Read Online At Last by Edward St. Aubyn - Free Book Online Page A

knees. She would catch him at the last moment, terrified that his soft head was about to crash onto the hard floor; and yet unable to go to the bed they both longed for, in case she crushed him to death.
    The days were a little better. The maternity nurse came in to help, the housekeeper bustled about in the kitchen, and with David out sailing and drinking, the house took on a superficially cheerful atmosphere. The three women fussed over Patrick and when Eleanor was resting back in her own bedroom she almost forgot about the dreadful nights; she almost forgot about the death of Georgina when she closed her eyes and could no longer see the stretch of grey water outside her window, and when she fed the baby from her breasts and they fell asleep together, she almost forgot about the violence that had brought him into the world.
    But then one day, three weeks after they came back from hospital, David stayed behind. He was in a dangerous mood from the start; she could smell the brandy in his coffee and see the furious jealousy in his looks. By lunchtime, he had wounded everyone in the house with his cutting remarks, and all the women were anxious, feeling him pacing around, waiting for the chance to hurt and humiliate them. Nevertheless, they were surprised when he strode into the kitchen, carrying a battered leather bag and wearing a surgeon’s ill-fitting green pyjamas. He ordered them to clear a space on the scrubbed oak table, unfolded a towel, took out a wooden case of surgical instruments from the bag and opened it next to the towel. He asked for a saucepan of boiling water, as if everything had already been agreed and everyone knew what was going on.
    ‘What for?’ said the housekeeper, the first to wake from the trance.
    ‘To sterilize the instruments,’ David answered in the tone of a man explaining something very obvious to someone very stupid. ‘The time has come to perform a circumcision. Not, I assure you,’ he added, as if to allay their innermost fears, ‘for religious reasons,’ he allowed himself a fleeting smile, ‘but for medical ones.’
    ‘You’ve been drinking,’ Eleanor blurted out.
    ‘Only a beaker of surgical spirit,’ he quipped, a little giddy from the prospect of the operation; and then, no longer in the mood for fun, ‘Bring me the boy.’
    ‘Are you sure it’s for the best?’ asked the maternity nurse.
    ‘Do not question my authority,’ said David, throwing everything into it: the older man, the doctor, the employer, the centuries of command, but also the paralysing dart of his psychological presence, which made it seem life-threatening to oppose him.
    His credentials as a murderer were well established in Eleanor’s imagination. Late at night, when he was down to one listener, amongst the empty bottles and crushed cigars, David was fond of telling the story of an Indian pig-sticking hunt he had been on in the late nineteen-twenties. He was thrilled by the danger of galloping through the high grass with a lance, chasing a wild boar whose tusks could ruin a horse’s legs, throw a rider to the ground and gore him to death. Impaling one of these fast, tough pigs was also a terrific pleasure, more involving than a long-distance kill. The only blemish on the expedition was that one of the party was bitten by a wild dog and developed the symptoms of rabies. Three days from the nearest hospital, it was already too late to help, and so the hunters decided to truss up their foaming and thrashing friend in one of the thick nets originally intended for transporting the bodies of the dead pigs, and to hoist him off the ground, tying the corners of the net to the branches of a big jacaranda tree. It was challenging, even for these hard men, to enjoy the sense of deep relaxation that follows a day of invigorating sport with this parcel of hydrophobic anguish dangling from a nearby tree. The row of lanterns down the dinner table, the quiet gleam of silver, the well-trained servants, the