Getting Home Page 10

  ‘Time we made a move, I think.’ stood up to ward off any argument. ‘I need my beauty sleep. Lovely food. It’s always lovely food, you’re such wonderful cooks. You must come to us soon. Very soon.’

  ‘Steph, you must come for lunch.’ Marcus’s invitations always sounded like commands. She arranged for Max to play with Chalice Parsons in the afternoon, put on the black suit she had for client meetings and took the train from Westwick Green.

  ‘The thing is, Steph, our insurance only covers us for three months. That’s if it isn’t a war situation. Then we aren’t covered at all. There was a lot of yelling from the assessors but that Capelli guy told them. I can keep paying Stewart’s salary a couple of months beyond, but if things don’t resolve soon I’ll have to take another look at it. You see what I’m saying here?’

  She saw what he was saying. In the autumn there would be no more money. But Stewart would be home by then.

  When she got back to Church Vale there was no answer from the Parsons’house. Stephanie passed two demented hours running between her house and theirs before Allie drew up in the studio car, casually imparting the news that her help had taken all three children to Helford Hospital because Cherish had thrown Chalice head-first downstairs. ‘They don’t think she’s broken anything, thank heaven. It’s not the first time.’ With a little chuckle which implied that there were professions in which stupidity was an advantage, she added, ‘I think she might be not too bright.’

  ‘You mean the help?’ Stephanie asked, weak with anxiety but momentarily entertaining the unspeakable opinion that when children came so close to murdering each other defective parenting might be involved.

  ‘Chalice. I don’t know about the girl yet, she’s only been here a couple of weeks.’ The Parsons’ household suffered a rapid succession of domestic employees. Allie complained savagely if things were not done but seldom got around to telling the help what to do, much less to paying them.

  Stephanie telephoned her mother. Lately they had spoken almost every day. ‘Marcus says the insurance runs out in three months. Stewart should be home by then, shouldn’t he?’

  ‘Darling, do you think it’s wise to count on that?’ She was dismayed at her daughter’s tone of otherworldly certainty.

  ‘I just hope he’ll be home soon. I know it shouldn’t be different, being alone now, when he travels so much, but …’ Where Stewart had been there was a void. His clothes were not there to wash, his food was not there to cook, his telephone calls never came. His absence was fearful. She thought of him all the time, which made things worse. Nobody liked to put to Stephanie the possibility that her husband might not return at all.

  ‘I know, darling, I know. You just have to keep busy – that’s the secret.’ Stephanie’s mother was moved to confide what she considered an intimacy. ‘That’s what I did after your father. I made myself so busy I didn’t have time to think. The golf club saved my life. And then, of course, I met your stepfather.’

  ‘I suppose it couldn’t hurt to build up the business a little.’ It would take a moment for her mother to register that thought. Her concept of a woman’s work was as a dating strategy; she had always had difficulty in under standing her daughters’careers.

  ‘What business?’ she said vaguely.

  ‘My business. You know. Designing gardens. You’re right, who knows how things will turn out? We’ve so little saved.’ There was a stifled intake of breath on the telephone. Stephanie’s mother thought at once of her own savings, and feared the day that her daughter might need support.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Stephanie followed with regrettable bitterness, ‘If we’re really stuck I can always rent out the house for six months.’

  ‘Good idea,’ her mother said warmly.

  Angered, Stephanie went to work with commitment which surprised herself. Previously, she had run her business on social principles – nice clients only and not too far from either home or school. Now she seized every commission that came her way, especially the well-paid ones. She flattered clients, padded costings, rethought her pricing structure and sharpened up her invoicing. Her telephone rang all morning, her fax spouted paper, her desk, became mountainous with briefs and sketches and piles of catalogues. She felt more secure but also disloyal.

  With the house cluttered and the day full, the emptiness of her life still echoed. After six the phone fell silent. After Max was asleep, she sat up working, her desk a pool of light in the dim, silent house. Work was not enough. As the hours passed, her sickening fears accumulated until by midnight she was strung out with terror and unable to sleep. She held out against asking Rachel for pills, and against acknowledging the mistrust of her so-called friend which underlay her resistance.

  She was certain that Westwick would nurture her – wasn’t that the purpose of a community, to support its members when they needed it? She volunteered – to serve on the members’ events sub-committee at The Cedars, to research air pollution for the Old Westwick Society, to run the cake stall at The Magpies Sports Day. She drew a project management chart of cakes promised, cakes to be frozen, cakes to be collected, cakes for which recipes had to be found. Then the phone rang all evening. On the empty sycamore table, baskets of paper appeared.

  She volunteered to host the next meeting of the Old Westwick Society in the duly apologised absence of their chair, Lauren Pike, who was away on a psychologists’course. Then she forgot, so that, when the doorbell rang suddenly one afternoon, her heart raced. She jumped up from her desk and ran downstairs. Stewart was found, he was safe, they had come back to tell her. She ran to the hall, but there on the front path stood Clara Funk, secretary of the Society, clutching, the velvet lapels of her baggy coat, and there beyond her on the street was Jemima Thorogood, another society stalwart, chaining her bicycle to a lamp-post. Stephanie’s hopes crashed like an elevator in a disaster movie. It took strength to smile welcome.

  ‘I hope we are not too early.’ Mrs Funk peered about her as she came into the house. Patrolling the pavements, sitting beside her husband as he drove their old car very slowly around the streets, she was a familiar Westwick sight. People said she had lost all her family in concentration camps.

  ‘Not at all,’ Stephanie muttered.

  ‘You did not forget?’ demanded Mrs Funk.

  ‘Oh no. Everything’s all ready.’ Only half a lie; the sitting room was orderly at least and. with Sports Day imminent there were already six cakes in her freezer.

  Across the road, the old Land Rover driven by the chairman of the environmental sub-committee was disgorging the balance of their quorum, two more grey-haired women, a humourless young man from the Nature Triangle Working Party, the prematurely aged ex-army man who served as their treasurer and two town-planning students working on theses of suburban development.

  Stephanie asked Mrs Funk, ‘Can I take your coat?’

  It was a rhetorical question. Even in high summer, Mrs Funk kept her body layered with clothes, the rusty velvet coat fastened with straggling tassels over sweaters and scarves. The Funks had come to Westwick from Czechoslovakia at the end of World War II. Mrs Funk lived in layers of clothing as if she felt the need to protect her body from curious eyes. In winter, a black chenille beret sagged over her crag of a nose; tonight-only a flowered wool scarf was tied over her staring brown hair, and she picked at the knot with gloved hands.

  Energetically, Stephanie brewed tea and coffee, defrosted a cake, found pencils and checked on Max, who was absorbed in the adventures of Roadrunner. Under cover of these activities, she called up the draft of her paper on particulates and environmental health and printed it out.

  Apologies for absence were received from Mrs S Appleyard, Dr R Carman, Mrs F Delingrand, Mrs R Lloyd-Richards, Mrs L Pike, Mr E Parsons and Mrs P Salmon. The minutes of the previous meeting were adopted with only two paragraphs of additional notes on the question of the proposed new street lights along Riverview Drive from Mrs Funk.

  The lack of progress of the planning applic
ation for the Oak Hill Business Park was noted with lengthy approval. Support was readily pledged to the Grove Parade Traders’Association against new parking regulations. It was agreed that Willow Gardens, which unluckily led to a narrow stretch of tow-path, just negotiable by car, which was the only passage from Westwick to Helford that did not involve a junction on the 31, was becoming, a rat-run for motorists and the secretary agreed to write to the Planning Department requesting a barrier on the tow-path and speed humps on the road.

  The results of the study of the colony of red ghost moths discovered at the Oak Hill Nature Triangle were noted, although the chair of the environmental subcommittee pointed out that the return of this rare lepidopterous native should not be taken as an indication that there had been any reduction in the toxic vehicle emissions concentrated at the junction of the 31 and the 46, which remained above World Health Organisation recommended maximum levels. Reinforcing these concerns, Mrs Sands presented her paper on particulates and the incidence of asthma, and it was resolved to forward this to the Environment Department with a request for immediate action to reduce the emissions.

  Mrs Funk spoke eloquently against the encroachment of bars and restaurants into the commercial sites of the Broadway previously occupied by useful small shops and the committee resolved seriously to consider the question of opposing the renewal of the licence of the Wilde At Heart. The date of the next meeting was set for one month’s time, and the place the small room in St Nicholas’s church hall, Mrs Sands to liaise with Father Strudwick and the St Nicholas Players. Mrs Sands was thanked for her hospitality and delicious coffee fudge sponge.

  Mrs Funk left last, and in the hall she suddenly reached out for Stephanie’s hand. ‘I have heard terrible news about your husband,’ she began.

  ‘Not terrible…’ protested Stephanie.

  ‘Yes, terrible,’ Mrs Funk affirmed righteously, her cloudy eyes wet with emotion. ‘A terrible thing. You are a brave woman.’

  ‘Not really…’

  ‘Yes, really. I know. I know what it is to be brave. To have to be brave like you are. So. I say well done. And I say, if you are feeling alone, come and see us. Erich and I. You know where we live. Promise me, come and see us.’

  ‘Yes,’ Stephanie was embarrassed. ‘Oh yes. Of course I will.’

  ‘Promise me,’ Mrs Funk demanded again from halfway down the path. ‘We know what it is, remember.’

  ‘I promise,’ Stephanie lied, trying to look bright-eyed and cheery. The telephone rang in the kitchen. ‘I must go now.’

  Breathless with emotion rather than running for the call, Stephanie flipped the kitchen telephone off its bracket. The caller was a stranger, a man, his voice callous but young. ‘Mrs Sands? I’m from the Helford and Westwick Courier. We’ve had some information that you’ve suffered a rather sad event just recently …’

  ‘Who from?’ she demanded, alarmed. Her arm, holding the receiver, was trembling. She leaned against the work-top for support.

  ‘The police have confirmed it to us that your husband is missing…’

  Damn WPC Clegg and her officious cold heart.

  ‘We thought you might be able to talk to us about it, maybe give us some pictures, you and your family—’

  ‘No,’ she broke, in decisively. ‘I’ve already decided I don’t want to do that. It’s bad enough that this has happened without being exploited by the media. My son’s only five, for goodness’sake.’

  ‘People often find there’s a lot of sympathy—’

  ‘The Foreign Office advise me not to talk to newspapers,’ she went on, knowing that there was no argument against this point. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t see any advantage to us in giving you what you want. I’m sure it would be nice for you, because nothing much goes on out here, but I have to think of myself and my family. Nobody else will, it seems.’ And she rang off, clumsy with her shaking hand, before he could argue any more.

  After that, the veneer of calm she had achieved through concentrating on the petty business of the neighbourhood was torn away. She sat down in the kitchen feeling defenceless, victimised, a pathetic helpless thing about to be torn apart by greedy predators. She wished Mrs Funk had not left. It occurred to her that no one else had made her a good offer of sympathy. When the telephone rang it was never a Westwick friend asking how she fared, alone with a five-year old and perhaps already a widow. The fact was she had heard less from her friends since the disaster than before.

  In the city, when a bad thing happened and she couldn’t talk to Stewart about it, she called one of The Crowd. A friend. The Crowd were friends for every need. Whatever your pain required, advice, psychobabble, a bottle of vodka, a night of talking, even comfort sex for those who found sex comforting, The Crowd would supply it. You had only to name your need.

  She had expected the same from Westwick, but, she excused them, people here had more complex lives. They had children, they had husbands, Rachel had her clinic, Lauren her clients, Belinda her tennis and Allie her TV show. Her mind’s ear heard Allie spelling out in tabloid sound bites the sensations which were still unreal to her: ordeal, anguish, heartbreak, grief.

  Stephanie went out into her garden in the twilight. The jasmine was flowering now, the perfume was wonderful at night. She had imagined sitting out here with Stewart, while their children slept contentedly in their bedrooms above, all at peace at the end of the day. Her breathing was loud in the silence; someone should help her, but nobody was coming.

  6. The Vigilance Committee

  ‘The search is continuing in the city of Astrakhan, just at the north of the Caspian Sea…’ Mr Capelli paused to let her find the name on the map. Still true to his promise, he called from the Consular Division every morning at ten. He sounded young, but he spoke with authority and had the patience of a grandfather. ‘On the estuary of the River Don. Grot it?’

  ‘Yes.’ From the travel bookshop where they used to inform themselves for their holidays, Stephanie had bought herself a map, Soviet produced, captioned in bizarre English. She needed to reassure herself that this was not a fantasy. With nothing but Capelli’s voice on the phone to ground her in reality, the word kidnap bounced off the walls of her mind. When she was alone her mood wavered violently between unnatural serenity and howling panic; without Stewart, her whole being seemed unstable.

  ‘The new information suggests strongly that they are in the city. We’ve been aware of nationalist elements there for a while. Can you see the border with Chechnya is relatively close? The war may be over bur our reports suggest that things are hardly settling down. There’s been some migration by people whose allegiances were with minor factions. Kazakhstan is oil-rich, predicted to be richer than Kuwait by the year 2015. That’s their incentive.’

  Mr Capelli was her greatest comfort. She had discovered that he would talk on as long as she cared to listen, always fluent, always informed, always eager with phrases like ‘our consular case report’and ‘our counterterrorism policy department’which imparted the reassurance that there was a magnificent official machine working full-stretch for Stewart’s benefit.

  After ten minutes, she felt foolish asking questions just to keep the flow of his confident voice rolling and brought the conversation to an end. On the map the Caspian Sea curled around like an evil foetus in the womb of central Asia, its head crested with grey to indicate land below sea level. Her imagination offered pictures of flooded streets and pestilent swamps and Stewart dying of diseases long eradicated in the developed world.

  To stabilise her mind, she turned the map sideways to read the scale, put her ruler against the page and calculated that Astrakhan was 400 kilometres from Grozny, the name faintly familiar from half-heard news bulletins. To the north, Volgograd was the same distance. She had last heard Stewart’s voice from Volgograd. Her calculator told her that 400 kilometres was 250 miles. On the facing page was a map showing population density, on which the region of Astrakhan was coloured burnt siena, indicating 10.25 inhabitants per square kil
ometre. There were five million Kazakhs in the total population. On the next map the whole area around the Don was coloured light green for arable land with meadow, permanent grassland and grazing.

  She was sitting at the little desk in an alcove outside their bedroom which Stewart used for household business. He was a major empty desk man, generating surfaces which were blatantly bare, boasting spaciously of decisions actioned and paperwork eliminated. A screen, a space, that was it. The mouse and the keyboard were concealed in a nifty drawer, the fax and phone had a hidden shelf, the cables were invisibly integrated.

  Stephanie was for clutter, up to a point. In fact, quite a high point. She was also attached to paper. It was, after all, derived from vegetable matter. Baskets with documents lapping over their edges felt industrious. Well-stuffed files were a testament to security. You never knew when you were going to need a list or a letter or a certificate or something.

  She conducted the business of The Terrace Garden Design Studio among slithering, fluttering mounds of paper, and Stewart administered everything else from this naked desk. They were one of those fraternal couples who looked alike and thought alike, so this pocket of disharmony in their relationship was exciting. They made much of it, this little interface of yin and yang. She crowed when his system crashed. He laughed when she could not find her driver’s licence. She gave him Dr Solomon’s Anti-Virus programme for his birthday. He gave her a magnetic badge reading ‘hedgehog on the information superhighway’.

  He ran the household accounts on a spreadsheet which he had taught her how to enter several times. She had the instructions written down on a piece of paper inside the cover of her organiser. Or maybe on the pinboard. Or the pending tray. Or if not there, down the back of her desk where things which fell off the pinboard might be found. When he went away, which he had done more than they were comfortable with in the past year, she preserved their mail casually in a willow, basket to demonstrate that life was perfectly viable without the computer. When he came back, he updated the system and threw the papers away.