‘Call my office.’
In the normal way, Chester’s office ran his diary and his schedule was set in stone. Since Ted was asking to override the BSD’s preordained course it was necessary to get Chester to call his office and sanction an emergency reschedule. Then Ted’s PA – he employed only one – could call Chester’s junior PA, one of two, and fix things so that Ted and Adam could walk over to Grove House at 8 pm on Friday evening.
Satisfied, Ted cut off, spoke to his secretary, then, with a glorious shudder of guilt, keyed in the next number on his list. ‘Is this the City Theatre Museum? Do you have a conservation department? A conservation officer? Excellent! Let me speak to her.’
Four hours later he was again feeling his way down the dusty steps of the underground theatre, playing his torch over the coy chorus girls on the walls. ‘This is just the beginning,’ he promised the museum official, a round-eyed woman with a choirboy haircut, deliciously receptive to Ted in the role of the prodigal plutocrat seduced from the path of profit by this cultural treasure trove.
‘A-m-m-m-m-azing. This is just a-m-m-azing.’ She was stammering with excitement. Ted found himself pretty excited also, in the fine, clean, buccaneering way he had not felt for years. Not felt, in fact, since he bought his first property in Westwick. But there was an added sizzle now, a spin on the deal, because instead of crassly cutting through the regulations which might obstruct him he had turned the process on its head. What he was about to do, with the innocent connivance of this dear woman who devoted her life to the extracting of the lingering smell of greasepaint from crates of ephemera and memorabilia and sweat-rotted costumes, was get the regulations to work for him. Doing wrong and doing right at the same time! Whichever way you sliced it! The Jesuitical sophistication of the whole thing charmed him utterly.
Four days later he leaned over the labour-intensive patina of the Pikes’Jacobean-style oak dining table and laid a folder of drawings before Chester.
‘The problem, quite simply, is that we won’t get the price we need for Sun Wharf. The pictures changed. As of today, there is a preservation order on the site.’ Chester’s eyes bulged, the toad enraged. He opened his mouth to speak and Ted pretended not to see. ‘Part of the site. Grade one. Applied for last year. I opposed it on Tudor’s behalf, naturally. Got it kicked back to a subcommittee. But it was granted yesterday. They speeded things up when they saw we’d started work.’ The joy of a paperless office, as the conservation officer had agreed, was that documents didn’t exactly have dates any more. You could create them in time whenever you liked.
‘It was a goddam sweatshop. Who the fuck wants to preserve that?’ Chester looked as if he might even be able to excrete venom through his pores. A red flush of rage was rising up his neck, behind his eats, across his temples. He was almost shining with anger. To his right, Adam DeSouza shifted on his hams, his mind running on placatory suggestions.
‘Nobody. The order applies to a music hall.’
‘What music hall, for Christ’s sake?’
‘Originally, it occupied the centre of the site. The factory building was erected over and around it, concealing it totally. It was boarded up around nineteen-nineteen, in perfect condition. Absolutely untouched. Architectural gem. Body calling themselves Theatre Conservation Trust found it when they were willed a trunkload of old programmes and realised the building hadn’t been demolished.’ Imaginative details, his speciality. Ted glowed with proper pride.
Chester, who handled theatre programmes rarely, with disdain, and only as an expected element of corporate entertainment, departed from the project in spirit at this point, followed a few seconds later by Adam, who had been to a play once in his life, knew they were used for propaganda by so-called intelligentsia and was grateful that Belinda at least was as averse to the experience as he was.
‘How much are we going to be short?’ Adam enquired, uncapping his pen to take down evidence for the prosecution.
‘I want to propose a creative alternative.’ Ted felt he was cruising. ‘I admit my initial reaction, like yours, was one of dismay. Then, when I looked at the new parameters, I realised that this could actually work to our advantage.’ He felt like a conjurer, plucking the rabbit triumph from the black hat disaster. Chester and Adam were open-mouthed, hearing him. He had them, they would buy. He had not been to the theatre since the early days of his marriage but when he was working, on Sun Wharf, he would go every week, and take his daughters when they were old enough. Yes, that was a click of Chester’s back teeth at the word creative, but it was just a mannerism the BSD had, part of his dominance display, not indicative of an actual attitude. ‘Basically, I propose we develop the site ourselves. Twenty-seven loft-style-apartments, retaining the auditorium as the circulation area. It’s not a costly option at all. Or a long job. We can have them all sold by the time Oak Hill’s in phase two Double our original forecast figure at current prices. I’ve talked to the bank, they’ll back us.’
He sensed hesitation. Chester had lidded his eyes and tented his fingertips. Adam was waiting on Chester. The drawings would clinch it, nobody could resist the drawings. Ted reached out and unfurled the folder, revealing an artist’s impression of the pocket auditorium transformed into an atrium floored in blond limestone and garnished with palms, the gilded breasts of the nymphs glowing in the luminance shed by a new glass dome, the proscenium leading to the reception area for the integral swimming pool and fitness centre.
‘Can I look at your figures?’ Adam’s fat cheeks were pleasantly creased but his eyes were elusive. Magnanimously, Ted handed him a sheaf of costings.
‘We can also apply for a grant from the National Heritage Fund. Because this is a unique building and the quality of the decorative work is extremely high, we could go in with the backing of people like the City Theatre Museum. Perhaps twenty-five per cent of the total investment.’
‘As much as that.’ Adam ran his eyes down the figures, pretending scrutiny.
‘It’s a unique project. We can write our own ticket.’
‘In essence, you’re talking about a restoration job.’ Adam, Ted knew, found more charm in the new than the old. It went with his immigrant insecurity, the idea that whatever was there already was just filling space until it could be torn down and the site colonised by something new. He had needed some convincing from Belinda to stay in Westwick at all, and still remarked uneasily on the inconvenience of having to live in a building which was not absolutely yours because someone else had lived there before.
‘I thought the loft thing had peaked,’ said Chester sourly.
‘Projects like this, finished to a high standard, aimed at young professionals, singles, couples, gay couples even, two-income, high earning, high-geared lifestyles, are fetching better and better prices.’ Ted handed out a reprint from a trade journal. There would be time enough to convince them that this was the right direction for Tudor Homes. The economics of it all might do the job for him. ‘And when we come to Strankley Ridge,’ triumphantly, Ted put the cherry on the cake, ‘allowing two years for the inquiry to report, we will find ourselves in a substantially improved position. So our original scheme, which you recall was for a seven-acre development, could even be doubled in size.’
‘Well, I think that covers all the angles.’ Chester saw no point in wasting any more time. He rocked himself out of the massive carver chair, slipped down to his feet and walked around the table to dismiss them. ‘Leave it with me, Ted. Good work. Interesting scheme, very. Very creative.’
At 5 am the next morning, the telephone rang in the DeSouzas’ house.
‘Adam – Chester.’
‘Chester.’ The murmur of the VIP lounge was behind the BSD’s voice. He was at the airport.
‘Parsons. Time we lost him.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘What’s the best way?’
Anticipating the conversation, Adam had looked through the essential documents on his return from Grove House the previous evening.
‘S
ome caution required. He knows where a few bodies are buried.’
‘Surely.’
‘I’d vote for a lifeboat manoeuvre. Ringfence this Sun Wharf thing, let him get in it up to his neck then cut him loose.’
‘Excellent. How long?’
‘Six months.’
‘What’ll it cost?’
‘Maybe nothing. The man’s not a total fool but he’s emotional. I’ll keep my eye on him.’
‘Do that.’
Damon Parsons walked along the 31 in the night, facing the oncoming traffic, pretending to shoot out the headlights of every car that passed: p-tchoww! p-tchoww! p-tchoww-eeee! Tonight he was going for tyres. Offside front tyres. When he got one, the car was going to spin out of control across all the lanes, cannon into the central barrier, bounce off it, slew across the fast lane and then maybe a container truck would hit the rear of it with an incredible smash and there’d be glass and metal all over and the speed of the track would take it into a skid right out across the road and it would carry on skidding maybe fifty yards and other cars would hit it and maybe a Porsche would come down the fast lane and the driver would lose control and hit the first car and the Porsche would flip up in the air right over it and crash down beyond and all its windows would burst out. And he would be first on the scene. This could really happen. It was on the police video.
His T-shirt rippled in the slipstream. One car after another whipped up a steady wind. He stopped and held out the shirt to see the wind made by the cars blowing the edges. When he stopped walking he swayed around. He was not very drunk but the rough grass of the roadside was difficult to walk on.
The cars kept coming, howling past one after another after another. The lights shone in his eyes, flash, flash, flash. Damon climbed up on the overpass that took traffic down into Helford and squatted like an ape in the girders. The overpass was as rickety as a helter-skelter. It was supposed to have been a temporary structure but it had been standing for seventeen years. Now the cars were cunning above him: da-boom da-boom, da-boom da-boom, da-boom da-boom. There were vehicles as far as the eye could see in both directions, a dragon of white light roaring out of the darkness before him, behind a snake of red lights crawling into the orange glow of the city night sky.
He lay down on the narrow cold metal and pretended a high-velocity rifle with an infra-red sight. They were accurate to half a mile. With one of those he could get a tyre half a mile out there, out past Acorn Junction near the 46 interchange. If he got a tyre right there on the 46 interchange maybe a tall truck would pile into the crash and topple right over the edge of the approach road and land on its roof and crush a car underneath, and the windscreens would burst out and then more cars would run into that heap of metal. But half-a-mile away he probably wouldn’t be first on the scene.
He thought about finding a rock and dropping it on a car below. If you dropped it just right you could get a windscreen but there wouldn’t necessarily be a crash because people could just push out the windscreen and keep driving. It was cold. His arms were cold, the girder was cold underneath him. He climbed down.
Along the river it was quiet. Quietness was intolerable to him. In the absence of noise his thoughts got too active and they wriggled around like maggots in a tin and then started crawling everywhere. The more they crawled around the stronger they got. They let things into his mind, things which frightened him, questions that did not have answers, or if they did the answers were too big for him to grasp. Damon could not entertain concepts like what would happen to him, what could happen to him, what he wanted to happen to him. He just did not know. His mind was too shallow, those things could not be packed into it.
In re-hab they asked him those kind of questions, which is why he didn’t like being in re-hab. Those people were supposed to be so smart, but he couldn’t make them understand that he didn’t understand. Every day almost, somebody would sit there with him with that eyebally look they all had and ask him something he couldn’t answer and he would sit there saying, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ but they never really got that he wasn’t hiding anything or avoiding anything or covering up anything; there wasn’t anything to hide or avoid or dissemble. He just didn’t know.
In re-hab they forbade you to drink alcohol but he was cool with that. Other people talked about wanting a drink but Damon never wanted a drink. He didn’t like the smell of drink or the taste of drink; Coke was better, so something in Coke was what he liked to drink best. He never felt he wanted to sink a beer and smack his lips and wipe his mouth like sheep-shearers in the ads on TV, although he did those things because people seemed to like him doing them, it made them laugh.
Drink was like music, or lights or the noise of people talking. It filled up his head so his thoughts couldn’t run around and that was good. The best thing of all for making thoughts behave was to do something scary, because then it was like the light was actually inside his brain making the thoughts lie down and be totally still, as if they were all dead. Running across the road, right across the 31, all six lanes of it, was scary, but Dad didn’t like him to do that. Recently, Damon, had worked out that there had to be something you could do which would be so totally scary that the thoughts would actually die, they would lie down and never ever move again.
There was very little water in the river, but it was running fast and the surface of it was crinkled in the light from the cars on the 31. He jumped over the embankment wall and down on to the stones of the dry margin of the riverbed. The stones crunched under his boots. He picked up some pebbles and threw them into the water to make more noise, but the splashes sounded lonely so he stopped doing that and went back to the road and turned away from the embankment up a side street which would probably lead up to the sound and movement of the Broadway.
The street he chose was the right one because his girl was walking down it. She was walking quickly on the other side of the street, so he hurried up and crossed the road to be with her. It was a few weeks since he had seen her last, he was afraid that she had been taken away. Under a street light he saw that she was more beautiful than ever. He could say that to her, it was the sort of thing boys said to their girls. He started turning the words over in his brain, making sure they would come outright. You are more beautiful than ever.
‘You are more beautiful than ever.’ There, they’d come out perfectly. She was still walking fast, maybe she was even walking faster. She didn’t understand. Maybe she hadn’t heard. Damon was half-running, trying to keep up with her. She couldn’t have heard him properly. He had to stop her and make her stand still so she could hear him say it again. He put out his hand to take hold of her arm.
I will go like Josephine going to Malmaison, Stephanie promised herself, with grace and dignity because what I’m doing is for the best. Anyway, this is not a retreat, we are not running away. This is the best thing for Max, which is all that really matters. I thought it was the best thing for my son to bring him here but now the best thing is to move out. I can’t manage by myself, I’m not clever enough to make the money we need, or strong enough to stand up to the whole neighbourhood. Gemma’s right, there’s a natural law operating here and I can’t fight it.
‘What a pretty garden. I’m sure we’ll have your house rented in no time,’ vowed the senior negotiator from Grove Estates gallantly, trotting from room to room with a clipboard, trailing her bitter atmosphere of great personal tragedy. Stephanie almost regretted having called her in, but there were only two agents in town and it was bad business not to compare quotes at least.
‘Very popular street, neutral decor, good entertaining space, eat-in kitchen, well-arranged family rooms, nice big garden – we’ve got half a dozen companies looking for houses like this,’ assured the man from Greenwoods on the Broadway, grinning like a fox while he measured the rooms with his electronic gauge. ‘We’ll need to see the deeds and the mortgage document if there is a mortgage document. Just a formality, proof of ownership. I’d recommend getting as much of yo
ur own stuff out of the way as you can before we bring people round. If a place looks empty people can imagine themselves living there more easily.’
I haven’t time to be sad, Stephanie told herself, going back to her desk as soon as he left. Ridiculous to sit here shivering with misery because another family is going to live in your house, For a while, just for a while. Six months. And if Stewart is released tomorrow, then what? You’ll have rented out his home.
Stewart would understand that she and Max had suffered also. She reached for a new green crayon. In the past few months she had used up one or even two green crayons a week, drawing in her special symbols for vegetation, little scribbled green circles for plants, big ones for trees.
The doorbell rang. She ignored it. She was not expecting anyone, it would be a Jehovah’s witness or a scaled-looking foreign teenager claiming to sell dishcloths for the blind. The bell rang again a fierce sharp shrill that was somehow characteristic. Peering out from behind Max’s curtains she saw the dark length of the Channel Ten limousine across the street and Allie standing on her front path looking up at the windows with a petulant frown.
‘Stephanie! Darling! I’ve only just heard. Poor little Max! Those dreadful Carman boys! Chalice can’t stand them, I can’t tell you what they tried to put down her dress. I had to come!’
Stephanie found her arms full of Cellophane, tangerine gerberas, ultramarine delphiniums and chameleon-green bells of Ireland, all etiolated and greenhouse grown, lashed into a bouquet and decorated with Pot Pourri’s loudest pink ribbon. ‘How lovely,’ she said, bemused by the high colour and high charge of emotion which swept them both through the house. ‘You shouldn’t have.’
‘Of course I should. You deserve them. More than deserve them. Isn’t that the extraordinary thing about tragedy, it’s never just one thing? First Stewart and then this. One terrible ordeal after another. Let me hug you, I have to hug you.’
An explosion, a bomb of emotion it was, going off at Stephanie’s front door, throwing all her feelings, so recently rearranged in functional little stacks, up to the sky in chaos and blowing the two of them clean through the house and out on to the terrace, where Allie’s skeletal arms laced themselves around Stephanie’s strong, round ones and squeezed like a giant nutcracker. Then she hauled off to arm’s length, and squeezed Stephanie’s elbows with her little paws, and glared into her clear green eyes. ‘Tell me,’ she urged, ‘how are you coping? How is Max coping?’
Getting Home Page 25