The Road Home (13 page)

By eleven, Lev could feel the movement in the kitchen slowing and the objects that arrived by his sinks were different: baking trays, sorbet glasses, ramekins, eggbeaters, pastry cutters, spoons, coffee cups, and cafetières. He allowed himself to turn, once, to see what everybody was doing, and he saw Sophie close the vegetable chiller and begin to take off her kitchen whites. When she removed the little cotton hat she’d been wearing, her hair was damp and lying in heavy curls close to her skull, as though she’d been swimming.

“Night, everybody,” she said.

G. K. Ashe came over to her, put a hand on her wet head, and considered her with his ice-blue eyes. “Nice calm work, Sophie,” he said. “Everything well coordinated. Pretty good.”

“Thank you, Chef,” said Sophie.

The other chefs raised a hand to her and then she turned to Lev. “Night, Olev,” she said.

Lev felt himself execute a ridiculous little bow, while holding in his hands a bowl and a whisk. Waldo and Jeb sniggered. Sophie smiled. Lev said quietly, “Sophie, I am sorry. My name is Lev. Not Olev.”

“Oh, right,” said Sophie. “I’m sorry, too.”

“Nothing to be sorry about,” said Ashe. “His name’s
Nurse.
”

By one o’clock—when the service was long over and the “front of house” empty of the last customers and the dining room dark and silent—the staff had gone home, and the only people who stayed behind in the kitchen were Lev and G. K. Ashe.

Ashe sat on a stool at his work station and drank white wine and made notes on his menu pads. His blue eyes darted everywhere, observing Lev as he cleaned the hobs and the salamanders, the plate warmers and the steel countertops. Lev was then reminded to sweep and mop the floor.

“I sacked the last nurse,” said G.K. as Lev poured hot water and floor cleaner into the red bucket, “because he refused to do this late-night stuff properly. I said to him, ‘You know you’re an idiot? Idiots sleep while the smart guys work.’ But he didn’t get it. So, tough. He was history. Lucky for you.”

“Yes,” said Lev. “Lucky for me, Chef.”

But he felt as tired as an old mule. His yearning for a cigarette made him shivery. His hands were sore and burning and the ache in his back was like a wound. He longed to lay down his head on the surprised faces of the wandering giraffes.

6

Elgar’s Humble Beginnings

THE LONDON HEAT wave lasted a long time.

Dust accumulated on the gates and railings of Belisha Road, and on the tops of cars. In the garden of number 12, the grass turned brown and the malnourished puppy whined all afternoon in the dry shade of the sycamore tree.

Christy Slane kept the windows of the flat wide open and Lev grew accustomed to the sounds of North London, as to a piece of modern music which he knew others admired but which he couldn’t quite bring himself to love. One of these sounds was the council chain saw biting into the limbs of the rowan trees.

Some afternoons, Lev just sat in his room, smoking and wondering and concealing tenpound notes in brown-paper parcels padded with newspaper to send to Ina. On other days, when he felt strong in his limbs, he walked to Parliament Hill and watched the kite fliers launch peculiar buzzing mattresses into the blue air and listened to snatches of conversation by the dark ponds of the Heath. He stared at lovers and young couples with babies, and envied them. The gray skin of his face and arms turned brown in the late sunshine. His hair grew long over his collar.

Most days, both Lev and Christy stayed in bed until midday, then Christy would make tea and crawl out to a Greek shop for fresh bread. Sometimes he cooked bacon and potato scones and fried tomatoes. Then he and Lev would sit at the table in the window of the bare sitting room, eating and talking about work and money, or trying to sing the nursery rhymes they’d taught their daughters long ago. Christy reminded Lev that Ireland was a land of song. He said music was in the green of the hedgerows and in the bleating of sheep; it was in the dreaming coves of the western shore and in the malting houses of the Guinness breweries. He said England had no songs, only marches and embarrassing old laments for dead glories. “When you come to a land without song, things are bound to go tits-up, sooner or later,” he said. “I should have known that before I married Angela.”

Toward the end of the summer, Lev went with Christy to a small shop at Archway, staffed by young Indian men, and bought a mobile phone. From an assistant whose name was Krishna, he chose the cheapest model available. When he and Christy came out of the shop, Christy slapped Lev’s shoulders and announced to him that now he was a “true citizen of London,” that he was a “modern human being,” and Lev felt pleased with his purchase. The mobile had a turquoise green casing. He had, as yet, almost nobody to make calls to, apart from Rudi, but he liked to cradle the phone in his hand and rerun the selection of ring tones. And, in the early hours as he walked home to Belisha Road from his night bus, he would sometimes call Christy—wherever Christy was, in some friend’s smoky room or in some Irish pub that never closed—and say, “This is Lev. Just phoning in.”

“Lev,” Christy would invariably say, “good man! I’ll be home in a jiffy.”

But he seldom was. If a plumbing job came up, he’d tell the people he only worked evenings, and when Lev left for GK Ashe, Christy would be doing a jigsaw puzzle at the table or hanging up sheets and T-shirts over the bath. Yet one afternoon, before Lev went to work, Christy showed him a wad of money.

“Cash,” he said, “see it? Cash is gold, and don’t forget that, Lev. Get paid in cash, and I’m not funding some eejit to knacker the trees or dig up the fuckin’ road. I’m not subsidizing foreign wars or helping to redecorate the House of Commons toilets. I’m paying for me own life and that’s all. And that’s the way I like it to be.”

Christy held out the money—a clutch of twenties—for Lev to admire. When Lev had admired them sufficiently, Christy offered to come and talk to G. K. Ashe, to persuade him to pay Lev in cash, but Lev said, “No, Christy. Thank you for thinking. But I have a bank account now. Damian helped me. Sometimes I go to look at this bank, Clerkenwell branch, to feel pride in my money so safe.”

“All right,” said Christy. “I appreciate your sentimental attachment to the premises of capitalist extortionists. But it’s robbery to get National Insurance and all that extra stuff off you when the hourly rate is so pitiful.”

“I get free supper meal.”

“Sure. I guess that’s worth something. Got a top chef filling your belly once a day. But I’ve seen you come home. You’re beat. They’re workin’ you like a slave.”

“No,” said Lev. “I’m okay. And sending money home.”

“How much’re you sendin’, though? You’ve not a lot to spare.”

“Depends. Sometimes twenty pound a week. In my country, this can go far.”

“Can it? Well, Jeezus, why don’t we all move there, then?”

Christy sat down opposite Lev at the sitting-room table. His thin arms rested on an ancient tea stain. He sighed and went on, “I’d
like
to move there. Why not? If twenty quid a week can buy you what it used to buy. They could do with a few plumbers, couldn’t they? Put in some nice sanitary ware. Your daughter could have her own little washbasin with dolphin taps, eh, Lev?”

“You don’t want to move there,” said Lev.

“Why not? I like the sound of it. Goats tinklin’ along in the street. Tin jewelry. Old-fashioned folk dancing. I truly like the thought of it.”

“No,” said Lev. “You wouldn’t like, Christy. No future there. No work.”

“I’d make me own work,” said Christy. “Like Rudi and his taxi firm. And we could go drinking all together—you, me, and Rudi. And I’d be away from Angela. Away from the lawyers . . .”

“But also away from Frankie.”

“Yes,” said Christy, with a melancholy sigh. “Well, I know. But it’s not as if I
see
her, is it? Only those glimpses I get. Oh, and I didn’t tell you: Angela’s got a boyfriend now. Some eejit of an estate agent. Planning on moving in with him. Her and Frankie. Moving in with
that
. Kills me, it does. If Frankie starts to call him ‘Daddy,’ I’ll have to murder somebody. I tell you, fella, I’ll have to commit a serious crime.”

Lev looked at Christy, who was twisting a rubber band round his wad of twenties. On his narrow face, the flare of eczema was spreading wider.

“Why you can’t see Frankie?” Lev said quietly. “It’s your daughter.”

Christy didn’t raise his eyes, just stared at the money roll. After a while, he said, “Angela made things out. Said I was violent when I’d been drinking. Said I hit her. Said if I hit my wife, I was capable of hitting the child.”

He laid down the money and lit a cigarette. Not looking at Lev, he said, “I didn’t hit Angela. I’m sure I never did. Or if I did, it’s just vanished away out of me, into a void. So I had to tell my lawyer: ‘I don’t
know
.’ Angela showed me a swollen lip one time. Perhaps I did that. Perhaps I did. But I wouldn’t have said such a thing was in me. I wouldn’t have said Christy Slane would ever get anywhere near to doin’ that. But how do I know?”

Lev sat very still. He wanted to admit to Christy that, where love was concerned, he knew that he himself had been capable of saying and doing things of which he’d later felt ashamed.

But this subject needed time, and the cheap clock on Christy’s mantelpiece was ticking toward three thirty. Lev had to leave soon and get on his bus. He reached out and took a cigarette from Christy’s pack of Silk Cut. The sharing of cigarettes had become a quiet habit with them. It confirmed them, in Lev’s mind, as friends. He inhaled and said, “I believe you didn’t do this, Christy. Somewhere in your mind, you would know.”

“But would I?” said Christy. “That’s what I’m not sure about. And that’s why I can’t defend meself. It’s all just gone dark. And now this eejit of a property-shop employee is fucking Angela and reading Frankie bedtime stories. I’m the out-and-out loser.”

When Lev got home from GK Ashe, toward two o’clock, he found Christy on the landing outside the flat door, lying in a pool of sick. Lev went into the flat and dampened a sheaf of kitchen paper and came back to Christy and swabbed away the vomit from his mouth. Then he ran a bath and carried Christy into the bathroom and undressed him and laid him in the warm water. Christy was conscious by now and aware of where he was. His face was very white, except for the sore band of eczema, and his voice sounded thin and hesitant, like the voice of a person on the end of a wavering mobile-phone connection.

“Sorry, fella,” he said to Lev. “That’s fuckin’ disgusting. Me ma used to say to me, ‘Wouldn’t mind Dad’s drunken rages, wouldn’t mind him smashing up Aunt Bridie’s tea service, if only he could keep the drink
down
.’ ”

“It’s okay,” said Lev. “It’s okay.”

He left Christy soaping his neck with a washcloth and returned to mop up the pool of vomit on the landing. Though the smell was foul, Lev could endure it. When Marina had become ill, she had vomited often and he’d just got used to it. It was part of her was what he used to tell himself. It was everyday human mess. It was proof that Marina was still alive.

Cold autumn arrived without warning.

When Lev left for work one afternoon, the sun was still quite warm on the windowpanes of 12 Belisha Road; when he came out into the Clerkenwell night, all the pubs and bars had closed their doors and a freezing wind was howling through deserted streets. Lev set off toward his bus stop. He tugged up the collar of his leather jacket as rain began to fall. The revolving yellow light of a street-sweeping cart lit up a suddenly unfamiliar city.

Waiting for his night bus, on a tilting bench no wider than a plank, Lev remembered how, when Marina had worked in the Procurator’s Office of Public Works in Baryn, he used to imagine her as the guardian of his world, used to feel confident that whatever changes might be on their way, his wife would be one of the first to know about them. Even changes in the weather. The Office of Public Works had invested in what the procurator called a “reliable forecasting facility.” Marina always knew, for instance, when snowfall was expected. Her department would have overseen the oiling of ancient snowplows and authorized the call-up of the retired drivers of these machines, taken from their homes to be put on a fearful standby in the Baryn transport depot, where the only creature comfort was an antique samovar bolted to the wall and a stall of rusty urinals that were never cleaned.

“These old men,” Marina used to say, “have to use the urinals very often. I worry they will get some infection.”

Lev’s bus arrived and he climbed on and was glad of the weak warmth to be found inside and the lemonish light in the darkness. He wished someone could have warned him about the suddenness of change in the English seasons. He knew he’d become so accustomed to the fine weather he’d made no adjustments in his mind for a cold autumn. And now he could see the long tunnel of winter waiting ahead, the dark afternoons, that old middle-of-the-night sadness you could feel when you heard the wind tormenting the trees.

Lev closed his eyes. His back ached from his long shift at the sinks. He stuffed his hands inside the pockets of his jacket and clutched the precious money he found there. Memories of Marina’s office in the Public Works building now filled his mind. He could remember its fusty smell and the sound of its heavy door opening and closing and Marina’s nameplate on her desk.

It had been in winter that he and Marina had become entrapped in their one furious quarrel. Even at the time, Lev had known that the detestable way he was behaving toward his wife had something to do with the cold season, with lightlessness, with the too-thin blood in his veins. All along that dark time, he’d hated himself—his ranting voice, his hardened heart—but this hatred didn’t alter what he felt or what he did. All along that dark time, he had known he was probably mistaken, but he couldn’t recant, couldn’t cease to believe what had suddenly, in the space of a single day, become his blinding conviction.

He had accused Marina of being unfaithful to him. He believed that her lover was her boss, the procurator himself, the fifty-year-old Mr. Rivas, formerly known as Comrade Rivas.