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

Respecting Patrick’s silence, Johnny had eaten his way through most of his corn-fed chicken by the time Patrick spoke again.

‘So, what can one say about a man who rapes his own child?’

‘I suppose it might help if you could see him as sick rather than evil,’ Johnny suggested limply. ‘I can’t get over this,’ he added, ‘it’s really awful.’

‘I’ve tried what you suggest,’ said Patrick, ‘but then, what is evil if not sickness celebrating itself? While my father had any power he showed no remorse or restraint, and when he was poor and abandoned he only showed contempt and morbidity.’

‘Maybe you can see his actions as evil, but see him as sick. Maybe one can’t condemn another person, only their actions…’ Johnny hesitated, reluctant to take on the role of the defence. ‘Maybe he couldn’t stop himself anymore than you could stop yourself taking drugs.’

‘Maybe, maybe, maybe,’ said Patrick, ‘but I didn’t harm anyone else by taking drugs.’

‘Really? What about Debbie?’

‘She was a grown-up, she could choose. I certainly gave her a hard time,’ Patrick admitted. ‘I don’t know, I try to negotiate truces of one sort or another, but then I run up against this unnegotiable rage.’ Patrick pushed his plate back and lit a cigarette. ‘I don’t want any pudding, do you?’

‘No, just coffee.’

‘Two coffees, please,’ said Patrick to the waiter who was now theatrically tight-lipped. ‘I’m sorry I snapped at you earlier, I was in the middle of trying to say something rather tricky.’

‘I was only trying to do my job,’ said the waiter.

‘Of course,’ said Patrick.

‘Do you think there’s any way you can forgive him?’ asked Johnny.

‘Oh, yes,’ said the waiter, ‘it wasn’t that bad.’

‘No, not you,’ laughed Johnny.

‘Sorry I spoke,’ said the waiter, going off to fetch the coffee.

‘Your father, I mean.’

‘Well, if that absurd waiter can forgive me, who knows what chain reaction of absolution might not be set in motion?’ said Patrick. ‘But then neither revenge nor forgiveness change what happened. They’re sideshows, of which forgiveness is the less attractive because it represents a collaboration with one’s persecutors. I don’t suppose that forgiveness was uppermost in the minds of people who were being nailed to a cross until Jesus, if not the first man with a Christ complex still the most successful, wafted onto the scene. Presumably those who enjoyed inflicting cruelty could hardly believe their luck and set about popularizing the superstition that their victims could only achieve peace of mind by forgiving them.’

‘You don’t think it might be a profound spiritual truth?’ asked Johnny.

Patrick puffed out his cheeks. ‘I suppose it might be, but as far as I’m concerned, what is meant to show the spiritual advantages of forgiveness in fact shows the psychological advantages of thinking you’re the son of God.’

‘So how do you get free?’ asked Johnny.

‘Search me,’ said Patrick. ‘Obviously, or I wouldn’t have told you, I think it has something to do with telling the truth. I’m only at the beginning, but presumably there comes a point when you grow bored of telling it, and that point coincides with your “freedom”.’

‘So rather than forgive you’re going to try and talk it out.’

‘Yes, narrative fatigue is what I’m going for. If the talk cure is our modern religion then narrative fatigue must be its apotheosis,’ said Patrick suavely.

‘But the truth includes an understanding of your father.’

‘I couldn’t understand my father better and I still don’t like what he did.’

‘Of course you don’t. Perhaps there is nothing to say except, “What a bastard.” I was only groping for an alternative because you said you were exhausted by hatred.’

‘I am, but at the moment I can’t imagine any kind of liberation except eventual indifference.’

‘Or detachment,’ said Johnny. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll ever be indifferent.’

‘Yes, detachment,’ said Patrick, who didn’t mind having his vocabulary corrected on this occasion. ‘Indifference just sounded cooler.’

The two men drank their coffee, Johnny feeling that he had been drawn too far away from Patrick’s original revelation to ask, ‘What actually happened?’

Patrick, for his part, suspected that he had left the soil of his own experience, where wasps still gnawed at the gaping figs and he stared down madly onto his own five-year-old head, in order to avoid an uneasiness that lay even deeper than the uneasiness of his confession. The roots of his imagination were in the Pagan South and the unseemly liberation it had engendered in his father, but the discussion had somehow remained in the Cotswolds being dripped on by the ghosts of England’s rude elms. The opportunity to make a grand gesture and say, ‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine,’ had somehow petered out into ethical debate.

‘Thanks for telling me what you’ve told me,’ said Johnny.

‘No need to get Californian about it, I’m sure it’s nothing but a burden.’

‘No need to be so English,’ said Johnny. ‘I am honoured. Any time you want to talk about it I’m available.’

Patrick felt disarmed and infinitely sad for a moment. ‘Shall we head off to this wretched party?’ he said.

They walked out of the dining room together, passing David Windfall and Cindy Smith.

‘There was an unexpected fluctuation in the exchange rate,’ David was explaining. ‘Everyone panicked like mad, except for me, the reason being that I was having a tremendously boozy lunch with Sonny in his club. At the end of the day I’d made a huge amount of money from doing absolutely nothing while everybody else had been very badly stung. My boss was absolutely livid.’

‘Do you get on well with your boss?’ asked Cindy who really couldn’t have cared less.

‘Of course I do,’ said David. ‘You Americans call it “internal networking”, we just call it good manners.’

‘Gee,’ said Cindy.

‘We’d better go in separate cars,’ said Patrick, as he walked through the bar with Johnny, ‘I might want to leave early.’

‘Right,’ said Johnny, ‘see you there.’

SONNY’S INNER CIRCLE, THE forty guests who were dining at Cheatley before the party, hung about in the Yellow Room, unable to sit down before Princess Margaret chose to.

‘Do you believe in God, Nicholas?’ asked Bridget, introducing Nicholas Pratt into the conversation she was having with Princess Margaret.

Nicholas rolled his eyeballs wearily, as if someone had tried to revive a tired old piece of scandal.

‘What intrigues me, my dear, is whether he still believes in us. Or have we given the supreme schoolmaster a nervous breakdown? In any case, I think it was one of the Bibescos who said, “To a man of the world, the universe is a suburb.”’

‘I don’t like the sound of your friend Bibesco,’ said Princess Margaret, wrinkling her nose. ‘How can the universe be a suburb? It’s too silly.’

‘What I think he meant, ma’am,’ replied Nicholas, ‘is that sometimes the largest questions are the most trivial, because they cannot be answered, while the seemingly trivial ones, like where one sits at dinner,’ he gave this example while raising his eyebrows at Bridget, ‘are the most fascinating.’

‘Aren’t people funny? I don’t find where one sits at dinner fascinating at all,’ lied the Princess. ‘Besides, as you know,’ she went on, ‘my sister is the head of the Church of England, and I don’t like listening to atheistic views. People think they’re being so clever, but it just shows a lack of humility.’ Silencing Nicholas and Bridget with her disapproval, the Princess took a gulp from her glass of whisky. ‘Apparently it’s on the increase,’ she said enigmatically.