Getting Home (2 page)

She rubbed her eyes, then wiped away the crushed aphids she had smeared on her cheek. Napoleon had his army; Josephine had her roses. In her office, she used to keep a postcard of the Empress's coronation portrait by David on her pinboard. One day there had been a new partner, and he had stopped to look at it. ‘She had your nose,' he had said.

‘It was fashionable then,' she had answered.

‘It's in the classical vernacular, fashion's got nothing to do with it.'

‘My mother's always trying to get me to have it – you know – done.'

‘Are you having lunch with your mother?' He had rushed that. Afterwards, when she knew him well, she realised that Stewart did not normally rush. He was a measured man, and she never dated people at work. Something got hold of them both that day.

She kept the postcard. Perhaps she wanted the poise of that long-necked figure bowing her head in a diamond coronet. Perhaps Josephine was an obvious role model for a gardener; otherwise she was not at all an obvious role model for Stephanie, who had no ambitions to be known as a woman who would have drunk gold out of her lover's skull. On the contrary, when people described her as a sweet woman she was well satisfied. She saw herself as a unexceptional, lucky to be married to the last good husband to be found in the wild, and ambitious only to raise a family. Which was more than the Empress Josephine had done for Napoleon, for all her
Souvenir de la Malmaison.

The first ladybird opened its bright wing cases and took flight. One after another its companions followed, soaring away down the border, spurning the feast before them for the freedom of the air. Stephanie shook her head and strode over to the garage for the malathion spray. The aphids would die and to hell with the environment. It was 6.24 am. She was doing morning car pool.

Approaching the Lieberman house, Ted Parsons ran with the resolve of Jesse Owens at the 1938 Berlin Olympics. A triangle of sweat darkened the back of his vest, his feet in their battered Nikes pronated with a flourish. He ran his fingers through his hair in case it was sticking up instead of flowing aerodynamically off his temples.

Alder Reach was deserted. His footfalls echoed on the ground. Even the scratch of the dog's claws resounded in the still air; Moron was gamely keeping pace. Ted fixed a sportive gleam in his eyes and a relaxed half-smile on his lips. He was passing her house. The curtains upstairs were still closed. The bitch.

Topaz Lieberman bit the end of her pen. What were Stalin's aims in negotiating the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939? Did he believe that by allowing Hitler to occupy first the Sudetenland and then the rest of Czechoslovakia the Western Powers had bought off Germany, who would then turn her expansionist ambitions east? Should we infer from the secret part of the agreement relating to the division of Poland between the two powers that Stalin's intention was that the Nazis should invade that country and thus provoke Britain and France to abandon their policy of appeasement? What are the implications of the second secret clause in the pact restoring the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to the rule of the Soviets?

‘You know what?' At the far end of the living area, her sister ripped the laces from one of her boots.

‘Don't talk to me, Flora, I need an A for this essay.'

‘I just thought you'd like to know that That just ran down our street again.'

‘So?' Inside the mind of Joseph Stalin, Topaz was reluctant to be recalled to the life of her family.

‘So – third time this week. He's doing it on purpose, isn't he?'

‘Mum has a life too, you know. I mean, she is a woman.'

‘Yeah, but does she have to have a life with That?'

‘She doesn't even like him, she called him a sleazebag.'

‘That dog's going to die on him.'

‘The dog's obese. Animal companions should have regular exercise.'

‘People like That shouldn't be allowed to own an animal.' Flora glared after the figure on the street outside, sighed resentfully and began to rethread her boot laces.

In the marriage area of the house, the wind chimes, hung by their mother to ensnare any passing
chi
, clashed loudly. The youngest of the Lieberman girls backflipped into the eating area and landed in the splits. ‘Molly, for God's sake!' hissed her sisters, neither raising their big oval eyes from their tasks.

In the deferential daylight of Maple Grove, Allie Parsons looked into her dressing-room mirror. Ravening free radicals were destroying her dermis, her collagen was mutating, the studio lights were baking her complexion like pie crust. Stress! Red veins coming up on her chin, that was stress. And she was allergic – that black stuff puffing out under her eyes, yeast allergy. Crostini, for God's sake. Ted knew what bread did to her skin. God, he was proud enough of her career in public.

Did people still have dermabrasion? She grimaced. Six weeks of a scabby face – forget it. Come the end of the series she would restore her facade somehow. Possibly just the eyes. Or one of those laser lifts? Maybe the Channel would pay. But, if they paid, they'd have to know. Ted would pay, he owed her.

She clipped back her hair, ignoring the regrowth. On the dressing table among the pots and bottles and tubes and jars was a packet of suppositories. Allie Parsons extracted two, stabbed them with her nail scissors, squeezed, smeared the contents under each eye, followed with pink Vitamine-E enriched hydrating gel over the rest of her face, wiped her hands on her robe and reached for the vanity vits. Co-enzyme Q? DHEA? Super-C? All of them.

That little smart-ass who was standing in on the weather desk, having the nerve to put up a feature idea about some spa. She should just shut up and get the pollen count right for once. Kids died from asthma.
Family First
was a tight team, no room for attitude problems. Facial aerobics, lower lip over upper, repeat five times.

On the bridge which carried the 31 over the river a black limousine glided among the slow-moving lanes of commuter traffic, bringing Chester Pike back from the airport. Chester flew to St Louis twice a week. He took a laptop, but the truth was that now he had no need to sit crunching numbers every fallow minute. He had thrust through to the stratosphere, he was cruising. Guys like DeSouza could do the figures. Chester should have liked that but he did not; he felt passive, he felt out of control, he felt uneasy.

That morning he also felt nauseous. Sitting on the group board announcing a projected profit increase of only 3.9%, seeing twenty-nine guys and the two women look at him with eyes like ice-picks; that had been bad. Initiative fatigue, loss of focus, failure to control the process of market change – he felt the accusations wheeling over his head like buzzards. Plus, after the flight his knees were stiff, his shoes were pinching and someone had sandpapered his eyeballs.

He saw a jogger in the distance and thought of Ted Parsons. Great guy. Great instinct for land resources. And a great operator. Years the Oak Hill site had been rotting away in a swamp of lapsed titles, lost deeds, zoning regulations and God knows what else. Ted had just gone in there with a flame thrower.

The beauty of it was that it had just been sitting there under their eyes, a wasted piece of land in the armpit of the 31 and the 46. He remembered it from his first years in Westwick: an industrial blemish on a residential landscape, carbon-stained cooling towers of the old plant standing bleakly over the derelict admin building. The kids who smashed the windows, and sprayed graffiti on the walls must have come out from the city; Westwick kids did piano lessons and tennis squad for fun, not recreational vandalism.

The driver braked to an infinitesimal crawl to negotiate a lane closure for resurfacing. Chester grunted with irritation and checked his watch. In Singapore they'd have done the work at night and had the whole thing finished in a week. Every second of wasted time annoyed him, although he had nowhere to be for three hours.

One day the county, being head leaseholders of Oak Hill, had woken up and demolished the buildings, sold the rubble to an infill site in Birmingham and put up a razor-wire palisade. What remained now was a desert of stony earth, scattered with hub caps and rusting mattress spring, ragged banners of plastic blowing around the thistles. Plus a brand new lease and a royal flush of planning consents held by the Oak Hill Development Trust, directors Chester Pike, Edward J Parsons and A L DeSouza.

As his driver swung smoothly down the slip to the Broadway, Chester saw things as they would be two years down the line: a twenty-storey, mirror-faced high-rise, the low-rises including the Channel Ten studios with the blue and green logo on the roof, parking for ten thousand vehicles and there, right at the entrance to the Grove, the faux-alpine wood-effect eaves of the biggest Magno hypermarket in the country. Magno Oak Hill was going to be the most modern, most productive shopping environment in the entire continent. Strong location was the bedrock of Magno's corporate culture. They were brainstorming in St Louis right now. And next year Chester would sit with the group board at that never-ending black table and announce projected year-on profits of 300.9 per cent.

The car cruised down The Broadway and glided into Maple Grove. Chester belched disconsolately. He felt suffocated. The huge trees blocked the horizon, the little cutesey houses said little cutesey lives – the kind of place it was OK to live in during your first marriage. In his mind, Chester Pike was out of here. He was out of Westwick in a duplex on the river in town, out of the wife-and-kids life and in his own life. Two more years, that was all.

His electronic gates opened in welcome. His was the largest home in the neighbourhood, and the only one to have a name: Grove House, engraved in copperplate on brass, polished daily by the housekeeper. No longer feeling his pinching shoes, Chester let his vision carry him up to the bedroom, where his wife was half awake. He kissed her cheek, and when she flinched in surprise and asked, ‘Good trip?' he answered, ‘You betcha.'

Along the river, Ted Parsons took things slower. Plenty of time for stamina training on the home stretch. Waddling stiff-legged at his side, Moron looked up at his master with gratitude. The sun hung above the willow trees, a pale disc of light. A faint breeze drew the last wisp of mist off the water and shook the yellowed leaves of the trees. In the thin brightness of morning, looking back under the bridge towards Helford, an old church spire punctuated the curve of the river. Cut out the cars on the bridge and you had a village picture postcard.

He passed the houseboats, wondering how people actually lived in those things. At least a quarter of Ted's heart would have liked to know first hand, but he stifled it. At least half his heart was spellbound by the river at sunrise, and he ignored that also. It was all just romance, and, as his father had often warned him, romance is death to enterprise.

The brown water tossed the sunlight against the blistered black hull of the
Dawn Treader.
The yellow iris buds at the bankside swelled in the warmth. The ropes creaked as the hulk tugged at her mooring. In the upper berth of the second cabin, Sweetheart listened to the water and thought about the riverbank fairies. If they came out at night they must be going to bed now.

Sweetheart saw the queen of the riverbank fairies in a nightgown of all colours, like oil spreading on water. But it seemed likely that she wouldn't like the way nightdresses got up around your neck while you were sleeping. Sweetheart frowned. Pyjamas did not seem quite right for a queen. But if you were a queen you could have anything you wanted, anything at all. It was a problem.

Daddy would know. It would be very good to go into Daddy's cabin and get into the big bed and have him explain all this, but, since they had been on their own without Mummy, getting into the big bed was not allowed. Sweetheart sat up and scratched the back of her neck to stir up her brain and get an answer. Daddy was definitely still asleep, because you could hear a mouse think in the
Dawn Treader
and all she could hear was the water.

Maybe Daddy would change the big bed rule if she did something to make him happy. He was almost never happy these days. Sweetheart climbed out of her bunk and checked on her father. Then she went into the galley. She filled up the coffee machine and switched it on, peeled a banana and put it on a plate, found a clean glass and poured out some juice. Another problem: when Daddy smelled of wine in the morning he liked to have headache tablets with his juice, but they were in the cupboard with the special lock children could not open. Sweetheart scratched her neck again.

Daddy had fixed the cupboard up on the wall with a screwdriver.

The telephone was silent. Stephanie put the handset back on the console to make sure the batteries were charged. The red light was on, the thing was plugged in. It was 6.42, he had definitely said he would call at 6.00. Stewart had also said Kazakstan had almost no infrastructure, there were probably only twenty telephone lines, out of the whole state.

She heard her son coming downstairs. Max reacted when he could see that she was anxious. He would say nothing – her son did not waste words – but instead of noise and eagerness the five-year-old power pack would start running down and a resentful apathy would start stealing his good nature. She opened a cupboard, her mind still on the telephone. Maybe Crunchy Nut Cornflakes would distract Max. Maybe she'd have some too.

Halfway up Riverview Drive, Moron was lagging behind his master. The dog was wheezing miserably. Ted Parsons checked his watch: nearly seven, he'd done more than his time. They could slow up as soon as they passed the DeSouza house. ‘Good boy, Moron,' he encouraged the animal. ‘Good boy. Keep it up.' Moron was getting silvery about the muzzle. Ted was getting silvery about the temples. Adam DeSouza had gone grey at 28, but for a lawyer that was a plus.

Belinda DeSouza hugged her pillow with both her downy brown arms. Carlos Moya to serve against Becker. Championship point. At Flushing Meadow the crowd is silent in anticipation. Moya steps up to the line. His thighs strain against his white shorts. A lock of hair like a black ribbon ripples in the wind as he raises his racquet. The ball is in the air. Every cell of his body is dedicated to winning this point.