The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (31 page)

‘Don’t mention it,’ said Earl.

The receptionist returned with a brown-paper bag that was already a little crumpled, and Patrick imagined that he’d had to empty out his groceries hastily in order not to fail in front of his employer.

‘Perfect,’ said Patrick.

‘Do we charge for these bags?’ asked Earl, and then, before the receptionist could answer, he added, ‘Because this one’s on me.’

‘Earl, I don’t know what to say.’

‘It’s nothing,’ said Earl. ‘I have a meeting right now, but I would be honoured if you would have a drink with me later.’

‘Can I bring my father?’ asked Patrick, raising the bag.

‘Hell, yes,’ said Earl, laughing.

‘Seriously, though, I’m afraid I can’t. I’m going out to dinner tonight and I have to fly back to England tomorrow.’

‘That’s too bad.’

‘Well, it’s a great regret to me,’ said Patrick with a wan smile, as he headed quickly for the door.

‘Goodbye, old friend,’ said Earl, with a big wave.

‘Bye now,’ said Patrick, flicking up the collar of his overcoat before he ventured into the rush hour street.

*   *   *

In the black-lacquered hall, opposite the opening doors of the elevator, an African mask gawked from a marble-topped console table. The gilded aviary of a Chippendale mirror gave Patrick a last chance to glance with horror at his fabulously ill-looking face before turning to Mrs Banks, Marianne’s emaciated mother, who stood vampirishly in the elegant gloom.

Opening her arms so that her black silk dress stretched from her wrists to her knees, like bat’s wings, she cocked her head a little to one side, and exclaimed with excrutiated sympathy, ‘Oh, Patrick, we were so sorry to hear your news.’

‘Well,’ said Patrick, tapping the casket he held under his arm, ‘you know how it is: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. What the Lord giveth he taketh away. After what I regard, in this case, as an unnaturally long delay.’

‘Is that…?’ asked Mrs Banks, staring round-eyed at the brown-paper bag.

‘My father,’ confirmed Patrick.

‘I must tell Ogilvy we’ll be one more for dinner,’ she said with peals of chic laughter. That was Nancy Banks all over, as magazines often pointed out after photographing her drawing room, so daring but so
right.

‘Banquo doesn’t eat meat,’ said Patrick, putting the box down firmly on the hall table.

Why had he said Banquo? Nancy wondered, in her husky inner voice which, even in the deepest intimacy of her own thoughts, was turned to address a large and fascinated audience. Could he, in some crazy way, feel responsible for his father’s death? Because he had wished for it so often in fantasy? God, she had become good at this after seventeen years of analysis. After all, as Dr Morris had said when they were talking through their affair, what was an analyst but a former patient who couldn’t think of anything better to do? Sometimes she missed Jeffrey. He had let her call him Jeffrey during the ‘letting-go process’ that had been brought to such an abrupt close by his suicide. Without even a note! Was she really meeting the challenges of life, as Jeffrey had promised? Maybe she was ‘incompletely analysed’. It was too dreadful to contemplate.

‘Marianne’s dying to see you,’ she murmured consolingly as she led Patrick into the empty drawing room. He stared at a baroque escritoire cascading with crapulous putti.

‘She got a phone call the moment you arrived and couldn’t get out of answering it,’ she added.

‘We have the whole evening…’ said Patrick. And the whole night, he thought optimistically. The drawing room was a sea of pink lilies, their shining pistils accusing him of lust. He was dangerously obsessed, dangerously obsessed. And his thoughts, like a bobsleigh walled with ice, would not change their course until he had crashed or achieved his end. He wiped his hands sweatily on his trousers, amazed to have found a preoccupation stronger than drugs. ‘Ah, there’s Eddy,’ exclaimed Nancy.

Mr Banks strode into the room in a chequered lumberjack shirt and a pair of baggy trousers. ‘Hello,’ he said with his rapid little blur, ‘I was tho thorry to hear about your fawther. Marianne says that he was a wemarkable man.’

‘You should have heard the remarks,’ said Patrick.

‘Did you have a very difficult relationship with him?’ asked Nancy encouragingly.

‘Yup,’ Patrick replied.

‘When did the twouble stawt?’ asked Eddy, settling down on the faded orange velvet of a bow-legged marquise.

‘Oh, June the ninth, nineteen-o-six, the day he was born.’

‘That early?’ smiled Nancy.

‘Well, we’re not going to resolve the question of whether his problems were congenital or not, at least not before dinner; but even if they weren’t, he didn’t delay in acquiring them. By all accounts, the moment he could speak he dedicated his new skill to hurting people. By the age of ten he was banned from his grandfather’s house because he used to set everyone against each other, cause accidents, force people to do things they didn’t want to.’

‘You make him sound evil in a rather old-fashioned way. The satanic child,’ said Nancy sceptically.

‘It’s a point of view,’ said Patrick. ‘When he was around, people were always falling off rocks, or nearly drowning, or bursting into tears. His life consisted of acquiring more and more victims for his malevolence and then losing them again.’

‘He must have been charming as well,’ said Nancy.

‘He was a kitten,’ said Patrick.

‘But wouldn’t we now say that he was just wery disturbed?’ asked Eddy.

‘So what if we did? When the effect somebody has is destructive enough the cause becomes a theoretical curiosity. There are some very nasty people in the world and it is a pity if one of them is your father.’

‘I don’t think that people noo so much about how to bring up kids in those days. A lot of parents in your fawther’s generation just didn’t know how to express their love.’

‘Cruelty is the opposite of love,’ said Patrick, ‘not just some inarticulate version of it.’

‘Sounds right to me,’ said a husky voice from the doorway.

‘Oh, hi,’ said Patrick, swivelling around in his chair, suddenly self-conscious in Marianne’s presence.

Marianne sailed towards him across the dim drawing room, its floorboards creaking underfoot, and her body tipped forward at a dangerous angle like the figurehead on the prow of a ship.

Patrick rose and wrapped his arms around her with greed and desperation.

‘Hey, Patrick,’ she said, hugging him warmly. ‘Hey,’ she repeated soothingly when he seemed reluctant to let go. ‘I’m so sorry. Really, really sorry.’

Oh, God, thought Patrick, this is where I want to be buried.

‘We were just tawking about how parents sometimes don’t know how to express their love,’ lisped Eddy.

‘Well, I guess I wouldn’t know about that,’ said Marianne with a cute smile.

Her back as curved as a negress’s, she walked towards the drinks tray with awkward and hesitating grace, as if she were a mermaid only recently equipped with human legs, and helped herself to a glass of champagne.

‘Does anybody wanna a glass of this,’ she stammered, craning her neck forward and frowning slightly, as if the question might contain hidden depths.

Nancy declined. She preferred cocaine. Whatever you said about it, it wasn’t fattening. Eddy accepted and Patrick said he wanted whisky.

‘Eddy hasn’t really gotten over
his
father’s death,’ said Nancy to nudge the conversation on a little.

‘I never really told my fawther how I felt,’ explained Eddy, smiling at Marianne as she handed him a glass of champagne.

‘Neither did I,’ said Patrick. ‘Probably just as well in my case.’

‘What would you have said?’ asked Marianne, fixing him intently with her dark blue eyes.

‘I would have said … I can’t say…’ Patrick was bewildered and annoyed by having taken the question seriously. ‘Never mind,’ he mumbled, and poured himself some whisky.

Nancy reflected that Patrick was not really pulling his weight in this conversation.

‘They fuck you up. They don’t mean to but they do,’ she sighed.

‘Who says they don’t mean to?’ growled Patrick.

‘Philip Larkin,’ said Nancy, with a glassy little laugh.

‘But what was it about your father that you couldn’t get over?’ Patrick asked Eddy politely.

‘He was kind of a hero to me. He always noo what to do in any situation, or at least what he wanted to do. He knew how to handle money and women; and when he hooked a three-hundred-pound marlin, the marlin always lost. And when he bid for a picture at auction, he always got it.’

‘And when
you
wanted to sell it again you always succeeded,’ said Nancy humorously.

‘Well, you’re
my
hero,’ stammered Marianne to her father, ‘and I don’t want to get over it.’

Fucking hell, thought Patrick, what do these people do all day, write scripts for
The Brady Bunch
? He hated happy families with their mutual encouragement, and their demonstrative affection, and the impression they gave of valuing each other more than other people. It was utterly disgusting.

‘Are we going out to dinner together?’ Patrick asked Marianne abruptly.

‘We could have dinner here.’ She swallowed, a little frown clouding her face.

‘Would it be frightfully rude to go out?’ he insisted. ‘I’d like to talk.’

The answer was clearly yes, as far as Nancy was concerned, it would be frightfully rude. Consuela was preparing the scallops this very minute. But in life, as in entertaining, one had to be flexible and graceful and, in this case, some allowances should be made for Patrick’s bereavement. It was hard not to be insulted by the implication that she was handling it badly, until one considered that his state of mind was akin to temporary insanity.

‘Of course not,’ she purred.

‘Where shall we go?’ asked Patrick.

‘Ah … there’s a small Armenian restaurant I really really like,’ Marianne suggested.

‘A small Armenian restaurant,’ Patrick repeated flatly.

‘It’s so great,’ gulped Marianne.

12

UNDER A CERULEAN DOME
dotted with dull-gold stars Marianne and Patrick, in a blue velveteen booth of their own, read the plastic-coated menus of the Byzantium Grill. The muffled rumble of a subway train shuddered underfoot and the iced water, always so redundant and so quick to arrive, trembled in the stout ribbed glasses. Everything was shaking, thought Patrick, molecules dancing in the tabletop, electrons spinning, signals and soundwaves undulating through his cells, cells shimmering with country music and police radios, roaring garbage trucks and shattering bottles; his cranium shuddering like a drilled wall, and each sensation Tabasco-flicked onto his soft grey flesh.

A passing waiter kicked Patrick’s box of ashes, looked round and apologized. Patrick refused his offer to ‘check that for you’ and slid the box further under the table with his feet.

Death should express the deeper being rather than represent the occasion for a new role. Who had said that? The terror of forgetting. And yet here was his father being kicked around by a waiter. A new role, definitely a new role.

Perhaps Marianne’s body would enable him to forget his father’s corpse, perhaps it contained a junction where his obsession with his father’s death and his own dying could switch tracks and hurtle towards its new erotic destination with all of its old morbid élan. What should he say? What could he say?

Angels, of course, made love without obstruction of limb or joint, but in the sobbing frustration of human love-making, the exasperating substitution of ticklishness for interfusion, and the ever-renewed drive to pass beyond the mouth of the river to the calm lake where we were conceived, there would have been, thought Patrick, as he pretended to read the menu but in fact fixed his eyes on the green velvet that barely contained Marianne’s breasts, an adequate expression of the failure of words to convey the confusion and intensity he felt in the wake of his father’s death.

Besides, not having fucked Marianne was like not having read the
Iliad
– something else he had been meaning to do for a long time.

Like a sleeve caught in some implacable and uncomprehending machine, his need to be understood had become lodged in her blissful but dangerously indifferent body. He would be dragged through a crushing obsession and spat out the other end without her pulse flickering or her thoughts wandering from their chosen paths.

Instead of her body saving him from his father’s corpse, their secrets would become intertwined; half the horizon formed by his broken lip, half by her unbroken lips. And this vertiginous horizon, like an encircling waterfall, would suck him away from safety, as if he stood on a narrow column of rock watching the dragging water turn smooth around him, seeming still as it turned to fall, falling everywhere.

Jesus, thought Marianne, why had she agreed to have dinner with this guy? He read the menu like he was staring at a ravine from a high bridge. She couldn’t bear to ask him another question about his father, but it seemed wrong to make him talk about anything else.

The whole evening could turn into a major drag. He was in some drooling state between loathing and desire. It was enough to make a girl feel guilty about being so attractive. She tried to avoid it, but she had spent too much of her life sitting opposite hangdog men she had nothing in common with, their eyes burning with reproach, and the conversation long congealed and mouldy, like something from way way
way
back in the icebox, something you must have been crazy to have bought in the first place.

Vine leaves and hummus, grilled lamb, rice, and red wine. At least she could eat. The food here was really good. Simon had brought her here first. He had a gift for finding the best Armenian restaurants in any city in the world. Simon was so so clever. He wrote poems about swans and ice and stars, and it was tough to know what he was trying to say, because they were so indirect without really being very suggestive. But he was a genius of savoir faire, especially in the Armenian-restaurant department. One day Simon had said to her in his faintly Brooklyn stammer, ‘Some people have certain emotions. I don’t.’ Just like that. No swans, no ice, no stars, nothing.