The Patrick Melrose Novels (66 page)

‘One may be too busy opening up to one's full potential,' said Patrick in a racy version of his Kettle voice.

As soon as they heard Johnny entering the house, Julia climbed astride Patrick's lap, facing him with her hands dangling lightly over his shoulders.

‘Does he know?' she asked.

‘Yes.'

‘Is that a good idea?'

‘He won't tell anyone.'

‘Maybe, but now it's too late for us not to tell anyone. I can't believe we're already into who knows what, that's all. We've only just been to bed together and it's already a problem of knowledge.'

‘It's always a problem of knowledge.'

‘Why?'

‘Because there was this garden, right? And this apple tree…'

‘Oh, honestly, that has nothing to do with it. That's a different kind of knowledge.'

‘They came together. In the absence of God, we have the omniscience of gossip to keep us preoccupied with who knows what.'

‘I'm not in fact preoccupied with who knows what, I'm preoccupied with how we feel for each other. I think you want it to be about knowledge because you're more at home in your head than in your heart. Anyhow, you didn't have to tell Johnny.'

‘Whatever,' said Patrick, suddenly drained of all desire to prove a point or win an argument. ‘I often think there should be a superhero called Whateverman. Not an action hero like Superman or Spiderman, but an inaction hero, a hero of resignation.'

‘Is there a comma between “Whatever” and “Man”?'

‘Only when he can be bothered to speak, which, believe me, isn't often. When someone screams, “There's a meteor headed straight for us! It's the end of all life on Earth!”, he says, “Whatever, man,” with a comma in between. But when he is invoked, during an episode of ethnic cleansing, or paranoid schizophrenia, as in, “This is a job for Whateverman”, it's all in one word.'

‘Does he have a cloak?'

‘God, no. He wears the same old jeans and T-shirt year in year out.'

‘And this fantasy is all in the service of not admitting that you were wrong to tell Johnny.'

‘It was wrong if it upset you,' said Patrick. ‘But when my oldest friend asked me what was going on, it would have been glib to leave out the most important fact.'

‘Poor darling, you're just too—'

‘Authentic,' Patrick interrupted. ‘That's always been my trouble.'

‘Why don't you bring some of that authenticity upstairs?' asked Julia, leaning forwards and giving Patrick a long slow kiss.

He was grateful that she made it impossible for him to answer her question. He wouldn't have known what to say. Was she mocking his shallow disembodied presence the night before? Or hadn't she noticed? The problem of other minds. Christ, he was at it again. They were kissing. Get into it. Picture of himself getting into it. No, not the picture, the thing in itself. Whatever that was. Who was to say that authenticity lay in being oblivious to the reflective aspect of the mind? He was speculative. Why suppress that in favour of what was, in the end, just a picture of authenticity, a cliché of into-it-ness?

Julia broke off the kiss.

‘Where have you gone?' she asked.

‘I was lost in my head,' he admitted. ‘I think I was thrown by your request for me to bring my authenticity upstairs – there's just so much of it, I'm not sure I can manage.'

‘I'll help,' said Julia.

They untangled themselves and walked back into the house, holding hands, like a couple of moon-struck teenagers.

When they reached the landing and were about to slip into Julia's bedroom, they heard stifled giggling from Lucy's bedroom, followed by a crescendo of hushing. Transformed from furtive lovers into concerned parents, they walked down the corridor with a new authority. Julia tapped gently on the door and immediately pushed it open. The room was dark, but light from the corridor fell across a crowded bed. All of Lucy's indispensable soft toys, her white rabbit and her blue-eyed dog and, incredibly, the chipmunk she had chewed religiously since her third birthday, were scattered in various buckled postures across the bedspread, and replaced, inside the bed, by a live boy.

‘Darling?' said Julia.

The children made no sound.

‘It's no use pretending to be asleep. We heard you down the corridor.'

‘Well,' said Lucy, sitting up suddenly, ‘we're not doing anything wrong.'

‘We didn't say you were,' said Julia.

‘This is the most outrageous subplot,' said Patrick. ‘Still, I don't see why they shouldn't sleep together if they want to.'

‘What's a subplot?' asked Robert.

‘Another part of the main story,' said Patrick, ‘reflecting it in some more or less flagrant way.'

‘Why are
we
a subplot?' asked Robert.

‘You're not,' said Patrick. ‘You're a plot in your own right.'

‘We've got so much to talk about,' said Lucy, ‘we just couldn't wait until tomorrow.'

‘Is that why you two are still up?' asked Robert. ‘Because you've got so much to talk about. Is that why you said we were a subplot?'

‘Listen, forget I ever said it,' said Patrick. ‘We're all each other's subplots,' he added, trying to confuse Robert as much as possible.

‘Like the moon going round the earth,' said Robert.

‘Exactly. Everyone thinks they're on the earth, even when they're on somebody else's moon.'

‘But the earth goes round the sun,' said Robert. ‘Who's on the sun?'

‘The sun is uninhabitable,' said Patrick, relieved that they had travelled so far from the original motive of his comment. ‘Its only plot is to keep us going round and round.'

Robert looked troubled and was about to ask another question when Julia interrupted him.

‘Can we return to our own planet for a second?' she asked. ‘I suppose I don't mind you sharing a bed, but remember we're going to Aqualand tomorrow, so you must go straight to sleep.'

‘What else would we do?' said Lucy, starting to giggle. ‘Smudging?'

She and Robert made sounds of extravagant revulsion and collapsed in a heap of limbs and laughter.

 

9

PATRICK ORDERED ANOTHER DOUBLE
espresso and watched the waitress weave her way back to the bar, only momentarily transfixed by a vision of her sprawled across one of the tables, gripping its sides while he fucked her from behind. He was too loyal to linger over the waitress when he was already involved in a fantasy about the girl in the black bikini on the other side of the cafe, her eyes closed and her legs slightly parted, absorbing the beams of the morning sun, still as a lizard. He might never recover from the look of intense seriousness with which she had examined her bikini line. An ordinary woman would have reserved that expression for a bathroom mirror, but she was a paragon of self-absorption, running her finger along the inside edge of her bikini, lifting it and realigning it still closer to the centre, so that it interfered as little as possible with the total nudity which was her real object. The mass of holiday-makers on the Promenade Rose, shuffling forward to claim their coffin-sized plot of beach, might as well not have existed; she was too fascinated by the state of her tan, her wax job, her waistline, too in love with herself to notice them. He was in love with her too. He was going to die if he didn't have her. If he was going to be lost, and it looked as if he was, he wanted to be lost inside her, to drown in the little pool of her self-love – if there was room.

Oh, no, not that. Please. A piece of animated sports equipment had just walked up to her table, put his pack of red Marlboros and his mobile phone next to her mobile phone and pack of Marlboro Lights, kissed her on the lips and sat down, if that was the right term for the muscle-bound bouncing with which he eventually settled into the chair next to hers. Heartbreak. Disgust. Fury. Patrick skimmed over the ground of his immediate emotions and then forced himself upwards into the melancholy sky of resignation. Of course she was spoken for a million times over. In the end it was a good thing. There could be no real dialogue between those who still thought that time was on their side and those who realized that they were dangling from its jaws, like Saturn's children, already half-devoured. Devoured. He could feel it: the dull efficiency of a praying mantis tearing arcs of flesh from the still living aphid it has clamped between its forelegs; the circular hobbling of a wildebeest, reluctant to lie down with the lion who hangs confidently from his neck. The fall, the dust, the last twitch.

Yes, in the end it was a good thing that Bikini Girl was spoken for. He lacked the pedagogic patience and the particular kind of vanity which would have enabled him to opt for the cheap solution of being a youth vampire. It was Julia who had got him used to sex during her fortnight's stay, and it was among the time refugees of her blighted generation that he must look for lovers. With the possible exception, of course, of the waitress who was now weaving her way back towards him. There was something about the shop-worn sincerity of her smile which suited his mood. Or was it the stubborn pout of the labial mould formed by her jeans? Should he get a shot of brandy to tip into his espresso? It was only ten thirty in the morning, but there were already several misty-cold glasses of beer blazing among the round tables. He only had two days of holiday left. They might as well be debauched. He ordered the brandy. At least that way she would be back soon. That's how he liked to think of her, weaving back and forth on his behalf, tirelessly attending to his clumsy search for relief.

He turned towards the sea, but the harsh glitter of the water blinded him and, while he shielded his eyes from the sun, he found himself imagining all the people on that body-packed curve of blond sand, shining with protective lotions, playing with bats and balls, lolling in the placid bay, reading on their towels and mattresses, all being blasted by a fierce wind and blown into a fine veil of sparkling sand, and the collective murmur, pierced by louder shouts and sharper cries, falling silent.

He must rush down that beach to shelter Mary and the children from ruin, give them a few more seconds of life with the decomposing shield of his own body. He struggled so hard to get away from his roles as a father and a husband, only to miss them the moment he succeeded. There was no better antidote to his enormous sense of futility than the enormous sense of purpose which his children brought to the most obviously futile tasks, such as pouring buckets of sea water into holes in the sand. Before he managed to break away from his family, he liked to imagine that once he was alone he would become an open field of attention, or a solitary observer training his binoculars on some rare species of insight usually obscured by the mass of obligations that swayed before him like a swarm of twittering starlings. In reality solitude generated its own roles, not based on duty but on hunger. He became a cafe voyeur, drunk with desire, or a calculating machine compulsively assessing the inadequacy of his income.

Was there any activity which didn't freeze into a role? Could he listen without being a listener, think without being a thinker? No doubt there was a flowing world of present participles, of listening and thinking, rushing along beside him, but it was part of the grim allegorical tinge of his mentality that he sat with his back to this glittering torrent, staring at a world of stone. Even his affair with Julia seemed to have
The Sorrows of Adultery
carved on its plinth. Instead of thrilling him with his own audacity, it reminded him of how little he had left. After they had started sleeping together, his days were spent sprawled on a pool-side lounger, feeling that he might as well have been splayed in a roadside ditch, discouraging the excitement of some hungry rats, rather than turning down the demands of his adorable children. His guilt-fuelled bouts of charm towards Mary were as flagrant as his row-picking arguments. The margin of freedom he had gained with Julia was soon filled with the concrete of another role. She was his mistress, he was her married man. She would struggle to get him away, he would struggle to keep her in the mistress slot without tearing his family apart. They were already in a perfectly structured situation, with ultimately opposed interests. Its currency was deception: of Mary, of each other, and of themselves. It was only in the immediate greed of a bed that they could find any common ground. He was amazed by the amount of defeat and inconvenience that already surrounded his affair with Julia. The only sane action would be to end it straight away, to define it as a summer fling and not try to elaborate it into a love affair. The terrible thing was that he had already lost control of the situation. He only felt well when he was in bed with her, when he was inside her, when he was coming inside her. Kneeling on the floor, that had been good, when she had sat in the armchair with her knees up and her legs spread. And the night of the thunder storm, the air awash with free ions, when she stood in the window, gasping at the lightning, and he stood behind her and … and here came his brandy, thank God.

He smiled at the waitress. What was the French for ‘How about it, darling?' Something, something, something,
chérie
. He'd better stick to the French for ‘Same again' – stay on safe ground. Yes, he was lost because he liked everything about Julia: the smell of tobacco on her breath, the taste of her menstrual blood. He couldn't rely on revulsion of any sort to set him free. She was kind, she was careful, she was accommodating. He was going to have to rely on the machine of their situation to grind them down, as he knew it would.

‘
Encore la même chose
,' he called to the waitress, swirling his finger over his empty glass while she unloaded her tray at a nearby table. She nodded. She was the waitress, and he was the waiter waiting for the waitress. Everyone had their role.