Getting Home (28 page)

‘But I like the little stuff,' Stephanie protested, truthfully. There was much security in knowing you were doing your best for your child, even in tying his shoe laces. Parenthood as the spiritual death of a thousand cuts was something she had heard other mothers complain of, but had never experienced. ‘I enjoy it. Max is just … an angel, I'm so lucky. And I like looking after everybody.'

‘Yeah, I like it too, and I love my girls to pieces and I like the nice warm feeling you get of doing the right stuff.' Gemma looked at the face opposite her and saw the slightest, most tentative gleam of vitality dawning in the harrowed grey eyes. ‘But let's face it, that's all you get. Otherwise all you get for bringing up kids is abuse. If you're lucky. And if you're not, you're just wiped. People come along and take another little piece of your heart, and one day you won't be there any more, just the hole where you used to be. You'll be a disappeared one, a non-person. It's like you can make yourself a victim because you think kids are the purpose of life but everybody else thinks it's something else. So the purpose of their life actually is taking away yours. You're just the next best thing to dead meat, a herbivore in a carnivorous world. So that's why you need the moments. I mean – did Thelma and Louise have any kids?'

‘I can't remember.'

‘Betcha they didn't. If you're a mother you can't even drive off a cliff and get away with it. I tell ya.'

The days after this meeting seemed lighter. Stephanie found she worked faster. Jobs which had stuck to her fingers were finished at last; things she had lost were found. She became aware that since Stewart had been gone she had drifted for long, grey hours in a kind of chaos which was born of unhappiness, with so little mental strength that a very simple task, like costing a planting or computing a slope, had needed long and laborious concentration.

She went with budding hope to the first meeting of the support group for the partners and families of kidnap victims, which was convened by a deep voice on the telephone at an anonymous uptown hotel, close to Central Station, at 5 pm, over coffee and finger sandwiches. When she arrived she found a woman of a species she recognised at once, the unsexed matron bred by the armed forces or the civil service, a flat-chested, crop-haired, long-skirted doyenne, posed in the centre of a small group and using her institutional good manners as a means of domination.

‘And where is
your
husband?' she enquired, and fluttered with insincere embarrassment as she added, ‘Or is it your husband? We've all got so much to learn about each other.'

‘Kazakhstan.' Stephanie mumbled the still unfamiliar name. ‘In Russia. What used to be Russia.'

‘The former Soviet Union.' The matron made it sound like a correction. Around them the rest of the group, unified only in their willingness to be drones to this queen bee, nodded understanding. ‘My husband,' the matron confided, ‘is in Iraq, poor man. A diplomat. Very junior, actually.'

There were four others, their missing men had been on business in Namibia, studying the climate in New Guinea, backpacking in Indonesia and on a church mission to Algeria. ‘And she has had
no
news,' the matron volunteered. ‘Not a word since he was taken. That must be the worst, don't you think? I don't know how I'd cope with nothing at all.'

The scrape of cups on saucers was loud in the quiet room. Eating sandwiches seemed too gross, they went untouched. Soft, shallow smiles were traded. The matron mediated the exchange of information as she would have run an embassy cocktail party. No doubt she had used her leverage with Capelli to get this event organised for her own benefit. Stephanie felt cheated; she had hoped for the chance at last to rage against the unfairness of it all in good company. The horrible compost of her feelings was just too ugly to bring into her cultivated day-to-day life.

The matron and two of the others were seeing counsellors. Only the backpacker's partner had no children. The others all had children in their teens. In time they got down to where they all lived.

‘Westwick!' marvelled the matron, as if personally affronted. ‘But that's a very nice neighbourhood, isn't it?'

‘We thought so,' Stephanie answered, half smiling at what she was saying. Five faces were regarding her with rank envy. The matron was in a Foreign Office apartment close by. Three of the others were from cities in the Coffin, one from a much less favoured suburb to the east of the city.

‘Where is Westwick?' queried Algeria, sounding as if the place had been chosen to distress her.

‘Out near the airport,' Stephanie answered briskly.

‘One of those lovely quiet places with old houses and trees on the streets – it was the first garden suburb, wasn't it?' The matron was giving no ground.

‘That was Maple Grove,' said Stephanie. ‘We don't live in Maple Grove.'

‘All the same,' said the matron, ‘it must be very nice.'

After that the other five formed a bond which excluded her, and Stephanie went home on the train in tears again, having been condemned to suffer without support as punishment for the privilege of living in Westwick.

The next day her mother returned, bringing her son to console her.

‘Max is such a dear,' she said, settling in the garden as if she had an important matter to discuss. ‘Quite fell in love with my grandson when we had him to ourselves. Did I tell you what he said to the stewardess on the flight back?'

‘Yes, you did.' Stephanie observed that her mother was restless. She was looking around and twitching her toes and playing with her triple-strand pearls. Something was up. There was a sense of purpose about her. She usually cruised along with at least a facade of serenity. Since the necessity for action was what made her mother nervous, it wouldn't be long before she made her move.

‘Oh well – but he was a dream. I suppose it is the annoying thing about children that they always act their best with other people.' Rejuvenated, her mother appeared now, with a good strong suntan to set off her Grace Kelly pastels.

‘He's a dream at home too. And at school. Term starts tomorrow.' Another milestone in time, another cycle of the year begun, and still no hope of Stewart. Mr Capelli had lately been assuring her, ‘things are moving forward very well in Kazakhstan,' but after nearly five months he was obviously running short of things to say.

Max had been inside his home all of thirty seconds before asking if Courtenay Fuller could come over. It was simple to amuse Courtenay, all she wanted to do was climb things; Stephanie's garden had one tree worth climbing, with one branch within reach. Between the three of them they had added a rope ladder and the children had begun some fantasy game requiring them to climb the tree and descend the ladder interminably.

It was the no-man's land of the year, the time when seeds are setting, fruit is ripening and late roses open in the mellow afternoon sun. Creation was gearing up for the great push of the autumn. In the city, working people were getting back to their desks with an obscure feeling of relief and drawing up masterful task lists. In Westwick, mothers were pairing football boots and naming hockey-sticks and laying in supplies of pens, pencils, ink, socks, calculators, geometry instruments, gym leotards, dictionaries and nit lotion, mobbing out the scruffy little school shop in Helford.

‘How's the work going? Did you get much done while we were away?' her mother enquired with unusual interest.

‘Fine. There's plenty coming in. I'm getting the hang of making it pay. It seems all the suppliers want paying in advance and all the clients want to pay six months late. I wish I was making enough to hire an assistant.' She resented time wasted chasing invoices, and besides, it was hideously embarrassing. On the other hand, there was a sum equal to a month's budget owing from a job she had done back in May.

‘You've got that girl …'

‘Inmaculada? Her English isn't up to it.'

‘We'd always have Max for you, you know, if things got difficult one day.'

It was a three-hour drive to her mother's house. Not a tempting offer. Stephanie made an appreciative face over her tea cup. So much talking without saying; the pressure of words unspoken was getting critical. Impossible to think of telling her mother that half the neighbourhood was gossiping that her grandson was illegitimate and her son-in-law had abandoned them. Where would you start on a topic like that? All the same, it was seething unsuspected in her head like magma in a volcano, that and her pointless rage at the whole situation.

Four years of living here and that absurd Lieberman woman was the only one person she could actually talk to. The rest of the time it was stay cool, draw trellis-work, make peanut-butter sandwiches and find courteous forms of words to remind people you were still a human being, even if something bad had happened to you.

‘Have you thought any more about renting the house out?' her mother asked before long.

‘Why?' Here it was, the cause of the trouble. Stephanie made her eyes big and soft, and her voice low and soft, and tilted her head on her long neck like a polite giraffe, a pose of non-confrontational innocence which she had always found effective.

‘We were thinking,' – she smoothed down her skirt, picking invisible threads off it – ‘your stepfather and I, that you might like to do that. And maybe move in with us for a while. We worry about you, all alone with this terrible business dragging on. You wouldn't have to work so hard. Our place is so big. I think there's even an old tree house in the garden.'

Stephanie pasted on a bland half-smile and felt it set like concrete on her lips. Careful, take it easy, take it at face value, don't give offence. ‘How kind,' she forced out, holding down the voice tone, then for the sake of simulating warmth, she put her cup down and gave her mother a hug. ‘I'll think about it, really I will.'

‘You've done wonders with the house,' her mother pressed on, gentle but pitiless, ‘I'm sure it would rent well. Then you wouldn't have all these things to worry about – the money, or getting someone to look after Max …'

‘I really will think about it,' Stephanie repeated, howling with horror inside, ‘but I do like working, you know.'

‘But you look tired, dear. More than tired, you're looking – harrowed.'

‘Of course I'm looking tired and harrowed – wouldn't you in my situation?'

‘I suppose …'

‘Have you thought what might be happening to Stewart right now? Have you thought that he might be dead, he might have been dead for weeks?'

‘Don't be angry, dear. We're only trying to help.'

‘I know, I know. I'm sorry.'

When she was alone with the children, and her mood settled, she found herself keeping her promise. Probably the house would rent well, everything she and Stewart had taken such pride in, the lustrous sun room, the pretty terrace, the gleaming kitchen, the cosy bedrooms. Rental homes were never stylish, anybody would be thrilled to be offered their house.

Go home to Mummy. Give up, give in, revert to a child-state, eat without having to cook, sleep without having to launder. No more climbing into a suit to give a presentation then coming home and climbing into a sweatshirt to be a mother. Regular cheques, no more clients, no more invoices.

No more Westwick. No more acting sweet around Lauren Pike when you felt like stabbing her. No more hiding from Allie in fear of becoming a media victim. No more avoiding Ted in case he made another pass. Lately she had poured half her energy into these accommodations. She was tired of it, she was sick of it. So why the silent scream at the mere idea of moving out?

This house is us, it is Stewart and me, and once it made me happy. Ecstatically happy, on the day we moved in. She remembered standing on the front path watching Stewart get Max out of the car and feeling joy streaming around them, gilding the scene like the October sunshine. She remembered going back to Stewart, holding on to his arm, laying her head against his shoulder, stroking Max's hot round cheek and saying, ‘You can't imagine how happy I am,' and Stewart clumsily catching hold of her fingers. She remembered thinking, I must remember this: my husband, our baby, our home in Westwick – perfect happiness.

Needing comfort, she sat down at the sycamore table and called back the scene. She saw herself and Stewart carrying their baby, walking together up the path to the new house. She saw them opening the stiff door and letting their happiness blow them through the fresh empty rooms, and knew that they had felt bliss then, but now could not retrieve the feeling. Her memory held nothing but words and pictures when she urgently wanted the proof that she had once deserved to be happy.

Stewart had done what he always did in houses, a funny little dance, running his fingers around architraves and his toes along floorboards, as if communicating with the construction itself by touch. ‘It's a dream, isn't it?' he said to her. ‘A lovely family home in Westwick. You are a very clever woman, you know that?'

‘I'm not. I was just in the right place at the right time, that's all.'

‘I thought that was cleverness.' He asked the baby, now gazing wonderingly up from the crook of his arm, ‘Isn't that cleverness, Maxie? Being in the right place at the right time so we get to buy a beautiful house in a beautiful neighbourhood we never even looked in because we thought we couldn't possibly afford to live there. I think that's very clever. My boy, your Mummy is a very clever woman.' The baby yawned fit to unhinge his little gummy jaws, and appeared to agree.

Stephanie had said nothing. People had on occasion called her clever, but she was afraid if she accepted that opinion she would have to do something to justify it. She had gone on into the garden, her own little Eden.

Presently, their furniture had been carried in, followed by Allie, their first visitor, who pushed a great Cellophaned bouquet of red roses with corkscrew willow twigs into Stephanie's arms with one hand and put a bottle of champagne down on a packing case by Stewart with the other. ‘Welcome, my dears. Welcome to Westwick!' Stewart lowered Max for her to kiss. Somehow, people had an instinct to save Allie from ever looking awkward. ‘Darling baby, always so good! I just came to see you over the threshold. Look at me, I'm still in my make-up – don't let me get it on you. I can't stop, I know you're in chaos and I'm waiting for the studio car. Gorgeous kitchen, do let me see …'