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

She walked beside the edge of the wall above the garden terrace and, wanting to explain her sudden action, she stretched out her arms, embraced the view, and said, ‘What a perfect day.’ Nobody replied. Scanning the landscape for something else to say, she glimpsed a slight movement at the far end of the garden. At first she thought it was an animal crouched under the pear tree, but when it got up she saw that it was a child. ‘Is that your son?’ she asked. ‘In the red trousers.’

Eleanor walked over to her side. ‘Yes, it’s Patrick. Patrick!’ she shouted. ‘Do you want some tea, darling?’

There was no answer. ‘Maybe he can’t hear you,’ said Bridget.

‘Of course he can,’ said David. ‘He’s just being tiresome.’

‘Maybe we can’t hear him,’ said Eleanor. ‘Patrick!’ she shouted again. ‘Why don’t you come and have some tea with us?’

‘He’s shaking his head,’ said Bridget.

‘He’s probably had tea two or three times already,’ said Nicholas; ‘you know what they’re like at that age.’

‘God, children are so sweet ,’ said Bridget, smiling at Eleanor. ‘Eleanor,’ she said in the same tone, as if her request should be granted as a reward for finding children sweet, ‘could you tell me which room I’m in because I’d quite like to go up and have a bath and unpack.’

‘Of course. Let me show you,’ said Eleanor.

Eleanor led Bridget into the house.

‘Your girlfriend is very, I believe the word is “vivacious”,’ said David.

‘Oh, she’ll do for now,’ said Nicholas.

‘No need to apologize, she’s absolutely charming. Shall we have a real drink?’

‘Good idea.’

‘Champagne?’

‘Perfect.’

David fetched the champagne and reappeared tearing the golden lead from the neck of a clear bottle.

‘Cristal,’ said Nicholas dutifully.

‘Nothing but the best, or go without,’ said David.

‘It reminds me of Charles Pewsey,’ said Nicholas. ‘We were drinking a bottle of that stuff at Wilton’s last week and I asked him if he remembered Gunter, Jonathan Croyden’s unspeakable amanuensis. And Charles roared – you know how deaf he is – “Amanuensis? Bumboy, you mean: unspeakable bumboy. ” Everyone turned round and stared at us.’

‘They always do when one’s with Charles.’ David grinned. It was so typical of Charles, one had to know Charles to appreciate how funny it was.

The bedroom Bridget had been put in was all flowery chintz, with engravings of Roman ruins on every wall. Beside the bed was a copy of Lady Mosley’s A Life of Contrasts , on top of which Bridget had thrown Valley of the Dolls , her current reading. She sat by the window smoking a joint, and watched the smoke drift through the tiny holes in the mosquito net. From below, she could hear Nicholas shout ‘ unspeakable bumboy ’. They must be reminiscing about their school days. Boys will be boys.

Bridget lifted one foot onto the windowsill. She still held the joint in her left hand, although it would burn her fingers with the next toke. She slipped her right hand between her legs and started to masturbate.

‘It just goes to show that being an amanuensis doesn’t matter as long as you have the butler on your side,’ said Nicholas.

David picked up his cue. ‘It’s always the same thing in life,’ he chanted. ‘It’s not what you do, it’s who you know.’

To find such a ludicrous example of this important maxim made the two men laugh.

Bridget moved over to the bed and spread herself out face down on the yellow bedcover. As she closed her eyes and resumed masturbating, the thought of David flashed over her like a static shock, but she forced herself to focus loyally on the memory of Barry’s stirring presence.

WHEN VICTOR WAS IN trouble with his writing he had a nervous habit of flicking open his pocket watch and clicking it closed again. Distracted by the noise of other human activities he found it helpful to make a noise of his own. During the contemplative passages of his daydreams he flicked and clicked more slowly, but as he pressed up against his sense of frustration the pace increased.

Dressed this morning in the flecked and bulky sweater he had hunted down ruthlessly for an occasion on which clothes simply didn’t matter, he fully intended to begin his essay on the necessary and sufficient conditions of personal identity. He sat at a slightly wobbly wooden table under a yellowing plane tree in front of the house, and as the temperature rose he stripped down to his shirtsleeves. By lunchtime he had recorded only one thought, ‘I have written books which I have had to write, but I have not yet written a book which others have to read.’ He punished himself by improvising a sandwich for lunch, instead of walking down to La Coquière and eating three courses in the garden, under the blue and red and yellow parasol of the Ricard Pastis company.

Despite himself he kept thinking of Eleanor’s puzzled little contribution that morning, ‘Gosh, I mean, if anything is in the mind, it’s who you are.’ If anything is in the mind it’s who you are: it was silly, it was unhelpful, but it whined about him like a mosquito in the dark.

Just as a novelist may sometimes wonder why he invents characters who do not exist and makes them do things which do not matter, so a philosopher may wonder why he invents cases that cannot occur in order to determine what must be the case. After a long neglect of his subject, Victor was not as thoroughly convinced that impossibility was the best route to necessity as he might have been had he recently reconsidered Stolkin’s extreme case in which ‘scientists destroy my brain and body, and then make out of new matter, a replica of Greta Garbo’. How could one help agreeing with Stolkin that ‘there would be no connection between me and the resulting person’?

Nevertheless, to think one knew what would happen to a person’s sense of identity if his brain was cut in half and distributed between identical twins seemed, just for now, before he had thrown himself back into the torrent of philosophical debate, a poor substitute for an intelligent description of what it is to know who you are.

Victor went indoors to fetch the familiar tube of Bisodol indigestion tablets. As usual he had eaten his sandwich too fast, pushing it down his throat like a sword-swallower. He thought with renewed appreciation of William James’s remark that the self consists mainly of ‘peculiar motions in the head and between the head and throat’, although the peculiar motions somewhat lower down in his stomach and bowels felt at least as personal.

When Victor sat down again he pictured himself thinking, and tried to superimpose this picture on his inner vacancy. If he was essentially a thinking machine, then he needed to be serviced. It was not the problems of philosophy but the problem with philosophy that preoccupied him that afternoon. And yet how often the two became indistinguishable. Wittgenstein had said that the philosopher’s treatment of a question was like the treatment of a disease. But which treatment? Purging? Leeches? Antibiotics against the infections of language? Indigestion tablets, thought Victor, belching softly, to help break down the doughy bulk of sensation?

We ascribe thoughts to thinkers because this is the way we speak, but persons need not be claimed to be the thinkers of these thoughts. Still, thought Victor lazily, why not bow down to popular demand on this occasion? As to brains and minds, was there really any problem about two categorically different phenomena, brain process and consciousness, occurring simultaneously? Or was the problem with the categories?

From down the hill Victor heard a car door slam. It must be Eleanor dropping Anne at the bottom of the drive. Victor flicked open his watch, checked the time, and snapped it closed again. What had he achieved? Almost nothing. It was not one of those unproductive days when he was confused by abundance and starved, like Buridan’s ass, between two equally nourishing bales of hay. His lack of progress today was more profound.