Getting Home (27 page)

‘Like my father did, I suppose?'

‘Don't be spiteful, Stephanie. You were never spiteful.'

‘Maybe I'm a late developer,' her daughter suggested crisply. It was the first time her internal voice spoke aloud.

‘Daddy will be home when I get back,' Max said as she drove him over to her mother's house. It wasn't a question, but her son had a way of asking for what he wanted by making these sudden statements.

‘I hope he will, darling,' she answered carefully, ‘but there's no way of knowing. He's still kidnapped. And you're only going to be away a week, you know. Even if they set him free tomorrow it could take him almost that long to get home to us.'

‘Kidnapped.' She heard him, on the back seat, kick his feet with anger. ‘Are people rescuing him?'

‘They're negotiating. It means talking to the people who've captured him. When people kidnap people it's because they want something, you see. So to get Daddy back, we have to find out what the people want. Or the negotiators have to do that.'

‘They should hurry up. Then Daddy could come on holiday.'

The first two days without her son were like days without a vital organ; the shock knocked a hole in her short-term memory and she wasted precious minutes looking up the names of common shrubs she used all the time. The third day she stabilised, functioning but submerged in a cold depression. No husband, no son, no life except her own. And when that ends, this is how it will be. She wasted a morning crying.

‘How are you bearing up?' enquired Mr Capelli, calling from the Foreign Office.

‘I'm not,' she answered shortly.

‘Because it's been suggested that – ah – there might be some benefit in meeting up with other families who are – in – or – well – ah – going through the same thing. Same kind of thing.' His fluent confidence had gone, he was embarrassed. Weeping kinfolk were obviously outside his terms of reference. ‘And if – ah – you felt that was – ah – what you wanted to do, as it were, I could – ah – put you in touch.'

‘Yes,' she told him eagerly. ‘Yes. A support group, you mean. Are there that many of us?'

‘Not so many,' he was conscious of the need for discretion. ‘Six or seven, maybe. But one of the cases handled by a colleague here has made this suggestion. Lady whose husband – ah, partner – is being held in the Middle East. If you like I'd be only too happy …'

‘Yes. Give her my phone number, please.'

Other people lived in this limbo also. It was a burden, a great weight of loneliness and fear crushing her spirit. The idea of sharing it was a comfort. She turned up the radio and began a new job. The silent house was so threatening that she had closed the doors to empty rooms and liked the radio playing loud enough to be heard everywhere. Sometimes she had to leave the radio on all night.

Topaz Lieberman went to a Youth for Democracy Summer School even though it was a known CIA front and democracy was really the least efficient form of government. Flora Lieberman went to a martial arts summer camp. Molly Lieberman went to Hungary with the county junior gymnastic display team. At the Gaia Garden Centre, Gemma Lieberman hosed down the conservatory then lounged behind her mountainous desk rationalising that there was no point watering the stock outside since the mints grew whatever she did, and what-ever she did nothing else would grow at all.

Gemma also hated a quiet house. On the evening of the first day when all three of her daughters were about their business, Gemma saw Stephanie disconsolately browsing the organic vegetable counter at the Helford Magno. She looked out of focus. Even in old shorts and a blue chambray shirt the woman was a pretty dresser in the trim, modest style of young mothers in French baby-wear ads, but today there was something disarrayed about her. Gemma decided to approach.

‘So howyadoin?' Stephanie blinked in surprise. ‘Remember me, the madwoman you bought the Corsican mints from?' Her thick hair was braided for coolness, and tied with black silk cord. It hung down over one shoulder, tangling with the buttons on her loose orange dress. There was a lot of movement in the dress; if she was wearing a bra, it was not up to the job of keeping her breasts still.

‘Gemma,' Stephanie confirmed, coming back to earth from the misty grey planet Miserable, where she seemed to spend all the time that wasn't given to work. ‘At Gaia. Of course. You saved us with those mints. Hello.'

‘Howareya?' Gemma disregarded the flicker of guilt in the other woman's face and picked up a pack of oyster mushrooms. ‘Do you eat these things? What are they like?'

‘They're … pointless, I think.'

‘No taste, no texture, why bother, huh?'

‘I think people have them for stir-fries.'

‘No taste, no texture but no real cooking necessary, is that it?'

‘Pretty much.'

‘Mints take all right?'

‘They must have done, the clients haven't complained.'

‘I hope they've got someone to water them if they're away.'

‘No need, I put a watering system in the design scheme. Automatic. On a timer. Always do it – you have to have automated sprinklers. Even if they take out a maintenance contract with the boys who work for me they never remember the watering.'

‘I never understand how people can do that. I mean, why invite a plant into your life and then kill it? You have something in your life, you give it what it needs, right? I mean, it's only water. Pretty basic.'

‘And it has to be a timer with a year calendar. They can't handle setting it month-by-month.'

‘People are weird, aren't they?'

Companionably, they walked over to the fruit. ‘These are so cheap,' Gemma marvelled, weighing a Guatemalan melon in her hand. It was chilled and had no scent. ‘What did they pay the guys who picked them?'

‘I know.' In her state of deepened melancholy, Stephanie was so tender-hearted that the world's injustices ate at her spirit like ulcers. ‘I wish they wouldn't label the apples,' she remarked, picking up a ball-shaped red cellulose growth with a sticker reading ‘Gala'. ‘It's like they're just products.'

‘There's no fun in shopping when you're on your own, is there?' Gemma rolled the melon back into the display.

This was not a Westwick conversation. Westwick conversations were as light as the thistledown which drifted over in the summer air from the Oak Hill Nature Triangle. Westwick conversations were as free of content as a fat-free yoghurt is free of fat. Actually, more so. Westwick conversations would no more court an issue than a Westwick child would ride in a car without a seatbelt. In Stephanie's increasingly robust opinion. Westwick conversations were not worthy of the name. She found herself breathing easier.

They drifted on to Magno's café, which attempted, with a blue and white plastic awning over the steel counter and plastic palm trees stuck on the tiled walls, to convince the supermarket's clientele that the store was as warm, human, entertaining, varied and nutritiously enticing as a Mediterranean street market.

‘You're not going away, then?' Gemma blew on her coffee; they both took it black rather than get involved with non-dairy whitener.

‘I don't like to. I keep thinking – suppose I wasn't here when there was some news of my husband?'

‘They'd find you.'

‘I suppose – I don't like to take the chance, you know? And I need to keep working. I mean, thank God I can. His firm – well partnership, he's an architect – isn't insured to pay his salary for ever. I've got to be a bread winner now.'

‘Tough, huh?'

‘Mmn.'

‘Tell me about it. I like your hair, by the way. It suits you.'

‘Thank you.' Stephanie ran her hand over the nape of her neck, still not used to feeling bare skin. She found she wanted to ask why this woman's husband was in jail. The question was welling up like molten lava, not to be resisted. ‘Why—' she began.

‘He imported a foreign car without a licence,' interrupted the other, confidentially narrowing one eye. ‘Actually, quite a few of 'em. It was his business but he bent the rules because he was crazy. So what he's really in jail for is being mad. Oh, excuse me, I shouldn't say that. Mad people have their rights too. Sanity challenged, maybe. Manic depressive, it used to be. Now its bi-polar syndrome. Molly was what tipped him over the edge, after she was born he made our lives living hell, which is not actually a crime. So in the end, I found out what he
could
be charged with, and turned him in. Now his parents don't speak to me because I made their son a lunatic and my parents don't speak to me because I made the girls'father a jailbird. But we get by.'

‘My father was in jail,' Stephanie looked into the dregs of her coffee, realising that she had confessed this to no one since the something-to-declare conversation she had with Stewart after they decided to get married. ‘We got by. I can see now, it was very hard on my mother: But for my sister and me, it was just a blessing to have a quiet normal life.'

‘How is it with what happened to your husband and stuff?' For once it seemed a natural question.

‘Hell. It's so frustrating, there's nothing I can do. Nothing anyone can do. I think I'm going mad, sometimes. This morning the guy from the Foreign Office said there was going to be a support group of people like me and did I want my name put forward.'

‘There are that many people?'

‘Seems so. So I said yes.'

‘Good.'

They were silent for a little while. Stephanie slipped her feet half out of her white summer loafers and felt relaxed for the first time in months.

Gemma finished her coffee. She sensed something, the
chi
flipping about like a fish, sending destiny off in a new direction. ‘Look,' she proposed, ‘dya wanna go down the Wilde At Heart and do some serious bitching?' Groye Parade faced St Nicholas's Church across the corner of The Broadway and Church Vale. Here the municipality had been induced to recreate a theme park market square, with old shop fronts glowing under their preservation orders around a red granite horse trough now planted with begonias.

Among these little emporia, the Kwality Korner Store stood out by its lack of pretension. The rest of the shops, battered as their margins were by soaring rents, redoubling taxes, merciless parking restrictions and the relentless competition of Magno Supermarkets, turned bright-painted faces to the world and offered such luxury goods as Magno customers did not buy in big enough quantities to make their supply economically viable.

Gemma and Stephanie took an outside table at the Wilde At Heart and indulged themselves with white wine and salads. The long afternoon sun sparkled in the bottle-glass panes of Parsley & Thyme's bow window. The boy from Catchpole & Forge was sweeping up the day's sawdust. The window designer of Bon Ton slipped a Max Mara beige silk shirtwaist over the single display dummy and complemented it with a pair of pale python slingbacks. In Bundle's Baby Boutique, the assistant, her mouth full of pins, finished a window display of sunsuits and swimming costumes.

Outside Pot Pourri, Marcia the owner topped up the water of her stocks and sunflowers and her spaniel, Bedlam, lay on the hot pavement panting. Pot Pourri had taken to staying open in the evening, hoping to make some guilt money from commuting husbands returning late from the office. The bank of bouquets, displayed in rustic baskets outside the period shopfront, led one to expect Eliza Doolittle at any moment.

They exchanged fears and wishes and life-stories. They talked luxuriously about their children. They discussed hybridisation of fashionable plants and deplored it. They discovered that they both knew Rod Fuller, and Gemma told Stephanie the true story of his wife's death but did not open the topic of his drinking since the accident. They agreed that Sweetheart was the most adorable child in Westwick after their own and put this down to her Irish-Chinese-Anglo-Saxon heritage plus good parenting.

They finished their salads and, in holiday mood, ordered ice cream. The senior negotiator at Grove Estates put in the window the details of a new six-bedroom, five-bathroom immaculate family home in Cedar Close. People almost never bought homes from Grove Estates and this woman was the reason. She was small and thin with a pinched face which seemed on the point of creasing up with quiet weeping; she looked like a woman whose husband had just left her, and people came to Westwick for substance and space, stability and happy families. Greenwoods on the Broadway did three times as much business as Grove Estates, although their negotiators were almost caricatures of their profession, vulpine young men in striped shirts, mobile phones welded to their ears.

‘This isn't just have-ovaries-will-talk, is it?' Gemma suggested. ‘This is a moment. Something will come of this.' Stephanie opened her mouth to say she had to get back to work, then changed her mind and said nothing.

‘You see, I have this theory about mothers,' Gemma continued, putting her feet up on an empty chair. ‘That every now and then when two mothers are gathered together a moment comes along, and they have to say – yes. We will have this. This is for us. Not for our children, or our husbands, or our families, or society, or God, or the highest good – we have no excuse for this, this is for us and we are going to have it, just because we want it.'

‘Good theory, I like it,' Stephanie affirmed, surprised that now she was not even wondering what she might be getting into here sharing the deepest, darkest and dirkest with this voluptuously undisciplined female whom the rest of Westwick shunned.

‘What a moment is is an oxygen mask.' She pulled out the cord that tied her hair and dangled it from her upstretched arm, copying the air-crew cabaret. ‘Just when you're gasping for life with the trivia and the banality and the socks and the pants and the schoolbooks and the total endless utter responsibility for everything, it comes tumbling down from the sky and you can breathe again.'