The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (11 page)

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.’

‘But that’s what charm is: being malicious about everybody except the person you are with, who then glows with the privilege of exemption.’

‘If that’s what charm is,’ said Anne, ‘it broke down on this occasion, because I felt that none of us was exempt.’

‘Do you wish to confirm your own theory by saying something nasty about one of your fellow dinner guests?’

‘Well, now that you mention it,’ said Anne, laughing, ‘I thought that Nicholas Pratt was a total creep.’

‘I know what you mean. His problem is that he wanted to go into politics,’ Victor explained, ‘but was destroyed by what passed for a sex scandal some years ago and would probably now be called an “open marriage”. Most people wait until they’ve become ministers to ruin their political careers with a sex scandal, but Nicholas managed to do it when he was still trying to impress Central Office by contesting a by-election in a safe Labour seat.’

‘Precocious, huh,’ said Anne. ‘What exactly did he do to deserve his exile from paradise?’

‘He was found in bed with two women he was not married to by the woman he was married to, and she decided not to “stand by his side”.’

‘Sounds like there wasn’t any room,’ said Anne, ‘but like you say, it was bad timing. Back in those days you couldn’t go on television and say how it was a “really liberating experience”.’

‘There may still be,’ said Victor with mock astonishment, joining the tips of his fingers pedagogically, to form an arc with his hands, ‘certain rural backwaters of Tory England where, even today, group sex is not practised by
all
the matrons on the Selection Committee.’

Anne sat down on Victor’s knee. ‘Victor, do two people make a group?’

‘Only part of a group, I’m afraid.’

‘You mean,’ said Anne with horror, ‘we’ve been having part-of-a-group sex?’ She got up again, ruffling Victor’s hair. ‘That’s awful.’

‘I think,’ Victor continued calmly, ‘that when his political ambitions were ruined so early, Nicholas became rather indifferent to a career and fell back on his large inheritance.’

‘He still doesn’t make it on to my casualty list,’ said Anne. ‘Being found in bed with two girls isn’t the shower room in Auschwitz.’

‘You have high standards.’

‘I do and I don’t. No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too small if it’s cherished,’ Anne said. ‘Anyhow, he isn’t suffering that badly, he’s got a stoned schoolgirl with him. She was being moody in the back of the car. Two like her isn’t enough, he’ll have to graduate to triplets.’

‘What’s she called?’

‘Bridget something. One of those not very convincing English names like Hop-Scotch.’

Anne moved on quickly, she was determined not to let Victor get lost in ruminations about where Bridget might ‘fit in’. ‘The oddest thing about the day was our visit to Le Wild Ouest.’

‘Why on earth did you go there?’

‘As far as I could make out we were there because Patrick wants to go, but Eleanor gets priority.’

‘You don’t think she might have just been checking whether it was an amusing place to take her son?’

‘In the Dodge City of arrested development, you gotta be quick on the draw,’ said Anne, whipping out an imaginary gun.

‘You seem to have entered into the spirit of the place,’ said Victor drily.

‘If she wanted to take her son there,’ Anne resumed, ‘he could have come with us. And if she wanted to find out whether it was an “amusing place”, Patrick could have told her.’

Victor did not want to argue with Anne. She often had strong opinions about human situations which did not really matter to him, unless they illustrated a principle or yielded an anecdote, and he preferred to concede this stony ground to her, with whatever show of leniency his mood required. ‘There isn’t anyone at dinner tonight left for us to disparage,’ he said, ‘except David, and we know what you think of him.’

‘That reminds me, I must read at least a chapter of
The Twelve Caesars
so I can give it back to him this evening.’

‘Read the chapters on Nero and Caligula,’ Victor suggested, ‘I’m sure they’re David’s favourites. One illustrates what happens when you combine a mediocre artistic talent with absolute power. The other shows how nearly inevitable it is for those who have been terrified to become terrifying, once they have the opportunity.’

‘But isn’t that the key to a great education? You spend your adolescence being promoted from terrified to terrifier, without any women around to distract you.’

Victor decided to ignore this latest demonstration of Anne’s rather tiresome attitude towards English public schools. ‘The interesting thing about Caligula,’ he went on patiently, ‘is that he intended to be a model emperor, and for the first few months of his reign he was praised for his magnanimity. But the compulsion to repeat what one has experienced is like gravity, and it takes special equipment to break away from it.’

Anne was amused to hear Victor make such an overtly psychological generalization. Perhaps if people had been dead long enough they came alive for him.

‘Nero I dislike for having driven Seneca to suicide,’ Victor droned on. ‘Although I’m well aware of the hostility that can arise between a pupil and his tutor, it is just as well to keep it within limits,’ he chuckled.

‘Didn’t Nero commit suicide himself, or was that just in
Nero, the Movie
?’

‘When it came to suicide he showed less enthusiasm than he had done for driving other people to it. He sat around for a long time wondering which part of his “pustular and malodorous” body to puncture, wailing, “Dead and so great an artist!”’

‘You sound like you were there.’

‘You know how it is with the books one reads in one’s youth.’

‘Yeah, that’s kinda how I feel about
Francis the Talking Mule,
’ said Anne.

She got up from the creaking wicker chair. ‘I guess I’d better catch up on “one’s youth” before dinner.’ She moved over to Victor’s side. ‘Write me one sentence before we have to go,’ she said gently. ‘You can do that, can’t you?’

Victor enjoyed being coaxed. He looked up at her like an obedient child. ‘I’ll try,’ he said modestly.

Anne walked through the gloom of the kitchen and climbed the twisting stairs. She felt a cool pleasure at being alone for the first time since the early morning and wanted to have a bath straight away. Victor liked to wallow in the tub, controlling the taps with his big toe, and she knew how irrationally disappointed he became if the steaming water ran out during this important ceremony. Besides, if she bathed now she could lie on her bed and read for a couple of hours before going out to dinner.