The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (39 page)

It was strange, in February, not to give the party in the house, but Sonny was convinced that his ‘things’ would be imperilled by what he called ‘Bridget’s London friends’. He was haunted by his grandfather’s complaint that his grandmother had filled the house with ‘spongers, buggers, and Jews’, and, while he recognized the impossibility of giving an amusing party without samples from all these categories, he wasn’t about to trust them with his ‘things’.

Bridget walked across the denuded drawing room, and picked up the phone.

‘Hello?’

‘Darling, how are you?’

‘Aurora! Thank God it’s you. I was dreading another virtual stranger begging to bring their entire family to the party.’

‘Aren’t people
awful
?’ said Aurora Donne in that condescending voice for which she was famous. Her large liquid eyes and creamy complexion gave her the soft beauty of a Charolais cow, but her sniggering laughter, reserved for her own remarks, was more reminiscent of a hyena. She had become Bridget’s best friend, instilling her with a grim and precarious confidence in exchange for Bridget’s lavish hospitality.

‘It’s been a nightmare,’ said Bridget, settling down in the spindly caterer’s chair that had replaced one of Sonny’s things. ‘I can’t believe the cheek of some of these people.’

‘You don’t have to tell me,’ said Aurora. ‘I hope you’ve got good security.’

‘Yes,’ said Bridget. ‘Sonny’s got the police, who were supposed to be at a football match this afternoon, to come here instead and check everything. It makes a nice change for them. They’re going to form a ring around the house. Plus, we’ve got the usual people at the door, in fact, someone called “Gresham Security” has left his walkie-talkie by the phone.’

‘They make such a fuss about royalty,’ said Aurora.

‘
Don’t
,’ groaned Bridget. ‘We’ve had to give up two of our precious rooms to the private detective and the lady-in-waiting. It’s such a waste of space.’

Bridget was interrupted by the sound of screaming in the hall.

‘You’re a filthy little girl! And nothing but a burden to your parents!’ shouted a woman with a strong Scottish accent. ‘What would the Princess say if she knew that you dirtied your dress? You filthy child!’

‘Oh dear,’ said Bridget to Aurora, ‘I do wish Nanny wasn’t quite so horrid to Belinda. It’s rather terrible, but I never dare say anything to her.’

‘I know,’ said Aurora sympathetically, ‘I’m absolutely terrified of Lucy’s nanny. I think it’s because she reminds one of one’s own nanny.’

Bridget, who had not had a ‘proper’ nanny, wasn’t about to reveal this fact by disagreeing. She had made a special effort, by way of compensation, to get a proper old-fashioned nanny for seven-year-old Belinda. The agency had been delighted when they found such a good position for the vicious old bag who’d been on their books for years.

‘The other thing I dread is my mother coming tonight,’ said Bridget.

‘Mothers can be so critical, can’t they?’ said Aurora.

‘Exactly,’ said Bridget, who in fact found her mother tiresomely eager to please. ‘I suppose I ought to go off and be nice to Belinda,’ she added with a dutiful sigh.

‘Sweet!’ cooed Aurora.

‘I’ll see you tonight, darling.’ Bridget was grateful to get rid of Aurora. She had a million and one things to do and besides, instead of giving her those transfusions of self-confidence for which she was, well, almost employed (she didn’t have a bean), Aurora had recently taken to implying that she would have handled the arrangements for the party better than Bridget.

Given that she had no intention of going up to see Belinda it was quite naughty to have used her as an excuse to end the conversation. Bridget seldom found the time to see her daughter. She could not forgive her for being a girl and burdening Sonny with the anxiety of having no heir. After spending her early twenties having abortions, Bridget had spent the next ten years having miscarriages. Successfully giving birth had been complicated enough without having a child of the wrong gender. The doctor had told her that it would be dangerous to try again, and at forty-two she was becoming resigned to having one child, especially in view of Sonny’s reluctance to go to bed with her.

Her looks had certainly deteriorated over the last sixteen years of marriage. The clear blue eyes had clouded over, the candlelit glow of her skin had sputtered out and could only be partially rekindled with tinted creams, and the lines of her body, which had shaped so many obsessions in their time, were now deformed by accumulations of stubborn fat. Unwilling to betray Sonny, and unable to attract him, Bridget had allowed herself to go into a mawkish physical decline, spending more and more time thinking of other ways to please her husband – or rather not to displease him, since he took her efforts for granted but lavished his attention on the slightest failure.

She ought to get on with the arrangements, which, in her case, meant worrying, since all the work had been delegated to somebody else. The first thing she decided to worry about was the walkie-talkie on the table beside her. It had clearly been lost by some hopeless security man. Bridget picked the machine up and, curious, switched it on. There was a loud hissing sound and then the whinings of an untuned radio.

Interested to see if she could make anything intelligible emerge from this melee of sound, Bridget got up and walked around the room. The noises grew louder and fainter, and sometimes intensified into squeals, but as she moved towards the windows, darkened by the side of the marquee that reared up wet and white under the dull winter sky, she heard, or thought she heard, a voice. Pressing her ear close to the walkie-talkie she could make out a crackling, whispering conversation.

‘The thing is, I haven’t had conjugal relations with Bridget for some time…’ said the voice at the other end, and faded again. Bridget shook the walkie-talkie desperately, and moved closer to the window. She couldn’t understand what was going on. How could it be Sonny she was listening to? But who else could claim that he hadn’t had ‘conjugal relations’ with her for some time?

She could make out words again, and pressed the walkie-talkie to her ear with renewed curiosity and dread.

‘To chuck Bridget at this … it’s bound to be … but one does feel some responsibility towards…’ Interference drowned the conversation again. A prickling wave of heat rushed over her body. She must hear what they were saying, what monstrous plan they were hatching. Who was Sonny talking to? It must be Peter. But what if it wasn’t? What if he talked like this to everyone, everyone except her?

‘All the things are in trust,’ she heard, and then another voice saying: ‘Lunch … next week.’ Yes, it was Peter. There was more crackling, and then, ‘Happy birthday.’

Bridget sank down in the window seat. She raised her arm and almost flung the walkie-talkie against the wall, but then lowered it again slowly until it hung loosely by her side.

4

JOHNNY
HALL HAD BEEN
going to Narcotics Anonymous meetings for over a year. In a fit of enthusiasm and humility he found hard to explain, he had volunteered to make the tea and coffee at the Saturday three o’clock meeting. He recognized many of the people who took one of the white plastic cups he had filled with a tea bag or a few granules of instant coffee, and struggled to remember their names, embarrassed that so many of them remembered his.

After making the tea Johnny took a seat in the back row, as usual, although he knew that it would make it harder for him to speak, or ‘share’, as he was urged to say in meetings. He enjoyed the obscurity of sitting as far away as possible from the addict who was ‘giving the chair’. The ‘preamble’ – a ritual reading of selections from ‘the literature’, explaining the nature of addiction and NA – washed over Johnny almost unnoticed. He tried to see if the girl sitting in the front row was pretty, but couldn’t see enough of her profile to judge.

A woman called Angie had been asked by the secretary to do the chair. Her stumpy legs were clad in a black leotard, and her hair hid two-thirds of her raddled and exhausted face. She had been invited down from Kilburn to add a touch of grit to a Chelsea meeting which dwelt all too often on the shame of burgling one’s parents’ house, or the difficulty of finding a parking space.

Angie said she had started ‘using’, by which she meant taking drugs, in the sixties, because it was ‘a gas’. She didn’t want to dwell on the ‘bad old days’, but she had to tell the group a little bit about her using to put them in the picture. Half an hour later, she was still describing her wild twenties, and yet there was clearly some time to go before her listeners could enjoy the insight that she had gleaned from her regular attendance of meetings over the last two years. She rounded off her chair with some self-deprecating remarks about still being ‘riddled with defects’. Thanks to the meetings she had discovered that she was totally insane and completely addicted to everything. She was also ‘rampantly co-dependent’, and urgently needed individual counselling in order to deal with lots of ‘childhood stuff’, Her ‘relationship’, by which she meant her boyfriend, had discovered that living with an addict could create a lot of extra hassles, and so the two of them had decided to attend ‘couples counselling’. This was the latest excitement in a life already packed with therapeutic drama, and she was very hopeful about the benefits.

The secretary was very grateful to Angie. A lot of what she had shared, he said, was relevant for him too. He’d ‘identified one hundred per cent’, not with her using because his had been very different – he had never used needles or been addicted to heroin or cocaine – but with ‘the feelings’. Johnny could not remember Angie describing any feelings, but tried to silence the scepticism which made it so difficult for him to participate in the meetings, even after the breakthrough of volunteering to make the tea. The secretary went on to say that a lot of childhood stuff had been coming up for him too, and he had recently discovered that although nothing unpleasant had happened to him in childhood, he’d found himself smothered by his parents’ kindness and that breaking away from their understanding and generosity had become a real issue for him.

With these resonant words the secretary threw the meeting open, a moment that Johnny always found upsetting because it put him under pressure to ‘share’. The problem, apart from his acute self-consciousness and his resistance to the language of ‘recovery’, was that sharing was supposed to be based on ‘identification’ with something that the person who was doing the chair had said, and it was very rare for Johnny to have any clear recollection of what had been said. He decided to wait until somebody else’s identification identified for him the details of Angie’s chair. This was a hazardous procedure because most of the time people identified with something that had not in fact been said in the chair.

The first person to speak from the floor said that he’d had to nurture himself by ‘parenting the child within’. He hoped that with God’s help – a reference that always made Johnny wince – and the help of the Fellowship, the child within would grow up in a ‘safe environment’. He said that he too was having problems with his relationship, by which he meant his girlfriend, but that hopefully, if he worked his Step Three and ‘handed it over’, everything would be all right in the end. He wasn’t in charge of the results, only the ‘footwork’.

The second speaker identified one hundred per cent with what Angie had said about her veins being ‘the envy of Kilburn’, because his veins had been the envy of Wimbledon. There was general merriment. And yet, the speaker went on to say, when he had to go to the doctor nowadays for a proper medical reason, they couldn’t find a vein anywhere on his body. He had been doing a Step Four, ‘a fearless and searching moral inventory’, and it had brought up a lot of stuff that needed looking at. He had heard someone in a meeting saying that she had a fear of success and he thought that maybe this was his problem too. He was in a lot of pain at the moment because he was realizing that a lot of his ‘relationship problems’ were the result of his ‘dysfunctional family’. He felt unlovable and consequently he was unloving, he concluded, and his neighbour, who recognized that he was in the presence of feelings, rubbed his back consolingly.

Johnny looked up at the fluorescent lights and the white polystyrene ceiling of the dingy church-hall basement. He longed to hear someone talk about their experiences in ordinary language, and not in this obscure and fatuous slang. He was entering the stage of the meeting when he gave up daydreaming and became increasingly anxious about whether to speak. He constructed opening sentences, imagined elegant ways of linking what had been said to what he wanted to say, and then, with a thumping heart, failed to announce his name quickly enough to win the right to speak. He was particularly restless after the show of coolness he always felt he had to put on in front of Patrick. Talking to Patrick had exacerbated his rebellion against the foolish vocabulary of NA, while increasing his need for the peace of mind that others seemed to glean from using it. He regretted agreeing to have dinner alone with Patrick, whose corrosive criticism and drug nostalgia and stylized despair often left Johnny feeling agitated and confused.

The current speaker was saying that he’d read somewhere in the literature that the difference between ‘being willing’ and ‘being ready’ was that you could sit in an armchair and be willing to leave the house, but you weren’t entirely ready until you had on your hat and overcoat. Johnny knew that the speaker must be finishing, because he was using Fellowship platitudes, trying to finish on a ‘positive’ note, as was the custom of the obedient recovering addict, who always claimed to bear in mind ‘newcomers’ and their need to hear positive notes.

He must do it, he must break in now, and say his piece.

‘My name’s Johnny,’ he blurted out, almost before the previous speaker had finished. ‘I’m an addict.’

‘Hi, Johnny,’ chorused the rest of the group.

‘I have to speak,’ he said boldly, ‘because I’m going to a party this evening, and I know there’ll be a lot of drugs around. It’s a big party and I just feel under threat, I suppose. I just wanted to come to this meeting to reaffirm my desire to stay clean today. Thanks.’