The Patrick Melrose Novels (20 page)

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.

‘Have you been to see your father yet?' she asked outright.

‘I did see him,' said Patrick without hesitation. ‘I thought he was at his best in a coffin – so much less difficult than usual.' He grinned at her disarmingly.

Anne smiled at him faintly, but Patrick needed no encouragement.

‘When I was young,' he said, ‘my father used to take us to restaurants. I say “restaurants” in the plural, because we never stormed in and out of less than three. Either the menu took too long to arrive, or a waiter struck my father as intolerably stupid, or the wine list disappointed him. I remember he once held a bottle of red wine upside down while the contents gurgled out onto the carpet. “How dare you bring me this filth?” he shouted. The waiter was so frightened that instead of throwing him out, he brought more wine.'

‘So you liked being with him in a place he didn't complain about.'

‘Exactly,' said Patrick. ‘I couldn't believe my luck, and for a while I expected him to sit up in his coffin, like a vampire at sunset, and say, “The service here is intolerable.” Then we would have had to go to three or four other funeral parlours. Mind you, the service
was
intolerable. They sent me to the wrong corpse.'

‘The wrong corpse!' exclaimed Anne.

‘Yes, I wound up at a jaunty Jewish cocktail party given for a Mr Hermann Newton. I wish I could have stayed; they seemed to be having such fun…'

‘What an appalling story,' said Anne, lighting a cigarette. ‘I'll bet they give courses in Bereavement Counselling.'

‘Of course,' said Patrick, letting out another quick hollow laugh and sinking back into his armchair. He could definitely feel the influence of the Quaaludes now. The alcohol had brought out the best in them, like the sun coaxing open the petals of a flower, he reflected tenderly.

‘I'm sorry?' he said. He had not heard Anne's last question.

‘Is he being cremated?' she repeated.

‘Yes, that's right,' said Patrick. ‘I gather that when people are cremated one never really gets their ashes, just some communal rakings from the bottom of the oven. As you can imagine, I regard that as good news. Ideally,
all
the ashes would belong to somebody else, but we don't live in a perfect world.'

Anne had given up wondering whether he was sorry about his father's death, and had started wishing he was a little sorrier. His venomous remarks, although they could not affect David, made Patrick look so ill he might have been waiting to die from a snakebite.

Patrick closed his eyes slowly and, after a very long time, slowly opened them again. The whole operation took about half an hour. Another half an hour elapsed while he licked his dry and fascinatingly sore lips. He was really getting something off that last Quaalude. His blood was hissing like a television screen after closedown. His hands were like dumbbells, like dumbbells in his hands. Everything folding inward and growing heavier.

‘Hello there!' Anne called.

‘I'm so sorry,' said Patrick, leaning forward with what he imagined was a charming smile. ‘I'm awfully tired.'

‘Maybe you ought to go to bed.'

‘No, no, no. Let's not exaggerate.'

‘You could lie down for a few hours,' Anne suggested, ‘and then have dinner with Victor and me. We're going to a party afterward, given by some ghastly Long Island Anglophiles. Just your kind of thing.'

‘It's sweet of you, but I really can't face too many strangers at the moment,' said Patrick, playing his bereavement card a little too late to convince Anne.

‘You should come along,' she coaxed. ‘I'm sure it will be an example of “unashamed luxury”.'

‘I can't imagine what that means,' said Patrick sleepily.

‘Let me give you the address anyhow,' Anne insisted. ‘I don't like the idea of your being alone too much.'

‘Fine. Write it down for me before I go.'

He knew he had to take some speed soon or involuntarily take up Anne's offer to ‘lie down for a few hours'. He did not want to swallow a whole Beauty, because it would take him on a fifteen-hour megalomaniac odyssey, and he didn't want to be that conscious. On the other hand, he had to get rid of the feeling that he had been dropped into a pool of slowly drying concrete.

‘Where's the loo?'

Anne told him how to get there, and Patrick waded across the carpet in the direction she had indicated. Once he had locked the bathroom door Patrick felt a familiar sense of security. Inside a bathroom he could give in to the obsession with his own physical and mental state which was so often compromised by the presence of other people or the absence of a well-lit mirror. Most of the ‘quality time' in his life had been spent in a bathroom. Injecting, snorting, swallowing, stealing, overdosing; examining his pupils, his arms, his tongue, his stash.

‘O bathrooms!' he intoned, spreading out his arms in front of the mirror. ‘Thy medicine cabinets pleaseth me mightily! Thy towels moppeth up the rivers of my blood…' He petered out as he took the Black Beauty from his pocket. He was just going to take enough to function, just enough to … what had he been about to say? He couldn't remember. My God, it was short-term memory loss again, the Professor Moriarty of drug abuse, interrupting and then obliterating the precious sensations one went to such trouble to secure.

‘Inhuman fiend,' he muttered.

The black capsule eventually came apart and he emptied half the contents onto one of the Portuguese tiles around the basin. Taking out one of his new hundred-dollar notes, he rolled it into a tight tube and sniffed up the small heap of white powder from the tile.

His nose stung and his eyes watered slightly but, refusing to be distracted, Patrick resealed the capsule, wrapped it in a Kleenex, put it back in his pocket and then, for no reason he could identify, almost against his will, he took it out again, emptied the rest of the powder onto a tile and sniffed it up as well. The effects wouldn't last so long this way, he argued, inhaling deeply through his nose. It was too sordid to take half of anything. Anyhow, his father had just died and he was entitled to be confused. The main thing, the heroic feat, the proof of his seriousness and his samurai status in the war against drugs, was that he hadn't taken any heroin.

Patrick leaned forward and checked his pupils in the mirror. They had definitely dilated. His heartbeat had accelerated. He felt invigorated, he felt refreshed, in fact he felt rather aggressive. It was as if he had never taken a drink or a drug, he was back in complete control, the lighthouse beams of speed cutting through the thick night of the Quaaludes and the alcohol and the jet lag.

‘And,' he said, clasping his lapels with mayoral solemnity, ‘last but not least, through the dark shadow, if I might put it thus, of our grief for the passing away of David Melrose.'

How long had he been in the bathroom? It seemed like a lifetime. The fire brigade would probably be forcing the door down soon. Patrick started to clear up hastily. He didn't want to put the shell of the Black Beauty into the waste-paper basket (paranoia!) and so he forced the two halves of the empty capsule down the basin plughole. How was he going to explain his reanimated state to Anne? He splashed some cold water on his face and left it ostentatiously dripping. There was only one thing left to do: that authentic-sounding flush with which every junkie leaves a bathroom, hoping to deceive the audience that crowds his imagination.

‘For God's sake,' said Anne when he got back to the drawing room, ‘why don't you dry your face?'

‘I was just reviving myself with a little cold water.'

‘Oh yeah?' said Anne. ‘What kind of water was that?'

‘Very refreshing water,' he said, wiping his sweaty palms on his trousers as he sat down. ‘Which reminds me,' he said, getting up immediately, ‘I'd love another drink if I may.'

‘Sure,' said Anne resignedly. ‘By the way, I forgot to ask, how is Debbie?'

The question filled Patrick with the horror which assailed him when he was asked to consider another person's feelings. How was Debbie? How the fuck should he know? It was hard enough to rescue himself from the avalanche of his own feelings, without allowing the gloomy St Bernard of his attention to wander into other fields. On the other hand the amphetamines had given him an urgent desire to talk and he couldn't ignore the question entirely.

‘Well,' he said from the other side of the room, ‘she's following in her mother's footsteps, and writing an article about great hostesses. Teresa Hickmann's footsteps, invisible to most people, glow in the dark for her dutiful daughter. Still, we should be grateful that she hasn't modelled her conversational style on her father's.'

Patrick was momentarily lost again in the contemplation of his psychological state. He felt lucid, but not about anything, except his own lucidity. His thoughts, anticipating themselves hopelessly, stuttered in the starting blocks, and brought his feeling of fluency dangerously close to silence. ‘But you haven't told me,' he said, tearing himself away from this intriguing mental stammer and at the same time taking his revenge on Anne for asking him about Debbie, ‘how is Victor?'

‘Oh, fine. He's a grand old man now, a role he's been training for all his life. He gets a lot of attention and he's lecturing on Identity, which, as he says, he can do with his eyes closed. Did you ever read
Being, Knowing, and Judging
?'