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

Anne had had enough. She felt a combination of boredom and rebelliousness which reminded her of adolescence. She could take no more of David’s mood, and the way he baited Eleanor, tormented Nicholas, silenced Bridget, and even diminished Victor.

‘Sorry,’ she murmured to Eleanor, ‘I’ll be right back.’

In the dim hallway, she pulled a cigarette out of her bag and lit it. The flaming match was reflected in all the mirrors around the hall, and made a sliver of glass shine momentarily at the foot of the stairs. Stooping down to pick up the glass with the tip of her index finger, Anne suddenly knew that she was being watched and, looking up, she saw Patrick sitting on the widest step where the staircase curved. He wore flannel pyjamas with blue elephants on them, but his face looked downcast.

‘Hi, Patrick,’ said Anne, ‘you look so grim. Can’t you get to sleep?’

He did not answer or move. ‘I just have to get rid of this piece of glass,’ said Anne. ‘I guess something broke here earlier?’

‘It was me,’ said Patrick.

‘Hang on one second,’ she said.

She’s lying, thought Patrick, she won’t come back.

There was no wastepaper basket in the hall, but she brushed the glass off her finger into a porcelain umbrella stand that bristled with David’s collection of exotic canes.

She hurried back to Patrick and sat on the step beneath him. ‘Did you cut yourself on that glass?’ she asked tenderly, putting her hand on his arm.

He pulled away from her and said, ‘Leave me alone.’

‘Do you want me to get your mother?’ asked Anne.

‘All right,’ said Patrick.

‘OK. I’ll go get her right away,’ said Anne. Back in the dining room, she heard Nicholas saying to Victor, ‘David and I were meaning to ask you before dinner whether John Locke really said that a man who forgot his crimes should not be punished for them.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Victor. ‘He maintained that personal identity depended on continuity of memory. In the case of a forgotten crime one would be punishing the wrong person.’

‘I’ll drink to that,’ said Nicholas.

Anne leaned over to Eleanor and said to her quietly, ‘I think you ought to go and see Patrick. He was sitting on the stairs asking for you.’

‘Thank you,’ whispered Eleanor.

‘Perhaps it should be the other way round,’ said David. ‘A man who remembers his crimes can usually be relied upon to punish himself, whereas the law should punish the person who is irresponsible enough to forget.’

‘D’you believe in capital punishment?’ piped up Bridget.

‘Not since it ceased to be a public occasion,’ said David. ‘In the eighteenth century a hanging was a really good day’s outing.’

‘Everybody enjoyed themselves: even the man who was being hanged,’ added Nicholas.

‘Fun for all the family,’ David went on. ‘Isn’t that the phrase everybody uses nowadays? God knows, it’s always what I aim for, but an occasional trip to Tyburn must have made the task easier.’

Nicholas giggled. Bridget wondered what Tyburn was. Eleanor smiled feebly, and pushed her chair back.

‘Not leaving us I hope, darling,’ said David.

‘I have to … I’ll be back in a moment,’ Eleanor mumbled.

‘I didn’t quite catch that: you have to be back in a moment?’

‘There’s something I have to do.’

‘Well, hurry, hurry, hurry,’ said David gallantly, ‘we’ll be lost without your conversation.’

Eleanor walked to the door at the same time as Yvette opened it carrying a silver coffee pot.

‘I found Patrick on the stairs,’ Anne said. ‘He seemed kind of sad.’

David’s eyes darted towards Eleanor’s back as she slipped past Yvette. ‘Darling,’ he said, and then more peremptorily, ‘Eleanor.’

She turned, her teeth locked onto a thumbnail, trying to get a grip that would hold. She often tore at the stunted nails when she was not smoking. ‘Yes?’ she said.

‘I thought that we’d agreed that you wouldn’t rush to Patrick each time he whines and blubbers.’

‘But he fell down earlier and he may have hurt himself.’

‘In that case,’ said David with sudden seriousness, ‘he may need a doctor.’ He rested the palms of his hands on the top of the table, as if to rise.

‘Oh, I don’t think he’s hurt,’ said Anne, to restrain David. She had a strong feeling that she would not be keeping her promise to Patrick if she sent him his father rather than his mother. ‘He just wants to be comforted.’

‘You see, darling,’ said David, ‘he isn’t hurt, and so it is just a sentimental question: does one indulge the self-pity of a child, or not? Does one allow oneself to be blackmailed, or not? Come and sit down – we can at least discuss it.’

Eleanor edged her way back to her chair reluctantly. She knew she would be pinned down by a conversation that would defeat her, but not persuade her.

‘The proposition I want to make,’ said David, ‘is that education should be something of which a child can later say: if I survived that, I can survive anything.’

‘That’s crazy and wrong,’ said Anne, ‘and you know it.’

‘I certainly think that children should be stretched to the limit of their abilities,’ said Victor, ‘but I’m equally certain they can’t be if they’re intensely miserable.’

‘Nobody wants to make anybody miserable,’ said Nicholas, puffing out his cheeks incredulously. ‘We’re just saying that it doesn’t do the child any good to be mollycoddled. I may be a frightful reactionary, but I think that all you have to do for children is hire a reasonable nanny and put them down for Eton.’

‘What, the nannies?’ said Bridget giggling. ‘Anyway, what if you have a girl?’

Nicholas looked at her sternly.

‘I guess that putting things down is your speciality,’ said Anne to Nicholas.

‘Oh, I know it’s an unfashionable view to hold these days,’ Nicholas went on complacently, ‘but in my opinion nothing that happens to you as a child really matters.’

‘If we’re getting down to things that don’t really matter,’ said Anne, ‘you’re top of my list.’

‘Oh, my word,’ said Nicholas, in his sports commentator’s voice, ‘a ferocious backhand from the young American woman, but the line judge rules it out.’

‘From what you’ve told me,’ said Bridget, still elated by the thought of nannies in tailcoats, ‘nothing much that happened in your childhood did matter: you just did what everyone expected.’ Feeling a vague pressure on her right thigh, she glanced round at David, but he seemed to be staring ahead, organizing a sceptical expression on his face. The pressure stopped. On her other side, Victor peeled a nectarine with hurried precision.

‘It’s true,’ said Nicholas, making a visible effort at equanimity, ‘that my childhood was uneventful. People never remember happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering. I remember stroking my cheek against the velvet collar of my overcoat. Asking my grandfather for pennies to throw into that golden pool at the Ritz. Big lawns. Buckets and spades. That sort of thing.’

Bridget could not concentrate on what Nicholas was saying. She felt cold metal against her knee. Looking down, she saw David lifting the edge of her dress with a small silver knife and running it along her thigh. What the fuck did he think he was doing? She frowned at him reproachfully. He merely pressed the point a little more firmly into her thigh, without looking at her.

Victor wiped the tips of his fingers with his napkin, while answering a question which Bridget had missed. He sounded a little bored and not surprisingly, when she heard what he had to say. ‘Certainly if the degree of psychological connectedness and psychological continuity have become sufficiently weakened, it would be true to say that a person should look upon his childhood with no more than charitable curiosity.’