‘Thank God we’re only six,’ David said in a loud whisper to Nicholas. ‘There’s some chance she’ll crack the problem before the soup gets cold.’ Nicholas smirked obediently.
God, I hate grown-up dinner parties, thought Bridget, as Yvette brought in the steaming soup.
‘Tell me, my dear, what did you make of the Emperor Galba?’ said David to Anne, leaning courteously towards her, to emphasize his indifference to Bridget.
This was the line that Anne had hoped the conversation would not take. Who? she thought, but said, ‘Ah, what a character! What really interested me, though, was the character of Caligula. Why do you think he was so obsessed with his sisters?’
‘Well, you know what they say,’ David grinned, ‘vice is nice, but incest is best.’
‘But what…’ asked Anne, pretending to be fascinated, ‘what’s the psychology of a situation like that? Was it a kind of narcissism? The nearest thing to seducing himself?’
‘More, I think, the conviction that only a member of his own family could have suffered as he had done. You know, of course, that Tiberius killed almost all of their relations, and so he and Drusilla were survivors of the same terror. Only she could really understand him.’
As David paused to drink some wine, Anne resumed her impersonation of an eager student. ‘Something else I’d love to know is why Caligula thought that torturing his wife would reveal the reason he was so devoted to her?’
‘To discover witchcraft was the official explanation, but presumably he was suspicious of affection which was divorced from the threat of death.’
‘And, on a larger scale, he had the same suspicion about Roman people. Right?’ asked Anne.
‘Up to a point, Lord Copper,’ said David. He looked as if there were things he knew, but would never divulge. So these were the benefits of a classical education, thought Anne, who had often heard David and Victor talk about them.
Victor had been eating his soup silently and very fast while Nicholas told him about Jonathan Croyden’s memorial service. Eleanor had abandoned her soup and lit a cigarette; the extra Dexedrine had put her off her food. Bridget daydreamed resolutely.
‘I’m afraid I don’t approve of memorial services,’ said Victor, pursing his lips for a moment to savour the insincerity of what he was about to say, ‘they are just excuses for a party.’
‘What’s wrong with them,’ David corrected him, ‘is that they are excuses for such bad parties. I suppose you were talking about Croyden.’
‘That’s right,’ said Victor. ‘They say he spoke better than he wrote. There was certainly room for improvement.’
David bared his teeth to acknowledge this little malice. ‘Did Nicholas tell you that your friend Vijay was there?’
‘No,’ said Victor.
‘Oh,’ said David, turning to Anne persuasively, ‘and you never told us why he left so suddenly.’ Anne had refused to answer this question on several occasions, and David liked to tease her by bringing it up whenever they met.
‘Didn’t I?’ said Anne, playing along.
‘He wasn’t incontinent?’ asked David.
‘No,’ said Anne.
‘Or worse, in his case, flirtatious?’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘He was just being himself,’ Nicholas suggested.
‘That might have done it,’ said Anne, ‘but it was more than that.’
‘The desire to pass on information is like a hunger, and sometimes it is the curiosity, sometimes the indifference, of others that arouses it,’ said Victor pompously.
‘OK, OK,’ said Anne, to save Victor from the silence that might well follow his pronouncement. ‘Now it’s not going to seem like that big a deal to you sophisticated types,’ she added demurely. ‘But when I took a clean shirt of his up to his room, I found a bunch of terrible magazines. Not just pornography, much much worse. Of course I wasn’t going to ask him to leave. What he reads is his own affair, but he came back and was so rude about my being in his room, when I was only there to take back his lousy shirt, that I kind of lost my temper.’
‘Good for you,’ said Eleanor timidly.
‘What sort of magazines exactly?’ asked Nicholas, sitting back and crossing his legs.
‘I wish you’d confiscated them,’ giggled Bridget.
‘Oh, just awful,’ said Anne. ‘Crucifixion. All kinds of animal stuff.’
‘God, how hilarious,’ said Nicholas. ‘Vijay rises in my estimation.’
‘Oh, yeah?’ said Anne. ‘Well, you should have seen the look on the poor pig’s face.’
Victor was a little uneasy. ‘The obscure ethics of our relations to the animal kingdom,’ he chuckled.
‘We kill them when we feel like it,’ said David crisply, ‘nothing very obscure about that.’
‘Ethics is not the study of what we do, my dear David, but what we ought to do,’ said Victor.
‘That’s why it’s such a waste of time, old boy,’ said Nicholas cheerfully.
‘Why do you think it’s superior to be amoral?’ Anne asked Nicholas.
‘It’s not a question of being superior,’ he said, exposing his cavernous nostrils to Anne, ‘it just springs from a desire not to be a bore or a prig.’
‘Everything about Nicholas is superior,’ said David, ‘and even if he were a bore or a prig, I’m sure he would be a superior one.’
‘Thank you, David,’ said Nicholas with determined complacency.
‘Only in the English language,’ said Victor, ‘can one be “a bore”, like being a lawyer or a pastry cook, making boredom into a profession – in other languages a person is simply boring, a temporary state of affairs. The question is, I suppose, whether this points to a greater intolerance towards boring people, or an especially intense quality of boredom among the English.’
It’s because you’re such a bunch of boring old farts, thought Bridget.
Yvette took away the soup plates and closed the door behind her. The candles flickered, and the painted peasants came alive again for a moment.
‘What one aims for,’ said David, ‘is ennui.’
‘Of course,’ said Anne, ‘it’s more than just French for our old friend boredom. It’s boredom plus money, or boredom plus arrogance. It’s I-find-everything-boring, therefore I’m fascinating. But it doesn’t seem to occur to people that you can’t have a world picture and then not be part of it.’
There was a moment of silence while Yvette came back carrying a large platter of roast veal and vegetables.
‘Darling,’ said David to Eleanor, ‘what a marvellous memory you have to be able to duplicate the dinner you gave Anne and Victor last time they were here.’
‘Oh, God, how awful,’ said Eleanor. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Talking of animal ethics,’ said Nicholas, ‘I gather that Gerald Frogmore shot more birds last year than anyone in England. Not bad for a chap in a wheelchair.’
‘Maybe he doesn’t like to see things move about freely,’ said Anne. She immediately felt the excitement of half wishing she had not made this remark.
‘You’re not anti-blood sports?’ asked Nicholas, with an unspoken ‘on top of everything else’.
‘How could I be?’ asked Anne. ‘It’s a middle-class prejudice based on envy. Have I got that right?’
‘Well, I wasn’t going to say so,’ said Nicholas, ‘but you put it so much better than I could possibly hope to…’
‘Do you despise people from the middle classes?’ Anne asked.
‘I don’t despise people from the middle classes, on the contrary, the further from them, the better,’ said Nicholas, shooting one of his cuffs. ‘It’s people in the middle classes that disgust me.’
‘Can middle-class people be from the middle class in your sense?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Nicholas generously, ‘Victor is an outstanding case.’
Victor smiled to show that he was enjoying himself.
‘It’s easier for girls, of course,’ Nicholas continued. �
�Marriage is such a blessing, hoisting women from dreary backgrounds into a wider world.’ He glanced at Bridget. ‘All a chap can really do, unless he’s the sort of queer who spends his whole time writing postcards to people who might need a spare man, is to toe the line. And be thoroughly charming and well informed,’ he added, with a reassuring smile for Victor.
‘Nicholas, of course, is an expert,’ David intervened, ‘having personally raised several women from the gutter.’
‘At considerable expense,’ Nicholas agreed.
‘The cost of being dragged into the gutter was even higher, wouldn’t you say, Nicholas?’ said David, reminding Nicholas of his political humiliation. ‘Either way, the gutter seems to be where you feel at home.’
‘Cor blimey, guv,’ said Nicholas in his comical cockney voice. ‘When you’ve gorn down the drain like wot I ’ave, the gutter looks like a bed o’ roses.’
Eleanor still found it inexplicable that the best English manners contained such a high proportion of outright rudeness and gladiatorial combat. She knew that David abused this licence, but she also knew how ‘boring’ it was to interfere with the exercise of unkindness. When David reminded someone of their weaknesses and failures she was torn between a desire to save the victim, whose feelings she adopted as her own, and an equally strong desire not to be accused of spoiling a game. The more she thought about this conflict, the more tightly it trapped her. She would never know what to say because whatever she said would be wrong.
Eleanor thought about her stepfather barking at her mother across the wastes of English silver, French furniture, and Chinese vases that helped to prevent him from becoming physically violent. This dwarfish and impotent French duke had dedicated his life to the idea that civilization had died in 1789. He nonetheless accepted a ten per cent cut from the dealers who sold pre-revolutionary antiques to his wife. He had forced Mary to sell her mother’s Monets and Bonnards on the ground that they were examples of a decadent art that would never really matter. To him, Mary was the least valuable object in the fastidious museums they inhabited, and when eventually he bullied her to death he felt that he had eliminated the last trace of modernity from his life except, of course, for the enormous income that now came to him from the sales of a dry-cleaning fluid made in Ohio.
Eleanor had watched her mother’s persecution with the same vivid silence as she experienced in the face of her own gradual disintegration tonight. Although she was not a cruel person, she remembered being helpless with laughter watching her stepfather, by then suffering from Parkinson’s disease, lift a forkful of peas, only to find the fork empty by the time it reached his mouth. Yet she had never told him how much she hated him. She had not spoken then, and she would not speak now.
‘Look at Eleanor,’ said David, ‘she has that expression she only puts on when she is thinking of her dear rich dead mother. I’m right, aren’t I, darling?’ he cajoled her. ‘Aren’t I?’
‘Yes, you are,’ she admitted.
‘Eleanor’s mother and aunt,’ said David in the tone of a man reading Little Red Riding Hood to a gullible child, ‘thought that they could buy human antiques. The moth-eaten bearers of ancient titles were reupholstered with thick wads of dollars, but,’ he concluded with a warm banality which could not altogether conceal his humorous intentions, ‘you just can’t treat human beings like things.’
‘Definitely,’ said Bridget, amazed to hear herself speak.
‘You agree with me?’ said David, suddenly attentive.
‘Definitely,’ said Bridget, who appeared to have broken her silence on somewhat limited terms.
‘Maybe the human antiques wanted to be bought,’ Anne suggested.
‘Nobody doubts that,’ said David, ‘I’m sure they were licking the windowpane. What’s so shocking is that after being saved, they dared to rear up on their spindly Louis Quinze legs and start giving orders. The ingratitude!’
‘Cor!’ said Nicholas. ‘Wot I wouldn’t give for some o’ ’em Looey Can’s legs – they must be wurf a bob or two.’
Victor was embarrassed on Eleanor’s behalf. After all, she was paying for dinner.
Bridget was confused by David. She agreed wholeheartedly with what he had said about people not being things. In fact, once she’d been tripping and had realized with overwhelming clarity that what was wrong with the world was people treating each other like things. It was such a big idea that it was hard to hold on to, but she had felt very strongly about it at the time, and she thought David was trying to say the same thing. She also admired him for being the only person who frightened Nicholas. On the other hand, she could see why he frightened Nicholas.
Anne had had enough. She felt a combination of boredom and rebelliousness which reminded her of adolescence. She could take no more of David’s mood, and the way he baited Eleanor, tormented Nicholas, silenced Bridget, and even diminished Victor.
‘Sorry,’ she murmured to Eleanor, ‘I’ll be right back.’
In the dim hallway, she pulled a cigarette out of her bag and lit it. The flaming match was reflected in all the mirrors around the hall, and made a sliver of glass shine momentarily at the foot of the stairs. Stooping down to pick up the glass with the tip of her index finger, Anne suddenly knew that she was being watched and, looking up, she saw Patrick sitting on the widest step where the staircase curved. He wore flannel pyjamas with blue elephants on them, but his face looked downcast.
‘Hi, Patrick,’ said Anne, ‘you look so grim. Can’t you get to sleep?’
He did not answer or move. ‘I just have to get rid of this piece of glass,’ said Anne. ‘I guess something broke here earlier?’
‘It was me,’ said Patrick.
‘Hang on one second,’ she said.
She’s lying, thought Patrick, she won’t come back.
There was no wastepaper basket in the hall, but she brushed the glass off her finger into a porcelain umbrella stand that bristled with David’s collection of exotic canes.
She hurried back to Patrick and sat on the step beneath him. ‘Did you cut yourself on that glass?’ she asked tenderly, putting her hand on his arm.
He pulled away from her and said, ‘Leave me alone.’
‘Do you want me to get your mother?’ asked Anne.
‘All right,’ said Patrick.
‘OK. I’ll go get her right away,’ said Anne. Back in the dining room, she heard Nicholas saying to Victor, ‘David and I were meaning to ask you before dinner whether John Locke really said that a man who forgot his crimes should not be punished for them.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Victor. ‘He maintained that personal identity depended on continuity of memory. In the case of a forgotten crime one would be punishing the wrong person.’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ said Nicholas.
Anne leaned over to Eleanor and said to her quietly, ‘I think you ought to go and see Patrick. He was sitting on the stairs asking for you.’
‘Thank you,’ whispered Eleanor.
‘Perhaps it should be the other way round,’ said David. ‘A man who remembers his crimes can usually be relied upon to punish himself, whereas the law should punish the person who is irresponsible enough to forget.’
‘D’you believe in capital punishment?’ piped up Bridget.
‘Not since it ceased to be a public occasion,’ said David. ‘In the eighteenth century a hanging was a really good day’s outing.’
‘Everybody enjoyed themselves: even the man who was being hanged,’ added Nicholas.
‘Fun for all the family,’ David went on. ‘Isn’t that the phrase everybody uses nowadays? God knows, it’s always what I aim for, but an occasional trip to Tyburn must have made the task easier.’
Nicholas giggled. Bridget wondered what Tyburn was. Eleanor smiled feebly, and pushed her chair back.
‘Not leaving us I hope, darling,’ said David.
‘I have to … I’ll be back in a moment,’ Eleanor mumbled.
‘I didn’t quite catch that: you
have to be back in a moment?’
‘There’s something I have to do.’
‘Well, hurry, hurry, hurry,’ said David gallantly, ‘we’ll be lost without your conversation.’
Eleanor walked to the door at the same time as Yvette opened it carrying a silver coffee pot.
‘I found Patrick on the stairs,’ Anne said. ‘He seemed kind of sad.’
David’s eyes darted towards Eleanor’s back as she slipped past Yvette. ‘Darling,’ he said, and then more peremptorily, ‘Eleanor.’
She turned, her teeth locked onto a thumbnail, trying to get a grip that would hold. She often tore at the stunted nails when she was not smoking. ‘Yes?’ she said.
‘I thought that we’d agreed that you wouldn’t rush to Patrick each time he whines and blubbers.’
‘But he fell down earlier and he may have hurt himself.’
‘In that case,’ said David with sudden seriousness, ‘he may need a doctor.’ He rested the palms of his hands on the top of the table, as if to rise.
‘Oh, I don’t think he’s hurt,’ said Anne, to restrain David. She had a strong feeling that she would not be keeping her promise to Patrick if she sent him his father rather than his mother. ‘He just wants to be comforted.’
‘You see, darling,’ said David, ‘he isn’t hurt, and so it is just a sentimental question: does one indulge the self-pity of a child, or not? Does one allow oneself to be blackmailed, or not? Come and sit down – we can at least discuss it.’
Eleanor edged her way back to her chair reluctantly. She knew she would be pinned down by a conversation that would defeat her, but not persuade her.
‘The proposition I want to make,’ said David, ‘is that education should be something of which a child can later say: if I survived that, I can survive anything.’
‘That’s crazy and wrong,’ said Anne, ‘and you know it.’
‘I certainly think that children should be stretched to the limit of their abilities,’ said Victor, ‘but I’m equally certain they can’t be if they’re intensely miserable.’
The Patrick Melrose Novels Page 11
