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

‘That’s why it’s such a waste of time, old boy,’ said Nicholas cheerfully.

‘Why do you think it’s superior to be amoral?’ Anne asked Nicholas.

‘It’s not a question of being superior,’ he said, exposing his cavernous nostrils to Anne, ‘it just springs from a desire not to be a bore or a prig.’

‘Everything about Nicholas is superior,’ said David, ‘and even if he were a bore or a prig, I’m sure he would be a superior one.’

‘Thank you, David,’ said Nicholas with determined complacency.

‘Only in the English language,’ said Victor, ‘can one be “a bore”, like being a lawyer or a pastry cook, making boredom into a profession – in other languages a person is simply boring, a temporary state of affairs. The question is, I suppose, whether this points to a greater intolerance towards boring people, or an especially intense quality of boredom among the English.’

It’s because you’re such a bunch of boring old farts, thought Bridget.

Yvette took away the soup plates and closed the door behind her. The candles flickered, and the painted peasants came alive again for a moment.

‘What one aims for,’ said David, ‘is ennui.’

‘Of course,’ said Anne, ‘it’s more than just French for our old friend boredom. It’s boredom plus money, or boredom plus arrogance. It’s I-find-everything-boring, therefore I’m fascinating. But it doesn’t seem to occur to people that you can’t have a world picture and then not be part of it.’

There was a moment of silence while Yvette came back carrying a large platter of roast veal and vegetables.

‘Darling,’ said David to Eleanor, ‘what a marvellous memory you have to be able to duplicate the dinner you gave Anne and Victor last time they were here.’

‘Oh, God, how awful,’ said Eleanor. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Talking of animal ethics,’ said Nicholas, ‘I gather that Gerald Frogmore shot more birds last year than anyone in England. Not bad for a chap in a wheelchair.’

‘Maybe he doesn’t like to see things move about freely,’ said Anne. She immediately felt the excitement of half wishing she had not made this remark.

‘You’re not anti-blood sports?’ asked Nicholas, with an unspoken ‘on top of everything else’.

‘How could I be?’ asked Anne. ‘It’s a middle-class prejudice based on envy. Have I got that right?’

‘Well, I wasn’t going to say so,’ said Nicholas, ‘but you put it so much better than I could possibly hope to…’

‘Do you despise people from the middle classes?’ Anne asked.

‘I don’t despise people from the middle classes, on the contrary, the further from them, the better,’ said Nicholas, shooting one of his cuffs. ‘It’s people in the middle classes that disgust me.’

‘Can middle-class people be from the middle class in your sense?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Nicholas generously, ‘Victor is an outstanding case.’

Victor smiled to show that he was enjoying himself.

‘It’s easier for girls, of course,’ Nicholas continued. ‘Marriage is such a blessing, hoisting women from dreary backgrounds into a wider world.’ He glanced at Bridget. ‘All a chap can really do, unless he’s the sort of queer who spends his whole time writing postcards to people who might need a spare man, is to toe the line. And be thoroughly charming and well informed,’ he added, with a reassuring smile for Victor.

‘Nicholas, of course, is an expert,’ David intervened, ‘having personally raised several women from the gutter.’

‘At considerable expense,’ Nicholas agreed.

‘The cost of being dragged into the gutter was even higher, wouldn’t you say, Nicholas?’ said David, reminding Nicholas of his political humiliation. ‘Either way, the gutter seems to be where you feel at home.’

‘Cor blimey, guv,’ said Nicholas in his comical cockney voice. ‘When you’ve gorn down the drain like wot I ’ave, the gutter looks like a bed o’ roses.’

Eleanor still found it inexplicable that the best English manners contained such a high proportion of outright rudeness and gladiatorial combat. She knew that David abused this licence, but she also knew how ‘boring’ it was to interfere with the exercise of unkindness. When David reminded someone of their weaknesses and failures she was torn between a desire to save the victim, whose feelings she adopted as her own, and an equally strong desire not to be accused of spoiling a game. The more she thought about this conflict, the more tightly it trapped her. She would never know what to say because whatever she said would be wrong.

Eleanor thought about her stepfather barking at her mother across the wastes of English silver, French furniture, and Chinese vases that helped to prevent him from becoming physically violent. This dwarfish and impotent French duke had dedicated his life to the idea that civilization had died in 1789. He nonetheless accepted a ten per cent cut from the dealers who sold pre-revolutionary antiques to his wife. He had forced Mary to sell her mother’s Monets and Bonnards on the ground that they were examples of a decadent art that would never really matter. To him, Mary was the least valuable object in the fastidious museums they inhabited, and when eventually he bullied her to death he felt that he had eliminated the last trace of modernity from his life except, of course, for the enormous income that now came to him from the sales of a dry-cleaning fluid made in Ohio.

Eleanor had watched her mother’s persecution with the same vivid silence as she experienced in the face of her own gradual disintegration tonight. Although she was not a cruel person, she remembered being helpless with laughter watching her stepfather, by then suffering from Parkinson’s disease, lift a forkful of peas, only to find the fork empty by the time it reached his mouth. Yet she had never told him how much she hated him. She had not spoken then, and she would not speak now.

‘Look at Eleanor,’ said David, ‘she has that expression she only puts on when she is thinking of her dear rich dead mother. I’m right, aren’t I, darling?’ he cajoled her. ‘Aren’t I?’

‘Yes, you are,’ she admitted.

‘Eleanor’s mother and aunt,’ said David in the tone of a man reading Little Red Riding Hood to a gullible child, ‘thought that they could buy human antiques. The moth-eaten bearers of ancient titles were reupholstered with thick wads of dollars, but,’ he concluded with a warm banality which could not altogether conceal his humorous intentions, ‘you just can’t treat human beings like things.’

‘Definitely,’ said Bridget, amazed to hear herself speak.

‘You agree with me?’ said David, suddenly attentive.

‘Definitely,’ said Bridget, who appeared to have broken her silence on somewhat limited terms.

‘Maybe the human antiques wanted to be bought,’ Anne suggested.

‘Nobody doubts that,’ said David, ‘I’m sure they were licking the windowpane. What’s so shocking is that after being saved, they dared to rear up on their spindly Louis Quinze legs and start giving orders. The ingratitude !’

‘Cor!’ said Nicholas. ‘Wot I wouldn’t give for some o’ ’em Looey Can’s legs – they must be wurf a bob or two.’

Victor was embarrassed on Eleanor’s behalf. After all, she was paying for dinner.

Bridget was confused by David. She agreed wholeheartedly with what he had said about people not being things. In fact, once she’d been tripping and had realized with overwhelming clarity that what was wrong with the world was people treating each other like things. It was such a big idea that it was hard to hold on to, but she had felt very strongly about it at the time, and she thought David was trying to say the same thing. She also admired him for being the only person who frightened Nicholas. On the other hand, she could see why he frightened Nicholas.