Ashenden (44 page)

“Can I have a beer, Dad?” said Luke, coming into the kitchen.

“Sure,” said Charlie. “Help yourself.”

Luke opened the fridge and pulled out a can. One of the ear-pieces of his iPhone dangled down, broadcasting a dance track to his groin. Since he left school, he’d been working for an event caterer
and had saved enough money to spend the rest of his gap year traveling in South America. Even for Charlie, who had spent a good deal of his life in dangerous places, his son’s itinerary was worryingly loose. It invited kidnapping or worse, he’d told his ex-wife, who quite rightly had pointed out to him that so far as taking risks were concerned, he didn’t have a leg to stand on.

Any pride Charlie took in his son, which was a great deal, he was conscious that he owed to Helen, who’d brought him up, provided him with a stepfather he got on with, and ensured that Luke’s relationship with his biological father had survived long distances, infrequent visits, and all the many other ways in which Charlie had fallen short as a parent.

Luke pulled the ring tab and the can hissed open.

“So, you going to keep the house or what?”

“I’d rather not, to be honest.”

Charlie opened the oven door to check the sausages. They were still lying pale on the oven tray, doing nothing in particular.

“Mum didn’t think you would want to. She says Ros does, though.”

“It seems that way. You getting hungry?” It was past eight o’clock.

“Mmm,” said Luke. “Kind of.”

“If she’s not back soon, we’ll start without her. As soon as the sausages are done.”

“I wouldn’t mind a place like this,” said Luke, leaning back against the kitchen counter, drinking his beer. He had strong features, a nose a little too big for his face, a mouth a little too wide. “If I had, like, a squillion pounds. It would be a cool place for a festival.”

“The squillion pounds, that’s the problem,” said Charlie. “The other day when it rained, Tony had eighteen buckets on the go in the staircase hall.”

“Fuck,” said Luke.

Charlie ran the tap on the dirty pans in the sink. Turned it off again.

“Seriously, if you really want this place, I’ll do my best to hang on to it for you.” His gut twisted as he said these words.

“No, thanks.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” Luke said, grinning. “I’d rather have the cash any day.”

A door banged down the hall.

“Ros,” said Charlie, checking the sausages again to disguise his relief. “Finally these are getting somewhere.”

Ros came into the kitchen, gave Luke a kiss on the cheek, dumped shopping bags on the table.

“Hiya.”

Charlie closed the oven door, straightened up. “Just in time,” he said. “Supper in three days or thereabouts.”

“It’s a bloody awful oven,” said Ros.

“You look different,” said Charlie.

“Had a haircut.”

“Suits you.”

Ros fished around in one of the bags and pulled out a bottle of champagne. She felt it. “Good, it’s still cold. Get some glasses,” she said to Luke.

“What’s the occasion?” said Charlie. “No, not those, Luke, you don’t drink champagne from tumblers.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Dad,” said Luke, replacing the tumblers and setting down three mismatched stem glasses.

Ros peeled away the foil, twisted off the wire, and uncorked the bottle with a deft flick of her wrist. Poured the fizzing wine.

“A toast,” she said. “Here’s to sanity.”

Luke looked at his father, and Charlie looked at Ros.

“To sanity,” Charlie said. “Personally, I’m all for it. In moderation.”

Ros took a sip and put her glass down on the table. “This is by way of an apology.” She shook her new haircut. “You’re quite right, Charlie. You’ve been right all along. We should sell.”

Yes! Charlie was astonished and delighted, in that order. He felt like punching the air.

“No need to apologize, though I have to say I’m really pleased you’ve changed your mind.” He chinked his glass against his sister’s. “Here’s to the future owners of Ashenden Park. Their very good health.”

“To their very deep pockets,” said Ros.

“Dad,” said Luke. “I think the sausages are burning.”

All through dinner, Charlie tried to account for his sister’s sudden reversal, the closed door that had fallen open, her epiphany. Was it down to his own powers of persuasion the previous night, or the call from her daughter, Maisie, or was it obscurely connected to her haircut? He had known too many women not to be aware that haircuts often signaled
something
.

After supper, Luke sloped off, not to bed but to iPlayer.

“Well,” said Charlie.

“Well,” said Ros, raising her glass. “Just so you know, I’m going home tomorrow.”

“That’s good.”

“Before I had my hair cut, I met Geoff for lunch and he gave me a bollocking.”

“Did he?” Charlie made a mental note to buy Geoff a drink the next time he saw him.

“He’s been dead against me trying to hang on to this place all along. I told him what you said last night and he completely agreed with it. I’m sorry, I’ve been a bit of an idiot.”

No, thought Charlie, a drink was not enough. Geoff deserved at least a good bottle of claret.

“It wasn’t ever really going to work, you know.”

“I think I knew that deep down. I’ll ring the bank on Monday and we’ll see about instructing an agent.”

“Actually,” said Charlie, and proceeded to tell her about his encounter with Izzie Beckmann earlier that day. “Funnily enough, she was a socialist when I knew her.”

Ros said, “Some of us still are.”

“Can’t do any harm to ring her. She knows the place like the back of her hand. Her father restored it.”

“I’m not entirely convinced she’s the right person,” said Ros, “but there’s no harm in sounding her out.”

She got up, with a scrape of chair legs, to clear the plates.

“I spoke to Rachel earlier,” said Charlie, over the clatter of dishes.
“She’s got a bug of some kind. She was actually sick when we were talking on Skype.”

Ros wiped down the counter with a cloth. “Poor thing.”

“She hasn’t looked great all week, to be honest, sort of washed out. I was going to call her”—he looked at his watch—“around now, but she asked me not to.”

“It’s been hard on you being away from her, hasn’t it?”

“Yes, in a word.” He picked up a spoon and fiddled with it.

“You wait until you’ve been married as long as me and Geoff. A little break can be just what the doctor ordered.”

*  *  *

The next morning Charlie went online and booked a plane ticket. Then, despite the fact it was Sunday, he rang Izzie and they arranged a time to discuss the sale.

Izzie was a quick worker, very professional, he had to give her that. She had already pulled together a proposal when they met.

“Of course, we’re going to need decent photographs,” she said. “There’s someone I use a lot, who’s good, but it would be fantastic if you took a few yourself. I checked you out on Google. You’ve done some really great work.”

“Sure, I don’t mind doing that,” said Charlie, his vanity more than mollified. “How about historical stuff? Ros has dug up a lot of old documents.”

“Good,” said Izzie. “We can use some of those too. When are you leaving?”

“Day after tomorrow.”

“Well, we’ll keep in touch by email and so on.”

“Yes,” said Charlie. “And there’s always Skype.”

*  *  *

Charlie’s plane was forty-five minutes late. Rachel was waiting for him in the arrivals hall. At first glance she looked tired, and a little thin, but as he came closer, he noticed a kind of glittery tremulousness about her. He took her in his arms and buried his face in her hair. He was home.

“How are you feeling?” he said, as he wheeled his bag in the direction of the exit.

“Much better now you’re back.” She gave him a sideways glance.

“Oh, God, me too,” he said. “I’ve been worried about you.”

“Sorry. And sorry about the other day. I got a new wastepaper basket.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Outside, waiting in line for a taxi, she touched her fingers to his cheek and smiled. “Charlie?”

“What?”

“I’ve got something to show you.”

“What is it?”

She didn’t say anything. Instead, she opened her purse and handed him a little white plastic wand with a blue line down the center.

“You’re pregnant?” A dizzy rush to his head.

She nodded. “What do you think?”

He pulled her to him and kissed her. Something seemed to have happened to his breath, his chest, his heart, which was skipping about like a lunatic.

“I’m sorry that I made you worry. It just didn’t feel right not telling you in person. Are you pleased?”

Tears came to his eyes. “I’m absolutely thrilled.”

*  *  *

A blustery afternoon in early April and Ma’lita was living in a hotel again. Admittedly it was a three-room suite in a five-star hotel, but it was still a hotel and in five, six years of touring she’d grown to despise them. The way, for all the personal service and individual touches and original decor, they remained heartless anonymous places, places that couldn’t care less about you, which welcomed anyone with a platinum credit card. The suite was decorated in cream and chocolate and smelled of expensive toiletries, fresh linen, flowers, and leather. But she had to check the headed notepaper to remind herself that on the other side of the double-glazed windows
that dulled the roar of rush-hour traffic, it was Birmingham out there, not London, New York, or Paris. She was due to give the last concert of her current tour the next evening at the NEC and had spent the day doing sound checks.

By this stage of Ma’lita Lewis’s stratospheric career as a performer and recording artist she no longer had need of a surname. Like Madonna and Beyoncé, she was Ma’lita on both sides of the Atlantic, in Europe, Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and just about every other market you could mention. They didn’t like her in Finland, but Finland was an exception. Also a small country.

Ma’lita. Some people thought the apostrophe was an affectation, a gimmick, or a PR stunt. It wasn’t. It was the way her name appeared on her birth certificate. Although there had been times at school when she’d dropped the apostrophe for a while, it was now part of what her manager, Derwent, called the Ma’lita
brand
. You could do cool things with it graphically. For example, the bottle of her signature perfume had been designed so that the top, the bit you unscrewed, formed the head of an apostrophe that curled down in an elegant tail to divide her name on the label.

Ma’lita was twenty-six, which was the exact same number of countries where her second single, “All You Want (Tonight),” reached number one five years ago. Her third album had just gone quadruple platinum.

The tabloids had a lot of fun with the apostrophe in the early days.
Ma’king Whoopee
when she was papped at four a.m. coming out of a nightclub pissed after her first UK number one.
Mar’vellous
when she wowed the Brits. And
Ma’lita to Be a Ma’ma?
when there were rumors that she was pregnant.

In those days the press had also made a big deal about her being mixed race, the daughter of a Mauritian mother and an absent white father (who got in touch when she started making money, with a little help from a journalist she’d personally like to kill). What was that all about? She was British; it said so on the passport she had to get when she started touring. Born in Britain, raised in southeast London on a sink estate, educated in a failing comprehensive, unemployed
and destined for the scrap heap at sixteen. British through and through.

“Boss?” said Jasmine, coming through from the room next door they used as an office.

Jasmine was her PA, and “boss,” said tongue in cheek, was one of the ways she reminded Ma’lita that she was a person, not a pop diva. This kept her feet on the ground, which is where she wanted them.

“What’s up?” Ma’lita leaned back against the cream leather of the sofa and rubbed her eyes.

“Just got this email,” said Jasmine. She was a south London kid herself, only with GCSEs and a couple of good A levels. “You might wanna look.”

“Yeah, what is it?”

“Remember the estate agent who got in touch after the piece in the
Mail
?”

“Which one?”

“The woman.”

“Yeah, I think I remember. She was friendly.”

“Boss, they’re all friendly when they’ve got something to sell. Anyway, she’s sent some details through of a house she thinks you might like.”

During the
Mail
interview, set up to publicize the tour, an exhausted Ma’lita had talked about wanting to buy a place, stop touring for a while, put down some roots. As soon as it was published, she’d been flooded with offers from people trying to sell her property: penthouses in Chelsea (which looked like hotels), penthouses in New York (which looked like hotels), and a penthouse in Dubai (which was part of a hotel). Derwent had spent a day on the phone to the record company reassuring them that she was not about to retire and depart into the wilderness.

“Have a look,” said Jasmine, handing her a bunch of pages stapled together.

Ma’lita remembered the woman better now. She hadn’t sent her details of penthouses. She’d got hold of her number somehow and rung up to ask questions. Where did she want to live? England.
Town or country? Country. Old house or new? Old. How big? Big enough. Big enough for her mother, who wasn’t working as a mental health nurse anymore but was still living in southeast London, big enough for her staff, for a recording studio. She’d felt like a little girl writing a letter to Father Christmas. “I always wanted to live near water,” Ma’lita remembered saying. The sea? the woman had said. “Any kind of water.”

The house was called Ashenden Park. It was three houses, really, one big one and two smaller ones, although the smaller ones weren’t small at all. To Ma’lita it looked like a mum holding two children by the hand. A mum who was really proud of her kids. The whole place was a beautiful warm honey color. She read through the pages, studied the photographs. The house was not far from Heathrow. It was on the river. Prickles rose on Ma’lita’s arms and the back of her neck, the same prickles her fans said they got from listening to her music. Then she turned to the first page and read it all the way through again.