The bellboy returned ten minutes later. Patrick stubbed out his cigarette and took the brown-paper bag from him. The two of them walked together towards the revolving doors.

‘The young lady was wondering where you were going,’ said the bellboy.

‘What did you say?’

‘I said I thought it was de airport.’

‘And what did she say?’

‘I wouldn’t loik to repeat it, sir,’ said the bellboy respectfully.

So much for that, thought Patrick, spinning through the doors. Slash. Burn. Move on. Out into the scintillating light, under a paler wider sky, his eyeballs drilled like a Roman statue.

Across the street he saw a man, his left arm severed at the wrist, a slight rawness where the bone was most prominent, a four days’ unshaven, bitter face, yellow lenses, curling lip, lank hair, stained raincoat. The stump twitched upward in brisk involuntary jerks. Heavy smoker. Hater of the world. Mon semblable. Other people’s words.

Still, there were some important differences. Patrick distributed banknotes to the doorman and the bellboy. The driver opened the door for him and he climbed into the back with his brown-paper bag. He sprawled across the black leather seat, closed his eyes, and pretended to sleep.

Praise for the Patrick Melrose novels

‘Clearly one of the major achievements of contemporary British fiction. Stingingly well-written and exhilaratingly funny’

David Sexton, Evening Standard

‘From the very first lines I was completely hooked . . . By turns witty, moving and an intense social comedy, I wept at the end but wouldn’t dream of giving away the totally unexpected reason’

Antonia Fraser, Sunday Telegraph

‘Wonderful caustic wit . . . Perhaps the very sprightliness of the prose – its lapidary concision and moral certitude – represents the cure for which the characters yearn. So much good writing is in itself a form of health’

Edmund White, Guardian

‘The Patrick Melrose novels can be read as the navigational charts of a mariner desperate not to end up in the wretched harbor from which he embarked on a voyage that has led in and out of heroin addiction, alcoholism, marital infidelity and a range of behaviors for which the term “self-destructive” is the mildest of euphemisms. Some of the most perceptive, elegantly written and hilarious novels of our era . . . Remarkable’

Francine Prose, New York Times

‘Perhaps the most brilliant English novelist of his generation’

Alan Hollinghurst

‘Beautifully written, excruciatingly funny and also very tragic’

Mariella Frostrup, Sky Magazine

‘The main joy of a St Aubyn novel is the exquisite clarity of his prose, the almost uncanny sense he gives that, in language as in mathematical formulae, precision and beauty invariably point to truth . . . Characters in St Aubyn novels are hyper-articulate, and the witty dialogue is here, as ever, one of the chief joys’

Suzi Feay, Financial Times

‘Humor, pathos, razor-sharp judgement, pain, joy and everything in between. The Melrose novels are a masterwork for the twenty-first century, by one of our greatest prose stylists’

Alice Sebold