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

‘I don’t know whether I should tell you this,’ said Aurora. ‘I probably shouldn’t.’ She frowned, glancing at Bridget.

‘What?’ Bridget implored her. ‘You’ve got to tell me.’

‘No,’ said Aurora. ‘It’ll only upset you. It was stupid of me to mention it.’

‘You have to tell me now,’ said Bridget desperately.

‘Well, of course you’re the last to know – one always is in these situations, but it’s been fairly common knowledge…’ Aurora lingered suggestively on the word ‘common’ which she had always been fond of, ‘that Sonny and Miss Smith have been having an affair for some time.’

‘God,’ said Bridget. ‘So that’s who it is. I knew something was going on…’ She suddenly felt very tired and sad, and looked as if she was going to cry.

‘Oh, darling, don’t,’ said Aurora. ‘Chin up,’ she added consolingly.

But Bridget was overwhelmed and went up with Aurora to her bedroom and told her all about the telephone call she’d overheard that morning, swearing her to a secrecy to which Aurora swore several other people before the evening was out. Bridget’s friend advised her to ‘go on the warpath’, thinking this was the policy likely to yield the largest number of amusing anecdotes.

* * *

‘Oh, do come and help us,’ said China who was sitting with Angus Broghlie and Amanda Pratt. It was not a group that Patrick had any appetite to join.

‘We’re making a list of all the people whose fathers aren’t really their fathers,’ she explained.

‘Hmm, I’d do anything to be on it,’ groaned Patrick. ‘Anyway, it would take far too long to do in one evening.’

* * *

David Windfall, driven by a fanatical desire to exonerate himself from the blame of bringing Cindy Smith and making his hostess angry, rushed up to his fellow guests to explain that he had just been obeying orders, and it wasn’t really his idea. He was about to make the same speech to Peter Porlock when he realized that Peter, as Sonny’s best friend, might view it as faint-hearted, and so he checked himself and remarked instead on ‘that dreadful christening’ where they had last met.

‘Dreadful,’ confirmed Peter. ‘What’s the vestry for, if it isn’t to dump babies along with one’s umbrella and so forth? But of course the vicar wanted all the children in the church. He’s a sort of flower child who believes in swinging services, but the purpose of the Church of England is to be the Church of England. It’s a force of social cohesion. If it’s going to get evangelical we don’t want anything to do with it.’

‘Hear, hear,’ said David. ‘I gather Bridget’s very upset about my bringing Cindy Smith,’ he added, unable to keep away from the subject.

‘Absolutely furious,’ laughed Peter. ‘She had a blazing row with Sonny in the library, I’m told: audible above the band and the din, apparently. Poor Sonny, he’s been locked in there all evening,’ grinned Peter, nodding his head towards the door. ‘Stole in there to have a tête-à-tête , or rather a jambe-à-jambe , I should imagine, with Miss Smith, then the blazing row, and now he’s stuck with Robin Parker trying to cheer himself up by having his Poussin authenticated. The thing is for you to stick to your story. You met Cindy, wife couldn’t come, asked her instead, foolishly didn’t check, nothing to do with Sonny. Something along those lines.’

‘Of course,’ said David who had already told a dozen people the opposite story.

‘Bridget didn’t actually see them at it, and you know how women are in these situations: they believe what they want to believe.’

‘Hmm,’ said David, who’d already told Bridget he was just obeying orders. He winced as he saw Sonny emerging from the library nearby. Did Sonny know that he’d told Bridget?

‘Sonny!’ squealed David, his voice slipping into falsetto.

Sonny ignored him and boomed, ‘It is a Poussin!’ to Peter.

‘Oh, well done,’ said Peter, as if Sonny had painted it himself. ‘Best possible birthday present to find that it’s the real thing and not just a “school of”—’

‘The trees,’ said Robin, slipping his hand inside his dinner jacket for a moment, ‘are unmistakable.’

‘Will you excuse us?’ Sonny asked Robin, still ignoring David. ‘I have to have a word with Peter in private.’ Sonny and Peter went into the library and closed the door.

‘I’ve been a bloody fool,’ said Sonny. ‘Not least for trusting David Windfall. That’s the last time I’m having him under my roof. And now I’ve got a wife crisis on my hands.’

‘Don’t be too hard on yourself,’ said Peter needlessly.

‘Well, you know, I was driven to it,’ said Sonny, immediately taking up Peter’s suggestion. ‘I mean, Bridget’s not having a son and everything has been frightfully hard. But when it comes to the crunch I’m not sure I’d like life here without the old girl running the place. Cindy has got some very peculiar ideas. I’m not sure what they are, but I can sense it.’

‘The trouble is it’s all become so complicated,’ said Peter. ‘One doesn’t really know where one stands with women. I mean, I was reading about this sixteenth-century Russian marriage-guidance thing, and it advises you to beat your wife lovingly so as not to render her permanently blind or deaf. If you said that sort of thing nowadays they’d string you up. But, you know, there’s a lot in it, obviously in a slightly milder form. It’s like the old adage about native bearers: “Beat them for no reason and they won’t give you a reason to beat them.”’

Sonny looked a little bewildered. As he later told some of his friends, ‘When it was all hands on deck with the Bridget crisis, I’m afraid Peter didn’t really pull his weight. He just waffled on about sixteenth-century Russian pamphlets.’

* * *

‘It was that lovely judge Melford Stevens,’ said Kitty, ‘who said to a rapist, “I shall not send you to prison but back to the Midlands, which is punishment enough.” I know one isn’t meant to say that sort of thing, but it is rather marvellous, isn’t it? I mean England used to be full of that sort of wonderfully eccentric character, but now everybody is so grey and goody-goody.’

* * *

‘I frightfully dislike this bit,’ said Sonny, struggling to keep up the appearance of a jovial host. ‘Why does the band leader introduce the musicians, as if anyone wanted to know their names? I mean, one’s given up announcing one’s own guests, so why should these chaps get themselves announced?’

‘Couldn’t agree with you more, old bean,’ said Alexander Politsky. ‘In Russia, the grand families had their own estate band, and there was no more question of introducing them than there was of presenting your scullion to a grand duke. When we went shooting and there was a cold river to cross, the beaters would lie in the water and form a sort of bridge. Nobody felt they had to know their names in order to walk over their heads.’

‘I think that’s going a bit far,’ said Sonny. ‘I mean, walking over their heads. But, you see, that’s why we didn’t have a revolution.’

‘The reason you didn’t have a revolution, old bean,’ said Alexander, ‘is because you had two of them: the Civil War and the Glorious one.’

* * *

‘And on cornet,’ said Joe Martin, the band leader, ‘“Chilly Willy” Watson!’

Patrick, who had been paying almost no attention to the introductions, was intrigued by the sound of a familiar name. It certainly couldn’t be the Chilly Willy he’d known in New York. He must be dead by now. Patrick glanced round anyway to have a look at the man who was standing up in the front row to play his brief solo. With his bulging cheeks and his dinner jacket he couldn’t have been less reminiscent of the street junkie whom Patrick had scored from in Alphabet City. Chilly Willy had been a toothless, hollow-cheeked scavenger, shuffling about on the edge of oblivion, clutching on to a pair of trousers too baggy for his cadaverous frame. This jazz musician was vigorous and talented, and definitely black, whereas Chilly, with his jaundice and his pallor, although obviously a black man, had managed to look yellow.