Edward Aubyn - The Patrick Melrose Novels - Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk

‘Oh, it’s all right, I can manage the bags,’ said Nicholas. He wanted to get Bridget alone in their room for a moment and tell her to ‘buck up’.

‘No, really, let François do it, he’s had nothing to do all day,’ said Eleanor, who didn’t want to be left alone with David.

Nicholas had to content himself with beaming his unspoken disapproval towards Bridget, who wandered down the steps trying to avoid the cracks between the paving stones, and did not even glance in his direction.

When they arrived in the hall, Eleanor was delighted by David’s absence. Perhaps he had drowned in the bath. It was too much to hope. She sent Nicholas and Bridget out onto the terrace and went to the kitchen to ask Yvette for some tea. On the way she drank a glass of brandy.

‘Could you bear to make a little light conversation now and again?’ said Nicholas as soon as he was alone with Bridget. ‘You haven’t yet addressed a word to Eleanor.’

‘OK, darling,’ said Bridget, still trying not to walk on the cracks. She turned towards Nicholas and said in a loud whisper, ‘Is this the one?’

‘What?’

‘The fig tree where he made her eat on all fours.’

Nicholas looked up at the windows above him, remembering the conversations he had overheard from his bedroom the last time he was staying. He nodded, putting his fingers to his lips.

Figs littered the ground underneath the tree. Some were reduced to a black stain and a few pips, but a number had not yet decayed and their purple skins, covered in a dusty white film, were still unbroken. Bridget knelt down like a dog on the ground.

‘For God’s sake,’ snarled Nicholas, leaping over to her side. At that moment the drawing room door opened and Yvette came out, carrying a tray of cakes and cups. She only glimpsed what was going on, but it confirmed her suspicion that rich English people had a strange relationship with the animal kingdom. Bridget rose, smirking.

‘ Ah, fantastique de vous revoir, Yvette ,’ said Nicholas.

‘ Bonjour, Monsieur. ’

‘ Bonjour ,’ said Bridget prettily.

‘ Bonjour, Madame ,’ said Yvette stoutly, though she knew that Bridget was not married.

‘David!’ roared Nicholas over Yvette’s head. ‘Where have you been hiding?’

David waved his cigar at Nicholas. ‘Got lost in Surtees,’ he said, stepping through the doorway. He wore his dark glasses to protect him from surprises. ‘Hello, my dear,’ he said to Bridget, whose name he had forgotten. ‘Have either of you seen Eleanor? I caught a glimpse of some pink trousers rounding a corner, but they didn’t answer to her name.’

‘That’s certainly what she was last seen wearing,’ said Nicholas.

‘Pink suits her so well, don’t you think?’ said David to Bridget. ‘It matches the colour of her eyes.’

‘Wouldn’t some tea be delicious?’ said Nicholas quickly.

Bridget poured the tea, while David went to sit on a low wall, a few feet away from Nicholas. As he tapped his cigar gently and let the ash fall at his feet, he noticed a trail of ants working their way along the side of the wall and into their nest in the corner.

Bridget carried cups of tea over to the two men, and as she turned to fetch her own cup, David held the burning tip of his cigar close to the ants and ran it along in both directions as far as he could conveniently reach. The ants twisted, excruciated by the heat, and dropped down onto the terrace. Some, before they fell, reared up, their stitching legs trying helplessly to repair their ruined bodies.

‘What a civilized life you have here,’ Bridget sang out as she sank back into a dark-blue deckchair. Nicholas rolled his eyeballs and wondered why the hell he had told her to make light conversation. To cover the silence he remarked to David that he had been to Jonathan Croyden’s memorial service the day before.

‘Do you find that you go to more memorial services, or more weddings these days?’ David asked.

‘I still get more wedding invitations, but I find I enjoy the memorials more.’

‘Because you don’t have to bring a present?’

‘Well, that helps a great deal, but mainly because one gets a better crowd when someone really distinguished dies.’

‘Unless all his friends have died before him.’

‘That, of course, is intolerable,’ said Nicholas categorically.

‘Ruins the party.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t approve of memorial services,’ said David, taking another puff on his cigar. ‘Not merely because I cannot imagine anything in most men’s lives that deserves to be celebrated, but also because the delay between the funeral and the memorial service is usually so long that, far from rekindling the spirit of a lost friend, it only shows how easily one can live without him.’ David blew on the tip of his cigar and it glowed brightly. The opium made him feel that he was listening to another man speak.

‘The dead are dead,’ he went on, ‘and the truth is that one forgets about people when they stop coming to dinner. There are exceptions, of course – namely, the people one forgets during dinner.’

With his cigar he caught a stray ant which was escaping with singed antennae from his last incendiary raid. ‘If you really miss someone, you are better off doing something you both enjoyed doing together, which is unlikely to mean, except in the most bizarre cases, standing around in a draughty church, wearing a black overcoat and singing hymns.’

The ant ran away with astonishing speed and was about to reach the far side of the wall when David, stretching a little, touched it lightly with a surgeon’s precision. Its skin blistered and it squirmed violently as it died.

‘One should only go to an enemy’s memorial service. Quite apart from the pleasure of outlasting him, it is an opportunity for a truce. Forgiveness is so important, don’t you think?’

‘Gosh, yes,’ said Bridget, ‘especially getting other people to forgive you.’

David smiled at her encouragingly, until he saw Eleanor step through the doorway.

‘Ah, Eleanor,’ grinned Nicholas with exaggerated pleasure, ‘we were just talking about Jonathan Croyden’s memorial.’

‘I guess it’s the end of an era,’ said Eleanor.

‘He was the last man alive to have gone to one of Evelyn Waugh’s parties in drag,’ said Nicholas. ‘He was said to dress much better as a woman than as a man. He was an inspiration to a whole generation of Englishmen. Which reminds me, after the memorial I met a very tiresome, smarmy Indian who claimed to have visited you just before staying with Jonathan at Cap Ferrat.’

‘It must have been Vijay,’ said Eleanor. ‘Victor brought him over.’

‘That’s the one,’ Nicholas nodded. ‘He seemed to know that I was coming here. Perfectly extraordinary as I’d never set eyes on him before.’

‘He’s desperately fashionable,’ explained David, ‘and consequently knows more about people he has never met than he does about anything else.’

Eleanor perched on a frail white chair with a faded blue cushion on its circular seat. She rose again immediately and dragged the chair further towards the shade of the fig tree.

‘Watch out,’ said Bridget, ‘you might squash some of the figs.’

Eleanor made no reply.

‘It seems a pity to waste them,’ said Bridget innocently, leaning over to pick a fig off the ground. ‘This one is perfect.’ She brought it close to her mouth. ‘Isn’t it weird the way their skin is purple and white at the same time.’

‘Like a drunk with emphysema,’ said David, smiling at Eleanor.

Bridget opened her mouth, rounded her lips and pushed the fig inside. She suddenly felt what she later described to Barry as a ‘very heavy vibe’ from David, ‘as if he was pushing his fist into my womb’. Bridget swallowed the fig, but she felt a physical need to get out of the deckchair and move further away from David.