The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (40 page)

‘Thanks, Johnny,’ the group echoed.

He’d done it, he’d said what was really troubling him. He hadn’t managed to say anything funny, clever, or interesting, but he knew that somehow, however ridiculous and boring these meetings were, having taken part in one would give him the strength not to take drugs at the party tonight and that he would be able to enjoy himself a little bit more.

Glowing with goodwill after speaking, Johnny listened to Pete, the next speaker, with more sympathy than he’d been able to muster at the beginning of the meeting.

Someone had described recovery to Pete as ‘putting your tie around your neck instead of your arm’. There was subdued laughter. When he was using, Pete had found it easy to cross the road because he didn’t care whether he was run over or not, but in early recovery he’d become fucking terrified of the traffic (subdued laughter) and walked for miles and miles to find a zebra crossing. He’d also spent his early recovery making lines out of Coleman’s mustard powder and wondering if he’d put too much in the spoon (one isolated cackle). He was ‘in bits’ at the moment because he had broken up with his relationship. She’d wanted him to be some kind of trout fisherman, and he’d wanted her to be a psychiatric nurse. When she’d left she’d said that she still thought he was the ‘best thing on two legs’. It had worried him that she’d fallen in love with a pig (laughter). Or a centipede (more laughter). Talk about pushing his shame buttons! He’d been on a ‘Step Twelve Call’ the other day, by which he meant a visit to an active addict who had rung the NA office, and the guy was in a dreadful state, but frankly, Pete admitted, he had wanted what the other guy had more than the other guy wanted what he had. That was the insanity of the disease! ‘I came to this programme on my knees,’ concluded Pete in a more pious tone, ‘and it’s been suggested that I remain on them’ (knowing grunts, and an appreciative, ‘Thanks, Pete’).

The American girl who spoke after Pete was called Sally. ‘Sleeping at night and staying awake during the day’ had been ‘a real concept’ for her when she ‘first came round’. What she wanted from the programme was ‘wall-to-wall freedom’, and she knew she could achieve that with the help of a ‘Loving Higher Power’. At Christmas she’d been to a pantomime to ‘celebrate her inner child’. Since then she’d been travelling with another member of the Fellowship because, like they said in the States, ‘When you’re sick together, you stick together.’

After the group had thanked Sally, the secretary said that they were in ‘Newcomer’s Time’ and that he would appreciate it if people would respect that. This announcement was almost always followed by a brief silence for the Newcomer who either didn’t exist, or was too terrified to speak. The last five minutes would then be hogged by some old hand who was ‘in bits’ or ‘just wanted to feel part of the meeting’. On this occasion, however, there was a genuine Newcomer in the room, and he dared to open his mouth.

Dave, as he was called, was at his first meeting and he didn’t see how it was supposed to stop him taking drugs. He’d been about to go, actually, and then someone had said about the mustard and the spoon and making lines, and like he’d thought he was the only person to have ever done that, and it was funny hearing someone else say it. He didn’t have any money, and he couldn’t go out because he owed money everywhere: the only reason he wasn’t stoned was that he didn’t have the energy to steal anymore. He still had his TV, but he had this thing that he was controlling it, and he was afraid of watching it now because last night he’d been worried that he’d been putting the bloke on TV off by staring at him. He couldn’t think what else to say.

The secretary thanked him in the especially coaxing voice he used for Newcomers whose distress formed his own spiritual nourishment, an invaluable opportunity to ‘give it away’ and ‘pass on the message’. He advised Dave to stick around after the meeting and get some phone numbers. Dave said his phone had been cut off. The secretary, afraid that magical ‘sharing’ might degenerate into mere conversation, smiled firmly at Dave and asked if there were any more Newcomers.

Johnny, somewhat to his surprise, found himself caring about what happened to Dave. In fact, he really hoped that these people, people like him who had been hopelessly dependent on drugs, obsessed with them, and unable to think about anything else for years, would get their lives together. If they had to use this obscure slang in order to do so, then that was a pity but not a reason to hope that they would fail.

The secretary said that unless there was somebody who urgently needed to share, they were out of time. Nobody spoke, and so he stood up and asked Angie to help him close the meeting. Everybody else stood up as well and held hands.

‘Will you join me in the Serenity Prayer,’ asked Angie, ‘using the word “God” as you understand him, her, or it. God,’ she said to kickstart the prayer, and then when everyone was ready to join in, repeated, ‘God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference.’

Johnny wondered as usual to whom he was addressing this prayer. Sometimes when he got chatting to his ‘fellow addicts’ he would admit to being ‘stuck on Step Three’. Step Three made the bold suggestion that he hand his will and his life over to God ‘as he understood him’.

At the end of the meeting, Amanda Pratt, whom he hadn’t noticed until then, came up to him. Amanda was the twenty-two-year-old daughter of Nicholas Pratt by his most sensible wife, the general’s daughter with the blue woolly and the simple string of pearls he used to dream gloomily of marrying when he was going out with Bridget.

Johnny did not know Amanda well, but he somehow knew this story about her parents. She was eight years younger than him, and to Johnny she was not a drug addict at all, just one of those neurotic girls who had taken a bit of coke or speed to help her dieting, and a few sleeping pills to help her sleep, and, worst of all, when these pitiful abuses had started to become unpleasant, she had stopped them. Johnny, who had wasted his entire twenties repeating the same mistakes, took a very condescending view of anybody who came to the end of their tether before him, or for less good reasons.

‘It was so funny,’ Amanda was saying rather louder than Johnny would have liked, ‘when you were sharing about going to a big party tonight, I knew it was Cheatley.’

‘Are you going?’ asked Johnny, already knowing the answer.

‘Oh, ya,’ said Amanda. ‘Bridget’s practically a stepmother, because she went out with Daddy just before he married Mummy.’

Johnny looked at Amanda and marvelled again at the phenomenon of pretty girls who were not at all sexy. Something empty and clinging about her, a missing centre, prevented her from being attractive.

‘Well, we’ll see each other tonight,’ said Johnny, hoping to end the conversation.

‘You’re a friend of Patrick Melrose, aren’t you?’ asked Amanda, immune to the finality of his tone.

‘Yes,’ said Johnny.

‘Well, I gather he spends a lot of time slagging off the Fellowship,’ said Amanda indignantly.

‘Can you blame him?’ sighed Johnny, looking over Amanda’s shoulder to see if Dave was still in the room.

‘Yes, I do blame him,’ said Amanda. ‘I think it’s rather pathetic, actually, and it just shows how sick he is: if he wasn’t sick, he wouldn’t need to slag off the Fellowship.’

‘You’re probably right,’ said Johnny, resigned to the familiar tautologies of ‘recovery’. ‘But listen, I have to go now, or I’ll miss my lift down to the country.’

‘See you tonight,’ said Amanda cheerfully. ‘I may need you for an emergency meeting!’

‘Umm,’ said Johnny. ‘It’s nice to know you’ll be there.’

5

ROBIN
PARKER WAS HORRIFIED
to see, through the pebble spectacles which helped him to distinguish fake Poussins from real ones, but could not, alas, make him a safe driver, that an old woman had moved into ‘his’ compartment during the ordeal he had just undergone of fetching a miniature gin and tonic from the squalid buffet. Everything about the train offended him: the plastic ‘glass’, the purple-and-turquoise upholstery, the smell of diesel and dead skin, and now the invasion of his compartment by an unglamorous personage wearing an overcoat that only the Queen could have hoped to get away with. He pursed his lips as he squeezed past an impossible pale-blue nanny’s suitcase that the old woman had left cluttering the floor. Picking up his copy of the
Spectator
, a Perseus’s shield against the Medusa of modernity, as he’d said more than once, he lapsed into a daydream in which he was flown
privately
into Gloucestershire from Zurich or possibly Deauville, with someone really glamorous. And as he pretended to read, passing through Charlbury and Moreton-in-Marsh, he imagined the clever and subtle things he would have said about the Ben Nicholsons on the wall of the cabin.

Virginia Watson-Scott glanced nervously at her suitcase, knowing it was in everybody’s way. The last time she’d been on a train, a kind young man had hoisted it into the luggage rack without sparing a thought for how she was going to get it down again. She’d been too polite to say anything, but she could remember tottering under the weight as the train drew in to Paddington. Even so, the funny-looking gentleman opposite might at least have offered.

In the end she’d decided not to pack the burgundy velvet dress she’d bought for the party. She had lost her nerve, something that would never have happened when Roddy was alive, and fallen back on an old favourite that Sonny and Bridget had seen a hundred times before, or would have seen a hundred times if they asked her to Cheatley more often.

She knew what it was, of course: Bridget was embarrassed by her. Sonny was somehow gallant and rude at the same time, full of old-fashioned courtesies that failed to disguise his underlying contempt. She didn’t care about him, but it did hurt to think that her daughter didn’t want her around. Old people were always saying that they didn’t want to be a burden. Well, she
did
want to be a burden. It wasn’t as if she would be taking the last spare room, just one of Sonny’s cottages. He was always boasting about how many he had and what a terrible responsibility they were.

Bridget had been such a nice little girl. It was that horrible Nicholas Pratt who had changed her. It was hard to describe, but she had started to criticize everything at home, and look down her nose at people she’d known all her life. Virginia had only met Nicholas once, thank goodness, when he had taken her and Roddy to the opera. She had said to Roddy afterwards that Nicholas wasn’t her cup of tea at all, but Roddy had said that Bridget was a sensible girl and she was old enough now to make her own decisions.

*   *   *

‘Oh, do come on,’ said Caroline Porlock. ‘We promised to arrive early and lend moral support.’

Moral support, thought Peter Porlock, still dazed from his conversation with Sonny that morning, was certainly what Cheatley needed.

They headed down the drive past placid deer and old oaks. Peter reflected that he was one of those Englishmen who could truly claim that his home was his castle, and wondered whether that was the sort of thing to say during one’s famous television appearances. On balance, he decided, as Caroline whizzed the Subaru through the honey-coloured gateposts, probably not.

*   *   *

Nicholas Pratt lounged in the back of the Alantours’ car. This is how the world should be seen, he thought: through the glass partition of a limousine.

The rack of lamb had been excellent, the cheeses flown in from France that morning, delicious, and the 1970 Haut Brion, ‘
très buvable
’, as the ambassador had modestly remarked.

‘
Et la comtesse, est-elle bien née?
’ asked Jacqueline, returning to the subject of Bridget, so that her husband could savour the details of her background.

‘
Pas du tout
,’ answered Nicholas in a strong English accent.

‘Not quite from the top basket!’ exclaimed Jacques d’Alantour, who prided himself on his command of colloquial English.

Jacqueline was not quite from the top basket herself, reflected Nicholas, which was what gave that rather hungry quality to her fascination with social standing. Her mother had been the daughter of a Lebanese arms dealer, and had married Phillipe du Tant, a penniless and obscure baron who had neither been able to spoil her like her father, nor to save her from being spoilt. Jacqueline had not been born so much as numbered, somewhere in the Union des Banques Suisses. With the slightly sallow complexion and downturned mouth she had inherited from her mother, she could have done without the frighteningly prominent nose that her father had settled on her; but already famous as an heiress from an early age, she appeared to most people as a photograph come to life, a name made flesh, a bank account personified.

‘Is that why you didn’t marry her?’ teased Jacqueline.

‘I’m quite
bien né
enough for two,’ replied Nicholas grandly. ‘But, you know, I’m not the snob I used to be.’

The ambassador raised his finger in judgement. ‘You are a better snob!’ he declared, with a witty expression on his face.

‘There are so many varieties of snobbism,’ said Jacqueline, ‘one cannot admire all of them.’

‘Snobbery is one of the things one should be most discriminating about,’ said Nicholas.

‘Some things, like not tolerating stupid people, or not having pigs at one’s table, are not snobbish at all, they are simply common sense,’ said Jacqueline.

‘And yet,’ said the wily ambassador, ‘sometimes it is necessary to have pigs at one’s table.’

Diplomats, thought Nicholas, long made redundant by telephones, still preserved the mannerisms of men who were dealing with great matters of state. He had once seen Jacques d’Alantour fold his overcoat on a banister and declare with all the emphasis of a man refusing to compromise over the Spanish Succession, ‘I shall put my coat
here.
’ He had then placed his hat on a nearby chair and added with an air of infinite subtlety, ‘But my hat I shall put
here.
Otherwise it may fall!’ as if he were hinting that on the other hand some arrangement could be reached over the exact terms of the marriage.