The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn Read Free Book Online Page A

keep her options open.
    The thing about Nicholas was that he really was rich and beautiful and he was a baronet, which was nice and sort of Jane Austeny. Still, it wouldn’t be long before people started saying, ‘You can tell he used to be good-looking,’ and someone else would intervene charitably with, ‘Oh, no, he still is.’ In the end she would probably marry him and she would be the fourth Lady Pratt. Then she could divorce him and get half a million pounds, or whatever, and keep Barry as her sex slave and still call herself Lady Pratt in shops. God, sometimes she was so cynical it was frightening.
    She knew that Nicholas thought it was the sex that kept them together. It was certainly what had got them together at the party where they first met. Nicholas had been quite drunk and asked her if she was a ‘natural blonde’. Yawn, yawn, what a tacky question. Still, Barry was in Glastonbury and she’d been feeling a bit restless and so she gave him this heavy look and said, ‘Why don’t you find out for yourself?’ as she slipped out of the room. He thought he had found out, but what he didn’t know was that she dyed all her hair. If you do something cosmetic, you might as well do it thoroughly, that was her motto.
    In the bathroom, Nicholas stuck out his tongue and admired its thickly coated surface, still tinged with blackish purple from last night’s coffee and red wine. It was all very well to make jokes about Sarah Watford’s double chins, but the truth was that unless he held his head up like a Guardsman on parade he had one himself. He couldn’t face shaving, but he dabbed on a little of Bridget’s make-up. One didn’t want to look like the old queen in Death in Venice , with rouge trickling down cholera-fevered cheeks, but without a little light powder he had what people called ‘a distinctly unhealthy pallor’. Bridget’s make-up was rather basic, like her sometimes truly appalling clothes. Whatever one said about Fiona (and one had said some thoroughly unpleasant things in one’s time) she did have the most amazing creams and masks sent over from Paris. He sometimes wondered if Bridget might not be (one had to slip into the softening nuances of the French tongue) insortable. Last weekend at Peter’s she had spent the whole of Sunday lunch giggling like a fourteen-year-old.
    And then there was her background. He did not know when the house of Watson and the house of Scott had seen fit to unite their fortunes, but he could tell at a glance that the Watson-Scotts were Old Vicarage material who would kill to have their daughter’s engagement in Country Life. The father was fond of the races and when Nicholas had taken him and his keen-on-roses wife to Le Nozze di Figaro at Covent Garden, Roddy Watson-Scott had said, ‘They’re under starter’s orders,’ as the conductor mounted the podium. If the Watson-Scotts were just a little too obscure, at least everyone was agreed that Bridget was flavour of the month and he was a lucky dog to have her.
    If he married again he would not choose a girl like Bridget. Apart from anything else, she was completely ignorant. She had ‘done’ Emma for A-level, but since then, as far as he could make out, she only read illustrated magazines called Oz or The Furry Freak Brothers supplied to her by a seamy character called Barry. She spent hours poring over pictures of spiralling eyeballs and exploding intestines and policemen with the faces of Doberman pinschers. His own intestines were in a state of bitter confusion and he wanted to clear Bridget out of the bedroom before they exploded.
    â€˜Darling!’ he shouted, or rather tried to shout. The sound came out as a croak. He cleared his throat and spat in the basin.
    â€˜You couldn’t be an angel and get my glass of orange juice from the dining room, could you? And a cup of tea?’
    â€˜Oh, all