Getting Home Read online

  ‘Please, don’t be sorry. It’s the best place for him. Please God, I should never have a worse problem than how to tell people. But it was such a drag. I felt like sewing it over my chest in sequins or something.’

  Unexpectedly, humour like a sip of champagne bubbled up and tickled the back of Stephanie’s nose. She actually chuckled. ‘I know,’ she murmured. ‘It gets too much. I can hear myself saying the same things every day, all these useless words piling up. I just want to scream, but what good would it do?’ Her disturbed feelings, added to the fatigue created by her hours of work in the morning sun, were now generating a silly weakness. Waking and sleeping, anxiety had been chewing her nerves for weeks. ‘And you feel like you’re being a burden to people. You’re not asking for their sympathy exactly, but they feel they have to say something kind.’

  ‘In the end, I took the Noël Coward line. “Nevair apologise and nevair explain.”‘ With the ballpoint as a cigarette holder, she did The Master very well.

  ‘I’ll remember that.’

  They climbed into their vehicles and drove in convoy to Church Vale. Stephanie was not surprised to find that the dead Lada belonged to Gemma. In the actor’s garden, under the dismissive eyes of Derek and Dave, Ms Lieberman laboured with a will and the planting was finished in half an hour.

  ‘There,’ she said, wiping her hands down her thighs. ‘All done. I feel better about being such a durr now. Look, I’ve got to get back, I promised Topaz I’d do stocktaking – but come see us again, huh? Not just if you need something – let’s face it, we haven’t got much – but if you’d like company or something. I know you’re busy, but come anyway, huh?’ And she ducked into the wretched Lada and rattled away.

  That night, when she was alone with her sleeping son, Stephanie’s thoughts turned back to Gemma Lieberman, and raised the question of the crime for which her husband was in jail. The distinction interested her beyond the scope of gossip. At that point in the history of the region, husbands from Westwick did not go to jail. It was one of the particular attractions of the neighbourhood for Stephanie, whose father had also gone to jail, if only for a ridiculously ineffectual attempt at fraud and only for six months.

  10. A Club for Ladies and Gentlemen

  ‘Mr Fuller, this is always a sensitive conversation.’ The doctor looked as if someone had stopped in the middle of pulling his entrails out through his nose. He was hanging his head and kicking invisible fluff balls off the mirror-polished floor of the twelfth-floor corridor outside the Intensive Care Unit in Helford Hospital with his mirror-polished shoes. ‘To combat your wife’s infection we could give her antibiotics intravenously as I believe we’ve done before.’ He twitched the patient’s file into his eyeline as if to refresh his memory. ‘Which might very well be successful, although she is a little weaker now. And we have seen some of the drug-resistant strains here this year. Or, our alternative is to not intervene. Then nature will take its course and we can allow Mary-Sue to slip away from us.’

  His wife’s name was Mairi-Sui, but Rod felt it would be mean to correct the man when he was doing his best. Furthermore, at that exact moment, the moment he had been expecting any time over the last six months, his mind was void of words.

  ‘It’s always a very, very difficult decision to make with a PVS patient,’ the doctor continued in an earnest tone which did not really camouflage his own opinion that the decision was in fact very easy. ‘I would never say that miracles don’t happen. If you asked me, though, I would have to say that they haven’t happened in my experience of these patients so far.’

  Rod found some words. ‘Can you give me a moment?’

  ‘Of course. Take all the time you need. I’ll be on the ward another half an hour.’

  At the far, far end of the corridor, where four red seating units were grouped alongside a dying dieffenbachia, Sweetheart was restlessly flicking her fingers, waiting. Rod wished he was a child of five, with someone he considered wise to make decisions for him. He made the long trek down the glassy floor towards her. The hospital had a special atmosphere, the air was hot and thick but its smell was dry, as if chemically desiccated. Sweetheart looked at him and he knew that she knew. He wondered if she ought to know, and what he had given away in his manner. This was a burden that he could hardly bear, let alone share with his child, delightfully precocious as she was.

  ‘It’s pneumonia again.’ He sat down beside her, the person he lived for who he now had to exclude from the most vital part of his life for her own protection. This was not a child’s decision. He had to make it by himself.

  ‘Might Mummy die this time?’ she asked, playing along so well that it cracked him up and he lost the words again for a while. He nodded his head. She put her hand in his and it was like holding a tiny bird.

  ‘I’ve got to go back and see the doctor again,’ he said when he could get the sentence out. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

  In the sister’s office, the doctor tried to put a good professional facade on his satisfaction. ‘It’s a very peaceful thing,’ he said; keeping half an eye on the monitor screen while he keyed in some characters. Was there a code for death, one of those medical references framed to hide the facts from ordinary people, a string of numbers to signify the end of a life? Look, with a spot I damn him. With a slash and a sub-code for the circumstances – /DOA, dead on arrival; /DDR, during resuscitation; /DSI, secondary infection; / DMA, death by mutual agreement? ‘I’ll ask the nurse to make her tidy and then you can sit with her for a while. Do you know where the telephone is, if there’s anyone you need to call? I’m afraid we can’t allow mobiles in the hospital, they interfere with some of our equipment.’

  He knew very well where the telephone was. He had spent much time there. Mairi-Sui’s parents were the other side of the world, with five other children, three of them male. His own mother had never approved of their marriage. They were already getting his classes covered at The Cedars. Gemma would cancel his private clients. ‘Be strong, honeybuns,’ she enjoined him gently. ‘Like you have a choice, I know. Do you want me to come up and fetch Sweetheart?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Did he have to be alone while his wife died? The weight of his daughter’s body, the touch of her warm limbs, young and dense with life, was unbelievably comforting to him, but he never dared hold her for long except when friends were about to witness. Was it right to take comfort from a child? Did he already lean on her too much?

  ‘You could ask her what she wants to do.’ Gemma prompted. ‘Maybe it’s too heavy for her. I don’t know. She’s a good kid.’

  ‘She sees people die on ER every week. This is her mother. I don’t know.’

  ‘On ER, when people die, what happens with their family?’

  ‘Usually they get a great screaming entrance and then they’re kept out of the way by the nice curly-haired nurse while speccy Doctor Mark does the flat-iron thing. If you see it. Quite often they cut to another story.’

  ‘OK. I can’t believe I asked that. Are we really sitting here on the phone trying to get the protocol for dying from a TV show?’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know. I can’t believe I answered you either.’

  ‘What’s your gut tell you? What feels right?’

  ‘Nothing feels right, Gemma. What would feel right is having Mairi-Sui back with us. Nothing’s felt right since …’

  This was like his fog dream, when a shapeless fear smothered him and he ran in every direction without seeing where he was going, running into a wall whichever way he went, and each time he ran a little, less far, so the walls where getting closer and closer but he could never see them because of the fog, even when he could put out his hands and touch the walls from standing still.

  A drink would feel right now, a real drink, maybe vodka. No vodka: he had made a rule for himself to stick with wine. Crossing to spirits was the great divide, crossing Jordan the wrong way. Who could be a serious drunk if all they did was get sloppy on wine every now and then? Self-d
eception, the first sign of alcoholism. No vodka, no wine.

  ‘OK, OK.’ At the end of the phone, Gemma was slurping her tea. ‘So – if Mairi-Sui could speak still, what would she want?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nothing ever happened in our lives until this, you know. I don’t know what pain would do to her. She wouldn’t want her to suffer, she never wanted anyone to suffer.’

  ‘What would Sweetheart want?’

  That was simple. ‘To be with me.’

  ‘Well, then – isn’t that your answer?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Won’t you feel better if she’s with you?’

  ‘Yes, but this isn’t about how I’m going to feel, is it? I can’t lay this trauma on her because it’ll make me feel better. This is about what’s best for Sweetheart. Or least bad, anyway.’

  ‘OK, then, how about this. I’ll decide for you. Keep her with you. Then she can’t turn round to you later on and accuse you of keeping her away. It’s too bad you’ll have to feel better. You can’t win this one; being a parent means always having to say you’re sorry. And I’ll close up here and come and sit outside and impersonate your mother if she was a good person and if Sweetheart gets upset or anything I can take her home. How about that?’

  The fog was clearing. He did not want vodka. Maybe wine, maybe he could reconsider that, when it was over. Rod scrubbed his scalp with his free hand. ‘That would be good, Gemma. Can you do that?’

  ‘Of course I can. Hospitals, I’ve been there. I know hospitals. I can close up Gaia, nobody ever comes in anyway and if they do, they’ll come back. Topaz’ll be here in a couple of hours anyway. Tell me what ward you’re on.’

  With all the tubes and monitors, Mairi-Sui looked like one piece of equipment linked up to all the others, and a broken down, ill-designed machine at that. The nurses had disconnected most of the apparatus, which made her seem more human, but the real Mairi-Sui had vanished long ago. While most of his mind quaked with distress, a reasoning voice babbled on, calling his attention to the bloomless, parchment skin, the stringy joints, the sunken throat which aroused no memory at all of the pulsing creamy hollows he had once kissed.

  They had smeared balm on her lips to keep them moist, not very accurately. He remembered her sitting at a mirror with her lip-brush, the poise of her wrist, the tip of the brush pecking at the petal skin. The body was not yet wasted but it seemed halfway into another existence. She could still breathe for herself, but it was just a function, harsh and mindless, nothing like the easy breath of life.

  The humming of the waterbed was eerie. Sweetheart had the CD player, the same which pumped out aerobic mixes for the clients. They talked about putting on something she liked, a hard choice because Mairi-Sui had loved Meatloaf, which seemed wrong, and the old R & B songs, which were going to make them cry. She had just finished a run of Carousel, but that was dangerous too; for a while every musical she had danced in that they could think of had sad songs in it. When Gemma arrived she found them sitting either side of the bed, holding the cold hands under the blanket, listening to ‘Luck Be A Lady Tonight’.

  ‘Welcome.’ In the doorway of Grove House, Chester Pike balanced on his neat little feet beneath his eighteenth-century fanlight. ‘Welcome, welcome. Good to see you, Allie, my dear. Ted. Welcome. Come along through.’ Soon his guests would be announced by a porter thirty floors down and admitted by a manservant. Only two more years. Or maybe less. Things were moving in that department.

  ‘So pleased you could come.’ Lauren wafted her house-keeper towards them with two misted flutes of champagne. Twice a year the Parsons were invited to Grove House. At Christmas, when the Pikes gave two parties, A list and B list, the Parsons came to the A-list party, not because either Lauren or Chester considered that they deserved to but because they lived close enough to observe all the arrivals and departures and therefore knew that two parties were held and would know to which they were bidden. In the summer, usually late in the summer because the Pike’s impulse to entertain them was not strong, they were asked to dinner. ‘Chester’s so hard to pin down these days,’ Lauren would say to Allie. ‘Twice a week in St Louis. I hardly see him myself. I’ve told him we can’t live like this. But I’ll get a day out of him, I promise.’

  Ted fed himself some salted almonds from a silver dish and took a short stroll up the edge of the blue Chinese carpet. No kicking back or hanging out chez Chester, let alone partying down. Every detail of an event at the Pikes was choreographed, as if they followed the prescriptions of some secret social manual. Their affairs were so regimented they could have been staged from a military entertaining handbook. Tonight was a Summer Casual Dinner Grade II: four courses, catered, but served by the housekeeper, with Lauren in floor-length black linen and a plain gold link necklace. Grade I would have been five courses, served by the staff, short silk and diamonds.

  Guests never saw the manual, so you had to guess your grade in advance. Allie, trussed in strapless white silk splattered with red roses, had over-estimated. Ted was glad he had held out against her in the matter of a black tie. Of such bitter little victories was marital satisfaction made nowadays.

  ‘Hurmph.’ Chester cleared his throat for conversation and took up a position in front of his eighteenth-century limewood fire-surround carved with swags of fruit and dead game birds. ‘Hurmph, hah. Oak Hill progressing, yes?’

  ‘Planning consent was granted yesterday,’ Ted confirmed with pride. ‘I got the word, informally. Old contact on the committee. We’ll get the papers next week.’ Fifteen years ago, Ted had let the planning committee chair, then merely the deputy surveyor for the county, in on a deal with a rambling, rotting mansion at the end of Riverview Drive, now undergoing its second facelift as a complex of luxury apartments with stunning river views. It was, he felt, one of the smartest things he had ever done.

  ‘Splendid, splendid. So when …’ Chester’s impression was that the affair had hung fire forever. This business of waiting for permissions, which Parsons thought so important, seemed plain soft to him.

  ‘We can move the day the papers are through. Contractors’ boards will go up tomorrow; they’ve started work clearing the site already. The heavy plant will come up mid-week. They need a police escort for that.’ The vision of giant diggers crawling up the 31 with outriders and flashing lights ought to appeal to the small boy in every man, Ted considered. And he was proud of his zap off the starting blocks with this one.

  ‘Very good, very good.’ Chester put his elbow on the mantelpiece with a view to leaning casually against it. He was not a tall man, certainly not as tall as the man who had carved his fire-surround, and the pose left his jacket seams straining. With his round body, little feet, undershot jaw and slightly popped eyes, Chester looked like a tortured toad. ‘And how did you enjoy your trip to Whitbridge?’

  Ted had prepared a report on the Strankley Ridge sites, and Chester had it, but clearly did not intend to waste time actually reading it. He knew the pattern; the BSD worked on capsule briefings. He had underlings to read for him.

  ‘You were absolutely right,’ Ted watched his launch flattery disappear into Chester’s ego like water vanishing into sand. ‘Magnificent opportunity, magnificent. When the Thirty-four extension is completed the region will be equidistant from the city airport and the new airport to the north. Rail link to Whitbridge due for upgrading next year. All the support services in place – schools, hospital, the new Magno at Ambleford. At least five prime sites in that valley alone. We can take our pick.’

  ‘So your decision …’

  ‘I’ve had a prospectus prepared.’ Ted throttled back self-satisfaction as he announced this initiative. ‘We could take a look after dinner.’ And he glanced chivalrously to Lauren, seeking the chatelaine’s sanction for this unseemly commercial note in her home.

  ‘Why not now?’ Chester blinked at him, the amphibian sighting a fly.

  ‘Why not?’ Ted echoed. ‘Of course, why not. I’ll just be a moment.’
Don’t rush, he counselled himself as he left the room and went out to the Discovery. No shuffling to impress. You are cool, you are in control. This is going well, really well.

  Sprint, man, sprint, Chester urged him, watching silently at the window as Parsons loped towards his vehicle. This is taking too long.

  ‘Have you planned your holiday?’ Lauren enquired brightly of Allie, who hated holidays and hated planning them almost as much.

  ‘We might borrow a friend’s boat,’ she answered, trying to convey that a small yacht was always at their disposal somewhere, ‘though I do worry about the children on boats, don’t you?’

  ‘Nothing for them to do, is there?’ Lauren sympathised.

  Corporate syncopation was not Ted’s thing, never had been. He was a loner, a maverick, an independent freebooter sailing under his own flag. Oak Hill was a breakthrough project for him, his first commercial development. Commercial was where the big money was; he was waiting for the out-of-place feeling to get normal, like the discomfort of having your teeth scaled, a friendly sort of soreness once you got used to it. Commercial was a different game, surprisingly different. He was pleased with himself for learning the moves, even making up his own moves, but he had fallen into a way of feinting passes at Chester to see him react and getting a bead on what he ought to be doing from that. Weaselling around the BSD was not what he had been made for; it went against the grain, but it was getting to be a habit.

  Take Strankley Ridge. Left to himself, he would never have even looked at the site. Or maybe he would have looked, but only-to reassure himself that his gut feeling was the right feeling. He was uneasy with building on green fields, it was that simple. With the big dick swinging over him now, he found himself having to construct a whole commercial rationale for his instinct. That instinct had made him millions, it had never been wrong, but tap-dancing around it with logic seemed to damp it down, it did not speak to him so clearly.