Getting Home (25 page)

The festivities began with a display of Scottish dancing to a slightly dragging tape of jaunty accordion music. The children skipped along in pairs. Miss Helens tapped her foot in time. The sun shone. Adam DeSouza zoomed in on Wendy. The sachertorte glistened, the wings on the butterfly cakes drooped. Jon Carman tripped up his brother, who punched him in the face before a teacher could separate them.

The races took place after an interval for lemonade and refreshments. Courtenay Fuller won the egg-and-spoon race. In the three-legged race, Max was paired with Ben Carman. For some reason they did not finish, but from where she was standing at the back of the spectator seating, Stephanie did not see what happened. Felix Pike won the sack race, largely by knocking over the other competitors. Courtenay Fuller won the sprint, the somersault race and the hopping race. Max appeared fit to burst with pride.

‘She cheated,' Wendy DeSouza informed Stephanie, handing over her pennies for a flapjack.

‘I don't think so,' Stephanie replied. ‘It looked like she won fair and square from where I was.'

‘You would say that,' Wendy retorted, picking the raisins out of her purchase and flicking them into the flowerbed. ‘Max is her boyf.'

‘No he isn't,' declared Chalice Parsons, lurking spectrally behind her. ‘She can't have a boyf. She climbs things.'

‘Nobody your age can have a boyfriend,' Stephanie declared, struck with the horror of Max being termed a boyf. ‘You're way too young. Do you want a cake, Chalice?'

‘Ugh, no. Cakes are disgusting. They make you fat. When can you have a boyf? How old do you have to be?'

‘Grown up,' Stephanie told her.

‘Courtenay isn't grown up,' the child complained, getting into her characteristic hysterical vibrato. ‘She isn't grown up and she has a boyf.'

‘No she doesn't – they're just friends,' Stephanie announced, feeling sticky with innuendo again. Ridiculous, from a five-year-old.

‘See,' Wendy carefully put her mutilated flapjack back on the plate. ‘I told you. Max won't be her boyf now because she cheated.'

The vista to Max's adulthood was suddenly illuminated. My son is my son until he takes a wife. Of course, he would leave, and it would be her duty to let him go gladly, into a world full of little monsters like Chalice and Wendy, into another woman's house, leaving her own empty. She felt in advance the vacuum of his bed-room, the gape at the kitchen table. An empty house, except, please God, for Stewart. Please, God, because we love him, we need him, I'm going mad and I can't bear this. It has been ten weeks now; if this is some divine joke, it's not funny any more. It wasn't funny in the first place.

‘Mrs Sands,' yodelled Miss Helens from the trackside. ‘We need one more for the parents'race.'

Reluctantly Stephanie left the table and went over to line up with three other mothers and Josh Carman. Max was always severely embarrassed if she did anything to distinguish herself, but Miss Helens was not be refused.

Afterwards, she realised that three months alone had reversed some of the processes of coupled parenthood. She had been genderised, the presence of her husband and child had killed whatever was perceived as unmotherly in her, made her soft and slow and passive. Now she was changing, regaining her toughness and aggression. And her speed. At the starter's flag she tore away and was surprised to find herself along by the umpire's table and declared the winner, to black looks from Josh, who lumbered in behind her in second place.

‘Well run, Mrs Sands! Such a pity your husband couldn't be here.' Miss Helens had a propensity for elephantine tact. Stephanie decided she could let it go.

‘There's no more news, I suppose?' Miss Helens persisted.

‘Afraid not,' Stephanie confirmed.

‘You cut your hair,' observed Ted Parsons sadly, as if personally rejected once more. ‘Allie can't make it. Something came up at the studio.' The brief and tepid look which Stephanie threw his way held enough promise of forgiveness for him to hover.

‘I've tried to keep everything normal for Max at home.' Stephanie resumed her conversation, trying to shoulder Ted away into the press of parents. ‘He is sensitive, of course, and he does pick up on my moods, but I haven't noticed any signs of stress so far. But you never know how your children are when they're away from you, do you? How has he been in school? Does he seem upset at all?'

‘Certainly not. Nothing that we've noticed. He's reading marvellously and his number work is coming on. Delightful boy.' At five, Max had a reading age of nine, which made him the hero of his class as far as Miss Helens was concerned.

‘That's good then, isn't it?'

‘Indeed it is.'

Miss Helens clanked with gold bracelets, her puffy face defined with hard colours and thick lines, and gave the general impression of a lady colonel sportingly enduring brief secondment to an infant's school. Her manner implied that she solicited news of Stewart not from care for Max, nor sympathy for his mother, but because she claimed it as her social duty to gather such information and disseminate it as she saw fit.

‘I must say, Max has been very calm about it all,' she told Stephanie. ‘Perhaps a little quieter than usual, but that would be all. We keep them busy. It may look like play, but there is a structure to the day here.' She patted the back of her crisp, butterscotch curls, swallowing a snicker of disappointment that no news was to be offered to her about the most colourful incident in the community for some years.

‘Yes.' Stephanie turned back to the stall and gave all her attention to her price list, trying to embarrass Ted into moving on and Miss Helens into changing the subject. ‘Do you think I should charge more for the butterfly cakes? They're so popular.'

‘Max always has been very good, considering. I suppose he is used to your husband being away.' Ted drifted to a seat by himself at the edge of the arena but Miss Helens was not be embarrassed. Stephanie found her sunny mood clouding. That was a significant choice of words. Time for more firefighting.

‘Miss Helens,' she said briskly, ‘I do hope you'll forgive me if I'm out of order here, but I've heard some very odd stories about Stewart and Max since this terrible thing happened …' Yes, the story had got even this far. Miss Helens was gulping like a goldfish and turning pink under her make-up. A demon landed on Stephanie's shoulder and suggested that she open up a broadside and blaze away on the evils of gossip, tittle-tattle and circulating malicious rumours. ‘And just in case you had any doubts, I'd like to reassure you that we're just a regular little nuclear family,' she went on, struggling to keep her tone sweet. ‘Just mummy, daddy and their son Max. No step-parents or anything. Not to imply any criticism of other family structures, of course. But we're just the simple blood-related fairy-tale thing. OK?'

An angel's voice in Stephanie's ear sternly pointed out the possible disadvantages to Max of annoying his head teacher. A questionable reference from The Magpies, no place at St Nicholas's High School, her son turned out into a wilderness of educational discrimination which would leave him disadvantaged for life if she gave in to this outbreak of maternal defensiveness. Miss Helens was no fool. She had experience. If she was signalling some subtle difficulty with Max it was probably for good reason.

‘Your
hair!'
Belinda DeSouza growled, double-knotting Wendy's trainers with ferocity while Adam raked the scene with his camcorder. ‘It's so modern. But it really suits you.'

‘Of course, Mrs Sands,' Miss Helens pushed out her chest in maximum dignity, ‘people will say things, I appreciate that. But I don't pay any attention. Here at. The Magpies we are concerned only with the children. I assure you I was just thinking of Max and what a brave little boy he's been through all his troubles.'

Stephanie knew too much about the cruelty of infants. When she had been the child crying alone in the playground, she thought she had somehow invited persecution by not being good enough. Max was good enough. Actually, Max was pretty near perfect, healthy and clever and developmentally unchallenged. Such a plain, sturdy, four-square little boy that she had assumed he would escape. Stupid, stupid. Victimisation was part of life, you can't protect your children. Her heart plummeted. ‘What troubles?' she demanded. ‘Do you mean that he's been teased, then?'

‘Oh good heavens no. Certainly not. Nothing like that.' But that was a hit. Miss Helens suddenly diverted her attention to Chalice Parsons, who was lying prone on the grass, receiving the occasional accidental kick from her classmates playing nearby. ‘Chalice, dear, are you all right? Excuse me, Mrs Sands, won't you? Chalice, come along – we don't lie down unless we're ill now, do we? Are you ill this afternoon?' Limply, with a resentful glare, Chalice suffered herself to be helped up by a junior teacher and seated safely on a bench.

Stephanie was relieved when Max finally approached her with his new companion, saying, ‘It'll be all right, I promise it will. I'll ask her. It'll all be fine, you'll see,' in the tone of phoney cheeriness which Stephanie recognised as her own.

‘This is Courtenay,' he informed her. The announcement sounded much rehearsed. ‘She is my friend. Please can she come back with us today?'

Three sentences. This was serious. ‘Of course, if it's OK with her mother. Where is she?'

‘She died,' was the reply, serenely spluttered through incisors only halfway descended. ‘She got hit with a truck on her bicycle and she was ill for a long time and then she had to die. My daddy's coming for me. He'll be here soon. Max could come to our place but it's a boat and you might worry about him falling in the water.' Inclining her head, with her golden skin and little down-turned mouth, the child looked like a living icon.

Max gave his mandarin nod. Miss Helens breezed in with an explanation. ‘Courtenay lives on one of the houseboats along Riverview Gardens. I'm sure her father will be along any minute.' When the children had gone back to play, she added, ‘The mother died, some kind of accident. That's the story, I believe. He's very good with her, considering.' And Miss Helens'pale tongue flickered around her flat lips and her hands clasped each other more firmly, protectively clutching virtue to her belly.

The father. The story. Considering. Five words encoded her condemnation. An indignant sympathy caught flame in Stephanie's heart. She wanted to defend this bereft husband and father, whose honesty, morals and competence had been so casually impugned by a woman who had dribbled away whatever intelligence she had once possessed in queening over three to five-year-olds. Inhabiting a nursery universe, Miss Helens'human faculties had been stunted to infant proportions.

‘Ah.' Miss Helens almost clapped her hands with satisfaction to see her proposition proved immediately. ‘And
here
he is at last.'

Abruptly, Stephanie turned and found herself in the face of the child's father, who almost ran into the playground and halted well within the boundary of her personal space. At foreshortened angles she took in warm breath faintly smelling of peppermint, a fresh shirt open around a smooth thick neck, damp dark hair flipped back from the forehead and very long eyelashes, pale at the tip so the eyes were starred like daisy flowers.

Fragments of physical perfection fell into place as she and he recoiled. She was looking at Actaon, Endymion, Narcissus, some youth of mythical beauty created to humble goddesses and drive mortal women mad. She was looking at Rod of Rod's Bunbuster. Around him the air thinned, colours were brighter but there seemed to be less oxygen. ‘Oh.' Real words slipped away like fish; all she could manage were exclamations. ‘Um – ah …'

‘Mr Full
er
,' Miss Helens'face was now twitching with the effort of disciplining her smile. ‘We were waiting for you.'

Mr Fuller. From the jumble of information spilling out of her startled mind, Stephanie picked out the name and occupation. Rod Fuller, Fitness Instructor. She also retrieved his photograph from the notice board at The Cedars, a morbidly lit three-quarter profile above a polished shoulder and a sculptural bicep. ‘Rod the Bod,' Allie had giggled as they passed it, ‘isn't he just awe-some?'

‘My client was late, I got here as soon as I could.' Now he was awed rather than awesome, and anxious that the explanation should be accepted. Not wishing to be suspected of ogling, Stephanie looked at the ground. Clover was invading the grass.

‘Courtenay has been invited to Mrs Sands'house.' One of Miss Helens'hands tore itself away from the other to waft graciously in Stephanie's direction.

‘That's – uh – very kind.' He seemed disappointed.

‘Did you have other plans?' She hoped he did. This vibrantly physical but tongue-tied stranger in her kitchen, even for the five minutes sanctioned for the sake of politeness, was not what she needed right now. The leap of libido his nearness induced was scary. Jezebel, traitress, when Stewart is helpless, in danger and far away. And there was always the judgment of Westwick – glances like Ninja knives were already winging over from the few mothers remaining in the playground. The place had turned as jittery as a chicken run with a fox outside the fence.

‘Not at all. I like to do her reading before she gets tired, but …' The child, now hanging upside down from her knees on the highest bar of the frame, suddenly squealed, ‘Daddy!', windmilled her arms and hurled herself to the ground.

‘Take it easy.' In a symphonic counterpoint of glutes, hamstrings and the sculptural biceps, Rod Fuller strode over and scooped up the wriggling girl. She put her arms round his neck and smacked a kiss on his chin. ‘So you want to go to somebody else's house today?'

‘Please-oh-please-oh-please, can I, Daddy? Please. You can come for me later, can't you?'