Getting Home (29 page)

She darted inside like a bright parrot, still wearing the searing pink suit in which she had presented her show that morning. The greasy smell of her make-up was the first alien scent in the house. At once Stephanie felt useless; she was a head taller than Allie and twenty pounds heavier. They had no vase for the roses or glasses for the champagne; their possessions were sealed in crates all around her. She took Max while Stewart washed out the plastic cups she had packed for baby juice and popped the cork.

‘It will be so, so good to have you as a neighbour.' Allie skipped up on a crate and sat on the end of the worktop, crossing the legs of which Channel Ten's publicist said a million men dreamed each day. ‘Maybe we should do a new home feature – what do you think? So much social mobility these days, people relocating and stuff. We could film right here.' Stephanie did not realise she was shaking her head. ‘Oh! I forgot, you hate all this media stuff, you're so, so shy. I am so insensitive, Steph, can you forgive me? Of course you must be rushed off your feet. And the baby, he must keep you busy too. Never mind, we can do something another year. You must come over, meet some more neighbours. It's lovely having you so close to us now. Darling, do forgive me, I gotta run now …' And she jumped to the floor and was clattering down the front path to her car.

‘Just think – two years ago we knew nothing at all about daytime TV.' Stewart watched the car pull away, a pink sleeve waving through the window.

‘And we thought people who did were just sad.'

‘And then Allie Parsons came back into your life and we changed our minds. And now we're her neighbours and we owe her this, really, don't we?' With a sweeping arm, he indicated the huge space awaiting transformation at their hands. ‘If she hadn't given us the tip that they were knocking the price down we'd never have looked at it. I'd never have believed we could afford to live in Westwick.'

‘You negotiated them down. God, I was proud of you.'

‘She told us they'd sell for less – I pretty much knew what we could get it for.'

Stephanie heard Max and Sweetheart shrieking joyfully outside and felt her own mood all the more leaden. Happiness was like water, it just slipped through your fingers, it had no substance. When it disappeared, there was nothing left, not even the memory.

‘Mistur Parsons, you come arround to Sun Wharf today? Somzin' you might want to see.'

‘What is it, Yuris?' Ted did not want to go to the Sun Wharf site, where Yuris and the Lithuanians were doing some architectural salvage. He wanted to stay out at Oak Hill: the contractors there were new and he needed to spend time with them, bringing them up to speed. Yuris had been his best foreman for the past ten years and could be trusted to get a job done well and on time with no trouble and no more than one site visit from Ted each week. Besides, Ted liked watching the diggers. And Sun Wharf, on the east of the city, was almost three hours away.

‘We make start on second building this morning and is not what we zink.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Different building behind front wall. Some kinda t'eatre or zomzin'.'

‘Theatre?'

‘Thaz right. You need see it, Mistur Parsons.'

‘Yup,' he agreed, startled, ‘I'm on my way.'

Three and a half hours later – the cause of the delay was a double trailer bringing ready-baked potatoes to Magno. Helford which jackknifed and rolled over blocking all three lanes just after the Acorn Junction – Ted stood on a pile of rubble in Sun Wharf Lane and saw for himself.

The site had been a factory, at different times dedicated to bottling brandy and stitching mink skins but most recently in use as a sweatshop where two hundred Bengali women and children had sewn trousers day and night. After a pincer movement of the Immigration and Public Health authorities had closed the operation down the building had stood empty for years, the filthy windows boarded over and the roofs sagging and shedding their slates.

The inspector who had condemned the building after the raid gave the tip to Ted, and Tudor Estates bought the site for peanuts when the regeneration of the old docks was just something smart architects talked about and the concept of a brown-field site had not yet been named. Ted never had any intention of developing it himself. The cost of gutting and renovating an old building, the endless bureaucratic hassles, and the volatility of the market for dockland properties did not charm him. He bought the site to sell on when the market rose. That time was now at hand, and the cash would be better invested in Oak Hill.

Cleared sites sold best, but before demolition he put in a gang to strip ironwork and window shutters, collect the old slates and chisel out the corbels, cornices and fireplaces to sell on to an architectural salvage yard. Financially, the operation barely washed its own face but it put him in good standing with the planning authorities, and besides, he felt better about razing a building when he had first honoured the original craftsmen by saving their work.

Ugly, featureless and begrimed, from the outside Sun Wharf looked like three utilitarian brick boxes jammed together, the biggest in the middle. Yesterday, the gang reported that there was almost nothing worth saving except a few floorboards. Today, they had knocked their way into the central building through a bricked-up doorway and found a broad stone staircase leading below ground level.

‘Come,' Yuris suggested, respectfully watching Ted to see he did not trip over the fallen laths from the ceiling. ‘Firrst, look here,' and he turned his torch to the walls, lighting up what seemed to be a picture.

One of the men stepped forward with a broom and very gently brushed away the dust and cobwebs, revealing a lifesize mosaic panel of a dark-haired woman in rosy draperies, encircled by lilies and curlicues. Her dimpled feet in fanciful sandals were level with Ted's face. The next panel was a pert girl in knickerbockers with a bicycle. Opposite her posed a busty beauty laced into a black corset, bending saucily over a cage of doves. The stairway was lined with Edwardian chorus girls.

‘I'm zinkin'how in hell do zis,' the foreman explained as he led onwards. ‘Mozaic. How take down. Zen we go on …' The plaster from the ceiling had crumbled, becoming a layer of powdery dust on every surface. The handrails were brass. The doors at the bottom of the stairs were mahogany with cut glass panels.

They passed through a wide room with a low ceiling and wooden counter down one side; the men's boots had trodden a track across the floor to another pair of doors. Ted stood in the middle of the auditorium, struck dumb by the visions in the beam of his flashlight.

Everything was as it had been when the last punter staggered cheerfully out into the night. Here and there crumpled playbills lay where they had been dropped. Beer mugs stood on the tables in the stalls, with chairs pushed back at all angles by the departing audience. A few sheets of music were still on a stand in the pit, the pages bearing alterations scratched in uneven ink. A mop rested in a bucket in a corner. There was so much animation in these objects, which had lain as they were posed for eighty, perhaps a hundred, years, that it seemed as if the gaslights might glow to life at any moment, and a ghostly audience of sailors and longshoremen suddenly push through the doors and take their seats.

Walking tentatively forward in the darkness, Ted discovered that this had been a pocket playhouse, seating barely a hundred revellers, mostly in boxes in the higher tiers with plaster nymphs holding floriform gaslights to divide them. A shred of a curtain hung from the gilded proscenium. The boards where the players had their hour had rotted and fallen in.

‘Strange,' the foreman commented, shooting Ted a sideways glance. ‘I don't know what to do. I zink nobody knows this here.'

‘It's dry.' Ted shone his torch up at the ceiling, again finding holes in the plaster but only blackness above. ‘That's why everything's so perfect. There's two floors of building above us. Foundations must be dry. Water never got in.' The men of his salvage gang moved tentatively about, one of them finding an old briar pipe discarded on the lip of a stage box.

‘You zee what I mean?' Yuris asked with anxiety. ‘Eez perfeck. Perfeck. How take down, where we start …'

The romance of the find had its fangs in Ted's neck. His phone peeped and he turned it off. He passed through the secret door from front to back of the house and scrambled about backstage, finding rotting ropes and faded scenery, old machinery unrusted, greased and capable of working, an empty willow skip which fell to dry twigs at his touch.

The advantage to the developer in building a theatre was not obvious, unless perhaps such properties went for better prices at the beginning of the century. ‘Why build underground?' he asked himself, and took the stairs again to pursue the mystery outside. The beauty with the doves, with her deep bosom and strong flanks, put him in mind of Gemma. In another way, the dormant vitality of the entire find seemed to speak of her, but he dismissed the notion.

‘I neverr zink …' Yuris began, following eagerly.

‘No more did I. God damn, I've owned this for years. I had no idea, none at all.' He had never surveyed the site properly, always intending to keep it only until it was worth selling.

Blinking in the light, he saw that the ugly street elevation was false, thrown up in front of the arched music-hall facade, with iron stairs from side doors leading to the workshops above. At the wharf side, where the land approached the river, it fell away sharply. Probably here the water had carved a bed for itself thousands of years beforehand. The neighbouring buildings had extra half-floors on the wharf side. His investment probably occupied an area where the slope was wide enough to embrace the auditorium.

Yuris followed him patiently while the rest of the crew sat down around their pick-up and smoked, waiting for his decision.

‘Don't touch it,' Ted instructed them, and saw their hard, closed faces break up with pleasure. ‘I'm going to get a few more people to see this. Board up the door for now and leave everything just as it is. Make a start on the other side, get some flooring there if you can. I'll be back.'

‘Mrs Sands? Is this Mrs Sands?' Her heart jumping like a landed fish, Stephanie crushed the phone into her ear as she pulled into the slow lane of the 31 westbound.

‘Miss Helens?' Something had happened to Max. There could only ever be one reason for a call from the teacher at 11 am. ‘What's the matter? What's happened?'

‘Hopefully it's not too serious, Mrs Sands …'
Hopefully?
Then it was serious. Watch the road, watch the road. She stood on the brakes in time to avoid running into the back of an old Nissan crammed with people.

‘What's happened?' she demanded, furious with the woman for prevaricating.

‘He had a fall, Mrs Sands. Off the climbing frame. Of course, since we had the shock-absorbant surface put down it isn't nearly so hard—'

‘
What happened?
‘

‘But he has hurt his arm quite badly so one of the juniors has taken him to Helford hospital.'

‘Right.' Stephanie pulled out to the fast lane, wishing she had a hand free to let the hooting truck driver along side her know what she thought of his impatience. ‘I'm on my way.'

The speed control camera flashed as she tore up to Acorn Junction. There was no turn-off before then. She roared back eastwards calling in to her client to cancel their meeting, threw the Cherokee down the slip into Helford, hurtled along North Broadway to the hospital, wedged it into the last space in the car park, sprinted a quarter of a mile back to the building, found the emergency entrance and arrived breathless at the desk.

‘Max Sands,' she gasped. ‘Boy of five, fell off a climbing frame, hurt his arm?'

With maddening slowness the clerk put menus up on her screen. ‘Ah,' she said, pointing with her ballpoint as if Stephanie could see. ‘Should be up in X-ray by now. Take a seat, will you?'

‘Can't I go up and find him?'

‘You'll get lost. Just take a seat.'

‘But how long—'

‘We're very busy. He was lucky to have seen the nurse already.'

‘One of his teachers is with him – they must need her back at the school.'

With a bad grace, the clerk leaned towards the security glass and indicated a sign halfway down the corridor. ‘Go up to the fifth floor, turn left. There are more signs up there.'

In the X-ray department she found Max watching with interest through an open door as five nurses tried to hold a drunk homeless man down on the table. The nursery assistant who sat beside him snapped out of her coma of boredom as Stephanie approached and got to her feet.

‘I'm so sorry,' she whispered, obviously intending that Max should not hear. ‘I didn't see it. He's been awfully brave but I think something must be broken.'

‘All right,' Stephanie murmured, wondering why she was reassuring the girl instead of the other way round. ‘I'm here now. I'll take over. Hi, darling …'

‘Mum.' Max acknowledged her with the face that hoped she was not going to make a fuss.

‘Does it hurt?' she asked. The arm, the left arm, was packed in a plastic splint which he was holding carefully against his chest with his other hand.

‘Not much,' was the stolid reply. She ruffled his hair and he flinched away.

After the tramp was finally strapped to the table and dealt with, the nurses called in a patient in a neck brace on a trolley, a young man knocked off his motorcycle. Next came an old woman in a wheelchair, hit on a pedestrian crossing. Max's turn came after seventy-seven minutes.

Back in the emergency waiting area another hour slipped by. Stephanie went to the pay phone, cancelled her afternoon appointments and warned Inmaculada that the house might be empty when she got there.

Back on the ward, there was no sign of Max. The clerk reluctantly verified that he was with the doctor, and even more reluctantly pointed out the curtained cubicle.