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About the Author

Edward St Aubyn was born in London. His superbly acclaimed Patrick Melrose novels are Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother’s Milk (winner of the Prix Femina étranger and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize), and At Last. The series was made into a BAFTA-award winning Sky Atlantic TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role. St Aubyn is also the author of A Clue to the Exit, On the Edge (shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize), Lost for Words (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), and Dunbar, his re-imagining of King Lear for Hogarth Shakespeare.

Also by Edward St Aubyn

Also by Edward St Aubyn

The Patrick Melrose novels

Never Mind

Bad News

Some Hope

Mother’s Milk

At Last

On the Edge

A Clue to the Exit

Lost for Words

Dunbar

Dedication

For Sara

PART ONE

1

Francis ducked into the sallow copse that had sprung up on the land next to his cottage, pushing aside the pliant branches when he needed to and weaving through them when he could. As the slippery mud of the lane gave way to firmer ground among the trees, his tread relaxed and his attention expanded to take in the October air, already cool but still soft; the scent of growing fungus and sodden moss; the red defiance and yellow lethargy of decaying leaves, and the crows rasping in a nearby field. He felt the life around him and the life inside him flowing into each other, some of it in a tangle of sensation – when he touched the branch it also touched him – some of it in similes and resemblances and some, on the outer edge of his awareness, like a network of underground streams, or the pale mesh of roots under his feet, known without being seen. He felt this confluence of mutual life, although it was hard to hold in mind, was the fundamental background to all the sharp particularities that tried to monopolise his attention, like the robin that had just landed briefly in front of him, making him mirror the tiny, abrupt movements of its neck and then inviting him to follow the loops of its descending flight through the trees, to the rustle of its arrival among the leaves. Each form of life was bringing its own experience into the world; sometimes tightly overlapping with others, like the Purple Emperor cocoon he had seen stitched to one of these sallow branches last May; sometimes briefly interpenetrating, like the robin that had paused on a similar branch only a moment ago, and at other times radically isolated, like a streak of bacteria hidden in an Antarctic rock, but still embedded in its niche of whistling wind and perpetual frost.