mean to swear,’ he said. ‘Or rather, I did mean to, but I didn’t know you’d overhear me.’

‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘Daddy swears all the time.’

‘Are you Sonny and Bridget’s daughter?’

‘Yes. I’m Belinda.’

‘Can’t you get to sleep?’ asked Patrick, sitting down on the stairs next to her. She shook her head. ‘Why not?’

‘Because of the party. Nanny said if I said my prayers properly I’d go to sleep, but I didn’t.’

‘Do you believe in God?’ asked Patrick.

‘I don’t know,’ said Belinda. ‘But if there is a God he’s not very good at it.’

Patrick laughed. ‘But why aren’t you at the party?’ he asked.

‘I’m not allowed. I’m meant to go to bed at nine.’

‘How mean,’ said Patrick. ‘Do you want me to smuggle you down?’

‘Mummy would see me. And Princess Margaret said I had to go to bed.’

‘In that case we must definitely smuggle you down. Or I could read you a story.’

‘Oh, that would be nice,’ said Belinda, and then she put her fingers to her lips and said, ‘Shh, there’s someone coming.’

At that moment Bridget rounded the corner of the corridor and saw Patrick and Belinda together on the stairs.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked Patrick.

‘I was just trying to find my way back to the party and I ran into Belinda.’

‘But what were you doing here in the first place?’

‘Hello, Mummy,’ interrupted Belinda.

‘Hello, darling,’ said Bridget, holding out her hand.

‘I came up here with a girl,’ Patrick explained.

‘Oh God, you’re making me feel very old,’ said Bridget. ‘So much for the security.’

‘I was just going to read Belinda a story.’

‘Sweet,’ said Bridget. ‘I should have been doing that years ago.’ She picked Belinda up in her arms. ‘You’re so heavy, nowadays,’ she groaned, smiling at Patrick firmly, but dismissively.

‘Well, good night,’ said Patrick, getting up from the stairs.

‘Night,’ yawned Belinda.

‘I’ve got something I have to tell you,’ said Bridget, as she started to carry Belinda down the corridor. ‘Mummy is going to stay at Granny’s tonight, and we’d like you to come along as well. There won’t be any room for Nanny, though.’