Getting Home (19 page)

The night was close, but she found she was shivering. The scent of her jasmine was intoxicating, but it made her feel sick. Perhaps Ted was exaggerating, he was drunk after all, and now devoting his ungovernable libido to teasing Rachel. But she judged him a straight man and on the prosaic side of imaginative. Besides, how many bitch sessions had she sat in on herself? ‘We're always here for you,' those women had said. Here to think the worst of her, and of Max.
Thanks, girls, at this point in my life I really needed that.

Stephanie sat still and said nothing and wondered how long it would be before the riotous company realised that their hostess had been wounded. She waited in vain. The party broke up merrily after midnight and left with enthusiastic promises to have her over
soon.

On Thursday, miserable and hungover, she drove over to a job at the opposite end of Church Vale from the Parsons'house, one of the largest properties in Maple Grove, whose owners had excavated a swimming pool at the end of their garden. Getting the approval from the Maple Grove Society for things like this was in the league of getting the Biblical camel through the eye of a needle. Over in Grove End, a family had actually torched their own house in order to be able to rebuild it without the old servants'staircase, which the Maple Grove Society had insisted they preserve.

Stephanie suspected that her client, a character actor with a great career in psychopaths, had hired her to landscape the addition as part of his political strategy. Ingeniously, she had resurrected a Tudor Wilde design for a pergola with climbing roses around a brick-paved terrace, submitted it with copies of the original, schmoozed Jemima Thorogood most tastefully and been gratified to get the Society's consent with only two pages of modifications.

So far, the job had gone like a charm. Derek and Dave did not always work well with construction teams, but this time there had been no cause for flouncing. The bricks were laid, the uprights were raised, the crossbeams were being bolted into place as she watched. ‘Good work, team,' she commended them. ‘I'll be over with the plants in the morning.' Derek and Dave did not always plant successfully, either. Pruning, clipping and mowing were their major talents; they slashed and burned with enthusiasm. At digging, mulching and planting they were erratic; watering and spraying were activities which they could not be trusted to perform without supervision. They did not do nurture; their thing was destruction.

Back home in the evening, she set about stowing the stuff from Stewart's office in the study area he had arranged for himself. She sat at his desk, his beautiful desk with the flush-fitting keyboard drawer and the integrated ducts for the three plates of spaghetti linking the PC, and considered it a tribute to him to fit everything very neatly into its logical place.

Stewart sat here every Sunday evening. Flashy masculinity was not her husband's way; he did not care to drive fast or spend Saturday afternoons roaring at sport on the TV. What he liked was the dull business of being a man, reading the financial pages minutely, balancing their cheque books, getting into long dreary conversations with other men about world events which they could not, in all conscience, have any real knowledge of but would still chew over with the colossal gravity of global experts in the area. After the noisy, unstable life which her father had created for their family, Stephanie had felt like a little ship anchoring in a deep harbour when she met Stewart. Now she felt adrift, and sensed a storm brewing.

Here he had finally been forced to accept paper. Here were the household files, from AIR MILES to WILLS, their insurance policies and birth certificates and handbooks and guarantees. She got teary looking at his precise italic writing on the labels. There was space behind them. She pulled back WILLS and there, beside his will and her will in their matching plastic pockets, were two letters with her name and Max's name on them.

‘My darling,' hers began, which was enough to get her tears falling fast, ‘you will only be reading this if I'm not around any more. I want to tell you forever that I love you. You and Max are all that gives my life meaning …' She read on, her blurred eyes roaming over the page, fixing on
joy
and
always
and
care
and finally resting on
regret.
‘The only thing I regret is that I haven't left you both better provided for. Finding our house was a dream come true, but as things have turned out the element of illusion seems to have been more than we imagined. I'm sorry for that.' The passage lodged in her memory because she did not really understand it, but she had to weep for some time, and in the flood of her sadness she did not pay it specific attention.

At the Church Vale job on Friday, displaced rage seized her as she set about planting her scheme. Her energy was demonic. With Derek and Dave standing wilting over the supplies of water and manure, she worked full tilt into the heat of midday, installing the roses, beginning with the flashy scarlet
Danse de Feu
over the steps and ending with the rampant white
Iceberg
by the pool house. She broke fingernails and raised blisters on her hands. The sun brought out a sore on her lip.

‘Such a waste.' She threw down her spade at last. ‘All the boring ones with no scent. And he'll never keep that
Iceberg
, it gets black-spot.' Dave nodded in sympathy. The client claimed to be a martyr to hay fever and had insisted that they use only scentless varieties of rose.

‘What can you do if people have these allergies?' Wearily, Derek turned off the hose. ‘We're giving him what he wants. The customer is always right. At least he agreed to have the mint walk.'

They were all very taken with the mint walk, one of Stephanie's best solutions to the problem of fragrance without pollen. It was to be a part of the paving, a decorative band of cobblestones interplanted with creeping aromatics, tiny, fragrant little leaf mats which would tolerate occasional bruising as people walked on them and released refreshing perfumes into the air.

‘Yes,' she agreed, picking up her spade again. ‘The mints – where are they?'

Dave looked at Derek. ‘Haven't they come?'

Derek looked at Dave. ‘Don't look at me, I've been here with you all morning, I don't know.'

‘Well,' Stephanie said reasonably, ‘I know I confirmed the delivery, so they should be here. Why not check with the housekeeper?'

The mints had not been delivered. A call to the nursery established from a hysterical assistant that the driver delivering their plants had fallen asleep at the wheel and crashed on the 31 when still two hours away from the city.

‘Hell,' said Stephanie, and she stamped her foot. The boys flinched. Stamping and profanity were quite out of her character.

‘Steady,' suggested Dave.

‘Don't steady me,' she retorted.

‘Hey, enhance your calm, Steph,' Derek cautioned her. ‘Don't lose it over a few little mints.'

‘I'll lose it if I damn well want to,' she asserted. ‘This job has to be finished today. Where are we going to get two dozen prostrate mints in Westwick on a Friday afternoon?'

They were temporarily silent, then Dave said, ‘There's that mad place down in Willow Gardens.'

‘What mad place?'

‘Gaia – you mean Gaia, don't you? Sort of nursery place with the falling-down fence and that woman with huge hair?'

‘That's the one.' They giggled. ‘But she does have some unusual things; she might have what we need,' Dave allowed. ‘Although the place is kind of crazy.'

‘Well, call them up and ask,' Stephanie ordered, starting to feel tired. ‘If they've got them I'll go over and get them right now, while you start sweeping up.' Talking to the boys about missing Stewart was pointless; they seemed to think that sex was the problem, and cruising the Wilde At Heart on Saturday night would fix it.

Dave pulled out his phone and made the call. ‘Yess!' he reported quickly. ‘She's got mints.'

‘Tell her I'm on my way,' Stephanie directed, heading for her car.

Cleanliness had been the business of West wick for more than a century. Long after the river became a scummy, soup-thick vein of liquid waste, its tributaries still ran clear down Alder Bottom and Hel Vale; long after the city had smothered itself in stench and smoke, fresh breezes blew about Oak Hill. There had been laundries there, the highest land convenient to the city; old prints. showed the slopes festooned with lines of white sheets drying in the clean air, billowing vineyards of purity whose weekly harvest was carted back to houses in town.

History fixed things so that the cleanliness connection became almost karmic. The washing machine was invented, the laundries disappeared, the streams were buried in storm drains. At Oak Hill a power station was built to blacken the air with its emissions. But coal tar was a by-product, which made soap manufacture cheap, so by the thirties, barges were fetching tons of Goodie & Hazard's Daybreak Household Bars and Acorn Shoe Cream from their Helford works, where the one-time laundry maids clocked in and thanked progress for rubber gloves.

The Channel Ten building on the river at Helford had risen from the rubble of an old soap warehouse, a fact which The Boss decreed should be stressed in the corporate image. ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness,' he observed. ‘This is a dirty world and people like to know we've got God on our side.' The windows were enhanced with turquoise metal grilles; the boardroom had a fine view of the river and the helicopter pad built on the old wharf.

‘Queue Here For …' read a signboard outside the studio reception. The intention had been that the name of the programme currently needing an audience should be inserted in a window at the bottom of the sign, but the reception staff never bothered and the window was left empty. People queued all day anyway, mesmerised like cult devotees by the charismatic glow of television. Mostly women, mostly unemployed, very young or very old, they shuffled heavy-footed as a chain gang through a race of crush barriers, getting hot in the sun or wet in the rain, leaving the forecourt studded with chewing gum and littered with cola cans and cigarette butts.

The Channel's workers, down to the lowest runner, disdained even to mention the queue. The idea that
their
programme, however mindless it might be, went out to this underclass was impossible. These poor, stupid, ugly, ill-dressed, tattooed, sociopathic cattle were just live set-dressing, not representatives of the real audience. They went as embarrassedly unacknowledged as sexually transmitted parasites. What primitive sub-species would wait in line all day for the sake of making up a studio audience?

The queue were misunderstood. They did not particularly want to be an audience; they wanted to see a stat. They did not know that the celebrity entrance was through the gated and guarded scenery dock at the other side of the building. Only Allie Parsons ran the gauntlet. out front every morning, and the geeking and gawping and twittering and truanting children asking for autographs lit her up like downtown. Kowloon.

The end of the series was in sight. ‘In the autumn,'
Family First's
senior producer announced, ‘we're going to be losing Daniel.' The Himbo grinned a wide, hard, desperate grin, like Steve McQueen at the end of
The Great Escape.
‘And we'll be interviewing co-hosts over the summer.' Each year, the agents heard him with less enthusiasm. ‘That Parsons bitch,' one of them had said, ‘I wouldn't let one of my clients work with her if she was the last pair of implants on TV.'

‘We want to introduce some new features in the next series,' the producer announced to the team. ‘We need ideas. Audience research says we should be moving away from issue-based items to a more human—'

‘Real people, real lives,' Allie broke in with impatience. ‘Feelings, not so much of the talky-talky junk. We need to put more of life on the screen, the tears, the pain, the anguish, the guilt…'

‘The embarrassment,' suggested Daniel, insouciantly tipping back his chair.

‘And the laughter, of course'Allie waved her hands about as if to sculpt the desirable emotions from the air. ‘Love, warmth, stuff like that. What we need is more
heart.'

‘Gossip,' the senior producer elaborated, sensing a lack of response around the conference table. ‘We want to do more gossip. We're going to be losing Watchdog completely, nobody goes for that consumer stuff any more. Environment will be restructured. Health Matters stays but we'll turn it around to focus on personal stories, my life with motor-neurone, that kind of thing. There'll be a style makeover every day, not just every week, and we're going to invite viewers to actually make each other over so you'll get say a kid giving her grandma the look he thinks she ought to have, or the secretary dressing her boss; whatever.'

‘Are there still secretaries?' asked Maria, the one-time weather girl, with delicacy. Miraculously confirmed as a permanent researcher for the next series, she was staking out her turf.

‘Plus – this is the big one, folks,' Allie recaptured their attention with a sweep of her pen, like a conductor gathering up an orchestra, ‘we're going to start a lead feature strand focusing on real women with real problems, stories, tragedies.'

‘And there'll be a tarot reader on the sofa with Allie giving the spiritual perspective on every guest's dilemmas.' The producer nodded to his star with pride, inviting admiration for her selfless sacrifice for the sake of the programme. There was a silence. ‘Humanity, that's what this is about,' he urged, ‘Next season. I don't want anyone coming in here with an idea that hasn't got a human face on it. Now, if that's clear …'

‘Dumbing down,' said the junior researcher, throwing down his pencil with disgust. ‘I thought we were dragging our knuckles in the dirt already.'