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

‘And think of the Imperial Thumbache,’ said David, twisting his aching thumbs up and down with childish enjoyment.

This happy vein of fantasy was interrupted by Bridget’s return. After talking to Barry on the phone, Bridget had smoked another little joint and the colours around her had become very vivid. ‘ Love those kinky yellow slippers,’ she said to David brightly.

Nicholas winced.

‘Do you really like them?’ asked David, fixing her genially. ‘I’m so pleased.’

David knew intuitively that Bridget would be embarrassed by discussing her phone call, but he had no time to interrogate her now because Yvette came in to announce dinner. Never mind, thought David, I can get her later. In the pursuit of knowledge, there was no point in killing the rabbit before one found out whether its eyes were allergic to shampoo, or its skin inflamed by mascara. It was ridiculous to ‘break a butterfly upon a wheel’. The proper instrument for a butterfly was a pin. Stimulated by these consoling thoughts, David rose from his chair and said expansively, ‘Let’s have dinner.’

Disturbed by a draught from the opening door, the candles in the dining room flickered and animated the painted panels around the walls. A procession of grateful peasants, much appreciated by David, edged a little further along the twisting road that led to the castle gates, only to slip back again as the flames shifted the other way. The wheels of a cart which had been stuck in a roadside ditch, seemed to creak forward, and for a moment the donkey pulling it swelled with dark new muscles.

On the table Yvette had laid out two bowls of rouille for the fish soup, and a sweating green bottle of Blanc de Blancs stood at either end of the table.

On the way from the drawing room to the dining room, Nicholas made one last attempt to extort some enthusiasm for his beleaguered anecdote. It now took place in the residence of the Prince et Princesse de Quelque Chose. ‘Whoosh!’ he shouted at Anne with an explosive gesture. ‘The fifteenth-century tapestries burst into flame and their hôtel particulier BURNED TO THE GROUND. The reception had to be cancelled. There was a national scandal, and every bottle of Plantes Marines was banned worldwide. ’

‘As if it wasn’t tough enough already being called Quelque Chose,’ said Anne.

‘But now you can’t get it anywhere,’ cried Nicholas, exhausted by his efforts.

‘Sounds like the right decision. I mean, who wants their peculiar hotel burnt to the ground? Not me!’

Everyone waited to be seated and looked enquiringly at Eleanor. Although-there seemed to be no room for doubt, with the women next to David and the men next to her and the couples mixed, she felt a dreadful conviction that she would make a mistake and unleash David’s fury. Flustered, she stood there saying, ‘Anne … would you … no, you go there … no, I’m sorry…’

‘Thank God we’re only six,’ David said in a loud whisper to Nicholas. ‘There’s some chance she’ll crack the problem before the soup gets cold.’ Nicholas smirked obediently.

God, I hate grown-up dinner parties, thought Bridget, as Yvette brought in the steaming soup.

‘Tell me, my dear, what did you make of the Emperor Galba?’ said David to Anne, leaning courteously towards her, to emphasize his indifference to Bridget.

This was the line that Anne had hoped the conversation would not take. Who? she thought, but said, ‘Ah, what a character! What really interested me, though, was the character of Caligula. Why do you think he was so obsessed with his sisters?’

‘Well, you know what they say,’ David grinned, ‘vice is nice, but incest is best.’

‘But what…’ asked Anne, pretending to be fascinated, ‘what’s the psychology of a situation like that? Was it a kind of narcissism? The nearest thing to seducing himself?’

‘More, I think, the conviction that only a member of his own family could have suffered as he had done. You know, of course, that Tiberius killed almost all of their relations, and so he and Drusilla were survivors of the same terror. Only she could really understand him.’

As David paused to drink some wine, Anne resumed her impersonation of an eager student. ‘Something else I’d love to know is why Caligula thought that torturing his wife would reveal the reason he was so devoted to her?’

‘To discover witchcraft was the official explanation, but presumably he was suspicious of affection which was divorced from the threat of death.’

‘And, on a larger scale, he had the same suspicion about Roman people. Right?’ asked Anne.

‘Up to a point, Lord Copper,’ said David. He looked as if there were things he knew, but would never divulge. So these were the benefits of a classical education, thought Anne, who had often heard David and Victor talk about them.

Victor had been eating his soup silently and very fast while Nicholas told him about Jonathan Croyden’s memorial service. Eleanor had abandoned her soup and lit a cigarette; the extra Dexedrine had put her off her food. Bridget daydreamed resolutely.

‘I’m afraid I don’t approve of memorial services,’ said Victor, pursing his lips for a moment to savour the insincerity of what he was about to say, ‘they are just excuses for a party.’

‘What’s wrong with them,’ David corrected him, ‘is that they are excuses for such bad parties. I suppose you were talking about Croyden.’

‘That’s right,’ said Victor. ‘They say he spoke better than he wrote. There was certainly room for improvement.’

David bared his teeth to acknowledge this little malice. ‘Did Nicholas tell you that your friend Vijay was there?’

‘No,’ said Victor.

‘Oh,’ said David, turning to Anne persuasively, ‘and you never told us why he left so suddenly.’ Anne had refused to answer this question on several occasions, and David liked to tease her by bringing it up whenever they met.

‘Didn’t I?’ said Anne, playing along.

‘He wasn’t incontinent?’ asked David.

‘No,’ said Anne.

‘Or worse, in his case, flirtatious?’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘He was just being himself,’ Nicholas suggested.

‘That might have done it,’ said Anne, ‘but it was more than that.’

‘The desire to pass on information is like a hunger, and sometimes it is the curiosity, sometimes the indifference, of others that arouses it,’ said Victor pompously.

‘OK, OK,’ said Anne, to save Victor from the silence that might well follow his pronouncement. ‘Now it’s not going to seem like that big a deal to you sophisticated types,’ she added demurely. ‘But when I took a clean shirt of his up to his room, I found a bunch of terrible magazines. Not just pornography, much much worse. Of course I wasn’t going to ask him to leave. What he reads is his own affair, but he came back and was so rude about my being in his room, when I was only there to take back his lousy shirt, that I kind of lost my temper.’

‘Good for you,’ said Eleanor timidly.

‘What sort of magazines exactly?’ asked Nicholas, sitting back and crossing his legs.

‘I wish you’d confiscated them,’ giggled Bridget.

‘Oh, just awful,’ said Anne. ‘Crucifixion. All kinds of animal stuff.’

‘God, how hilarious,’ said Nicholas. ‘Vijay rises in my estimation.’

‘Oh, yeah?’ said Anne. ‘Well, you should have seen the look on the poor pig’s face.’

Victor was a little uneasy. ‘The obscure ethics of our relations to the animal kingdom,’ he chuckled.

‘We kill them when we feel like it,’ said David crisply, ‘nothing very obscure about that.’

‘Ethics is not the study of what we do, my dear David, but what we ought to do,’ said Victor.