Getting Home

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘What am I going to do?’ Miss Helens demanded of her empty playground at 3.30 pm. ‘Mrs Parson hasn’t called, we haven’t any instructions …’

  ‘What a shame.’ Stephanie had lingered to savour the moment. Max and Sweetheart were playing vertical hopscotch, a game Rod’s daughter had recently invented, involving a bean bag and a climbable object, in this case the frame. Chalice Parsons was sitting on the playground bench, white-faced and trembling. She was ripping the hem of her dress to rags for extra emphasis.

  ‘I need to close the school for the afternoon,’ Miss Helens protested. ‘I have a doctor’s appointment.’

  ‘Oh dear. That is a problem,’ Stephanie agreed with her sweetest smile.

  ‘I’ve got this number for Mrs Parsons but there’s no answer.’

  ‘She must be out.’

  Chalice began keening like an Arab widow.

  ‘And there’s no answer from Mr Parsons either.’

  ‘He must be at work.’

  ‘We called his mobile.’

  A struggle took place in Stephanie’s heart. One faction held that it would be most excruciatingly embarrassing for Allie and Ted if, when they had wronged her so gravely, she returned good for evil by sheltering Chalice until they returned home. The opposing faction moved that Ted and Allie were so morally deficient that they would feel very little if any embarrassment in those circumstances, and that taking Chalice home with her would in addition oblige Miss Helens, to whom she also owed no favours. The opposition also accused her of inverted masochism in even considering helping out here. She allowed it to prevail.

  ‘We must be going,’ she said cheerfully, ‘Come on kids, into the car.’

  Miss Helens abandoned all pride and followed them to the pavement. ‘Mrs Sands,’ she begged, ‘I know you sometimes take the Parsons girls. Would you …’

  ‘How could I possibly expose Max and Courtenay to …’ and she indicated Chalice, now screaming from the prone position on the ground, ‘such a disruptive influence, especially when they’ve both been so recently traumatised?’ Stephanie watched while Max attentively handed Sweetheart into his infant seat and buckled her safety belt with chivalrous care. She moved a few steps back towards The Magpies’lynch gate, out of the children’s ear-shot. ‘And, of course, Max has had his problems here as well, hasn’t he? Mr Fuller and I both feel our children need special care right now. We really must put them first.’

  She had played the ultimate trump, the right of a parent to put the needs of her own child above any other consideration. Miss Helens coloured magenta, twitched ingratiatingly, muttered assurances and began sidling crabwise away from the Cherokee. Chalice’s ululations were piercing, the noise echoed weirdly along the empty street. Stephanie sighed. ‘I can’t bear her being so upset,’ she admitted at last. ‘Chalice! Come on, you can come with us.’

  Three hours later, at home, she got a call from Ted, in the lather of embarrassment which usually covered a Westwick husband when he was required to do something more than pay for one of his children. She listened, idly wondering how many words he would use before being obliged to say ‘sorry’. Or if, in fact, he would be able to avoid the hardest word altogether. Which is what he did.

  ‘I do apologise, Stephanie,’ he granted with excessive graciousness. ‘I do hope we haven’t put you out. I had no idea this had happened until I got the school’s message. Cherish is still at St Nicholas’s. Allie must have had some misunderstanding with the help. I’ll be back for them as soon as I can. You’re not going out, are you?’

  ‘Where would I go, Ted?’ she asked without remorse. ‘I schedule my meetings in school time.’

  ‘Well – uh – I’ll be right over as soon as I can. Hope the traffic isn’t too bad.’

  Waiting, she screwed up her nerves. A confrontation was necessary, avoiding it would do more damage in the end. She was learning the interesting principle of vengeance, that an evil deed must be paid for, otherwise the evil of it would actually increase. She went upstairs to Stewart’s desk, and took out the letter left with his will.

  ‘Stay a minute, Ted,’ she invited him, when he arrived 90 minutes later, flustered and irritable but still giving off the vinous aroma of a good lunch.

  ‘Oh no, I wouldn’t trouble you …’ Chalice, comatose in front of the television, showed no sign of helping him make a quick getaway.

  ‘Perhaps you already have,’ Stephanie responded, indicating a seat at the end of the table and moving a stack of plant brochures so she could look at him directly but keep a physical barrier between them.

  ‘I don’t understand …’

  ‘I didn’t understand, Ted, when I found that Stewart had written me this sweet letter in case anything ever happened to him. Now something has happened to him, of course I read it.’ She passed him the page. ‘What I didn’t understand was the bit about out house – see, down at the end there?’

  ‘It’s a very good letter.’ Ted was wishing he had Stewart’s way with words. ‘There’s still no news, I suppose—’

  ‘This house, Ted. Our home.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, feeling suddenly shivery with dread. ‘That.’

  ‘This, really. Our home.’ She gestured around, making him look at the children sprawled in the playroom and their food warming in the oven and the full richness of the late summer garden with the rose petals unfolding in the sun. ‘Which because you’re all so vile to us, now that my husband isn’t around, I decided I wanted to rent out. You can guess what I discovered.’

  ‘The new access road to Oak Hill?’ She expected him to bluster and weasel and patronisingly tell her she didn’t understand, but he was squaring up his shoulders, apparently getting ready to take responsibility. ‘I’m sorry people are behaving badly,’ he added. ‘I hope you don’t mean me—’

  ‘I think I do mean you, Ted. Of course, not only you,’

  Thank God, Ted congratulated the deity, she is not going to cry. Or at least, she doesn’t look as if she is going to cry right now. He would have figured Stephanie as the teary type. He was relieved for a moment. ‘But I’ve always been very fond of you, you know that …’

  ‘How could I doubt it?’ She froze him with a straight look. ‘But not fond enough to let me know that my home was going to be demolished.’

  ‘Oh no,’ he said at once, ‘not necessarily. It was only an option. You understand, it’s out of my hands. We’re only concerned with the site itself. The Transport Department had three different routes under consideration …’

  ‘I think they’ve made up their minds now, Ted. This is the way they want to go. We’re going to lose our home I can’t even rent it right now.’

  ‘But there’ll be consultation …’

  ‘You know what that means.’

  ‘But I thought you approved of Oak Hill. When we were talking about it at the Old Westwick Society, that ridiculous man going on about the Nature Triangle – you kept out of it all.’

  ‘If I’d known my house was going to be knocked down, I’d have felt differently. You set me up, Ted. You set us up. Or Allie did. That’s why this house was so cheap, wasn’t it? Because you knew this was going to happen.’

  ‘No, look,’ he writhed around in his chair and crossed his long legs as if to squeeze out the discomfort of his guilt. ‘That’s not how it was. I promise you, word of honour.’ She sneered. The sweet woman actually sneered. Maybe she was going to yell instead of crying. ‘Look,’ he pressed on with anxiety. ‘I had a word with your husband, with Stewart. We had a deal. The idea was he would come in on Oak Hill with us, his firm would be the consulting architects, they’d have done very well … it didn’t work out like that. He changed his mind.’

  ‘Why?’ Stephanie felt outmanoeuvred. Worse, she felt betrayed. How dare Stewart cut some secret deal with Ted and treat her like a little Lucille Ball wife and tell her nothing? Her impulsion fizzled out, confusion crushed her.

  ‘I don’t know.’ The effort of telling that lie actually shot T
ed off his chair to stand up and walk around the room. ‘I didn’t set you up, Stephanie. I promise I didn’t. It would have been a great deal for Stewart, but it went wrong. And I had no idea the Transport people would do this. Look – I’ll make some calls in the morning, I’ll see what I can do. I promise. I’ll get back to you on it. Promise. It wasn’t a set-up. That wasn’t how it was, you mustn’t think that.’

  ‘Whatever,’ she said, helpless and deflated. He scooped Chalice into his arms and rushed for the door as fast as decently possible. ‘Damn,’ Stephanie said aloud. ‘I never asked him how things were at home.’

  The witches convened again that evening, and, while the pots were boiling and the children dispersed about their entertainments, they examined the omens.

  ‘Nobody picked up Chalice from The Magpies,’ Stephanie suggested. ‘I took her back with us, and Ted came around to fetch her, but I was so mad about the house business I forgot to ask about anything else.’

  ‘Figures,’ ruled Gemma, chopping onions. ‘If ever Allie does car pool she forgets, and if her help does it she forgets to tell the help to pick up. The poor kid’s always weeping in a heap at going-home time.’

  ‘I came down Church Vale but the house was just normal. No photographers or anything. I brought some anchovies and ham and stuff,’ Rod extracted a packet from the inside pocket of his Levi jacket. ‘I thought alla putanesca might be appropriate.’

  ‘I don’t shake my ass for a living,’ Gemma observed.

  Stephanie was impatient for action and suspicious of her new friend’s propensity for chaos. ‘Do you think she got the letter?’

  ‘Sure she got the letter. She’ll react, trust me. How do I do this?’ This was to Rod, about the array of new ingredients before her. ‘Why don’t you take over? Will the kids eat it?’

  ‘Sweetheart eats it.’ He installed himself at the chopping board, trying not to appear masterful in another cook’s domain.

  ‘Well, Flora could stand to lose the weight and Molly never wants to eat and I swear Topaz lives on human blood anyway … what about Max?’

  ‘He’ll be fine. Where did you send it, the letter?’

  ‘Nowhere. I sent it nowhere. I took it, in an envelope, marked personal and confidential, right up to Channel Ten studios. I did not send it to the house because Ted gets up first and could throw it away. Though if I’d given him the chance my money would be on him having it presented to her on a velvet cushion. He’d adore her to leave him; you know how husbands are, always hoping fate will do their evil deeds so they can stand back and get what they want and not be guilty at the same time. And I checked thar she is in the studio every day now, even though the show isn’t airing yet. Now do you trust me?’

  ‘Maybe it’s just in a bag with her fan mail.’ Rod moved to the sink and ran the taps. He had bought the best anchovies in Parsley & Thyme, the salted anchovies from Collioure which cost one tenth of a private client per six servings, and needed rinsing thoroughly and picking over for tiny bones, although the women would laugh if he asked for tweezers for the job.

  ‘Hah! Don’t tell me she gets fan mail. Two sackfuls of death threats a day, maybe.’ With a ferocious pop, Gemma pulled the cork on a bottle of Chateau Mr Singh.

  ‘She says she does,’ sighed Stephanie, ‘but I’m sure her secretary would show her anything like that. Did you copy the letter?’

  ‘Copy it?’ Gemma, startled in the act of filling glasses, splashed another libation on her table. ‘Why would I copy it, disgusting thing?’

  ‘We’ll just have to wait on.’ Rod drained a jar of capers, the dearest little piquant pearls, Italian, another tenth of a private client per six servings.

  At the far end of the room the door swung open and Topaz, returning from her evening shift filling shelves, rattled her bicycle into the room and out through the garden doors to its home in the shed. She returned with a newspaper, bright-eyed and pink-cheeked.

  ‘I don’t suppose any of you bought any media today.’ She marched to the table, clutching the newspaper to her chest.

  ‘What is it? Give it here, give it to me, let me see it. Topaz! Don’t tease your mother, give!’ Snatching the paper from Topaz’s unresisting hands, Gemma spread it on the table, careless of the detritus of onion skins, car keys, school timetables, telephone messages, deadly horticultural chemicals, reminders from the dentist, peppermints, flyers from pizza parlours and redundant Wonderbra padding which had somehow colonised the space since Topaz liberated it at breakfast.

  The paper was the Daily Post, a once up-market tabloid proud of its reputation as the favourite reading of the wives of men who took the quality broadsheets, and morally time-warped in the era when such a gender division obtained. The present editor, had nailed family values to his masthead and abandoned news-related items of more than 500 words, except in the theoretical case of an international disaster causing over 1,000 deaths in a country with a pronounceable name. The remaining acreage of newsprint was given over to gossip.

  Gemma read the women’s section, the gossip column and the Feng-Shui-your-car supplement. Stephanie reads the front page, the rest of the news and the features. Rod read the health section, the showbiz pages and the sport. Finding nothing, they swapped pages and read each other’s.

  ‘Topaz,’ growled Gemma, ‘if this is a wind-up …’

  ‘When did I ever?’ her daughter demanded, indignant.

  ‘Well, quite. So where is it?’

  With contemptuous economy of movement, Topaz took the showbiz diary from her mother and indicated a small paragraph at the bottom, headlined ‘TV Star’s Marriage Agony’.

  Allie Parsons, the nation’s favourite breakfast dish, is reported to be in hiding at a secret address following a row with her husband of eighteen years, property tycoon Edward J Parsons. ‘Yes, Allie’s marriage has hit a rough patch,’ confirmed a friend, ‘but Allie is devoted to her children, Damon, 17, Cherish, 8 and Chalice, 5 and we’re all really hoping that she and Edward will be able to work things out.’ ‘Family First, Allie’s toprated TV show, starts its new season in three weeks’time and the smart money says that the new look planned for the programme will no way run to a divorced host appearing in dark glasses.

  ‘Edward J Parsons,’ snorted Gemma, tossing the page away crossly so it planed off the table’s edge and fluttered to the floor. This was not the feature she had pictured; she had imagined a tale of shame, failure and paparazzi harassment, pictures of Allie running tearfully into Channel Ten, of Ted dour and ambushed on his doorstep. Truth to tell, the possibility of a hundred lenses poking relentlessly at her own bedroom curtains had also been considered.

  ‘She’s got a new picture.’ Rod came around the table to see the image the right way up. ‘That’s why we didn’t spot it. God, she looks about nineteen.’

  ‘Devoted to her children,’ sniffed Stephanie. ‘Devoted to them like she’s devoted to her hairdresser. Actually, less so. I bet she never forgets her fuckwit hairdresser.’

  ‘Stephanie. That’s swearing. I swear I never heard you swear before. My God, what is this woman doing to us all?’ In her disappointment Gemma seemed physically deflated by 20 pounds and a cup-size.

  Topaz watched and waited. Rod found himself looking at Stephanie with covert fascination, watching the palest, most adorable flush of embarrassment steal over her cheeks. Then he smelled his onions catching, shook off his enchantment and went back to the stove.

  ‘Come back here,’ Gemma commanded him.

  ‘Why?’ Tomatoes, anchovies, capers, chilli, herbs, pepper, taste, stir …

  ‘You know why, tough guy. That leg’s giving on you.’

  ‘D’ya think it is? Really?’ Bland, he was groping for bland, unconcerned, innocent, nothing wrong, but they were hard to catch at that moment. They all knew him too well.

  ‘You know it is,’. Gemma was pitiless, earthing her annoyance with the Parsons’house.’ ‘You’re staggering around like Quasimodo. It’s been gipping you for weeks, you’v
e been covering up.’

  ‘Fuck you.’ Cornered, he deployed the foxy grin. No woman within range of the foxy grin ever survived but it ricocheted off Gemma’s armoured heart and hit Stephanie, who got the feeling of spiders waltzing around the backs of her knees and found she had to sit down immediately.

  ‘Please, oh please,’ Gemma taunted. He threw the tea towel at her. ‘You shouldn’t work through pain, Rodolfo, you know that.’

  ‘What choice do I have? I could get cortisone shots, but they’d only mask the symptoms. We have to eat. Shaking my ass is all I can get paid for on a regular basis.’

  He turned back to his sauce to hide his red face in the steam of cooking, and there was an embarrassed silence.

  Topaz decided it was time to try the business of giving history a push. ‘Wasn’t the Parsons woman offering you a job?’ She spoke with total lack of emphasis, as if commenting on a much-repeated wildlife documentary. Oh look, the penguins of the Antarctic standing with their eggs on their feet.

  ‘No, Topaz, she was coming on to me. People say anything when they’re coming on to you. You’re seventeen, you should have found that out by now.’ He limped over and picked up the fallen tea towel. ‘I’m sorry, that was mean. I take it back.’

  ‘I think it was quite fair,’ Topaz told him, sounding objectively curious. ‘In general, I’d say that you were right. Of course. But it does happen that people actually give other people jobs from sexual motives, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Topaz,’ Gemma intervened, reflating to her real dimensions with indignation. ‘Shut up. Just shut up.’

  There are many kinds of insomnia, and Stephanie, who had slept like a proverbial baby except in the days when Max was sleeping like a true baby, was discovering them one after the other.