Edward Aubyn - The Patrick Melrose Novels - Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk

‘Morning Thunder,’ said Robert’s mother. ‘Isn’t Thomas enough morning thunder already?’

‘That’s your trouble, darling, you think Thomas can substitute for everything: tea, coffee, work, social life…’ He let the list hurtle on in silence, and then quickly buried the remark in more general commentary. ‘Morning Thunder is very literary, it just has added quotations.’ He cleared his throat and read out loud, ‘“ Born often under another sky, placed in the middle of an always moving scene, himself driven by an irresistible torrent which draws all about him, the American has no time to tie himself to anything, he grows accustomed only to change, and ends by regarding it as the natural state of man. He feels the need of it, more he loves it; for the instability, instead of meaning disaster to him, seems to give birth only to miracles all about him. ” – Alexis de Tocqueville.

‘So you see,’ he said, ruffling Robert’s hair, ‘wanting to “motor on” is in perfect keeping with the mood of this country, at least in 1840, or whatever.’

Thomas clambered onto a table whose protective circle of glass was about a foot less wide than the table itself, leaving the mulberry polyester tablecloth exposed at the edges.

‘Let’s go out to a restaurant,’ said Robert’s mother, lifting him gently into her arms.

Robert felt the sense of almost violent silence in the lift, made up of the things that his parents were not saying to each other, but also caused by the aroma of mental illness surrounding the knobbly headed lift operator who informed them with pride, rather than the apologies Robert felt they deserved, that the lift had been installed in 1926. Robert liked some things to be old – dinosaurs, for instance, or planets – but he liked his lifts brand new. The family’s longing to escape the red velveteen cage was explosive. While the madman jerked a brass lever back and forth, the lift lurched around in the vicinity of the ground floor and finally came to rest only an inch or two below the lobby.

In the fading light, they walked over glittering pavements, steam surging from corner drains and giant grilles replacing the paving stones for feverishly long stretches. Robert refused to give in to the cowardice of avoiding them altogether, but he walked on them reluctantly, trying to make himself lighter. Gravity had never seemed so grave.

‘Why do the pavements glitter?’ he asked.

‘God knows,’ said his father. ‘It’s probably the added iron, or the crushed quotations. Or maybe they’ve just had the caffeine sucked right out of them.’

Apart from a few yellowing newspaper articles displayed in the window, and a handwritten sign saying GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS, Venus Pizza gave no hint of the disgusting food that was being prepared indoors. The ingredients of the salads and pizzas seemed to fit in with the unreflecting expansion which Robert had been noticing since Heathrow. A list would start out reasonably enough with feta and tomato and then roll over the border into pineapple and Swiss cheese. Smoked chicken burst in on what had seemed to be a seafood party, and ‘all the above’ were served with French fries and onion rings.

‘Everything is “mouthwatering”,’ said Robert; ‘What does that mean? That you need a huge glass of water to wash away the taste?’

His mother burst out laughing.

‘It’s more like a police report on what they found in someone’s dustbin than a dish,’ his father complained. ‘The suspect was obviously a tropical-fruit freak with a hearty love of Brie and shellfish,’ he muttered in an American accent.

‘I thought French fries were called Freedom fries now,’ said Robert.

‘It’s cheaper to write GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS than reprint a hundred menus,’ said his father. ‘Thank goodness Spain joined the coalition of the willing, otherwise we’d be saying things like, “Mine’s a Supreme Court omelette with some Freedom fries on the side.” English muffins will probably survive the purge, but I wouldn’t go round asking for Turkish coffee after the way they behaved. I’m sorry.’ Robert’s father sank back into the booth. ‘I had such a love affair with America, I suppose I feel jilted by its current incarnation. Of course it’s a vast and complex society, and I have great faith in its powers of self-correction. But where are they? What happened to rioting? Satire? Scepticism?’

‘Hi!’ The waitress wore a badge saying KAREN. ‘Have you guys made a menu selection? Oh,’ she sighed, looking at Thomas, ‘you are gorgeous.’

Robert was mesmerized by the strange hollow friendliness of her manner. He wanted to set her free from the obligation to be cheerful. He could tell she really wanted to go home.

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.