The Patrick Melrose Novels (19 page)

The lift was a homage to French tapestry-making. Above the buttoned leather bench, on which the bereaved could pause before facing the corpse of their loved one, was an Arcadia of petit point where a courtier pretending to be a shepherd played a flute to a courtier pretending to be a shepherdess.

This was it, the big moment: the corpse of his chief enemy, the ruins of his creator, the body of his dead father; the great weight of all that was unsaid and would never have been said; the pressure to say it now, when there was nobody to hear, and to speak also on his father's behalf, in an act of self-division that might fissure the world and turn his body into a jigsaw puzzle.
This was it.

The sound that greeted Patrick as the doors of the lift slid open made him wonder if George had organized a surprise party, but the idea was too grotesque, given the difficulty of procuring more than half a dozen people
worldwide
who knew his father at all well and still liked him. He stepped out onto the landing and saw, beyond two Corinthian pillars, a panelled room full of gaily dressed elderly strangers. Men in every variety of lightweight tartan, and women in big white and yellow hats, were drinking cocktails and clutching each other's arms. At the back of the room, into which he wandered uncomprehendingly, was an open tilted coffin lined with white satin, and containing a punctiliously dressed, diminutive man with a diamond tie pin, snow-white hair, and a black suit. On a table beside him Patrick saw a stack of cards saying, ‘In Loving Memory of Hermann Newton.' Death was no doubt an overwhelming experience, but it must be even more powerful than he had imagined if it could transform his father into a small Jew with so many amusing new friends.

Patrick's heart thudded into action. He spun round and stormed back to the lift, where he received a static electric shock when he pushed the call button. ‘I can't fucking believe it,' he snarled, kicking a Louis XV-styled chair. The lift doors opened to reveal a fat old man with sagging grey flesh, wearing a pair of extraordinary Bermuda shorts and a yellow T-shirt. Hermann had obviously left a No Mourning clause in his will. Or maybe people were just happy to see him dead, thought Patrick. Beside the fat man stood his blowsy wife, also in beachwear, and next to her was the young woman from the reception desk.

‘Wrong fucking corpse,' said Patrick, glaring at her.

‘Oh, ho. Whoa there,' said the fat man, as if Patrick was overstating his case.

‘Try again,' said Patrick, ignoring the old couple as they waddled past.

He gave the receptionist his special melt-down-and-die stare, with eyebeams as heavy as scaffolding shooting across the space between them and pouring radioactivity into her brain. She seemed unperturbed.

‘I'm certain we don't have another party in the building at the moment,' she said.

‘I don't want to go to a party,' said Patrick. ‘I want to see my father.'

When they had reached the ground floor, the receptionist walked over to the counter where Patrick had first seen her and showed him her list of ‘parties' in the building. ‘There isn't any name on here except Mr Newton's,' she said smugly, ‘that's why I sent you to the Cedar Suite.'

‘Perhaps my father isn't dead at all,' said Patrick, leaning towards her; ‘that really would be a shock. Maybe it was just a cry for help, what do you think?'

‘I'd better go check with our director,' she said, retreating. ‘Excuse me just one moment.' She opened a door concealed in one of the panels and slipped behind it.

Patrick leaned against the counter, breathless with rage, among the black and white marble diamonds of the lobby floor. Just like the floor of that hall in Eaton Square. He had only been as high as the old lady's hand. She had clutched her cane, her prominent blue veins flowing down her fingers into a sapphire ring. Blood arrested and clarified. The old lady talked to his mother about their committee, while Patrick got lost in the feeling that he was making the resemblance happen. Now there were days when everything resembled everything else, and the smallest excuse for comparison made one object consume another in a bulimic feast.

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.