Getting Home (41 page)

Apprehensively, he took hold of the apparatus and stared at the keypad.

‘Its not what I'm going to do, it's what we're going to do. I don't know yet,' she told him. ‘I need more material. I need the surveyors Stewart used to go on record. But I do know that the only place Allie Parsons is vulnerable is in her own element. If we're on screen, we can fight her. If we aren't, we can't even touch her. It'll just be like we're in some parallel universe.'

‘But what if she says no?'

‘She says no.' Stephanie shrugged. ‘No harm done. But if she says yes – which she will – we can nail her hide to the barn door, hang her husband out to dry with the Environment Department and you'll still have a new career.'

‘But I want my old career,' he sighed, smiling to apologise for his weakness, subconsciously rubbing his tendon. The ache of it was getting comforting, like the hurt of a scab.

‘But does it want you?' she demanded, amazed at the force of her own will.

‘No,' he agreed, ‘it does not. Not with a busted ankle. And the career I had before that I can't have while Sweetheart's little.'

‘Well then,' Stephanie prodded him unyieldingly ‘Make the call. Just hit the redial button.'

‘But suppose I can't do that job? I've never done TV stuff, I can't write scripts…'

‘You think the guys she has doing this job can write scripts? I've been there, I've been in that office, I know they're idiots. For God's sake, I did that job in my little way. How difficult can it be?'

‘But you're intelligent …'

‘You're intelligent. For Christ's sake, Rod. The researchers write the scripts. Now dial.'

He sucked in a deep breath and she watched his chest swell and the top stud of his shirt strain against the flesh.

He stretched out his arms and pulled his shoulders around to release their stiffness and she watched the sinews in his neck flicker in the light. The tips of his eyelashes were actually infinitesimally curled, so the sun caught in them and his eyes had a starred look.

The charge in the air between them hung like latent lightning. They looked steadfastly at the ground. Stephanie had not met plain physical attraction before. The passion she had witr Stewart was woven into their relationship and embroidered with romance. When they made love, they strengthened their feelings, nurtured their son, solved their problems, renewed their hopes and blessed their home. She missed that, she longed for that.

Passion that was self-seeded, out of place but undeniable, was a new feeling. In the last few months, Stephanie had experienced many new feelings. She was coming around to the idea. That morning, Mr Capelli had reported the most thrilling development yet: the kidnappers had allowed Stewart to send her a message. Again, it had been an E-mail, a little miracle of printed words suddenly materialising from the computers mysterious depths. It did not say much, just simple words like love and patience. She had read it over and over, printed it out. The end of her ordeal was becoming possible, she was allowing herself to dream of it. But the end of something else was approaching with it, some dimension of her liberty.

Staring at the ground, she saw a weed in a crack between the stones and leaned down to pull it up. At the same moment Rod suddenly got to his feet. For a split second her cheek was half an inch from his thigh, so close she could feel the blood heat glow through his jeans. Then he stepped back and she felt a hand heavy and warm on her shoulder.

‘You're so patient,' was all he said. Then he took the telephone away across the lawn and she made herself busy nipping the last dead heads off her roses and tuned her ears away from the conversation. Patient, for Heaven's sake. She found she didn't want to be patient. Her time was running out.

Five minutes later she heard him cut the line. He came towards her, holding out the phone. ‘All done,' he said with a sigh. ‘I'm going in for an interview tomorrow, God knows what I'm going to say.'

She kissed him. It seemed like the right thing to do.

‘I am very loyal to my wife,' says Edward, ‘and looking back I can say that every year I've been with her I've loved her more. Allie is such a giving person, everything she does she puts in a hundred per cent.'
John Redfern paused at his keyboard and took another slug of coffee. For inspiration, he peered over the row of slides on the light box on the next desk. The boss shot, the one that was going to end up over a whole page, showed Allie Parsons in a white suit seated precisely on the end of a bed which was draped in red velvet. She leaned marginally towards her husband, who stood beside her. His right hand and her left were clasped.

It was hard to figure out why Edward the husband wasn't handsome; he was rail, lean, clean-cut, but there was just no spirit in him. He looked at the camera as if he were about to be shot. Maybe he was closet. Didn't people say that after midnight the difference between a gay man and a straight man was about a couple of beers?

‘… and it can be hard to live with a woman who has that kind of commitment. It's hard sometimes to share Allie with three million fans. But in the future I'm going to try harder to do that.'

‘I've told Ted he has to understand the role my work plays in my life,' says Allie, who's preparing for the new series of
Family First
due to air next week. ‘It's the most important thing to me, next to my marriage and our three beautiful children. I feel a deep sense of responsibility to the show and to our wonderful audiences. They deserve to see the best of me, and that's what I'm pledged to give them. It was easy for me to forgive Ted because I understand how stressful it can be for the people who love me. But now we're back together, we're happier than ever.'

Redfern re-read the interview and considered it a masterpiece. He tapped out some headlines –
Sexy secrets that make Allie Parsons' marriage work.
Family First
star forgives her straying husband. I understand what drove him into another woman's arms. Allie Parsons invites us into her lovely home to speak frankly of the problems in her marriage.

He put through a call to his star at the studio. ‘I'm saying this is your home, is that OK?'

‘F-a-a-b, darling,' she assured him. ‘God, I wish it
was
my home. I swear, as soon as I'm out of daytime I'll move into a hotel for good. So much stress, running a big house, I can't cope with it.'

An extraordinary meeting of the Old Westwick Society took place at the house of Mrs S Sands, who acted as chair in the absence of Mrs Pike and kindly made her dining room available to the delegates, although on this occasion the delectable cakes for which they had been so grateful in the past were not forthcoming and hospitality was limited to coffee and biscuits.

No apology for absence was received from Mrs Pike, nor from Mr E Parsons, or Dr R Carman or Dr J Carman, because the Secretary had not advised them of the meeting. ‘In the circumstances, which I'll get on to in a minute,' Stephanie announced, ‘I felt it inadvisable to tell them.'

‘Yes, and what are these circumstances, may we ask?' Mrs Funk prompted her, her sunken face eager under the brim of a green felt cloche hat with a curled feather which tickled her cheek. Mrs Funk knew what was to come and she was spoiling for action. She was gripping her umbrella as Joan of Arc gripped her sword.

There was an encouraging degree of shock. The faces turned attentively to her said that if this nice Mrs Sands was being underhanded, there must be a direly good reason.

Stephanie reviewed her troops. Next to Mrs Funk was Jemima Thorogood from the Maple. Grove Society, a spare, androgynous figure often seen proceeding about Westwick on her traditional black bicycle with its wicker basket tied to the handlebars with leather straps. Next to her cowered two new town-planning students, recently enrolled in West Helford College. Rod and Topaz were beside them, serene and serious. The delegate of the Oak Hill Nature Triangle was reassembling his broken ballpoint with inky fingers, while the chair of his environmental sub-committee picked bobbles off the sleeve of his sweatshirt. Penelope Salmon, another Maple Grove good wife, sat expectantly upright, fingering her pearls, next to timid Sonia Purkelli. Mr Singh from the Grove Parade Trader's Association was squaring off the copies of last meeting's minutes. Major Lloyd-Richards, the treasurer, young for an. ex-officer, with a private income just big enough to keep a roof over his head and vodka in his freezer, floated gently on the afterglow of his 6 pm pick-me-up. Mrs Funk and her husband huddled beside him.

It was evening and the still-spotless calico blinds shut out the twilight. The company sat nervously around the table, occasionally looking up at the flip chart installed beside Stephanie with discomfort in their faces. As a bat talion of warriors, they were not impressive. How sad, Stephanie observed to herself, that the job of looking after this community was deemed so dull and worthless that it should fall to people with nothing else to do with their lives.

‘Thank you, Clara. First of all, I'd like to introduce two new members: Topaz Lieberman from the Alder. Grove Residents' Association and Rod Fuller from the Westwick Basin Society.' She tried not to blush. These two bodies, with membership of five and two souls respectively, had been created over
penne all'amatriciana
the night before. Topaz assured her that this was legitimate political strategy. The rest of the table was nodding to the newcomers, no questions asked.

Nothing for it, time to plunge in. ‘Over the past couple of years we've watched the progress of the plans for the Oak Hill Business Park make their way through the due planning processes and reach the stage they are at now, where permission has been granted for the development and work has begun on the site,' she began.

‘And bulldozers come down our Broadway at seven am in the morning,' Mrs Funk added righteously.

‘What we didn't appreciate is that a new road is going to be built …' Stephanie turned to the flip chart and unrolled the first page, the map of Westwick. ‘Down to the Oak Hill Business Park from the Forty-six up here, cutting through New Farm Rise. As things stand at the moment, it will run through this house.'

They gasped. ‘You poor woman,' moaned Mrs Funk. ‘That dear little boy.'

‘In total,' Stephanie went on, trying to look as elegantly martyred as she could, ‘one hundred and thirteen houses in the New Farm region are scheduled for demolition. I've seen the plans myself at the Department of Transport.'

‘They can't do that!' vowed Penelope Salmon.

‘Actually, they can,' Topaz informed her. ‘If this were a private development, like the Business Park itself, the council would be legally obliged to consult the community, although not to listen to what we say. But a road is a government thing, it's the Department's business; their strategy for consultation will be to send us all a form with a choice-of-routes option for the road and we get to tick a box for the one we prefer. There's no box for no road. Then there's a public inquiry; almost all public inquiries are lost.'

Topaz was acquiring an almost effortless air of authority. As people around the table took in what she was saying, Stephanie felt the level of anger in the room rise considerably. ‘The fact is,' she confirmed, ‘they can put it where they like. And I'm afraid that's not the worst of it.' She savoured her moment. ‘I have discovered that the permission for the development has been improperly granted. Improperly because the site was formerly occupied by a power station, which was demolished twelve years ago.'

She sensed confusion in her audience. There was a certain miasma of hopelessness emanating from the older people, expecially from Jemima Thorogood, a distinct suggestion in their deepening, apathy that this was all by the by.

‘I remember it when we first came here,' Mrs Funk announced, ‘so does my husband. Chimneys with smoke coming out high in the sky. Making electricity for all the west side of the city.'

‘I found out that the permission had been wrongly granted when I was putting away some of my husband's things from his office,' Stephanie went on, making a shameless grab for sympathy for her abandoned state. There was some guilty restlessness. ‘The Development Trust asked his firm to consult on the buildings to be put on the site. The reason they did not do so is that the ground is polluted. The chemicals left behind by the power station are toxic. Highly toxic. A programme of what is called bio-remediation needs to be carried out to clean up the ground before anything else is built there. You'll recall from the plans we saw that no such programme is proposed and the developers haven't acknowledged the need to clean up the site at all. In fact, if you read their documents carefully, you'll see that they've gone to some lengths to cover up the problem.'

‘What do you mean by toxic exactly?' The earnest question came from the Nature Triangle.

‘She means poisoned!' declared Mrs Funk, half rising to her feet. ‘Don't you know English? Toxic is poisoned! The ground there is full of poisons, enough to kill us all.'

‘Surely not,' remonstrated the Major under his breath.

‘I have here the chemical survey commissioned by my husband from the country's leading experts in this field.' Stephanie pointed to the pile of paper in the centre of the table. She leaned on the word husband. It rang in people's ears; husband seemed to compel their attention much more effectively than the facts of disaster. After months alone, Stephanie was beyond cynicism.
Whatever gets the job done
, pleaded her inner voice. ‘As an architect, my husband needed a detailed technical analysis, but I think we can all understand the conclusions. And I myself, as a landscape architect, did a soil test on some land near Oak Hill. The pollutants discovered were lead, cadmium, mercury, copper, zinc and boron.'