The Patrick Melrose Novels

by Edward St. Aubyn

  Patrick felt a strong desire to take his father’s lip in both hands and tear it like a piece of paper, along the gash already made by his teeth.

  No, not that. He would not have that thought. The obscene necessity of going over the curtain pole. Not that, he would not have that thought. Nobody should do that to anybody else. He could not be that person. Bastard.

  Patrick growled, his teeth bared and clenched. He punched the side of the coffin with his knuckles to bring him round. How should he play this scene from the movie of his life? He straightened himself and smiled contemptuously.

  ‘Dad,’ he said in his most cloying American accent, ‘you were so fucking sad, man, and now you’re trying to make me sad too.’ He choked insincerely. ‘Well,’ he added in his own voice, ‘bad luck.’

  3

  ANNE EISEN TURNED INTO her building, carrying a box of cakes from Le Vrai Pâtisserie. If it had been La Vraie Pâtisserie, as Victor never tired of pointing out, it would have been even vraie-er, or plus vraie, she thought, smiling at Fred the doorman. Fred looked like a boy who had inherited his older brother’s school uniform. The gold-braided sleeves of his brown coat hung down to the knuckles of his big pale hands, whereas his trousers, defeated by the bulk of his buttocks and thighs, flapped high above the pale blue nylon socks that clung to his ankles.

  ‘Hi, Fred,’ said Anne.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Eisen. Can I help you with your packages?’ said Fred, waddling over.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Anne, stooping theatrically, ‘but I can still manage two millefeuilles and a pain aux raisins. Say, Fred,’ she added, ‘I have a friend coming over round four o’clock. He’s young and sort of ill-looking. Be gentle with him, his father just died.’

  ‘Oh, gee, I’m sorry,’ said Fred.

  ‘I don’t think he is,’ said Anne, ‘although he may not know that yet.’

  Fred tried to look as if he hadn’t heard. Mrs Eisen was a real nice lady, but sometimes she said the weirdest things.

  Anne got into the lift and pressed the button for the eleventh floor. In a few weeks it would all be over. No more eleventh floor, no more of Professor Wilson’s cane chairs and his African masks and his big abstract I-think-it’s-good-but-his-work-never-really-caught-on painting in the drawing room.

  Jim Wilson, whose rich wife enabled him to exhibit his rather old-fashioned liberal wares on Park Avenue, no less, had been ‘visiting’ Oxford since October, while Victor visited Columbia in exchange. Every time Anne and Victor went to a party – and they almost never stopped – she’d needle him about being the visiting professor. Anne and Victor had an ‘open’ marriage. ‘Open’, as in ‘open wound’ or ‘open rebellion’ or indeed ‘open marriage’, was not always a good thing, but now that Victor was seventy-six it hardly seemed worth divorcing him. Besides, somebody had to look after him.

  Anne got out of the lift and opened the door to apartment 11E, reaching for the light switch, next to the Red Indian blanket that hung in the hall. What the hell was she going to say to Patrick? Although he had turned into a surly and malicious adolescent, and was now a drug-addled twenty-two-year-old, she could still remember him sitting on the stairs at Lacoste when he was five, and she still felt responsible – she knew it was absurd – for not managing to get his mother away from that gruesome dinner party.

  Oddly enough, the delusions which had enabled her to marry Victor had really started on that evening. During the next few months Victor immersed himself in the creation of his new book, Being, Knowing, and Judging, so easily (and yet so wrongly!) confused with its predecessor, Thinking, Knowing, and Judging. Victor’s claim that he wanted to keep his students ‘on their toes’ by giving his books such similar titles had not altogether extinguished Anne’s doubts or those of his publisher. Nevertheless, like a masterful broom, his new book had scattered the dust long settled on the subject of identity, and swept it into exciting new piles.

  At the end of this creative surge Victor had proposed to Anne. She had been thirty-four and, although she didn’t know it at the time, her admiration for Victor was at its peak. She had accepted him, not only because he was imbued with that mild celebrity which is all a living philosopher can hope for, but also because she believed that Victor was a good man.

  What the hell was she going to say to Patrick, she wondered as she took a spinach-green majolica plate from Barbara’s fabulous collection and arranged the cakes on its irregularly glazed surface.

  It was no use pretending to Patrick that she had liked David Melrose. Even after his divorce from Eleanor, when he was poor and ill, David had been no more endearing than a chained Alsatian. His life was an unblemished failure and his isolation terrifying to imagine, but he still had a smile like a knife; and if he had tried to learn (talk about a mature student!) how to please people, his efforts were faintly repulsive to anyone who knew his real nature.

  As she leaned over an annoyingly low Moroccan table in the drawing room, Anne felt her dark glasses slip from the top of her head. Perhaps her yellow cotton dress was a little too upbeat for the occasion, but what the hell? Patrick had not seen her recently enough to tell that she had dyed her hair. No doubt Barbara Wilson would have let it go naturally grey, but Anne had to appear on television tomorrow night to talk about ‘The New Woman’. While she had been trying to find out what on earth a New Woman might be, she had got a New hairstyle and bought a New dress. It was research and she wanted expenses.

  Twenty to four. Dead time until he arrived. Time to light a lethal, cancer-causing cigarette, time to fly in the face of the Surgeon General’s advice – as if you could trust a man who was a surgeon and a general at the same time. She called that working both sides of the street. There was no disguising it, though, she did feel guilty, but then she felt guilty putting three drops of bath essence into the water instead of two. So what the hell?

  Anne had barely lit her mild, light, mentholated, almost entirely pointless cigarette, when the buzzer rang from downstairs.

  ‘Hi, Fred.’

  ‘Oh, hello, Mrs Eisen: Mr Melrose is here.’

  ‘Well, I guess you’d better send him up,’ she said, wondering if there wasn’t some way they could ever vary this conversation.

  Anne went into the kitchen, switched on the kettle, and sprinkled some tea leaves into the Japanese teapot with the wobbly overarching rattan handle.

  The doorbell interrupted her and she hurried out of the kitchen to open the front door. Patrick was standing with his back to her in a long black overcoat.

  ‘Hello, Patrick,’ she said.

  ‘Hello,’ he mumbled, trying to squeeze past her. But she took him by the shoulders and embraced him warmly.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

  Patrick would not yield to this embrace, but slid away like a wrestler breaking an opponent’s grip.

  ‘I’m sorry too,’ he said, bowing slightly. ‘Being late is a bore, but arriving early is unforgivable. Punctuality is one of the smaller vices I’ve inherited from my father; it means I’ll never really be chic.’ He paced up and down the drawing room with his hands in his overcoat pockets. ‘Unlike this apartment,’ he sneered. ‘Who was lucky enough to swap this place for your nice house in London?’

  ‘Victor’s opposite number at Columbia, Jim Wilson.’

  ‘God, imagine having an opposite number instead of always being one’s own opposite number,’ said Patrick.

  ‘Do you want some tea?’ asked Anne with a sympathetic sigh.

  ‘Hum,’ said Patrick. ‘I wonder if I could have a real drink as well? For me it’s already nine in the evening.’

  ‘For you it’s always nine in the evening,’ said Anne. ‘What do you want? I’ll fix it for you.’

  ‘No, I’ll do it,’ he said, ‘you won’t make it strong enough.’

  ‘OK,’ said Anne, turning towards the kitchen, ‘the drinks are on the Mexican millstone.’

  The millstone was engraved with feathered warriors, but it was the bottle of Wild Turkey whi
ch commanded Patrick’s attention. He poured some into a tall glass and knocked back another Quaalude with the first gulp, refilling the glass immediately. After seeing his father’s corpse, he had gone to the Forty-fourth Street branch of the Morgan Guaranty Bank and collected three thousand dollars in cash which now bulged inside an orange-brown envelope in his pocket.

  He checked the pills again (lower right pocket) and then the envelope (inside left) and then the credit cards (outer left). This nervous action, which he sometimes performed every few minutes, was like a man crossing himself before an altar – the Drugs; the Cash; and the Holy Ghost of Credit.

  He had already taken a second Quaalude after the visit to the bank, but he still felt groundless and desperate and overwrought. Perhaps a third one was overdoing it, but overdoing it was his occupation.

  ‘Does this happen to you?’ asked Patrick, striding into the kitchen with renewed energy. ‘You see a millstone, and the words “round my neck” ring up like the price on an old cash register. Isn’t it humiliating,’ he said, taking some ice cubes, ‘God, I love these ice machines, they’re the best thing about America so far – humiliating that one’s thoughts have all been prepared in advance by these idiotic mechanisms?’

  ‘The idiotic ones aren’t good,’ Anne agreed, ‘but there’s no need for the cash register to come up with something cheap.’

  ‘If your mind works like a cash register, anything you come up with is bound to be cheap.’

  ‘You obviously don’t shop at Le Vrai Pâtisserie,’ said Ann, carrying the cakes and tea into the drawing room.

  ‘If we can’t control our conscious responses, what chance do we have against the influences we haven’t recognized?’

  ‘None at all,’ said Anne cheerfully, handing him a cup of tea.

  Patrick let loose a curt laugh. He felt detached from what he had been saying. Perhaps the Quaaludes were beginning to make a difference.

  ‘Do you want a cake?’ said Anne. ‘I bought them to remind us of Lacoste. They’re as French as … as French letters.’

  ‘That French,’ gasped Patrick, taking one of the millefeuilles out of politeness. As he picked it up, the cake oozed cream from its flanks, like pus dribbling from a wound. Christ, he thought, this cake is completely out of control.

  ‘It’s alive!’ he said out loud, squeezing the millefeuille rather too hard. Cream spurted out and dropped on to the elaborate brass surface of the Moroccan table. His fingers were sticky with icing. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he mumbled, putting the cake down.

  Anne handed him a napkin. She noticed that Patrick was becoming increasingly clumsy and slurred. Before he had arrived she was dreading the inevitable conversation about his father; now she was worried that it might not take place.

  ‘Have you been to see your father yet?’ she asked outright.

  ‘I did see him,’ said Patrick without hesitation. ‘I thought he was at his best in a coffin – so much less difficult than usual.’ He grinned at her disarmingly.

  Anne smiled at him faintly, but Patrick needed no encouragement.

  ‘When I was young,’ he said, ‘my father used to take us to restaurants. I say “restaurants” in the plural, because we never stormed in and out of less than three. Either the menu took too long to arrive, or a waiter struck my father as intolerably stupid, or the wine list disappointed him. I remember he once held a bottle of red wine upside down while the contents gurgled out onto the carpet. “How dare you bring me this filth?” he shouted. The waiter was so frightened that instead of throwing him out, he brought more wine.’

  ‘So you liked being with him in a place he didn’t complain about.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Patrick. ‘I couldn’t believe my luck, and for a while I expected him to sit up in his coffin, like a vampire at sunset, and say, “The service here is intolerable.” Then we would have had to go to three or four other funeral parlours. Mind you, the service was intolerable. They sent me to the wrong corpse.’

  ‘The wrong corpse!’ exclaimed Anne.

  ‘Yes, I wound up at a jaunty Jewish cocktail party given for a Mr Hermann Newton. I wish I could have stayed; they seemed to be having such fun…’

  ‘What an appalling story,’ said Anne, lighting a cigarette. ‘I’ll bet they give courses in Bereavement Counselling.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Patrick, letting out another quick hollow laugh and sinking back into his armchair. He could definitely feel the influence of the Quaaludes now. The alcohol had brought out the best in them, like the sun coaxing open the petals of a flower, he reflected tenderly.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ he said. He had not heard Anne’s last question.

  ‘Is he being cremated?’ she repeated.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Patrick. ‘I gather that when people are cremated one never really gets their ashes, just some communal rakings from the bottom of the oven. As you can imagine, I regard that as good news. Ideally, all the ashes would belong to somebody else, but we don’t live in a perfect world.’

  Anne had given up wondering whether he was sorry about his father’s death, and had started wishing he was a little sorrier. His venomous remarks, although they could not affect David, made Patrick look so ill he might have been waiting to die from a snakebite.

  Patrick closed his eyes slowly and, after a very long time, slowly opened them again. The whole operation took about half an hour. Another half an hour elapsed while he licked his dry and fascinatingly sore lips. He was really getting something off that last Quaalude. His blood was hissing like a television screen after closedown. His hands were like dumbbells, like dumbbells in his hands. Everything folding inward and growing heavier.

  ‘Hello there!’ Anne called.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Patrick, leaning forward with what he imagined was a charming smile. ‘I’m awfully tired.’

  ‘Maybe you ought to go to bed.’

  ‘No, no, no. Let’s not exaggerate.’

  ‘You could lie down for a few hours,’ Anne suggested, ‘and then have dinner with Victor and me. We’re going to a party afterward, given by some ghastly Long Island Anglophiles. Just your kind of thing.’

  ‘It’s sweet of you, but I really can’t face too many strangers at the moment,’ said Patrick, playing his bereavement card a little too late to convince Anne.

  ‘You should come along,’ she coaxed. ‘I’m sure it will be an example of “unashamed luxury”.’

  ‘I can’t imagine what that means,’ said Patrick sleepily.

  ‘Let me give you the address anyhow,’ Anne insisted. ‘I don’t like the idea of your being alone too much.’

  ‘Fine. Write it down for me before I go.’

  He knew he had to take some speed soon or involuntarily take up Anne’s offer to ‘lie down for a few hours’. He did not want to swallow a whole Beauty, because it would take him on a fifteen-hour megalomaniac odyssey, and he didn’t want to be that conscious. On the other hand, he had to get rid of the feeling that he had been dropped into a pool of slowly drying concrete.

  ‘Where’s the loo?’

  Anne told him how to get there, and Patrick waded across the carpet in the direction she had indicated. Once he had locked the bathroom door Patrick felt a familiar sense of security. Inside a bathroom he could give in to the obsession with his own physical and mental state which was so often compromised by the presence of other people or the absence of a well-lit mirror. Most of the ‘quality time’ in his life had been spent in a bathroom. Injecting, snorting, swallowing, stealing, overdosing; examining his pupils, his arms, his tongue, his stash.

  ‘O bathrooms!’ he intoned, spreading out his arms in front of the mirror. ‘Thy medicine cabinets pleaseth me mightily! Thy towels moppeth up the rivers of my blood…’ He petered out as he took the Black Beauty from his pocket. He was just going to take enough to function, just enough to … what had he been about to say? He couldn’t remember. My God, it was short-term memory loss again, the Professor Moriarty of drug abuse, inte
rrupting and then obliterating the precious sensations one went to such trouble to secure.

  ‘Inhuman fiend,’ he muttered.

  The black capsule eventually came apart and he emptied half the contents onto one of the Portuguese tiles around the basin. Taking out one of his new hundred-dollar notes, he rolled it into a tight tube and sniffed up the small heap of white powder from the tile.

  His nose stung and his eyes watered slightly but, refusing to be distracted, Patrick resealed the capsule, wrapped it in a Kleenex, put it back in his pocket and then, for no reason he could identify, almost against his will, he took it out again, emptied the rest of the powder onto a tile and sniffed it up as well. The effects wouldn’t last so long this way, he argued, inhaling deeply through his nose. It was too sordid to take half of anything. Anyhow, his father had just died and he was entitled to be confused. The main thing, the heroic feat, the proof of his seriousness and his samurai status in the war against drugs, was that he hadn’t taken any heroin.

  Patrick leaned forward and checked his pupils in the mirror. They had definitely dilated. His heartbeat had accelerated. He felt invigorated, he felt refreshed, in fact he felt rather aggressive. It was as if he had never taken a drink or a drug, he was back in complete control, the lighthouse beams of speed cutting through the thick night of the Quaaludes and the alcohol and the jet lag.

  ‘And,’ he said, clasping his lapels with mayoral solemnity, ‘last but not least, through the dark shadow, if I might put it thus, of our grief for the passing away of David Melrose.’

  How long had he been in the bathroom? It seemed like a lifetime. The fire brigade would probably be forcing the door down soon. Patrick started to clear up hastily. He didn’t want to put the shell of the Black Beauty into the waste-paper basket (paranoia!) and so he forced the two halves of the empty capsule down the basin plughole. How was he going to explain his reanimated state to Anne? He splashed some cold water on his face and left it ostentatiously dripping. There was only one thing left to do: that authentic-sounding flush with which every junkie leaves a bathroom, hoping to deceive the audience that crowds his imagination.