Getting Home (10 page)

When he reached the top, the rain had conceded. In the clouds a few triangles of aquamarine appeared and there was more light. Ted rested his map against a beech trunk and outlined at least five tracts of land which could each support a development of small, spacious closes leading to quality homes. His preference would be for the far side of Ambleford, since overlooking a supermarket was unlikely to appeal to the end-users, and just high enough up the valley sides to avoid the problems of water without sloping uneconomically.

Run-off fertiliser from the wheat made the grass at the edge of the field fine and thick like the first hair of a lusty infant. His city shoes slipped as he descended the hill. Another memory of his mother came back to him, of walking with her on a hot day through a field of tall yellow flowers which threw golden shadows up to all the soft parts of her face, under her chin and around her ears and in the smiling hollows of her cheeks.

As he walked the sky cleared and a silvery light washed the landscape. The wheat was blue-green in the sun but there were no poppies. His mother had worn a sunhat decorated with wheat ears, cornflowers and poppies, but modern herbicides conceded no territory to flowers. Ted regretted not changing his clothes. His suit imprisoned him, slapping his wallet against his ribs at every step, dictating a walk when he wanted to run like a boy and leap like the rabbits.

Back in the village, he bought a Coke at the general store and leaned against his car to drink it. Melancholy circled, wheedling him like a beggar. What are you here for, it demanded, and why, when you are here to hunt profit, are you thinking of your mother and your dog? Where is your focus, where is the progress? This is what you did when you were twenty. Why waste your costly time on walking in fields when a lower-paid man could do the job? I know you, you can't lie to me; you came out here wanting to be alone in a field. You are not old but you act like it; you should not be tired but you also act like that. You are heartsick, but why? Is it that woman? Or you, you sickening yourself with your own weakness, frightening yourself with your own imagination. You lost your nerve yesterday with Adam. He has you marked now. Chester is a heavy hitter, and Adam will become a heavy hitter, but you will be stuck on the reserve bench all your life because your mind is disobedient, it runs around after pleasure and beauty and shiny bright ideas.

Down the valley floated the sound of a church clock striking six, the church in Butterstream without doubt, since Ambleford had only the unadorned Meeting House. Ted rubbed his eyes, and when he opened them a miraculous procession was approaching along the road.

First came a dog, some kind of crossbred agricultural dog with eager, naughty eyes and a long coat so caked in mud that its colour was undetectable. Tongue lolling, it ran diagonally to and fro across the street.

Behind the dog came a police officer on a motorcycle at the lowest speed he could achieve, his engine idling, his feet skimming the ground. His leather jacket was smartly fastened and his eyes were fixed on the middle-distance, indicating that what followed was his affair only because it constituted a matter of public safety.

Behind the police officer came another dog, quite possibly a parent of the first one, older but just as dirty. Behind the dog walked a horse, a heavy-set coloured animal and the filthiest horse Ted had ever seen, mud and dust sticking to every inch of hide including its snarled black-and-white mane, which hung to its nose and streamed almost to the ground over its shoulders. On unshod hooves, carrying its head low in order to see its way, the horse meandered more or less in the centre of the road.

At the horse's shoulder walked a young woman wearing enormous mud-encrusted boots on the end of bare legs. She smiled, an echo of the triumphant grin of Crusty, and smoked a small hand-rolled cigarette as she walked. Her hair was matted in dreadlocks and her print dress, under an old blanket wrapped squaw-fashion, was unbuttoned to reveal multiple navel rings.

The horse was harnessed, by a split leather collar and yards of orange baling twine, to the shafts of a cart, on which sat another woman, much fatter with a shaven head and a steel bolt through one eyebrow. With one hand she held the flapping reins and with the other petted a third and even older dog sitting on a cushion at her side.

On the cart, a dwelling had been erected in the style of a covered wagon, with black polythene stretched over a barrel-shaped frame. As the vehicle progressed it swayed from side to side, a jaunty pennant made from an old yellow fertiliser bag waving at the rear. Various pieces of equipment hung clanking from the body, among them a ladder, some shovels, a rusted Hibachi barbecue and a child's pushchair.

Behind the cart skulked a fourth dog of unrelated breed, skinny and greyhound-like, and at a proper distance crawled the last unit of the procession, another officer on a motorcycle, sun twinkling from the chrome. He smiled around him at the people who appeared at doors and windows to gape at the spectacle, his cap pushed back on his head in self-satisfaction.

Ted observed that all the performers in this tableau enjoyed their roles, that the women were delighted with the degree of outrage which they offered the village and the officers were well pleased to be protecting their community by escorting such a dire menace safely on its way. The inhabitants of Ambleford also seemed gratified to have been visited by a manifestation of the great public drama of the Strankley Ridge inquiry. Ted himself felt satisfied to see his fears actually made flesh before his eyes. If Adam had seen this, he thought, he would hear me better.

The air became still again. The mother-of-pearl light of the early evening softened the pink of the roses and warmed the plain stone walls of the Meeting House. The cooing of a dove echoed between the hillsides. A grinning youth drove his tractor down the main street and collected the girl from the general store as she locked the door. Ted climbed back into his vehicle, in no hurry to get home.

A traffic jam gives a man a dangerous sense of impotence. ‘
Ecoute-moi
,' sang Sumi Jo as he waited stoically in the tailback to a crash, ‘
Rapelle-toi! N'est-ce plus ma voix? N'est-ce pas ma main que cette main presse? N'est-ce plus Manon
?'

In the last roadhouse in the 31 corridor, with a cup of coffee-flavoured liquid on the table, Ted pulled a piece of paper from his briefcase and wrote a letter. ‘I can't go back to what I was,' he wrote. ‘I am like wine in a bottle and you poured me out. I don't care what you do with me now, whether you drink me or throw me away. But you have to know what you've done. I'm not asking you to forgive me. I know this is stupid.'

The roadhouse offered every convenience necessary to support human life: vegetarian hamburgers; fragranced plastic flower arrangements in the toilets; a post box and a vending machine for stamps.

Mrs E Parsons had such poor muscle tone that it seemed biologically impossible for her to stand upright. Her blood pressure was high for a woman her age, her resting heart rate was fast, her BMI was low but body fat was surprisingly high. Grip strength was poor, stamina, was poor, flexibility was below average, peak flow rate average. Rod assessed her build as endomorphic, query disguised by an eating disorder. She gave off the sour smell of a body which was never used. Spod city, absolutely.

To touch she was like an oven-ready broiling chicken, cold and flabby and rather light for her size. He considered tactful approaches to suggesting she should have a bone scan.

‘I have so much stress,' she told him. ‘Media is a real high-stress profession. You know, deadlines, pressure … and I carry my show, I just am the whole thing. It's a real responsibility. Sometimes when I leave the studio. I'm so tense I feel like screaming.' The hand to the forehead, the fingers to the bridge of the nose, anguish mimed so as not to smudge the make-up. A miniature woman, everything undersized.

‘What I would recommend is a programme of three sessions a week to start with, building to four …'

‘Oh God, I'll never have the time …'

‘And I'd suggest concentrating on aerobic work to begin with, to give you a base level of general fitness, plus I'd like to do some Pilates exercises with you to work on posture and flexibility. Then in time we can start thinking about strength work.'

‘I'd hate to get muscles. I hate that look.'

‘Tone. Just toning. Tone is essential in the abdominal area to hold your spine correctly, and toned muscles work better and protect you from getting injured.' The same lines every day. When you are in the theatre again you will have to say the same lines every day; look on this as training for yourself.

‘I can't possibly do three times a week.'

‘I could come to your office. I do that with quite a few of my clients.'

Horror flashed in her eyes and she groped for an excuse, finally fixing on, ‘But you don't know what my schedule is like.'

‘Would you say it was heavier than Oprah Winfrey's schedule?'

‘She was
fat.
‘ She got up from the bench and pinched a little white skin at her midriff below the pristine sports bra stretched over her chest – surgically enhanced chest; they stood out like grapefruit halves.

They were out on her patio, where the bushes in tubs were yellowed and the soft summer air had a faint ammonia tang. The end of the garden was fenced off with a Versailles-style trellis. He made out rabbit-hutches, and some kind of fat dog which was tied up, and occasionally yelped at them. ‘Be quiet,' she ordered it, sounding irritated.

‘We could include power walks, just around the block here or over in the park. He could come along.'

‘He's my husband's dog,' she told him, with emphatic distaste. ‘I can't really walk in the street, in public. Not in my position.' The example of Jackie Onassis came to his mind but he let it go. He was feeling tired now, and the right Achilles was flaming, and the management had issued a disciplinary notice about using original music for classes instead of the synthetic tempo-adjusted bilge which cleared the copyright laws.

She suggested going into the kitchen for a drink. Was he kidding himself or was there something a little off about this? She had a preening manner, and a way of over-emphasising her words which made simple statements sound suggestive. Her interest in her health was clearly recent. All her kit was skintight and brand new, but that was not unusual in Westwick.

‘Having children can raise the stress levels of working women so much that their health could be at risk,' she told him, finding an item from that morning's show still retrievable in her memory. ‘They did research somewhere, California I think. Even if they have only one child, the stress hormones just shoot right up. And I have three kids.'

‘Uh-huh,' he agreed, wondering about working men with children.

‘Shall we have that drink now?' she suggested, heading back to the kitchen where unwashed plates covered all the surfaces. ‘Do you think I need massage?' she asked, wiggling her rear as she peered into the fridge. He retreated to the far end of the room. ‘My shoulders get so-o-o tight …'

Her shoulders were habitually dragged forward, the left lower than the right, with marked torsion through the middle thoracics. It was a mess. Actually, the whole body was a mess, right down to the prolapsed metatarsal arches and the bunions. ‘Working on your posture and the way you use your body will help realign your spine and stop that tightness from building up.'

‘I just love massage.'

‘Of course, massage is good for releasing tension, loosening you up, helping the muscles work through their fullest range of motion and recover from training so building up strength faster.' Mistake, mistake. Even before he had finished speaking she was perking up hopefully.

‘I thought maybe Shiatsu, or something? To get my energy moving. I have no energy, I feel kind of bleaghh, you know? Would you do that, massage?'

‘It isn't something I do, no. Fitness training is all I'm qualified for. Pilates technique works on the alignment of the whole body, it would definitely release the kind of tension you have.' She gave a pout of disappointment, and more little ridges appeared in her make-up like sand waves on a beach.

‘What age are your children?' He had noticed the detritus of pink plastic shards and dead cyberpets around the edges of the room.

‘Oh – young. Really young.' She cracked a can of diet drink and poured it into two smeared crystal glasses. ‘They need so much, children. They drain you. So you don't think shiatsu?' Now she was fetching ice. ‘You know, you look familiar to me … Of course, I've seen, you at The Cedars but I'm sure I know you from somewhere else.'

‘I'm an actor,' he owned, knowing what would follow.

‘An
actor
,' she repeated, seeming pleased. ‘Of course. Weren't you in … what was it …' Yes, his instinct was correct. There was her hand trickling over his when she gave him the drink, and her eyes heading his off at the pass.

‘You won't have seen anything I've done. A lot of theatre, just a few little things for TV. My high spot was an educational video of
Julius Caesar.'

‘Shakespeare. Well for heaven's sake.' His personal space was invaded, indeed it was almost colonised, she was too close and she was lingering. ‘I can see that. I bet you could really fill out a toga.' Sweat broke out at his temples and a drop ran down his cheek.

‘It was modern dress. I had a suit.'

‘Look,' she said after a few moments, mercifully taking a step back. ‘I'm sure you haven't watched my show
Family First
, you know, it's all sort of family oriented why would you? But, you know, every series I have a co-host, you know, a
man.'
It was as if she had named a magical, mythical animal, seldom sighted. ‘We'll be looking for someone new next year – starting late September. Screen experience, a good presence, intelligence … You don't have to write scripts or anything, they do all that for you. Why don't you think about it? Do you have an agent?'