Getting Home

by Celia Brayfield

  Ted saw the lights at the Lieberman house from way off, and the Sands girl’s Jeep, and the Sands girl herself with her little boy in a yellow raincoat going into the house. Lest anyone should think he had a particular reason to be on Alder Reach, Ted chose to ran on the opposite side of the road to the Lieberman house. He kept his head up and facing forwards, trying to peek into the illuminated windows as he passed, but saw nothing except the hazy, sulking shape of Flora on the window seat.

  In Maple Grove, Allie Parsons looked in her dressingroom mirror and saw a woman in her prime. Her complexion was smooth, pink and glowing – laser treatment every year from now on; it worked and it solved that problem of what to do in the summer. No more puffiness around the eyes, either, thanks to the new radionics diet analysis which said she needed more magnesium and selenium but could eat all the yeast and dairy products she liked.

  You’re irresistible, she told her reflection. It’s God’s own truth, you always get what you want. You wanted Rod Fuller, and you’ve got him, and what an absolute trophy the dear boy is turning out to be. You wanted Stephanie Sands sobbing on the sofa, and in three hours’time that’s just what you’ll have. You want a primetime show – lunch with The Boss tomorrow, his invitation. It speaks for itself. Irresistible. Congratulations, my dear, you are a star. She reached for her sunscreen. Very important to protect the new skin. Pale as Gwyneth Paltrow, that was the look for now.

  On the 31, the snake of city-bound vehicles glowed by the light of half a million headlamps; half a million windscreen wipers plied across a quarter of a million windscreens. In the back of a viridian Volkswagen camper sprinkled with painted five-petalled daisies, with the name New Green Army stencilled on its sides, the windows were steamy.

  ‘OK,’ demanded Crusty merrily, ‘who prayed for rain?’

  ‘We did,’ answered fourteen robust voices.

  ‘Well just because it worked this time, don’t you shamans start thinking you’re anything special, OK?’

  After more than an hour of crawling forwards at a speed slower than walking pace, the camper reached the Helford interchange, where it turned off and took the road for the river frontage and the Channel Ten studios: A second camper followed it, and a seriously overloaded Citroen 2CV, and a further procession of rusted, dented vehicles reconceived in colours well beyond the scope of the manufacturer’s paint chart.

  Along the river, Ted crossed to take shelter under the willows, then crossed back because the trees were already almost leafless and their huge roots breaking up the path made the paving slabs lie crazily; he didn’t want to turn an ankle. Ten years ago, of course, he’d have jumped over the cracked slabs with joy, glorying in his strength and agility. Suddenly it had become amazingly easy to twist a foot.

  ‘So Harrier Homes brought you to Westwick, Mr Parsons?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. My first job in the property business. I was a surveyor for Harrier Homes.’

  In those days, Harrier Homes had three designs: the Adam, the Washington and the Smythson. The Adam had pillars at either side of the door, the Washington had a pillared porch over the door and the Smythson had no pillars but long windows with broken pediments over them.

  Now, as in those days, Harrier were the most successful residential builders in the country. Their target market were the young couples culturally unprepared for property ownership, whose parents had been productionline workers or machine operators or labourers, living careful, hard lives in rented homes. The young found themselves living differently; with clean hands they filled out credit applications for personal computers and named occupations in customer service and client care.

  When the first of their 1.8 children arrived, they turned their attention to the full-page advertisements for Harrier Homes. Trees on the streets meant security to them, pillars meant class and property itself meant wealth, part of the arcane process of acquiring advantage in life, that trick which their parents had never mastered but which they were sure would come to them easily with a little practice and changing times.

  At twenty-one, Ted Parsons would have been relieved to get any job at all and when Harrier Homes accepted him he could hardly believe his luck.

  ‘Well done, son,’ his father blessed him, ‘I’m pleased you’ve found an outfit to take you on.’

  ‘Well done, dear,’ his mother concurred, with the tilt of her head and the rueful smile she usually deployed on hearing news of a death.

  ‘Their stock dropped a couple of points last week,’ commented his sister, freshly married to a market analyst. Unlike his sister, Ted had done badly at school and at that point in his life shared his family’s relief that he was not unemployable. Having the close horizon of his youth, all other considerations were unclear to him.

  In a detestable little two-tone Ford he scampered around the fringes of the city looking for sites. He scanned town plans and zoning laws and, anxious to impress and be promoted, he. read widely on megatrends and demographic prophecy. Being lonely much of the time, he would talk to anyone in a bar or a café, and learned at least as much from those conversations as from his professional studies. One day he went to a place called Fuller’s Eyot at Helford, where the roofless shell of a once-elegant riverside villa stood beside a rotting warehouse, the dismal sight reflected in the scummy surface of the water.

  From a distance, Fuller’s Eyot was tempting. The following year a new bridge was to be built and the 31 upgraded from four lanes to six. By accident, rather than transport planning – a question which the city fathers were reluctant to address least they lost their official cars – the little orbital railway connected Helford directly to the heart of the business district in twenty minutes. The Helford Picture House had just become a shopping precinct and thanks to a major settlement by Polish immigrants in the forties there were junior and senior Roman Catholic schools of good reputation. In the neighbouring area of Westwick, he noted a synagogue, sports fields and a little park with a lake and a pseudo-Parisian bandstand, much decayed but still charming.

  Ted drew up a list of pros and cons and made only one entry on the negative side. The river was still tidal at Helford and, geographically speaking, about a third of the area, including Fuller’s Eyot, was below sea level. At spring tides ducks paddled above the sagging jetties. Another decade of global warming and the site would go the way of Bangladesh. ‘Pity.’ He shook his head, regretfully and crossed the list through. ‘And people have lived there for hundreds of years.’ The report damning the site as prone to flooding and uninsurable was already dictated when he left the office on Friday night.

  The rain pocked the calm surface of the river and bounced off the flat roof of a houseboat. As he passed, a male figure appeared on the deck, followed by a child. They wore matching blue cagoules and scurried down the gangplank with their heads down, making for an old Toyota. Ted had never realised that people actually lived with children on those things. Surely it was a dangerous place to bring up a child?

  At 6.57 am the security camera on the 31 recorded the breakdown of a Land Rover with a horsebox behind it. The vehicle was in the slow lane. Police cars arrived at the scene within five minutes, and directed the traffic around the obstruction while awaiting a tow truck.

  The driver of the Land Rover and her companion went around to the doors of the horsebox. What happened next was not clear to the camera. What it recorded was a horse suddenly loose on the highway, and the two women running after it with outspread arms. The homeless youth who had been sitting out of the rain in the girders under the overpass jumped down to help them, but their efforts to restrain the animal only seemed to put it in the mood to party. Soon it was cantering up and down the hard shoulder, throwing bucks energetically to either side, out of control.

  The police activated the speed warning signs, which flashed HAZARD AHEAD – DEAD SLOW over both eastbound and westbound lanes of the 31, to the annoyance of the eastbound drivers who had already been at a standstill for a quarter of an hour. A police helicopter with
a searchlight was called up, and hovered over the scene tracking the horse, to its considerable alarm. The horse put its head down and galloped towards the Acorn Junction.

  Chester Pike’s driver carried two suitcases out to the car waiting on the gravel carriageway drive of Grove House. When the man was out of earshot Chester turned to his wife, who had lately taken to sleeping in full make-up and getting up early to restore her face and hair before seeing him off in a lace-edged yellow satin peignoir. Lauren had also started talking about taking a holiday together without the children. Chester was not a sensitive man, but in this matter also his instinct was prompting him to action.

  ‘Goodbye, dear,’ he said, kissing her on the forehead while keeping hold of his briefcase.

  ‘Why all the luggage?’ Lauren asked, holding him at arm’s length, looking at him with uncomfortable directness.

  He licked his lips before replying, ‘I’m not sure how long I’ll be away this time.’

  ‘Why not?’ she pressed him. She was trying to hold both his hands but the briefcase allowed her only the left. Now he took his fingers, clammy from his morning shower, out of her grasp.

  ‘There’s a lot happening in St Louis,’ he answered. ‘My sense,’ Lauren informed him briskly, ‘is that things have been happening in St Louis for quite a while and that it’s time you sat down and told me about them.’

  ‘I can’t,’ he responded with a degree of triumph, ‘the flight’s at eight ten and we’re running late already.’ ‘I think I deserve to know, Chester.’

  ‘We’ll talk when I get back,’ he promised her, turning towards the door.

  ‘You’re not coming back,’ she pointed out.

  ‘I did not say that,’ he insisted from the doorstep. ‘Take care of yourself. I’ll see you soon.’

  There seemed little point in waving him off. There seemed little point in the silk peignoir, which she found extremely impractical because it swirled around her legs at every step. Lauren took off the redundant garment and put it on the breakfast bar in the kitchen, the place where she left any clothes she intended to pass on to the housekeeper. Then she went upstairs to change into her street clothes. She was doing morning car pool.

  ‘So, Mr Parsons, if you decided not to recommend Helford to Harrier Homes – what happened?’

  Ted was steaming up Riverview Drive, feeling warm and strong and powerful. Maybe he ran better without the weight of Oak Hill on his conscience. Now he was free of the project, it was taking on a doomed look. He had been accustomed, in his career, to seeing expert advice disproved by time, but the way young Sands had reacted to the Oak Hill job had always stuck in his memory. Until he got free of the problem, he had not realised quite how much it had weighed him down.

  ‘Looking back, it was almost like destiny,’ he told the imaginary microphone. After closing the file on Fuller’s Eyot, a series of serendipitous events typical of the life of a man of twenty-four in the city brought him to a party given by an absolute stranger on a baking summer night, from which he found himself going home with a tall, deep-bosomed, snake-haired beauty, who wore red sandals with four-inch spike heels. Ted woke on his first day in Westwick on a mattress on the floor of a studio in Maple Grove, saw blue sky through green leaves and the beauty naked on a wicker, lounger on her verandah, and began to dream.

  Ted never gave up his dreams without a fight. In a few years, after he chose a breathless girl with unravelling clothes named Alexandra Azarian to be his dream, this became a source of much misery to him. Back then his persistence was an asset.

  The beauty threw him out of the house as soon as he was fully conscious. By temperament Ted was tranquil to a fault, but nothing summoned up his blood as powerfully as rejection. In a daze he rambled through the neighbourhood, goggling at the ancient trees and the Dutch gables, basking in the rosy afternoon sun reflected from the mellow brick walls. The deep peace of Maple Grove restored him. He sensed dignity, exclusivity, stability, a potential of a wholly different order to the crass margins of Harrier Homes. Like a bomb, the recognition that Maple Grove could be everything that Harrier Homes were not crashed through the branches and fell on his head.

  Since his car was still in the city he took a train, which was headed the wrong way. Rolling out of Helford, he decided to look at Fuller’s Eyot again and on Monday recalled his dictaphone tape and set to work.

  Meetings with the river authority and the city environment department and the government environment department took place. Ted read international reports on global warming and consulted professors of geography. Having discovered more than he cared to know about the state of the planet, he lunched underwriters, seeking their opinion on the flood barrier planned in ten years time down river to the east, between the city and the sea.

  He concluded that while the world would warm and the sea would rise, the river would also fall and the flood barrier would stand effectively against freak tides and high winds. He predicted that for the next thirty years, Fuller’s Eyot would be drier than it had ever been since the first barge tied up there in 1753. This prediction, correct so far, was never shared with the owners of the site, who were relieved to sell to Harrier Homes for what they considered a very reasonable price.

  Fuller’s Eyot became an estate of new homes named The Willows, and Ted used his end-of-year bonus to buy the end of a lease on the lower half of a house in Church Vale. The next year, he used his bonus to buy the freehold of the house, and helped the upstairs tenants, Mr and Mrs Funk, to buy a brand new ground-floor apartment in a retirement development with a warden just off the Broadway. Mrs Funk came to look on him as a son, and he came to look on her as the living archive of the area because in her rambling conversation he found out every material fact about his neighbours; who was dying, who wanted to move south to be near their children, whose investments had been unwise and who owned the cat’s cradle of leases and sub-leases into which most of Tudor Wilde’s houses had been divided.

  In five years Ted was in business for himself, turning over his first million, about to sell the restored Grove House to Chester, and married with a son. He never saw the beauty again, but he looked out for her every night as he drove home, until Gemma Lieberman came into his life.

  ‘My God, we’re only just in time,’ marvelled Gemma from the back of the Cherokee as Stephanie swung it past the front of the Channel Ten building, where fifty people stood huddled under umbrellas near the queue sign. ‘It’s not even seven-thirty yet. Crusty wasn’t due till eight.’

  ‘Crusty’s over there,’ Rod observed, pointing to the VW camper pulling into the roadside. ‘This is just the regular audience.’

  ‘Don’t these people have lives?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Rod waved his car-park pass at the security officer who raised the barrier and directed Stephanie to a bay with Rod’s name painted on it.

  ‘My, you’re grand,’ Gemma observed, descending from the vehicle with a flounce of her skirts. She had picked a trailing dress of grape-coloured crinkle fabric with a matching embroidered jacket in which to make her screen debut.

  ‘I think my agent felt undervalued. They just gave me whatever he asked. He had to hold out for something. Did we bring umbrellas?’

  ‘God, no …’ said Gemma, at the same time as Topaz answered, ‘Of course,’ and pulled a neatly furled parasol from under their seat.

  ‘We’ll see you guys later,’ Stephanie promised.

  Rod signed her in as a guest of Family First at the reception desk, where Allie’s secretary had already left her name. They went up to his office. Rod changed into his new suit, a splendidly tailored, pin-striped, single-vented, double-breasted affair which endowed him, he felt, with only slightly less authority than the Pope on his Vatican balcony. He reassured Stephanie that his report was safe on a cassette in the inner pocket, and in addition he had mailed copies of it to both the Environment Minister and the Planning Director of Helford & Westwick Council, to arrive that morning.

  With jangl
ing nerves and nothing to do for at least an hour, they went up to the canteen for coffee and sat watching the rain sluicing down the window panes. Some die-hard ducks were paddling across the river, swept out into midstream by the yellow foaming effluent from the storm drain which carried the River Hel into the main channel.

  Rod ran his fingers down Stephanie’s forearm where the faint freckling of summer was fading to white. The damp air had made her hair frizz in a manner he found adorable and she found annoying. Apart from that difference, they were thinking the same thoughts.

  ‘I know we can’t ever do that again,’ he said, taking hold of her hand, ‘but I’m really glad we did it.’

  ‘Yes.’ There was nothing to say for a while. Then Stephanie remembered how soft the grass had been under her bare skin. ‘I wish I knew what seed they planted,’ she said. ‘If I ever have a lawn again, I’d like to use it. You have to think of all sorts of things for a lawn, the shade and the drainage and the traffic on it. Making love on it isn’t a standard check. But important, really.’

  ‘Will you ever have a lawn again?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I’ll talk to Stewart when he gets back, but I was the one who wanted to live in Westwick, he’s not so concerned.’

  ‘He’s definitely OK, then?’

  ‘Yes,’ she assured him, touchingly certain. ‘They let him send another E-mail yesterday. The Foreign Office say the negotiations are almost over. Not long now.’

  In Riverview Drive, Lauren Pike picked up Ben and Jon Carman. Because her son Felix refused to sit within arm’s reach of either of the Carman twins, she made Ben sit in the front seat beside her and belted Jon into one of the dickey seats at back of her new seven-seater Mercedes, leaving Felix to share the back seat with Chalice Parsons. It never occurred to her that she could run a smaller car if the boys did not fight. She also confiscated a toy pistol from Jon.