The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (72 page)

His mother smiled at her and said, ‘Could we have a Vesuvio without the pineapple chunks or the smoked turkey or…’ She started laughing helplessly. ‘I’m sorry…’

‘Mummy!’ said Robert, starting to laugh as well.

Thomas scrunched up his eyes and rocked back and forth, not wanting to be left out. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘it’s incredible.’

‘Maybe we should approach this from the other direction,’ said Robert’s father. ‘Could we have a pizza with tomato, anchovy and black olives.’

‘Like the pizzas in Les Lecques,’ said Robert.

‘We’ll see,’ said his father.

Karen tried to master her bewilderment at the poverty of the ingredients.

‘You want mozzarella, right?’

‘No thanks.’

‘How about a drizzle of basil oil?’

‘No drizzle, thank you.’

‘OK,’ she said, hardened by their stubbornness.

Robert slid across the Formica table and rested his head sideways on the pillow of his folded arms. He felt he had been trapped all day in an argument with his body: confined on the plane when he was ready to run around, and running around now when he should have been in bed. In the corner a television with the sound turned down enough to be inaudible, but too little to be silent, radiated diagonally into the room. Robert had never seen a baseball game before, but he had seen films in which the human spirit triumphed over adversity on a baseball field. He thought he could remember one in which some gangsters tried to make a sincere baseball star deliberately lose a game, but at the last moment, just when he was about to throw the whole thing away and the groans of disappointment from the crowd seemed to express the whole unsatisfactoriness of a world in which there was nothing left to believe in, he went into a trance and remembered when he had first hit a ball a long way, into the middle of a wheat field in the middle of America. He couldn’t betray that amazing slow-motion sky-bound feeling from his childhood, and he couldn’t betray his mother who always wore an apron and told him not to lie, and so he hit the ball right out of the stadium, and the gangsters looked a bit like Karen when she took the pizza order, only much angrier, but his girlfriend looked proud of him, even though the gangsters were standing either side of her, because she was basically like his mother with much more expensive peach-coloured clothes, and the crowd went crazy because there was something to believe in again. And then there was a car chase and the gangsters, whose reflexes were not honed by a lifetime in sports and whose bad character turned into bad driving on a crucial bend, crashed their car and exploded.

In the game on television the gangsters seemed to be having much more success and the ball hardly got hit at all. Every few minutes advertisements interrupted the play and then the words WORLD SERIES in huge gold letters spun out of nowhere and glinted on the screen.

‘Where’s our wine?’ said his father.

‘Your wine,’ Robert’s mother corrected him.

He saw his father clench his jaw and swallow a remark. When Karen arrived with the bottle of red wine, his father started drinking decisively, as if the remark he had not made was stuck in his throat. Karen gave Robert and Thomas huge glasses of ice stained with cranberry juice. Robert sipped his drink listlessly. The day had been unbearably long. Not just the pressurized biscuit-coloured staleness of the flight, but the Immigration formalities as well. His father, who had joked that he was going to describe himself as an ‘international tourist’ on the grounds that that was how President Bush pronounced ‘international terrorist’, managed to resist the temptation. He was nevertheless taken into a side room by a black female Immigration officer after having his passport stamped.

‘She couldn’t understand why an English lawyer was born in France,’ he explained in the taxi. ‘She clasped her head and said, “I’m just trying to get a concept of your life, Mr Melrose.” I told her I was trying to do the same thing and that if I ever wrote an autobiography I’d send her a copy.’

‘Oh,’ said Robert’s mother, ‘so that’s why we waited an extra half-hour.’

‘Well, you know, when people hate officialdom, they either become craven or facetious.’

‘Try craven next time, it’s quicker.’

When the pizzas finally arrived Robert saw that they were hopeless. As thick as nappies, they hadn’t been adjusted to the ninety per cent reduction in ingredients. Robert scraped all the tomato and anchovy and olives into one corner and made two mouthfuls of miniature pizza. It was not at all like the delicious, thin, slightly burnt pizza in Les Lecques but somehow, because he had thought it might be, he had opened a trap door into the summers he used to have and would never have again.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked his mother.

‘I just want a pizza like the ones in Les Lecques.’ He was assailed by injustice and despair. He really didn’t want to cry.

‘Oh, darling, I so understand,’ she said, touching his hand. ‘I know it seems far-fetched in this mad restaurant, but we’re going to have a lovely time in America.’

‘Why is Bobby crying?’ said Thomas.

‘He’s upset.’

‘But I don’t want him to cry,’ said Thomas. ‘I don’t want him to!’ he screamed, and started crying himself.

‘Fucking hell,’ said Robert’s father. ‘I knew we should have gone to Ramsgate.’

On the way back to the hotel, Thomas fell asleep in his stroller.

‘Let’s cut to the chase,’ said Robert’s father, ‘and not pretend we’re going to sleep with each other. You take both of the boys into the bedroom and I’ll take the sofa bed.’

‘Fine,’ said Robert’s mother, ‘if that’s what you want.’

‘There’s no need to introduce exciting words like “want”. It’s what I’m realistically anticipating.’

Robert fell asleep immediately, but woke up again when the red digits on the bedside clock said 2:11. His mother and Thomas were still asleep but he could hear a muffled sound from the drawing room. He found his father on the floor in front of the television.

‘I put my back out unfolding that fucking sofa bed,’ he said, doing push-ups with his hips still pressed to the carpet.

The bottle of whiskey was on the glass table, three-quarters empty next to a ravaged sheet of Codis painkillers.

‘I’m sorry about the Venus Pizza,’ said his father. ‘After going there, and shopping at Carnegie Foods and watching a few hours of this delinquent network television, I’ve come to the conclusion that we should probably fast during our holiday here. Factory farming doesn’t stop in the slaughterhouse, it stops in our bloodstreams, after the Henry Ford food missiles have hurtled out of their cages into our open mouths and dissolved their growth hormones and their genetically modified feed into our increasingly wobbly bodies. Even when the food isn’t “fast”, the bill is instantaneous, dumping an idle eater back on the snack-crowded streets. In the end, we’re on the same conveyor belt as the featherless, electrocuted chickens.’

Robert found his father vaguely frightening, with his bloodshot eyes and the sweat stains on his shirt, twisting the corkscrew of his own talk. Robert knew that he wasn’t being communicated with, but allowed to listen to his father practising speeches. All this time while he had been asleep, his father had been pacing up and down a mental courtroom, prosecuting.

‘I liked the Park,’ said Robert.

‘The Park’s nice,’ his father conceded, ‘but the rest of the country is just people in huge cars wondering what to eat next. When we hire a car you’ll see that it’s really a mobile dining room, with little tables all over the place and cup holders. It’s a nation of hungry children with real guns. If you’re not blown up by a bomb, you’re blown up by a Vesuvio pizza. It’s absolutely terrifying.’

‘Please stop,’ said Robert.

‘I’m sorry. I just feel…’ His father suddenly seemed lost. ‘I just can’t sleep. The Park is great. The city is breathtakingly beautiful. It’s just me.’

‘Is whiskey going to be part of the fast?’

‘Unfortunately,’ said his father, imitating the mischievous way that Thomas liked to say that word, ‘the whiskey is something
very
pure and can’t reasonably be included in the war against corruption.’

‘Oh,’ said Robert.

‘Or war
on
corruption, as they would say here. War on terror; war on crime; war on drugs. I suppose if you’re a pacifist here you have to have a war on war, or nobody would notice.’

‘Daddy,’ Robert warned him.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ He grabbed the remote control. ‘Let’s turn off this mind-shattering rubbish and read a story.’

‘Excellent,’ said Robert, jumping onto the sofa bed. He felt he was pretending to be more cheerful than he was, a little bit like Karen. Perhaps it was infectious, or something in the food supply.

14

‘
OH
,
PATRICK
,
WHY WEREN
’
T
we told that the lovely life we had was going to end?’ said Aunt Nancy, turning the pages of the photograph album.

‘Weren’t you told that?’ said Patrick. ‘How maddening. But then again, it didn’t end for the people who might have told you. Your mother just ruined it by trusting your stepfather.’

‘Do you know the worst thing about that – I’m going to use the word “evil” – ’

‘Popular word these days,’ murmured Patrick.

‘– man?’ Nancy continued, only briefly closing her eyelids to refuse admittance to Patrick’s distracting remark. ‘He used to grope me in the back of Mummy’s car while she was at home dying of cancer. He had Parkinson’s by then, so he had a shaky grip, if you know what I’m saying. After Mummy died, he actually asked me to marry him. Can you believe that? I just laughed, but sometimes I think I should have accepted. He only lasted two more years, and I might have been spared the sight of the little nephew’s removal men carrying my dressing table out of my bedroom, while I lay in bed, on the morning of Jean’s death. I said to the brutes in blue overalls, “What are you doing? Those are my hairbrushes.” “We were told to take everything,” they grunted, and then they threw me out of bed, so they could load that on the van as well.’

‘It might have been even more traumatic to marry someone you loathed and found physically disgusting,’ said Patrick.

‘Oh, look,’ said Nancy, turning a page of the album, ‘here’s Fairley, where we spent the beginning of the war, while Mummy was still stuck in France. It was the most divine house on Long Island. Do you know that uncle Bill had a one-hundred-and-fifty-acre garden; I’m not talking about woods and fields, there were plenty of those as well. Nowadays people think they’re God almighty if they have a ten-acre garden on Long Island. There was
the
most beautiful pink marble throne in the middle of the topiary garden where we used to play grandmother’s footsteps. It used to belong to the Emperor of Byzantium…’ She sighed. ‘All lost, all the beautiful things.’

‘The thing about things is that they just keep getting lost,’ said Patrick. ‘The Emperor lost his throne before Uncle Bill lost his garden furniture.’

‘Well, at least Uncle Bill’s children got to sell Fairley,’ Nancy flared up. ‘They didn’t have it stolen.’

‘Listen, I’m the first to sympathize. After what Eleanor did, we’re the most financially withered branch of the family,’ said Patrick. ‘How long were you separated from your mother?’ he asked, as if to introduce a lighter note.

‘Four years.’

‘Four years!’

‘Well, we went to America two years before the war started. Mummy stayed in Europe trying to get the really good things out of France and England and Italy, and she only made it to America two years after the Germans invaded. She and Jean escaped via Portugal and when they arrived I remember that her shoe trunk had fallen overboard from the fishing boat they hired to get them across to New York. I thought that if you could get away from the Germans and only lose a trunk with nothing in it but shoes, you weren’t having such a bad war.’

‘But how did you feel about not seeing her all that time?’

‘Well, you know, I had the oddest conversation with Eleanor a couple of years before she had her stroke. She told me that when Mummy and Jean arrived at Fairley, she rowed out to the middle of the lake and refused to talk to them because she was so angry that Mummy had abandoned us for four years. I was shocked because I couldn’t remember anything about it. I mean, that would have been a big deal in our young lives. But all I remember is Mummy’s shoes getting lost.’

‘I guess everybody remembers what’s important to them,’ said Patrick.

‘She told me that she hated Mummy,’ said Nancy. ‘I mean, I didn’t know that was
genetically
possible.’

‘Her genes probably just stood by horrified,’ said Patrick. ‘The story Eleanor always told me was that she hated your mother for sacking the two people she loved and depended on: her father and her nanny.’

‘I tied myself to the car when Nanny was being driven away,’ said Nancy competitively.

‘Well, there you have it – didn’t you feel a little gene-defying twinge…’

‘No! I blamed Jean. He was the one who persuaded Mummy that we were too old to have a nanny.’

‘And your father?’

‘Well, Mummy said that she just couldn’t afford to keep him any more. Every week he would drive her crazy with some new extravagance. In the run-up to Ascot, for instance, he didn’t just buy a racehorse, he bought a stable of racehorses. Do you know what I’m saying?’

‘Those were the days,’ said Patrick. ‘I’d love to be in a position to be irritated by Mary buying a couple of dozen racehorses, rather than getting in a blind panic when Thomas needs a new pair of shoes.’

‘You’re exaggerating.’

‘It’s the only extravagance I can still afford.’

The telephone rang, drawing Nancy into a study next to her library, and leaving Patrick on the soft sofa dented by the weight of the red leather album, with 1940 stamped in gold on its spine.

The image of Eleanor rowing out to the middle of the lake and refusing to talk to anyone fused in Patrick’s imagination with her present condition, bedridden and cut off from the rest of the world.