For Patrick Melrose, 'family' is more than a double-edged sword. As friends, relations and foes trickle in to pay final respects to his mother, Eleanor an heiress who forsook the grandeur of her upbringing for 'good works', freely bestowed upon everyone but her own child Patrick finds that his transition to orphanhood isn't necessarily the liberation he had so long imagined. Yet as the service ends and the family gather for a final party, as conversations are overheard, danced around and concertedly avoided, amidst the social niceties and the social horrors, the calms and the rapids, Patrick begins to sense a new current. And at the end of the day, alone in his rooftop bedsit, it seems to promise some form of safety, at last.