The Road Home

by Rose Tremain

  The bathroom was also painted white and was brightly lit. The bath, basin, and lavatory looked new. Lev saw a wry smile cross Christy’s face. “The pièce de résistance. Angela would have nabbed it if she’d known how to uncouple the piping, but luckily she didn’t.”

  “Very nice toilet,” said Lev.

  “Yes, glad you noticed it. Put it all in meself. That’s my trade: plumber. But I’m freelance now—if that’s the word for more or less unemployed. Couldn’t keep to me job after Angela left. But at least we’ve got a nice environment to shit in. I’ll find you a towel.”

  Christy went away and Lev heard him opening a cupboard in another room. Lev looked down at the miniature plastic shop standing by the miniature house. A sign on the shop’s door read: HI! MY STORE IS OPEN.

  Christy returned and handed Lev a green towel. “So,” he said, “tell me your first name.”

  “My name?”

  “I’m Christy. I’m Irish, in case you hadn’t noticed. Baptized ‘Christian,’ but that was too much to bear, too much of a yoke, you know what I mean? But ‘Christy’ is all right. Just call me that.”

  “Yes,” said Lev. “And I am Lev.”

  “Right,” said Christy. “Now I’ll make a pot of tea, Lev, and we can get the money side of things done. Terms are one month’s rent in advance, or if you can’t manage that right now, I’ll settle for two weeks.”

  “I prefer two weeks,” said Lev.

  “That’s okay. I can live with that, fella.”

  Lev began counting out notes: almost all the money he now possessed. Once again, he thought about Rudi’s assurances that he’d be able to live on twenty pounds a week. “I’m informed about the world,” Rudi had often said. “I don’t just watch the news, I interpret it. My judgments are backed up by hours of further reading.” Lev also knew that Rudi would argue about the ninety pounds and, in all probability, get Christy to lower the rent by some percentage or other, but that he, Lev, was incapable of such an argument. And he felt lucky to have found Christy Slane, to have been given a child’s room. He wasn’t too embarrassed or proud to lay his head on a pillowcase printed with giraffes.

  “Pity the men, I say,” said Christy as they drank the tea. “Women have got us by the balls in this century, that’s what I feel.”

  “Yes?” said Lev.

  “I’ll admit, my drinking got bad, and it’s not so fantastic trying to share your life with me when I’m like that. Drink lets loose the shite in me. There’s shite in every man—and every woman—it’s the nature of being human. But most of the time, it’s kept in, you know what I mean? Most of the time, you’re not looking at a steamin’ pile of manure.”

  Lev nodded. Both he and Christy Slane were smoking, and the butts in the cheap ashtray were piling up.

  “So I have some sympathy with Angela,” Christy continued. “I can see her side of it all. But then she gets so nasty. You know? She tells me I’m a piece of nothing. And she tells me in front of Frankie, my daughter. Then Frankie won’t talk to me, won’t let me kiss her good night. I go in there—in your room—and she turns her head away. I get one of her toys and I say, ‘Look, Frankie, Sammy the Clown wants you to say good night to your daddy . . .’ Pathetic this was, because she takes no notice. She pulls the covers over her head, like I’m going to hurt her. And I never hurt her. I swear to God. It was only Angela made her act like that.”

  Lev nodded. He saw that Christy didn’t really care whether he understood what he’d been saying. Perhaps, he thought, it’s easier for him to talk if he knows I don’t understand. Because now he was started on the story of his recent life, he didn’t seem to want to stop. And Lev didn’t mind. He was gradually coming to understand that the Irishman’s loneliness was nearly as acute as his own. They were the same kind of age. They both longed to return to a time before the people they loved most were lost.

  “What a mess,” sighed Christy. “Will it ever be cleaned up? I don’t think so. I think Angela’s got me in a noose. I go to Frankie’s school, in their playtime, and I watch her in the playground, I watch her skipping and jumping. But I’m not allowed to go near her. The teachers have instructions: I’m not to try to make contact with her. I’m considered some kind of ‘unacceptable risk’ because I once broke a few plates and glasses. So now I have to go to court to get my rights back, my rights as a father—my rights as a human being. And what if I lose? I’m trying to stay clear of the booze. You can help me, Lev. You’re a disciplined man, I can tell this. I’d like you to help me. Don’t let me go to the pub. And if I open a bottle of Guinness at home, try to get the fucking thing away from me. Right? Just take it and tip it down the sink.”

  “Yes,” said Lev. “I try. But I have many hours at GK Ashe to work.”

  “Sure you do. I’d forgotten that for a moment—like I was thinkin’ we could just sit here for the foreseeable future drinking tea! I like it when things are nice and quiet like this. Cuppa tea. Smoke. Quietness. I like that.”

  “Yes,” said Lev. “I like also.”

  “Tell me about your daughter, then.”

  Lev took out his wallet and found the photograph of Maya that he carried there. He passed it to Christy. He could remember with absolute clarity the soft texture of the woolen dress Maya had been wearing that day. He watched Christy look tenderly at the picture.

  “Girls,” he said. “So lovely. Aren’t they? So sweet and darlin’. Butter-wouldn’t-melt and all that. And then, bang, they turn away from you. They say they hate you. They break your heart.”

  He passed the photograph back and Lev put it away. In the silence that followed, Lev tried to tell Christy about Marina’s death, so that this subject would be out in the open and not there to catch him off guard, at a time when speaking about it would be too hard. When Christy asked him why Marina died, Lev tried to explain that cases of leukemia were common in Auror and Baryn, but nobody knew why. Some people said there was contamination in the water, others that the cancer came from eating too little red meat, or too much rose-petal jam.

  His own theory was that Marina’s death had something to do with the electricity pylon whose shadow fell over his house in the late afternoons. He tried to tell Christy that this shadow had a chill to it, a gray chill, which was particular to it, and that seeing it laid out across the garden—across the goat pen and the chicken house and the vegetable patch Marina used to tend with such care—had always filled him with rage and foreboding. He was grateful that electricity had come to Auror, but his hatred and fear of the pylon shadow had never left him.

  Christy stared at Lev, with his face resting on his hands, which were bone-thin and scarred here and there with the traces of burns. After a while, he said, “Why was it the shadow you feared and not the pylon itself?”

  Lev thought about this. He tried to say that the shadow touched them. It laid a kind of grid over them. The pylon was a little distance away on the hillside behind Auror, but the shadow fell directly onto them, and there was nothing they could do about it.

  Christy cleared away the teacups. The afternoon was gone now and the sounds of evening in Belisha Road began to accumulate around them. Distinct among these was loud, clanging music coming from the flat below.

  “EastEnders,” announced Christy. “You’d better watch it, fella. Tell you a bit more about the mad world you’re in.”

  Christy heated a steak-and-kidney pie for them, and they ate it with some tinned peas, sitting on the wicker chairs, watching the TV, and when he’d eaten, Lev fell asleep to the sound of furious arguments going on and on in a TV place called Albert Square. The sleep he fell into was deep and sound, and when he woke, the TV was off and the room was almost dark and there was no sign of Christy Slane.

  Lev walked alone through the flat. The kitchen was tidy, the supper plates washed up and put away. He went into Christy’s bedroom and saw a double bed, unmade, and a bedside table cluttered with paperback books, letters, and pills. Apart from the bed and the table, the room was empty. A
t the window, a blanket had been hung up for a curtain.

  Lev returned to the sitting room. He stared longingly at the telephone. He tried for some time to resist this longing, but it wouldn’t go away, so—without any idea what a phone call to his country might cost—he tugged out some coins from his pocket and set these down by the phone. Then he picked up the receiver and dialed Rudi’s number. When he heard Rudi’s familiar growling voice, he felt warm in his heart.

  “Hey!” yelled Rudi. “I miss you! Everybody misses you. What’s happening over there? Are you ready to come back yet?”

  Lev laughed. He told Rudi that he’d found a job in a kitchen, that he was lodging in a child’s room, that people in London were fatter than he’d imagined.

  “Fat?” said Rudi. “So what? Don’t blame people for being fat, Lev. If we had better food here, I’d be happy to be fat. I’d parade my fat belly. And if Lora grew a big arse, I wouldn’t care. I’d hold it to my face and kiss it.”

  “Well, okay,” said Lev, “but I hadn’t imagined people looking like this. I’d imagined them looking like Alec Guinness in Bridge on the River Kwai.”

  “That film was made back in the Cold War, Lev. It was made before the fucking Cold War. You’re way out-of-date with everything.”

  “So are you,” said Lev. “You calculated that I could live on twenty pounds a week. The room alone is ninety.”

  “Ninety pounds? You’re being cheated, my friend.”

  “No,” said Lev. “I looked at about thirty Rooms to Let in the newspaper. ES newspaper. This was the cheapest one.”

  Rudi went silent. Lev let this silence last for a moment, then he asked after Maya and his mother. Rudi replied, “They’re all right, Lev. They’re fine. Except one goat went missing. Ina thinks some fucker stole it right out of the goat pen. She thinks he’ll take them all, one by one, now that you’re not there.”

  It was Lev’s turn to be lost for the next word. What came to his memory was the delicacy with which the goats trotted around their dusty corral.

  “Tell Ina to take them inside the house at night,” he said.

  “And put them where?” said Rudi.

  “Anywhere. The kitchen.”

  “And then they shit all over the floor, and that bastard breaks in the house to nab them. D’you want that?”

  “Tell Ina to double-bolt the door.”

  “Sure, I’ll tell her that. But you know, Lev, she keeps saying to me, ‘Rudi, why did my son go away? Tell me why Lev went away.’ ”

  “She knows why I went away. You all know, so don’t torture me with it, Rudi. At the end of next week, my first money will arrive. Then Ina will be happy.”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll tell her that, too: happy at the end of next week.”

  Lev changed the subject. He asked after the taxi business, and Rudi replied, “Well, nothing’s changed since you left. As you know, people don’t want to cycle places anymore, now they know the Tchevi’s available. They want to ride in style on my leather upholstery. But I’ve just noticed something: they’re wearing the fucking upholstery away! They let their bums slide around on it. I guess they like the feeling of their bums sliding around, but it’s doing my interior no fucking good.”

  “If it’s just the upholstery wearing away,” said Lev, “you can live with that.”

  “Well, I can live with it, but it makes me mad.”

  “Better that than any of the machine parts going wrong.”

  “Well said, my friend. You’re bright today, I see. But maybe now you’ll be able to ship auto parts to me from London?”

  “Yes,” said Lev. “When I get on my feet. When I can find my way . . .”

  “You lonely?” said Rudi.

  “Yes,” said Lev.

  There was another silence now, in which Lev imagined Rudi in his hallway, where, on a mahogany dresser, he kept his taxi log and an old cuckoo clock which spat out a broken wooden bird to announce all the hours of the day and the night.

  “I saw your Diana card,” said Rudi after a while. “Ina showed it to me, and I got a hard-on. I thought, Princess, smile me your lovely smile, then come sit on me.”

  Lev laughed. He heard his own laughter as a distant and surprising thing. Then, after a moment, Rudi’s familiar laughter began to chime with it, and Lev remembered the vodka-soaked railway journey to Glic and dancing the tango under the stars and the blue-neon fish of Lake Essel.

  “Forget Diana,” said Lev. “I’ve got a date tomorrow with two-point-five meters of steel draining top.”

  G. K. Ashe wasn’t the way Lev had imagined him; he was a wiry man, not tall, with wild black hair he stuffed inside a cotton hat and eyes of a startling blue. Lev put his age at about thirty-five.

  He came into the kitchen just before four and found Lev ready at his sinks with his striped apron on. “Okay,” he said, shaking Lev’s hand, “I’m G. K. Ashe. Glad you’re joining us, Olev.”

  “I am glad also, sir,” said Lev.

  “Don’t call me ‘sir.’ Call me ‘Chef.’ ”

  “Chef . . .”

  “Damian told you I run a tight ship?”

  “Tight ship?”

  “The difference between a kitchen where some people are lazy and careless and one where everybody’s tasking at maximum stretch is the difference between a successful enterprise and a failed one. And the word ‘failure’ pisses me off. I don’t want even to contemplate it, right? Everybody in this space has to cut the mustard, okay?”

  “Mustard, Chef?”

  G. K. Ashe moved past Lev toward the sinks. “Now,” he said, “this station. Treat it like an operating theater. I want all the stuff—every spoon, every tin, every colander, every bowl, every crusher, chopper, stoner, grater, every last potato peeler—sterile-clean. When you’ve scrubbed up a roasting pan, I want to be able to drink a cocktail out of it. Okay?”

  “Cock tail, Chef?”

  “Yes. The hygiene in some kitchens is bloody pitiful. Seventy percent of cases of food poisoning in this country begin in restaurant kitchens. But not in mine. Not in mine. So see to it, right?” G.K. put his hand on Lev’s shoulder. “ ‘Nurse’ is going to be your nickname,” he said. “That’s what I call my KPs: Nurse. And you have to live up to your name.”

  “Nurse?”

  “Yup. Don’t take it as an insult. Quite the contrary. It’s a designation. Just do your work with pride and you’ll be okay.”

  “I will try,” said Lev.

  G.K. smiled. He pirouetted away from Lev, but turned to say, “New menu begins this evening, so it may get a bit hot in here, there may be a fair bit of replating going on, but what do nurses do? They stay calm. They clear up the mess. You got it? We’re counting on you, Olev.”

  More staff began to arrive. They came over and introduced themselves to Lev, and Lev tried to remember their names: Tony and Pierre, sous-chefs; Waldo, pâtisserie and dessert chef; Sophie, vegetable and salad preparation; then the waiters, Stuart, Jeb, and Mario. All were younger than Lev, and they seemed solemn, as actors seem when they’re nervous.

  At five, the group sat down at a table at the back of the restaurant and Jeb served poached chicken legs with celery, carrots, and gnocchi, cooked by Tony. Lev ate very slowly. There was some cleansing herb in the gnocchi he wanted to identify. He savored the delicious potato ball, rolled it round in his mouth. Parsley, that was it. He ate it silently, wondering how it was made, while all around him the dishes for the new menu were being discussed and final notes scribbled by the chefs.

  “Plating up the trout terrine,” he heard G. K. Ashe say, “I want the leaves in a rosette shape and clear of the slice. I don’t want them touching the fish or lying all over the plate like some stupid paper chase. Barely dress them, okay? Just a glisten of vinaigrette. And the grapefruit mayonnaise should look like an army button on the cuff of the terrine. You see the image?”

  “Yes, Chef,” said Pierre.

  “And keep it small,” G.K. went on. “The trout’s moist enough, rich e
nough. What we’re saying with this mayo is, Okay, we’re going to spoil you now, but not too much. You have to savor it.”

  Lev understood only words here and there. He ate more gnocchi. He imagined serving these, in their beautiful chicken broth, to Maya.

  The menu discussion went on, charged with intensity. “The pintade, Chef,” said Tony. “The vin de noix is going to make it lovely and dark. I was thinking . . . lay on the breast three batons of . . . maybe steamed beetroot, and get a nice vibrant color contrast.”

  “No,” said Ashe. “No beetroot. Cèpes. We discussed this. Just the cèpes and the little sandcastle of potato gratin. Now, everybody okay with the halibut?”

  “Yes, Chef.”

  “Did you get some nice endive, Pierre?”

  “Yes, Chef.”

  “Don’t overcook it, then. I don’t want to see my lovely halibut sitting on bogie slime.”

  There was a clatter of laughter. Sophie said, “You’re putting me off my grub, Chef.”

  “Good,” said G.K. “You’re too fat as it is.”

  The group went silent. Lev looked up and saw Sophie blush and lay down her knife and fork on her half-finished meal, and he remembered Lora once saying, “In a workplace, as a woman in this country, you’re fighting a war. Every day.”

  He looked away from Sophie as Stuart and Mario cleared the chicken plates and Waldo brought in a dish of crème brûlée, its crust still bubbling from his blowtorch.

  “Chef,” said Waldo, “I want everybody to try this. I’m using blueberries, just cooked for one minute to soften their shape, as a nice astringent base to the crème.”

  “Okay,” said G.K. “Give us a spoon.” Then he turned to Lev. “You taste this, too,” he said. “We call desserts ‘puddings’ in England; hangover from the days when that’s what desserts were: steamed puddings. It’s probably why Queen Victoria was the shape she was. But in Britain now a pudding can be a mint sorbet; it can be a poached lychee in a spun-sugar basket. You get it, Olev?”