Getting Home (32 page)

‘Money, that's what this is about,' Stephanie declared, wondering if she was going to become as bitter as Gemma before long. ‘The cheque was on her desk. Josh Carman just bought her off. Stewart would never have let them get away with it. He's got this way of just standing there being decent and people don't pull strokes on him. God, I wish he was here.'

‘Believe me, Stephanie, if Stewart was here you wouldn't be having this hassle. They're picking on you because you're a woman without a man, and Max is a child without a father. So they think they can get away with it, all of them, even Miss Helens.' Gemma sat heavily back in her chair; it creaked with her weight. ‘It's primitive. You've got no male to fight for you, so you're automatically a victim. That's what this is about.'

‘But that's just animal,' Rod protested, thinking that Ms Arty T-shirt, with her soft, soft eyes and her long, long legs, did indeed at times have the air of a nubile doe antelope at the water-hole.

‘Yes it is,' Gemma confirmed, picking up the coffee and beginning to pour. ‘Nice, clean, leafy Westwick, exclusive Maple Grove – bullshit. It's a jungle out there. I bet you've had half your friend's husbands slavering round your door already. Go on – deny it if you can.'

Stephanie coloured and shook her head. ‘How did you know?'

‘Because the same thing happens to every single woman in a suburb. The husbands wheel around like vultures, the wives treat you like a pariah dog, like it was your fault their sex lives are so lousy the guys are permanently in rut. Excuse me, every single person. This is an equal opportunity phenomenon. Rod gets hit on just the same.' And she got up and went to open another bottle of wine, reckoning the occasion demanded it.

‘Go on, tell about Allie Parsons.'

‘There's nothing to tell,' he asserted, a shadow of disgust clouding his fine, broad forehead. ‘I've been training her, if you can call it that, almost five months now and she never lets up. If they made steel shorts I'd wear'em. She's even offered to fix me a job on her show.'

‘Meanwhile, I'm getting harassment off the husband.' The cork, popped indignantly and Gemma brought the bottle to the table. ‘He gives me this fantastic contract supplying decor plants for his office and then it's a dozen oysters for lunch, the sticky paw on my leg and the big smooch in the taxi.'

‘He's so pathetic, Ted.' Stephanie didn't realise she was smiling. In her grey mood, she had accepted a degree of responsibility for the pass in the garden; it was a relief to discover she had not been the only woman to arouse lust in Ted Parsons ‘ despised loins.

‘You too, huh?' Gemma refilled her glass. ‘Yeah, he is pathetic. I can feel sorry for him if I let myself get that soft. Married to the witch-queen. Aren't those kids tragic? She should be prosecuted for child abuse, she really should. And spouse abuse. And they're always in the gossip magazines. “Allie Parsons of
Family First
with her lovely husband and her lovely family in their lovely home in Westwick …” Not that I read gossip magazines, of course.'

‘Of course you don't.'

‘Did we say you did? You just see them at the hairdresser, that's all.'

‘Topaz brings them home for me from Magno. This is what my daughter thinks of me.'

It was after midnight when Stephanie unsteadily extracted her sleeping son from the back of the Cherokee in New Farm Rise, struggled upstairs carrying him and slid him into bed without waking him. The bruise on his back was now showing its full colours. Soon he was going to be too heavy for her to manage. Stewart was stronger, of course, but Stewart was gone.

She went downstairs and drank some water, feeling helpless. Stephanie never took her good life for granted. She was always conscious of what she had left behind: shame, anxiety, being poor, and guilty pretence, the companions of her own childhood. Stewart had been her passport to safety. Now the passport had been revoked, she was being stripped of her privileges and pushed down again to raise her own child in the appropriate condition of misery. They weren't good enough to live good lives, not good enough for Westwick. She could leave, or she could stay. Staying meant she'd have to tough it out, work her ass off without getting paid for it, fight everybody when they picked on Max and the only joy would be a bitch session round at Gemma's place. No choice, really.

She walked around the house, enjoying the quiet and the order, feeling the emptiness. There was a fat moon shining and no blinds were drawn. Moonlight silvered the lawn and cast deep shadows behind their furniture. It's just a house, she told herself. Just a shell. Someone else can live here. I want someone to take care of us. I
need
someone to take care of us, I can't do it by myself. I'll call my mother in the morning.

‘Chester?'

‘Ted.' Like a toad gulping a fly, the BSD swallowed down the name, as if he were expecting the call, which paranoided Ted somewhat, because he had been counting surprise among his weapons. In the background the roar of the 31 could be heard above the crackle of the line; Chester was on his way to the airport.

‘Chester, I need a meeting. ASAP. About the Sun Wharf sale.'

‘I thought that was going through.'

‘I think it would pay us to take a different approach.'

‘How so?'

‘It's complex. That's why I need a meeting.'

‘Call my office.'

In the normal way, Chester's office ran his diary and his schedule was set in stone. Since Ted was asking to override the BSD's preordained course it was necessary to get Chester to call his office and sanction an emergency reschedule. Then Ted's PA – he employed only one – could call Chester's junior PA, one of two, and fix things so that Ted and Adam could walk over to Grove House at 8 pm on Friday evening.

Satisfied, Ted cut off, spoke to his secretary, then, with a glorious shudder of guilt, keyed in the next number on his list. ‘Is this the City Theatre Museum? Do you have a conservation department? A conservation officer? Excellent! Let me speak to her.'

Four hours later he was again feeling his way down the dusty steps of the underground theatre, playing his torch over the coy chorus girls on the walls. ‘This is just the beginning,' he promised the museum official, a round-eyed woman with a choirboy haircut, deliciously receptive to Ted in the role of the prodigal plutocrat seduced from the path of profit by this cultural treasure trove.

‘A-m-m-m-m-azing. This is just a-m-m-azing.' She was stammering with excitement. Ted found himself pretty excited also, in the fine, clean, buccaneering way he had not felt for years. Not felt, in fact, since he bought his first property in Westwick. But there was an added sizzle now, a spin on the deal, because instead of crassly cutting through the regulations which might obstruct him he had turned the process on its head. What he was about to do, with the innocent connivance of this dear woman who devoted her life to the extracting of the lingering smell of greasepaint from crates of ephemera and memorabilia and sweat-rotted costumes, was get the regulations to work for him. Doing wrong and doing right at the same time! Whichever way you sliced it! The Jesuitical sophistication of the whole thing charmed him utterly.

Four days later he leaned over the labour-intensive patina of the Pikes'Jacobean-style oak dining table and laid a folder of drawings before Chester.

‘The problem, quite simply, is that we won't get the price we need for Sun Wharf. The pictures changed. As of today, there is a preservation order on the site.' Chester's eyes bulged, the toad enraged. He opened his mouth to speak and Ted pretended not to see. ‘Part of the site. Grade one. Applied for last year. I opposed it on Tudor's behalf, naturally. Got it kicked back to a subcommittee. But it was granted yesterday. They speeded things up when they saw we'd started work.' The joy of a paperless office, as the conservation officer had agreed, was that documents didn't exactly have dates any more. You could create them in time whenever you liked.

‘It was a goddam sweatshop. Who the fuck wants to preserve that?' Chester looked as if he might even be able to excrete venom through his pores. A red flush of rage was rising up his neck, behind his eats, across his temples. He was almost shining with anger. To his right, Adam DeSouza shifted on his hams, his mind running on placatory suggestions.

‘Nobody. The order applies to a music hall.'

‘What music hall, for Christ's sake?'

‘Originally, it occupied the centre of the site. The factory building was erected over and around it, concealing it totally. It was boarded up around nineteen-nineteen, in perfect condition. Absolutely untouched. Architectural gem. Body calling themselves Theatre Conservation Trust found it when they were willed a trunkload of old programmes and realised the building hadn't been demolished.' Imaginative details, his speciality. Ted glowed with proper pride.

Chester, who handled theatre programmes rarely, with disdain, and only as an expected element of corporate entertainment, departed from the project in spirit at this point, followed a few seconds later by Adam, who had been to a play once in his life, knew they were used for propaganda by so-called intelligentsia and was grateful that Belinda at least was as averse to the experience as he was.

‘How much are we going to be short?' Adam enquired, uncapping his pen to take down evidence for the prosecution.

‘I want to propose a creative alternative.' Ted felt he was cruising. ‘I admit my initial reaction, like yours, was one of dismay. Then, when I looked at the new parameters, I realised that this could actually work to our advantage.' He felt like a conjurer, plucking the rabbit triumph from the black hat disaster. Chester and Adam were open-mouthed, hearing him. He had them, they would buy. He had not been to the theatre since the early days of his marriage but when he was working, on Sun Wharf, he would go every week, and take his daughters when they were old enough. Yes, that was a click of Chester's back teeth at the word creative, but it was just a mannerism the BSD had, part of his dominance display, not indicative of an actual attitude. ‘Basically, I propose we develop the site ourselves. Twenty-seven loft-style-apartments, retaining the auditorium as the circulation area. It's not a costly option at all. Or a long job. We can have them all sold by the time Oak Hill's in phase two Double our original forecast figure at current prices. I've talked to the bank, they'll back us.'

He sensed hesitation. Chester had lidded his eyes and tented his fingertips. Adam was waiting on Chester. The drawings would clinch it, nobody could resist the drawings. Ted reached out and unfurled the folder, revealing an artist's impression of the pocket auditorium transformed into an atrium floored in blond limestone and garnished with palms, the gilded breasts of the nymphs glowing in the luminance shed by a new glass dome, the proscenium leading to the reception area for the integral swimming pool and fitness centre.

‘Can I look at your figures?' Adam's fat cheeks were pleasantly creased but his eyes were elusive. Magnanimously, Ted handed him a sheaf of costings.

‘We can also apply for a grant from the National Heritage Fund. Because this is a unique building and the quality of the decorative work is extremely high, we could go in with the backing of people like the City Theatre Museum. Perhaps twenty-five per cent of the total investment.'

‘As much as that.' Adam ran his eyes down the figures, pretending scrutiny.

‘It's a unique project. We can write our own ticket.'

‘In essence, you're talking about a restoration job.' Adam, Ted knew, found more charm in the new than the old. It went with his immigrant insecurity, the idea that whatever was there already was just filling space until it could be torn down and the site colonised by something new. He had needed some convincing from Belinda to stay in Westwick at all, and still remarked uneasily on the inconvenience of having to live in a building which was not absolutely yours because someone else had lived there before.

‘I thought the loft thing had peaked,' said Chester sourly.

‘Projects like this, finished to a high standard, aimed at young professionals, singles, couples,
gay
couples even, two-income, high earning, high-geared lifestyles, are fetching better and better prices.' Ted handed out a reprint from a trade journal. There would be time enough to convince them that this was the right direction for Tudor Homes. The economics of it all might do the job for him. ‘And when we come to Strankley Ridge,' triumphantly, Ted put the cherry on the cake, ‘allowing two years for the inquiry to report, we will find ourselves in a substantially improved position. So our original scheme, which you recall was for a seven-acre development, could even be doubled in size.'

‘Well, I think that covers all the angles.' Chester saw no point in wasting any more time. He rocked himself out of the massive carver chair, slipped down to his feet and walked around the table to dismiss them. ‘Leave it with me, Ted. Good work. Interesting scheme, very. Very creative.'

At 5 am the next morning, the telephone rang in the DeSouzas' house.

‘Adam – Chester.'

‘Chester.' The murmur of the VIP lounge was behind the BSD's voice. He was at the airport.

‘Parsons. Time we lost him.'

‘Absolutely.'

‘What's the best way?'

Anticipating the conversation, Adam had looked through the essential documents on his return from Grove House the previous evening.

‘Some caution required. He knows where a few bodies are buried.'

‘Surely.'

‘I'd vote for a lifeboat manoeuvre. Ringfence this Sun Wharf thing, let him get in it up to his neck then cut him loose.'

‘Excellent. How long?'

‘Six months.'

‘What'll it cost?'