The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (12 page)

On top of the books by her bed was
Goodbye to Berlin
and Anne thought how much more fun it would be to reread that rather than dip into the grisly Caesars. From the thought of pre-war Berlin her mind jumped back to the remark she had made about the shower room in Auschwitz. Was she, she wondered, giving in to that English need to be facetious? She felt tainted and exhausted by a summer of burning up her moral resources for the sake of small conversational effects. She felt she had been subtly perverted by slick and lazy English manners, the craving for the prophylactic of irony, the terrible fear of being ‘a bore’, and the boredom of the ways they relentlessly and narrowly evaded this fate.

Above all it was Victor’s ambivalence towards these values that was wearing her down. She could no longer tell whether he was working as a double agent, a serious writer pretending to the Folks on the Hill – of which the Melroses were only rather a tarnished example – that he was a devoted admirer of the effortless nullity of their lives. Or perhaps he was a triple agent, pretending to her that he had not accepted the bribe of being admitted to the periphery of their world.

Defiantly, Anne picked up
Goodbye to Berlin
and headed towards the bathroom.

The sun disappeared early behind the roof of the tall, narrow house. At his table under the plane tree Victor put his sweater back on. He felt safe in the bulk of his sweater with the distant sound of Anne running her bath. He wrote a sentence in his spidery hand, and then another.

10

IF
DAVID HAD AWARDED
himself the most important painting in the house, at least Eleanor had secured the largest bedroom. At the far end of the corridor, its curtains were closed all day to protect a host of frail Italian drawings from the draining power of the sun.

Patrick hesitated in the doorway of his mother’s bedroom, waiting to be noticed. The dimness of the room made it seem even larger, especially when a breeze stirred the curtains and an unsteady light spread shadows over the stretching walls. Eleanor sat at her desk with her back to Patrick, writing a cheque to the Save the Children Fund, her favourite charity. She did not hear her son come into the room until he stood beside her chair.

‘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.

They so often returned late from Annabel’s that Patrick had once asked anxiously, ‘Who is Annabels?’ Everyone in the room had laughed and David could remember Bunny Warren saying, with that simple-hearted tactlessness for which he was almost universally adored, ‘She’s a very lovely young girl your parents are exceptionally fond of.’ Nicholas had seen his chance and said, ‘I sospect ze child is experienzing ze sibling rivalry.’

When David came in late at night and found Patrick sitting on the stairs, he would order him back to the nursery, but after he had gone to bed he sometimes heard the floorboards creak on the landing. He knew that Patrick crept into his mother’s room to try to extract some consolation from her stupefied back, as she lay curled up and unconscious on the edge of her mattress. He had seen them in the morning like refugees in an expensive waiting room.

David turned off the taps and found that the screaming had stopped. Screaming that only lasted as long as it took to fill a bath could not be taken seriously. David tested the water with a foot. It was far too hot, but he pushed his leg down deeper until the water covered his hairless shin, and started to scald him. Every nerve in his body urged him to step out of the steaming bath, but he called up his deep resources of contempt and kept his leg immersed to prove his mastery over the pain.

He straddled the bath; one foot burning, the other cool against the cork floor. It took no effort for him to revive the fury he had felt an hour earlier when he glimpsed Bridget kneeling under the tree. Nicholas had obviously told that silly bitch about the figs.

Oh, happy days, he sighed, where had they fled? Days when his now bedraggled wife, still freshly submissive and eager to please, had grazed so peacefully among the rotting figs.

David hoisted his other leg over the side of the bath and plunged it into the water, in the hope that the additional pain would stimulate him to think of the right revenge to take on Nicholas during dinner.

‘Why the hell did you have to do that? I’m sure David saw you,’ Nicholas snapped at Bridget, as soon as he had heard David’s bedroom door close.

‘Saw what?’

‘You, down on all fours.’

‘I didn’t have to,’ said Bridget sleepily from the bed. ‘I only did it because you were so keen to tell me the story, and I thought it might turn you on. It obviously did the first time.’

‘Don’t be so absurd.’ Nicholas stood with his hands on his hips, a picture of disapproval. ‘As to your effusive remarks – “What a perfect life you have here”,’ he simpered, ‘“What a wonderful view” – they made you sound even more vulgar and stupid than you are.’

Bridget still had trouble in taking Nicholas’s rudeness seriously.

‘If you’re going to be horrid,’ she said, ‘I’ll elope with Barry.’

‘And that’s another thing,’ gasped Nicholas, removing his silk jacket. There were dark sweat rings under the arms of his shirt. ‘What was going through your mind – if mind is the right word – when you gave that yob the telephone number here?’

‘When I said that we must keep in touch, he asked me for the number of the house I was staying in.’

‘You could have lied, you know,’ yelped Nicholas. ‘There’s such a thing as dishonesty.’ He paced up and down shaking his head. ‘Such a thing as a broken promise.’

Bridget rolled off the bed and crossed the room. ‘Just fuck off,’ she said, slamming the bathroom door and locking it. She sat on the edge of the bath and remembered that her copy of
Tatler
and, worse, her make-up were in the room next door.

‘Open the door, you stupid bitch,’ said Nicholas swivelling the doorknob.

‘Fuck off,’ she repeated. At least she could prevent Nicholas from using the bathroom for as long as possible, even if she only had a bubble bath to amuse her.

11

WHILE HE WAS LOCKED
out of the bathroom Nicholas unpacked and filled the most convenient shelves with his shirts; in the cupboard his suits took up rather more than half the space. The biography of F. E. Smith that he had already carried with him to half a dozen houses that summer was placed again on the table on the right-hand side of the bed. When he was finally allowed access to the bathroom, he distributed his possessions around the basin in a familiar order, his badger brush to one side and his rose mouthwash to the other.