Getting Home (36 page)

‘
You
should see how things die around Allie Parsons.' Spiteful, that was actually spiteful, Stephanie congratulated herself. Good going.

‘I bet it's a dump …'

‘With that poor dog …' Rod nodded, remembering Moron's longing eyes.

‘Will you cut that out? You sound like Topaz.'

Stephanie put her hand on her heart, mimicking Allie. ‘True confessions, guys. The Parsons'garden was the start of it all. I owe them everything …'

Right back then, the first time she set foot in Westwick, she had sensed some geomantic flaw in the region. She took away from that first visit a passion to live here and the obscure sense that her love for plants transgressed some unwritten local statute. Her first private commission had been the Parsons'garden, and that same threatened shadow had come over Allie's face as soon as she showed the drawings.

It had begun in the name of friendship. ‘I know – you must come over and tell me how to make the back yard into something,' Allie had decreed, and under cover of progressing their relationship she and Stewart had come to No 6 Church Vale on a rich June evening, Stephanie still in the first flush of pregnancy, nimble in new flat shoes, hopefully sweeping a loose print dress around her imperceptibly expanded belly.

At the front of the Parsons' house then was a parched lawn, and at the centre of it an old yew tree stood dying, rust-brown branches dragging the ground, ripped apart by the weight of its own growth. They passed through the house, retaining an impression of dark beams and white space, watched over by New England wooden decoy birds with scimitar beaks and gimlet eyes.

The back yard was the most desolate domestic enclosure Stephanie had ever seen. The terrace was tinged grey-green with grime and algae, and curtained along one wall with a glaucous large-leafed ivy. Withered stems in holes at oppressively regular intervals at the paving showed that roses and honeysuckles had been intended; the ammoniacal whiff of dog's urine explained their failure to thrive. When she knew the household better, she understood that Moron passed day and night out there, kept tethered by a leash looped over the clothes line like a guard dog in a builder's yard rather than a beloved domestic pet.

There had been some attempt to finish off this homestead with livestock. After more scorched grass, at the end of the yard sagged a decaying fence, beyond which were rabbit hutches, shingled miniature pavilions with windows, the most elaborate rodent housing money could have bought. Investigating, Stephanie found one unoccupied and in the other a terrified Netherland doe; it seemed to have given birth recently; a number of dead foetal rabbits were visible here and there in the saturated hay.

Leaning wearily over the whole scene was the amputated trunk of another ancient tree, a die-hard sycamore, sawn off ten feet from the ground, with new shoots bristling from its peeling bark like the last wisps of hair on a balding scalp. Beneath this, some reproduction French wire work furniture was arranged, and here Stephanie sat with her client and friend-to-be, delicately soliciting her requirements. ‘Oh, I just want it to be beautiful, you
know
,' was the most direction she could get.

Ted she remembered also, the same Ted who even then must have been sitting in his office with the planning application for Oak Hill. Had he been the one who drew that map full of crosses, condemning herself and her family to financial hara kiri? Her first impression of the husband was that he drooped like a parched vine beside his radiant wife. He had a handsome face but a scoured complexion and a pained look as if his head ached all the time.

‘I think we just met the man who resurrected Maple Grove,' Stewart said as they drove back to the city. ‘He was telling me a story of seeing some actress who lived here years ago when the place was run down, and getting in with the end of a short lease that he sold his car to buy.'

How cramped and dusty and unnatural their city life had seemed after the pale space of the Parsons'house, how meanly artificial the balcony where Stephanie had her lavender balls in pots and a yucca struggled to breathe in the fumes rising from the Thai Garden restaurant below.

‘Those trees,' she sighed, looking over a vista of ten thousand living units and nothing vegetable rooted in the earth. ‘Do you think they were in the original planting scheme for the estate?'

Stewart went to look at his books and found a biography of Tudor Wilde. ‘Maple Grove was a garden before they built on it. I thought I remembered that – most of the land which Wilde developed was the park belonging to one of the big houses he had demolished, and the orchard belonging to his own father-in-law. The other house was owned by the founder of some botanical society. Wilde drew the street plan around the trees.'

She peered at the page over his shoulder. ‘” The arboretum planted by C E Crisp, President of the National Horticultural Society, with thirty-five different rare species of tree.” So – that poor old yew could have been two hundred years old.'

‘They're a size, aren't they, those trees. What are they, thirty feet? Fifty? You don't often see a tree that size.'

‘I wonder if there was a ginkgo. They always had a ginkgo, when they planted an arboretum. The oldest tree we know.' For a while they said nothing further, turning the pages together, scanning the old photographs of working horses pulling carts down Church Vale, barges loading at Helford Wharves, and Wilde himself in a frock coat posed with his building gang in bowler hats and waistcoats. ‘Would you like to live somewhere like that?' Stewart asked her finally, in the emphatically matter-of-fact tone he reserved for questions on which he had extremely strong opinions.

‘We couldn't possibly afford it.' She tried to keep this as a statement, but it veered towards a question.

‘Not now. Maybe in a few years. See how things go, eh?'

As things went, it was a year later when Allie called her to say a house was for sale in New Farm Rise at an unexpectedly low price. A family moving abroad, she had hinted; Stephanie recalled the conversation in the bitter clarity of hindsight. By then she had transformed I the Parsons'back yard with a ravishing if slightly vulgar all-white planting scheme and dog-proof containers for a I rank of spiral box trees, each one costing, as Allie put it, enough for a pair of new tits. Allie at least spent the money with enthusiasm, after falling into, a wary silence over the drawings and giving Stephanie the outfoxed look which pledged revenge for an offence unspecified.

The scheme lasted less than a season. The box trees, never watered, immediately died. Tactfully, Stephanie sympathised and said nothing when Allie had the dead topiary replaced by common laurels. When the right moment came, she suggested a maintenance contract, thus inviting Derek and Dave into her life. They reported that Mrs Parsons screamed at her children a great deal and was never around on pay day. By then the Parsons were neighbours, and Stephanie considered that spreading gossip was bad for the community, so she received that information and chose not to transmit it further.

In this parish of distinguished horticultural connections, she had expected to find kindred souls. Naturally the people who chose to live in leafy Westwick would have a special empathy with the vegetable kingdom. Instead she found only women like Allie and Belinda, quite oblivious of the ugliness of their own gardens and superstitiously envious of the beauty of hers. They rolled uneasy eyes over her rose arbour and her homage-to-Sissinghurst silver border and were emphatically silent. Stephanie saw that it was correct to admire material possessions, for the boys to envy Josh Carman's Mercedes, the girls to sigh over Lauren Pike's Coalport dinner service, but there was a problem with her garden, which was a creation not a purchase.

‘You can't create around here,' Gemma proposed, spreading out her hands flat on the table top. ‘That's another thing that Mamma don't allow. No politics, no ethics, no creation.'

‘What are you going to do with that letter?' asked Rod, pointing at the fruit basket where Gemma had tucked the missive between the fingers of a bunch of bananas.

‘What do you think I'm going to do with it? Frame it? I'm sending it to his wife, aren't I? The Madonna of Morning TV, the mother of our neighbourhood rapist and the wife of another. She likes reading her viewers'letters out on air, doesn't she? She likes a nice human tragedy for breakfast, doesn't she? She should thank me.' And so should Ted, she added mentally, because the truth will make him free.

In the mind of Allie Parsons, such as it was, what was said had no importance. Thus she might babble sentimentally of friendship to Stephanie and the other wives of Westwick regardless of the fact that she did not consider them to be her friends. Her concept of friendship did not extend to people who were merely useful, only to those who were actually powerful. Most of her conversation included such adjustments of meaning. Obviously, the purpose of talking was to get what you wanted. What you actually said was irrelevant, the result was what counted. Obviously, therefore, it was right to say whatever was necessary for people to give you what you wanted, regardless of whether what you said would pass any kind of reality check.

Allie considered that she had been right to invite the Sands to buy their doomed house in New Farm Rise because Ted was going to cut Stewart in on the Oak Hill deal and make them very rich, definitely rich enough to join them in Maple Grove. Getting the Sands to buy the house had saved the rest of the New Farm area from waking up to their impending danger. It had been a nasty moment when the house went up for sale; Ted had talked about delaying the Oak Hill planning application until the sale was completed, at which Chester had seen red. Then Allie had saved the day by fixing up the whole deal quickly and privately. Besides, she needed Stephanie.

To Allie, Stephanie was an invaluable resource: she had whatever it was the Channel Ten viewers thought a woman ought to have, some rare essence of femininity. Allie lacked this, and so needed her. Tying her in had been tricky because the woman was obtusely immune to media glamour, although in the end a perfect sucker for the Westwick thing.

Allie considered she was right to live in Westwick, because the whole place stank of family values and added the ideal backdrop to her life to date. She was right to have married Ted, whose earnings had underwritten her TV breakthrough and who, with the children, completed the middle ground of her career picture. She felt she was right to be looking beyond Westwick, marriage and family now, to the primetime, mainstream, big-bucks phase to come. She was also right to anticipate the colossal cash fallout of the Oak Hill development because frankly it was the only real benefit of the marriage with Ted which was left to be garnered. Or so she had evaluated him, until she opened the thickish envelope exuberantly addressed in green marker with ‘Personal and Confidential'underlined twice.

‘It's OK,' her secretary assured her with a little embarrassment. ‘I made security put it through X-ray. I wouldn't have bothered you with it but it was hand-delivered, so maybe it could be someone you know?'

Westwick being a closed world, a Shangri-La sealed from the outside behind a mountainous range of money, none of the women there whom Allie idly termed friends ever realised that a two-tier value system was in operation. In Stephanie's case, she was further blinded by her pure heart. For dear friends Allie would be witty and taking, she sent flowers, she dashed off charming notes of thanks, had her secretary enter their birthdays in the diary, entertained prodigally in restaurants and showered down the bounty of
Family First
freebies. For people called friends in Westwick she broke promises, forgot dates, never showed at parties and sent each a bottle of Magno fragranced bath oil at Christmas. All with the assumption that they would appreciate that they deserved no better.

You had lunch with dear friends, and to the others you said, ‘we must have lunch.' You might even make the lunch date, but then you broke it. It was the way of the world, the others accepted it. ‘Just locals. Local people,' Allie dismissed them. ‘They won't mind. People you have to know, you know? Not really important but you have to know them so you might as well get along.'

Allie Parsons considered that a friend, a real friend, a
dear
friend, was essentially a person who could advance her career. Thus The Boss was a dear friend, and Chester Pike was a dear friend of Ted's. Stephanie was not a dear friend, especially since her husband had fallen out with Ted. The DeSouzas were not dear friends, but merited exceptional treatment while Ted and Adam were associates. And John Redfern, editor of
Hey!
(Your Number One for Celebrity Gossip – Real People, Real Heartbreak, Real Homes), was a dear friend also, and after she read the contents of the envelope, she telephoned him.

‘John, darling …' she snuffled enticingly down the phone. ‘Can you do lunch? I so need to talk to a friend. I can't tell you the dreadful thing that's happened.'

For such a promising prospect, John Redfern immediately made himself available. They met at the first and most dignified of the city's shrines to a celebrity chef, a place to which socialites herded to toast their divorces, a breathless rotunda where triple tablecloths flounced to the floor and carved gothic rood-screens, plundered from old churches, concealed the bench where waiters made sure the tottering little pagodas of food were not actually so precarious that they collapsed before the moment of presentation.

‘He's been having an affair,' Allie confided as soon as the orders were placed.

‘Your husband.' Redfern had forgotten the name. It happened with husbands all the time. Besides, everybody knew Parsons was bonking The Boss and women's sense of ownership was curious when it came to men.

‘Ted. I'm distraught,' she announced, pertly poised on the edge of her chair, the rolling turquoise eyes running a third celebrity check on the other diners. Important to know you were in a first-XI venue. Very important to judge the moment a restaurant started to slide and move on. Those little signs, rubbernecks, musos, people paying in cash, men romancing their afternoon pussy. She noted Tina Brown and relaxed.