The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk Read Online Free PDF

Anne Moore had been sent by the London bureau of the New York Times to interview the eminent philosopher Sir Victor Eisen, he had seemed a little old-fashioned. He had just returned from lunch at the Athenaeum, and his felt hat, darkened by rain, lay on the hall table. He pulled his watch out of his waistcoat pocket with what struck Anne as an archaic gesture.

    ‘Ah, exactly on time,’ he said. ‘I admire punctuality.’

    ‘Oh, good,’ she answered, ‘a lot of people don’t.’

    The interview had gone well, so well in fact that later in the afternoon it moved into his bedroom. From that point on Anne had willingly interpreted the almost Edwardian clothes, the pretentious house and the claret-stained anecdotes as part of the camouflage that a Jewish intellectual would have had to take on, along with a knighthood, in order to blend into the landscape of conventional English life.

    During the months that followed she lived with Victor in London, ignoring any evidence that made this mild interpretation look optimistic. Those interminable weekends, for instance, which started with briefings on Wednesday night: how many acres, how many centuries, how many servants. Thursday evening was given over to speculation: he hoped, he really hoped, that the Chancellor wouldn’t be there this time; could Gerald still be shooting now that he was in a wheelchair? The warnings came on Friday, during the drive down: ‘ Don’t unpack your own bags in this house.’ ‘ Don’t keep asking people what they do.’ ‘ Don’t ask the butler how he feels , as you did last time.’ The weekends only ended on Tuesday when the stalks and skins of Saturday and Sunday were pressed again for their last few drops of sour juice.

    In London, she met Victor’s clever friends but at weekends the people they stayed with were rich and often stupid. Victor was their clever friend. He purred appreciatively at their wine and pictures and they started many of their sentences by saying, ‘Victor will be able to tell us…’ She watched them trying to make him say something clever and she watched him straining himself to be more like them, even reiterating the local pieties: wasn’t it splendid that Gerald hadn’t given up shooting? Wasn’t Gerald’s mother amazing? Bright as a button and still beavering away in the garden at ninety-two. ‘She completely wears me out,’ he gasped.

    If Victor sang for his supper, at least he enjoyed eating it. What was harder to discount was his London house. He had bought the fifteen-year lease on this surprisingly large white stucco house in a Knightsbridge crescent after selling his slightly smaller but freehold house at a less fashionable address. The lease now had only seven years to run. Anne stoutly ascribed this insane transaction to the absent-mindedness for which philosophers are famous.

    Only when she had come down here to Lacoste in July and seen Victor’s relationship with David had her loyalty begun to wear away. She started to wonder how high a price in wasted time Victor was prepared to pay for social acceptance, and why on earth he wanted to pay it to David.

    According to Victor, they had been ‘exact contemporaries’, a term he used for anyone of vaguely his own age who had not noticed him at school. ‘I knew him at Eton’ too often meant that he had been ruthlessly mocked by someone. He said of only two other scholars that they were friends of his at school, and he no longer saw either of them. One was the head of a Cambridge college and the other a civil servant who was widely thought to be a spy because his job sounded too dull to exist.

    She could picture Victor in those days, an anxious schoolboy whose parents had left Austria after the First World War, settled in Hampstead, and later helped a friend find a house for Freud. Her images of David Melrose had been formed by a mixture of Victor’s stories and her American vision of English privilege. She pictured him, a demigod from the