The Patrick Melrose Novels

by Edward St. Aubyn

  ‘I don’t know,’ lied Patrick. ‘I can’t decide between the onion soup and the traditional English goat’s cheese salad. An analyst once told me I was suffering from a “depression on top of a depression”.’

  ‘Well, at least you got on top of the first depression,’ said Johnny, closing the menu.

  ‘Exactly,’ smiled Patrick. ‘I don’t think one can improve on the traitor of Strasbourg whose last request was that he give the order to the firing squad himself. Christ! Look at that girl!’ he burst out in a half-mournful surge of excitement.

  ‘It’s whatshername, the model.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Well, at least now I can get obsessed with an unobtainable fuck,’ said Patrick. ‘Obsession dispels depression: the third law of psychodynamics.’

  ‘What are the others?’

  ‘That people loathe those they’ve wronged, and that they despise the victims of misfortune, and … I’ll think of some more over dinner.’

  ‘I don’t despise the victims of misfortune,’ said Johnny. ‘I am worried that misfortune is contagious, but I’m not secretly convinced that it’s deserved.’

  ‘Look at her,’ said Patrick, ‘pacing around the cage of her Valentino dress, longing to be released into her natural habitat.’

  ‘Calm down,’ said Johnny, ‘she’s probably frigid.’

  ‘Just as well if she is,’ said Patrick. ‘I haven’t had sex for so long I can’t remember what it’s like, except that it takes place in that distant grey zone beneath the neck.’

  ‘It’s not grey.’

  ‘Well, there you are, I can’t even remember what it looks like, but I sometimes think it would be nice to have a relationship with my body which wasn’t based on illness or addiction.’

  ‘What about work and love?’ asked Johnny.

  ‘You know it’s not fair to ask me about work,’ said Patrick reproachfully, ‘but my experience of love is that you get excited thinking that someone can mend your broken heart, and then you get angry when you realize that they can’t. A certain economy creeps into the process and the jewelled daggers that used to pierce one’s heart are replaced by ever-blunter penknives.’

  ‘Did you expect Debbie to mend your broken heart?’

  ‘Of course, but we were like two people taking turns with a bandage – I’m afraid to say that her turns tended to be a great deal shorter. I don’t blame anyone anymore – I always mostly and rightly blamed myself…’ Patrick stopped. ‘It’s just sad to spend so long getting to know someone and explaining yourself to them, and then having no use for the knowledge.’

  ‘Do you prefer being sad to being bitter?’ asked Johnny.

  ‘Marginally,’ said Patrick. ‘It took me some time to get bitter. I used to think I saw things clearly when we were going out. I thought, she’s a mess and I’m a mess, but at least I know what kind of mess I am.’

  ‘Big deal,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Quite,’ sighed Patrick. ‘One seldom knows whether perseverance is noble or stupid until it’s too late. Most people either feel regret at staying with someone for too long, or regret at losing them too easily. I manage to feel both ways at the same time about the same object.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Johnny.

  Patrick raised his hands, as if trying to quiet the roar of applause.

  ‘But why is your heart broken?’ asked Johnny, struck by Patrick’s unguarded manner.

  ‘Some women,’ said Patrick, ignoring the question, ‘provide you with anaesthetic, if you’re lucky, or a mirror in which you can watch yourself making clumsy incisions, but most of them spend their time tearing open old wounds.’ Patrick took a gulp of Perrier. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘there’s something I want to tell you.’

  ‘Your table is ready, gentlemen,’ a waiter announced with gusto. ‘If you’d care to follow me into the dining room.’

  Johnny and Patrick got up and followed him into a brown-carpeted dining room decorated with portraits of sunlit salmon and bonneted squires’ wives, each table flickering with the light of a single pink candle.

  Patrick loosened his bow tie and undid the top button of his shirt. How could he tell Johnny? How could he tell anyone? But if he told no one, he would stay endlessly isolated and divided against himself. He knew that under the tall grass of an apparently untamed future the steel rails of fear and habit were already laid. What he suddenly couldn’t bear, with every cell in his body, was to act out the destiny prepared for him by his past, and slide obediently along those rails, contemplating bitterly all the routes he would rather have taken.

  But which words could he use? All his life he’d used words to distract attention from this deep inarticulacy, this unspeakable emotion which he would now have to use words to describe. How could they avoid being noisy and tactless, like a gaggle of children laughing under the bedroom window of a dying man? And wouldn’t he rather tell a woman, and be engulfed in maternal solicitude, or scorched by sexual frenzy? Yes, yes, yes. Or a psychiatrist, to whom he would be almost obliged to make such an offering, although he had resisted the temptation often enough. Or his mother, that Mrs Jellyby whose telescopic philanthropy had saved so many Ethiopian orphans while her own child fell into the fire. And yet Patrick wanted to tell an unpaid witness, without money, without sex, and without blame, just another human being. Perhaps he should tell the waiter: at least he wouldn’t be seeing him again.

  ‘There’s something I have to tell you,’ he repeated, after they had sat down and ordered their food. Johnny paused expectantly, putting down his glass of water from an intuition that he had better not be gulping or munching during the next few minutes.

  ‘It’s not that I’m embarrassed,’ Patrick mumbled. ‘It’s more a question of not wanting to burden you with something you can’t really be expected to do anything about.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Johnny.

  ‘I know that I’ve told you about my parents’ divorce and the drunkenness and the violence and the fecklessness … That’s not really the point at all. What I was skirting around and not saying is that when I was five—’

  ‘Here we are, gentlemen,’ said the waiter, bringing the first courses with a flourish.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Johnny. ‘Go on.’

  Patrick waited for the waiter to slip away. He must try to be as simple as he could.

  ‘When I was five, my father “abused” me, as we’re invited to call it these days—’ Patrick suddenly broke off in silence, unable to sustain the casualness he’d been labouring to achieve. Switchblades of memory that had flashed open all his life reappeared and silenced him.

  ‘How do you mean “abused”?’ asked Johnny uncertainly. The answer somehow became clear as he formulated the question.

  ‘I…’ Patrick couldn’t speak. The crumpled bedspread with the blue phoenixes, the pool of cold slime at the base of his spine, scuttling off over the tiles. These were memories he was not prepared to talk about.

  He picked up his fork and stuck the prongs discreetly but very hard into the underside of his wrist, trying to force himself back into the present and the conversational responsibilities he was neglecting.

  ‘It was…’ he sighed, concussed by memory.

  After having watched Patrick drawl his way fluently through every crisis, Johnny was shocked at seeing him unable to speak, and he found his eyes glazed with a film of tears. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he murmured.

  ‘Nobody should do that to anybody else,’ said Patrick, almost whispering.

  ‘Is everything to your satisfaction, gentlemen?’ said the chirpy waiter.

  ‘Look, do you think you could leave us alone for five minutes so we can have a conversation?’ snapped Patrick, suddenly regaining his voice.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said the waiter archly.

  ‘I can’t stand this fucking music,’ said Patrick, glancing around the dining room aggressively. Subdued Chopin teetered familiarly on the edge of hearing.

  ‘Why don’t they turn the fucking thing off,
or turn it up?’ he snarled. ‘What do I mean by abused?’ he added impatiently. ‘I mean sexually abused.’

  ‘God, I’m sorry,’ said Johnny. ‘I’d always wondered why you hated your father quite so much.’

  ‘Well, now you know. The first incident masqueraded as a punishment. It had a certain Kafkaesque charm: the crime was never named and therefore took on great generality and intensity.’

  ‘Did this go on?’ asked Johnny.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Patrick hastily.

  ‘What a bastard,’ said Johnny.

  ‘That’s what I’ve been saying for years,’ said Patrick. ‘But now I’m exhausted by hating him. I can’t go on. The hatred binds me to those events and I don’t want to be a child anymore.’ Patrick was back in the vein again, released from silence by the habits of analysis and speculation.

  ‘It must have split the world in half for you,’ said Johnny.

  Patrick was taken aback by the precision of this comment.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I think that’s exactly what happened. How did you know?’

  ‘It seemed pretty obvious.’

  ‘It’s strange to hear someone say that it’s obvious. It always seemed to me so secret and complicated.’ Patrick paused. He felt that although what he was saying mattered to him enormously, there was a core of inarticulacy that he hadn’t attacked at all. His intellect could only generate more distinctions or define the distinctions better.

  ‘I always thought the truth would set me free,’ he said, ‘but the truth just drives you mad.’

  ‘Telling the truth might set you free.’

  ‘Maybe. But self-knowledge on its own is useless.’

  ‘Well, it enables you to suffer more lucidly,’ argued Johnny.

  ‘Oh, ya, I wouldn’t miss that for the world.’

  ‘In the end perhaps the only way to alleviate misery is to become more detached about yourself and more attached to something else,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Are you suggesting I take up a hobby?’ laughed Patrick. ‘Weaving baskets or sewing mailbags?’

  ‘Well, actually, I was trying to think of a way to avoid those two particular occupations,’ said Johnny.

  ‘But if I were released from my bitter and unpleasant state of mind,’ protested Patrick, ‘what would be left?’

  ‘Nothing much,’ admitted Johnny, ‘but think what you could put there instead.’

  ‘You’re making me dizzy … Oddly enough there was something about hearing the word mercy in Measure for Measure last night that made me imagine there might be a course that is neither bitter nor false, something that lies beyond argument. But if there is I can’t grasp it; all I know is that I’m tired of having these steel brushes whirring around the inside of my skull.’

  Both men paused while the waiter silently cleared away their plates. Patrick was puzzled by how easy it had been to tell another person the most shameful and secret truth about his life. And yet he felt dissatisfied; the catharsis of confession eluded him. Perhaps he had been too abstract. His ‘father’ had become the codename for a set of his own psychological difficulties and he had forgotten the real man, with his grey curls and his wheezing chest and his proud face, who had made such clumsy efforts in his closing years to endear himself to those he had betrayed.

  When Eleanor had finally gathered the courage to divorce David, he had gone into a decline. Like a disgraced torturer whose victim has died, he cursed himself for not pacing his cruelty better, guilt and self-pity competing for mastery of his mood. David had the further frustration of being defied by Patrick who, at the age of eight, inspired by his parents’ separation, refused one day to give in to his father’s sexual assaults. Patrick’s transformation of himself from a toy into a person shattered his father, who realized that Patrick must have known what was being done to him.

  During this difficult time, David went to visit Nicholas Pratt in Sister Agnes, where he was recovering from a painful operation on his intestine following the failure of his fourth marriage. David, reeling from the prospect of his own divorce, found Nicholas lying in bed drinking champagne smuggled in by loyal friends, and only too ready to discuss how one should never trust a bloody woman.

  ‘I want someone to design me a fortress,’ said David, for whom Eleanor was proposing to build a small house surprisingly close to her own house in Lacoste. ‘I don’t want to look out on the fucking world again.’

  ‘Completely understand,’ slurred Nicholas, whose speech had become at once thicker and more staccato in his postoperative haze. ‘Only trouble with the bloody world is the bloody people in it,’ he said. ‘Give me that writing paper, would you?’

  While David paced up and down the room, flouting the hospital rules by smoking a cigar, Nicholas, who liked to surprise his friends with his amateur draughtsmanship, made a sketch worthy of David’s misanthropic ecstasy.

  ‘Keep the buggers out,’ he said when he had finished, tossing the page across the bedclothes.

  David picked it up and saw a pentagonal house with no windows on the outside and a central courtyard in which Nicholas had poetically planted a cypress tree, flaring above the low roof like a black flame.

  The architect who was given this sketch took pity on David and introduced a single window into the exterior wall of the drawing room. David locked the shutters and stuffed crunched-up copies of The Times into the aperture, cursing himself for not sacking the architect when he first visited him in his disastrously converted farmhouse near Aix, with its algae-choked swimming pool. He pressed the window closed on the newspaper and then sealed it with the thick black tape favoured by those who wish to gas themselves efficiently. Finally a curtain was drawn across the window and only reopened by rare visitors who were soon made aware of their error by David’s rage.

  The cypress tree never flourished and its twisted trunk and grey peeling bark writhed in a dismal parody of Nicholas’s noble vision. Nicholas himself, after designing the house, was too busy ever to accept an invitation. ‘One doesn’t have fun with David Melrose these days,’ he would tell people in London. This was a polite way to describe the state of mental illness into which David had degenerated. Woken every night by his own screaming nightmares, he lay in bed almost continuously for seven years, wearing those yellow-and-white flannel pyjamas, now worn through at the elbows, which were the only things he had inherited from his father, thanks to the generous intervention of his mother who had refused to see him leave the funeral empty-handed. The most enthusiastic thing he could do was to smoke a cigar, a habit his father had first encouraged in him, and one he had passed on to Patrick, among so many other disadvantages, like a baton thrust from one wheezing generation to the next. If David left his house he was dressed like a tramp, muttering to himself in giant supermarkets on the outskirts of Marseilles. Sometimes in winter he wandered about the house in dark glasses, trailing a Japanese dressing gown, and clutching a glass of pastis, checking again and again that the heating was off so that he didn’t waste any money. The contempt that saved him from complete madness drove him almost completely mad. When he emerged from his depression he was a ghost, not improved but diminished, trying to tempt people to stay in the house that had been designed to repel their unlikely invasion.

  Patrick stayed in this house during his adolescence, sitting in the courtyard, shooting olive stones over the roof so that they at least could be free. His arguments with his father, or rather his one interminable argument, reached a crucial point when Patrick said something more fundamentally insulting to David than David had just said to him, and David, conscious that he was growing slower and weaker while his son grew faster and nastier, reached into his pocket for his heart pills and, shaking them into his tortured rheumatic hands, said with a melancholy whisper, ‘You mustn’t say those things to your old Dad.’

  Patrick’s triumph was tainted by the guilty conviction that his father was about to die of a heart attack. Still, things were not the same after that, especially when Patrick was able to patroniz
e his disinherited father with a small income, and cheapen him with his money as Eleanor had once cheapened him with hers. During those closing years Patrick’s terror had largely been eclipsed by pity, and also by boredom in the company of his ‘poor old Dad’. He had sometimes dreamed that they might have an honest conversation, but a moment in his father’s company made it clear that this would never happen. And yet Patrick felt there was something missing, something he wasn’t admitting to himself, let alone telling Johnny.

  Respecting Patrick’s silence, Johnny had eaten his way through most of his corn-fed chicken by the time Patrick spoke again.

  ‘So, what can one say about a man who rapes his own child?’

  ‘I suppose it might help if you could see him as sick rather than evil,’ Johnny suggested limply. ‘I can’t get over this,’ he added, ‘it’s really awful.’

  ‘I’ve tried what you suggest,’ said Patrick, ‘but then, what is evil if not sickness celebrating itself? While my father had any power he showed no remorse or restraint, and when he was poor and abandoned he only showed contempt and morbidity.’

  ‘Maybe you can see his actions as evil, but see him as sick. Maybe one can’t condemn another person, only their actions…’ Johnny hesitated, reluctant to take on the role of the defence. ‘Maybe he couldn’t stop himself anymore than you could stop yourself taking drugs.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe, maybe,’ said Patrick, ‘but I didn’t harm anyone else by taking drugs.’

  ‘Really? What about Debbie?’

  ‘She was a grown-up, she could choose. I certainly gave her a hard time,’ Patrick admitted. ‘I don’t know, I try to negotiate truces of one sort or another, but then I run up against this unnegotiable rage.’ Patrick pushed his plate back and lit a cigarette. ‘I don’t want any pudding, do you?’

  ‘No, just coffee.’

  ‘Two coffees, please,’ said Patrick to the waiter who was now theatrically tight-lipped. ‘I’m sorry I snapped at you earlier, I was in the middle of trying to say something rather tricky.’