The Patrick Melrose Novels

by Edward St. Aubyn

  ‘That’s certainly what she was last seen wearing,’ said Nicholas.

  ‘Pink suits her so well, don’t you think?’ said David to Bridget. ‘It matches the colour of her eyes.’

  ‘Wouldn’t some tea be delicious?’ said Nicholas quickly.

  Bridget poured the tea, while David went to sit on a low wall, a few feet away from Nicholas. As he tapped his cigar gently and let the ash fall at his feet, he noticed a trail of ants working their way along the side of the wall and into their nest in the corner.

  Bridget carried cups of tea over to the two men, and as she turned to fetch her own cup, David held the burning tip of his cigar close to the ants and ran it along in both directions as far as he could conveniently reach. The ants twisted, excruciated by the heat, and dropped down onto the terrace. Some, before they fell, reared up, their stitching legs trying helplessly to repair their ruined bodies.

  ‘What a civilized life you have here,’ Bridget sang out as she sank back into a dark-blue deckchair. Nicholas rolled his eyeballs and wondered why the hell he had told her to make light conversation. To cover the silence he remarked to David that he had been to Jonathan Croyden’s memorial service the day before.

  ‘Do you find that you go to more memorial services, or more weddings these days?’ David asked.

  ‘I still get more wedding invitations, but I find I enjoy the memorials more.’

  ‘Because you don’t have to bring a present?’

  ‘Well, that helps a great deal, but mainly because one gets a better crowd when someone really distinguished dies.’

  ‘Unless all his friends have died before him.’

  ‘That, of course, is intolerable,’ said Nicholas categorically.

  ‘Ruins the party.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t approve of memorial services,’ said David, taking another puff on his cigar. ‘Not merely because I cannot imagine anything in most men’s lives that deserves to be celebrated, but also because the delay between the funeral and the memorial service is usually so long that, far from rekindling the spirit of a lost friend, it only shows how easily one can live without him.’ David blew on the tip of his cigar and it glowed brightly. The opium made him feel that he was listening to another man speak.

  ‘The dead are dead,’ he went on, ‘and the truth is that one forgets about people when they stop coming to dinner. There are exceptions, of course – namely, the people one forgets during dinner.’

  With his cigar he caught a stray ant which was escaping with singed antennae from his last incendiary raid. ‘If you really miss someone, you are better off doing something you both enjoyed doing together, which is unlikely to mean, except in the most bizarre cases, standing around in a draughty church, wearing a black overcoat and singing hymns.’

  The ant ran away with astonishing speed and was about to reach the far side of the wall when David, stretching a little, touched it lightly with a surgeon’s precision. Its skin blistered and it squirmed violently as it died.

  ‘One should only go to an enemy’s memorial service. Quite apart from the pleasure of outlasting him, it is an opportunity for a truce. Forgiveness is so important, don’t you think?’

  ‘Gosh, yes,’ said Bridget, ‘especially getting other people to forgive you.’

  David smiled at her encouragingly, until he saw Eleanor step through the doorway.

  ‘Ah, Eleanor,’ grinned Nicholas with exaggerated pleasure, ‘we were just talking about Jonathan Croyden’s memorial.’

  ‘I guess it’s the end of an era,’ said Eleanor.

  ‘He was the last man alive to have gone to one of Evelyn Waugh’s parties in drag,’ said Nicholas. ‘He was said to dress much better as a woman than as a man. He was an inspiration to a whole generation of Englishmen. Which reminds me, after the memorial I met a very tiresome, smarmy Indian who claimed to have visited you just before staying with Jonathan at Cap Ferrat.’

  ‘It must have been Vijay,’ said Eleanor. ‘Victor brought him over.’

  ‘That’s the one,’ Nicholas nodded. ‘He seemed to know that I was coming here. Perfectly extraordinary as I’d never set eyes on him before.’

  ‘He’s desperately fashionable,’ explained David, ‘and consequently knows more about people he has never met than he does about anything else.’

  Eleanor perched on a frail white chair with a faded blue cushion on its circular seat. She rose again immediately and dragged the chair further towards the shade of the fig tree.

  ‘Watch out,’ said Bridget, ‘you might squash some of the figs.’

  Eleanor made no reply.

  ‘It seems a pity to waste them,’ said Bridget innocently, leaning over to pick a fig off the ground. ‘This one is perfect.’ She brought it close to her mouth. ‘Isn’t it weird the way their skin is purple and white at the same time.’

  ‘Like a drunk with emphysema,’ said David, smiling at Eleanor.

  Bridget opened her mouth, rounded her lips and pushed the fig inside. She suddenly felt what she later described to Barry as a ‘very heavy vibe’ from David, ‘as if he was pushing his fist into my womb’. Bridget swallowed the fig, but she felt a physical need to get out of the deckchair and move further away from David.

  She walked beside the edge of the wall above the garden terrace and, wanting to explain her sudden action, she stretched out her arms, embraced the view, and said, ‘What a perfect day.’ Nobody replied. Scanning the landscape for something else to say, she glimpsed a slight movement at the far end of the garden. At first she thought it was an animal crouched under the pear tree, but when it got up she saw that it was a child. ‘Is that your son?’ she asked. ‘In the red trousers.’

  Eleanor walked over to her side. ‘Yes, it’s Patrick. Patrick!’ she shouted. ‘Do you want some tea, darling?’

  There was no answer. ‘Maybe he can’t hear you,’ said Bridget.

  ‘Of course he can,’ said David. ‘He’s just being tiresome.’

  ‘Maybe we can’t hear him,’ said Eleanor. ‘Patrick!’ she shouted again. ‘Why don’t you come and have some tea with us?’

  ‘He’s shaking his head,’ said Bridget.

  ‘He’s probably had tea two or three times already,’ said Nicholas; ‘you know what they’re like at that age.’

  ‘God, children are so sweet,’ said Bridget, smiling at Eleanor. ‘Eleanor,’ she said in the same tone, as if her request should be granted as a reward for finding children sweet, ‘could you tell me which room I’m in because I’d quite like to go up and have a bath and unpack.’

  ‘Of course. Let me show you,’ said Eleanor.

  Eleanor led Bridget into the house.

  ‘Your girlfriend is very, I believe the word is “vivacious”,’ said David.

  ‘Oh, she’ll do for now,’ said Nicholas.

  ‘No need to apologize, she’s absolutely charming. Shall we have a real drink?’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘Champagne?’

  ‘Perfect.’

  David fetched the champagne and reappeared tearing the golden lead from the neck of a clear bottle.

  ‘Cristal,’ said Nicholas dutifully.

  ‘Nothing but the best, or go without,’ said David.

  ‘It reminds me of Charles Pewsey,’ said Nicholas. ‘We were drinking a bottle of that stuff at Wilton’s last week and I asked him if he remembered Gunter, Jonathan Croyden’s unspeakable amanuensis. And Charles roared – you know how deaf he is – “Amanuensis? Bumboy, you mean: unspeakable bumboy.” Everyone turned round and stared at us.’

  ‘They always do when one’s with Charles.’ David grinned. It was so typical of Charles, one had to know Charles to appreciate how funny it was.

  The bedroom Bridget had been put in was all flowery chintz, with engravings of Roman ruins on every wall. Beside the bed was a copy of Lady Mosley’s A Life of Contrasts, on top of which Bridget had thrown Valley of the Dolls, her current reading. She sat by the window sm
oking a joint, and watched the smoke drift through the tiny holes in the mosquito net. From below, she could hear Nicholas shout ‘unspeakable bumboy’. They must be reminiscing about their school days. Boys will be boys.

  Bridget lifted one foot onto the windowsill. She still held the joint in her left hand, although it would burn her fingers with the next toke. She slipped her right hand between her legs and started to masturbate.

  ‘It just goes to show that being an amanuensis doesn’t matter as long as you have the butler on your side,’ said Nicholas.

  David picked up his cue. ‘It’s always the same thing in life,’ he chanted. ‘It’s not what you do, it’s who you know.’

  To find such a ludicrous example of this important maxim made the two men laugh.

  Bridget moved over to the bed and spread herself out face down on the yellow bedcover. As she closed her eyes and resumed masturbating, the thought of David flashed over her like a static shock, but she forced herself to focus loyally on the memory of Barry’s stirring presence.

  9

  WHEN VICTOR WAS IN trouble with his writing he had a nervous habit of flicking open his pocket watch and clicking it closed again. Distracted by the noise of other human activities he found it helpful to make a noise of his own. During the contemplative passages of his daydreams he flicked and clicked more slowly, but as he pressed up against his sense of frustration the pace increased.

  Dressed this morning in the flecked and bulky sweater he had hunted down ruthlessly for an occasion on which clothes simply didn’t matter, he fully intended to begin his essay on the necessary and sufficient conditions of personal identity. He sat at a slightly wobbly wooden table under a yellowing plane tree in front of the house, and as the temperature rose he stripped down to his shirtsleeves. By lunchtime he had recorded only one thought, ‘I have written books which I have had to write, but I have not yet written a book which others have to read.’ He punished himself by improvising a sandwich for lunch, instead of walking down to La Coquière and eating three courses in the garden, under the blue and red and yellow parasol of the Ricard Pastis company.

  Despite himself he kept thinking of Eleanor’s puzzled little contribution that morning, ‘Gosh, I mean, if anything is in the mind, it’s who you are.’ If anything is in the mind it’s who you are: it was silly, it was unhelpful, but it whined about him like a mosquito in the dark.

  Just as a novelist may sometimes wonder why he invents characters who do not exist and makes them do things which do not matter, so a philosopher may wonder why he invents cases that cannot occur in order to determine what must be the case. After a long neglect of his subject, Victor was not as thoroughly convinced that impossibility was the best route to necessity as he might have been had he recently reconsidered Stolkin’s extreme case in which ‘scientists destroy my brain and body, and then make out of new matter, a replica of Greta Garbo’. How could one help agreeing with Stolkin that ‘there would be no connection between me and the resulting person’?

  Nevertheless, to think one knew what would happen to a person’s sense of identity if his brain was cut in half and distributed between identical twins seemed, just for now, before he had thrown himself back into the torrent of philosophical debate, a poor substitute for an intelligent description of what it is to know who you are.

  Victor went indoors to fetch the familiar tube of Bisodol indigestion tablets. As usual he had eaten his sandwich too fast, pushing it down his throat like a sword-swallower. He thought with renewed appreciation of William James’s remark that the self consists mainly of ‘peculiar motions in the head and between the head and throat’, although the peculiar motions somewhat lower down in his stomach and bowels felt at least as personal.

  When Victor sat down again he pictured himself thinking, and tried to superimpose this picture on his inner vacancy. If he was essentially a thinking machine, then he needed to be serviced. It was not the problems of philosophy but the problem with philosophy that preoccupied him that afternoon. And yet how often the two became indistinguishable. Wittgenstein had said that the philosopher’s treatment of a question was like the treatment of a disease. But which treatment? Purging? Leeches? Antibiotics against the infections of language? Indigestion tablets, thought Victor, belching softly, to help break down the doughy bulk of sensation?

  We ascribe thoughts to thinkers because this is the way we speak, but persons need not be claimed to be the thinkers of these thoughts. Still, thought Victor lazily, why not bow down to popular demand on this occasion? As to brains and minds, was there really any problem about two categorically different phenomena, brain process and consciousness, occurring simultaneously? Or was the problem with the categories?

  From down the hill Victor heard a car door slam. It must be Eleanor dropping Anne at the bottom of the drive. Victor flicked open his watch, checked the time, and snapped it closed again. What had he achieved? Almost nothing. It was not one of those unproductive days when he was confused by abundance and starved, like Buridan’s ass, between two equally nourishing bales of hay. His lack of progress today was more profound.

  He watched Anne rounding the last corner of the drive, painfully bright in her white dress.

  ‘Hi,’ she said.

  ‘Hello,’ said Victor with boyish gloom.

  ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Oh, it’s been fairly futile exercise, but I suppose it’s good to get any exercise at all.’

  ‘Don’t knock that futile exercise,’ said Anne, ‘it’s big business. Bicycles that don’t go anyplace, a long walk to nowhere on a rubber treadmill, heavy things you don’t even need to pick up.’

  Victor remained silent, staring down at his one sentence. Anne rested her hands on his shoulders. ‘So there’s no major news on who we are?’

  ‘Afraid not. Personal identity, of course, is a fiction, a pure fiction. But I’ve reached this conclusion by the wrong method.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Not thinking about it.’

  ‘But that’s what the English mean, isn’t it, when they say, “He was very philosophical about it”? They mean that someone stopped thinking about something.’ Anne lit a cigarette.

  ‘Still,’ said Victor in a quiet voice, ‘my thinking today reminds me of a belligerent undergraduate I once taught, who said that our tutorials had “failed to pass the So What Test”.’

  Anne sat down on the edge of Victor’s table and eased off one of her canvas shoes with the toe of the other. She liked to see Victor working again, however unsuccessfully. Placing her bare foot on his knee, she said, ‘Tell me, Professor, is this my foot?’

  ‘Well, some philosophers would say that under certain circumstances,’ said Victor, lifting her foot in his cupped hands, ‘this would be determined by whether the foot is in pain.’

  ‘What’s wrong with the foot being in pleasure?’

  ‘Well,’ said Victor, solemnly considering this absurd question, ‘in philosophy as in life, pleasure is more likely to be an hallucination. Pain is the key to possession.’ He opened his mouth wide, like a hungry man approaching a hamburger, but closed it again, and gently kissed each toe.

  Victor released her foot and Anne kicked off the other shoe. ‘I’ll be back in a moment,’ she said, walking out carefully over the warm sharp gravel to the kitchen door.

  Victor reflected with satisfaction that in ancient Chinese society the little game he had played with Anne’s foot would have been considered almost intolerably familiar. An unbound foot represented for the Chinese a degree of abandon which genitals could never achieve. He was stimulated by the thought of how intense his desire would have been at another time, in another place. He thought of the lines from The Jew of Malta, ‘Thou hast committed Fornication: but that was in another country, and besides the wench is dead.’ In the past he had been a Utilitarian seducer, aiming to increase the sum of general pleasure, but since starting his affair with Anne he had been unprecedentedly faithful. Never physically alluring, he
had always relied on his cleverness to seduce women. As he grew uglier and more famous, so the instrument of seduction, his speech, and the instrument of gratification, his body, grew into an increasingly inglorious contrast. The routine of fresh seductions highlighted this aspect of the mind–body problem more harshly than intimacy, and he had decided that perhaps it was time to be in the same country with a living wench. The challenge was not to substitute a mental absence for a physical one.

  Anne came out of the house carrying two glasses of orange juice. She gave one to Victor.

  ‘What were you thinking?’ she asked.

  ‘Whether you would be the same person in another body,’ lied Victor.

  ‘Well, ask yourself, would you be nibbling my toes if I looked like a Canadian lumberjack?’

  ‘If I knew it was you inside,’ said Victor loyally.

  ‘Inside the steel-capped boots?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  They smiled at each other. Victor took a gulp of orange juice. ‘But tell me,’ he said, ‘how was your expedition with Eleanor?’

  ‘On the way back I found myself thinking that everybody who is meeting for dinner tonight will probably have said something unkind about everybody else. I know you’ll think it’s very primitive and American of me, but why do people spend the evening with people they’ve spent the day insulting?’

  ‘So as to have something insulting to say about them tomorrow.’

  ‘Why, of course,’ gasped Anne. ‘Tomorrow is another day. So different and yet so similar,’ she added.

  Victor looked uneasy. ‘Were you insulting each other in the car, or just attacking David and me?’

  ‘Neither, but the way that everyone else was insulted I knew that we would break off into smaller and smaller combinations, until everyone had been dealt with by everyone else.’