‘Sounds like there wasn’t any room,’ said Anne, ‘but like you say, it was bad timing. Back in those days you couldn’t go on television and say how it was a “really liberating experience”.’
‘There may still be,’ said Victor with mock astonishment, joining the tips of his fingers pedagogically, to form an arc with his hands, ‘certain rural backwaters of Tory England where, even today, group sex is not practised by all the matrons on the Selection Committee.’
Anne sat down on Victor’s knee. ‘Victor, do two people make a group?’
‘Only part of a group, I’m afraid.’
‘You mean,’ said Anne with horror, ‘we’ve been having part-of-a-group sex?’ She got up again, ruffling Victor’s hair. ‘That’s awful.’
‘I think,’ Victor continued calmly, ‘that when his political ambitions were ruined so early, Nicholas became rather indifferent to a career and fell back on his large inheritance.’
‘He still doesn’t make it on to my casualty list,’ said Anne. ‘Being found in bed with two girls isn’t the shower room in Auschwitz.’
‘You have high standards.’
‘I do and I don’t. No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too small if it’s cherished,’ Anne said. ‘Anyhow, he isn’t suffering that badly, he’s got a stoned schoolgirl with him. She was being moody in the back of the car. Two like her isn’t enough, he’ll have to graduate to triplets.’
‘What’s she called?’
‘Bridget something. One of those not very convincing English names like Hop-Scotch.’
Anne moved on quickly, she was determined not to let Victor get lost in ruminations about where Bridget might ‘fit in’. ‘The oddest thing about the day was our visit to Le Wild Ouest.’
‘Why on earth did you go there?’
‘As far as I could make out we were there because Patrick wants to go, but Eleanor gets priority.’
‘You don’t think she might have just been checking whether it was an amusing place to take her son?’
‘In the Dodge City of arrested development, you gotta be quick on the draw,’ said Anne, whipping out an imaginary gun.
‘You seem to have entered into the spirit of the place,’ said Victor drily.
‘If she wanted to take her son there,’ Anne resumed, ‘he could have come with us. And if she wanted to find out whether it was an “amusing place”, Patrick could have told her.’
Victor did not want to argue with Anne. She often had strong opinions about human situations which did not really matter to him, unless they illustrated a principle or yielded an anecdote, and he preferred to concede this stony ground to her, with whatever show of leniency his mood required. ‘There isn’t anyone at dinner tonight left for us to disparage,’ he said, ‘except David, and we know what you think of him.’
‘That reminds me, I must read at least a chapter of The Twelve Caesars so I can give it back to him this evening.’
‘Read the chapters on Nero and Caligula,’ Victor suggested, ‘I’m sure they’re David’s favourites. One illustrates what happens when you combine a mediocre artistic talent with absolute power. The other shows how nearly inevitable it is for those who have been terrified to become terrifying, once they have the opportunity.’
‘But isn’t that the key to a great education? You spend your adolescence being promoted from terrified to terrifier, without any women around to distract you.’
Victor decided to ignore this latest demonstration of Anne’s rather tiresome attitude towards English public schools. ‘The interesting thing about Caligula,’ he went on patiently, ‘is that he intended to be a model emperor, and for the first few months of his reign he was praised for his magnanimity. But the compulsion to repeat what one has experienced is like gravity, and it takes special equipment to break away from it.’
Anne was amused to hear Victor make such an overtly psychological generalization. Perhaps if people had been dead long enough they came alive for him.
‘Nero I dislike for having driven Seneca to suicide,’ Victor droned on. ‘Although I’m well aware of the hostility that can arise between a pupil and his tutor, it is just as well to keep it within limits,’ he chuckled.
‘Didn’t Nero commit suicide himself, or was that just in Nero, the Movie?’
‘When it came to suicide he showed less enthusiasm than he had done for driving other people to it. He sat around for a long time wondering which part of his “pustular and malodorous” body to puncture, wailing, “Dead and so great an artist!”’
‘You sound like you were there.’
‘You know how it is with the books one reads in one’s youth.’
‘Yeah, that’s kinda how I feel about Francis the Talking Mule,’ said Anne.
She got up from the creaking wicker chair. ‘I guess I’d better catch up on “one’s youth” before dinner.’ She moved over to Victor’s side. ‘Write me one sentence before we have to go,’ she said gently. ‘You can do that, can’t you?’
Victor enjoyed being coaxed. He looked up at her like an obedient child. ‘I’ll try,’ he said modestly.
Anne walked through the gloom of the kitchen and climbed the twisting stairs. She felt a cool pleasure at being alone for the first time since the early morning and wanted to have a bath straight away. Victor liked to wallow in the tub, controlling the taps with his big toe, and she knew how irrationally disappointed he became if the steaming water ran out during this important ceremony. Besides, if she bathed now she could lie on her bed and read for a couple of hours before going out to dinner.
On top of the books by her bed was Goodbye to Berlin and Anne thought how much more fun it would be to reread that rather than dip into the grisly Caesars. From the thought of pre-war Berlin her mind jumped back to the remark she had made about the shower room in Auschwitz. Was she, she wondered, giving in to that English need to be facetious? She felt tainted and exhausted by a summer of burning up her moral resources for the sake of small conversational effects. She felt she had been subtly perverted by slick and lazy English manners, the craving for the prophylactic of irony, the terrible fear of being ‘a bore’, and the boredom of the ways they relentlessly and narrowly evaded this fate.
Above all it was Victor’s ambivalence towards these values that was wearing her down. She could no longer tell whether he was working as a double agent, a serious writer pretending to the Folks on the Hill – of which the Melroses were only rather a tarnished example – that he was a devoted admirer of the effortless nullity of their lives. Or perhaps he was a triple agent, pretending to her that he had not accepted the bribe of being admitted to the periphery of their world.
Defiantly, Anne picked up Goodbye to Berlin and headed towards the bathroom.
The sun disappeared early behind the roof of the tall, narrow house. At his table under the plane tree Victor put his sweater back on. He felt safe in the bulk of his sweater with the distant sound of Anne running her bath. He wrote a sentence in his spidery hand, and then another.
10
IF DAVID HAD AWARDED himself the most important painting in the house, at least Eleanor had secured the largest bedroom. At the far end of the corridor, its curtains were closed all day to protect a host of frail Italian drawings from the draining power of the sun.
Patrick hesitated in the doorway of his mother’s bedroom, waiting to be noticed. The dimness of the room made it seem even larger, especially when a breeze stirred the curtains and an unsteady light spread shadows over the stretching walls. Eleanor sat at her desk with her back to Patrick, writing a cheque to the Save the Children Fund, her favourite charity. She did not hear her son come into the room until he stood beside her chair.