Around the corner of the house, Patrick climbed up onto the low wall at the outer edge of the terrace and, a fifteen-foot drop to his left, he balanced his way along with arms spread out. He walked the whole length of the wall and then jumped down again. He was at the top of the garden steps with the fig tree in sight, when he heard his father’s voice shouting, ‘Don’t let me ever see you do that again!’
Patrick was startled. Where was the voice coming from? Was it shouting at him? He spun around and looked behind him. His heart was beating hard. He often overheard his father shouting at other people, especially his mother, and it terrified him and made him want to run away. But this time he had to stand still and listen because he wanted to understand what was wrong and whether he was to blame.
‘Come up here immediately!’
Now Patrick knew where the voice was coming from. He looked up and saw his father leaning over the balcony.
‘What have I done wrong?’ he asked, but too quietly to be heard. His father looked so furious that Patrick lost all conviction of his own innocence. With growing alarm he tried to work backward from his father’s rage to what his own crime might be.
By the time he had climbed the steep stairs to his father’s bedroom, Patrick was ready to apologize for anything, but still felt a lingering desire to know what he was apologizing for. In the doorway he stopped and asked again, audibly this time, ‘What have I done wrong?’
‘Close the door behind you,’ said his father. ‘And come over here.’ He sounded disgusted by the obligation the child had thrust upon him.
As Patrick slowly crossed the floor he tried to think of some way to placate his father. Maybe if he said something clever he’d be forgiven, but he felt extraordinarily stupid and could only think over and over: two times two equals four, two times two equals four. He tried to remember something he had noticed that morning, or anything, anything at all that might persuade his father that he had been ‘observing everything’. But his mind was eclipsed by the shadow of his father’s presence.
He stood by the bed and stared down at the green bedspread with the bonfire birds on it. His father sounded rather weary when he spoke.
‘I’m going to have to beat you.’
‘But what have I done wrong?’
‘You know perfectly well what you have done,’ his father said in a cold, annihilating voice that Patrick found overwhelmingly persuasive. He was suddenly ashamed of all the things he had done wrong. His whole existence seemed to be contaminated by failure.
Moving quickly, his father grabbed Patrick’s shirt collar. He sat down on the bed, hoisted Patrick over his right thigh, and removed the yellow slipper from his left foot. Such rapid manoeuvres would normally have made David wince with pain, but he was able to regain his youthful agility in the service of such a good cause. He pulled down Patrick’s trousers and underpants and raised the slipper surprisingly high for a man who had trouble with his right shoulder.
The first blow was astonishingly painful. Patrick tried to take the attitude of stoic misery admired by dentists. He tried to be brave but, during the beating, although he at last realized that his father wanted to hurt him as much as possible, he refused to believe it.
The harder he struggled, the harder he was hit. Longing to move but afraid to move, he was split in half by this incomprehensible violence. Horror closed in on him and crushed his body like the jaws of a dog. After the beating, his father dropped him like a dead thing onto the bed.
And he still could not get away. Pushing his palm against Patrick’s right shoulder blade, his father was holding him down. Patrick twisted his head around anxiously, but could only see the blue of his father’s dressing gown.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked, but his father did not answer and Patrick was too scared to repeat the question. His father’s hand was pushing down on him and, his face squashed into the folds of the bedspread, he could hardly breathe. He stared fixedly up at the curtain pole and the top of the open windows. He could not understand what form the punishment was now taking, but he knew that his father must be very angry with him to be hurting him so much. He could not stand the helplessness that washed over him. He could not stand the unfairness. He did not know who this man was, it could not be his father who was crushing him like this.
From the curtain pole, if he could get up on the curtain pole, he could have sat looking down on the whole scene, just as his father was looking down on him. For a moment, Patrick felt he was up there watching with detachment the punishment inflicted by a strange man on a small boy. As hard as he could Patrick concentrated on the curtain pole and this time it lasted longer, he was sitting up there, his arms folded, leaning back against the wall.
Then he was back down on the bed again feeling a kind of blankness and bearing the weight of not knowing what was happening. He could hear his father wheezing, and the bedhead bumping against the wall. From behind the curtains with the green birds, he saw a gecko emerge and cling motionlessly to the corner of the wall beside the open window. Patrick lanced himself towards it. Tightening his fists and concentrating until his concentration was like a telephone wire stretched between them, Patrick disappeared into the lizard’s body.
The gecko understood, because at that very instant it dashed round the corner of the window and out onto the wall. Below he could see the drop to the terrace and the leaves of the Virginia creeper, red and green and yellow, and from up there, close against the wall, he could hold on with suckered feet and hang upside down safely from the eaves of the roof. He scurried onto the old roof tiles which were covered in grey and orange lichen, and then into the trough between the tiles, all the way up to the ridge of the roof. He moved fast down the other slope, and was far away, and nobody would ever find him again, because they wouldn’t know where to look, and couldn’t know that he was coiled up in the body of a gecko.
‘Stay here,’ said David, standing up and adjusting his yellow and white pyjamas.
Patrick could not have done anything else. He recognized, dully at first and then more vividly, the humiliation of his position. Face down on the bed, with his trousers bunched around his knees and a strange, worrying wetness at the base of his spine. It made him think he was bleeding. That, somehow, his father had stabbed him in the back.
His father went to the bathroom and came back. With a handful of lavatory paper he wiped away the increasingly cold pool of slime that had started to trickle between Patrick’s buttocks.
‘You can get up now,’ he said.
Patrick could not in fact get up. The memory of voluntary action was too remote and complicated. Impatiently, his father pulled up Patrick’s trousers and lifted him off the bed. Patrick stood beside the bed while his father clasped his shoulders, ostensibly to straighten his stance, but it made Patrick think that his father was going to pin his shoulders back and force them together until he was turned inside out and his lungs and heart burst out of his chest.
Instead, David leaned over and said, ‘Don’t ever tell your mother or anyone else what happened today, or you’ll be very severely punished. Do you understand?’
Patrick nodded.
‘Are you hungry?’
Patrick shook his head.
‘Well, I’m starving,’ said David chattily. ‘You really should eat more, you know. Build up your strength.’
‘Can I go now?’
‘All right, if you don’t want any lunch, you can go.’ David was irritated again.
Patrick walked down the drive and as he stared at the toes of his scuffed sandals he saw, instead, the top of his head as if from ten or twelve feet in the air, and he felt an uncomfortable curiosity about the boy he was watching. It was not quite personal, like the accident they saw on the road last year and his mother said not to look.
Back down again, Patrick felt utter defeat. There was no flash of purple cloaks. No special soldiers. No gecko. Nothing. He tried to take to the air again, the way seabirds do when a wave breaks over the rock where the
y were standing. But he had lost the power to move and stayed behind, drowning.
8
DURING LUNCH DAVID FELT that he had perhaps pushed his disdain for middle-class prudery a little too far. Even at the bar of the Cavalry and Guards Club one couldn’t boast about homosexual, paedophiliac incest with any confidence of a favourable reception. Who could he tell that he had raped his five-year-old son? He could not think of a single person who would not prefer to change the subject – and some would behave far worse than that. The experience itself had been short and brutish, but not altogether nasty. He smiled at Yvette, said how ravenous he was, and helped himself to the brochette of lamb and flageolets.
‘Monsieur has been playing the piano all morning.’
‘And playing with Patrick,’ David added piously.
Yvette said they were so exhausting at that age.
‘Exhausting!’ David agreed.
Yvette left the room and David poured another glass of the Romanée-Conti that he had taken from the cellar for dinner, but had decided to drink on his own. There were always more bottles and it went so well with lamb. ‘Nothing but the best, or go without’: that was the code he lived by, as long as the ‘go without’ didn’t actually happen. There was no doubt about it, he was a sensualist, and as to this latest episode, he hadn’t done anything medically dangerous, just a little rubbing between the buttocks, nothing that would not happen to the boy at school in due course. If he had committed any crime, it was to set about his son’s education too assiduously. He was conscious of already being sixty, there was so much to teach him and so little time.
He rang the little bell beside his plate and Yvette came back into the dining room.
‘Excellent lamb,’ said David.
‘Would Monsieur like the tarte Tatin?’
He had no room left, alas, for tarte Tatin. Perhaps she could tempt Patrick to have some for tea. He just wanted coffee. Could she bring it to the drawing room? Of course she could.
David’s legs had stiffened and when he rose from his chair he staggered for a couple of steps, drawing in his breath sharply through his teeth. ‘God damn,’ he said out loud. He had suddenly lost all tolerance for his rheumatic pains and decided to go upstairs to Eleanor’s bathroom, a pharmaceutical paradise. He very seldom used painkillers, preferring a steady flow of alcohol and the consciousness of his own heroism.
Opening the cupboard under Eleanor’s basin he was struck by the splendour and variety of the tubes and bottles: clear ones and yellow ones and dark ones, orange ones with green caps, in plastic and glass, from half a dozen countries, all urging the consumer not to exceed the stated dose. There were even envelopes marked Seconal and Mandrax, stolen, he imagined, from other people’s bathroom cabinets. Rummaging about among the barbiturates and stimulants and anti-depressants and hypnotics, he found surprisingly few painkillers. He had turned up only a bottle of codeine, a few diconol and some distalgesics, when he discovered, at the back of the cupboard, a bottle of sugar-coated opium pellets he had prescribed just two years before, for his mother-in-law, to ease the uncontrollable diarrhoea which accompanied her intestinal cancer. This last act of Hippocratic mercy, long after the end of his brief medical practice, filled him with nostalgia for the healer’s art.
On a charmingly quaint label from Harris’s in St James’s Street, was written: ‘The Opium (B.P. 0.6 grains)’ and under that, ‘Duchesse de Valençay’ and finally, ‘To be taken as required’. Since there were several dozen pellets left, his mother-in-law must have died before developing an opium habit. A merciful release, he reflected, popping the bottle into the pocket of his houndstooth jacket. It would have been too tiresome if she had been an opium addict on top of everything else.
David poured his coffee into a thin round eighteenth-century china cup, decorated with gold and orange cockerels fighting one another under a gold and orange tree. He took the bottle from his pocket, shook three white pellets into his hand and swallowed them with a gulp of coffee. Excited by the idea of resting comfortably under the influence of opium, he celebrated with some brandy made in the year of his birth, a present to himself which, as he told Eleanor when she paid for a case of it, reconciled him to growing old. To complete the portrait of his contentment he lit a cigar and sat in a deep chair beside the window with a battered copy of Surtees’s Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities. He read the first sentence with familiar pleasure, ‘What truebred city sportsman has not in his day put off the most urgent business – perhaps his marriage, or even the interment of his rib – that he might “Brave the morn” with that renowned pack, the Surrey Subscription Fox Hounds?’
* * *
When David woke up a couple of hours later, he felt tied down to a turbulent sleep by thousands of small elastic strings. He looked up slowly from the ridges and the valleys of his trousers and focused on his coffee cup. It seemed to have a thin luminous band around its edges and to be slightly raised above the surface of the small round table it lay on. He was disturbed but fascinated when he noticed that one of the gold and orange cockerels was very slowly pecking out the eye of the other. He had not expected to hallucinate. Although extraordinarily free from pain, he was worried by the loss of control that hallucination entailed.
The armchair felt like a cheese fondue as he dragged himself out of it, and walking across the floor reminded him of climbing a sand dune. He poured two glasses of cold coffee and drank them straight down, hoping they would sober him up before Eleanor returned with Nicholas and that girl of his.
He wanted to go for a brisk walk, but could not help stopping to admire the luxurious glow of his surroundings. He became particularly engrossed in the black Chinese cabinet and the colourful figures embossed on its lacquered surface. The palanquin in which an important mandarin lounged shifted forward, and the parasol held above his head by servants in shallow straw hats started to revolve hesitatingly.
David tore himself away from this animated scene and went outside. Before he could find out whether fresh air would dispel his nausea and give him back the control he wanted, he heard the sound of Eleanor’s car coming down the drive. He doubled back, grabbed his copy of Surtees, and retreated into the library.
After Anne had been dropped off at Victor’s, Nicholas took her place in the front passenger seat. Bridget sprawled in the back sleepily. Eleanor and Nicholas had been talking about people she didn’t know.
‘I’d almost forgotten how wonderful it is here,’ said Nicholas, as they approached the house.
‘I’ve completely forgotten,’ said Eleanor, ‘and I live here.’
‘Oh, Eleanor, what a sad thing to say,’ said Nicholas. ‘Tell me it isn’t true quickly, or I won’t enjoy my tea.’
‘OK,’ said Eleanor, lowering the electric window to flick a cigarette out, ‘it isn’t true.’
‘Good girl,’ said Nicholas.
Bridget couldn’t think of anything to say about her new surroundings. Through the car window she could see wide steps sweeping down beside a large house with pale blue shutters. Wisteria and honeysuckle climbed and tumbled at various points along the side of the house to break the monotony of the stone. She felt she had seen it all before, and for her it had only the slim reality of a photograph in the flicked pages of a magazine. The dope had made her feel sexy. She was longing to masturbate and felt remote from the chatter going on around her.
‘François should come to fetch your bags,’ said Eleanor. ‘Leave them in the car and he’ll bring them later.’
‘Oh, it’s all right, I can manage the bags,’ said Nicholas. He wanted to get Bridget alone in their room for a moment and tell her to ‘buck up’.
‘No, really, let François do it, he’s had nothing to do all day,’ said Eleanor, who didn’t want to be left alone with David.
Nicholas had to content himself with beaming his unspoken disapproval towards Bridget, who wandered down the steps trying to avoid the cracks between the paving stones, and did not even glance in his direction.
‘Could you bear to make a little light conversation now and again?’ said Nicholas as soon as he was alone with Bridget. ‘You haven’t yet addressed a word to Eleanor.’
‘OK, darling,’ said Bridget, still trying not to walk on the cracks. She turned towards Nicholas and said in a loud whisper, ‘Is this the one?’
‘What?’
‘The fig tree where he made her eat on all fours.’
Nicholas looked up at the windows above him, remembering the conversations he had overheard from his bedroom the last time he was staying. He nodded, putting his fingers to his lips.
Figs littered the ground underneath the tree. Some were reduced to a black stain and a few pips, but a number had not yet decayed and their purple skins, covered in a dusty white film, were still unbroken. Bridget knelt down like a dog on the ground.
‘For God’s sake,’ snarled Nicholas, leaping over to her side. At that moment the drawing room door opened and Yvette came out, carrying a tray of cakes and cups. She only glimpsed what was going on, but it confirmed her suspicion that rich English people had a strange relationship with the animal kingdom. Bridget rose, smirking.
‘Ah, fantastique de vous revoir, Yvette,’ said Nicholas.
‘Bonjour, Monsieur.’
‘Bonjour,’ said Bridget prettily.
‘Bonjour, Madame,’ said Yvette stoutly, though she knew that Bridget was not married.
‘David!’ roared Nicholas over Yvette’s head. ‘Where have you been hiding?’
David waved his cigar at Nicholas. ‘Got lost in Surtees,’ he said, stepping through the doorway. He wore his dark glasses to protect him from surprises. ‘Hello, my dear,’ he said to Bridget, whose name he had forgotten. ‘Have either of you seen Eleanor? I caught a glimpse of some pink trousers rounding a corner, but they didn’t answer to her name.’
The Patrick Melrose Novels Page 7