Getting Home (9 page)

‘Nothing.' Irrational, but for a second Stephanie felt disbelieved. ‘That man from the Foreign Office calls every morning but they haven't heard anything.'

‘Agony, it must be just agony.'

‘Yes.' Stephanie squirmed. She had spent the previous night tortured by her imagination, which insisted on producing pictures of Stewart as a limp corpse with a bullet hole in his forehead. The pain still felt shameful, she did not like to admit it to her friends.

Relaxing, Allie unbuttoned her jacket – scarlet for politics, today's interviewee had been a transsexual mayor. Belinda deSouza, Lauren Pike, Rachel Carman and Stephanie moved their chairs to make space for he in the shade of the big white calico umbrella. In physical terms, there was enough space already. It was the size of the ego which they needed to accommodate.

‘Such an ordeal,' murmured Belinda, refixing the combs in her thick dark hair.

‘I can't imagine what you must be going through.' Truth to tell, Lauren could not imagine much at all, but Stephanie knew she meant well.

‘Stress is the killer.' The mere thought made Rachel reach for another cigarette. ‘Come see me any time, honey. Happy pills, we got'em. Seriously, the stuff on the market these days, nobody need worry'bout a thing.'

‘You're so kind, Rachel.' Besides the shame, Stephanie sensed the element of entertainment in her drama. These women with lives from which wealth had removed all life-threatening incidents were avid to be her spectators.

Allie shook her head, marvelling at the terrible suffering before her, a mannerism copied from Princess Diana on her first landmine campaign; she watched its effect reflected in the glass of the terrace doors. ‘The Internet kidnappers. Oh my. My, my.' Jealousy was making her feel nauseous. She reached for the day's menu. ‘Terror on the Web. What is this world coming to? I didn't even know they had the Internet over there. Didn't we ban exporting computers to Russia? Is the tuna on today?‘

Order was part of the beauty of life in Westwick. To everything there was a season, or a day of the week, or an effectively time-managed hour. Duties, pastimes, pleasures, they were all scheduled. Your life was an orbit, you were as predictable as a planet, your movements were cosmically ordained, your role in the universe was secure, destiny was predetermined, thought was unnecessary, E= mc2 took care of everything.

This major conjunction took place on Friday at midday, when Stephanie, Lauren, Rachel and Belinda lined up for Rod's Bunbuster Workout at The Cedars Health and Racquet Club and flopped into lunch afterwards. In summer their table was upwind of the barbecue, not too close to the door and in full sun when there was full sun. Rachel and Belinda brought their racquets and stayed on afterwards for their game. In case there was a pollen surge, Lauren kept her Ventolin on the table. They kept a chair for Allie, who looked on the event as an important research exercise, keeping her in touch with what ordinary mothers were thinking.

They called themselves friends. In the virtual relationship of parallel parenthood, in ante-natal class, playground and PTA, they had spent so much time together exchanging information essential to their children's development that it was only seemly to erect the facade of friendship around their association.

Allie waved over a waiter. ‘There has to be tuna, it's so delicious, it's what I ought to be eating and you always have it. And a green salad, no dressing. Has everyone else ordered?' They nodded. The waiter departed with a worried frown. Allie let her eyes follow him, drift on to the corridor leading to the changing rooms and take in the sight of Rod Fuller departing in his leather jacket. She put on her sunglasses again in order to be able to keep watching undetected until he passed the reception desk and disappeared. Such a hunk. And dumb, so dumb.

The normality of it all cut Stephanie so deeply that she started to cry and put down her Snapple. Belinda reached out with her freckled arm and hugged her around the shoulders. ‘Bear up, sweetie. We're with you.'

‘If there's anything we can do, you must tell us.' Lauren dispensed a taut professional grin, her gold necklace winking in the sun. ‘We're all here for you, you know that.'

‘Can the sympathy, for Chrissake. You'll make it worse.'

‘Rachel, I don't mind, I'm fine, really.'

‘Trust me, he's OK. Stewart isn't the sort to get into trouble, it'll all be over soon. I'm prescribing a decent glass of wine, a plate of comfort food and don't get stupid and call your mother.' Rachel was their jester, licensed to voice the thoughts and do the things they dared not. People were inclined to smile at the mere sight of her, a little woman with surprised eyebrows, chubby cheeks and bubbly black curls. Given her addiction to clothing in Day-Glo colours, she needed to invoke the gravitas of her profession frequently to maintain a level of respect.

She waved over the waiter. ‘Now the Pinot Noir has the most iron, but I know you girls want to stick with your Chardonnay, so what say we have a bottle of each?'

Allie propped her chin on her hand, indicating thoughtful consideration, once more checking the effect with her reflection. Yes, it worked. ‘Now, what are we going to do with you this afternoon?'

‘Max …'

‘We'll take care of Max.' Rachel dunked a potato skin, dropping sour cream on her Day-Glo bosom.

‘I thought I'd Just carry on as normal. I don't want him to feel that anything is wrong. Max has swim squad today.' Stephanie did not like to say that she yet to discover any argument, bribe or threat strong enough to get her son to agree to play with Ben and Jon Carman.

‘Great, so he'll be dropped off here and you don't have to pick him up until five. Let's do something, come on, what's it to be? How about a little retail therapy? Or shall we see if we can get a court?' Rachel refilled her glass. Lauren murmured things which were not quite advice, indeed were not quite anything, but sounded pleasant. Belinda mentioned the new linen shirts at Bon Ton on the Broadway. Stephanie sipped and smiled and listened and let the cooing sympathy and the wine wrap around her trembling heart and soothe it. An hour slipped past.

‘So,' Allie had bright round eyes which most people thought were blue, ‘what's it to be? You wanna burn some plastic?'

‘You're so dear …' Stephanie felt her throat seize. She would not cry, they wanted her to cry. ‘You're such wonderful friends, I just don't know …'

‘Yes you do,' Rachel informed her, picking up her racquet. ‘You definitely don't want to play tennis because you hate it. You want to go shopping.'

‘I don't hate tennis, I just hate losing.'

‘Don't we all?' Belinda was tying back her hair, annoyed because Rachel was drunk, and actually played better when she was drunk. ‘Go shopping, go on. Spoil yourself.'

Shopping or tennis. Was it the wine or was this pathetic? Remove my child, remove my husband, and my life is down to shopping or tennis? Where were the art galleries of yesterday, where the boutiques and the bookshops and the brasseries and the
caffe latte
with conversation which swallowed up city time so sweetly? Where was the city, and its friends?

From the day she met Stewart, their friends started to merge into a single entity. Singles, couples, her sister, Marcus, they rolled themselves together and became The Crowd, fit only for immature amusements, French movies and late parties. She married Stewart, and they had Max, and each passage was a warp factor thrusting them into a different dimension. It was not just a single-couple thing, because most of The Crowd were coupled most of the time, but a matter of interests. The conversations became shorter, they could not mesh their minds.

When Stewart had told The Crowd they were moving to Westwick, she had seen a mixture of envy and resignation on their faces. One of them, the one who for a time Stephanie had dared to designate her best friend, had asked sharply, ‘How do you think you'll like living out in the suburbs?' ‘A whole lot,' she had sassed back, and broke the back of the friendship right there.

Allie brushed unseen crumbs from her red jacket and reached for her phone. ‘Shopping it shall be,' she said. ‘I'll just call in and tell them where I am – unless …' Yes, there it was, that stricken look in Stephanie's eyes. Pathetically easy to make that woman feel guilty. ‘Unless there's something else – Stephanie? A massage or something? They might have a therapist free – shall I ask?'

Stephanie looked from one concerned face to another. They wanted to know that they had cared for her, these women whose primary role was supposedly caring for their husbands and their children, who flocked around her distress, soft and anxious like fluttering doves. She had to make a decision.

‘I'd like to stay and watch Max swim,' she told them. ‘Truly. I'll be fine. Don't worry about me. Please.'

They got up and went their different ways, but Allie remained at the table, and, when they were alone, reached out with her little hand for Stephanie's arm. ‘You'd feel so much better if you talked about this.' Her eyes were now violet with sincerity. ‘Believe me. I know how you feel about TV and of course I understand, but listen to me just one minute. You have no idea how powerful it is to speak out and be heard by all those people. It's really, really therapeutic. If you could only just share …'

Suddenly, Stephanie found herself dry eyed, clear headed and unashamed.

‘No. I can't, Allie. I can't stand people knowing. This is private.'

‘But if you knew, if you really knew – people out there, the people who watch
Family First
, they've got such big hearts, Steph. I am amazed, truly, every day,' the hand now on the heart again, ‘at how wonderful people are, how they empathise …'

‘I'm sure they are wonderful, Allie, but I couldn't do it. Please, I have to go now – I'm late for Max.'

After she had gone, almost running off the terrace, Allie sat alone and looked at her phone. Then she called the
Helford & Westwick Courier
and explained to owner, editor, advertising manager and sole reporter that she had a victim of international terrorism in New Farm Rise.

A hopeless light from the low grey sky made it seem late in the day, although it was only just after two when Ted Parsons filled the Discovery with gas and the CD player with the new Three Tenors, Classic Duets and The Ultimate Opera Collection, and set off for Strankley Ridge. It took an hour and a half to struggle out of the city. Another forty minutes behind a convoy of articulated trailers brought him to the outskirts of Whitbridge, where a five-mile tailback led to the contraflow around the works for the new orbital highway.

Patiently he inched the Discovery forward. ‘
Vesti la giubba
…' When Domingo sang, resignation was heroic. ‘I am just an actor, the show must go on.' He sang along, his other secret vice. Lusting for Gemma Lieberman was not really a vice; if God had not meant her to inspire lust, she would have been born into a family of Taliban priests. The engine idled, his mind ran in neutral. When the road was finished, the transport people estimated that one million people would make this journey every day.

Already, three hundred people took this trip every day and never returned. Every day, three hundred people moved out of the city. An excellent statistic, discovered that morning in the property pages. They would need houses, this daily three hundred, and Tudor Homes would build them: unique, exclusive, double-garaged homes. Triple-garaged homes, that was the way forward now. Ted Parsons tried to take satisfaction in the thought.

He navigated the last excavation then drove on down the small roads which awaited upgrading. Tree branches overhung the highway, etiolated limbs from doomed hedges no longer considered worth trimming. Driving west across Strankley Ridge, he passed the site of the Neolithic stone circle. There was a banner lashed to some bushes, reading NO MORE ROADS, and another accusing the Transport Minister of masturbation, and a working model dragon made of old car body parts, thirty feet long with flashing red eyes, posed in the act of eating an inflatable plastic planet. Behind this installation Ted glimpsed some dirty tents and a phalanx of security vehicles.

Cruising downhill, he reached the valley bottom, where the road wandered between the settlements of Butterstream and Ambleford. As he descended, he saw the land to which Magno had staked claim, a flat apron of meadow intersected by small streams and bordered by a derelict railway track. Adam's foresight was recognisable here; the green lobby, forceful in country areas; could be distracted by assurances that freight would travel by rail not road and would turn their attention to the uncooperative rail network companies while the trucks rolled.

He parked by the Quaker Meeting House in Ambleford, and felt spots of rain on his face as he set off, map in hand. The village had one street only, the road itself, running dead straight between two rows of buildings like a main street in a cowboy town. His route led away from it, through the back of the village, past stone-wailed country gardens already exuberant with roses, down an overgrown track pitted with horses'hooves and out along the fields edges, respecting the green wheat. His mother had been a country girl. ‘Walk on the irons of the field,' she used to say to him. ‘The farmer won't thank you for treading down his crops.'

There was no wind. Raindrops still fell singly. A thousand shades of grey surged slowly across the sky, swallows flying black against the light. He turned uphill and disturbed a huge settlement of rabbits, who scampered madly for their holes, leaping over each other in panic then leaping again for good luck. Moron, be remembered with guilt, was patiently waiting out his years on the end of a rope in their yard.

On the skyline stood three gangling old beeches, oddly slender for their obvious age, the tallest in the middle. Each trunk kinked at the same point thirty feet above ground as if a giant had reached down from heaven to gather them, clamped his fist around the trunks and then changed his mind. The canopies did not spread until much higher, leaving a few contorted branches below. Three trees on a hill suggested crucifixion, but Ted had trained himself to disregard omens.