Getting Home (15 page)

Stephanie shut her door and leaned on it, in shock. It was a moment or two before she could focus. A woman she had considered a friend had grabbed the first opportunity to call her a liar and rummage in her life for the evidence. Her family life. She felt violated. Lauren's parting chatter echoed in the hallway like a bad smell, the slick patter of social superiority. She had distant memories of her paternal grandfather, promoted from the ranks on the eve of D-Day, rhapsodising about the officer class and their behavioural ideals, and of her father and the smokescreen of phoney gallantry behind which he bounced cheques and had affairs. These status tricks, these too she had intended to leave behind when they moved to Westwick.

She went out into her garden – her Prozac, her opium, her safe oblivion. The first time they had left Dad, her grandmother had taken her into the garden, away from the screaming and the stuffing of suitcases. It had been raining. Tiny pools shimmered at the centre of each lupin leaf. There was a fairy ballroom at the bottom of each one, her grandmother explained, where orchestras played and dancers whirled and the daylight twinkled through the water like the sparkle of chandeliers.

Topaz Lieberman felt she did her best work before dawn. At the business end of the kitchen, she cleared a space for her books around the computer by moving things which had invaded the desk to their proper places: the basket of clean washing on to the ironing board, a tray of seedlings to the conservatory, the telephone to its wall bracket, the cat litter sack to the utility room, the midnight blue satin bra and a pair of green snakeskin high-heeled sandals to the stair from where they might or might not progress back to the drawers and cupboard in her mother's bedroom over the following fortnight.

She wiped the screen with anti-static cloth, angled the keyboard as she liked it at 35 degrees to the screen, paused to throw away three mouldy nectarines in the bowl because the sight of them bugged her, powered up and began to write.

‘Joseph Stalin: His Path To Power.' Click click, mark and underline. Line, line. ‘Three men fought for the leadership of the USSR in the power vacuum created by the death of Lenin on 21 January 1924. Lenin, although in his early fifties, had been a dying man since his first stroke is May 1922. In his final hours Stalin, general secretary of the Communist Party, was asserting himself as never before at the Party conference.'

The silence was unreal. When the cat came in from the garden, the cat flap crashed in the quiet; knowing better than to disturb Topaz at her work, the animal bolted furtively upstairs to a welcoming bed. In the distance, a single car roared along The Broadway from Maple Grove. Peace, order, sterility. The parable of Switzerland and the cuckoo clock. If one of those ants stopped moving, would you really care? Topaz allowed herself a nanosecond to yearn for the tumult of Bolshevik action, for ranting and storming, the thunder of boots in corridors, the roaring of mobs in streets. She slipped the encyclopedia disc into the CD drive and scanned in a photograph of the young, lean-jawed Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (a name indicating Jewish ancestry) in a peaked cap and worn greatcoat.

‘Stalin's Leadership Strategy.' Her slender, tapering fingers rattled the keys with enthusiasm. Click, click, mark, underline. Click click, bullet points. ‘Strategic alliance against Trotsky. Line. Suppression of Lenin's critical testament. Line. Proactive moves against Trotsky. Line. Identification with famine relief measures. Line. Popular policy objectives. Line. Trotsky isolated from military.' The man was just awesome. The way he wasted Zinoviev, just incredible. She scanned in a contemporary cartoon of a floored Trotsky defenceless before the massed bayonets of his opponents.

She stopped when it was light, closed the file, poured herself a long glass of milk and went into the on-line banking service. No change. On the Gaia business account the balance was just enough to cover the loan interest due in at the end of the week. On the personal account they were overdrawn already with ten days to go until the end of the month and Molly down to captain the school under-14s in the county finals on Saturday, which meant fares and snacks and entry fees. There was the tax money in the savings account, her major achievement of the year, but Topaz's spreadsheet told her that it was not enough. The Liebermensch were barely hanging on by their fingernails.

She closed down the computer, laid the table for breakfast, pulled another load of washing out of the machine and pinned it up on the line outside. The cat had been at the trash again, rubbish was blowing over the tangle of vegetation her mother designated a physic garden. From among the stinking fronds of wormwood she pulled half a letter.

The letter had been torn in two while still unopened in its envelope, the method of dispatch her mother used to favour for bills before Topaz had educated her. This was not a bill. This was a handwritten letter, which suggested to Topaz a person of an earlier generation, probably also of a sentimental temperament. The other half of the letter was still in the garbage, stuck to a crescent of pizza crust –
Fiorentina
, Mum's usual, spinach and three cheeses, alleged to send a donation to the Florence Rescue Fund with every order. Gemma never could get the difference between low-fat and vegetarian.

Topaz took the letter indoors, extracted the halves from the envelope and taped them back together. As she suspected, the signature was ‘Ted'and the text was the kind of pathetic mush people were reduced to when hormones were in control. Hormones mystified Topaz. Her own never disturbed her mental balance, they would not dare. Hormones had stuck her mother with three kids and no money to raise them, not really a viable life choice. Looking at other people, Topaz had concluded that hormones produced the kind of distraction which definitely blocked the path to power. Look at Clinton. And surely it was no coincidence that Stalin's greatest years were right after Nadia Aliluieva killed herself at the age of 30.

She put the letter in her bag and went upstairs. ‘Wake up, Flora.' She shook her sister by the foot, pinching the boot-calloused toes. ‘Don't forget it's your day for ironing today. Come on, Molly, time to get up. You're to eat your cereal this morning, don't think you can throw it down the sink and I won't know because I will.'

‘Coach doesn't want us getting fat,' mumbled Molly from under her pillow.

‘Coach cares about cups and medals, doesn't care whether you're crippled at thirty. You're just another body to him, he has no appreciation of adult female metabolic requirements. You'll be out of his life in a couple of years and he'll be starving a new team. Women who eat a diet deficient in essential oils and calories risk premature osteoporosis, you know that.'

‘No I don't,' was the defiant response. Topaz thought of what a labour camp could do for her sister's attitude, but contented herself by dragging the Polly Pocket quilt off her prone form and warning, ‘And tidy this room up before you leave. Flora, you make sure it's done. And don't forget to wake Gemma.'

While she rode over to the Magno store at Helford and labelled apples for two hours before school, she considered the question of the letter. Her mother's business was carrying too much debt, it was sick. Actually, so sick they couldn't sell it, although it was doubtful that her mother had marketed the enterprise sincerely. The stock turnover was virtually non-existent, because most of the plants they ordered died. While Gemma had a contract with Ted Parsons' company she brought in enough money to keep the household afloat.

Topaz asked herself why in the world her mother had suddenly elected to walkout on the job. It was quite typical of her to contract an inappropriate involvement, and, obviously, some kind of lover's tiff had taken place, but in Topaz's reasoning these considerations were trivial and easily resolved.

Denouncement, that was the right strategy. And purge the opposition. Flora had a field camp meeting today in any case. And little Courtenay Fuller was coming back with Molly, and she was the mushiest creature in the universe. Luck had always smiled on Stalin, too.

‘Mum,' Topaz began that evening, as soon as Gemma was standing contentedly in front of the stove stirring the rice, sipping from the glass of wine in her free hand, ‘I found this beautiful letter in the garden.'

She unfolded the repaired page and held it carefully out of her mother's reach. At the far end of the table, Molly and Courtenay looked up from their improvements to Polly Pocket's Pony Gymkhana?

‘How dare you read my letters!' Gemma exclaimed, putting down her glass and lunging for it as Topaz had anticipated. Gemma Lieberman was built to lounge rather than lunge. Wearing platform sandals and a long aubergine-coloured dress elaborated with ruffles and fringes and trailing cuffs, she was not dressed for quick movement. She dragged a lettuce off the worktop and scared the cat with a clatter of falling utensils while Topaz drifted serenely away behind the little girls without looking as if she had moved. ‘Give me that,' she demanded, knowing her daughter had won again. ‘It's private. You had no right to look at it.'

‘I'm sorry, Mum. I thought it might be important. I've never seen a real love letter before. I didn't know people still wrote things like that.'

At the word ‘love'the attention of Molly and Courtenay was riveted on Gemma. ‘I said, give it to me.' Gemma lunged again and her hair, which hung like unravelled rope to her waist, snagged in a door handle. She yanked it free and held out her hand, demanding the letter.

‘You tore it up,' Topaz protested in her calm, deep voice, ‘and it wasn't even opened. I thought you must have made a mistake. I mean, people don't write love letters nowadays, do they? I thought you might want to keep it, it might be precious. I mean, supposing you both died and you never knew he loved you – wouldn't that be tragic?' The little girls were wide-eyed at the notion.

‘Come on, Topaz. You just think it's tragic I'm not getting a paycheck from Tudor Homes any more.'

‘No, I don't. It's like …' Topaz struggled for the words. Emotional stuff was so hard to express. ‘It's like you said about love being sort of energy, like breath or something. I thought you couldn't really want to just block it out like that.'

‘You don't know what you're talking about. This has nothing to do with love.' Gemma had a good sense for her eldest daughter's strategies, but she could not decently accuse Topaz of having the mentality of a pimp in front of Molly and her friend. Nor could she claim that love was entirely out of the picture; Ted had been kind to her, a response for which she had not been prepared. ‘Look, you've got it wrong.' She opened negotiations in a reasonable tone designed to give the lie to the usual allegations of irrationality, ‘That letter isn't precious and it is
not
a love letter. It's something I will never want to remember from someone I want to forget, and the kind of letter I hope you never have to deal with when you're an adult. Which is why I threw it away. Now put it back in the rubbish where you found it. I promise you, that is its proper place.' She was pleased with that, it struck the perfect note of high parental piety.

‘You're upset about it,' Topaz countered.

‘I'm upset that you decided to get hold of it and read it, Topaz.'

‘I thought it was a sweet letter. He writes some lovely things, really quite poetic. Are you sure you don't even want to read it?'

‘You ought to read it, Mum,' Molly observed, her eyes huge with curiosity. ‘Supposing he died and you never knew he loved you.'

‘It's trying to persuade me to do something wrong, Molly, so why should I read it? If I don't want to be persuaded, I can just throw the letter away and then there's no danger.'

‘Can I see it? What does it say that's so lovely?' Molly persisted.

‘Oh, that'd be
so
sad,' sighed Courtenay, combing her micro-pony's luxuriant mane.

Gemma smouldered at her eldest daughter, indicating that she considered Topaz irresponsible for raising adult affairs in front of infants. Topaz iced her mother, conveying that a parent had no right to let personal feelings interfere with her responsibility to provide for her children. Hadn't the brothels of the Caucasus funded the Bolshevik victory?

‘You're treating me like
Boule de Suif
, Topaz, and I don't deserve that.' Gemma shoved her hair off her face and skewered half of it into a bun with a handy satay stick.

With ceremony, Topaz folded the letter. ‘You might change your mind one day and want to know what it says. If you don't want to keep it, I'll keep it for you. In my room. So if you ever want it, just ask me.' The entire household, even including the cat, knew better than to invade Topaz's room.

‘Fine,' Gemma shrugged her shoulders, hitched up her bra straps and turned back to the rice pot. Holding the letter with reverence, Topaz moved towards the spiral staircase incongruously introduced into the kitchen area sometime in the seventies when the house's previous owner knocked out all the internal walls at the ground floor level. She took her time; Stalin knew when to be patient.

‘My dad says love is the answer.' Courtenay turned back to her game and mounted a tiny plastic horsewoman on her horse.

‘My dad said if love was the answer he was glad he didn't hear the question,' Molly cantered her tiny plastic horse up to a tiny plastic gate, ‘but he's a crazy person and they can say anything.' A tiny plastic refusal occurred. ‘Bad pony. That's three faults.'

‘Make him do it again,' Topaz advised from the stairs. ‘You should never let a horse get away with a refusal, you know that.'

In the deep of night, the telephone rang in the Parsons house. Ted was still awake. He had been sleeping badly. ‘We've got your son again,' the caller told him, in a portentous man-to-man tone.

‘Oh God,' he responded.