Getting Home (24 page)

‘Absolutely.' He was surprised that she made the admission.

‘You could at least let me lead my own life,' he pleaded.

‘No,' she said lightly, kicking the table leg again with one of her pointed pink suede evening mules. ‘Don't be so god-damned selfish, Ted. Your life is my life, my life is my work. I can't have that kind of thing said about me. While I'm on
Family First,
we stick together. You're a joke, Ted, a lightweight, a dickhead. You and your stupid little deals and your stupid houses. Chester – you kiss his ass, you think he's the big “I Am”, he's just a jerk, no style; he can't cut it. We can get divorced when it suits me, when I've moved on from
Family First.
Believe me, I can't wait.' She was longing to move up into the next level of life, wife of some hot big guy, anchor of some hot prime-time show, her cover of
Time
not far off. One breakthrough, that was all she needed; the job or the man, the chicken or the egg.

‘Are you having an affair?' she demanded, as he expected her to.

‘No,' he said.

‘You're not even lying, are you? Well, I can't say I'm surprised. You're hardly a man, are you? Not many women could put up with you sliming them. Go on have a fling, be my guest. I don't want you leching after every little whore in your office, getting into a sexual harassment suit. That would look good, wouldn't it?'

This was too much for Ted. All his hopes lay pulverised in fragments at his feet. He announced that he would take the dog out for a while, and dawdled along in the deep darkness beneath the old trees of Maple Grove, listening to Moron snuffling equably in the trim grass. If he were a proper man, he knew, he would be able to walk on to Alder Reach now, and find a warm welcome there. As it was, he would have to go back to his own desolate bed and lie there in the darkness, the man who made his fortune selling happy homes to happy families.

‘Topaz, can I ask you something?' For once, Flora Lieberman was idling. Mooning about the living space ruffling up her mop of hair, picking up an apple, deciding she didn't want it, picking up a pen, not knowing what to write, scrubbing at her eyes and making them red, flopping on the sofa, getting up again, stretching up her dimpled arms to the ceiling, letting them fall heavily to her sides.

Her sister, chipping at her rock-pile of books, was becoming irritated. ‘If we can deal with what's bothering you and get some peace around here – sure, ask me anything.'

‘You remember Damon Parsons?'

‘Lurch.'

‘Yeah, that's him.' Damon's sense of balance was defective. At St Nicholas's High School he canted at his desk, lummoxed about the corridors and fell over on the sports fields. No lecture the staff could devise about the social divisiveness of stigmatising the disadvantaged saved him from his nickname.

‘Is he still in school?'

Flora sighed. ‘Unfortunately. He was sent away on some alcohol programme but when he came back they just put him down a year.'

‘What about him?' Topaz already had the essence of the problem. All this sighing and avoidance – it had to be sex.

Of the three Lieberman sisters, Flora alone took after her mother. While Topaz and Molly were economically made, Flora was ample and unconstructed. Molly was an imp; Topaz had matured effortlessly from imp to dryad; Flora was in mid-metamorphosis from blob to goddess; her suddenly abundant flesh burst seams every day. She was struggling through the curse of full-out adolesence, randomly attacked by sweat, pimples, blubber, jugs and despair. To Topaz, she was a pain.

‘He keeps following me.'

‘Tell him to go away.'

‘I have told him.'

‘And …'

‘And he just grins at me.'

‘You can't be telling him right then. If you intend to communicate something, you're reponsible for doing so in a manner which achieves understanding.'

‘I don't think he can understand, Topaz. He's not right, you know? I think he's only in school because his mother schmoozes around with all that TV stuff and the head's just taken in by it. I mean, I've been in classes with him and he's not playing with a full deck. He's weird. He scares me.'

‘That's not logical, Flora.'

‘It is so logical. He's a huge thing and he could do anything. You know he smashed up the Wilde At Heart last year when he was drunk.'

Topaz considered. Unruly elements had to be purged. Society was healthier without their influence. Nepotism was a cancer which ate at the hearts of the people. On the other hand, her sister, with her flouncing flesh and feeble spirit, was colluding with her persecutor. Since they were not in a position to purge the offender at this point in time, only Flora's contribution to the problem could be addressed.

‘Go and sign up for a martial arts class,' counselled Topaz, ‘or self-defence for women or something. You need to empower yourself. When you cease to feel like a victim, you won't act like a victim and then you will no longer be a victim.'

‘They make you fall about and hit people in self-defence.' Physical activity, beyond a little languid dancing, did not attract Flora. She regarded having to cycle to school as the greatest burden of their comparative poverty.

‘How do you know until you've done it?' Topaz countered. ‘But this isn't about learning to fight, Flora. You don't understand. It's about getting in touch with your inner strength, so you never need to fight anybody. You shouldn't be creeping around letting yourself be intimidated by a retard like Lurch.'

‘No,' Flora agreed. If you asked Topaz for help, you had to take whatever she gave you. Her authority was total. Trouble was, there were things Topaz didn't understand. Like failure. Let alone fear of failure. And as for worrying that you'd chosen the wrong thing to fail at … Topaz could do things that most people found difficult without any trouble at all. If you said you were having problems, she just blinked at you.

‘Otherwise,' Topaz added with supreme rationality, ‘what we could do is get Gemma to go and speak to the school about it …'

Flora winced. Nothing in the world was more painful than having her mother intervene in her school life. Topaz went back to her books, confident of the outcome. For a short while the only sound in the room was the muted clatter of her keyboard.

‘OK,' Flora sighed eventually. ‘I'll do it. If you really think it will help.'

‘They do martial arts at that gym in Helford. You can ask Rod to take you, if you like.' Topaz never took her eyes from the screen. Flora had once heard Rod Fuller say that Topaz had been born without doubt, and that this was a great advantage in life.

High summer came to Westwick. The lawns lost their lushness and the leaves on the tall trees hung limp in the dry air. Radiators boiled on the 31. Ted, Adam and Josh boasted to each other of their in-car air-conditioning. Moron found a wedge of shade on the terrace behind the house and lay there like a dead dog all afternoon. Damon Parsons took to bunking off school and sleeping among the weeds in the central reservation of Acorn Junction. The water level in the river fell, leaving the
Dawn Treader
half-beached among blooming pink willow herb.

The management of The Cedars posted a notice to its clients warning them that correct tennis attire might include a tennis headband of white or pastel towelling with a discreet logo, available from the boutique at only three times a reasonable price, but did not embrace aerobic sweatbands in bright colours, bandannas or surf wear; players wearing such apparel would be asked to leave the court, and members were requested to advise their guests accordingly. The mirrors in the studio steamed up during the Bunbuster. The studio manager gave Rod Fuller his third warning about wearing no socks with trainers.

The first blooms on her
Souvenir de la Malmaison
were stupendous but Stephanie had no time to admire them, for all over Westwick people saw stupendous roses in other people's gardens and wanted some for themselves, and some of them called The Terrace Garden Design Studio and demanded bowers and arbours and pergolas the day before yesterday, so. Stephanie's phone rang more than ever and she asked Inmaculada, her baby-sitter, to work every afternoon. The aphids recolonised
Souvenir de la Malmaison.

Her hair made her neck sweaty, however she braided it, twisted it and pinned it up. One day she grew violently impatient with it and had it cut.

She preserved a window in her diary for sports day at The Magpies. In good time she withdrew the cakes from the freezer, rounded up the promised donations, packed them all prettily in baskets, ironed her gingham picnic cloths and made up a basket of posies for good luck. It felt excellent to bustle about her kitchen while the neighbours dropped by with their batches of cookies. It felt decent and goodwifely and like living in a real community where people cared and looked out for each other. It felt like playing her proper part in weaving the social fabric, exactly the kind of experience for which she had wanted to live in Westwick. Her rankling indignance faded; gossip was natural, after all. And Ted had probably heard what he wanted to hear. Such a shame for Allie, to see her husband becoming the classic marital loose cannon.

The Magpies was housed in a gothic mansion on the edge of Maple Grove, a large, fantastical building more fit for the Addams Family than for fifty privileged infants on a regime of finger painting and flash cards. Sports Day was a matter of high tradition. Red, white and blue bunting was draped on the lych gate. The flat grass space which was the house's former tennis court was painted with white lines. Beside the finishing tape was set a table for the teacher deputed umpire, also responsible for superintending a deposit of the contestants'asthma inhalers. The refreshment table was spread in the shade of the last remaining maple in Maple Grove.

Stephanie got busy displaying her stock. ‘I like your hair, it makes you look more assertive,' Lauren Pike told her with her
noblesse oblige
simper as she double-knotted Felix's trainers.
So I looked like a pushover before,
Stephanie concluded, smiling as if complimented.

‘Did you know your son was in love, Mrs Sands?'

‘In what? Who? What, Max?' Stephanie jumped as if she had been bitten, almost dropping Sonia Purkelli's magnificent sachertorte which was getting shiny in the heat.

‘We see it all the time. True love can strike at any age. Aren't they sweet?' Miss Helens, principal of The Magpies, had a smile that was not really a smile, more an attempt to suppress excessive signals of pleasure. She stretched her lips flat against her teeth, pulled her mouth back into her chin and tucked her chin down into the pie-crust frill around the neck of her pink-striped blouse as if she thought smiling was not quite normal. Nevertheless, a glittery excitement lit up her blue-shadowed eyes as she poked a finger across the playground towards Max. ‘With little Courtenay Fuller, there. Aren't they delightful?'

‘God, Stephanie, what have you done to your hair?' demanded Rachel Carman. ‘Shut up, Rach,' ordered her husband, steering her towards the centre of the front row of the spectators'chairs. ‘It's cute, Steph, really. I like it.'

Stephanie followed Miss Helens'finger and saw her son standing gravely at the foot of the climbing frame attending a little golden-skinned creature who swung from a high bar like a pretty gibbon, her checked frock flapping from her shoulders.

‘It's been going on for a fortnight.' Miss Helens smartly adjusted her manner to ameliorate what she perceived as maternal disapproval. ‘They're charming together. She's quite a nice little girl. A good choice, I think. Brought Max out of himself a bit. Something to take his mind off things.'

Miss Helens was probably younger than she looked. She had allowed herself to become plump. More than any of the citizens of Maple Grove, she preferred to wear navy blue. She clasped her hands together in a prayerful attitude under her noble bosom and delivered archly voiced opinions on school affairs as if she were the dean of a great ivy-clad college, not the headmistress of a suburban kindergarten whose windows were obscured with cut-out animals and pasta collages.

In keeping with the dignity of her role in the community, Miss Helens did not teach. She left the finger-painting and flash cards to the assistants, but stood favouring parents with her conversation, framed in the gateway of her institution, which was now painted a wholesome cream, with short gingham curtains tied back with bows at every window, red for the reception class, yellow for intermediate, green for the seniors getting ready to move up to St Nicholas's Junior.

By and large, Westwick accepted Miss Helens's estimate of her value. Days at The Magpies might be devoted to the adventures of Fluff the Cat and Nip the Dog, and the goodness of sitting down and being quiet, as against the badness of showing your bottom and stabbing other children with pencils, but it was nevertheless a sacred place, a repository of virtue, a cornerstone of the community.

The principal's self-importance assured parents that in sending their darlings to The Magpies they were placing their tiny feet in orthopaedically approved footwear on the moving pavement of educational privilege which would carry them on through slick academic forcing houses and expensive boarding schools to the pickiest universities, and thence out into lives in which they would never have to talk to anyone with an IQ of less than 120 except in an emergency.

A junior teacher called the children to order. Stephanie watched the girl who was the object of Max's devotion as she scampered to the fireman's pole at the edge of the frame and slithered swiftly to the ground. Then she allowed him to take her free hand as soon as it was within reach and escort her into the school house. Max did not look back. Stephanie felt a stab of regret. I'm not a smother-mother, she lectured herself, I will let my son do what he has to do to grow up, I will respect his independence. It's natural for him to form close attachments. I should be grateful he's so affectionate. And caring. Just like Stewart. She ate a deliquescent butterfly cake to neaten up the plate.