Getting Home Page 6

  It was a new Allie Parsons who emerged, one who greeted the outsiders with flattering squeals of joy, as if they had chosen to leave their offices and entertain her. ‘My, oh my, what a magnificent catch,’ she cried, clasping her hands in admiration. ‘And you did all this for us? I’m overwhelmed, I really am. Now you must tell me,’ and she took the fish buyer seductively by the arm, ‘which one of these gorgeous creatures would you choose?’

  ‘Well, the tuna is on promotion this week …’

  ‘Tuna … just a tiny bit in the luxury bracket for us I think.’

  ‘What we need is a medium-sized whole fish with a sad expression,’ the senior researcher interjected anxiously, seeing the entire feature transmuting into something else, the shooting ratio for the series rising even higher than it already was and his date for the evening left waiting in fury by her phone.

  ‘Hey – look at this f-a-a-ab creature, isn’t he beautiful?’ Allie picked up an enormous lobster by the tail. ‘Is it still alive? He won’t nip me will he?’ The extended f-a-a-ab was her catchphrase; on screen, she made a point of using it within the first three sentences of her opening speech. She was getting increasingly annoyed that no comedian had yet done an impression of her.

  ‘Our lobsters are all freshly killed.’

  ‘Or what about this? What is this?’ Delicately she held up a big flat white fish, draping it reverently over the corner of the tray as if it were a length of cloth of silver.

  ‘Turbot. Our turbot are farmed in the North Atlantic, enabling us to offer them at about half the price of wild turbot.’

  ‘Oh my, that’s just f-a-a-ab … Now, everybody, let’s really think fish here …’

  And so the drama continued, until after forty minutes Allie was presented with a pair of lobsters and the fish buyer had departed in a state of high satisfaction, also leaving behind a very average herring which, in objective truth, looked more cheerful than the trout first chosen. Thinking fish had determined that a fish was definitely an ocean-swimming creature, so trout were out. The Magno Hypermarkets public relations director left a little later, having summoned an assistant to oversee the operation in her absence.

  The Himbo set out across the city with the herring, the assistant and a camera journalist griping about the afternoon light. He was filmed attempting to return the fish to a Magno Downtown store on the grounds that it looked unhappy. At another Magno, he was filmed returning a packet of detergent because he did not care for its perfume. Lastly, he was captured in the Magno at Helford taking back a packet of cornflakes because they were too yellow for his kitchen decor.

  The herring passed the night in the refrigerator in the studio kitchen. In the morning, at the suggestion of the public relations assistant from Magno, it was washed, patted dry, touched up around the gills with a little red lip gloss and coated with hair gel to restore its healthy fresh-from-the-ocean shine.

  ‘And now,’ The Himbo primed the watching millions with his extraordinary natural sincerity, ‘a fishy tale for our Watchdog feature. Every week on Watchdog we put a consumer claim to the test for you …’

  ‘And today,’ standing in front of the studio audience, Allie brandished the herring above her head. ‘With this fish,’ she confided to Camera Two, ‘we set out to test the claim of Magno Hypermarkets that they would exchange any unsatisfactory merchandise, however crazy the reason the customer might give for bringing it back, with no questions asked. We gave Daniel this fish and told him to take it back to Magno Downtown because it looked miserable and it was making him sad …’

  The audience moaned, ‘O-o-o-o-o-h,’ in sympathy, their sensibilities tenderised by a warm-up man who had told blue jokes for half an hour before the show started.

  ‘And after that,’ Allie gracefully deposited the fish on an Italian ceramic platter decorated with hand-painted lemons, and picked up the detergent, ‘Daniel took back this washing powder to Magno just because he didn’t like the smell …’

  ‘A-a-a-a-ah,’ sighed the audience, here and there breaking into lubricious titters, for it was a feature of Family First that The Himbo should appear virile enough to stir a housewife’s loins and bring sunshine to her day even through a veil of Prozac in the depths of winter and the pit of the menopause.

  ‘And finally, at our local Magno store here in Helford, he took back these cornflakes,’ and she held them up with both hands and shook the carton, ‘because the colour clashed with his kitchen curtains.’

  The sign above the stage which read LAUGH was illuminated and the audience guffawed obediently until the floor manager patted the air for them to quieten down. ‘So Daniel …’ Allie turned to The Himbo with an adorable wide smile. The rush of live television – there was nothing like it. ‘Let’s see how you got on …’

  Needing powerful distraction, Ted Parsons picked up the phone. He changed his mind and put it down, then picked in up again, punched a number from the memory and gulped a breath.

  ‘Listen,’ he commanded the answerer, ‘I have to go out to Whitbridge tomorrow afternoon. What say I pick you up when your kids are out of school and we enjoy the country air for a couple of hours and find somewhere to have a drink in the evening …’

  ‘Oh hi, Ted,’ responded Topaz Lieberman in a pleasant tone.

  ‘God, I’m sorry – you sound just like her.’

  ‘You always say that.’

  ‘Sorry, sorry. Is she there?’

  ‘Mum’s outside with a customer. Maybe you could call again in a few minutes?’ She meant that her mother would under no circumstances call him back. So young and so brilliantly oblique. At least Topaz had always been on his side.

  ‘Is she tied up tomorrow afternoon? What d’you think she’ll say?’

  ‘Uh – well, I’d leave it a few more weeks if I were you.’

  ‘Still mad, huh?’

  ‘Well, kind of.’

  ‘You mean yes.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Her plants have died, you know.’ He was looking at a dead parlour palm in the window of his office, its leaves browner and dryer and more shrivelled as the days passed. ‘We had a contract. She was supposed to maintain them.’

  ‘That’s too bad. There are other contractors – let me give you some numbers …’

  ‘You said she had a customer?’

  ‘Don’t sound so surprised. We have customers.’

  ‘I’m sure you do. How did the exams go?’

  ‘Challenging, but I suppose that’s how they’re meant to be.’ She knew he was not really interested.

  ‘Maybe it’s best not to tell her I called.’

  ‘OK, if you want. Take care now. Have a good day.’

  She hung up with a brisk click. Ted dawdled his receiver into place, as if it were possible that the line would come to life again and he would hear the voice he wanted to hear. He found that he very much wanted to hear that voice. It echoed from his memory, low and even, the chuckle of a wide river running over warm rocks, the drone of a fat queen bee. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled.

  He got up and walked around his office. For the billionth time, he admired the design of Jackson Kerr’s 1910 advertisement for homes in Maple Grove. A woman had started it all. Women were always responsible for men’s dreams. Ted saw Jackson Kerr as a buccaneer on the seas of enterprise, a bold adventurer who made his fortune dealing in hides and cloth, married a Westwick girl and decided to settle down. He bought her father’s house and the houses next to it. Grove House, Maple House, Elm Bank House. Kerr knocked down Maple and Elm Bank, creating, with their orchards and the paddocks, 24 acres of prime building land on which he planned a thousand houses, two schools, a library, a theatre and a church, all in the shade of the great trees of the arboretum planted by the venerable CE Crisp, president of the National Horticultural Society and owner of Elm Bank House for 36 years.

  Ted’s mind ran back to Gemma. I was a landmine and she stepped on me. I was a chrysalis and she split me open. I was wine and she pour
ed me out. Now I cannot go back to what I was.

  The map loomed over him. The palm was dead. The family picture on his desk had been taken when Chalice and Cherish were still babies, before his hopes were blighted and withered. On the street below throbbed a gridlock of taxis. He was not going to have a good day. The purpose of existence seemed exceptionally unclear.

  Stephanie snapped off the television. How could people be concerned with fish when her husband was missing? It was a measure of her mental distress that she was even watching such junk. She thought of morning TV as some kind of voodoo capable of turning normal women into underclass zombies. The fact that Allie Parsons was the cult’s high priestess and a national celebrity bothered her. Not that she would ever say so.

  Westwick had a lifeboat mentality. We’re all in this together, said the women tossed together on the stormy sea of parenthood, we must get along if we want to survive. Nobody argued in public, nobody criticised to the face. In private, and behind the back, gossip was to them what poison was to the Borgias – essential, compulsive, sadomasochistic rapture.

  She knew they suspected her because she held back, but Stephanie had made up her own code, some Mary Poppins nonsense of treating others the way you want to be treated yourself, and found that she was stubborn about it. Besides, honour demanded her loyalty to Allie, who had been her mentor and was her friend. They went back to their student days.

  Alexandra Azarian, as she had been then, was one of those girls who could never look dean or combed, never. wear anything untorn or unstained, never get to a class accompanied by a pen and never hand in anything on time. Her hair had been black, thin and ratted into clumps, and she had a nose which although small was hooked like a parrot’s beak.

  At that time, Stephanie stood at the edge of adulthood as a doe stands at the edge of a forest, in terror of the open space ahead. She was a good student, because beings conscientious kept her doubts to a manageable proportion. If her mind was free for an instant to think about her future she was overwhelmed by an uncertainty as fierce as madness. So she found the incompetence of Alexandra Azarian impressive.

  They had coincided partially – since Allie had dropped out after six weeks – in an art history module. Stephanie was fascinated to witness her sigh and flounce through the lectures as if Ucello had developed perspective expressly to irritate her, asking questions such as, ‘So what was Michaelangelo’s purpose in leaving the “Pieta” unfinished?’

  One day she vanished without formal explanation, although later when Stephanie saw her outside a bar the media students favoured she came over all bright with friendliness and explained. ‘My parents wanted me to drop that course, it was such a waste of time, don’t you think?’ There was a rumour of an affair with her lecturer, although the idea of that exceptionally embittered academic actually performing sex was quite wild.

  After a while, it seemed that she had disappeared altogether. She had not been popular, she had dated no one, no one was quite sure if she graduated, indeed she had changed course so often that what she might have graduated in was uncertain. Her most memorable quality had been a blitheness, a dizzy conviction that nothing really mattered, that consequently she could get away with anything.

  Years later, at some corporate day at a race meeting, Stewart had pulled out a chair for his wife next to Ted Parsons and the cry of ‘Oh my God, isn’t that Stephanie? My, oh my, oh my!’ had gone up from the far side of the table. This vibrant female had jumped up and come around to demand a hug, and Stephanie, compelled to rise and put herself between the little thin arms, had politely covered up her mystification with a muzzy smile until Allie posted a bulletin for the marquee at large: ‘We were at uni! I haven’t seen you since we did the Florentine school! Isn’t this just great?’

  She was immaculate, she was flaxen and her nose was straight, and she was also quite accustomed to the dramatis personae from the first act of her life failing to recognise her when they made their next entrance. Stephanie was not curious, but some cataclysmic event had turned the grub Alexandra Azarian into the gorgeous butterfly Allie Parsons. As they became friends, she assumed she would be told.

  ‘You must do something green for us,’ Allie said with non-specific fervour, and a few months later Stephanie’s garden for an inner-city play scheme won an award, and her newly designated friend redoubled her applications of flattery and enthusiasm until she agreed to appear on Family First. Stephanie hated the entire experience – the exposure, the make-up, the business of reducing her lifetime study to fifty meaningless words. The subsequently increased respect of her clients, colleagues and even her husband she considered utter hypocrisy. The episode was such a trauma that her only clear memory was of the screen Allie Parsons, a more assertive, more defined; more brilliant incarnation.

  Every man’s fantasy, every woman’s best friend – that was the Channel hype about their daytime star. It was almost true. Even among friends, Allie was always on always up, always shiny. For Westwick women, sensitive to the allegation that motherhood had softened them, slowed them, blunted their intellects and weakened their wills, she was something of a role model Other women slobbed out when appropriate. Sunday morning would find Stephanie, Rachel and Belinda in their kitchens in leggings and sweatshirts with their brains running in neutral. Even Lauren possessed a pale green towelling tracksuit for homey evenings. Allie never took off her little suits, never switched off.

  Part of her genius was understanding that no moment of public attention was wasted. Even her reaction shots were nano-performances. The eyebrow flash, the chin-dip, the magical close and pout of her rounded lips – the mouth of Manet’s barmaid was topped up with collagen every six months – and men all over the region basked in her fascinated attention. Family First had the highest proportion of male viewers in the 10 am time slot.

  The studio hairdresser came to her house every week to cut and maintain her hair the colour of butter – near-white, mountain-meadow gourmet butter. Most of it was razored into something neat and feathery like Peter Pan’s cap; just this thick lock at the front flopped over her forehead, convincing the most slatternly of women that they had something in common.

  As months passed, and then years, Stephanie understood that the time lost between Alexandra and was not to be retrieved. She found that in any area not connected with her profession, Allie had an impenetrable vagueness. Her children suffered from it, since she forgot most things a mother needed to remember, down to their shoe sizes and what time school came out. At The Magpies Montessori, little Chalice was often the last child in the playground, howling with misery in the arms of an exasperated teacher until the Parsons’au pair appeared at the gate, or Allie herself drifted in, enquiring, ‘Oh dear, am I late?’ without a trace of guilt.

  Almost the first lesson in the ways of Westwick was never to rely on the Parsons household for anything, for it would assuredly let you down. Allie seemed to exist fully only at the Channel Ten studio. Outside she was in a half-life. She told no stories, she seemed to have no memories, she certainly gave nothing away.

  Direct questions were feinted aside. One day when Allie had been particularly down on Ted, Stephanie had asked, ‘Where did you two meet?’ and Allie had shrugged and said, ‘Oh, you know, where do you meet your husband? It sort of doesn’t make any difference, don’t you think?’ And then she looked up with a great swimmy smile, adding, ‘I think women friends are more important, I really do. Isn’t it great that we’ve been friends for so long? We should be girlie about it, shouldn’t we? Exchange rings or make bracelets for each other or something. Would you wear it, if I gave you something?’

  Stephanie had been dumbstruck. At the time of friendship bracelets she had made no friends, because their man-shorn rump of a family moved often, forcing her to move from one school to the next before any attachment had time to form roots. She had resigned herself to having missed those pleasures, skipped a stage of development and matured without the pleasure of feminine intimacy. She felt les
s of a woman because of it. Before Max was born, she had hoped for a girl baby to restore the missing female-to-female bond.

  The relationships with other Westwick mothers suited her underdeveloped heart, with their carefully managed distances and tacitly agreed exclusion zones around husband, money, sex, and the imperfections of their children. Not until Allie proposed that bond did she understand what a deep wound she had covered over. The next day a bracelet was delivered, two thick bangles of silver linked together with a ring which carried a silver tag inscribed A on one side and S on the other. Although it felt disloyal to Stewart, Stephanie wore it often. When Allie called her to say that she had heard of a house in New Farm Rise on the market at a bargain price, Stephanie got a sense of personal validation she had felt only once before, on her wedding day.

  ‘But you must come on the show and talk about Stewart!’ Allie had said. Stephanie recoiled in fear. Trauma was a shame you kept hidden, she had learned that from her mother.

  ‘No,’ she replied, ‘I couldn’t do that.’ And her friends eyes, which were normally an indeterminate colour which could be blue when necessary, had turned black with suppressed rage.

  4. Ladies’ Discussion Society

  ‘You’re so brave … but you look great, honestly you do. Is there any more news? What an ordeal for you.’ Effervescing with sympathy, Allie picked her way around their table on the terrace at The Cedars. ‘And Max!’ she cried, removing her sunglasses for emphasis. ‘Tell me, how’s he taking it? I suppose he can’t understand. My God, how terrible. How you must feel. I – well, I don’t know how I’d feel if anything like that happened tome, Not that Ted ever travels. It’s been two weeks now, hasn’t it? Has there been any news?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Irrational, but for a second Stephanie felt disbelieved. ‘That man from the Foreign Office calls every morning but they haven’t heard anything.’