Getting Home (26 page)

‘I suppose I can.'

The remaining details of the pact were swiftly settled. The Carman twins were ordered down from the roof of the annexe, from where they had been throwing dried dog turds from the street at their companions, and made to wash their hands. Chalice Parsons was coaxed to her feet and given some tissues because she was crying. Max saw his lady love properly belted into his own infant seat. Stephanie drove them all away, stardust still tingling in her arteries from contact with the neighbourhood lust object who, she noticed, climbed into his small Toyota with a marked lack of energy, as if he had just had bad news.

Suddenly she had the feeling of looking down on herself from way up high, seeing a tiny woman with two minute scraps of humanity in her charge, unprotected on the surface of the earth, with a great wind gathering around them, about to blow them all away into the cosmos like motes of dust. In the hot Jeep she found herself shivering, gripping the steering wheel to stop her hands shaking. Stop it, she scolded her mind. You're just a blob of tissue in a bubble of skull, you count for nothing in the universe. These thoughts you're hounding me with are just sparks in a speck of jelly. Stop it. I'm not going to cry in front of the children, you won't make me.

Clara Funk was waiting for her when she arrived in New Farm Rise. ‘Mrs Sands, I'm so glad to see you.' Her gloved hand gripped Stephanie's forearm. ‘I need to ask your advice,' she confided. ‘This letter about the parking at Grove Parade.'

For once, Stephanie was grateful for the interruption. It terminated her desolate fantasies and her fear subsided. People said the Funks had met in Auschwitz, although that was not an enquiry easily made during the small talk of an Old Westwick Society meeting. Mrs Funk might now be an eccentric old woman but once she had been young and courageous, a woman who had survived the second Antichrist, who had triumphed over such unimaginable terrors that Stephanie's puny anxiety retreated in shame.

Willingly, she settled her in a chair and made tea in a glass with lemon as she knew Mrs Funk preferred. Her guest sat stiffly down, piling her shopping bags under the table, unwrapped her scarf, and began a litany on the subject of the parking regulations.

‘The last time they did this my husband was knocked down in the street and his leg broken,' she announced, looking suspiciously at the tea as it was set before her. ‘Outside the church, too. Of course I understand the regulations are the regulations, but if they enforce them so strictly and make the cars go faster all that we get is more accidents. At our age it's a serious matter, a broken leg. It will never be better, not really. Three months it took to heal just enough so he could go out. It's ridiculous. Ridiculous and dangerous.'

Cautiously, she took a sip of the tea, pulled her deeply lined face into a mask of disgust, put down the glass and stirred in more sugar, the spoon tapping in her unsteady fingers. ‘You, Mrs Sands, you are so clever,' All the sparse bristles of her eyebrows agitated with the effort of making her appeal. ‘Won't you write a letter for me telling them there are better things the police can do with their time than take away people who are parking where people always park anyway?'

‘Of course I will. No trouble at all.' Mrs Funk's written English was eccentric and barely legible; thus tasks for the Secretary of the Old Westwick Society often came to roost with other members. ‘I've the template all set up from the last time we wrote to the police. Shall we write to the Transport and Planning people too?'

‘Certainly, why not?'

‘I'll do it this evening.'

‘Well, thank you.' Having attained her objective without struggle, Mrs Funk was temporarily lost for a topic and went on stirring with her spoon, her yellowed eyes testing curiously on the children slumped in a carbohydrate stupor in the playroom. After a few moments Mrs Funk gathered her thoughts again and demanded, ‘You know, of course, why they are doing this?'

‘Aren't they always having blitzes on parking?'

‘There is always something behind these things.'

‘Do you think there's something behind it? I think they're just obsessive about parking because its the only problem the police have got round here and they've got to keep their offences quota up.' There were benefits to active membership of the Old Westwick Society, including the opportunity to discover from the area inspector that the Helford station had the lowest arrest and highest offence clear-up rates in the entire conurbation.

‘Of
that
I would not be so sure, either, dear Mrs Sands.' Mrs Funk swelled with delight in her knowledge of Westwick's undiscovered crimes and became alert at once. ‘They have all kinds of problems, let me tell you. Because the streets are clean doesn't mean nothing dirty's going on here, believe me, I know. No, why they are so excited with the traffic now is this Oak Hill business, don't you see? They will be bringing all kinds of heavy trucks down here, and the great big diggers and bulldozers, and they want everybody off the streets to let them through.'

‘But they haven't got permission for that, have they? I thought it was still stuck with the planning committee?'

‘No, it was granted last week. So there's nothing to stop them clearing the site and digging out for the foundations now. You see, I know how these things go. These big businesses, they don't take any account of little people like us. They spit on us. They think we're only crazy old women and stupid housewives, not worth their attention, not worth answering our letters. They just go right ahead, they
assume
they will get all the permission they need. There will be bulldozers coming down our Broadway any day now, you'll see.'

‘I don't think so, Mrs Funk. I do know a little about town planning laws, you know. They're pretty strict. When I was working in my husband's firm I had to comply with them all the time.' Reasonable, perhaps, to be paranoid if you really have been persecuted in your life, but all the same she had a policy of not indulging Mrs Funk's complaints because too sympathetic an ear only inflamed the old lady more.

‘We shall see,' was Mrs Funk's reply, complacent and not offended, for she was quite accustomed to these strategies for switching her off. ‘This is the beginning. We shall see.'

‘I'll write those letters this evening,' Stephanie promised as she bustled away to the playroom under the cover of motherhood.

In the long emptiness of the evening, after the disturbing Rod Fuller had collected his daughter and Max had gone obediently to bed, Stephanie composed the letter, and for good measure reviewed the Oak Hill saga in the minutes of the Old Westwick Society's meetings for the past two years.

The plans, she knew because she had been deputed to verify the fact, had been correctly submitted. Only three civic groups had lodged objections – themselves, the Green Party and the Westwick Nature Triangle. Not a formidable alliance, especially since the Triangle group was a conspiracy of anoraks forever locked in violent internecine conflict who could agree on nothing except that they needed a grant to improve disabled access to their rank little tract.

Stephanie considered that, were she herself in the position of sitting on the Planning Committee, she would probably approve the plans. After all, Stewart had been very positive about designing the development until he changed his mind and decided it was too big for their firm. She could not share the passion of Clara Funk and Jemima Thorogood against Oak Hill. In the irritating manner of the elderly, they were opposing change for the sake of it.

She sighed at the prospect of conflict to come, the hours of Mrs Funk's rambling oratory, the inevitable deputation of two irony-free officials from the Greens and a vociferous delegate from the Nature Triangle spouting statistics about the red ghost moth. Perhaps Stewart was right, perhaps it was time for her to let Westwick look after itself.

At 2 am, sedated by civic concern, she went to bed and slept well.

‘Now most of us think that a holiday is all about fun in the sun and unwinding away from all the stresses of modern living,' Allie burbled to the camera. ‘But a recent survey of holidaymakers revealed that four couples in ten admit they have worse fights on holiday than they do the rest of the year, and over fifty per cent said they found travelling very stressful. So since this is the last show before the summer holidays, we've invited a couples'counsellor along to the studio to tell us what we can do to make sure that the family who holidays together stays together afterwards …'

In the suffocating canicular doldrums of the year, Westwick was abandoned to plant life. The spikes on the horse chestnuts at the end of Orchard Close swelled viciously while their leaves showed rusty streaks. A Russian vine seethed over the DeSouzas'garage. The lawns scorched and thundery breezes blew dust into eddies at the street corners. A tomb-like quiet settled on the empty houses, where security lights switched themselves on and off, burglar alarms winked in empty rooms, cars rested silently in their garages. Sirius, the Dog Star, sparkled over the river by night and in the empty wind the dried sedges hissed along the banks.

The families of Westwick had their own methods of defence against the menace of intimacy in a strange place. Off Sag Harbor, Chester Pike went fishing all day, every day, while Lauren read Melanie Klein and the nanny took Felix and his siblings to the beach. In Tel Aviv, it was Josh Carman who took the boys to the beach while Rachel stayed in bed with a gastric virus. In Wyoming, Belinda DeSouza buzzed around her investment annoying the workmen carrying out low-season refurbishment while Adam sat indoors with the windows closed because of the flies and worked through the case of papers he took with him.

On Venice Lido, Ted Parsons ate an entire
Fantasia Tre Cioccolati
with three flavours of ice cream, strawberries, cream, amaretto, almond flakes, chocolate curls, praline wafers and raspberry sauce to show Chalice and Cherish that real Italian ice cream did not cause immediate death from obesity, but they drank Diet Coke and refused to eat. He splashed in the waves mewing like Flipper to show them that the sea was lovely and cool and wavy, but they would only dip their legs suspiciously in the pool. He explained to them the special beauty of a city which had grown up organically, a city through which the wealth of half the world had passed, a city with no cars, but they complained about walking and said the palazzos were dirty. He took them into St Mark's at sunset to see the rosy rays shimmering on the gold mosaic vaults of the roof but they said it was dark and scary and Chalice sat up in her bed all night gibbering hysterically, chewing the sheet and saying she wanted to go home.

Allie Parsons stayed to make a pilot for a new late-night talk show and series of staff training videos for Magno then went to the Edinburgh International Television Festival where The Boss was giving a lecture on Programming the Digital Revolution. The Boss chose to share a bed with a druggy-looking woman from a new youth channel who wore black leather trousers fastened with thongs. Allie stuck her nose in the air and tripped briskly between the conference rooms; her courage, as she saw it, was repaid by the earnest attention of a twenty-eight-year-old film school graduate from Western Australia who was trying to finance his script about Jesus the feminist.

Although he was far from being in the mood for hedonism, Rod Fuller forced himself to honour his contract to spend week at a Club Med resort in Turkey. In the morning, while Sweetheart snorkelled, he took a yoga class in an air-conditioned pavilion on a cliff overlooking the sea; in the afternoon they slept; in the evening, while Sweetheart made shell necklaces, he took an unchallenging aerobics class on the beach. In the night he tried to stay away from the women, and very nearly succeeded until the day before he left, when a wily Brazilian colleague poured zombies down his throat until he agreed to let her verify his claim that he was incapable of getting an erection. She blamed the rum. They both reckoned this chivalrous and parted friends.

Stephanie's stepfather decided she needed a holiday.

‘Don't you think she's kind of losing that bloom she used to have?' he ventured to his wife.

‘Youth doesn't last forever,' Stephanie's mother returned amiably.

‘She worries all the time,' he insisted. ‘It's only natural in her situation. But she looks kind-of pinched in the face. The light's gone out in her eyes. She should get away.'

‘I'm sure she'll take a holiday if she wants to. She seems to be making plenty of money,' the mother insisted, seeing how the land was lying.

‘She can't go off and sit on a beach with Max all by herself,' her husband persisted, assuming that simple obtuseness was all that ailed his wife.

‘Maybe one of her friends will think of asking her.'

‘We should ask her to come away with us,' he said finally.

‘If you like, dear,' was the answer. And so Stephanie and Max were invited to join the couple on their annual golf excursion, scheduled for their benefit at a family-oriented resort in Portugal.

Two days before departure Stephanie was offered her first commercial contract for years. ‘I don't know what to do,' she wailed down the phone.

‘Max can come with us,' her mother suggested patiently, ‘and you can stay home and get on with your … work.' The accusatory pause. You seem to think this work stuff is so important.

‘We won't
have
a home if I can't make enough money,' Stephanie pleaded. She heard her mother sigh.

‘I can't believe Stewart left you in this position,' she said, muting the words a little to indicate that her daughter could ignore them if she wanted, but Stephanie was getting a taste for combat.

‘What do you mean, Stewart left us?' she demanded.

‘Nothing, dear. Just a form of words. People of my generation believe a husband ought to provide for his family.'