Getting Home

by Celia Brayfield

  When the news of Stewart first broke, she had been wakeful and wired, thrumming with tension, twitching at every sound that might in the eagerness of her imagination be the first note of a telephone ring. The cure for this was nurturing activity, and she had gone out into the garden and watered her Souvenir de la Malmaison at 3 am.

  Once the shock was over, and anxieties had blossomed instantly in her mind like flowers in the desert, lurid and luxuriant, she had woken in the darkness with a churning brain and a pain in the pit of her stomach. Work was good for this, and she had sat at her desk doing drawings until dawn, with a mug of hot milk to soothe her guts.

  Then came the grey despair, the urge to look out of windows without seeing anything, to drift from room to room by starlight, picking things up for no reason, putting them down again, floating around the garden, stroking and holding leaves as if for a transfusion of fresh DNA, pure new life uninfected with sorrow. This was a mood which responded to nothing at first. Going to Rachel Carman for sleeping pills was out of the question and it was too hot to try a slug of brandy in the milk.

  It took a supreme effort of will to take Max back to his own bed when he blundered into hers in the night. Sitting on the floor beside him was a comfort, but she refused to use her child that way. Eventually she regressed intellectually and started reading her old books, the adventurous tales she had gulped down as a schoolgirl and ignored in embarrassment ever since, bodice-ripping romances and the tattered old biography of Josephine which had seeded the fantasies that sustained her until Stewart.

  For a week or so the charm of an attack on Westwick in general, and Allie Parsons in particular, had been so powerful that she had slept the night through, but now that a new rule of disappointment had commenced she could not sleep at all. After an uncomfortable hour of wadding her pillow this way and that, she got up, put on leggings and a T-shirt, and decided to tidy the house. Specifically, Stewart’s desk, where one of the crates from his office still sat reproachfully waiting to be unloaded.

  On the bookshelf, she made space for the manuals and handbooks and resource directories. Twelve copies of the Architectural Association quarterly, up to spring of that year, went next to them. His number three camera (one and two were with him) found a corner of a bottom drawer. Three mysterious add-ons to the computer went beside it. A box of back-up discs fitted into the top drawer, beside the equivalent archive for their household records.

  That was it; the job was done. She took the crate to the garage. Inmaculada had been at work: the kitchen was spotless, the sitting room plumped and-smoothed, the sun room was empty, the play room awaited Max in perfect order. Her office was clean, and the baskets of paper were half empty and squarely aligned, which was the best they ever got. In the darkness outside, an owl winged silently over the treetops. She picked a pencil off the floor and put it back in the pot. She was brilliantly conscious, vividly awake. It might have been Monday morning.

  For distraction, she went back to Stewart’s desk, fired up the computer and pulled out the box of back-ups. If there was evidence of that ‘deal’with Ted, she would find it. He had researched that wretched trip to Russia, perhaps there were notes, she would like to read his notes. She flicked through the disks; they were arranged in date order from the middle of the previous year. The last disk but two was labelled Oak Hill in what struck her eye as angry black pen.

  The disk contained three documents. The first was a technical report from a surveying firm whose name she if did not know. It was very long and she decided to pass over it. The second and third were only short E-mails. She went into a note to Marcus and as soon as it was on the screen a bolt of lightning shot up Stephanie’s spine. From the first scattering of words on which her eye fixed at random she sensed her husband writing in a tone that was hardly his, awkward, stiff phrases dragged out of a mind in pain.

  It seems to me important to make our positions clear on this. In my view, developing this site without a programme of bio-remediation should not be an option for us. I can understand that the cost of that kind of programme, when the contamination is now at a level where nobody should be on the site without protective clothing, is not something the client is happy with, but I myself would not be willing to go forward with this project on any other basis. I’m hoping we can resolve this, Marcus, but I am looking squarely at the end of Berkman & Sands if we can’t.

  Go forward. Not an option. Stewart despised jargon. Nobody should be on the site without protective clothing. What? She stared at the screen in stillness and silence for ten minutes, then copied the document, quit it and called up the report. After she had digested its conclusions, she made herself some notes.

  Dawn came, and then morning. Belinda was doing car pool. The post came, bringing the results of the soil analysis from Gaia; it showed astonishingly high levels of heavy metals in the soil, which was by then what she had expected. The report prepared for Stewart had found the same thing at Oak Hill. Rainwater running off Oak Hill would leech into the soil at Gaia.

  When Max was off to school Stephanie telephoned Mrs Funk. ‘Can I come over and talk to you?’

  ‘Of course, you poor woman, any time.’

  ‘I want to ask you about Westwick when you first moved here. In about half an hour?’

  ‘Why not? Erich and I will be glad of the company.’ As she put the telephone down it rang again. ‘Capelli, Mrs Sands, Foreign Office liaison.’ Correct as always, but he sounded like a different man this morning, eager and breathless.

  ‘I’m just on my way out,’ she told him, unthinkingly.

  ‘Just to let you know that we’ve had news in this morning of some really positive developments. The negotiator has at last achieved a meeting with the group holding your husband and managed to get some idea of what their demands are. It’s really excellent news, Mrs Sands. I knew you’d want to know immediately.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Thank you.’ She rang off, not knowing what else to say. Excellent news. Her heart was suddenly jumping in her chest like an excited child. Stewart’s coming home, this nightmare will be over, we’ll be a couple and nobody will ever push me around again. She felt her old self-confidence, close enough to sieze and put on again like magical armour. She hesitated, turned back from the door, went out into the garden and sat on a bench. Stewart would make everything all right when he was home, surely. No need to fight any more.

  Unexpectedly, she felt a faint regret. My goodness, she marvelled, I seem to have a taste for fighting all of a sudden. I really want to take this on. And suppose Stewart comes home only to find I’ve lost our home in the meantime? Some hero’s return that will be. She got to her feet again and set off to see Mrs Funk.

  18. Tennis Courts

  ‘Kids.’ Ted Parsons surveyed his family around the fourteen-seater farmhouse table. Chalice was twisting her forelock into ropes and sucking her thumb. Her technique involved swallowing half her grimy blue-white hand while rubbing her nose red with her free fingers. Cherish was rocking in her chair and kicking the table leg. Damon-half his face still obscured by bandages, sat with his mouth flopped open and his elbows on his knees, his left heel vibrating against the floor tiles. They could have posed for a sculpture, The Three Neurotic Monkeys.

  ‘Kids,’ he started again, ‘your mother has moved out because she’s cross with me. She’s going to be away for a while…’

  The girls eyes went large. Chalice sat up straight and took her fist out of her mouth, trailing a thread of spit.

  ‘Was it because I had a fidt widt Flora?’ Damon asked, spluttering through his injured nose.

  ‘No, it wasn’t because of anything you did, any of you. It was because of me.’

  ‘Flora hidt me, she hidt me. I fell over,’ his son protested.

  ‘It’s OK, son.’ Ted tried for a resonant, right-thinking, King-of-the-Hill tone but it came out plain pompous. ‘This has nothing to do with you.’

  ‘It’s you.’ Cherish crashed her chair down on all four legs and pointed a
t Chalice. ‘You’re a little bitch and you can’t keep a dress on five minutes without messing it. She always said so. An evil dirty little bitch.’

  ‘Well, you’re a little hoo-er,’ Chalice replied complacently, her thumb returning to her cheek. ‘You’re a filthy ugly little hoo-er and you’re no good and nobody could stand to be in the same house with you one minute, so there.’

  ‘Stop this! Girls!’ In their childish sneers he heard, the ghastly echo of Allie in a rage, the morning fit which she worked up most days on emerging from her dressing room. It seemed that she needed some surge of bad feeling to shoot her out of the house and into the studio. She would spew insults at all of them, spraying them with invective like a commando blazing away with a Kalashnikov on her progress out to her car. If he had been offered a fairy wish at that moment, it would be to have that memory erased and his daughters’minds filled with nothing but multiplication tables and scenarios for Barbie and Ken. Not until the girls had grown old enough to mimic Allie did he realise how severely limited Damon’s comprehension was; of all the barbs and taunts directed at him by his mother he had never retained anything more than the notion that he was at times a bad boy.

  ‘It’s me,’ Ted assured his children, unable to keep the pride out of his voice. ‘She’s cross with me.’

  ‘You’ve had an effer,’ Chalice accused her father, round-eyed and thrilled that the world of soap opera was finally merging with her own.

  ‘Affair, stupid,’ Cherish corrected her. ‘You’re such a baby, you don’t know anything.’

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ he told them, mystified at their immediate disappointment. He considered asking them how exactly, in the mind of precocious, under-nurtured five-and eight-year-olds, an affair might be defined but decided that this can of worms did not bear opening. ‘But your mother thinks I have, which is why she’s cross.’

  ‘If you had an affair in true life,’ Cherish fixed him in a cunning stare, ‘would she go away and never come back?’

  ‘Of course not,’ he blustered, groping for the right way through the jungle of inadmissible possibilities which had suddenly opened up in front of him. ‘She’s your mother, she loves you …’

  ‘That is bullshit,’ Cherish said sweetly. ‘She hates us, she always says she hates us.’

  ‘Especially me,’ Damon added. ‘She said I spoiled her life for her all the time, she said I was a disaster and she wished I’d never been born.’

  Ted found himself all out of appropriate platitudes. Denial was impossible, he had heard his wife say these things daily. He had allowed her to chase him out of his family, taken refuge in neutrality while she had wielded maternal force majeure and annexed them to the monstrous caravan of her public life. With his own flesh and blood, he was in alien territory.

  The help, at present a timid relative of Lauren’s Pike’s Filipina, took care of their physical needs, put what they recognised as food on the table, picked up their clothes and washed them and provided a legally adult presence between the four walls of their home. It was dawning on him that whatever else they required for healthy growth was now his responsibility.

  Somewhere on the misty outskirts of his mind, he had imagined another woman intervening, Gemma breasting the storms of his household like a figurehead, gathering up his personal huddled mass in her generous arms. Vain hope. This was down to him, three human disasters which had occurred while he ran around in his car saying he was about the business of making money when he was really just getting out of his house. Now, he recognised, he had to take charge and the first day of his command had not been creditable – the embarrassment of collecting Cherish from the darkened after-hours school and Chalice from Stephanie’s house the previous evening had been searing. The guilt of Stephanie’s accusation was still making him jumpy. At least he had the telephone number of Damon’s psychiatrist. And he had made that call to the Transport office. And he would learn. His children turned their faces towards him with hope brightening their eyes.

  ‘You could get us a stepmother,’ Cherish suggested, as if proposing a new toy. ‘Could you get one who was on TV? It’s cool being on TV if you don’t get too stressed. I think Mummy let herself get stressed too much.’

  ‘Do I have to go back to re-hab? They said last time we had gone as far as we could go and I had to find something else.’ The plea was delivered with as much coherence as Damon could command.

  ‘Well just have to get along as best we can and see what happens,’ he told them.

  On his way to work in the Discovery, his phone rang as he was approaching the tail of the vehicle snake backing up from the city end of the 31. It was his wife.

  ‘I’m in the Soho Hotel,’ she informed him as if imparting news of the gravest moment. ‘You have to come and see me this afternoon around three.’

  ‘Why?’ he demanded in a taunting tone. It was as if he had run away, not her, and was now able to caper around the edge of her universe, too nimble for her to take a swing at him.

  ‘God knows why you think you deserve any explanation.’

  ‘Of course I don’t,’ he agreed readily. ‘I’ve got a heavy day, Allie, I can’t just drop everything and run over to wherever you are.’

  ‘It’s vital to keep the story running.’

  ‘What story?’

  ‘I must have been mad to think you’d be capable of understanding. Look, Ted, the story’s no business of yours. Just come up here at three. You know the address?’

  ‘Allie, if you’ve got another stupid press thing going on, I’m happy to be out of it. Anyway I’m at Sun Wharf all day.’ The traffic eased forward a little more briskly, so he cut the line and let the Discovery surge up to 20 mph. Disobliging Allie, disobeying Allie, talking back to Allie – the hit was better than any drug he’d ever wondered about taking, definitely better than whatever whisky could offer. He was intoxicated, he saw himself in his wing mirror smiling a silly stoned smile.

  Of course, she knew where bodies were buried. Having a wifely 50-per-cent slice of everything he’d done in the past 18 years, she knew more than was advisable about projects undertaken by Tudor Homes and the Oak Hill Development Trust. Being himself spatchocked over the marriage on skewers of money, and in partnership with men whose only agenda was financial, it had not occurred to Ted that his wife might reckon her imperatives differently.

  The 31 proper had ceased now, officially he was on a road which had a name. It ran, six lanes wide, straight to the heart of the city, between the traffic-soiled facades of crumbling nineteenth-century townhouses, caged by iron railings, glared over by hoardings, here and there decorated by a struggling municipal planting of shrubs which served to sieve the wind of cigarette packets and fast food containers.

  The phone rang again. He answered optimistically, waiting for good news on Sun Wharf, which, due to the over-elaborate way Chester and Adam had decided to do things, with a separate development company and all that entailed, was not progressing as fast as he wanted.

  ‘Ted, don’t play games.’ Allie again, in Joan Crawford mode. He wanted to giggle. He imagined her in the kind of vulgar negligee which she considered the proper dishabille for a woman of her status in the hours between waking and dressing for the studio, perched over the telephone like a vulture in broderie-anglaise and pink ribbon bows.

  ‘You’re the game-player,’ he told her magnanimously. ‘Whatever this media scam is—’

  ‘Ted,’ her tone was ominously patient, ‘it’s quite simple. If you want Oak Hill to go ahead, and all of us to make a killing, you will do what I say. If you want a major scandal, keep right on as you are. Got it?’

  ‘If Oak Hill stalls we all lose.’ He had to stop himself singing the words. This conversation had been running a loop tape in his imagination for the past 24 hours. ‘Especially you. And that won’t sit too well with the Family First image, will it?’

  ‘I’m the only one who can stall Oak Hill,’ she announced in a voice fit for Queen Elizabeth defying the Spanish A
rmada. ‘So you can just get back in line, Ted.’

  ‘I have to tell you, dear, that Stephanie Sands may not be your best friend any more. Nor the great supporter of in Oak Hill she’s been up to now. She put me on the spot about it yesterday. She was pretty mad, I can tell you – they’re going to be running the road through their house, you know. I’d watch out for her, if I were you.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ his wife answered, now severely bored. ‘She’s nothing. Just nothing.’

  ‘She practically runs the Old Westwick Society,’ he returned, thinking as he said it that this was hardly a threat his wife would recognise. A hiss of amusement came over the line.

  ‘Oh wow, that’s really scary. Don’t be more of a dork than nature made you, Ted. If Oak Hill stalls I’ve left you anyway because I was so devastated to discover how you had misled me, etcetera, etcetera. You will stand trial for fraud. I get the kids and fifty per cent of everything else anyway. I’m being lunched by the Daily Courier today, I can get to work right away if that’s really what you want.’

  ‘I dare you,’ he chortled, swinging out of lane into a handy space opened up by a turning bus. ‘Think about it. If go down, I’ll take you with me.’

  There was a sigh, a small, irritated exhalation suitable far mourning laddered hosiery, and she rang off.

  The regeneration of the east of the city was a triumph of greed over humanity. In their eagerness to realise their rake-offs from raising the maximum number of saleable units of property, the city fathers had overlooked the fact that people would pass their lives in these units, that they would need to eat, drink, play, be ill, get educated, enjoy themselves, look out of the window and travel back and forth.

  There was housing, most of it of luxury standard; there were offices and marble atria. They rose in a pit of post-industrial slurry. At this time there was not much else east of the centre, no shops, schools, hospitals, restaurants, bars, cafés, cinemas, theatres, galleries, parks vistas except those decayed and wretched facilities serving the indigenous slum-dwellers who were unable to take the hint and relocate themselves.