The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (15 page)

‘Hi, Patrick,’ said Anne, ‘you look so grim. Can’t you get to sleep?’

He did not answer or move. ‘I just have to get rid of this piece of glass,’ said Anne. ‘I guess something broke here earlier?’

‘It was me,’ said Patrick.

‘Hang on one second,’ she said.

She’s lying, thought Patrick, she won’t come back.

There was no wastepaper basket in the hall, but she brushed the glass off her finger into a porcelain umbrella stand that bristled with David’s collection of exotic canes.

She hurried back to Patrick and sat on the step beneath him. ‘Did you cut yourself on that glass?’ she asked tenderly, putting her hand on his arm.

He pulled away from her and said, ‘Leave me alone.’

‘Do you want me to get your mother?’ asked Anne.

‘All right,’ said Patrick.

‘OK. I’ll go get her right away,’ said Anne. Back in the dining room, she heard Nicholas saying to Victor, ‘David and I were meaning to ask you before dinner whether John Locke really said that a man who forgot his crimes should not be punished for them.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Victor. ‘He maintained that personal identity depended on continuity of memory. In the case of a forgotten crime one would be punishing the wrong person.’

‘I’ll drink to that,’ said Nicholas.

Anne leaned over to Eleanor and said to her quietly, ‘I think you ought to go and see Patrick. He was sitting on the stairs asking for you.’

‘Thank you,’ whispered Eleanor.

‘Perhaps it should be the other way round,’ said David. ‘A man who remembers his crimes can usually be relied upon to punish himself, whereas the law should punish the person who is irresponsible enough to forget.’

‘D’you believe in capital punishment?’ piped up Bridget.

‘Not since it ceased to be a public occasion,’ said David. ‘In the eighteenth century a hanging was a really good day’s outing.’

‘Everybody enjoyed themselves: even the man who was being hanged,’ added Nicholas.

‘Fun for all the family,’ David went on. ‘Isn’t that the phrase everybody uses nowadays? God knows, it’s always what
I
aim for, but an occasional trip to Tyburn must have made the task easier.’

Nicholas giggled. Bridget wondered what Tyburn was. Eleanor smiled feebly, and pushed her chair back.

‘Not leaving us I hope, darling,’ said David.

‘I have to … I’ll be back in a moment,’ Eleanor mumbled.

‘I didn’t quite catch that: you have to be back in a moment?’

‘There’s something I have to do.’

‘Well, hurry, hurry, hurry,’ said David gallantly, ‘we’ll be lost without your conversation.’

Eleanor walked to the door at the same time as Yvette opened it carrying a silver coffee pot.

‘I found Patrick on the stairs,’ Anne said. ‘He seemed kind of sad.’

David’s eyes darted towards Eleanor’s back as she slipped past Yvette. ‘Darling,’ he said, and then more peremptorily, ‘Eleanor.’

She turned, her teeth locked onto a thumbnail, trying to get a grip that would hold. She often tore at the stunted nails when she was not smoking. ‘Yes?’ she said.

‘I thought that we’d agreed that you wouldn’t rush to Patrick each time he whines and blubbers.’

‘But he fell down earlier and he may have hurt himself.’

‘In that case,’ said David with sudden seriousness, ‘he may need a doctor.’ He rested the palms of his hands on the top of the table, as if to rise.

‘Oh, I don’t think he’s hurt,’ said Anne, to restrain David. She had a strong feeling that she would not be keeping her promise to Patrick if she sent him his father rather than his mother. ‘He just wants to be comforted.’

‘You see, darling,’ said David, ‘he isn’t hurt, and so it is just a sentimental question: does one indulge the self-pity of a child, or not? Does one allow oneself to be blackmailed, or not? Come and sit down – we can at least discuss it.’

Eleanor edged her way back to her chair reluctantly. She knew she would be pinned down by a conversation that would defeat her, but not persuade her.

‘The proposition I want to make,’ said David, ‘is that education should be something of which a child can later say: if I survived that, I can survive anything.’

‘That’s crazy and wrong,’ said Anne, ‘and you know it.’

‘I certainly think that children should be stretched to the limit of their abilities,’ said Victor, ‘but I’m equally certain they can’t be if they’re intensely miserable.’

‘Nobody wants to make anybody miserable,’ said Nicholas, puffing out his cheeks incredulously. ‘We’re just saying that it doesn’t do the child any good to be mollycoddled. I may be a frightful reactionary, but I think that all you have to do for children is hire a reasonable nanny and put them down for Eton.’

‘What, the nannies?’ said Bridget giggling. ‘Anyway, what if you have a girl?’

Nicholas looked at her sternly.

‘I guess that putting things down is your speciality,’ said Anne to Nicholas.

‘Oh, I know it’s an unfashionable view to hold these days,’ Nicholas went on complacently, ‘but in my opinion nothing that happens to you as a child really matters.’

‘If we’re getting down to things that don’t really matter,’ said Anne, ‘you’re top of my list.’

‘Oh, my word,’ said Nicholas, in his sports commentator’s voice, ‘a ferocious backhand from the young American woman, but the line judge rules it out.’

‘From what you’ve told me,’ said Bridget, still elated by the thought of nannies in tailcoats, ‘nothing much that happened in
your
childhood did matter: you just did what everyone expected.’ Feeling a vague pressure on her right thigh, she glanced round at David, but he seemed to be staring ahead, organizing a sceptical expression on his face. The pressure stopped. On her other side, Victor peeled a nectarine with hurried precision.

‘It’s true,’ said Nicholas, making a visible effort at equanimity, ‘that my childhood was uneventful. People never remember happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering. I remember stroking my cheek against the velvet collar of my overcoat. Asking my grandfather for pennies to throw into that golden pool at the Ritz. Big lawns. Buckets and spades. That sort of thing.’

Bridget could not concentrate on what Nicholas was saying. She felt cold metal against her knee. Looking down, she saw David lifting the edge of her dress with a small silver knife and running it along her thigh. What the fuck did he think he was doing? She frowned at him reproachfully. He merely pressed the point a little more firmly into her thigh, without looking at her.

Victor wiped the tips of his fingers with his napkin, while answering a question which Bridget had missed. He sounded a little bored and not surprisingly, when she heard what he had to say. ‘Certainly if the degree of psychological connectedness and psychological continuity have become sufficiently weakened, it would be true to say that a person should look upon his childhood with no more than charitable curiosity.’

Bridget’s mind flashed back to her father’s foolish conjuring tricks, and her mother’s ghastly floral-print dresses, but charitable curiosity was not what she felt.

‘Would you like one of these?’ said David, lifting a fig from the bowl in the middle of the table. ‘They’re at their best at this time of year.’

‘No, thanks,’ she said.

David pinched the fig firmly between his fingers and pushed it towards Bridget’s mouth, ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘I know how much you like them.’

Bridget opened her mouth obediently and took the fig between her teeth. She blushed because the table had fallen silent and she knew that everyone was watching her. As soon as she could she took the fig from her mouth and asked David if she could borrow his knife to peel it with. David admired her for the speed and stealth of this tactic and handed over the knife.

Eleanor watched Bridget take the fig with a familiar sense of doom. She could never see David impose his will on anyone without considering how often he had imposed it on her.

At the root of her dread was the fragmented memory of the night when Patrick was conceived. Against her will, she pictured the Cornish house on its narrow headland, always damp, always grey, more Atlantic than earth. He had pushed the hollow base of her skull against the corner of the marble table. When she had broken free he had punched the back of her knees and made her fall on the stairs and raped her there, with her arms twisted back. She had hated him like a stranger and hated him like a traitor. God, how she had loathed him, but when she had become pregnant she had said she would stay if he never,
never
touched her again.

Bridget chewed the fig unenthusiastically. As Anne watched her, she could not help thinking of the age-old question which every woman asks herself at some time or other: do I have to swallow it? She wondered whether to picture Bridget as a collared slave draped over the feet of an oriental bully, or as a rebellious schoolgirl being forced to eat the apple pie she tried to leave behind at lunch. She suddenly felt quite detached from the company around her.

Nicholas struck Anne as more pathetic than he had before. He was just one of those Englishmen who was always saying silly things to sound less pompous, and pompous things to sound less silly. They turned into self-parodies without going to the trouble of acquiring a self first. David, who thought he was the Creature from the Black Lagoon, was just a higher species of this involuted failure. She looked at Victor slumped round-shouldered over the remains of his nectarine. He had not kept up the half-clever banter which he usually felt it his duty to provide. She could remember him earlier in the summer saying, ‘I may spend my days doubting doubting, but when it comes to gossip I like
hard
facts.’ From then on it had been nothing but hard facts. Today he was different. Perhaps he really wanted to do some work again.

Eleanor’s crushed expression no longer moved her either. The only thing that made Anne’s detachment falter was the thought of Patrick waiting on the stairs, his disappointment widening as he waited, but it only spurred her on to the same conclusion: that she wanted nothing more to do with these people, that it was time to leave, even if Victor would be embarrassed by leaving early. She looked over to Victor, raising her eyebrows and darting her eyes towards the door. Instead of the little frown she had expected from him, Victor nodded his head discreetly as if agreeing with the pepper mill. Anne let a few moments go by then leaned over to Eleanor and said, ‘It’s sad, but I think we really must leave. It’s been a long day, you must be tired too.’

‘Yes,’ said Victor firmly, ‘I must get up early tomorrow morning and make some progress with my work.’ He heaved himself up and started to thank Eleanor and David before they had time to organize the usual protests.

In fact, David hardly looked up. He continued to run his thumbnail around the sealed end of his cigar, ‘You know the way out,’ he said, in response to their thanks, ‘I hope you’ll forgive me for not coming to wave goodbye.’

‘Never,’ said Anne, more seriously than she had intended.

Eleanor knew there was a formula everybody used in these situations, but she searched for it in vain. Whenever she thought of what she was meant to say, it seemed to dash around the corner, and lose itself in the crowd of things she should not say. The most successful fugitives were often the dullest, the sentences that nobody notices until they are not spoken: ‘How nice to see you … won’t you stay a little longer … what a good idea…’

Victor closed the dining room door behind him carefully, like a man who does not want to wake a sleeping sentry. He smiled at Anne and she smiled back, and they were suddenly conscious of how relieved they were to be leaving the Melroses. They started to laugh silently and to tiptoe towards the hall.

‘I’ll just check if Patrick is still here,’ Anne whispered.

‘Why are we whispering?’ Victor whispered.

‘I don’t know,’ Anne whispered back. She looked up the staircase. It was empty. He had obviously grown tired of waiting and gone back to bed. ‘I guess he’s asleep,’ she said to Victor.

They went out of the front door and up the wide steps towards their car. The moon was bruised by thin cloud and surrounded by a ring of dispersed light.

‘You can’t say I didn’t try,’ said Anne, ‘I was hanging right in there until Nicholas and David started outlining their educational programme. If some big-deal friend of theirs, like George, was feeling sad and lonely they would fly back to England and
personally
mix the dry martinis and load the shotguns, but when David’s own son is feeling sad and lonely in the room next door, they fight every attempt to make him less miserable.’

‘You’re right,’ said Victor, opening the car door, ‘in the end one must oppose cruelty, at the very least by refusing to take part in it.’

‘Underneath that New and Lingwood shirt,’ said Anne, ‘beats a heart of gold.’

*   *   *

Must you leave so soon? thought Eleanor.
That
was the phrase. She had remembered it. Better late than never was another phrase, not really true in this case. Sometimes things were too late, too late the very moment they happened. Other people knew what they were meant to say, knew what they were meant to mean, and other people still – otherer people – knew what the other people meant when they said it. God, she was drunk. When her eyes watered, the candle flames looked like a liqueur advertisement, splintering into mahogany-coloured spines of light. Not drunk enough to stop the half-thoughts from sputtering on into the night, keeping her from any rest. Maybe she could go to Patrick now. Whatshername had slipped off cunningly just after Victor and Anne left. Maybe they would let her go too. But what if they didn’t? She could not stand another failure, she could not bow down another time. And so she did nothing for a little longer.

‘If nothing matters, you’re top of my list,’ Nicholas quoted, with a little yelp of delight. ‘One has to admire Victor, who tries so hard to be conventional, for never having an entirely conventional girlfriend.’

‘Almost nothing is as entertaining as the contortions of a clever Jewish snob,’ said David.