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

‘No,’ said Bridget. ‘I know the whole P.M. thing would make her terribly tense.’

‘Is Granny upset?’ asked Belinda, coming to sit down next to her mother.

‘What on earth makes you ask that?’

‘She looked sad when she left.’

‘That’s just the way she looks when her face relaxes;’ said Bridget inventively.

Virginia came back into the nursery, stuffing her handkerchief up the sleeve of her cardigan.

‘I went into one of the rooms for a moment and saw my suitcase there,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Is that where I’m sleeping?’

‘Hmm,’ said Bridget, picking up her cup of tea and sipping it slowly. ‘I’m sorry it’s rather poky, but after all it’s only for one night.’

‘Just for one night,’ echoed Virginia, who’d been hoping to stay for two or three.

‘The house is incredibly full,’ said Bridget. ‘It’s such a strain on … on everybody.’ She tactfully swallowed the word ‘servants’ in Nanny’s presence. ‘Anyhow, I thought you’d like to be near Belinda.’

‘Oh, of course,’ said Virginia. ‘We can have a midnight feast.’

‘A midnight feast,’ spluttered Nanny who could contain herself no longer. ‘Not in my nursery!’

‘I thought it was Belinda’s nursery,’ said Tony waspishly.

‘I’m in charge,’ gasped Nanny, ‘and I can’t have midnight feasts.’

Bridget could remember the midnight feast her mother had made to cheer her up on the night before she went to boarding school. Her mother had pretended that they had to hide from her father, but Bridget later found out that he had known all about it and had even gone to buy the cakes himself. She suppressed this sentimental memory with a sigh and got up when she heard the noise of cars at the front of the house. She craned out of one of the small windows in the corner of the nursery.

‘Oh God, it’s the Alantours,’ she said. ‘I suppose I have to go down and say hello to them. Tony, will you be an angel and help me?’ she asked.

‘As long as you leave me time to put on my ball gown for Princess Margaret,’ said Tony.

‘Can I do anything?’ asked Virginia.

‘No, thanks. You stay here and unpack. I’ll order you a taxi to go to the Bossington-Lanes’. At about seven thirty,’ said Bridget calculating that Princess Margaret would not yet have come down for a drink. ‘My treat, of course,’ she added.

Oh, dear, thought Virginia, more money down the drain.

PATRICK HAD BOOKED HIS room late and so had been put in the annexe of the Little Soddington House Hotel. With the letter confirming his reservation the management had enclosed a brochure featuring a vast room with a four-poster bed, a tall marble fireplace, and a bay window opening onto wide views of the ravishing Cotswolds. The room Patrick was shown into, with its severely pitched ceiling and view onto the kitchen yard, boasted a full complement of tea-making facilities, instant-coffee sachets, and tiny pots of longlife milk. The miniature floral pattern on its matching waste-paper basket, curtains, bedspread, cushions, and Kleenex dispenser seemed to shift and shimmer.

Patrick unpacked his dinner jacket and threw it onto the bed, throwing himself down after it. A notice under the glass of the bedside table said: ‘To avoid disappointment, residents are advised to book in the restaurant in advance.’ Patrick, who had been trying to avoid disappointment all his life, cursed himself for not discovering this formula earlier.

Was there no other way he could stop being disappointed? How could he find any firm ground when his identity seemed to begin with disintegration and go on to disintegrate further? But perhaps this whole model of identity was misconceived. Perhaps identity was not a building for which one had to find foundations, but rather a series of impersonations held together by a central intelligence, an intelligence that knew the history of the impersonations and eliminated the distinction between action and acting.

‘Impersonation, sir,’ grunted Patrick, thrusting out his stomach and waddling towards the bathroom, as if he were the Fat Man himself, ‘is a habit of which I cannot approve, it was the ruination of Monsieur Escoffier…’ He stopped.

The self-disgust that afflicted him these days had the stagnancy of a malarial swamp, and he sometimes missed the cast of jeering characters that had accompanied the more dramatic disintegrations of his early twenties. Although he could conjure up some of these characters, they seemed to have lost their energy, just as he had soon forgotten the agony of being a ventriloquist’s dummy and replaced it with a sense of nostalgia for a period that had made up for some of its unpleasantness with its intensity.

‘Be absolute for death’, a strange phrase from Measure for Measure , returned to him while he bared his teeth to rip open a sachet of bath gel. Perhaps there was something in this half-shallow, half-profound idea that one had to despair of life in order to grasp its real value. Then again, perhaps there wasn’t. But in any case, he pondered, squeezing the green slime from the sachet and trying to get back to his earlier line of thought, what was this central intelligence, and just how intelligent was it? What was the thread that held together the scattered beads of experience if not the pressure of interpretation? The meaning of life was whatever meaning one could thrust down its reluctant throat.

Where was Victor Eisen, the great philosopher, when he needed him most? How could he have left the doubtless splendid Being, Knowing, and Judging (or was it Thinking, Knowing, and Judging ?) behind in New York when Anne Eisen had generously given him a copy during his corpse-collecting trip?

On his most recent visit to New York, he’d been back to the funeral parlour where, years before, he had seen his father’s body. The building was not as he remembered it at all. Instead of the grey stone facade, he saw soft brown brick. The building was much smaller than he expected and when he was driven inside by curiosity he found that there was no chequered black-and-white marble floor, and no reception desk where he expected to see one. Perhaps it had been changed, but even so, the scale was wrong, like places remembered from childhood and dwarfed by the passage of time.

The strange thing was that Patrick refused to alter his memory of the funeral parlour. He found the picture he had evolved over the years more compelling than the facts with which he was presented on revisiting the place. This picture was more suitable to the events that had occurred within the disappointing building. What he must remain true to was the effort of interpretation, the thread on which he tried to hang the scattered beads.

Even involuntary memory was only the resurfacing of an old story, something that had definitely once been a story. Impressions that were too fleeting to be called stories yielded no meaning. On the same visit to New York he had passed a red-and-white funnel next to some roadworks, spewing steam into the cold air. It felt nostalgic and significant, but left him in a state of nebulous intensity, not knowing whether he was remembering an image from a film, a book, or his own life. On the same walk he had dropped into a sleazy hotel in which he had once lived and found that it was no longer a hotel. The thing he was remembering no longer existed but, blind to the refurbished lobby, he continued to imagine the Italian with the scimitar tie-pin accusing him of trying to install his girlfriend Natasha as a prostitute, and to imagine the frenetic wallpaper covered in scratchy red lines like the frayed blood vessels of exhausted eyes.

What could he do but accept the disturbing extent to which memory was fictional and hope that the fiction lay at the service of a truth less richly represented by the original facts?