Getting Home Read online

  The prospectus was mouthwatering. Ambleford Meadows, it proclaimed over a photograph of the glorious sweep up the valley to the three skyline beeches. Experience the best in luxury living; pre-eminent homes; a dream location convenient for two airports; glorious views; painstaking attention to detail; fast trains to the city; above all else, a Tudor home.

  The artist’s impression of the houses themselves nodded to the hyper-realism of Andrew Wylie paintings, suggesting homestead values and the fruitful earth. Instead of the dull specification of room numbers and sizes, he had run the street names under the pictures: Beehive Lane; Quaker Wood; The Hawthorns; Beech Tree Heights.

  ‘Isn’t that attractive?’ Lauren commented, looking around her husband’s shoulder. ‘I love the names.’

  ‘Beech Tree Heights,’ Chester repeated, turning over the glossy page. ‘Impressive, Ted. I like it.’

  ‘We’re fine-tuning the costings.’ Ted slipped that in before finishing on a high note. ‘Our target market are young city-living professionals, middle-management, who’ve perhaps started families already and are looking for a real lifestyle package. In this location we can look to the north as well, for the people who don’t see the urban renewal happening fast enough for their children.’

  ‘Good thinking,’ Chester told him, thinking that without the costings this was all froth and no beer. ‘What’s holding up the costing?’

  ‘Survey.’ Airy, Ted’s tone was as airy as a galleried duplex. ‘With a hillside site like this, I’d like to be quite happy about the sub-soil.’

  ‘Why pick a hillside?’ Damn. Trust Chester to put his finger on it straight away.

  ‘Danger of subsidence down there in the bottom of the valley. Flooding, too. And the view, Chester. People will pay anything for an outlook. An extra thirty per cent on top of what they’d pay for the same house on the level.’

  ‘Well,’ said Chester, his bullshit detector trembling significantly, ‘you’re the expert. I’m hungry. Shall we go in?’

  Lauren’s decorator had carried the Jacobean theme through into the dining room, with a massive oak table on barleytwist legs and carved chairs which dug spitefully into the diners’backs. Ted looked without appetite at his plate of scorched vegetable matter in truffle oil. The smell of the truffle oil made him feel queasy. The feeling that Chester was not going to buy his elaborately designed evasion made him feel positively nauseous. His strategy to abort the project had been to choose a site whose development costs would be prohibitive, then let the BSD himself decide to pull out. Instead, the BSD was swinging around the corner ahead of him already.

  Chester chopped his plateful to shreds and scooped it into his mouth. Lauren twiddled some leaves. Allie poked something solid to the side of her plate. ‘Perfect,’ Ted complimented his hostess, ‘not too heavy.’

  The housekeeper cleared the plates. Lauren asked her to take out one of the silver candlesticks and polish away a fingermark on its base.

  ‘And how do you view this digital business?’ Chester asked Allie, groping for an aspect of broadcasting capable of holding his interest.

  ‘Oh, that’s way in the future, isn’t it?’ she parried, ‘We live right in the here-and-now on Family First. That’s what I find so frustrating.’ Chester and The Boss met on a few boards about the city. If The Boss was temporarily unaware of her potential, perhaps the word of another man would help. ‘I feel I’m really too experienced for that kind of thing, it just isn’t fulfilling. Of course, some things are fulfilling. We got great feedback on the Magno exchange promise, great.’

  ‘Don’t saw the meat, Theresa,’ Lauren admonished the housekeeper, who was struggling to carve a saddle of lamb at the serving table. ‘Just gentle pressure on the knife.’ Then she twitched a smile at Ted to assure him that he must be family if she corrected her staff in front of him. Her right hand moved continually from entrée knife to salad knife to bread knife to white wine glass to claret glass to water glass and out to her Ventolin and back, as if she needed constant reassurance that the table had been set correctly.

  ‘You get a such a boost when you can do something like the Magno report,’ Allie ran on. ‘You know you have really, really connected with the audience, you know?’

  ‘Our people look after you all right with that?’ Chester was expecting the answer he got.

  ‘Oh yes. Yes, of course. They were just f-a-a-b.’ She had an inspiration. ‘I’d just love to be able to do that kind of feature on a bigger scale, you know? A prime-time show. After – what is it now? Five awards? I feel I’ve gone as far as a girl can go in the daytime.’ She fairly sizzled at him over the rim of her glass, but Chester accepted flirtation from other men’s wives as no more than his due. His wife took a squirt from her inhaler.

  ‘Surely not,’ he said, not smiling. A portion of organic lamb balanced on a hill of lentils appeared in front of him and he applied himself to it, leaving her to turn back to Lauren with, ‘And you’ll be away to The Hamptons this summer?’

  ‘Oh yes, I can’t wait. As soon as school breaks up. Very dull of us, I know, always going to the same place, but we love it so.’ And she tried to catch her husband’s eye up the table, but Chester had relapsed into a momentary reverie of distaste for things heavy, dark, old and uncomfortable, and yen for things light, bright and modern, and for a light, bright, modern woman, perhaps the one he had already met in St Louis, to sparkle among them. And no lentils, fiddly, a waste of time.

  By 11 pm, the Parsons were home, wound-up and wakeful. ‘That went well, I thought,’ Ted ventured as they cast about the kitchen looking for cause not to go up the stairs together.

  ‘Vile,’ Allie said. ‘That man is such a bore.’ She meant that Chester seldom showed any sexual interest in her. She caught her reflection in the glass door of the oven and pulled up her jaw to keep its line taut.

  ‘You get on with his wife,’ Ted suggested.

  ‘Only the way women do,’ she flopped into a chair, pouting. She did not consider women of any importance unless they threatened her job.

  ‘She can be very gracious,’ Ted suggested, thinking about a small malt.

  ‘Oh God, the lady of the manor act. Isn’t it sick? God help the people she visits on her victim support thing. I think I’d rather be mugged than have Lauren Pike support me. She’d make me sterilise the Kleenex before I started crying.’

  From Allie, this was mellow conversation. Perhaps a useful moment was approaching. Ted decided to pass on the small malt, since the fact that he enjoyed the occasional late-night belt was one of the myriad of his characteristics which unfailingly enraged her. He poured himself a Coke instead, and Allie allowed him to give her a diet one also. This was tightrope walking. Judging the business minutely, he handed her both the can and a glass; actually pouring the drink would be servile, handing the can by itself, on the other hand, would be too rude.

  Snap, pour, drink, pause. So far so good.

  ‘Do you think about the future at all?’ he enquired, trying to find a casual segue into the subject.

  ‘Of course I think about the future, Ted.’ Snappish, but still amiable. They were sitting now at either end of the farmhouse table, splayed in the carver chairs among the disorder of the kitchen like a modern Manage à la Mode. ‘I must, must, must get out of daytime,’ she added, kicking at the table leg in frustration. ‘It’ll be the end of my career if I don’t. It’s hardly a career at all, daytime TV. And past thirty-five, you’re dead on the screen in the day. I’m a great political interviewer, surely they can see that? Besides, you get five times the money.’

  ‘I was thinking more about – you know, the family,’ Ted ventured.

  ‘He’s got to go back into rehab.’ Her tone was suddenly belligerent. ‘Tough love, that’s all he’ll get from me. I won’t have him falling about round here.’

  ‘I didn’t mean Damon,’ Ted explained. ‘All of us. I was thinking, while I was working on this Ambleford thing. There are some lovely houses that way, and still chea
p. We could get something three times this size, with land, ponies for the girls—’

  ‘No thanks,’ Allie responded briskly. ‘I’d have to get up at five every morning to get to the studios and I’d look like death warmed up in a week. You never thought of that, I suppose. Anyway, I thought you adored your precious Westwick.’

  ‘Oh, I do, I do,’ Ted assured her. ‘And I don’t mean get rid of this house, not at all. Keep it. Just base the family in the country. I’ll be spending a hell of a lot of time down there if the Ambleford thing goes live.’

  ‘Oh – I see,’ Allie said with a sneer. ‘What you’re saying is separate lives. You and the girls go off and play country living in some worm-eaten old farmhouse, I stay here and work my butt off and in a couple of years you file for divorce on the grounds I deserted the family. Is that what’s on your mind?’

  ‘Alex! Alex, please! What a monstrous thing to say!’ Ted jumped up and acted as outraged as he dared, spooked because his intentions had been guessed for the second time that evening. ‘How could you imagine I could even think of such an idea?’

  ‘Because I know you,’ she replied, unmoved. ‘You’re a pathetic little man with a bag of slop for brains. You hate me – you must do, because I sure as hell hate you; you’re too mean to divorce me because I’d get at least half everything as well as the kids. Well, thank God I got my share on paper, you can’t touch it. And now you’re so fucking stupid you thought you could manipulate me into giving it all away.’

  ‘I don’t see why …’ Ted protested, running his fingers into his hair and pulling it in frustration. ‘Look – I don’t care about the money. Really, I don’t. Money’s only money, take all you want. This is just a CV marriage to you, isn’t it?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ He was surprised that she made the admission.

  ‘You could at least let me lead my own life,’ he pleaded.

  ‘No,’ she said lightly, kicking the table leg again with one of her pointed pink suede evening mules. ‘Don’t be so god-damned selfish, Ted. Your life is my life, my life is my work. I can’t have that kind of thing said about me. While I’m on Family First, we stick together. You’re a joke, Ted, a lightweight, a dickhead. You and your stupid little deals and your stupid houses. Chester – you kiss his ass, you think he’s the big “I Am”, he’s just a jerk, no style; he can’t cut it. We can get divorced when it suits me, when I’ve moved on from Family First. Believe me, I can’t wait.’ She was longing to move up into the next level of life, wife of some hot big guy, anchor of some hot prime-time show, her cover of Time not far off. One breakthrough, that was all she needed; the job or the man, the chicken or the egg.

  ‘Are you having an affair?’ she demanded, as he expected her to.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘You’re not even lying, are you? Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. You’re hardly a man, are you? Not many women could put up with you sliming them. Go on have a fling, be my guest. I don’t want you leching after every little whore in your office, getting into a sexual harassment suit. That would look good, wouldn’t it?’

  This was too much for Ted. All his hopes lay pulverised in fragments at his feet. He announced that he would take the dog out for a while, and dawdled along in the deep darkness beneath the old trees of Maple Grove, listening to Moron snuffling equably in the trim grass. If he were a proper man, he knew, he would be able to walk on to Alder Reach now, and find a warm welcome there. As it was, he would have to go back to his own desolate bed and lie there in the darkness, the man who made his fortune selling happy homes to happy families.

  ‘Topaz, can I ask you something?’ For once, Flora Lieberman was idling. Mooning about the living space ruffling up her mop of hair, picking up an apple, deciding she didn’t want it, picking up a pen, not knowing what to write, scrubbing at her eyes and making them red, flopping on the sofa, getting up again, stretching up her dimpled arms to the ceiling, letting them fall heavily to her sides.

  Her sister, chipping at her rock-pile of books, was becoming irritated. ‘If we can deal with what’s bothering you and get some peace around here – sure, ask me anything.’

  ‘You remember Damon Parsons?’

  ‘Lurch.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s him.’ Damon’s sense of balance was defective. At St Nicholas’s High School he canted at his desk, lummoxed about the corridors and fell over on the sports fields. No lecture the staff could devise about the social divisiveness of stigmatising the disadvantaged saved him from his nickname.

  ‘Is he still in school?’

  Flora sighed. ‘Unfortunately. He was sent away on some alcohol programme but when he came back they just put him down a year.’

  ‘What about him?’ Topaz already had the essence of the problem. All this sighing and avoidance – it had to be sex.

  Of the three Lieberman sisters, Flora alone took after her mother. While Topaz and Molly were economically made, Flora was ample and unconstructed. Molly was an imp; Topaz had matured effortlessly from imp to dryad; Flora was in mid-metamorphosis from blob to goddess; her suddenly abundant flesh burst seams every day. She was struggling through the curse of full-out adolesence, randomly attacked by sweat, pimples, blubber, jugs and despair. To Topaz, she was a pain.

  ‘He keeps following me.’

  ‘Tell him to go away.’

  ‘I have told him.’

  ‘And …’

  ‘And he just grins at me.’

  ‘You can’t be telling him right then. If you intend to communicate something, you’re reponsible for doing so in a manner which achieves understanding.’

  ‘I don’t think he can understand, Topaz. He’s not right, you know? I think he’s only in school because his mother schmoozes around with all that TV stuff and the head’s just taken in by it. I mean, I’ve been in classes with him and he’s not playing with a full deck. He’s weird. He scares me.’

  ‘That’s not logical, Flora.’

  ‘It is so logical. He’s a huge thing and he could do anything. You know he smashed up the Wilde At Heart last year when he was drunk.’

  Topaz considered. Unruly elements had to be purged. Society was healthier without their influence. Nepotism was a cancer which ate at the hearts of the people. On the other hand, her sister, with her flouncing flesh and feeble spirit, was colluding with her persecutor. Since they were not in a position to purge the offender at this point in time, only Flora’s contribution to the problem could be addressed.

  ‘Go and sign up for a martial arts class,’ counselled Topaz, ‘or self-defence for women or something. You need to empower yourself. When you cease to feel like a victim, you won’t act like a victim and then you will no longer be a victim.’

  ‘They make you fall about and hit people in self-defence.’ Physical activity, beyond a little languid dancing, did not attract Flora. She regarded having to cycle to school as the greatest burden of their comparative poverty.

  ‘How do you know until you’ve done it?’ Topaz countered. ‘But this isn’t about learning to fight, Flora. You don’t understand. It’s about getting in touch with your inner strength, so you never need to fight anybody. You shouldn’t be creeping around letting yourself be intimidated by a retard like Lurch.’

  ‘No,’ Flora agreed. If you asked Topaz for help, you had to take whatever she gave you. Her authority was total. Trouble was, there were things Topaz didn’t understand. Like failure. Let alone fear of failure. And as for worrying that you’d chosen the wrong thing to fail at … Topaz could do things that most people found difficult without any trouble at all. If you said you were having problems, she just blinked at you.

  ‘Otherwise,’ Topaz added with supreme rationality, ‘what we could do is get Gemma to go and speak to the school about it …’

  Flora winced. Nothing in the world was more painful than having her mother intervene in her school life. Topaz went back to her books, confident of the outcome. For a short while the only sound in the room was the muted clatter of her key
board.

  ‘OK,’ Flora sighed eventually. ‘I’ll do it. If you really think it will help.’

  ‘They do martial arts at that gym in Helford. You can ask Rod to take you, if you like.’ Topaz never took her eyes from the screen. Flora had once heard Rod Fuller say that Topaz had been born without doubt, and that this was a great advantage in life.

  11. Good Cheap Day Schools on the Estate

  High summer came to Westwick. The lawns lost their lushness and the leaves on the tall trees hung limp in the dry air. Radiators boiled on the 31. Ted, Adam and Josh boasted to each other of their in-car air-conditioning. Moron found a wedge of shade on the terrace behind the house and lay there like a dead dog all afternoon. Damon Parsons took to bunking off school and sleeping among the weeds in the central reservation of Acorn Junction. The water level in the river fell, leaving the Dawn Treader half-beached among blooming pink willow herb.

  The management of The Cedars posted a notice to its clients warning them that correct tennis attire might include a tennis headband of white or pastel towelling with a discreet logo, available from the boutique at only three times a reasonable price, but did not embrace aerobic sweatbands in bright colours, bandannas or surf wear; players wearing such apparel would be asked to leave the court, and members were requested to advise their guests accordingly. The mirrors in the studio steamed up during the Bunbuster. The studio manager gave Rod Fuller his third warning about wearing no socks with trainers.

  The first blooms on her Souvenir de la Malmaison were stupendous but Stephanie had no time to admire them, for all over Westwick people saw stupendous roses in other people’s gardens and wanted some for themselves, and some of them called The Terrace Garden Design Studio and demanded bowers and arbours and pergolas the day before yesterday, so. Stephanie’s phone rang more than ever and she asked Inmaculada, her baby-sitter, to work every afternoon. The aphids recolonised Souvenir de la Malmaison.

  Her hair made her neck sweaty, however she braided it, twisted it and pinned it up. One day she grew violently impatient with it and had it cut.