The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (19 page)

What the fuck was going on? Why were his father’s
remains
so hard to find? He had no trouble in discovering them in himself, it was only Frank E. MacDonald that was experiencing this difficulty. While Patrick cackled hysterically at this thought, a bald homosexual with a moustache, and a strong sense of the restrained flair he brought with him into the mortuary business, emerged from the panelled door and clicked his way across the black and white diamonds of the lobby floor. Without apology, he told Patrick to step right this way and led him back into the elevator. He pressed the button for the second floor, less near to heaven than Mr Newton, but without the sound of a cocktail party. In the silence of that discreetly lit corridor, the director mincing ahead of him, Patrick began to realize that he had wasted his defences on an impostor and, exhausted by the farce of Mr Newton’s wake, he was now dangerously vulnerable to the impact of his father’s corpse.

‘This is the room,’ said the director, playing with his cuff. ‘I’ll leave you to be alone with him,’ he purred.

Patrick glanced into the small, richly carpeted room.
Fucking hell.
What was his father doing in a coffin? He nodded to the director and waited outside the room, feeling a wave of madness rise up inside him. What did it mean that he was about to see his father’s corpse? What was it meant to mean? He hovered in the doorway. His father’s head was lying towards him and he could not yet see the face, just the grey curls of his hair. They had covered the body with tissue paper. It lay in the coffin, like a present someone had put down halfway through unwrapping.

‘It’s Dad!’ muttered Patrick incredulously, clasping his hands together and turning to an imaginary friend. ‘You
shouldn’t
have!’

He stepped into the room, filled with dread again, but driven by curiosity. The face, alas, had not been covered in tissue, and Patrick was amazed by the nobility of his father’s countenance. Those looks, which had deceived so many people because they were disconnected from his father’s personality, were all the more impertinent now that the disconnection was complete. His father looked as if death was an enthusiasm he did not share, but with which he had been surrounded like a priest at a boxing match.

Those bruised, flickering eyes that assessed every weakness, like a teller’s fingers counting a stack of banknotes, were now closed. That underlip, so often thrust out before a burst of anger, now contradicted the proud expression into which his features had relaxed. It had been torn open (he must have still been wearing his false teeth) by rage and protest and the consciousness of death.

However closely he tracked his father’s life – and he felt the influence of this habit like a pollution in his bloodstream, a poison he had not put there himself, impossible to purge or leech without draining the patient – however closely he tried to imagine the lethal combination of pride and cruelty and sadness which had dominated his father’s life, and however much he longed for it not to dominate his own life, Patrick could never follow him into that final moment when he had known he was about to die and he had been right. Patrick had known he was about to die often enough, but he had always been wrong.

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 which 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.