Getting Home (11 page)

‘That's very kind.' He never knew how to get out of these things, or for that matter how he got into them. ‘But I have a family. I've booked myself out for a few years, while my daughter is growing up. I can't really commit myself to anything. We lost her mother a few months back so I'm all she has, really.'

‘Oh, I do know, those early years are so precious. But I've got children, and I manage.'

Clearly, no need to fear sympathy, but all the same he kept his eyes down and tried to look stupid, and probably succeeded, because her lack of interest was total. Speaking lightly to indicate that she cared nothing either way about the outcome, she continued, ‘Think about it, why don't you?'

He promised to do that. For her own good, he manoeuvred her into booking three sessions for the following week, anticipating that she would call and cancel.

Sweetheart, he remembered while buying frozen peas at Mr Singh's, had once pointed out the Parsons girls to him at the kindergarten. That evening, over his famous
linguini primavera
with sweetcorn, he asked her opinion. ‘Their mummy is on TV,' she said. ‘She never comes to school except once on Sports Day she gave the prizes.'

‘What are they like?'

‘The big one is a total bubble-head but she left because she's older. The small one cries all the time. She says her mummy will take her away because she hates it. And their brother is going to be in prison, Topaz says.'

‘You don't like them.'

‘No. They've got stupid names. Nobody likes them.' And she giggled and shovelled down another forkful. ‘Will you come to Sports Day, Dad? You can win everything.'

‘That's why I don't come. It's not always smart to win everything. Sometimes it's smarter to give someone else a chance.' The worst thing about parenthood was it made you sanctimonious. The real problem with Sports Day, and every other social event he attended as a father, was the loneliness – the mothers avoided him as if he carried a flesh-eating virus, the few fathers talked over his head. He did not understand why. Gemma said it was all down to sex and something to do with projection and envy in the case of the fathers, though he saw no cause for a man with a new Range Rover
and
a new Mercedes to envy him, running a seven-year-old Toyota.

‘Will you make a cake?' she persisted. ‘Everybody liked the one you did last term.' Carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, only a tiny bit collapsed at the centre. Not bad for an amateur.

‘The Carman boys didn't, they said it was disgusting.'

‘They never eat anything home-made.' She stabbed the air with her fork as if to impale the Carmans, left and right.

‘Don't wave your fork around, it's bad manners.'

When she was asleep he went up on deck to put the remaining frozen peas on his swollen tendon and watch the stars twinkle to life in the creamy summer night. Lights twinkled along Riverview Drive, and up Alder Reach, and all over Westwick, where husbands were coming home to their wives; granted, Westwick husbands, when they were not travelling, seldom made it through the door before 10 pm, but it was domesticity of a kind, along with brothers and sisters arguing over TV. Families all together under one roof, most of the time, at least. In the North Helford Hospital and Home for Incurables, his wife was drifting towards the end of her life on a river of morphine. Her eyes were open but unseeing. She was nourished by a plastic bag of soluble chemicals, and a vibrating waterbed coaxed her blood through her capillaries and stopped her getting bed sores. He could not go up to Mr Singhs to buy wine and leave Sweetheart alone. So here he was again, alone on deck, watching Venus blinking at him over the willows.

In Westwick there was no smoke without a barbecue. Smoke rose above Riverview Drive. The first barbecue of summer was a rite which belonged to Adam DeSouza, who had dreamed of
boerewors
sausages with gravy everyday since he had left Cape Town and, in his reasonable and ruthless way, had made Belinda's existence unbearable until she transmitted her persecution to the proprietor of Catchpole & Forge, Family Butchers on the Broadway, who petitioned his wholesalers and placed a regular order.

The women sat on the terrace with wine and the men stood over the fire with beer. Above the funereal wall of
Cupressus leylandii
, which preserved the DeSouza's privacy, the evening star was faint, depicting Venus in affliction.

Allie Parsons crossed her knees, feeling the toxins trapped in her cellulite protest. The appalling interlude of the weekend lay ahead; there was no filming to be done, no conference to attend, no story to cover. She would be incarcerated in her home. Ted would take the girls to The Cedars while she washed about the rooms like driftwood, turning over magazine pages. Of the popular press, Allie cared only for one genre: the magazines full of lovely homes, devoted couples, photogenic children and courageous triumphs over personal disaster.

It was over a year since Allie Parsons, host of
Family First
, had invited readers into her lovely home to reveal how her son Damon had beaten alcoholism. She questioned the value of that exercise. Damon had been 15 then, with menacing feet the size of telephone directories.

‘Kids grow up fast these days,' observed The Boss, the Channel's chairman, appraising her with less approval than she had anticipated.

‘We were so young when we got married,' she parried. ‘We made so many mistakes. Damon's a good kid at heart. The young have so much stress these days. I was thinking of a feature on it – exam pressure, suicides, you know.' But The Boss had merely smiled.

A cloud of smoke from the barbecue blew towards the women. ‘My husband is a pyromaniac.' Belinda flapped her hand at the fumes. ‘I think his ancestors must have been those people who burned each other in wicker cages.'

‘Sun worship, that's what that was about.' Rachel flicked ash into the rosemary bush, confident that her ancestors were guilty of nothing so barbarous.

‘They're all just boy scouts with their camp fires if you ask me.' Examining the futility of men was Allie's favourite pastime in these deadly nights when couples gathered together to excavate acquaintanceships in which the seams of affinity were running dangerously thin.

‘You could be right. Did. I tell you, he wants us to go on a wilderness weekend?'

‘A what?' Allie was alerted. Another feature?

‘A wilderness weekend. You go off into the woods with a backpack and a Swiss Army knife … oh, stop, Allie, I know what you're thinking. Adam would never do it. The firm wouldn't let him. Besides, he's not insured.'

‘I was thinking maybe another couple, if it's a thing people are getting into. So go on. You set off into the wilds…'

‘With a ton of mosquito spray and your Discman and a bottle of Bolly …' prompted Rachel.

‘Yes. And you sleep under the stars and tune into nature.'

‘That's it?'

‘That's it.' More smoke belched from the barbecue, and they all waved it away.

‘No tennis?' Rachel was horrified.

‘No tennis.'

‘He's crazy. You're sure Adam isn't leading a double life? I mean, maybe he's got a second family somewhere and he just forgot which wife he was with. You'd die if you had to go two whole days without tennis. I give you that as my professional opinion.' Rachel's deep, rough laugh reverberated from the walls of the house. She laughed alone. Women in Westwick kept cold houses and seldom laughed at jokes about adultery.

The essential facts of the DeSouza marriage were common knowledge Belinda had brought her condominium in Jackson Hole to the union, while Adam, as an immigrant, had been required to resit his bar exams and was therefore ten years behind his peers and trapped in a corporate job. Until his capital contribution to the family wealth outweighed that of his wife, Adam was a man who had been bought and paid for; other wives envied Belinda the power balance of her house, and wished her husband might stray to a strange bed to even the score.

‘So, go on. You drive out miles from anywhere …' Allie leaned her chin in her hand.

‘Well, that's it. You just go off and sleep in sleeping bags, pee in the woods and get ants in your hair.'

‘And what's the point of it?'

‘There isn't a point. He just wants to go fishing and make camp fires and be a boy scout.'

‘But is it always a husband and wife thing? Is it supposed to get you back in touch with each other and revitalise your relationship or something?'

‘Well, maybe …' Belinda shrugged. Rachel scowled. Allie tried a pleading look. Of course, they – the elite, the favoured, the wives of Westwick – did not need to pee in the woods in order to rediscover their husbands, but it might be a valid exercise for less enlightened women. ‘But I mean – what's to revitalise? If he's a jerk when he's washed and shaved, am I going to like him any better when he's wearing designer stubble and muddy old Levis?'

They nodded. A blanket of smoke rose from the barbecue and rolled over them. They coughed. ‘Sorry, ladies.' Adam brandished the tongs in apology, his smooth round cheeks shining with pleasure. ‘It'll burn down in a minute.'

Rachel tossed her cigarette butt into the hedge. ‘Did you hear what the first chicken said to the second chicken?'

‘Not another chicken joke.' Belinda could look very like Katharine Hepburn, with her square jaw and square smile and thick mane disciplined with combs. Now she did Katharine Hepburn looking down her nose at Cary Grant.

‘The first chicken said to the second chicken, “Why did the man cross the road?”‘

‘And…'

‘And the second chicken, said, “I don't know – why do men do anything?”‘

They laughed and the men heard the laughter. ‘The girls are enjoying themselves,' Adam remarked fondly.

He smiled frequently, his thin lips disappearing in a beatific crease which made his rounded cheeks plump like cushions. He stood over the barbecue with the tongs poised, impatient for the charcoal to glow, his blue butcher's apron tied around his waist area with a manly knot. Adam was a big man, not a fat man, well covered all over, his straight silver hair barbered boyishly short, a picture of substance and prosperity. Joshua Carman felt small beside him. Josh was small and round like his wife, with little, nimble-fingered, restless hands so delicate they could almost take a blood sample from a sleeping patient without waking her. He rolled a beer can nervously between his palms. ‘Ya know,' he offered the gathering, ‘there's an enzyme in beer which, has been proven to counteract the carcinogenic properties of burnt meat.'

‘Should I infer something about my cooking here?' Adam demanded. His sense of humour ran shallow while Josh's surged deep.

Standing up-wind, Ted Parsons cracked another beer and let his mind drift away from the pantomime. What amused him was that DeSouza, for all his childhood under African skies and his undeniable intellect, had never considered positioning the barbecue so that the prevailing breeze fanned the charcoal and carried the smoke away from the house. As it was, the apparatus shielded the fire basket, flames were half-hearted, and by the time the food was cooked the women were tired, drunk and smoke-cured like a row of Black Forest hams.

‘How'd it go this week?' Carman was talking about the Oak Hill project. There was no need to name it, it was number one on all their action lists.

‘Pretty good. The study'll be with us in two months and then we can go back to the county and get a start date.' It was Ted, through Tudor Homes, who moved things forward for the Oak Hill Development Trust. Adam worked for Chester, Chester controlled Magno. The payoff for Carman would be the health care contracts for Magno Oak Hill and Channel Ten, which condemned him to starve for two more years at least while the trust directors would get their snouts in the trough as soon as the feasibility study was done. Josh defined starving as being unable to justify buying a second home.

‘No hassles?'

‘We're not expecting any.' Adam at last speared a
boerewors
and lovingly laid its succulent length on the grill. He felt that the brief he had prepared for the consulting engineers was his masterwork. It had emphasised concerns about the water table and gravelly sub-soil and segued around the site's history so elegantly that the only areas of potential difficulty were effortlessly blocked out of the picture. Only a very curious mind would choose to forage, and he had delicately indicated to the engineers that they were not getting paid to be curious. ‘The access thing exercised a few minds, I think, but we've handled that and everyone's happy.'

‘And the BSD is cool?'

‘The BSD is cool,' Ted confirmed.

Adam moved on to lay out the steaks. They smiled around the fire, the contented bondmen of Chester Pike, who spent weekends at his place on the coast and left the neighbourhood lighter for his absence.

‘So nobody's fingered the problem?' Josh savoured the forbidden aroma of the sausage.

‘Problem?' Eat began to run and a burst of yellow flame consumed it, highlighting Adam's white teeth.

‘It's not a problem.' Ted shifted uneasily on his feet. He never followed Carman's humour. He had argued for his co-option to their talks because the man – no, the couple – had tentacles around certain areas of the community, making them good hostages against local trouble, but a medic did not think the way people in business had to think. He was afraid that one day Carman might rediscover his conscience. For that matter, he could still remember where his own was buried. ‘There's no problem,' he said again. ‘We've hired the biggest firm of consulting engineers in the country. On what we're paying them, I think if there was a problem we'd know by now.'

‘So everything's cool?'

‘They raised the question of a new access road, because the Thirty-one is already at capacity traffic-wise after the interchange with the orbital.' Adam smiled again and turned the sausages.