The Patrick Melrose Novels

by Edward St. Aubyn

Seeing his aunt made him marvel again at how different she was from her sister. And yet their attitudes of extreme worldliness and extreme unworldliness had a common origin in a sense of maternal betrayal and financial disappointment. The blame had been reattributed to her stepfather by Nancy, while Eleanor had tried to unload the sense of betrayal onto Patrick. Unsuccessfully, he now liked to think, although after only a few hours with his aunt he felt like a recovering alcoholic who has been given a cocktail shaker for his birthday.

  The tall clear windows looked onto a broad lawn sloping down to an ornamental pond and spanned by a wooden Japanese bridge. From where he sat he could see Thomas trying to hang over the side of the bridge, gently restrained by Mary while he pointed at the exotic waterfowl rippling across the bright coin of water. Or perhaps there were koi carp giving depth to the Japanese theme. Or some samurai armour gleaming in the mud. It was dangerous to underestimate Nancy’s decorative thoroughness. Robert was writing his diary in the little pond-side pagoda.

  Several shelves of unreadable classics creaked open and Nancy strode back into the room.

  ‘That was our rich cousin,’ she said, as if invigorated by contact with money.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Henry. He says you’re going to his island next week.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Patrick. ‘We’re just paw whi-te trash throwin’ oursef on the cha-ri-tee of our American kin.’

  ‘He wanted to know if your children were well behaved. I told him they hadn’t broken anything yet. “How long have they been there?” he asked. When I said you arrived about two hours ago, he said, “Oh, for God sakes, Nancy, what kind of a sample is that? I’m ringing back tomorrow for a full report.” I guess not everybody has the world’s most important collection of Meissen figurines.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he will either, after Thomas has been to stay.’

  ‘Don’t say that!’ said Nancy. ‘Now you’re making me nervous.’

  ‘I didn’t know Henry had become so pompous. I haven’t seen him in at least twenty years; it was really very hospitable of him to let us come. As a teenager he belonged to that familiar type, the complacent rebel. I suppose the rebel was defeated by the army of Meissen figurines. Who can blame him for surrendering? Imagine the gleaming hordes of porcelain milkmaids clearing the brow of the hill and flooding the bowl of the valley, and poor Henry with only a rolled-up portfolio statement to beat them off.’

  ‘You get awfully carried away by your imagination,’ said Nancy.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Patrick. ‘I haven’t been in court for three weeks. The speeches pile up…’

  ‘Well, your ancient aunt is going to have a rest now. We’re going to Walter’s and Beth’s for tea, and I’d better be on top form for that. Don’t let the children walk on the grass barefoot, or go into the woods at all. I’m afraid this part of Connecticut is a Lyme disease hot spot, and the ticks are just dreadful this year. The gardener tries to keep the poison ivy out of the garden, but he can’t control the woods. Lyme disease is just horrible. It’s recurring and if it goes untreated it can destroy your life. There’s a little boy who lives in the village here and he’s really not at all well. He has psychotic fits and things. Beth just takes the antibiotics round the clock. She “self-medicates”. She says it’s safer to assume you’re always in danger.’

  ‘Grounds for perpetual war,’ said Patrick. ‘Tout ce qu’il y a de plus chic.’

  ‘Well, if you want to put it that way.’

  ‘I think I do. Not necessarily to her face.’

  ‘Necessarily not to her face,’ Nancy flared up. ‘She’s one of my oldest friends and besides, she’s the most powerful of the Park Avenue women and it’s not a good idea to cross her.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ said Patrick.

  After Nancy had left, Patrick walked over to the drinks tray and, so as not to leave a dirty glass, drank several gulps of bourbon from a bottle of Maker’s Mark. He sank back into an armchair and stared out of the window. The impenetrable New England countryside looked pretty enough, but was in fact packed with more dangers than a Cambodian swamp. Mary already had several pamphlets on Lyme disease – named after a Connecticut town only a few miles away – and so there was no need to rush out and tell the family.

  ‘It’s safer to assume you’re always in danger.’ Some verbal tic made him want to say, ‘It’s safer to assume you’re safe unless you’re in danger’, but he was quickly won over by the plausibility of paranoia. In any case, he now felt in danger all the time. Danger of liver collapse, marital breakdown, terminal fear. Nobody ever died of a feeling, he would say to himself, not believing a word of it, as he sweated his way through the feeling that he was dying of fear. People died of feelings all the time, once they had gone through the formality of materializing them into bullets and bottles and tumours. Someone who was organized like him, with utterly chaotic foundations, a quite strongly developed intellect and almost nothing in between desperately needed to develop the middle ground. Without it, he split into a vigilant day mind, a bird of prey hovering over a landscape, and a helpless night mind, a jellyfish splattered on the deck of a ship. ‘The Eagle and the Jellyfish’, a fable Aesop just couldn’t be bothered to write. He guffawed with abrupt, slightly deranged laughter and got up to take another gulp of bourbon from the bottle. Yes, the middle ground was now occupied by a lake of alcohol. The first drink centred him for about twenty minutes and then the rest brought his night mind rushing over the landscape like the dark blade of an eclipse.

  The whole thing, he knew, was a humiliating Oedipal drama. Despite the superficial revolution in his relations with Eleanor, a local victory of compassion over loathing, the underlying impact she had made on his life remained undisturbed. His fundamental sense of being was a kind of free fall, a limitless dread, a claustrophobic agoraphobia. Doubtless there was something universal about fear. His sons, despite their lavish treatment from Mary, had moments of fear, but these were temporary afflictions, whereas Patrick felt that fear was the ground he stood on, or the groundlessness he fell into, and he couldn’t help connecting this conviction with his mother’s absolute inability to concentrate on another human being. He had to remind himself that the defining characteristic of Eleanor’s life was her incompetence. She wanted to have a child and became a lousy mother; she wanted to write children’s stories and became a lousy writer; she wanted to be a philanthropist and gave all her money to a self-serving charlatan. Now she wanted to die and she couldn’t do that either. She could only communicate with people who presented themselves as the portals to some bombastic generalization, like ‘humanity’ or ‘salvation’, something the mewling, puking Patrick must have been unable to do. One of the troubles with being an infant was the difficulty of distinguishing incompetence from malice, and this difficulty sometimes returned to him in the drunken middle of the night. It was now beginning to invade his view of Mary as well.

  Mary had been a devoted mother to Robert, but after the absorption of the first year she had resurfaced as a wife, if only because she wanted another child. With Thomas, perhaps because she knew that he was her last child, she seemed to be trapped in a Madonna and Child force field, preserving a precinct of purity, including her own rediscovered virginity. Patrick was in the unenviable role of Joseph in this enduring, unendurable Bethlehem. Mary had completely withdrawn her attention from him and the more he requested it the more he appeared in the light of an imposturous rival to his younger son. He had turned elsewhere, to Julia, and once that had collapsed, to the oblivious embrace of alcohol. He must stop. At his age he either had to join the resistance or become a collaborator with death. There was no room to play with self-destruction once the juvenile illusion of indestructibility had evaporated.

  Oh dear, he’d made rather too much progress with the Maker’s Mark. The logical thing to do was to take this bottle upstairs and pour the rest of it into the depleted bottle of bourbon hidden in his rucksack, and then nip into town to buy another
one for Nancy’s drinks table. He would, of course, have to make convincing inroads into the new bottle so that it resembled the old bottle before he had almost finished it. Practically anything was less complicated than being a successful alcoholic. Bombing Third World countries – now there was an occupation for a man of leisure. ‘It’s all right for some,’ he muttered, weaving his way across the room. He was arguably just a teeny-weeny bit too drunk for this time of day. His thoughts were cracking up, going staccato, getting overtrumped just as he was about to pick up the trick.

  Check: family in the garden. Check: silence in the hall. Run up the stairs, close the door, get the rucksack, decant the bourbon – all over his hand. Hide the empty on top of cupboard. Car keys. Down and out. Tell family? Yes. No. Yes. No! Get in car. Ding ding ding. Fucking American car safety ding ding. Safer to assume sudden violent death. Police no please no police, p-l-e-a-s-e. Slip away over crunchy nutritious gravel. Cruise control, out of control. Suggestible suggestions. Jump the tracks, get out of the syllable cruncher and into, into the sunlit death-trap countryside. Better pave the whole thing over. Angry posses of ordinary citizens with chain saws and concrete mixers. ‘We’ve lived in fear for long enough! We’ve got a right to protect our families! It says in the Bible, “The wild places shall be made tame. And the people shall have dominion over the ticks.”’

  He was drifting along in his silvery blue Buick LeSabre, screaming in a hillbilly accent. He couldn’t stop. He couldn’t stop anything. He couldn’t stop the car, he couldn’t stop drinking, he couldn’t stop the Koncrete Klux Klan. A bright red Stop sign slipped by as he merged quietly with the main road into town. He parked next to the Vino Veritas liquor store. The car had somehow locked itself, just to be on the safe side. Ding ding ding. Keys still in the ignition. He arched backwards trying to ease the dull pain in his lower back. Eroded vertebrae? Swollen kidneys? ‘We have to think our way out of the box of our habitual dichotomies,’ he purred, in the smug tones of a self-help tape. ‘It’s not an either vertebrae or kidneys situation, it’s a both kidneys and vertebrae situation. Think outside the box! Be creative!’

  And here, straight ahead of him, across the railway tracks, down among the playing fields, was another both and situation. Both the exuberant sentimentality of American family life unfolding among the brightly coloured tubes and slides and swings of a playground, with its soft wood-chip landing sites and, on a large area of grass beyond the chain-link fence, two pot-bellied policemen training an Alsatian to tear apart any sick fucks who thought to disturb the peace and prosperity of New Milton. One policeman held the dog by the collar, the other stood at the far end of the green with a huge padded arm guard. The Alsatian streaked across the grass, leapt onto the padded arm and shook his head savagely from side to side, his growling just audible through the humid air pierced by the cries of children and the sonic solicitude of safety-conscious cars. Did the children feel safer, or just feel that it was safer to assume they were always in danger? A Botero-shaped family munching soft buns at a round-cornered picnic table looked on as the first policeman hurried across the green and tried to detach the keen young Alsatian from his colleague’s arm. The second policeman was by now floundering on the grass trying to persuade the dog that he was not a sick fuck but one of the good guys.

  Vino Veritas had three sizes of Maker’s Mark. Not sure which one he was supposed to replace, Patrick bought all three.

  ‘Better be safe than sorry,’ he explained to the salesman.

  ‘You’d better believe it,’ said the salesman with a fervour that catapulted Patrick back into the parking lot.

  He was already in another phase of drunkenness. Sweatier, sadder, slower. He needed both another drink and a huge amount of coffee, so that he could stand up at Walter and Beth’s, or indeed anywhere. He was in fact certain, he might as well admit it, that the smallest bottle of Maker’s Mark was not the one he had to replace. He hadn’t been able to resist buying the baby bottle to complete the family. Ding ding ding. He unpeeled the red faux-wax cap and uncorked the bottle. As the bourbon slipped down his throat, he pictured a flaming beam crashing through the floors and ceilings of a building, spreading fire and wreckage. What a relief.

  The Better Latte Than Never coffee shop lived up to the maddening promise of its name. Patrick sailed past the invitation to a skinny caramel grande vanilla frapuccino in a transparent plastic cup jam-packed with mouthwatering ice and strawberry-flavoured whipped cream, and ordered some black coffee. He moved along the assembly line.

  ‘Have a great one!’ said Pete, a heavy-jawed blond beast in an apron, sliding the coffee across the counter.

  Old enough to remember the arrival of ‘Have a nice day’, Patrick could only look with alarm on the hyperinflation of ‘Have a great one’. Where would this Weimar of bullying cheerfulness end? ‘You have a profound and meaningful day now,’ he simpered under his breath as he tottered across the room with his giant mug. ‘Have a blissful one,’ he snapped as he sat at a table. ‘You all make sure you have an all-body orgasm,’ he whispered in a Southern accent, ‘and make it last.’ Because you deserve it. Because you owe it to yourself. Because you’re a unique and special person. In the end, there was only so much you could expect from a cup of coffee and an uneatable muffin. If only Pete had confined himself to realistic achievements. ‘Have a cold shower,’ or ‘Try not to crash your car.’

  He was back in the inflammatory, deranged drunkenness he had lost in the hot parking lot. Yes yes yes. After a few gallons of coffee there’d be no stopping him. Across the room, a voluptuous medical student in a pink cardigan and faded jeans was working on her computer. Her mobile phone was on the slate ledge of the Heat and Glow fireplace, next to the Walkman and the complicated drink. She sat on her chair with her knees raised and her legs wide open as if she had just given birth to her Hewlett Packard, The Pathology of Disease squashing some loose notes on the edge of the table. He must have her, on a must-have basis. She was so relaxed in her body. He stared at her and she looked back at him with a calm even gaze. She smiled. It was absolutely terrifying how perfect she was. He looked away and smiled bashfully at his kneecap. He couldn’t bear her being friendly. It made him want to cry. She was practically a doctor, she could probably completely save him. His sons would miss him at first, but they’d get over it. Anyway, they could come and stay. She was obviously an incredibly warm and loving person.

  The Oedipal vortex had him caught like a dead leaf in its compulsory spin, wanting one consolation after another. Some languages kept the ideas of desire and privation apart, but English forced them into the naked intimacy of a single syllable: want. Wanting love to ease the want of love. The war on want which made one want more. Whiskey was no better at looking after him than his mother had been, or his wife had become, or the pink cardigan would be if he lurched across the room, fell to his knees and begged her for mercy. Why did he want to do that? Where was the Eagle now? Why wasn’t he coolly registering the feeling of attraction and reabsorbing it into a sense of his present state of mind, or beyond that, into the simple fact of being alive? Why rush naively towards the objects of his thoughts, when he could stay at their source? He closed his eyes and slumped in his chair.

  So, here he was in the magnificence of the inner realm, no longer chasing after pink cardigans and amber bottles, but watching thoughts flick open like so many fans in a hot crowded room. He was no longer jumping into the painted scenes, but noticing the flicking, noticing the heat, noticing that drunkenness gave a certain predominance to images in his otherwise predominantly verbal mind, noticing that the conclusion he was looking for was not blackout and orgasm, but knowledge and insight. The trouble was that even when the object of pursuit changed, the anguish of pursuit remained. He found himself hurtling towards a vacuum rather than hurtling away from it. Big deal. In the end he was better off galloping after the syrupy mirage of a hot fuck. He opened his eyes. She was gone. Want in both directions. Directions delusions anyway. A universe of
want. Infinite melancholy.

  The scraping chair. Late. Family. Tea. Try not to think. Think: don’t think. Madness. Ding ding ding. Cruise control, out of control. Please stop thinking. Who’s asking? Who’s being asked?

  When he drew up to the house, the Others were arranged around Nancy’s car in a tableau of reproach and irritation.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe what happened to me in New Milton,’ he said, wondering what he would say if anybody asked.

  ‘We were about to leave without you,’ said Nancy. ‘Beth can’t stand people being late; they just drop right off her guest list.’

  ‘A slobbering thought,’ said Patrick. ‘I mean sobering thought,’ he corrected himself. Neither version was heard above the sound of crunching gravel and slamming doors. He climbed into the back of Nancy’s car and slumped next to Thomas, wishing he had the baby bottle of Maker’s Mark to nurse him through tea. During the journey he dozed superficially until he felt the car slow down and come to a halt. When he clambered out he found himself surrounded by unpunctuated woodland. The Berkshire Hills rolled off in every direction, like a heavy swell in a green and yellow ocean, with Walter and Beth’s white clapboard ark cresting the nearest wave. He felt seasick and land-bound at the same time.

  ‘Unbelievable,’ he muttered.

  ‘I know,’ said Nancy. ‘They pretty much own the view.’

  The tea party unfolded for Patrick in an unreliable middle distance. One moment he felt as glazed over as an aquarium on television, the next he was drowning. There were maids in uniform with eyeball aching white shoes. A small Hispanic butler. Sweet brown cinnamony iced tea. Park Avenue gossip. People laughing about something Henry Kissinger had said at dinner on Thursday.

  Then the garden tour began. Walter went ahead, sometimes unlocking his arm from Nancy’s in order to clip an impertinent shoot with the secateurs he held in his suede-gloved hand. He certainly wouldn’t be doing any gardening if it hadn’t been done already. He bore the same relation to the gardening as a mayor to the housing development on which he cuts the inaugural ribbon. Beth followed with Mary and the children. She was persistently modest about the garden and sometimes downright dissatisfied. When she came to a topiary deer that stood on the edge of a flower bed, she said, ‘I hate it! It looks like a kangaroo. I pour vinegar on it to try to kill it off. The climate here is impossible: we’re up to our waists in snow until the middle of May, and two weeks later we’re living in Vietnam.’