‘How are you today, Mr Master Man?’ asked his father, staring at him intently.
‘All right, thank you,’ said Patrick, wondering if it was a trick question. He was out of breath, but he knew he must concentrate because he was with his father. When he had asked what was the most important thing in the world, his father had said, ‘Observe everything.’ Patrick often forgot about this instruction, but in his father’s presence he looked at things carefully, without being sure what he was looking for. He had watched his father’s eyes behind their dark glasses. They moved from object to object and person to person, pausing for a moment on each and seeming to steal something vital from them, with a quick adhesive glance, like the flickering of a gecko’s tongue. When he was with his father, Patrick looked at everything seriously, hoping he looked serious to anyone who might watch his eyes, as he had watched his father’s.
‘Come here,’ said his father. Patrick stepped closer.
‘Shall I pick you up by the ears?’
‘No,’ shouted Patrick. It was a sort of game they played. His father reached out and clasped Patrick’s ears between his forefingers and thumbs. Patrick put his hands around his father’s wrists and his father pretended to pick him up by his ears, but Patrick really took the strain with his arms. His father stood up and lifted Patrick until their eyes were level.
‘Let go with your hands,’ he said.
‘No,’ shouted Patrick.
‘Let go and I’ll drop you at the same time,’ said his father persuasively.
Patrick released his father’s wrists, but his father continued to pinch his ears. For a moment the whole weight of his body was supported by his ears. He quickly caught his father’s wrists again.
‘Ouch,’ he said, ‘you said you were going to drop me. Please let go of my ears.’
His father still held him dangling in the air. ‘You’ve learned something very useful today,’ he said. ‘Always think for yourself. Never let other people make important decisions for you.’
‘Please let go,’ said Patrick. ‘Please.’ He felt that he was going to cry, but he pushed back his sense of desperation. His arms were exhausted, but if he relaxed them he felt as if his ears were going to be torn off, like the gold foil from a pot of cream, just ripped off the side of his head.
‘You said,’ he yelled, ‘you said.’
His father dropped him. ‘Don’t whimper,’ he said in a bored voice, ‘it’s very unattractive.’ He sat down at the piano and started playing the march again, but Patrick did not dance.
He ran from the room, through the hall, out of the kitchen, over the terrace, along the olive grove and into the pine wood. He found the thorn bush, ducked underneath it, and slid down a small slope into his most secret hiding place. Under a canopy of bushes, wedged up against a pine tree which was surrounded by thickets on every side, he sat down and tried to stop the sobs, like hiccups, that snarled his throat.
Nobody can find me here, he thought. He could not control the spasms that caught his breath as he tried to inhale. It was like being caught in sweaters, when he plunged his head in and couldn’t find the neck of the sweater and he tried to get out through the arm and it all got twisted and he thought he would never get out and he couldn’t breathe.
Why did his father do that? Nobody should do that to anybody else, he thought, nobody should do that to anybody else.
In winter when there was ice on the puddles, you could see the bubbles trapped underneath and the air couldn’t breathe: it had been ducked by the ice and held under, and he hated that because it was so unfair and so he always smashed the ice to let the air go free.
Nobody can find me here, he thought. And then he thought, what if nobody can find me here?
3
VICTOR WAS STILL ASLEEP in his room downstairs and Anne wanted him to stay asleep. After less than a year together they now slept in separate rooms because Victor’s snoring, and nothing else about him, kept her awake at night. She walked barefoot down the steep and narrow staircase running the tips of her fingers along the curve of the whitewashed walls. In the kitchen she removed the whistle from the spout of the chipped enamel kettle, and made coffee as silently as possible.
There was a tired ebullience about Victor’s kitchen, with its bright orange plates and watermelon slices grinning facetiously from the tea towels. It was a harbour of cheap gaiety built up by Victor’s ex-wife, Elaine, and Victor had been torn between protesting against her bad taste and the fear that it might be in bad taste to protest. After all, did one notice the kitchen things? Did they matter? Wasn’t indifference more dignified? He had always admired David Melrose’s certainty that beyond good taste lay the confidence to make mistakes because they were one’s own. It was at this point that Victor often wavered. Sometimes he opted for a few days, or a few minutes, of assertive impertinence, but he always returned to his careful impersonation of a gentleman; it was all very well to épater les bourgeois, but the excitement was double-edged if you were also one of them. Victor knew that he could never acquire David Melrose’s conviction that success was somehow vulgar. Though sometimes he was tempted to believe that David’s languor and contempt masked regret for his failed life, this simple idea dissolved in David’s overbearing presence.
What amazed Anne was that a man as clever as Victor could be caught with such small hooks. Pouring herself some coffee she felt a strange sympathy for Elaine. They had never met, but she had come to understand what had driven Victor’s wife to seek refuge in a full set of Snoopy mugs.
* * *
When Anne Moore had been sent by the London bureau of the New York Times to interview the eminent philosopher Sir Victor Eisen, he had seemed a little old-fashioned. He had just returned from lunch at the Athenaeum, and his felt hat, darkened by rain, lay on the hall table. He pulled his watch out of his waistcoat pocket with what struck Anne as an archaic gesture.
‘Ah, exactly on time,’ he said. ‘I admire punctuality.’
‘Oh, good,’ she answered, ‘a lot of people don’t.’
The interview had gone well, so well in fact that later in the afternoon it moved into his bedroom. From that point on Anne had willingly interpreted the almost Edwardian clothes, the pretentious house and the claret-stained anecdotes as part of the camouflage that a Jewish intellectual would have had to take on, along with a knighthood, in order to blend into the landscape of conventional English life.
During the months that followed she lived with Victor in London, ignoring any evidence that made this mild interpretation look optimistic. Those interminable weekends, for instance, which started with briefings on Wednesday night: how many acres, how many centuries, how many servants. Thursday evening was given over to speculation: he hoped, he really hoped, that the Chancellor wouldn’t be there this time; could Gerald still be shooting now that he was in a wheelchair? The warnings came on Friday, during the drive down: ‘Don’t unpack your own bags in this house.’ ‘Don’t keep asking people what they do.’ ‘Don’t ask the butler how he feels, as you did last time.’ The weekends only ended on Tuesday when the stalks and skins of Saturday and Sunday were pressed again for their last few drops of sour juice.
In London, she met Victor’s clever friends but at weekends the people they stayed with were rich and often stupid. Victor was their clever friend. He purred appreciatively at their wine and pictures and they started many of their sentences by saying, ‘Victor will be able to tell us…’ She watched them trying to make him say something clever and she watched him straining himself to be more like them, even reiterating the local pieties: wasn’t it splendid that Gerald hadn’t given up shooting? Wasn’t Gerald’s mother amazing? Bright as a button and still beavering away in the garden at ninety-two. ‘She completely wears me out,’ he gasped.
If Victor sang for his supper, at least he enjoyed eating it. What was harder to discount was his London house. He had bought the fifteen-year lease on this surprisingly large white stucco house in a Knightsbridge crescent after s
elling his slightly smaller but freehold house at a less fashionable address. The lease now had only seven years to run. Anne stoutly ascribed this insane transaction to the absent-mindedness for which philosophers are famous.
Only when she had come down here to Lacoste in July and seen Victor’s relationship with David had her loyalty begun to wear away. She started to wonder how high a price in wasted time Victor was prepared to pay for social acceptance, and why on earth he wanted to pay it to David.
According to Victor, they had been ‘exact contemporaries’, a term he used for anyone of vaguely his own age who had not noticed him at school. ‘I knew him at Eton’ too often meant that he had been ruthlessly mocked by someone. He said of only two other scholars that they were friends of his at school, and he no longer saw either of them. One was the head of a Cambridge college and the other a civil servant who was widely thought to be a spy because his job sounded too dull to exist.
She could picture Victor in those days, an anxious schoolboy whose parents had left Austria after the First World War, settled in Hampstead, and later helped a friend find a house for Freud. Her images of David Melrose had been formed by a mixture of Victor’s stories and her American vision of English privilege. She pictured him, a demigod from the big house, opening the batting against the village cricket team, or lounging about in a funny waistcoat he was allowed to wear because he was in Pop, a club Victor never got into. It was hard to take this Pop thing seriously but somehow Victor managed. As far as she could make out it was like being a college football hero, but instead of making out with the cheerleaders, you got to beat young boys for burning your toast.
When she had met David, at the end of the long red carpet unrolled by Victor’s stories, she spotted the arrogance but decided that she was just too American to buy into the glamour of David’s lost promise and failure. He struck her as a fraud and she had said so to Victor. Victor had been solemn and disapproving, arguing that on the contrary David suffered from the clarity with which he saw his own situation. ‘You mean he knows he’s a pain in the ass?’ she had asked.
Anne moved back towards the stairs, warming her hands with a steaming orange mug covered in purple hearts of various sizes. She would have liked to spend the day reading in the hammock that hung between the plane trees in front of the house, but she had agreed to go to the airport with Eleanor. This American Girls’ Outing had been imposed on her by Victor’s unquenchable desire to be associated with the Melroses. The only Melrose Anne really liked was Patrick. At five years old he was still capable of a little enthusiasm.
If at first she had been touched by Eleanor’s vulnerability, Anne was now exasperated by her drunkenness. Besides, Anne had to guard against her wish to save people, as well as her habit of pointing out their moral deficiencies, especially as she knew that nothing put the English more on edge than a woman having definite opinions, except a woman who went on to defend them. It was as if every time she played the ace of spades, it was beaten by a small trump. Trumps could be pieces of gossip, or insincere remarks, or irrelevant puns, or anything that dispelled the possibility of seriousness. She was tired of the deadly smile on the faces of people whose victory was assured by their silliness.
Having learned this, it had been relatively easy to play along with the tax-exiled English duke, George Watford, who came up from the coast for weekends with the Melroses, wearing shoes that tapered to a quite impossible thinness. His rather wooden face was covered in the thinnest cracks, like the varnish on the Old Masters he had ‘shocked the nation’ by selling. The English didn’t ask much of their dukes in Anne’s opinion. All they had to do was hang on to their possessions, at least the very well-known ones, and then they got to be guardians of what other people called ‘our heritage’. She was disappointed that this character with a face like a cobweb had not even managed the small task of leaving his Rembrandts on the wall where he found them.
Anne continued to play along until the arrival of Vijay Shah. Only an acquaintance, not a friend of Victor’s, they had met ten years before when Vijay, as head of the Debating Society, had invited Victor down to Eton to defend the ‘relevance’ of philosophy. Since then Vijay had cultivated the connection with a barrage of arty postcards and they had occasionally met at parties in London. Like Victor, Vijay had been an Eton scholar, but unlike Victor he was also very rich.
Anne felt guilty at first that she reacted so badly to Vijay’s appearance. His oyster-coloured complexion and the thick jowls that looked like a permanent attack of mumps were the unhappy setting for a large hooked nose with tufts of intractable hair about the nostrils. His glasses were thick and square but, without them, the raw dents on the bridge of his nose and the weak eyes peering out from the darker grey of their sockets looked worse. His hair was blow-dried until it rose and stiffened like a black meringue on top of his skull. His clothes did nothing to compensate for these natural disadvantages. If Vijay’s favourite flared green trousers were a mistake, it was a trivial one compared to his range of lightweight jackets in chaotic tartan patterns, with flapless pockets sewn onto the outside. Still, any clothes were preferable to the sight of him in a bathing suit. Anne remembered with horror his narrow shoulders and their white pustules struggling to break through a thick pelt of wiry black hair.
Had Vijay’s character been more attractive his appearance might have elicited pity or even indifference, but spending just a few days with him convinced Anne that each hideous feature had been moulded by internal malevolence. His wide, grinning mouth was at once crude and cruel. When he tried to smile, his purplish lips could only curl and twist like a rotting leaf thrown onto a fire. Obsequious and giggly with older and more powerful people, he turned savage at the smell of weakness, and would attack only easy prey. His voice seemed to be designed exclusively for simpering and yet when they had argued on the night before he left, it had achieved the shrill astringency of a betrayed schoolmaster. Like many flatterers, he was not aware that he irritated the people he flattered. When he had met the Wooden Duke he had poured himself out in a rich gurgling rush of compliments, like an overturned bottle of syrup. She overheard George complaining afterwards to David, ‘Perfectly ghastly man your friend Victor brought over. Kept telling me about the plasterwork at Richfield. Thought he must want a job as a guide.’ George grunted disdainfully and David grunted disdainfully back.
A little Indian guy being sneered at by monsters of English privilege would normally have unleashed the full weight of Anne’s loyalty to underdogs, but this time it was wiped out by Vijay’s enormous desire to be a monster of English privilege himself. ‘I can’t bear going to Calcutta,’ he giggled, ‘the people, my dear, and the noise.’ He paused to let everyone appreciate this nonchalant remark made by an English soldier at the Somme.
The memory of Vijay’s ingratiating purr died away as Anne tried to push open her bedroom door, which always stuck on a bulge in the quaintly uneven floor. This was another relic of Elaine, who had refused to change what she called ‘the authentic feel of the house’. Now the hexagonal tiles were worn to a paler terracotta where the door scraped them each time it was opened. Afraid of spilling her coffee she let the door stay stuck and edged sideways into the room. Her breasts brushed the cupboard as she passed.
Anne put her coffee mug down on the round marble-topped table with black metal legs which Elaine had carried back in triumph from some junk store in Apt and cunningly used as a bedside table. It was far too high and Anne often pulled the wrong book from the pile of unseen titles above her. Suetonius’ Twelve Caesars, which David had lent her way back at the beginning of August, kept turning up like a reproach. She had glanced at one or two chapters, but the fact that David had recommended the book made her reluctant to become intimate with it. She knew she really ought to read a bit more of it before dinner so as to have something intelligent to say when she gave it back to him tonight. All she remembered was that Caligula had planned to torture his wife to find out why he was so devoted to her. What w
as David’s excuse, she wondered.
Anne lit a cigarette. Lying on a pile of pillows and smaller cushions, slurping her coffee and playing with her cigarette smoke, she felt briefly that her thoughts were growing more subtle and expansive. The only thing that compromised her pleasure was the sound of running water in Victor’s bathroom.
First, he would shave and wipe the remnants of the shaving cream on a clean towel. Then he would plaster his hair as flat as he could, walk to the foot of the stairs and shout, ‘Darling.’ After a brief pause he would shout it again in his let’s-not-play-foolish-games voice. If she still did not appear he would call out, ‘Breakfast.’
Anne had teased him about it just the other day, and said, ‘Oh, darling, you shouldn’t have.’
‘Have what?’
‘Made breakfast.’
‘I haven’t.’
‘Oh, I thought when you shouted, “Breakfast,” you meant it was ready.’
‘No, I meant that I was ready for breakfast.’
* * *
Anne had not been far wrong, Victor was indeed in his bathroom downstairs brushing his hair vigorously. But, as always, a few seconds after he stopped the wave of hair which had tormented him since childhood sprang up again.
His pair of ivory hairbrushes had no handles. They were quite inconvenient, but very traditional, like the wooden bowl of shaving soap, which never thickened as satisfactorily as foam from a can. Victor was fifty-seven, but looked younger. Only a drooping in his flesh, a loss of tension around the jaw and the mouth and the tremendous depth of the horizontal lines in his forehead, revealed his age. His teeth were neat and strong and yellow. Though he longed for something more aerodynamic his nose was bulbous and friendly. Women always praised his eyes because their pale grey looked luminous against his slightly pitted olive-brown skin. All in all, strangers were surprised when a rapid and rather fruity lisp emerged from a face which could well have belonged to an overdressed prizefighter.
The Patrick Melrose Novels Page 3