The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (44 page)

Both men paused while the waiter silently cleared away their plates. Patrick was puzzled by how easy it had been to tell another person the most shameful and secret truth about his life. And yet he felt dissatisfied; the catharsis of confession eluded him. Perhaps he had been too abstract. His ‘father’ had become the codename for a set of his own psychological difficulties and he had forgotten the real man, with his grey curls and his wheezing chest and his proud face, who had made such clumsy efforts in his closing years to endear himself to those he had betrayed.

When Eleanor had finally gathered the courage to divorce David, he had gone into a decline. Like a disgraced torturer whose victim has died, he cursed himself for not pacing his cruelty better, guilt and self-pity competing for mastery of his mood. David had the further frustration of being defied by Patrick who, at the age of eight, inspired by his parents’ separation, refused one day to give in to his father’s sexual assaults. Patrick’s transformation of himself from a toy into a person shattered his father, who realized that Patrick must have known what was being done to him.

During this difficult time, David went to visit Nicholas Pratt in Sister Agnes, where he was recovering from a painful operation on his intestine following the failure of his fourth marriage. David, reeling from the prospect of his own divorce, found Nicholas lying in bed drinking champagne smuggled in by loyal friends, and only too ready to discuss how one should never trust a bloody woman.

‘I want someone to design me a fortress,’ said David, for whom Eleanor was proposing to build a small house surprisingly close to her own house in Lacoste. ‘I don’t want to look out on the fucking world again.’

‘Completely understand,’ slurred Nicholas, whose speech had become at once thicker and more staccato in his postoperative haze. ‘Only trouble with the bloody world is the bloody people in it,’ he said. ‘Give me that writing paper, would you?’

While David paced up and down the room, flouting the hospital rules by smoking a cigar, Nicholas, who liked to surprise his friends with his amateur draughtsmanship, made a sketch worthy of David’s misanthropic ecstasy.

‘Keep the buggers out,’ he said when he had finished, tossing the page across the bedclothes.

David picked it up and saw a pentagonal house with no windows on the outside and a central courtyard in which Nicholas had poetically planted a cypress tree, flaring above the low roof like a black flame.

The architect who was given this sketch took pity on David and introduced a single window into the exterior wall of the drawing room. David locked the shutters and stuffed crunched-up copies of
The Times
into the aperture, cursing himself for not sacking the architect when he first visited him in his disastrously converted farmhouse near Aix, with its algae-choked swimming pool. He pressed the window closed on the newspaper and then sealed it with the thick black tape favoured by those who wish to gas themselves efficiently. Finally a curtain was drawn across the window and only reopened by rare visitors who were soon made aware of their error by David’s rage.

The cypress tree never flourished and its twisted trunk and grey peeling bark writhed in a dismal parody of Nicholas’s noble vision. Nicholas himself, after designing the house, was too busy ever to accept an invitation. ‘One doesn’t have fun with David Melrose these days,’ he would tell people in London. This was a polite way to describe the state of mental illness into which David had degenerated. Woken every night by his own screaming nightmares, he lay in bed almost continuously for seven years, wearing those yellow-and-white flannel pyjamas, now worn through at the elbows, which were the only things he had inherited from his father, thanks to the generous intervention of his mother who had refused to see him leave the funeral empty-handed. The most enthusiastic thing he could do was to smoke a cigar, a habit his father had first encouraged in him, and one he had passed on to Patrick, among so many other disadvantages, like a baton thrust from one wheezing generation to the next. If David left his house he was dressed like a tramp, muttering to himself in giant supermarkets on the outskirts of Marseilles. Sometimes in winter he wandered about the house in dark glasses, trailing a Japanese dressing gown, and clutching a glass of pastis, checking again and again that the heating was off so that he didn’t waste any money. The contempt that saved him from complete madness drove him almost completely mad. When he emerged from his depression he was a ghost, not improved but diminished, trying to tempt people to stay in the house that had been designed to repel their unlikely invasion.

Patrick stayed in this house during his adolescence, sitting in the courtyard, shooting olive stones over the roof so that they at least could be free. His arguments with his father, or rather his one interminable argument, reached a crucial point when Patrick said something more fundamentally insulting to David than David had just said to him, and David, conscious that he was growing slower and weaker while his son grew faster and nastier, reached into his pocket for his heart pills and, shaking them into his tortured rheumatic hands, said with a melancholy whisper, ‘You mustn’t say those things to your old Dad.’

Patrick’s triumph was tainted by the guilty conviction that his father was about to die of a heart attack. Still, things were not the same after that, especially when Patrick was able to patronize his disinherited father with a small income, and cheapen him with his money as Eleanor had once cheapened him with hers. During those closing years Patrick’s terror had largely been eclipsed by pity, and also by boredom in the company of his ‘poor old Dad’. He had sometimes dreamed that they might have an honest conversation, but a moment in his father’s company made it clear that this would never happen. And yet Patrick felt there was something missing, something he wasn’t admitting to himself, let alone telling Johnny.

Respecting Patrick’s silence, Johnny had eaten his way through most of his corn-fed chicken by the time Patrick spoke again.

‘So, what can one say about a man who rapes his own child?’

‘I suppose it might help if you could see him as sick rather than evil,’ Johnny suggested limply. ‘I can’t get over this,’ he added, ‘it’s really awful.’

‘I’ve tried what you suggest,’ said Patrick, ‘but then, what is evil if not sickness celebrating itself? While my father had any power he showed no remorse or restraint, and when he was poor and abandoned he only showed contempt and morbidity.’

‘Maybe you can see his actions as evil, but see
him
as sick. Maybe one can’t condemn another person, only their actions…’ Johnny hesitated, reluctant to take on the role of the defence. ‘Maybe he couldn’t stop himself anymore than you could stop yourself taking drugs.’

‘Maybe, maybe, maybe,’ said Patrick, ‘but I didn’t harm anyone else by taking drugs.’

‘Really? What about Debbie?’

‘She was a grown-up, she could choose. I certainly gave her a hard time,’ Patrick admitted. ‘I don’t know, I try to negotiate truces of one sort or another, but then I run up against this unnegotiable rage.’ Patrick pushed his plate back and lit a cigarette. ‘I don’t want any pudding, do you?’

‘No, just coffee.’

‘Two coffees, please,’ said Patrick to the waiter who was now theatrically tight-lipped. ‘I’m sorry I snapped at you earlier, I was in the middle of trying to say something rather tricky.’

‘I was only trying to do my job,’ said the waiter.

‘Of course,’ said Patrick.

‘Do you think there’s any way you can forgive him?’ asked Johnny.

‘Oh, yes,’ said the waiter, ‘it wasn’t that bad.’

‘No, not you,’ laughed Johnny.

‘Sorry I spoke,’ said the waiter, going off to fetch the coffee.

‘Your father, I mean.’

‘Well, if that absurd waiter can forgive me, who knows what chain reaction of absolution might not be set in motion?’ said Patrick. ‘But then neither revenge nor forgiveness change what happened. They’re sideshows, of which forgiveness is the less attractive because it represents a collaboration with one’s persecutors. I don’t suppose that forgiveness was uppermost in the minds of people who were being nailed to a cross until Jesus, if not the first man with a Christ complex still the most successful, wafted onto the scene. Presumably those who enjoyed inflicting cruelty could hardly believe their luck and set about popularizing the superstition that their victims could only achieve peace of mind by forgiving them.’

‘You don’t think it might be a profound spiritual truth?’ asked Johnny.

Patrick puffed out his cheeks. ‘I suppose it might be, but as far as I’m concerned, what is meant to show the spiritual advantages of forgiveness in fact shows the psychological advantages of thinking you’re the son of God.’

‘So how do you get free?’ asked Johnny.

‘Search me,’ said Patrick. ‘Obviously, or I wouldn’t have told you, I think it has something to do with telling the truth. I’m only at the beginning, but presumably there comes a point when you grow bored of telling it, and that point coincides with your “freedom”.’

‘So rather than forgive you’re going to try and talk it out.’

‘Yes, narrative fatigue is what I’m going for. If the talk cure is our modern religion then narrative fatigue must be its apotheosis,’ said Patrick suavely.

‘But the truth includes an understanding of your father.’

‘I couldn’t understand my father better and I still don’t like what he did.’

‘Of course you don’t. Perhaps there is nothing to say except, “What a bastard.” I was only groping for an alternative because you said you were exhausted by hatred.’

‘I am, but at the moment I can’t imagine any kind of liberation except eventual indifference.’

‘Or detachment,’ said Johnny. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll ever be indifferent.’

‘Yes, detachment,’ said Patrick, who didn’t mind having his vocabulary corrected on this occasion. ‘Indifference just sounded cooler.’

The two men drank their coffee, Johnny feeling that he had been drawn too far away from Patrick’s original revelation to ask, ‘What actually happened?’

Patrick, for his part, suspected that he had left the soil of his own experience, where wasps still gnawed at the gaping figs and he stared down madly onto his own five-year-old head, in order to avoid an uneasiness that lay even deeper than the uneasiness of his confession. The roots of his imagination were in the Pagan South and the unseemly liberation it had engendered in his father, but the discussion had somehow remained in the Cotswolds being dripped on by the ghosts of England’s rude elms. The opportunity to make a grand gesture and say, ‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine,’ had somehow petered out into ethical debate.

‘Thanks for telling me what you’ve told me,’ said Johnny.

‘No need to get Californian about it, I’m sure it’s nothing but a burden.’

‘No need to be so English,’ said Johnny. ‘I
am
honoured. Any time you want to talk about it I’m available.’

Patrick felt disarmed and infinitely sad for a moment. ‘Shall we head off to this wretched party?’ he said.

They walked out of the dining room together, passing David Windfall and Cindy Smith.

‘There was an unexpected fluctuation in the exchange rate,’ David was explaining. ‘Everyone panicked like mad, except for me, the reason being that I was having a tremendously boozy lunch with Sonny in his club. At the end of the day I’d made a huge amount of money from doing absolutely nothing while everybody else had been very badly stung. My boss was absolutely livid.’

‘Do you get on well with your boss?’ asked Cindy who really couldn’t have cared less.

‘Of course I do,’ said David. ‘You Americans call it “internal networking”, we just call it good manners.’

‘Gee,’ said Cindy.

‘We’d better go in separate cars,’ said Patrick, as he walked through the bar with Johnny, ‘I might want to leave early.’

‘Right,’ said Johnny, ‘see you there.’

8

SONNY
’
S INNER CIRCLE
,
THE
forty guests who were dining at Cheatley before the party, hung about in the Yellow Room, unable to sit down before Princess Margaret chose to.

‘Do you believe in God, Nicholas?’ asked Bridget, introducing Nicholas Pratt into the conversation she was having with Princess Margaret.

Nicholas rolled his eyeballs wearily, as if someone had tried to revive a tired old piece of scandal.

‘What intrigues me, my dear, is whether he still believes in
us.
Or have we given the supreme schoolmaster a nervous breakdown? In any case, I think it was one of the Bibescos who said, “To a man of the world, the universe is a suburb.”’

‘I don’t like the sound of your friend Bibesco,’ said Princess Margaret, wrinkling her nose. ‘How can the universe be a suburb? It’s too silly.’

‘What I think he meant, ma’am,’ replied Nicholas, ‘is that sometimes the largest questions are the most trivial, because they cannot be answered, while the seemingly trivial ones, like where one sits at dinner,’ he gave this example while raising his eyebrows at Bridget, ‘are the most fascinating.’

‘Aren’t people funny? I don’t find where one sits at dinner fascinating at all,’ lied the Princess. ‘Besides, as you know,’ she went on, ‘my sister is the head of the Church of England, and I don’t like listening to atheistic views. People think they’re being so clever, but it just shows a lack of humility.’ Silencing Nicholas and Bridget with her disapproval, the Princess took a gulp from her glass of whisky. ‘Apparently it’s on the increase,’ she said enigmatically.

‘What is, ma’am?’ asked Nicholas.

‘Child abuse,’ said the Princess. ‘I was at a concert for the NSPCC last weekend, and they told me it’s on the increase.’

‘Perhaps it’s just that people are more inclined to wash their dirty linen in public nowadays,’ said Nicholas. ‘Frankly I find
that
tendency much more worrying than all this fuss about child abuse. Children probably didn’t realize they were being abused until they had to watch it on television every night. I believe in America they’ve started suing their parents for bringing them up badly.’