The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (43 page)

She was taking a long-term view and looking ahead two or three years. Looks didn’t last forever and she wasn’t ready for religion yet. Money was kind of a good compromise, staked up somewhere between cosmetics and eternity. Besides, she liked Sonny, she really did. He was cute, not to look at, God no, but aristocratic cute, old-fashioned out-of-a-movie cute.

Last year in Paris all the other models had come back to her suite in the Lotti – now there was a real suite – and each one of them, except a couple who chickened out, had done her fake orgasm, and Cindy’s was voted Best Fake Orgasm. They’d pretended the champagne bottle was an Oscar and she’d made an acceptance speech thanking all the men without whom it wouldn’t have been possible. Too bad she’d mentioned Sonny, seeing how she was going to marry him. Whoops!

She’d drunk a bit too much and put her father on the list also, which was probably a mistake ’cause all the other girls fell silent and things weren’t so much fun after that.

*   *   *

Patrick arrived downstairs before Johnny, and ordered a glass of Perrier at the bar. Two middle-aged couples sat together at a nearby table. The only other person in the bar, a florid man in a dinner jacket, obviously going to Sonny’s party, sat with folded arms, looking towards the door.

Patrick took his drink over to a small book-lined alcove in the corner of the room. Scanning the shelves, his eye fell on a volume called
The Journal of a Disappointed Man
, and next to it a second volume called
More Journals of a Disappointed Man
, and finally, by the same author, a third volume entitled
Enjoying Life.
How could a man who had made such a promising start to his career have ended up writing a book called
Enjoying Life
? Patrick took the offending volume from the shelf and read the first sentence that he saw: ‘Verily, the flight of a gull is as magnificent as the Andes!’

‘Verily,’ murmured Patrick.

‘Hi.’

‘Hello, Johnny,’ said Patrick, looking up from the page. ‘I’ve just found a book called
Enjoying Life.
’

‘Intriguing,’ said Johnny, sitting down on the other side of the alcove.

‘I’m going to take it to my room and read it tomorrow. It might save my life. Mind you, I don’t know why people get so fixated on happiness, which always eludes them, when there are so many other invigorating experiences available, like rage, jealousy, disgust, and so forth.’

‘Don’t you want to be happy?’ asked Johnny.

‘Well, when you put it like
that
,’ smiled Patrick.

‘Really you’re just like everyone else.’

‘Don’t push your luck,’ Patrick warned him.

‘Will you be dining with us this evening, gentlemen?’ asked a waiter.

‘Yes,’ replied Johnny, taking a menu, and passing one on to Patrick who was too deep in the alcove for the waiter to reach.

‘I thought he said, “Will you be dying with us?”’ admitted Patrick, who was feeling increasingly uneasy about his decision to tell Johnny the facts he had kept secret for thirty years.

‘Maybe he did,’ said Johnny. ‘We haven’t read the menu yet.’

‘I suppose “the young” will be taking drugs tonight,’ sighed Patrick, scanning the menu.

‘Ecstasy: the non-addictive high,’ said Johnny.

‘Call me old fashioned,’ blustered Patrick, ‘but I don’t like the sound of a non-addictive drug.’

Johnny felt frustratingly engulfed in his old style of banter with Patrick. These were just the sort of ‘old associations’ that he was supposed to sever, but what could he do? Patrick was a great friend and he wanted him to be less miserable.

‘Why do you think we’re so discontented?’ asked Johnny, settling for the smoked salmon.

‘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.’