Meltdown by Ben Elton Read Free Book Online Page A

and Lizzie and Robson cosied up and did for themselves. They’d never even had a live-in nanny, just a day girl. Lizzie was proud of the fact that despite a decade of feverish creativity she had never missed a single bedtime.
    Of course the fact that Robson was basically a house husband helped. He was nominally a director of Lizzie Food, the company they jointly owned, but everybody knew that dear old Robbo just arsed about a bit and played with the children before shuffling off to the pub or the golf club, where he was an enormously popular figure with his unkempt curly hair, his slight paunch, his ability to make even the most expensively tailored garment look like a sack and his comical ambition to get his handicap down to under forty.
    ‘Good old Robbo,’ the members would say to each other as he struggled to find his car keys after a few lunchtime pints. ‘Salt of the earth. Do anything for you. Lucky bastard too, catching that wife of his. Gives all of us crap blokes hope.’
    Some of the members secretly wondered whether Lizzie might play for the other netball team, but nothing could have been further from the truth. Lizzie loved Robbo deeply and passionately. He was the perfect partner for such a fastidious and restlessly energetic woman, being quite possibly the easiest and most even-tempered man alive. On their famous drunken graduation night it was he who had volunteered to shove the first radish.
    It was indeed considered curious that the thing Lizzie loved most in life was the only thing that was not perfectly presented and exquisitely designed. And as the years went by it almost seemed as if Robson was her portrait of Dorian Gray. The more shambolic and shapeless he got, the more utterly perfect everything that Lizzie created seemed to become.
    ‘It’s just brilliant genetics,’ Jimmy had observed about them on a curry night called to celebrate Lizzie and Robbo’s third wedding anniversary, ‘like that theory about ugly men marrying beautiful women in order to avoid producing a race of gargoyles.’
    ‘That’s not genetics,’ Rupert had said, ‘that’s economics. Beautiful women don’t marry poor ugly men.’
    ‘I’m going to!’ laughed Jane, an earnest young writer who had recently got engaged to Henry over an unpublished manuscript. Henry tried to smile but it was obvious he didn’t find his new girlfriend’s joke very funny. Henry was known to be extremely vain about his looks, particularly his splendid mop of blond hair.
    ‘Watch out, Jane,’ David observed. ‘You don’t really know him yet but you’ll soon find out that vanity’s name is not “woman” but “Henry”. In our house in Sussex he spent twice as long in front of the bathroom mirror as any of us, including Lizzie.’
    ‘We live in a shallow media age,’ Henry said, trying to sound good-humoured. ‘Appearance matters.’
    ‘You’re right about the bathroom though, Dave,’ Jane said. ‘He takes twice as long as me in there too!’
    This comment provoked a ‘woo-hoo’ from the boys as nobody had been quite sure if Jane was yet officially sleeping with Henry. Jane reddened.
    ‘I mean, you know . . . Occasionally,’ she said, ‘if I’ve stayed.’
    ‘This is my very point, Jane,’ Jimmy insisted, moving swiftly on to cover her embarrassment. ‘Nature readjusts, opposites attract. It’s Darwinian. If Lizzie and Robbo had married their own types, Lizzie’s children would be sad burnouts with OCD and Robbo’s children would be good-natured slobs scratching their balls and incapable of feeding themselves or changing the batteries on the TV remote.’
    ‘Isn’t that what Robbo is already?’ David had asked.
    ‘Guilty as charged!’ Robbo volunteered. ‘I am one lucky bastard and so I tell anyone who wants to know. The only plea I can offer in mitigation is that I never tried to force myself on her! Not that I wasn’t interested, of course. As I recall, we all were. I’ll never forget the day you came