Getting Home (23 page)

‘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.

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 cheap. 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?'