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

‘To who?’ asked Bridget.

‘The one you saw in Peter’s photograph album last weekend with a face like a crème brûlée after the first blow of the spoon, all covered in little cracks.’

‘Not everyone can have a lover who’s rich and beautiful,’ said Bridget, sliding through the sheets towards him.

‘Oaw, give over, luv, give over,’ said Nicholas in what he imagined to be a Geordie accent. He rolled out of bed and, moaning, ‘Death and destruction,’ crawled histrionically across the crimson carpet towards the open door of the bathroom.

Bridget looked critically at Nicholas’s body as he clambered to his feet. He had got a lot fatter in the past year. Maybe older men were not the answer. Twenty-three years was a big difference and at twenty, Bridget had not yet caught the marriage fever that tormented the older Watson-Scott sisters as they galloped towards the thirtieth year of their scatterbrained lives. All Nicholas’s friends were such wrinklies and some of them were a real yawn. You couldn’t exactly drop acid with Nicholas. Well, you could; in fact, she had, but it wasn’t the same as with Barry. Nicholas didn’t have the right music, the right clothes, the right attitude. She felt quite bad about Barry, but a girl had to keep her options open.

The thing about Nicholas was that he really was rich and beautiful and he was a baronet, which was nice and sort of Jane Austeny. Still, it wouldn’t be long before people started saying, ‘You can tell he used to be good-looking,’ and someone else would intervene charitably with, ‘Oh, no, he still is.’ In the end she would probably marry him and she would be the fourth Lady Pratt. Then she could divorce him and get half a million pounds, or whatever, and keep Barry as her sex slave and still call herself Lady Pratt in shops. God, sometimes she was so cynical it was frightening.

She knew that Nicholas thought it was the sex that kept them together. It was certainly what had got them together at the party where they first met. Nicholas had been quite drunk and asked her if she was a ‘natural blonde’. Yawn, yawn, what a tacky question. Still, Barry was in Glastonbury and she’d been feeling a bit restless and so she gave him this heavy look and said, ‘Why don’t you find out for yourself?’ as she slipped out of the room. He thought he had found out, but what he didn’t know was that she dyed all her hair. If you do something cosmetic, you might as well do it thoroughly, that was her motto.

In the bathroom, Nicholas stuck out his tongue and admired its thickly coated surface, still tinged with blackish purple from last night’s coffee and red wine. It was all very well to make jokes about Sarah Watford’s double chins, but the truth was that unless he held his head up like a Guardsman on parade he had one himself. He couldn’t face shaving, but he dabbed on a little of Bridget’s make-up. One didn’t want to look like the old queen in Death in Venice , with rouge trickling down cholera-fevered cheeks, but without a little light powder he had what people called ‘a distinctly unhealthy pallor’. Bridget’s make-up was rather basic, like her sometimes truly appalling clothes. Whatever one said about Fiona (and one had said some thoroughly unpleasant things in one’s time) she did have the most amazing creams and masks sent over from Paris. He sometimes wondered if Bridget might not be (one had to slip into the softening nuances of the French tongue) insortable. Last weekend at Peter’s she had spent the whole of Sunday lunch giggling like a fourteen-year-old.

And then there was her background. He did not know when the house of Watson and the house of Scott had seen fit to unite their fortunes, but he could tell at a glance that the Watson-Scotts were Old Vicarage material who would kill to have their daughter’s engagement in Country Life. The father was fond of the races and when Nicholas had taken him and his keen-on-roses wife to Le Nozze di Figaro at Covent Garden, Roddy Watson-Scott had said, ‘They’re under starter’s orders,’ as the conductor mounted the podium. If the Watson-Scotts were just a little too obscure, at least everyone was agreed that Bridget was flavour of the month and he was a lucky dog to have her.

If he married again he would not choose a girl like Bridget. Apart from anything else, she was completely ignorant. She had ‘done’ Emma for A-level, but since then, as far as he could make out, she only read illustrated magazines called Oz or The Furry Freak Brothers supplied to her by a seamy character called Barry. She spent hours poring over pictures of spiralling eyeballs and exploding intestines and policemen with the faces of Doberman pinschers. His own intestines were in a state of bitter confusion and he wanted to clear Bridget out of the bedroom before they exploded.

‘Darling!’ he shouted, or rather tried to shout. The sound came out as a croak. He cleared his throat and spat in the basin.

‘You couldn’t be an angel and get my glass of orange juice from the dining room, could you? And a cup of tea?’

‘Oh, all right.’

Bridget had been lying on her stomach, playing with herself lazily. She rolled out of bed with an exaggerated sigh. God, Nicholas was boring. What was the point of having servants? He treated them better than he treated her. She slouched off to the dining room.

Nicholas sat down heavily on the teak lavatory seat. The thrill of educating Bridget socially and sexually had begun to pall when he had stopped thinking about how wonderfully good he was at it and noticed how little she was willing to learn. After this trip to France he would have to go to Asprey’s to get her a going-away present. And yet he did not feel ready for that girl from the Old Masters department of Christie’s – a simple string of pearls about her woolly blue neck – who longed to exhaust herself helping a chap to keep his estate intact; a general’s daughter used to an atmosphere of discipline. A girl, his thoughts expanded gloomily, who would enjoy the damp little hills of Shropshire’s Welsh border, something he had yet to achieve himself despite owning so very many of them and having ‘farmer’ next to his still unsuccessful candidature for Pratt’s club. The Wits never tired of saying, ‘But, Nicholas, I thought you owned the place.’ He’d made too many enemies to get himself elected.

Nicholas’s bowels exploded. He sat there sweating miserably like one of the paranoid wrecks in Bridget’s favourite cartoon strips. He could imagine Fattie Poole squealing, ‘The man’s an absolute cunt, and if they let him in here, I shall have to spend the rest of my life at the Turf.’ It had been a mistake to get David Melrose to propose him, but David had been one of his father’s best friends, and ten years ago he’d not been as misanthropic or unpopular as he was now, nor had he spent so much time in Lacoste.

* * *

The route from Clabon Mews to Heathrow was too familiar to register on Nicholas’s senses. He had moved into the soporific phase of his hangover, and felt slightly nauseous. Very tired, he slouched in the corner of the taxi. Bridget was less jaded about foreign travel. Nicholas had taken her to Greece in July and Tuscany in August, and she still liked the idea of how glamorous her life had become.

She disliked Nicholas’s English Abroad outfits, particularly the panama hat he had on today and wore tilted over his face to show that he was not in the mood to talk. Nor did she like his off-white wild-silk jacket and the yellow corduroy trousers. She was embarrassed by the shirt with very narrow dark red stripes and a stiff white rounded collar, and by his highly polished shoes. He was a complete freak about shoes. He had fifty pairs, all made for him, and literally identical, except for silly details which he treated as world-shatteringly important.