Getting Home (40 page)

The phone rang again. He answered optimistically, waiting for good news on Sun Wharf, which, due to the over-elaborate way Chester and Adam had decided to do things, with a separate development company and all that entailed, was not progressing as fast as he wanted.

‘Ted, don't play games.' Allie again, in Joan Crawford mode. He wanted to giggle. He imagined her in the kind of vulgar negligee which she considered the proper dishabille for a woman of her status in the hours between waking and dressing for the studio, perched over the telephone like a vulture in broderie-anglaise and pink ribbon bows.

‘You're the game-player,' he told her magnanimously. ‘Whatever this media scam is—'

‘Ted,' her tone was ominously patient, ‘it's quite simple. If you want Oak Hill to go ahead, and all of us to make a killing, you will do what I say. If you want a major scandal, keep right on as you are. Got it?'

‘If Oak Hill stalls we all lose.' He had to stop himself singing the words. This conversation had been running a loop tape in his imagination for the past 24 hours. ‘Especially you. And that won't sit too well with the
Family First
image, will it?'

‘I'm the only one who can stall Oak Hill,' she announced in a voice fit for Queen Elizabeth defying the Spanish Armada. ‘So you can just get back in line, Ted.'

‘I have to tell you, dear, that Stephanie Sands may not be your best friend any more. Nor the great supporter of in Oak Hill she's been up to now. She put me on the spot about it yesterday. She was pretty mad, I can tell you – they're going to be running the road through their house, you know. I'd watch out for her, if I were you.'

‘Don't be stupid,' his wife answered, now severely bored. ‘She's nothing. Just nothing.'

‘She practically runs the Old Westwick Society,' he returned, thinking as he said it that this was hardly a threat his wife would recognise. A hiss of amusement came over the line.

‘Oh wow, that's really scary. Don't be more of a dork than nature made you, Ted. If Oak Hill stalls I've left you anyway because I was so devastated to discover how you had misled me, etcetera, etcetera. You will stand trial for fraud. I get the kids and fifty per cent of everything else anyway. I'm being lunched by the Daily Courier today, I can get to work right away if that's really what you want.'

‘I dare you,' he chortled, swinging out of lane into a handy space opened up by a turning bus. ‘Think about it. If go down, I'll take you with me.'

There was a sigh, a small, irritated exhalation suitable far mourning laddered hosiery, and she rang off.

The regeneration of the east of the city was a triumph of greed over humanity. In their eagerness to realise their rake-offs from raising the maximum number of saleable units of property, the city fathers had overlooked the fact that people would pass their lives in these units, that they would need to eat, drink, play, be ill, get educated, enjoy themselves, look out of the window and travel back and forth.

There was housing, most of it of luxury standard; there were offices and marble atria. They rose in a pit of post-industrial slurry. At this time there was not much else east of the centre, no shops, schools, hospitals, restaurants, bars, cafés, cinemas, theatres, galleries, parks vistas except those decayed and wretched facilities serving the indigenous slum-dwellers who were unable to take the hint and relocate themselves.

Water, the river and the old docks let into it, occupied inconvenient tracts of territory, making the land too swampy to build tunnels. A thousand-year-old forest had been felled to site a new road bridge, but that was still work in progress. A tinny little railway, of Disneyland proportion but without the charm, carried passengers too lowly to use cars. The rest of those who had business to go east resigned themselves to sit in traffic jams in the concrete canyons which cut through the business district with nothing to do but gawp up at the cranes deliberating over the landscape, the skeletal dinosaurs of a new Neolithic age.

Ted had some new toys: an in-car fax and anew stereo plus Trafficmaster facility which automatically cut in reports from the traffic helicopter patrolling the skies. He was longing for an excuse to use the fax, and the Trafficmaster had a knack of cutting in at the most exquisite moments in his brand new disc, Great Opera Love Duets No I. He passed time in traffic reading the manual for clues on how to disable it.

His phone rang again as Faust was entreating Marguerite not to break his heart. Punching the stereo volume button with his right hand, he had the phone in his left to pick up the call and, since the traffic chose that moment to break into a crawly steered with his left elbow. In which ungainly pose a voice barked, ‘Ted. Chester.'

‘Chester! Good to—'

‘Ted, your wife's been on.' Failure to control a wife, a major corporate misdemeanour. He could hear the BSD's annoyance over the fizzle and echo and tremor of the line, which suggested that he might be in flight at that very moment.

‘I'm sor—'

‘Do what she wants, Ted. We can't risk any exposure on this.'

‘But there's no—'

‘Just do it, Ted. Whatever it is will keep her quiet. You get me?'

The line hissed violently for a second then cut. Ted was momentarily blinded by frustration. The dented rear end of an old Nissan loomed too large ahead and he stamped on the brake so hard his tyres squealed and the Discovery rocked on its mighty suspension like a storm-lashed dinghy.

His mood of boyish defiance deflated, leaving him with the familiar dreary chafes of marital bondage. Around him the day greyed, the scummy pools lost their sparkle, the majesty of the cranes evaporated and such occasional architectural felicities as had already been constructed ceased to seem brave and brilliant and appeared merely bizarre.

The new stereo incorporated a route planner. With the manual balanced on the top of the dashboard, he succeeded in asking it for a route to the Soho Hotel from Sun Wharf. It suggested a perfectly logical itinerary smack through at least two of the most notorious gridlocks in the city, estimated journey time, from Ted's experience, seventy-five minutes minimum rather than the short half hour optimistically offered by the device's programming. He would have maybe forty minutes to go round the site with Yuris, then have to get back in the car. The echo of Chester snarled in his ear. The wing mirror told him he no longer smiled.

The tide in the affairs of men was about to turn. Allie could sense it. For a week, travelling to the Channel Ten studios from her hotel suite and back again, she had been looking at low water and no movement. She left Ted on a Wednesday; the
Daily Post
paragraph appeared on Thursday. On Friday, she got. Ted into line and John called from
Hey!
and suggested a date for the photo shoot. She spent the weekend at a new spa whose management were delighted to pick up her tab, checked into this hot new townhouse hotel in most fashionable residential street in the city and talked productively to the owner about making over the master bedroom at Church Vale with a wrought-iron four-poster and red velvet swags. In the new series of
Family First
, they would feature the spa's new Stressbust Weekend programme, and consult the hotelier for tips on interior decoration. They might even do some interviews in the suite itself.

On Monday, Allie asked herself what kind of bedroom Barbara Walters might have and charged her secretary to find out. The
Courier
carried a photograph of her contrite husband calling on her at her secret hideaway in a desperate attempt to patch up their marriage. And on Tuesday, with the two producers, she interviewed eleven potential new co-hosts for the show, four fresh from university, three actors, two established feces from cable, a reporter from a Gaelic language news agency and a kid with waist-length dreadlocks recommended by The boss's Edinburgh contact.

At first things did not go well. She somewhat favoured the last of the students, powerfully cute but capable of spelling media as
midea
, which irrationally enraged the senior producer. The others were respectively stoned, too slow and too tall; she felt a man over six foot made her look unnecessarily inauthoritative. The actors had hideous degrees of attitude and one of them had chosen to become blond, the cable kids had acne and looked too much like what they were, the Gael could not master comprehensible diction in any other language and nobody seriously expected them to hire the dread-lock kid although he half-heartedly hinted that he had been thinking of a crop.

It was as the interviewing triumvirate sat slumped of front of their lunchtime sandwiches that Allie felt the first tremor in the ether. Her secretary brought in her messages and there at the top of the list was the name Stephanie Sands.

‘That prissy little thing.' She turned the paper over, hardly believing what she read. ‘If she's calling me here about the car pool I'll … did she say what it was about?' Even in the furthest reaches of her consciousness the possibility that this weak-minded woman might have a vengeful purpose in calling did not exist. The fact that she actually had induced the Sands family to buy a house now scheduled for demolition had not been entered her memory. At the time when Ted was fretting that the untimely sale in New Farm Rise might put the whole neighbourhood on the alert, the final route of the fatal, road was undecided. A little subliminal sophistry and the conclusion of events, now so dire for Stephanie, Stewart and Max, had never quite registered in her mind, even when emphasised by her husband.

‘She said you would know,' her secretary replied. He was new for the new season, and very efficient in a brittle, campy way. ‘I didn't like to press her; she sounded, you know, kind of confidential.'

‘Confidential. Well now. Get her back for me, there's a dear.

‘Stephanie, darling,' she cooed in expectation, straining triumphantly back in her chair. ‘So good to hear from you.'

And then, in that silly, breathy voice Stephanie had, she heard, ‘Allie, darling, I feel so bad.'

‘Darling, no – why? You've nothing to feel bad about …'

‘Oh but I do. I've been so selfish and thoughtless and—'

‘Enough! I won't hear another word. Why, you're the sweetest woman that ever lived, everyone says so.' Yes, it was happening, she was right, she'd been right all along and now she had her. Allie rolled her eyes around to make contact with the three men in the room. ‘But having your husband kidnapped – why, that's just so stressful.' The men froze like statues, awaiting the next words.

‘I feel I've been so pathetic, you know. You've been wanting me to come on your show, which is really such
an honour
, I mean, anyone would be just so pleased, so
complimented
, to be asked to do something like that, and there I was, I just couldn't find the courage …'

‘Darling, I
know.
I know. That's just the kind of person you are, you're terribly sensitive …'

‘But that's no excuse. I mean, it must have been so embarrassing for you.'

‘For me? Please, I'm not the important one here. It's you, darling, and how you feel, and how poor little Max feels. I mean, this is a terrible time for you. That's what's important. That's the only thing that could possibly be important.' For the benefit of her silent audience, Allie mimed vomiting into the hotel wastebasket.

The half-hushed voice prattled on. ‘It's all just come to me today. You know, I think I must be adjusting to everything, to the kidnap and everything, because I'm starting to be able to get things in perspective now and I just feel so terrible about the way I acted to you and, well, I'm just calling you now to say that if you still want me on
Family First
of course I'll do it, and I am so, so sorry I couldn't say this to you before, and I do hope you can understand …'

‘Darling, of course I understand, of course. Now are you really sure, because I know how much you're feeling about this…'

There was a noise over the line which Allie interpreted as a strangled sob. She gave the room a thumbs-up sign.

‘I'm sure if you're sure,' Stephanie assured her.

‘Let me come and see you right away.' Allie jumped to her feet as if she were going to run out of the door directly and drive immediately over to Westwick. ‘You can be on the first programme of our new series. Look, let me come tonight, yes? We can talk about it then, woman to woman.'

‘Get a contract drawn,' she commanded the producers in general as soon as Stephanie rang off. ‘I'll take it with me. Let's nail her down right now. I don't want the silly bitch changing her mind on me.'

Among the yellow leaves and burgundy-red fruits of the crab tree, the thrush was asleep, having stuffed himself with snails in anticipation of the winter. Westwick was enjoying a few days of Indian summer. The gardens were being allowed to grow away to perdition. Even at midday the rich sunlight penetrated the thinning leaves and caressed the warm turf. The leaves were turning gold in the heat. The seed heads of the arums had burst, flaunting their orange berries in the soft air. The red vine tendrils overreached decency, probing everywhere for access. Japanese anemones, white as moonlight, shone at the back of the border.

‘Now it's your turn.' Sitting on her terrace, Stephanie handed the telephone to Rod. He looked at her as if she were giving him a dead rat. ‘Go on.'

‘But what are you going to do when you get in the studio?' Visually, the man was not made to express concern. His normal physical state was blatantly relaxed; Rod never fidgeted, he had no twitches, frowns or nervous mannerisms. By nature, his body fell comfortably into whatever posture was appropriate for the moment. Even the way he talked spoke of repose, plain sentences simply delivered without hesitation. This outer calm had now been replaced with a nervous tension so strong that his shoulders were paralysed with it and his hands were shaking. His face was lined with anxiety.