The Complete Roderick

mine. Excuse me all to hell.’

‘I just meant, most people have mothers.’

Norm’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel, as the car shot forward. ‘Oh sure. Most people. I suppose most people can’t buy a computer magazine without blushing. I suppose most people feel all the time like calling up a computer on the phone and inputting dirty data, real dirty data. Oh sure, most people!’

‘What do you remember about your mother, Norm?’

Norm jammed on the brakes, and the car skidded to an oblique stop. Tears were streaming down his face. ‘You keep that up and you can just get out and walk. You hear me?’

Roderick looked out at the bleak, icy road, the mountainous snowbanks, the blackness beyond. They were somewhere in the edge of a suburb, and there was nothing to be seen but falling snow and the darkness that might be trees. Large wet flakes drifted through the headlight beams.

‘I’m really looking forward to this party,’ he said. ‘Who’s giving it?’

Norm started driving again. ‘Mr Moxon. He’s a friend of my um Dad.’ Soon the car turned off the icy road into a long, heated drive. They drove on, past snow sculptures of men in top hats and women in bonnets, past massed evergreens with programmed lights, past everything, faster, racing headlong like the fastest troika imaginable.

The room was L-shaped, and large enough to accommodate more than one source of music. Around the corner a jukebox glowed from within a fireplace, radiating snatches of warm music to a small circle of admirers (though General Fleischman had located the secret volume control and kept turning it down). At the far end of the long gallery, a man with blue hair and a mirror monocle touched the keys of a white piano and sang:

When lovely woman stoops to polyandry
She ends up with more dishes in the sink
And greater loads of melancholy laundry
She’s less appreciated than you think.

The room between was beginning to fill up with life: talking faces, scanning eyes, hands clutching glasses or elbows or sketching in the air with cigarettes, voices scribbling in one another’s margins.

‘But that’s what I mean, Everett’s friends are all tired grey businessmen or engineers or something, and Francine’s all seem to be mumbling poets with pimply necks, God it’s all so — so haecceitic. I could’ve gone to Nassau…’

‘…was going to New York…’

‘…went to Prague…’

‘…doubled back down Dalecrest Boulevard, see, to catch the Hilldale Expressway through Valecrest, but guess what?’

‘Silicon, darling. Or do I mean silicone? Silly something, anyway. H.G. Wells said it was the basis of all life, imagine!’

Someone liked Rodin’s Thinker, someone complained of sinus trouble in Prague, someone else had lost money selling KUR shares too soon, so who said there was a Sandy Claus?

Father Warren, looking lean and aescetic as always despite the splendour of his black leather cassock, accepted a glass of sherry and glided on to the jukebox area to speak with General Fleischman.

The general was a tall, broad-shouldered old man with a deep tan and frothy white sideburns. Since his retirement from the Army he had been running a bank, but he still hoped for a job in Washington — maybe as a minor White House adviser. At the moment he was holding forth on puppet governments to Dr Tarr’s secretary, Judi Mazzini. She looked as though she’d rather be doing her nails.

‘Ruritania? General, I couldn’t even find it on a map.’

‘Nobody can, honey, that’s the trouble with we Americans. We tend to devisualize backdrop situations, we play down the role of unhostile puppets — Oh hello, padre. Like to have you meet Judi…’

But with a smile of apology she escaped, all but colliding with an Oriental waiter who managed to recover without spilling a drop of the foamy pink cocktail he was carrying the length of the room to a jowly woman in purple who said again:

‘But don’t you just love his Thinker?’

The boy with the straggly beard was cautious; he believed they were talking about a Japanese movie monster: the giant flying reptile Rodan. ‘His thinker, eh? Well I guess I maybe missed that…’

She now tasted the foamy drink and waved it away, her hand glittering with amethysts. ‘No I’m sorry but I just can’t drink that. Toy, you won’t be angry with me?’

The waiter smiled. ‘Not at all, Mrs Fleischman.’

‘Now you just take that back to the bartender and tell him it’s just too oh never mind, just bring me a gin and ton.’

When the waiter was not quite out of earshot she said, ‘Toy’s a treasure, wonder where Francine found him? He even pronounces my name right. I thought he’d be calling me Mrs Freshman, most of these, these people — but anyway, what were you saying, sweetie? How could you talk about Rodin and leave out his Thinker?’

The bearded boy stammered out something about Tokyo burning and special effects, adding, ‘Not that I guess it’s exactly Hugo material but—’

‘Yas, yas, his Hugo did have a lot of problems and finally they never did put it up at all — oh here’s Everett. Everett, sweetie, I want a word with you.’ Her ringed hand snagged the sleeve of a well-cut dinner jacket.

‘Hello, Thelma,’ he said, smiling. ‘Let me rustle up a drink for you.’ He moved on quickly, past the white piano, past voices expressing disappointment with an old city, delight with a new diet, faith in a second-hand religion.

‘That’s Everett,’ said someone.

‘Who?’

‘Our host, Everett Moxon.’

‘Isn’t his head small?’

‘Small?’

‘I don’t mean he wears a doughnut for a hat, I don’t even mean he’s a new Anatole France. I just meant — I think I must need a pill with this scotch.’

A pillbox was offered. ‘Here, have one of mine. Libidon this side, Solacyl that side.’

Moxon veered past the South sofa and paused to smile on the beauty of Mrs McBabbitt.

Connie McBabbitt was breathtakingly beautiful. Usually at a party she found a place to pose gracefully and remained there for the evening. Tonight she reclined with one elbow on the arm of the sofa, her hands clasped and her chin lifted upon a forefinger. The idea was for men to spend the evening lusting and longing after the curve of ivory cheek, throat, breast, the voluptuous swathe of black velvet, the old-fashioned obviousness of her perfection. If she did resemble a 1950s model, it was because that was the era of preference of the plastic surgeon who had created her.

Ten years of surgery, stage by stage, beginning with a resectioning of her pelvis and finishing with a quantity of fresh skin, had tightened the screw of beauty turn by turn until no more could be done — she hardly used makeup.

‘Everett, what a gorgeous party.’ Her voice too had been adjusted to a slight huskiness. ‘You seem to know so many people — didn’t I just see Edd McFee a minute ago? The painter?’

‘Could be, Connie. I sometimes feel a little lost at these affairs myself. Let me introduce you to Mr Vitanuova.’

The little square, thick man almost bowed over her hand. ‘Call me Joe,’ he said, regarding her through his grey eyebrows. ‘May I say that you are the most beautiful woman in the place? If not in the city? No offence to the other classy dolls, but you are class.’