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

‘What is, ma’am?’ asked Nicholas.

‘Child abuse,’ said the Princess. ‘I was at a concert for the NSPCC last weekend, and they told me it’s on the increase.’

‘Perhaps it’s just that people are more inclined to wash their dirty linen in public nowadays,’ said Nicholas. ‘Frankly I find that tendency much more worrying than all this fuss about child abuse. Children probably didn’t realize they were being abused until they had to watch it on television every night. I believe in America they’ve started suing their parents for bringing them up badly.’

‘Really?’ giggled the Princess. ‘I must tell Mummy, she’ll be fascinated.’

Nicholas burst out laughing. ‘But seriously, ma’am, the thing that worries me isn’t all this child abuse, but the appalling way that people spoil their children these days.’

‘Isn’t it dreadful?’ gasped the Princess. ‘I see more and more children with absolutely no discipline at all. It’s frightening.’

‘Terrifying,’ Nicholas confirmed.

‘But I don’t think that the NSPCC were talking about our world,’ said the Princess, generously extending to Nicholas the circle of light that radiated from her presence. ‘What it really shows is the emptiness of the socialist dream. They thought that every problem could be solved by throwing money at it, but it simply isn’t true. People may have been poor, but they were happy because they lived in real communities. My mother says that when she visited the East End during the Blitz she met more people there with real dignity than you could hope to find in the entire corps diplomatique.’

* * *

‘What I find with beautiful women,’ said Peter Porlock to Robin Parker as they drifted towards the dining room, ‘is that, after one’s waited around for ages, they all arrive at once, as buses are supposed to do. Not that I’ve ever waited around for a bus, except at that British Heritage thing in Washington. Do you remember?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Robin Parker, his eyes swimming in and out of focus, like pale blue goldfish, behind the thick lenses of his glasses. ‘They hired a double-decker London bus for us.’

‘Some people said “coals to Newcastle”,’ said Peter, ‘but I was jolly pleased to see what I’d been missing all these years.’

* * *

Tony Fowles was full of amusing and frivolous ideas. Just as there were boxes at the opera where you could hear the music but not see the action, he said that there should be soundproof boxes where you could neither hear the music nor see the action, but just look at the other people with very powerful binoculars.

The Princess laughed merrily. Something about Tony’s effete silliness made her feel relaxed, but all too soon she was separated from him and placed next to Sonny at the far end of the table.

* * *

‘Ideally, the number of guests at a private dinner party,’ said Jacques d’Alantour, raising a judicious index finger, ‘should be more than the graces and less than the muses! But this,’ he said, spreading his hands out and closing his eyes as if words were about to fail him, ‘this is something absolutely extraordinary.’

Few people were more used than the ambassador to looking at a dinner table set for forty, but Bridget smiled radiantly at him, while trying to remember how many muses there were supposed to be.

* * *

‘Do you have any politics?’ Princess Margaret asked Sonny.

‘Conservative, ma’am,’ said Sonny proudly.

‘So I assumed. But are you involved in politics? For myself I don’t mind who’s in government so long as they’re good at governing. What we must avoid at all costs is these windscreen wipers: left, right, left, right.’

Sonny laughed immoderately at the thought of political windscreen wipers.

‘I’m afraid I’m only involved at a very local level, ma’am,’ he replied. ‘The Little Soddington bypass, that sort of thing. Trying to make sure that footpaths don’t spring up all over the place. People seem to think that the countryside is just an enormous park for factory workers to drop their sweet papers in. Well, those of us who live here feel rather differently about it.’

‘One needs someone responsible keeping an eye on things at a local level,’ said Princess Margaret reassuringly. ‘So many of the things that get ruined are little out-of-the-way places that one only notices once they’ve already been ruined. One drives past thinking how nice they must have once been.’

‘You’re absolutely right, ma’am,’ agreed Sonny.

‘Is it venison?’ asked the Princess. ‘It’s hard to tell under this murky sauce.’

‘Yes, it is venison,’ said Sonny nervously. ‘I’m awfully sorry about the sauce. As you say, it’s perfectly disgusting.’ He could remember checking with her private secretary that the Princess liked venison.

She pushed her plate away and picked up her cigarette lighter. ‘I get sent fallow deer from Richmond Park,’ she said smugly. ‘You have to be on the list. The Queen said to me, “Put yourself on the list,” so I did.’

‘How very sensible, ma’am,’ simpered Sonny.

* * *

‘Venison is the one meat I rr-eally don’t like,’ Jacques d’Alantour admitted to Caroline Porlock, ‘but I don’t want to create a diplomatic incident, and so…’ He popped a piece of meat into his mouth, wearing a theatrically martyred expression which Caroline later described as being ‘a bit much’.

‘Do you like it? It’s venison,’ said Princess Margaret leaning over slightly towards Monsieur d’Alantour, who was sitting on her right.

‘Really, it is something absolutely mar-vellous, ma’am,’ said the ambassador. ‘I did not know one could find such cooking in your country. The sauce is extremely subtle.’ He narrowed his eyes to give an impression of subtlety.

The Princess allowed her views about the sauce to be eclipsed by the gratification of hearing England described as ‘your country’, which she took to be an acknowledgement of her own feeling that it belonged, if not legally, then in some much more profound sense, to her own family.

In his anxiety to show his love for the venison of merry old England, the ambassador raised his fork with such an extravagant gesture of appreciation that he flicked glistening brown globules over the front of the Princess’s blue tulle dress.

‘I am prostrated with horr-rror!’ he exclaimed, feeling that he was on the verge of a diplomatic incident.

The Princess compressed her lips and turned down the corners of her mouth, but said nothing. Putting down the cigarette holder into which she had been screwing a cigarette, she pinched her napkin between her fingers and handed it over to Monsieur d’Alantour.

‘Wipe!’ she said with terrifying simplicity.

The ambassador pushed back his chair and sank to his knees obediently, first dipping the corner of the napkin in a glass of water. While he rubbed at the spots of sauce on her dress, the Princess lit her cigarette and turned to Sonny.

‘I thought I couldn’t dislike the sauce more when it was on my plate,’ she said archly.

‘The sauce has been a disaster,’ said Sonny, whose face was now maroon with extra blood. ‘I can’t apologize enough, ma’am.’

‘There’s no need for you to apologize,’ she said.

Jacqueline d’Alantour, fearing that her husband might be performing an act inconsistent with the dignity of France, had risen and walked around the table. Half the guests were pretending not to have noticed what was going on and the other half were not bothering to pretend.

‘What I admire about P.M.,’ said Nicholas Pratt, who sat on Bridget’s left at the other end of the table, ‘is the way she puts everyone at their ease.’