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

‘It must have split the world in half for you,’ said Johnny.

Patrick was taken aback by the precision of this comment.

‘Yes. Yes, I think that’s exactly what happened. How did you know?’

‘It seemed pretty obvious.’

‘It’s strange to hear someone say that it’s obvious. It always seemed to me so secret and complicated.’ Patrick paused. He felt that although what he was saying mattered to him enormously, there was a core of inarticulacy that he hadn’t attacked at all. His intellect could only generate more distinctions or define the distinctions better.

‘I always thought the truth would set me free,’ he said, ‘but the truth just drives you mad.’

‘Telling the truth might set you free.’

‘Maybe. But self-knowledge on its own is useless.’

‘Well, it enables you to suffer more lucidly,’ argued Johnny.

‘Oh, ya, I wouldn’t miss that for the world.’

‘In the end perhaps the only way to alleviate misery is to become more detached about yourself and more attached to something else,’ said Johnny.

‘Are you suggesting I take up a hobby?’ laughed Patrick. ‘Weaving baskets or sewing mailbags?’

‘Well, actually, I was trying to think of a way to avoid those two particular occupations,’ said Johnny.

‘But if I were released from my bitter and unpleasant state of mind,’ protested Patrick, ‘what would be left?’

‘Nothing much,’ admitted Johnny, ‘but think what you could put there instead.’

‘You’re making me dizzy … Oddly enough there was something about hearing the word mercy in Measure for Measure last night that made me imagine there might be a course that is neither bitter nor false, something that lies beyond argument. But if there is I can’t grasp it; all I know is that I’m tired of having these steel brushes whirring around the inside of my skull.’

Both men paused while the waiter silently cleared away their plates. Patrick was puzzled by how easy it had been to tell another person the most shameful and secret truth about his life. And yet he felt dissatisfied; the catharsis of confession eluded him. Perhaps he had been too abstract. His ‘father’ had become the codename for a set of his own psychological difficulties and he had forgotten the real man, with his grey curls and his wheezing chest and his proud face, who had made such clumsy efforts in his closing years to endear himself to those he had betrayed.

When Eleanor had finally gathered the courage to divorce David, he had gone into a decline. Like a disgraced torturer whose victim has died, he cursed himself for not pacing his cruelty better, guilt and self-pity competing for mastery of his mood. David had the further frustration of being defied by Patrick who, at the age of eight, inspired by his parents’ separation, refused one day to give in to his father’s sexual assaults. Patrick’s transformation of himself from a toy into a person shattered his father, who realized that Patrick must have known what was being done to him.

During this difficult time, David went to visit Nicholas Pratt in Sister Agnes, where he was recovering from a painful operation on his intestine following the failure of his fourth marriage. David, reeling from the prospect of his own divorce, found Nicholas lying in bed drinking champagne smuggled in by loyal friends, and only too ready to discuss how one should never trust a bloody woman.

‘I want someone to design me a fortress,’ said David, for whom Eleanor was proposing to build a small house surprisingly close to her own house in Lacoste. ‘I don’t want to look out on the fucking world again.’

‘Completely understand,’ slurred Nicholas, whose speech had become at once thicker and more staccato in his postoperative haze. ‘Only trouble with the bloody world is the bloody people in it,’ he said. ‘Give me that writing paper, would you?’

While David paced up and down the room, flouting the hospital rules by smoking a cigar, Nicholas, who liked to surprise his friends with his amateur draughtsmanship, made a sketch worthy of David’s misanthropic ecstasy.

‘Keep the buggers out,’ he said when he had finished, tossing the page across the bedclothes.

David picked it up and saw a pentagonal house with no windows on the outside and a central courtyard in which Nicholas had poetically planted a cypress tree, flaring above the low roof like a black flame.

The architect who was given this sketch took pity on David and introduced a single window into the exterior wall of the drawing room. David locked the shutters and stuffed crunched-up copies of The Times into the aperture, cursing himself for not sacking the architect when he first visited him in his disastrously converted farmhouse near Aix, with its algae-choked swimming pool. He pressed the window closed on the newspaper and then sealed it with the thick black tape favoured by those who wish to gas themselves efficiently. Finally a curtain was drawn across the window and only reopened by rare visitors who were soon made aware of their error by David’s rage.

The cypress tree never flourished and its twisted trunk and grey peeling bark writhed in a dismal parody of Nicholas’s noble vision. Nicholas himself, after designing the house, was too busy ever to accept an invitation. ‘One doesn’t have fun with David Melrose these days,’ he would tell people in London. This was a polite way to describe the state of mental illness into which David had degenerated. Woken every night by his own screaming nightmares, he lay in bed almost continuously for seven years, wearing those yellow-and-white flannel pyjamas, now worn through at the elbows, which were the only things he had inherited from his father, thanks to the generous intervention of his mother who had refused to see him leave the funeral empty-handed. The most enthusiastic thing he could do was to smoke a cigar, a habit his father had first encouraged in him, and one he had passed on to Patrick, among so many other disadvantages, like a baton thrust from one wheezing generation to the next. If David left his house he was dressed like a tramp, muttering to himself in giant supermarkets on the outskirts of Marseilles. Sometimes in winter he wandered about the house in dark glasses, trailing a Japanese dressing gown, and clutching a glass of pastis, checking again and again that the heating was off so that he didn’t waste any money. The contempt that saved him from complete madness drove him almost completely mad. When he emerged from his depression he was a ghost, not improved but diminished, trying to tempt people to stay in the house that had been designed to repel their unlikely invasion.

Patrick stayed in this house during his adolescence, sitting in the courtyard, shooting olive stones over the roof so that they at least could be free. His arguments with his father, or rather his one interminable argument, reached a crucial point when Patrick said something more fundamentally insulting to David than David had just said to him, and David, conscious that he was growing slower and weaker while his son grew faster and nastier, reached into his pocket for his heart pills and, shaking them into his tortured rheumatic hands, said with a melancholy whisper, ‘You mustn’t say those things to your old Dad.’

Patrick’s triumph was tainted by the guilty conviction that his father was about to die of a heart attack. Still, things were not the same after that, especially when Patrick was able to patronize his disinherited father with a small income, and cheapen him with his money as Eleanor had once cheapened him with hers. During those closing years Patrick’s terror had largely been eclipsed by pity, and also by boredom in the company of his ‘poor old Dad’. He had sometimes dreamed that they might have an honest conversation, but a moment in his father’s company made it clear that this would never happen. And yet Patrick felt there was something missing, something he wasn’t admitting to himself, let alone telling Johnny.