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

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.

‘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.’