Getting Home Read online

  Bello:

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  Contents

  Celia Brayfield

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. The Healthiest Place in the World

  2. Annual Death Rate Under 6 Per Thousand

  3. Weekly Lectures

  4. Ladies’ Discussion Society

  5. Masquerades

  6. The Vigilance Committee

  7. Hot and Cold Water to Every House

  8. A School of Art

  9. Plenty of Greenery

  10. A Club for Ladies and Gentlemen

  13. The Tudor Theatre

  14. A Natural History Society

  15. A Garden to Every House

  16. Cozy Comfort

  17. Regular Dances

  18. Tennis Courts

  19. Only Twenty Minutes from the City Centre

  21. Peace Assured

  22. A Green Location

  23. Good Gravelly Sub-soil

  24. The Most Approved Sanitary Arrangements

  Celia Brayfield

  Getting Home

  Celia Brayfield

  Celia Brayfield is a novelist and cultural commentator. She is the author of nine novels. The latest, Wild Weekend explores the tensions in a Suffolk village in homage to Oliver Goldmsith’s She Stoops to Conquer. To explore suburban living, she created the community of Westwick and explored mid-life manners in Mr Fabulous And Friends, and the environmental implications of urbanisation in Getting Home. She has often juxtaposed historical and contemporary settings, notably eighteenth century Spain in Sunset, pre-revolutionary St Petersburg in White Ice and Malaysia in the time of World War II in Pearls. Four of her novels have been optioned by major US, UK or French producers.

  Her non-fiction titles include two standard works on the art of writing: Arts Reviews (Kamera Books, 2008) and Bestseller (Fourth Estate, 1996.) Her most recent is Deep France (Pan, 2004) a journal of a year she spent writing in south-west France.

  She has served on the management committee of The Society of Authors and judged national literary awards including the Betty Trask Award and the Macmillan Silver PEN Prize. A former media columnist, she contributes to The Times, BBC Radio 4 and other national and international media.

  Dedication

  For Chloe

  Epigraph

  The more I’m with you pretty baby

  The more I feel my love increase

  I’m building all my dreams around you

  Our happiness will never cease

  But nothing’s any good without you

  Cos baby you’re my centrepiece

  I’ll buy a house and garden somewhere

  Along a country road apiece

  A little cottage on the outskirts

  Where we can really find release

  But nothing’s any good without you

  Cos baby you’re my centrepiece

  ‘Centrepiece’:

  Lyrics by Harry Edison and Jon Hendricks

  1. The Healthiest Place in the World

  The sun rose upon Westwick with respect. The pure glow of dawn approached the tree tops, discreetly penetrated the canopy of leaves and invited the sleeping community to wake up and enjoy the day.

  The light falling through the cherry trees on New Farm Rise dappled the empty street. The-white porches were virtuous with fresh paint; the cropped grass blades prickled in the damp earth. Stephanie Sands woke at 5.38 am, anxious because her husband was away but content because he was going to telephone at 6.00, her son was sleeping and her garden was growing.

  All Stephanie could do was grow things. In thirty-two years she had obediently acquired other skills but felt no joy in practising them. Stephanie had raised plants, she made gardens and now she was raising a family. She had not considered that what one person grew another could then cut down.

  That innocent morning in early summer, Stephanie went out to her garden, barefoot in her bathrobe, taking the telephone. The air was cool and sweet, nourishing as milk. She breathed deeply. Her young crab apple tree was blooming, its branches thick with dark red petals, casting long ruffled shadows across the grass. All around, her life was as good as she could possibly have made it.

  Half a mile away in Maple Grove, the leaves of the old trees smothered the tentative early sunlight. A grey glow revealed the empty gardens. At the corner of Church Vale and Grove End, a front door opened and a fat black dog hurtled down the front path. After it came a call hoarse with the universal terror of a citizen of the suburbs, the fear of annoying the neighbours: ‘Moron! Come back here!’

  At the end of the path, the animal cannoned nose first into the white gate. Westwick architecture was big on story-book details: picket fences, Dutch gables, Rapunzel turrets, hanging balconies. The dog yelped, fell on its rear, rolled over, crushed half a lavender bush and bounded back up on its paws, its blubbery body agitated by its frantic tail.

  A man in running shorts appeared on the porch. He was lean and long-legged, and if his shoulders had not sloped he would have looked athletic. Gently, considerate of his neighbours, he shut his front door. Then Ted Parsons turned his back on most of the disappointments of his life, opened the gate and jogged into the street.

  Start slow. No problem with that. The dog stormed ahead, joyfully delinquent, oblivious of other people’s turf; Moron the labrador, named by his son. It takes one to know one. No, that was unfair, Damon was not that bad. Ted had two secret vices and fairness was one of them. The time was 5.55 am.

  His blood was sluggish and his legs were still cold. There was a band of pressure around his chest. He had a flashback to the age of 14, stumbling after the rest of the boys on shaking knees, hoping at least that no one would notice him. Well, that had been football and this was life. In the real game. Ted Parsons was a player, and those scrappy kids who years ago stuffed mud down his shorts in the changing rooms, where were they now?

  As he turned into The Broadway, he felt his stride lengthen and the blood begin to pump. ‘It ain’t how you start, it’s how you finish,’ he said aloud, rounding the graveyard wall of the Church of St Nicholas.

  St Nicholas’s had a white bell tower with fretwork flashings topped by a little green copper cupola. A cocktail of creole, gothic and renaissance, it marked the southwestern boundary of Maple Grove; if Westwick was the most desirable neighbourhood in the whole conurbation, Maple Grove was its green shady silent heart.

  St Nicholas’s stood on the site of a much older place of worship dedicated to St Werberga. It was quite a few centuries since Werberga had been a good commercial name. Jackson Kerr, the developer who had caused Maple Grove to be built, had commissioned a new church and arranged the rededication of the parish in 1912. All that remained of the old building were some blistered headstones set back against the churchyard wall for the convenience of the grass cutters. Moron halted and cocked a stumpy leg to piss on one of them.

  Ted set off along The Broadway. He raised a hand to Mr Singh, who was taking down the shutters of the Kwality Korner Store. He considered his route: northwest through the New Farm estate or south towards the river along Al
der Reach?

  Gemma Lieberman lived on Alder Reach. Gemma Lieberman might be in the shower, drops of water rounded on her olive skin, drips falling from her nipples. Or she might be in bed, warm and tousled and.… lonely. His thighs drove him on like pistons. Or she might be standing in her kitchen eating toast, in a T-shirt that did not quite cover her backside so that gorgeous dimpled half-moon portions of flesh were almost asking to be grabbed.

  He turned south. Anyway, the New Farm area had a bad association – that dingbat of an architect. Who could understand a man like that, what went on in his head? Young but dumb. Big project, mega profit, quantum leap in your business profile – or putter along with the contracts you’ve got and in two years’time you’ll be dead. Was that such a difficult choice? Ted Parsons shook his head. New Farm was off the map now. Here be losers. He turned into Alder Reach at 6.07 am. Knowing what to expect, Moron followed his master with reluctance.

  In New Farm Rise, Stephanie Sands felt the dew between her toes. Aphids were crusting the buds on her Souvenir de la Malmaison, crawling three-deep around the sepals, insolently waving their antennae. In a well ventilated jar in her shed she had been collecting ladybirds to combat the aphids. Now she fetched the jar and, careful of their tiny legs, pushed the ladybirds with her fingertips on to the encrusted stems.

  ‘Feeling lucky, punks?’ She watched the ladybirds advance on their meal. ‘You don’t know what this is, do you? This is a rose named in memory of the Empress Josephine. If you little beasts give it a break it’s going to be pink.’ Oblivious of their doom, the aphids kept their wings folded and crawled up the stems on microscopic feet. ‘Souvenir de la Malmais has been in cultivation since eighteen thirty-something and I have wanted to grow it all my life. I am not growing it to feed you guys. This is not a soup kitchen, you’ve made a big mistake. Now get off my patch or you’re toast.’

  Was that the telephone? She was talking only because she was anxious. People said Westwick was exquisitely peaceful but in the early morning in summer the birds made such a racket you could miss the piping of a telephone.

  Below the bird calls, to Stephanie’s ears, her garden emitted a kind of green noise, the continuous bustle of vegetation going about its business, leaves reaching up for light, roots siphoning water, tendrils casting about for anchorage. This morning, however, she was not listening with her imagination. She could hear from the far distance the thin growl of cars streaming into the city on the 31. Close by, the thrush in the flowering crab was hopping from twig to twig, trying out his throat. Yes, the telephone was switched to ring. It was 6.13 now.

  Get a grip, woman. When Napoleon went to Egypt, did Josephine fret if his letters did not come? No, she pinned up her hair and went out getting into trouble with Therese Tallien. So why should I worry if my husband doesn’t call from wherever he is? He called yesterday. The lines from Eastern Europe are always bad. Business is like war; men have to think about glory and fortune and victory, not their wives being pitiful back home.

  She rubbed her eyes, then wiped away the crushed aphids she had smeared on her cheek. Napoleon had his army; Josephine had her roses. In her office, she used to keep a postcard of the Empress’s coronation portrait by David on her pinboard. One day there had been a new partner, and he had stopped to look at it. ‘She had your nose,’ he had said.

  ‘It was fashionable then,’ she had answered.

  ‘It’s in the classical vernacular, fashion’s got nothing to do with it.’

  ‘My mother’s always trying to get me to have it – you know – done.’

  ‘Are you having lunch with your mother?’ He had rushed that. Afterwards, when she knew him well, she realised that Stewart did not normally rush. He was a measured man, and she never dated people at work. Something got hold of them both that day.

  She kept the postcard. Perhaps she wanted the poise of that long-necked figure bowing her head in a diamond coronet. Perhaps Josephine was an obvious role model for a gardener; otherwise she was not at all an obvious role model for Stephanie, who had no ambitions to be known as a woman who would have drunk gold out of her lover’s skull. On the contrary, when people described her as a sweet woman she was well satisfied. She saw herself as a unexceptional, lucky to be married to the last good husband to be found in the wild, and ambitious only to raise a family. Which was more than the Empress Josephine had done for Napoleon, for all her Souvenir de la Malmaison.

  The first ladybird opened its bright wing cases and took flight. One after another its companions followed, soaring away down the border, spurning the feast before them for the freedom of the air. Stephanie shook her head and strode over to the garage for the malathion spray. The aphids would die and to hell with the environment. It was 6.24 am. She was doing morning car pool.

  Approaching the Lieberman house, Ted Parsons ran with the resolve of Jesse Owens at the 1938 Berlin Olympics. A triangle of sweat darkened the back of his vest, his feet in their battered Nikes pronated with a flourish. He ran his fingers through his hair in case it was sticking up instead of flowing aerodynamically off his temples.

  Alder Reach was deserted. His footfalls echoed on the ground. Even the scratch of the dog’s claws resounded in the still air; Moron was gamely keeping pace. Ted fixed a sportive gleam in his eyes and a relaxed half-smile on his lips. He was passing her house. The curtains upstairs were still closed. The bitch.

  Topaz Lieberman bit the end of her pen. What were Stalin’s aims in negotiating the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939? Did he believe that by allowing Hitler to occupy first the Sudetenland and then the rest of Czechoslovakia the Western Powers had bought off Germany, who would then turn her expansionist ambitions east? Should we infer from the secret part of the agreement relating to the division of Poland between the two powers that Stalin’s intention was that the Nazis should invade that country and thus provoke Britain and France to abandon their policy of appeasement? What are the implications of the second secret clause in the pact restoring the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to the rule of the Soviets?

  ‘You know what?’ At the far end of the living area, her sister ripped the laces from one of her boots.

  ‘Don’t talk to me, Flora, I need an A for this essay.’

  ‘I just thought you’d like to know that That just ran down our street again.’

  ‘So?’ Inside the mind of Joseph Stalin, Topaz was reluctant to be recalled to the life of her family.

  ‘So – third time this week. He’s doing it on purpose, isn’t he?’

  ‘Mum has a life too, you know. I mean, she is a woman.’

  ‘Yeah, but does she have to have a life with That?’

  ‘She doesn’t even like him, she called him a sleazebag.’

  ‘That dog’s going to die on him.’

  ‘The dog’s obese. Animal companions should have regular exercise.’

  ‘People like That shouldn’t be allowed to own an animal.’ Flora glared after the figure on the street outside, sighed resentfully and began to rethread her boot laces.

  In the marriage area of the house, the wind chimes, hung by their mother to ensnare any passing chi, clashed loudly. The youngest of the Lieberman girls backflipped into the eating area and landed in the splits. ‘Molly, for God’s sake!’ hissed her sisters, neither raising their big oval eyes from their tasks.

  In the deferential daylight of Maple Grove, Allie Parsons looked into her dressing-room mirror. Ravening free radicals were destroying her dermis, her collagen was mutating, the studio lights were baking her complexion like pie crust. Stress! Red veins coming up on her chin, that was stress. And she was allergic – that black stuff puffing out under her eyes, yeast allergy. Crostini, for God’s sake. Ted knew what bread did to her skin. God, he was proud enough of her career in public.

  Did people still have dermabrasion? She grimaced. Six weeks of a scabby face – forget it. Come the end of the series she would restore her facade somehow. Possibly just the eyes. Or one of those laser lifts? Maybe t
he Channel would pay. But, if they paid, they’d have to know. Ted would pay, he owed her.

  She clipped back her hair, ignoring the regrowth. On the dressing table among the pots and bottles and tubes and jars was a packet of suppositories. Allie Parsons extracted two, stabbed them with her nail scissors, squeezed, smeared the contents under each eye, followed with pink Vitamine-E enriched hydrating gel over the rest of her face, wiped her hands on her robe and reached for the vanity vits. Co-enzyme Q? DHEA? Super-C? All of them.

  That little smart-ass who was standing in on the weather desk, having the nerve to put up a feature idea about some spa. She should just shut up and get the pollen count right for once. Kids died from asthma. Family First was a tight team, no room for attitude problems. Facial aerobics, lower lip over upper, repeat five times.

  On the bridge which carried the 31 over the river a black limousine glided among the slow-moving lanes of commuter traffic, bringing Chester Pike back from the airport. Chester flew to St Louis twice a week. He took a laptop, but the truth was that now he had no need to sit crunching numbers every fallow minute. He had thrust through to the stratosphere, he was cruising. Guys like DeSouza could do the figures. Chester should have liked that but he did not; he felt passive, he felt out of control, he felt uneasy.

  That morning he also felt nauseous. Sitting on the group board announcing a projected profit increase of only 3.9%, seeing twenty-nine guys and the two women look at him with eyes like ice-picks; that had been bad. Initiative fatigue, loss of focus, failure to control the process of market change – he felt the accusations wheeling over his head like buzzards. Plus, after the flight his knees were stiff, his shoes were pinching and someone had sandpapered his eyeballs.

  He saw a jogger in the distance and thought of Ted Parsons. Great guy. Great instinct for land resources. And a great operator. Years the Oak Hill site had been rotting away in a swamp of lapsed titles, lost deeds, zoning regulations and God knows what else. Ted had just gone in there with a flame thrower.