The Patrick Melrose Novels (64 page)

Thank goodness Johnny was coming later in the month. Patrick felt sure that he was missing something which Johnny could illuminate for him. It was easy to see what was sick, but it was so difficult to know what it meant to be well.

‘Patrick!'

They were after him. He could hear Julia calling his name. Perhaps she could come and join him behind the olive tree, give him a very quick blow job, so that he felt a little lighter and calmer during lunch. What a great idea. Standing outside her door last night. The tangle of shame and frustration. He clambered to his feet. Knees going. Old age and death. Cancer. Out of his private space into the confusion of other people, or out of the confusion of his private space into the effortless authority of his engagement with others. He never knew which way it would go.

‘Julia. Hi, I'm over here.'

‘I've been sent to find you,' said Julia, walking carefully over the rougher ground of the olive grove. ‘Are you hiding?'

‘Not from you,' said Patrick. ‘Come and sit here for a few seconds.'

Julia sat down next to him, their backs against the forking trunk.

‘This is cosy,' she said.

‘I've been hiding here since I was a child. I'm surprised there isn't a dent in the ground,' said Patrick. He paused and weighed up the risks of telling her.

‘I stood outside your door last night at four in the morning.'

‘Why didn't you come in?' said Julia.

‘Would you have been pleased to see me?'

‘Of course,' she said, leaning over and kissing him briefly on the lips.

Patrick felt a surge of excitement. He could imagine pretending to be young, rolling around among the sharp stones and the fallen twigs, laughing manfully as mosquitoes fed on his naked flesh.

‘What stopped you?' asked Julia.

‘Robert. He found me hesitating in the corridor.'

‘You'd better not hesitate next time.'

‘Is there going to be a next time?'

‘Why not? You're bored and lonely; I'm bored and lonely.'

‘God,' said Patrick, ‘if we got together, there would be a terrifying amount of boredom and loneliness in the room.'

‘Or maybe they have opposite electrical charges and they'd cancel each other out.'

‘Are you positively or negatively bored?'

‘Positively,' said Julia. ‘And I'm absolutely and positively lonely.'

‘You may have a point, then,' smiled Patrick. ‘There's something very negative about
my
boredom. We're going to have to conduct an experiment under strictly controlled conditions to see whether we achieve a perfect elimination of boredom or an overload of loneliness.'

‘I really should drag you back to lunch now,' said Julia, ‘or everyone will think we're having an affair.'

They kissed. Tongues. He'd forgotten about tongues. He felt like a teenager hiding behind a tree, experimenting with real kissing. It was bewildering to feel alive, almost painful. He felt his pent-up longing for closeness streaming through his hand as he placed it carefully on her belly.

‘Don't get me going now,' she said, ‘it's not fair.'

They climbed groaning to their feet.

‘Seamus had just arrived when I came to get you,' said Julia, brushing the dust off her skirt. ‘He was explaining to Kettle what went on during the rest of the year.'

‘What did Kettle make of that?'

‘I think she's decided to find Seamus charming so as to annoy you and Mary.'

‘Of course she has. It's only because you've got me all flustered that I hadn't worked that out already.'

They made their way towards the stone table, trying not to smile too much or to look too solemn. Patrick felt himself sliding back under the microscope of his family's attention. Mary smiled at him. Thomas threw out his arms in welcome. Robert gazed at him with his intimidating, knowledgeable eyes. He picked up Thomas and smiled at Mary, thinking, ‘A man may smile and smile and be a villain.' Then he sat down next to Robert, feeling as he did when he defended an obviously guilty client in front of a famously difficult judge. Robert noticed everything. Patrick admired his intelligence, but far from short-circuiting his depression as Thomas did, Robert made him more aware of the subtle tenacity of the destructive influence that parents had on their children – that he had on his children. Even if he was an affectionate father, even if he wasn't making the gross mistakes his parents had made, the vigilance he invested in the task created another level of tension, a tension which Robert had picked up. With Thomas he would be different – freer, easier, if one could be free and easy while feeling unfree and uneasy. It was all so hopeless. He really must get a decent night's sleep. He poured himself a glass of red wine.

‘It's good to see you, Patrick,' said Seamus, rubbing him on the back.

Patrick felt like punching him.

‘Seamus has been telling me all about his workshops,' said Kettle. ‘I must say they sound absolutely fascinating.'

‘Why don't you sign up for one?' said Patrick. ‘It's the only way you'll see the place in the cherry season.'

‘Ah, the cherries,' said Seamus. ‘Now, they're something really special. We always have a ritual around the cherries – you know, the fruits of life.'

‘It sounds very profound,' said Patrick. ‘Do the cherries taste any better than they would if you experienced them as the fruits of a cherry tree?'

‘The cherries…' said Eleanor. ‘Yes … no…' She rubbed out the thought hastily with both hands.

‘She loves the cherries. They're grand, aren't they?' said Seamus, clasping Eleanor's hand in his reassuring grip. ‘I always take her a bowl in the nursing home, freshly picked, you know.'

‘A handsome rent,' said Patrick, draining his glass of wine.

‘No,' said Eleanor, panic-stricken, ‘no rent.'

Patrick realized he was upsetting his mother. He couldn't even go on being sarcastic. Every avenue was blocked. He poured himself another glass of wine. One day he was going to have to drop the whole thing, but just for now he was going to go on fighting; he couldn't stop himself. Fight with what, though? If only he hadn't gone to such trouble to make his mother's folly legally viable. She had handed him, without any sense of irony, the task of disinheriting himself, and he had carried it out carefully. He had sometimes thought of putting a hidden flaw in the foundations. He had sat in the multi-jurisdictional meetings with
notaires
and solicitors, discussing ways of circumventing the forced inheritance of the Napoleonic code, the best way to form a charitable foundation, the tax consequences and the accountancy procedures, and he had never done anything except refine the plan to make it stronger and more efficient. The only way out was that elastic band of debt which Eleanor was now proposing to snip. He had really put it in for her protection. He had tried to set aside the hope that she would take advantage of it, but now that he was about to lose that hope, he realized that he had been cultivating it secretly, using it to keep him at a small but fatal distance from the truth. Saint-Nazaire would soon be gone for ever and there was nothing he could do about it. His mother was an unmaternal idiot and his wife had left him for Thomas. He still had one reliable friend, he sobbed silently, splashing more red wine into his glass. He was definitely going to get drunk and insult Seamus, or maybe he wasn't. In the end, it was even harder to behave badly than to behave well. That was the trouble with not being a psychopath. Every avenue was blocked.

A scene was unfolding around him, no doubt, but his attention was so submerged that he could hardly make out what was going on. If he clawed his way up the slippery well shaft, what would he find anyway, except Kettle extolling Queen Mary's child-rearing methods, or Seamus radiating Celtic charisma? Patrick looked over the valley, a gauntlet of memory and association. In the middle of the view was the Mauduits' ugly farmhouse, its two big acacia trees still growing in the front yard. When he was a child he had often played with the oafish Marcel Mauduit. They used to fashion spears out of the pale green bamboos that flanked the stream at the bottom of the valley. They flung them at little birds which managed to leave several minutes before the bamboo clattered onto the abandoned branch. When Patrick was six years old Marcel invited him to watch his father beheading a chicken. There was nothing more curious and amusing than watching a chicken run around in silly circles looking for its head, Marcel explained. You really had to see it for yourself. The boys waited in the shade of the acacia trees. An old hatchet was stuck at a handy angle among the crisscross cuts on the surface of a brownish plane tree stump. Marcel danced around like an Indian with a tomahawk, pretending to decapitate his enemies. In the distance, Patrick could hear the panic in the chicken coop. By the time Marcel's father arrived, gripping a hen by the neck, her wings beating uselessly against his vast belly, Patrick was beginning to side with her. He wanted this one to get away. He could see that she knew what was going on. She was held down sideways, her neck stuck over the edge of the stump. Monsieur Mauduit brought the hatchet down so that her head flopped neatly at his feet. Then he put the rest of her quickly on the ground and, with an encouraging pat, set her off on a frantic dash for freedom, while Marcel jeered and laughed and pointed. Elsewhere, the hen's eyes stared at the sky and Patrick stared at her eyes.

With his fourth glass of wine, Patrick found his imagination tilting towards Victorian melodrama. Dark scenes formed of their own accord, but he did nothing to stop them. He saw the bloated figure of a drowned Seamus floating in the Thames. His mother's wheelchair seemed to have lost control and was bouncing down the coastal path towards a Dorset cliff. Patrick noted the magnificent National Trust backdrop as she pitched forwards over the edge. One day he really must drop the whole thing, get real, get contemporary, accept the facts, but just for the moment he would go on imagining himself putting the last touches to a forged will, while Julia, seated on the edge of his desk, bemused him with the complexity of her undergarments. Just for now, he would have another little splash of wine.

Thomas leant forward in Mary's lap, and with her usual perfect intuition, she immediately handed him a biscuit. He sank back on her chest convinced, as he was hundreds of times a day, that he would never need something without being given it. Patrick scanned himself for jealousy, but it wasn't there. There was plenty of dark emotion but no rivalry with his infant son. The trick was to keep up a high level of loathing for his own mother, leaving no room to feel jealous of Thomas getting the solid foundations his father so obviously lacked. Thomas leant forwards a second time and, with an enquiring murmur, held out his biscuit to Julia, offering her a bite. Julia looked at the wet and blunted biscuit, made a face and said, ‘Yuk. No thank you very much.'

Patrick suddenly realized that he couldn't make love to someone who missed the point of Thomas's generosity so completely. Or could he? Despite his revulsion, he felt his lust running on, not unlike a beheaded chicken. He had now achieved the pseudo-detachment of drunkenness, the little hillock before the swamps of self-pity and memory loss. He saw that he really must get well, he couldn't go on this way. One day he was going to drop the whole thing, but he couldn't do that until he was ready, and he couldn't control when he would be ready. He could, however, get ready to be ready. He sank back in his chair and agreed at least to that: his business for the rest of the month was to get ready to be ready to be well.

 

8

‘
HOW ARE YOU?
'
ASKED
Johnny, lighting a cheap cigar.

The flaring match brought a patch of colour into the black and white landscape cast by the moonlight. The two men had come outside after dinner to talk and smoke. Patrick looked at the grey grass and then up at a sky bleached of stars by the violence of the moon. He didn't know where to begin. The previous evening he had somehow managed to transcend the ‘Yuk' incident, stealing into Julia's bed after midnight and staying there until five in the morning. He had slept with Julia in a speculative haze which his impulsiveness and greed failed to abolish. Too busy asking himself what adultery felt like, he had almost forgotten to notice what Julia felt like. He wondered what it meant to be back inside a woman who, apart from the relatively faint reality of her limbs and skin, was above all a site of nostalgia. What it certainly did not mean was Time Regained. Being a pig in the trough of a disreputable emotion turned out to fall short of the spontaneous timelessness of involuntary memory and associative thinking. Where were the uneven cobblestones and silver spoons and silver doorbells of his own life? If he stumbled across them, would floating bridges spring into being, with their own strange sovereignty, belonging to neither the original nor the repeated, the past nor the fugitive present, but to some kind of enriched present capable of englobing the linearity of time? He had no reason to think so. He felt deprived not only of the ordinary magic of intensified imagination, but of the even more ordinary magic of immersion in his own physical sensations. He wasn't going to scold himself for a lack of particularity in experiencing his sexual pleasure. All sex was prostitution for both participants, not always in the commercial sense, but in the deeper etymological sense that they stood in for something else. The fact that this was sometimes done so effectively that there were weeks or months in which the object of desire and the person one happened to be in bed with seemed identical could not prevent the underlying model of desire from beginning to drift away, sooner or later, from its illusory home. The strangeness of Julia's case was that she stood in for herself, as she had been twenty years ago, a pre-drift lover.

‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,' said Johnny, realizing that Patrick didn't want to answer his question.