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

The house in Lacoste, where Patrick had spent most of his childhood, was now separated by only a few vines from a nasty suburb. Its old furniture had been sold and the redundant well filled in and sealed. Even the tree frogs, bright green and smooth against the smooth grey bark of the fig trees had gone, poisoned, or deprived of their breeding ground. Standing on the cracked terrace, listening to the whining of a new motorway, Patrick would try to hallucinate the faces that used to emerge from the smoky fluidity of the limestone crags, but they remained stubbornly hidden. On the other hand, geckos still flickered over the ceilings and under the eaves of the roof, and a tremor of unresolved violence always disturbed the easy atmosphere of holidays, like the churning of an engine setting the gin trembling on a distant deck. Some things never let him down.

The phone rang, and Patrick picked it up hastily, grateful for the interruption. It was Johnny saying that he’d arrived, and suggesting that they meet in the bar at eight thirty. Patrick agreed and, released from the hamster’s wheel of his thoughts, got up to turn off the bathwater.

* * *

David Windfall, florid and hot from his bath, squeezed into dinner jacket trousers that seemed to strain like sausage skins from the pressure of his thighs. Beads of sweat broke out continually on his upper lip and forehead. He wiped them away, glancing at himself in the mirror; although he looked like a hippopotamus with hypertension he was well satisfied.

He was going to have dinner with Cindy Smith. She was world-famously sexy and glamorous, but David was not intimidated because he was charming and sophisticated and, well, English. The Windfalls had been making their influence felt in Cumbria for centuries before Miss Smith popped onto the scene, he reassured himself as he buttoned up the over-tight shirt on his already sweating neck. His wife was in the habit of buying him seventeen-and-a-half-inch collars in the hope that he would grow thin enough to wear them. This trick made him so indignant that he decided that she deserved to be ill and absent and, if everything went well, betrayed.

He still hadn’t told Mrs Bossington-Lane that he wouldn’t be going to her dinner. He decided, as he choked himself on his bow tie, that the best way to handle it was to seek her out at the party and claim that his car had broken down. He just hoped that nobody else he knew would be having dinner in the hotel. He might try to use this fear to persuade Cindy to dine in his room. His thoughts panted on optimistically.

* * *

It was Cindy Smith who occupied the magnificent bedroom advertised in the brochure of the hotel. They’d told her it was a suite, but it was just a semi-large bedroom without a separate seating area. These old English houses were so uncomfortable. She’d only seen a photograph of Cheatley from the outside, and it looked real big, but there’d better be underfloor heating and a whole lot of private bathrooms, or she couldn’t even face her own plan to become the independently wealthy ex-Countess of Gravesend.

She was taking a long-term view and looking ahead two or three years. Looks didn’t last forever and she wasn’t ready for religion yet. Money was kind of a good compromise, staked up somewhere between cosmetics and eternity. Besides, she liked Sonny, she really did. He was cute, not to look at, God no, but aristocratic cute, old-fashioned out-of-a-movie cute.

Last year in Paris all the other models had come back to her suite in the Lotti – now there was a real suite – and each one of them, except a couple who chickened out, had done her fake orgasm, and Cindy’s was voted Best Fake Orgasm. They’d pretended the champagne bottle was an Oscar and she’d made an acceptance speech thanking all the men without whom it wouldn’t have been possible. Too bad she’d mentioned Sonny, seeing how she was going to marry him. Whoops!

She’d drunk a bit too much and put her father on the list also, which was probably a mistake ’cause all the other girls fell silent and things weren’t so much fun after that.

* * *

Patrick arrived downstairs before Johnny, and ordered a glass of Perrier at the bar. Two middle-aged couples sat together at a nearby table. The only other person in the bar, a florid man in a dinner jacket, obviously going to Sonny’s party, sat with folded arms, looking towards the door.

Patrick took his drink over to a small book-lined alcove in the corner of the room. Scanning the shelves, his eye fell on a volume called The Journal of a Disappointed Man , and next to it a second volume called More Journals of a Disappointed Man , and finally, by the same author, a third volume entitled Enjoying Life. How could a man who had made such a promising start to his career have ended up writing a book called Enjoying Life ? Patrick took the offending volume from the shelf and read the first sentence that he saw: ‘Verily, the flight of a gull is as magnificent as the Andes!’

‘Verily,’ murmured Patrick.

‘Hi.’

‘Hello, Johnny,’ said Patrick, looking up from the page. ‘I’ve just found a book called Enjoying Life. ’

‘Intriguing,’ said Johnny, sitting down on the other side of the alcove.

‘I’m going to take it to my room and read it tomorrow. It might save my life. Mind you, I don’t know why people get so fixated on happiness, which always eludes them, when there are so many other invigorating experiences available, like rage, jealousy, disgust, and so forth.’

‘Don’t you want to be happy?’ asked Johnny.

‘Well, when you put it like that ,’ smiled Patrick.

‘Really you’re just like everyone else.’

‘Don’t push your luck,’ Patrick warned him.

‘Will you be dining with us this evening, gentlemen?’ asked a waiter.

‘Yes,’ replied Johnny, taking a menu, and passing one on to Patrick who was too deep in the alcove for the waiter to reach.

‘I thought he said, “Will you be dying with us?”’ admitted Patrick, who was feeling increasingly uneasy about his decision to tell Johnny the facts he had kept secret for thirty years.

‘Maybe he did,’ said Johnny. ‘We haven’t read the menu yet.’

‘I suppose “the young” will be taking drugs tonight,’ sighed Patrick, scanning the menu.

‘Ecstasy: the non-addictive high,’ said Johnny.

‘Call me old fashioned,’ blustered Patrick, ‘but I don’t like the sound of a non-addictive drug.’

Johnny felt frustratingly engulfed in his old style of banter with Patrick. These were just the sort of ‘old associations’ that he was supposed to sever, but what could he do? Patrick was a great friend and he wanted him to be less miserable.

‘Why do you think we’re so discontented?’ asked Johnny, settling for the smoked salmon.

‘I don’t know,’ lied Patrick. ‘I can’t decide between the onion soup and the traditional English goat’s cheese salad. An analyst once told me I was suffering from a “depression on top of a depression”.’

‘Well, at least you got on top of the first depression,’ said Johnny, closing the menu.

‘Exactly,’ smiled Patrick. ‘I don’t think one can improve on the traitor of Strasbourg whose last request was that he give the order to the firing squad himself. Christ! Look at that girl!’ he burst out in a half-mournful surge of excitement.

‘It’s whatshername, the model.’

‘Oh, yeah. Well, at least now I can get obsessed with an unobtainable fuck,’ said Patrick. ‘Obsession dispels depression: the third law of psychodynamics.’

‘What are the others?’

‘That people loathe those they’ve wronged, and that they despise the victims of misfortune, and … I’ll think of some more over dinner.’