Getting Home (46 page)

The police activated the speed warning signs, which flashed HAZARD AHEAD – DEAD SLOW over both eastbound and westbound lanes of the 31, to the annoyance of the eastbound drivers who had already been at a standstill for a quarter of an hour. A police helicopter with a searchlight was called up, and hovered over the scene tracking the horse, to its considerable alarm. The horse put its head down and galloped towards the Acorn Junction.

Chester Pike's driver carried two suitcases out to the car waiting on the gravel carriageway drive of Grove House. When the man was out of earshot Chester turned to his wife, who had lately taken to sleeping in full make-up and getting up early to restore her face and hair before seeing him off in a lace-edged yellow satin peignoir. Lauren had also started talking about taking a holiday together without the children. Chester was not a sensitive man, but in this matter also his instinct was prompting him to action.

‘Goodbye, dear,' he said, kissing her on the forehead while keeping hold of his briefcase.

‘Why all the luggage?' Lauren asked, holding him at arm's length, looking at him with uncomfortable directness.

He licked his lips before replying, ‘I'm not sure how long I'll be away this time.'

‘Why not?' she pressed him. She was trying to hold both his hands but the briefcase allowed her only the left. Now he took his fingers, clammy from his morning shower, out of her grasp.

‘There's a lot happening in St Louis,' he answered. ‘My sense,' Lauren informed him briskly, ‘is that things have been happening in St Louis for quite a while and that it's time you sat down and told me about them.'

‘I can't,' he responded with a degree of triumph, ‘the flight's at eight ten and we're running late already.' ‘I think I deserve to know, Chester.'

‘We'll talk when I get back,' he promised her, turning towards the door.

‘You're not coming back,' she pointed out.

‘I did not say that,' he insisted from the doorstep. ‘Take care of yourself. I'll see you soon.'

There seemed little point in waving him off. There seemed little point in the silk peignoir, which she found extremely impractical because it swirled around her legs at every step. Lauren took off the redundant garment and put it on the breakfast bar in the kitchen, the place where she left any clothes she intended to pass on to the housekeeper. Then she went upstairs to change into her street clothes. She was doing morning car pool.

‘So, Mr Parsons, if you decided not to recommend Helford to Harrier Homes – what happened?'

Ted was steaming up Riverview Drive, feeling warm and strong and powerful. Maybe he ran better without the weight of Oak Hill on his conscience. Now he was free of the project, it was taking on a doomed look. He had been accustomed, in his career, to seeing expert advice disproved by time, but the way young Sands had reacted to the Oak Hill job had always stuck in his memory. Until he got free of the problem, he had not realised quite how much it had weighed him down.

‘Looking back, it was almost like destiny,' he told the imaginary microphone. After closing the file on Fuller's Eyot, a series of serendipitous events typical of the life of a man of twenty-four in the city brought him to a party given by an absolute stranger on a baking summer night, from which he found himself going home with a tall, deep-bosomed, snake-haired beauty, who wore red sandals with four-inch spike heels. Ted woke on his first day in Westwick on a mattress on the floor of a studio in Maple Grove, saw blue sky through green leaves and the beauty naked on a wicker, lounger on her verandah, and began to dream.

Ted never gave up his dreams without a fight. In a few years, after he chose a breathless girl with unravelling clothes named Alexandra Azarian to be his dream, this became a source of much misery to him. Back then his persistence was an asset.

The beauty threw him out of the house as soon as he was fully conscious. By temperament Ted was tranquil to a fault, but nothing summoned up his blood as powerfully as rejection. In a daze he rambled through the neighbourhood, goggling at the ancient trees and the Dutch gables, basking in the rosy afternoon sun reflected from the mellow brick walls. The deep peace of Maple Grove restored him. He sensed dignity, exclusivity, stability, a potential of a wholly different order to the crass margins of Harrier Homes. Like a bomb, the recognition that Maple Grove could be everything that Harrier Homes were not crashed through the branches and fell on his head.

Since his car was still in the city he took a train, which was headed the wrong way. Rolling out of Helford, he decided to look at Fuller's Eyot again and on Monday recalled his dictaphone tape and set to work.

Meetings with the river authority and the city environment department and the government environment department took place. Ted read international reports on global warming and consulted professors of geography. Having discovered more than he cared to know about the state of the planet, he lunched underwriters, seeking their opinion on the flood barrier planned in ten years time down river to the east, between the city and the sea.

He concluded that while the world would warm and the sea would rise, the river would also fall and the flood barrier would stand effectively against freak tides and high winds. He predicted that for the next thirty years, Fuller's Eyot would be drier than it had ever been since the first barge tied up there in 1753. This prediction, correct so far, was never shared with the owners of the site, who were relieved to sell to Harrier Homes for what they considered a very reasonable price.

Fuller's Eyot became an estate of new homes named The Willows, and Ted used his end-of-year bonus to buy the end of a lease on the lower half of a house in Church Vale. The next year, he used his bonus to buy the freehold of the house, and helped the upstairs tenants, Mr and Mrs Funk, to buy a brand new ground-floor apartment in a retirement development with a warden just off the Broadway. Mrs Funk came to look on him as a son, and he came to look on her as the living archive of the area because in her rambling conversation he found out every material fact about his neighbours; who was dying, who wanted to move south to be near their children, whose investments had been unwise and who owned the cat's cradle of leases and sub-leases into which most of Tudor Wilde's houses had been divided.

In five years Ted was in business for himself, turning over his first million, about to sell the restored Grove House to Chester, and married with a son. He never saw the beauty again, but he looked out for her every night as he drove home, until Gemma Lieberman came into his life.

‘My God, we're only just in time,' marvelled Gemma from the back of the Cherokee as Stephanie swung it past the front of the Channel Ten building, where fifty people stood huddled under umbrellas near the queue sign. ‘It's not even seven-thirty yet. Crusty wasn't due till eight.'

‘Crusty's over there,' Rod observed, pointing to the VW camper pulling into the roadside. ‘This is just the regular audience.'

‘Don't these people have lives?'

‘I don't think so.' Rod waved his car-park pass at the security officer who raised the barrier and directed Stephanie to a bay with Rod's name painted on it.

‘My, you're grand,' Gemma observed, descending from the vehicle with a flounce of her skirts. She had picked a trailing dress of grape-coloured crinkle fabric with a matching embroidered jacket in which to make her screen debut.

‘I think my agent felt undervalued. They just gave me whatever he asked. He had to hold out for something. Did we bring umbrellas?'

‘God, no …' said Gemma, at the same time as Topaz answered, ‘Of course,' and pulled a neatly furled parasol from under their seat.

‘We'll see you guys later,' Stephanie promised.

Rod signed her in as a guest of
Family First
at the reception desk, where Allie's secretary had already left her name. They went up to his office. Rod changed into his new suit, a splendidly tailored, pin-striped, single-vented, double-breasted affair which endowed him, he felt, with only slightly less authority than the Pope on his Vatican balcony. He reassured Stephanie that his report was safe on a cassette in the inner pocket, and in addition he had mailed copies of it to both the Environment Minister and the Planning Director of Helford & Westwick Council, to arrive that morning.

With jangling nerves and nothing to do for at least an hour, they went up to the canteen for coffee and sat watching the rain sluicing down the window panes. Some die-hard ducks were paddling across the river, swept out into midstream by the yellow foaming effluent from the storm drain which carried the River Hel into the main channel.

Rod ran his fingers down Stephanie's forearm where the faint freckling of summer was fading to white. The damp air had made her hair frizz in a manner he found adorable and she found annoying. Apart from that difference, they were thinking the same thoughts.

‘I know we can't ever do that again,' he said, taking hold of her hand, ‘but I'm really glad we did it.'

‘Yes.' There was nothing to say for a while. Then Stephanie remembered how soft the grass had been under her bare skin. ‘I wish I knew what seed they planted,' she said. ‘If I ever have a lawn again, I'd like to use it. You have to think of all sorts of things for a lawn, the shade and the drainage and the traffic on it. Making love on it isn't a standard check. But important, really.'

‘Will you ever have a lawn again?'

‘I don't think so. I'll talk to Stewart when he gets back, but I was the one who wanted to live in Westwick, he's not so concerned.'

‘He's definitely OK, then?'

‘Yes,' she assured him, touchingly certain. ‘They let him send another E-mail yesterday. The Foreign Office say the negotiations are almost over. Not long now.'

In Riverview Drive, Lauren Pike picked up Ben and Jon Carman. Because her son Felix refused to sit within arm's reach of either of the Carman twins, she made Ben sit in the front seat beside her and belted Jon into one of the dickey seats at back of her new seven-seater Mercedes, leaving Felix to share the back seat with Chalice Parsons. It never occurred to her that she could run a smaller car if the boys did not fight. She also confiscated a toy pistol from Jon.

In Church Grove, Chalice Parsons had made the mistake of trying to hug her mother as part of a bid to be let off school because of the rain. As a result, she had the red imprint of Allie's hand across her cheek, and was made to wait indoors until it had subsided. ‘Hurry up, dear,' Lauren chided her. ‘We're late.'

No sooner had they turned into the Broadway than it mysteriously filled with vehicles which immediately ground to a halt. Outside Pot Pourri, Marcia was lowering the awning to keep the rain off her stock. Mr Singh had opened up the Kwality Korner Store. A van delivering some of the new season's stock to Bon Ton was too big for the parking bay and slowed the traffic down still more. The boys craned out of the windows to see Sky High's traffic report helicopter bank over Westwick on it way to join the police chopper hovering over the Acorn Junction.

Lauren found herself short of breath. She turned up the air conditioning and reached for her handbag to find her Ventolin. The inhaler did not seem to be there.

‘Felix,' she said, handing the bag back to her son, ‘you're a clever boy. See if you can find my puffer in my now, be a dear.'

A mile further down the Broadway, Ted Parsons made another break with the tradition of the past years and slipped four discs of an entire opera into his CD player. He had decided to graduate to Wagner.

The Rhine maidens were interrupted by the Travelmaster. ‘An incident on the Thirty-one at Westwick has fouled up traffic for at least five miles east-bound into the city,' the artificial voice informed him, ‘and the westbound lane is also affected. The tailbacks are running down the Forty-six now and all vehicles are advised to avoid the area if at all possible. That's the Thirty-one eastbound at Westwick. All vehicles avoid the area.'

‘There's been an incident out on the Thirty-one,' Allie's driver informed her, holding his umbrella reverentially over her head as she inserted herself into the back seat of her car. ‘It sounds pretty serious. I don't know what you want me to do …'

‘If it's bad on the Broadway, cut along Willow Gardens,' she ordered him. ‘We can take that little road which runs under the bridge. I can't be late this morning. It's the first show of the new series. I've got a new co-host, poor lamb he's so-o-o nervous, I must,
must
be there early so I can give him confidence.'

Damon didn't mind the rain. For once, he could ignore the cars. The horse was what enthralled him. It had jumped, actually jumped, nimbly picking up all four of its huge flat hooves and flying into the air, jumping over the crash barrier at the central reservation of the Acorn Junction, and now it was eating the weeds as if it this were a field and it was just grazing peacefully on long green grass.

‘Don't go near him,' the long-haired woman warned Damon. ‘He's dangerous, he'll kick you. Stay away.' But Damon wasn't afraid. The horse was watching him, he could see the white of its eye rolling as he walked towards him. The horse knew he was his friend. They hadn't looked after him; he was very dirty, with mud in his shaggy coat and tangles in his mane. From an old leather head-collar hung a plaited rope of orange plastic twine. He was big, as big as the biggest horse they had at the animal facility at the re-hab place, and brown and white.

‘Stay away,' the other woman yelled. ‘You'll frighten him out into the cars. You stupid fucker, stop where you are.'

The horse shook its mane and carried on cropping the weeds. ‘You shouldn't be here,' Damon informed him. ‘This is a dangerous place. You wouldn't believe the wrecks I've seen out here.'