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

‘Not at all,’ said Patrick. ‘On the contrary, I remember your being kind. When you’re young it makes a difference to meet people who are kind, however rarely. You’d imagine they’re buried under the routine of horror, but in fact incidents of kindness get thrown into sharp relief.’

‘Have you forgiven your father?’ asked Anne.

‘Oddly enough you’ve caught me on the right evening. A week ago I would have lied or said something dismissive, but I was just describing over dinner exactly what I had to forgive my father.’

‘And?’

‘Well,’ said Patrick, ‘over dinner I was rather against forgiveness, and I still think that it’s detachment rather than appeasement that will set me free, but if I could imagine a mercy that was purely human, and not one that rested on the Greatest Story Ever Told, I might extend it to my father for being so unhappy. I just can’t do it out of piety. I’ve had enough near-death experiences to last me a lifetime, and not once was I greeted by a white-robed figure at the end of a tunnel – or only once and he turned out to be an exhausted junior doctor in the emergency ward of the Charing Cross Hospital. There may be something to this idea that you have to be broken in order to be renewed, but renewal doesn’t have to consist of a lot of phoney reconciliations!’

‘What about some genuine ones?’ said Anne.

‘What impresses me more than the repulsive superstition that I should turn the other cheek, is the intense unhappiness my father lived with. I ran across a diary his mother wrote during the First World War. After pages of gossip and a long passage about how marvellously they’d managed to keep up the standards at some large country house, defying the Kaiser with the perfection of their cucumber sandwiches, there are two short sentences: “Geoffrey wounded again”, about her husband in the trenches, and “David has rickets”, about her son at his prep school. Presumably he was not just suffering from malnutrition, but being assaulted by paedophiliac schoolmasters and beaten by older boys. This very traditional combination of maternal coldness and official perversion helped to make him the splendid man he turned into, but to forgive someone, one would have to be convinced that they’d made some effort to change the disastrous course that genetics, class, or upbringing proposed for them.’

‘If he’d changed the course he wouldn’t need forgiving,’ said Anne. ‘That’s the whole deal with forgiving. Anyhow, I don’t say you’re wrong not to forgive him, but you can’t stay stuck with this hatred.’

‘There’s no point in staying stuck,’ Patrick agreed. ‘But there’s even less point in pretending to be free. I feel on the verge of a great transformation, which may be as simple as becoming interested in other things.’

‘What?’ said Anne. ‘No more father-bashing? No more drugs? No more snobbery?’

‘Steady on,’ gasped Patrick. ‘Mind you, this evening I had a brief hallucination that the world was real…’

‘“An hallucination that the world was real” – you oughta be Pope.’

‘Real,’ Patrick continued, ‘and not just composed of a series of effects – the orange lights on a wet pavement, a leaf clinging to the windscreen, the sucking sound of a taxi’s tyres on a rainy street.’

‘Very wintery effects,’ said Anne.

‘Well, it is February,’ said Patrick. ‘Anyway, for a moment the world seemed to be solid and out there and made up of things.’

‘That’s progress,’ said Anne. ‘You used to belong to the the-world-is-a-private-movie school.’

‘You can only give things up once they start to let you down. I gave up drugs when the pleasure and the pain became simultaneous and I might as well have been shooting up a vial of my own tears. As to the naive faith that rich people are more interesting than poor ones, or titled people more interesting than untitled ones, it would be impossible to sustain if people didn’t also believe that they became more interesting by association. I can feel the death throes of that particular delusion, especially as I patrol this room full of photo opportunities and feel my mind seizing up with boredom.’

‘That’s your own fault.’

‘As to my “father-bashing”,’ said Patrick, ignoring Anne’s comment, ‘I thought of him this evening without thinking about his influence on me, just as a tired old man who’d fucked up his life, wheezing away his last years in that faded blue shirt he wore in the summer. I pictured him sitting in the courtyard of that horrible house, doing The Times ’ crossword, and he struck me as more pathetic and more ordinary , and in the end less worthy of attention.’

‘That’s what I feel about my dreadful old mother,’ said Anne. ‘During the Depression, which for some of us never ended, she used to collect stray cats and feed them and look after them. The house would be full of cats. I was just a kid, so naturally I’d get to love them, and play with them, but then in the autumn my crazy old mother would start muttering, “They’ll never make it through the winter, they’ll never make it through the winter.” The only reason they weren’t going to make it through the winter was that she’d soak a towel in ether and drop it in the old brass washing machine and pile the cats in afterward, and when they’d “fallen asleep” she’d turn on the washing machine and drown the poor buggers. Our whole garden was a cat cemetery, and you couldn’t dig a hole or play a game without little cat skeletons turning up. There was a terrible scratching sound as they tried to get out of the washing machine. I can remember standing by the kitchen table – I was only as high as the kitchen table – while my mother loaded them in and I’d say, “Don’t, please don’t,” and she’d be muttering, “They’ll never make it through the winter.” She was ghastly and quite mad, but when I grew up I figured that her worst punishment was to be herself and I didn’t have to do anything more.’

‘No wonder you get nervous in the English countryside when people start talking about killing animals. Perhaps that’s all identity is: seeing the logic of your own experience and being true to it. If only Victor was with us now!’

‘Oh, yes, poor Victor,’ said Anne. ‘But he was looking for a non-psychological approach to identity,’ she reminded Patrick with a wry smile.

‘That always puzzled me,’ he admitted. ‘It seemed like insisting on an overland route from England to America.’

‘If you’re a philosopher, there is an overland route from England to America,’ said Anne.

‘Oh, by the way, did you hear that George Watford had a stroke?’

‘Yeah, I’m sorry to hear that. I remember meeting him at your parents.’

‘It’s the end of an era,’ said Patrick.

‘It’s the end of a party as well,’ said Anne. ‘Look, the band is going home.’

* * *

When Robin Parker asked Sonny if they could have ‘a private word’ in the library, Sonny not only felt that he’d spent his entire birthday party having difficult interviews in that wretched room, but also that, as he’d suspected (and he couldn’t help pausing here to congratulate himself on his perspicacity), Robin was going to blackmail him for more money.

‘Well, what is it,’ he said gruffly, once again sitting at his library desk.

‘It isn’t a Poussin,’ said Robin, ‘so I really don’t want to authenticate it. Other people, including experts, might think it was, but I know it isn’t.’ Robin sighed. ‘I’d like my letter back and of course I’ll return the … fee,’ he said, placing two thick envelopes on the table.

‘What are you blathering about?’ asked Sonny, confused.