Free The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn Page B

damp and conventional funeral without enthusiasm; he already knew he had been disinherited. As the coffin was lowered into the ground, he reflected how much of his father’s life had been spent in a trench of one sort or another, shooting at birds or men, and how it was really the best place for him.
    After the funeral, when the guests had left, David’s mother came up to his old bedroom for a moment of private mourning with her son. She said, in her sublime voice, ‘I know he would have wanted you to have these,’ and placed a pair of carefully folded pyjamas on the bed. When David did not reply, she pressed his hand and closed her faintly blue eyelids for a moment, to show that such things lay too deep for words, but that she knew how much he would prize the little pile of white and yellow flannel from a shop in Bond Street which had gone out of business before the First World War.
    It was the same yellow and white flannel that had now grown too hot. David got up from the piano stool and paced about with his dressing gown open, puffing on his cigar. There was no doubt that he was angry with Patrick for running away. It had spoiled his fun. He granted that he had perhaps miscalculated the amount of discomfort he could safely inflict on Patrick.
    David’s methods of education rested on the claim that childhood was a romantic myth which he was too clear-sighted to encourage. Children were weak and ignorant miniature adults who should be given every incentive to correct their weakness and their ignorance. Like King Chaka, the great Zulu warrior, who made his troops stamp thorn bushes into the ground in order to harden their feet, a training some of them may well have resented at the time, he was determined to harden the calluses of disappointment and develop the skill of detachment in his son. After all, what else did he have to offer him?
    For a moment he was winded by a sense of absurdity and impotence; he felt like a farmer watching a flock of crows settle complacently on his favourite scarecrow.
    But he pushed on bravely with his original line of thought. No, it was no use expecting gratitude from Patrick, although one day he might realize, like one of Chaka’s men running over flinty ground on indifferent feet, how much he owed to his father’s uncompromising principles.
    When Patrick was born David had been worried that he might become a refuge or an inspiration to Eleanor, and he had jealously set about ensuring that this did not happen. Eleanor eventually resigned herself to a vague and luminous faith in Patrick’s ‘wisdom’, a quality she attributed to him some time before he had learned to control his bowels. She thrust him downstream in this paper boat and collapsed back, exhausted by terror and guilt. Even more important to David than the very natural worry that his wife and his son might grow fond of one another was the intoxicating feeling that he had a blank consciousness to work with, and it gave him great pleasure to knead this yielding clay with his artistic thumbs.
    As he walked upstairs to get dressed, even David, who spent most of his day angry or at least irritated, and who made a point of not letting things surprise him, was surprised by the burst of rage that swept over him. What had started as indignation at Patrick’s escape turned now into a fury he could no longer control. He strode into his bedroom with his underlip pushed out petulantly and his fists clenched, but he felt at the same time a strong desire to escape his own atmosphere, like a crouching man hurrying to get away from the whirling blades of the helicopter in which he has just landed.
    The bedroom he entered had a mock-monastic look, large and white, with bare dark-brown tiles miraculously warm in winter when the underfloor heating was turned on. The only painting on the wall was a picture of Christ wearing the crown of thorns, one of which pierced his pale brow. A trickle of still fresh blood