The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (6 page)

If he married again he would not choose a girl like Bridget. Apart from anything else, she was completely ignorant. She had ‘done’
Emma
for A-level, but since then, as far as he could make out, she only read illustrated magazines called
Oz
or
The Furry Freak Brothers
supplied to her by a seamy character called Barry. She spent hours poring over pictures of spiralling eyeballs and exploding intestines and policemen with the faces of Doberman pinschers. His own intestines were in a state of bitter confusion and he wanted to clear Bridget out of the bedroom before
they
exploded.

‘Darling!’ he shouted, or rather tried to shout. The sound came out as a croak. He cleared his throat and spat in the basin.

‘You couldn’t be an angel and get my glass of orange juice from the dining room, could you? And a cup of tea?’

‘Oh, all right.’

Bridget had been lying on her stomach, playing with herself lazily. She rolled out of bed with an exaggerated sigh. God, Nicholas was boring. What was the point of having servants? He treated them better than he treated her. She slouched off to the dining room.

Nicholas sat down heavily on the teak lavatory seat. The thrill of educating Bridget socially and sexually had begun to pall when he had stopped thinking about how wonderfully good he was at it and noticed how little she was willing to learn. After this trip to France he would have to go to Asprey’s to get her a going-away present. And yet he did not feel ready for that girl from the Old Masters department of Christie’s – a simple string of pearls about her woolly blue neck – who longed to exhaust herself helping a chap to keep his estate intact; a general’s daughter used to an atmosphere of discipline. A girl, his thoughts expanded gloomily, who would enjoy the damp little hills of Shropshire’s Welsh border, something he had yet to achieve himself despite owning so very many of them and having ‘farmer’ next to his still unsuccessful candidature for Pratt’s club. The Wits never tired of saying, ‘But, Nicholas, I thought you owned the place.’ He’d made too many enemies to get himself elected.

Nicholas’s bowels exploded. He sat there sweating miserably like one of the paranoid wrecks in Bridget’s favourite cartoon strips. He could imagine Fattie Poole squealing, ‘The man’s an absolute cunt, and if they let him in here, I shall have to spend the rest of my life at the Turf.’ It had been a mistake to get David Melrose to propose him, but David had been one of his father’s best friends, and ten years ago he’d not been as misanthropic or unpopular as he was now, nor had he spent so much time in Lacoste.

*   *   *

The route from Clabon Mews to Heathrow was too familiar to register on Nicholas’s senses. He had moved into the soporific phase of his hangover, and felt slightly nauseous. Very tired, he slouched in the corner of the taxi. Bridget was less jaded about foreign travel. Nicholas had taken her to Greece in July and Tuscany in August, and she still liked the idea of how glamorous her life had become.

She disliked Nicholas’s English Abroad outfits, particularly the panama hat he had on today and wore tilted over his face to show that he was not in the mood to talk. Nor did she like his off-white wild-silk jacket and the yellow corduroy trousers. She was embarrassed by the shirt with very narrow dark red stripes and a stiff white rounded collar, and by his highly polished shoes. He was a complete freak about shoes. He had fifty pairs, all made for him, and
literally
identical, except for silly details which he treated as world-shatteringly important.

On the other hand, she knew that her own clothes were devastatingly sexy. What could be more sexy than a purple miniskirt and black suede cowboy jacket with tassels hanging all along the arms and across the back? Under the jacket you could see her nipples through the black T-shirt. Her black and purple cowboy boots took half an hour to get off, but they were well worth it, because everybody noticed them.

Since half the time she didn’t get the point of one’s stories at all, Nicholas wondered whether to tell Bridget about the figs. In any case, he was not sure he wanted her to get the point of the fig story. It had happened about ten years ago, just after David persuaded Eleanor to buy the house in Lacoste. They hadn’t married because of Eleanor’s mother trying to stop them, and David’s father threatening to disinherit him.

Nicholas tipped the brim of his hat. ‘Have I ever told you what happened the first time I went to Lacoste?’ To make sure the story did not fall flat, he added, ‘The place we’re going today.’

‘No,’ said Bridget dully. More stories about people she didn’t know, most of them taking place before she was born. Yawn, yawn.

‘Well, Eleanor – whom you met at Annabel’s, you probably don’t remember.’

‘The drunk one.’

‘Yes!’ Nicholas was delighted by these signs of recognition. ‘At any rate, Eleanor – who wasn’t drunk in those days, just very shy and nervous – had recently bought the house in Lacoste, and she complained to David about the terrible waste of figs that fell from the tree and rotted on the terrace. She mentioned them again the next day when the three of us were sitting outside. I saw a cold look come over David’s face. He stuck his lower lip out – always a bad sign, half brutal and half pouting – and said, “Come with me.” It felt like following the headmaster to his study. He marched us towards the fig tree with great long strides, Eleanor and I stumbling along behind. When we got there we saw figs scattered all over the stone paving. Some of them were old and squashed, others had broken open, with wasps dancing around the wound or gnawing at the sticky red and white flesh. It was a huge tree and there were a
lot
of figs on the ground. And, then David did this amazing thing.
He told Eleanor to get on all fours and eat all the figs off the terrace.
’

‘What, in front of you?’ said Bridget, round-eyed.

‘Quite. Eleanor
did
look rather confused and I suppose the word is betrayed. She didn’t protest, though, just got on with this rather unappetizing task. David wouldn’t let her leave a single one. She did once look up pleadingly and say, “I’ve had enough now, David,” but he put his foot on her back and said, “Eat them up. We don’t want them going to waste, do we?”’

‘Kink-ky,’ said Bridget.

Nicholas was rather pleased with the effect his story was having on Bridget. A hit, a palpable hit, he thought to himself.

‘What did you do?’ asked Bridget.

‘I watched,’ said Nicholas. ‘You don’t cross David when he’s in that sort of mood. After a while Eleanor looked a little sick and so then I did suggest we collect the rest of the figs in a basket. “You mustn’t interfere,” said David. “Eleanor can’t bear to see the figs wasted when there are starving people in the world. Can you, darling? And so she’s going to eat them all up on her own.” He grinned at me, and added, “Anyway, she’s far too picky about her food, don’t you think?”’

‘Wow!’ said Bridget. ‘And you still go and stay with these people?’

The taxi drew up outside the terminal and Nicholas was able to avoid the question. A porter in a brown uniform spotted him immediately and hurried to collect the bags. Nicholas stood transfixed for a moment, like a man under a warm shower, between the grateful cabbie and the assiduous porter, both calling him ‘Guv’ simultaneously. He always gave larger tips to people who called him ‘Guv’. He knew it, and they knew it, it was what was called a ‘civilized arrangement’.

Bridget’s concentration span was enormously improved by the story about the figs. Even when they had boarded the plane and found their seats, she could still remember what it was she’d wanted him to explain.

‘Why do you like this guy anyway? I mean, does he sort of make a habit of ritual humiliation or something?’

‘Well, I’m told, although I didn’t witness this myself, that he used to make Eleanor take lessons from a prostitute.’

‘You’re kidding,’ said Bridget admiringly. She swivelled round in her seat. ‘Kink-ky.’

An air hostess brought two glasses of champagne, apologizing for the slight delay. She had blue eyes and freckles and smiled ingratiatingly at Nicholas. He preferred these vaguely pretty girls on Air France to the absurd ginger-haired stewards and frumpish nannies on English aeroplanes. He felt another wave of tiredness from the processed air, the slight pressure on his ears and eyelids, the deserts of biscuit-coloured plastic around him and the dry acid taste of the champagne.

The excitement radiating from Bridget revived him a little, and yet he had still not explained what attracted him to David. Nor was it a question he particularly wanted to look into. David was simply part of the world that counted for Nicholas. One might not like him, but he was impressive. By marrying Eleanor he had obliterated the poverty which constituted his great social weakness. Until recently the Melroses had given some of the best parties in London.

Nicholas lifted his chin from the cushion of his neck. He wanted to feed Bridget’s ingenuous appetite for the atmosphere of perversion. Her reaction to the story about the figs had opened up possibilities he would not know how to exploit, but even the possibilities were stimulating.

‘You see,’ he said to Bridget, ‘David was a younger friend of my father’s, and I’m a younger friend of his. He used to come down to see me at school and take me to Sunday lunch at the Compleat Angler.’ Nicholas could feel Bridget’s interest slipping away in the face of this sentimental portrait. ‘But what I think fascinated me was the air of doom he carried around with him. As a boy he played the piano brilliantly and then he developed rheumatism and couldn’t play,’ said Nicholas. ‘He won a scholarship to Balliol but left after a month. His father made him join the army and he left that too. He qualified as a doctor but didn’t bother to practise. As you can see, he suffers from an almost heroic restlessness.’

‘Sounds like a real drag,’ said Bridget.

The plane edged slowly towards the runway, while the cabin crew mimed the inflation of life jackets.

‘Even their son is the product of rape.’ Nicholas watched for her reaction. ‘Although you mustn’t tell anyone that. I only know because Eleanor told me one evening, when she was very drunk and weepy. She’d been refusing to go to bed with David for ages because she couldn’t bear to be touched by him, and then one evening he rugby tackled her on the stairs and wedged her head between the banisters. In law, of course, there is no such thing as marital rape, but David is a law to himself.’

The engines started to roar. ‘You’ll find in the course of your life,’ boomed Nicholas, and then, realizing that he sounded pompous, he put on his funny pompous voice, ‘as I have found in the course of mine, that such people, though perhaps destructive and cruel towards those who are closest to them, often possess a vitality that makes other people seem dull by comparison.’

‘Oh, God, gimme a break,’ said Bridget. The plane gathered speed and shuddered into the pasty English sky.

5

AS
ELEANOR
’
S
BUICK DRIFTED
along the slow back roads to Signes the sky was almost clear except for a straggling cloud dissolving in front of the sun. Through the tinted border of the windscreen, Anne saw the cloud’s edges curling and melting in the heat. The car had already been caught behind an orange tractor, its trailer loaded with dusty purple grapes; the driver had waved them on magnanimously. Inside the car, the air conditioning gently refrigerated the atmosphere. Anne had tried to prise the keys from her, but Eleanor said that nobody else ever drove her car. Now the soft suspension and streams of cold air made the dangers of her driving seem more remote.

It was still only eleven o’clock and Anne was not looking forward to the long day ahead. There had been an awkward, stale silence since she’d made the mistake of asking how Patrick was. Anne felt a maternal instinct towards him, which was more than she could say for his mother. Eleanor had snapped at her, ‘Why do people think they are likely to please me by asking how Patrick is, or how David is? I don’t know how they are, only they know.’

Anne was stunned. A long time went by before Anne tried again. ‘What did you think of Vijay?’

‘Not much.’

‘Me neither. Luckily he had to leave earlier than expected.’ Anne still did not know how much to reveal about the row with Vijay. ‘He was going to stay with that old man they all worship, Jonathan somebody, who writes those awful books with the crazy titles, like
Anemones and Enemies
or
Antics and Antiques.
You know the one I mean?’

‘Oh, him, Jesus, he’s awful. He used to come to my mother’s house in Rome. He would always say things like, “The streets are pullulating with beggars,” which made me really angry when I was sixteen. But is that Vijay man rich? He kept talking as if he must be, but he didn’t look as if he ever spent any money – not on his clothes anyhow?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Anne, ‘he is
so
rich: he is factory-rich, bank-rich. He keeps polo ponies in Calcutta, but he doesn’t like polo and never goes to Calcutta. Now that’s what I call rich.’

Eleanor was silent for a while. It was a subject in which she felt quietly competitive. She did not want to agree too readily that neglecting polo ponies in Calcutta was what she called rich.

‘But stingy as hell,’ said Anne to cover the silence. ‘That was one of the reasons we had a row.’ She was longing to tell the truth now, but she was still unsure. ‘Every evening he rang home, which is Switzerland, to chat in Gujarati to his aged mother, and if there was no answer, he’d show up in the kitchen with a black shawl around his frail shoulders, looking like an old woman himself. Finally I had to ask him for some money for the phone calls.’

‘And did he pay you?’

‘Only after I lost my temper.’

‘Didn’t Victor help?’ asked Eleanor.

‘Victor shies away from crass things like money.’