Getting Home (38 page)

‘This house, Ted. Our home.'

‘Oh,' he said, feeling suddenly shivery with dread. ‘That.'

‘This, really. Our home.' She gestured around, making him look at the children sprawled in the playroom and their food warming in the oven and the full richness of the late summer garden with the rose petals unfolding in the sun. ‘Which because you're all so vile to us, now that my husband isn't around, I decided I wanted to rent out. You can guess what I discovered.'

‘The new access road to Oak Hill?' She expected him to bluster and weasel and patronisingly tell her she didn't understand, but he was squaring up his shoulders, apparently getting ready to take responsibility. ‘I'm sorry people are behaving badly,' he added. ‘I hope you don't mean me—'

‘I think I do mean you, Ted. Of course, not only you,'

Thank God, Ted congratulated the deity, she is not going to cry. Or at least, she doesn't look as if she is going to cry right now. He would have figured Stephanie as the teary type. He was relieved for a moment. ‘But I've always been very fond of you, you know that …'

‘How could I doubt it?' She froze him with a straight look. ‘But not fond enough to let me know that my home was going to be demolished.'

‘Oh no,' he said at once, ‘not necessarily. It was only an option. You understand, it's out of my hands. We're only concerned with the site itself. The Transport Department had three different routes under consideration …'

‘I think they've made up their minds now, Ted. This is the way they want to go. We're going to lose our home I can't even rent it right now.'

‘But there'll be consultation …'

‘You know what that means.'

‘But I thought you approved of Oak Hill. When we were talking about it at the Old Westwick Society, that ridiculous man going on about the Nature Triangle – you kept out of it all.'

‘If I'd known my house was going to be knocked down, I'd have felt differently. You set me up, Ted. You set us up. Or Allie did. That's why this house was so cheap, wasn't it? Because you knew this was going to happen.'

‘No, look,' he writhed around in his chair and crossed his long legs as if to squeeze out the discomfort of his guilt. ‘That's not how it was. I promise you, word of honour.' She sneered. The sweet woman actually sneered. Maybe she was going to yell instead of crying. ‘Look,' he pressed on with anxiety. ‘I had a word with your husband, with Stewart. We had a deal. The idea was he would come in on Oak Hill with us, his firm would be the consulting architects, they'd have done very well … it didn't work out like that. He changed his mind.'

‘Why?' Stephanie felt outmanoeuvred. Worse, she felt betrayed. How dare Stewart cut some secret deal with Ted and treat her like a little Lucille Ball wife and tell her nothing? Her impulsion fizzled out, confusion crushed her.

‘I don't know.' The effort of telling that lie actually shot Ted off his chair to stand up and walk around the room. ‘I didn't set you up, Stephanie. I promise I didn't. It would have been a great deal for Stewart, but it went wrong. And I had no idea the Transport people would do this. Look – I'll make some calls in the morning, I'll see what I can do. I promise. I'll get back to you on it. Promise. It wasn't a set-up. That wasn't how it was, you mustn't think that.'

‘Whatever,' she said, helpless and deflated. He scooped Chalice into his arms and rushed for the door as fast as decently possible. ‘Damn,' Stephanie said aloud. ‘I never asked him how things were at home.'

The witches convened again that evening, and, while the pots were boiling and the children dispersed about their entertainments, they examined the omens.

‘Nobody picked up Chalice from The Magpies,' Stephanie suggested. ‘I took her back with us, and Ted came around to fetch her, but I was so mad about the house business I forgot to ask about anything else.'

‘Figures,' ruled Gemma, chopping onions. ‘If ever Allie does car pool she forgets, and if her help does it she forgets to tell the help to pick up. The poor kid's always weeping in a heap at going-home time.'

‘I came down Church Vale but the house was just normal. No photographers or anything. I brought some anchovies and ham and stuff,' Rod extracted a packet from the inside pocket of his Levi jacket. ‘I thought
alla putanesca
might be appropriate.'

‘I don't shake
my
ass for a living,' Gemma observed.

Stephanie was impatient for action and suspicious of her new friend's propensity for chaos. ‘Do you think she got the letter?'

‘Sure she got the letter. She'll react, trust me. How do I do this?' This was to Rod, about the array of new ingredients before her. ‘Why don't you take over? Will the kids eat it?'

‘Sweetheart eats it.' He installed himself at the chopping board, trying not to appear masterful in another cook's domain.

‘Well, Flora could stand to lose the weight and Molly never wants to eat and I swear Topaz lives on human blood anyway … what about Max?'

‘He'll be fine. Where did you send it, the letter?'

‘Nowhere. I sent it nowhere. I
took
it, in an envelope, marked personal and confidential, right up to Channel Ten studios. I did not send it to the house because Ted gets up first and could throw it away. Though if I'd given him the chance my money would be on him having it presented to her on a velvet cushion. He'd adore her to leave him; you know how husbands are, always hoping fate will do their evil deeds so they can stand back and get what they want and not be guilty at the same time. And I checked thar she is in the studio every day now, even though the show isn't airing yet. Now do you trust me?'

‘Maybe it's just in a bag with her fan mail.' Rod moved to the sink and ran the taps. He had bought the best anchovies in Parsley & Thyme, the salted anchovies from Collioure which cost one tenth of a private client per six servings, and needed rinsing thoroughly and picking over for tiny bones, although the women would laugh if he asked for tweezers for the job.

‘Hah! Don't tell me she gets fan mail. Two sackfuls of death threats a day, maybe.' With a ferocious pop, Gemma pulled the cork on a bottle of Chateau Mr Singh.

‘She says she does,' sighed Stephanie, ‘but I'm sure her secretary would show her anything like that. Did you copy the letter?'

‘Copy it?' Gemma, startled in the act of filling glasses, splashed another libation on her table. ‘Why would I copy it, disgusting thing?'

‘We'll just have to wait on.' Rod drained a jar of capers, the dearest little piquant pearls, Italian, another tenth of a private client per six servings.

At the far end of the room the door swung open and Topaz, returning from her evening shift filling shelves, rattled her bicycle into the room and out through the garden doors to its home in the shed. She returned with a newspaper, bright-eyed and pink-cheeked.

‘I don't suppose any of you bought any media today.' She marched to the table, clutching the newspaper to her chest.

‘What is it? Give it here, give it to me, let me see it. Topaz! Don't tease your mother, give!' Snatching the paper from Topaz's unresisting hands, Gemma spread it on the table, careless of the detritus of onion skins, car keys, school timetables, telephone messages, deadly horticultural chemicals, reminders from the dentist, peppermints, flyers from pizza parlours and redundant Wonderbra padding which had somehow colonised the space since Topaz liberated it at breakfast.

The paper was the
Daily Post
, a once up-market tabloid proud of its reputation as the favourite reading of the wives of men who took the quality broadsheets, and morally time-warped in the era when such a gender division obtained. The present editor, had nailed family values to his masthead and abandoned news-related items of more than 500 words, except in the theoretical case of an international disaster causing over 1,000 deaths in a country with a pronounceable name. The remaining acreage of newsprint was given over to gossip.

Gemma read the women's section, the gossip column and the Feng-Shui-your-car supplement. Stephanie reads the front page, the rest of the news and the features. Rod read the health section, the showbiz pages and the sport. Finding nothing, they swapped pages and read each other's.

‘Topaz,' growled Gemma, ‘if this is a wind-up …'

‘When did I ever?' her daughter demanded, indignant.

‘Well, quite. So where is it?'

With contemptuous economy of movement, Topaz took the showbiz diary from her mother and indicated a small paragraph at the bottom, headlined ‘TV Star's Marriage Agony'.

Allie Parsons, the nation's favourite breakfast dish, is reported to be in hiding at a secret address following a row with her husband of eighteen years, property tycoon Edward J Parsons. ‘Yes, Allie's marriage has hit a rough patch,' confirmed a friend, ‘but Allie is devoted to her children, Damon, 17, Cherish, 8 and Chalice, 5 and we're all really hoping that she and Edward will be able to work things out.'
‘Family First,
Allie's toprated TV show, starts its new season in three weeks'time and the smart money says that the new look planned for the programme will no way run to a divorced host appearing in dark glasses.

‘Edward J Parsons,' snorted Gemma, tossing the page away crossly so it planed off the table's edge and fluttered to the floor. This was not the feature she had pictured; she had imagined a tale of shame, failure and paparazzi harassment, pictures of Allie running tearfully into Channel Ten, of Ted dour and ambushed on his doorstep. Truth to tell, the possibility of a hundred lenses poking relentlessly at her own bedroom curtains had also been considered.

‘She's got a new picture.' Rod came around the table to see the image the right way up. ‘That's why we didn't spot it. God, she looks about nineteen.'

‘Devoted to her children,' sniffed Stephanie. ‘Devoted to them like she's devoted to her hairdresser. Actually, less so. I bet she never forgets her fuckwit hairdresser.'

‘Stephanie. That's swearing. I swear I never heard you swear before. My God, what is this woman doing to us all?' In her disappointment Gemma seemed physically deflated by 20 pounds and a cup-size.

Topaz watched and waited. Rod found himself looking at Stephanie with covert fascination, watching the palest, most adorable flush of embarrassment steal over her cheeks. Then he smelled his onions catching, shook off his enchantment and went back to the stove.

‘Come back here,' Gemma commanded him.

‘Why?' Tomatoes, anchovies, capers, chilli, herbs, pepper, taste, stir …

‘You know why, tough guy. That leg's giving on you.'

‘D'ya think it is? Really?' Bland, he was groping for bland, unconcerned, innocent, nothing wrong, but they were hard to catch at that moment. They all knew him too well.

‘You know it is,'. Gemma was pitiless, earthing her annoyance with the Parsons'house.' ‘You're staggering around like Quasimodo. It's been gipping you for weeks, you've been covering up.'

‘Fuck you.' Cornered, he deployed the foxy grin. No woman within range of the foxy grin ever survived but it ricocheted off Gemma's armoured heart and hit Stephanie, who got the feeling of spiders waltzing around the backs of her knees and found she had to sit down immediately.

‘Please, oh please,' Gemma taunted. He threw the tea towel at her. ‘You shouldn't work through pain, Rodolfo, you know that.'

‘What choice do I have? I could get cortisone shots, but they'd only mask the symptoms. We have to eat. Shaking my ass is all I can get paid for on a regular basis.'

He turned back to his sauce to hide his red face in the steam of cooking, and there was an embarrassed silence.

Topaz decided it was time to try the business of giving history a push. ‘Wasn't the Parsons woman offering you a job?' She spoke with total lack of emphasis, as if commenting on a much-repeated wildlife documentary. Oh look, the penguins of the Antarctic standing with their eggs on their feet.

‘No, Topaz, she was coming on to me. People say anything when they're coming on to you. You're seventeen, you should have found that out by now.' He limped over and picked up the fallen tea towel. ‘I'm sorry, that was mean. I take it back.'

‘I think it was quite fair,' Topaz told him, sounding objectively curious. ‘In general, I'd say that you were right. Of course. But it does happen that people actually give other people jobs from sexual motives, doesn't it?'

‘Topaz,' Gemma intervened, reflating to her real dimensions with indignation. ‘Shut up. Just shut up.'

There are many kinds of insomnia, and Stephanie, who had slept like a proverbial baby except in the days when Max was sleeping like a true baby, was discovering them one after the other.

When the news of Stewart first broke, she had been wakeful and wired, thrumming with tension, twitching at every sound that might in the eagerness of her imagination be the first note of a telephone ring. The cure for this was nurturing activity, and she had gone out into the garden and watered her
Souvenir de la Malmaison
at 3 am.

Once the shock was over, and anxieties had blossomed instantly in her mind like flowers in the desert, lurid and luxuriant, she had woken in the darkness with a churning brain and a pain in the pit of her stomach. Work was good for this, and she had sat at her desk doing drawings until dawn, with a mug of hot milk to soothe her guts.

Then came the grey despair, the urge to look out of windows without seeing anything, to drift from room to room by starlight, picking things up for no reason, putting them down again, floating around the garden, stroking and holding leaves as if for a transfusion of fresh DNA, pure new life uninfected with sorrow. This was a mood which responded to nothing at first. Going to Rachel Carman for sleeping pills was out of the question and it was too hot to try a slug of brandy in the milk.