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

‘Are you Sonny and Bridget’s daughter?’

‘Yes. I’m Belinda.’

‘Can’t you get to sleep?’ asked Patrick, sitting down on the stairs next to her. She shook her head. ‘Why not?’

‘Because of the party. Nanny said if I said my prayers properly I’d go to sleep, but I didn’t.’

‘Do you believe in God?’ asked Patrick.

‘I don’t know,’ said Belinda. ‘But if there is a God he’s not very good at it.’

Patrick laughed. ‘But why aren’t you at the party?’ he asked.

‘I’m not allowed. I’m meant to go to bed at nine.’

‘How mean,’ said Patrick. ‘Do you want me to smuggle you down?’

‘Mummy would see me. And Princess Margaret said I had to go to bed.’

‘In that case we must definitely smuggle you down. Or I could read you a story.’

‘Oh, that would be nice,’ said Belinda, and then she put her fingers to her lips and said, ‘Shh, there’s someone coming.’

At that moment Bridget rounded the corner of the corridor and saw Patrick and Belinda together on the stairs.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked Patrick.

‘I was just trying to find my way back to the party and I ran into Belinda.’

‘But what were you doing here in the first place?’

‘Hello, Mummy,’ interrupted Belinda.

‘Hello, darling,’ said Bridget, holding out her hand.

‘I came up here with a girl,’ Patrick explained.

‘Oh God, you’re making me feel very old,’ said Bridget. ‘So much for the security.’

‘I was just going to read Belinda a story.’

‘Sweet,’ said Bridget. ‘I should have been doing that years ago.’ She picked Belinda up in her arms. ‘You’re so heavy, nowadays,’ she groaned, smiling at Patrick firmly, but dismissively.

‘Well, good night,’ said Patrick, getting up from the stairs.

‘Night,’ yawned Belinda.

‘I’ve got something I have to tell you,’ said Bridget, as she started to carry Belinda down the corridor. ‘Mummy is going to stay at Granny’s tonight, and we’d like you to come along as well. There won’t be any room for Nanny, though.’

‘Oh good, I hate Nanny.’

‘I know, darling,’ said Bridget.

‘But why are we going to Granny’s?’

Patrick could no longer hear what they were saying as they went round the corner of the corridor.

* * *

Johnny Hall had been curious to meet Peter Porlock ever since Laura told him that Peter had needlessly paid for one of her abortions. When Laura introduced them, Peter wasted no time in swearing Johnny to secrecy about this ‘dreadful Cindy and Sonny thing’.

‘Of course I’ve known about it for ages,’ he began.

‘Whereas I had no idea,’ David Windfall chipped in, ‘even when Sonny asked me to bring her.’

‘That’s funny,’ said Laura, ‘I thought everybody knew.’

‘Some people may have suspected, but nobody knew the details,’ said Peter proudly.

‘Not even Sonny and Cindy,’ mocked Laura.

David, who was already apprised of Peter’s superior knowledge, drifted off and Laura followed.

Left alone with Johnny, Peter tried to correct any impression of frivolity he might have given by saying how worried he was about his ‘ailing papa’ to whom he had not bothered to address a word all evening. ‘Are your parentals still alive?’ he asked.

‘And kicking,’ said Johnny. ‘My mother would have managed to give an impression of mild disappointment if I’d become the youngest Prime Minister of England, so you can imagine what she feels about a moderately successful journalist. She reminds me of a story about Henry Miller visiting his dying mother with a pilot friend of his called Vincent. The old woman looked at her son and then at Vincent and said, “If only I could have a son like you, Vincent.”’

‘Look here, you won’t leak anything I’ve said to the press, will you?’ asked Peter.

‘Alas, the editorial pages of The Times aren’t yet given over entirely to love-nest scandals,’ said Johnny contemptuously.

‘Oh, The Times ,’ murmured Peter. ‘Well, I know it’s frightfully unfashionable, but I still think one should practise filial loyalty. It’s been frightfully easy for me: my mother was a saint and my father’s the most decent chap you could hope to meet.’

Johnny smiled vaguely, wishing Laura had charged Peter double.

‘Peter!’ said a concerned Princess Margaret.

‘Oh, ma’am, I didn’t see you,’ said Peter, bowing his head briefly.

‘I think you should go to the hall. I’m afraid your father isn’t at all well, and he’s being taken off by ambulance.’

‘Good God,’ said Peter. ‘Please excuse me, ma’am, I’ll go immediately.’

The Princess, who had announced in the hall that she would tell Peter herself, and forced her lady-in-waiting to intercept other well-wishers on the same mission, was thoroughly impressed by her own goodness.

‘And who are you?’ she asked Johnny in the most gracious possible manner.

‘Johnny Hall,’ said Johnny, extending a hand.

The republican omission of ma’am, and the thrusting and unacceptable invitation to a handshake, were enough to convince the Princess that Johnny was a man of no importance.

‘It must be funny having the same name as so many other people,’ she speculated. ‘I suppose there are hundreds of John Halls up and down the country.’

‘It teaches one to look for distinction elsewhere and not to rely on an accident of birth,’ said Johnny casually.

‘That’s where people go wrong,’ said the Princess, compressing her lips, ‘there is no accident in birth.’

She swept on before Johnny had a chance to reply.

* * *

Patrick walked down towards the first floor, the hubbub of the party growing louder as he descended past portraits by Lely and Lawrence and even a pair, dominating the first-floor landing, by Reynolds. The prodigious complacency which the Gravesend genes had carried from generation to generation, without the usual interludes of madness, diffidence or distinction, had defied the skills of all these painters, and, despite their celebrity, none of them had been able to make anything appealing out of the drooping eyelids and idiotically arrogant expressions of their sitters.

Thinking about Belinda, Patrick started half-consciously to walk down the stairs as he had in moments of stress when he was her age, leading with one foot and bringing the other down firmly beside it on the same step. As he approached the hall he felt an overwhelming urge to cast himself forward onto the stone floor, but stopped instead and held onto the banister, intrigued by this strange impulse, which he could not immediately explain.

Yvette had told him many times about the day he had fallen down the stairs at Lacoste and cut his hand. The story of his screams and the broken glass and Yvette’s fear that he had cut a tendon had installed themselves in his picture of childhood as an accepted anecdote, but now Patrick could feel the revival of the memory itself: he could remember imagining the frames of the pictures flying down the corridor and embedding themselves in his father’s chest, and decapitating Nicholas Pratt. He could feel the despairing urge to jump down the stairs to hide his guilt at snapping the stem of the glass by squeezing it so tightly. He stood on the stairs and remembered everything.

The security guard looked at him sceptically. He’d been worried ever since he allowed Patrick and Laura to go upstairs. Laura’s coming down on her own and claiming that Patrick was still in their room had strengthened his suspicions. Now Patrick was behaving very eccentrically, trailing one leg as he came down the stairs, staring at the ground. He must be on drugs, thought the security guard angrily. If he had his way he’d arrest Patrick and all the other rich cunts who thought they were above the law.