Getting Home (5 page)

They expected her to act now. She looked at her watch. ‘Carl and Betty won't be up yet. I will speak to them this evening. I'll call my mother – she should be back by now.' Her mother's life was now ruled by golf and her stepfather. They did not like to play in the late afternoon because the shadows were tricky and working people started to get on the links.

‘I can't think of anything else,' she said to the police-woman.

‘You'll find it's a lot to take in,' she replied, moving towards the door. ‘There's a very good Victim Support organisation in Westwick. I'll leave you their number.' She picked a card from a pocket in the cover of her notebook and left it on the console in the-hall.

‘If you need anything, Steph …' Marcus did not know how to get off the doorstep.

‘I'll call,' she reassured him. ‘You were good to come, Marcus. I appreciate it.'

She walked down the front path to see them off; it seemed only polite. The departing cars made whirlpools of blossom petals, then the street was quiet and sunny again. She felt dread drenching her heart; trouble had found its way to her door. Things like this were not supposed to happen in Westwick. The schools and the gardens and the history and the ten-minute run to the airport were part of the story, but the real reason she had set her heart on living here was that it was safe. Or had seemed safe.

The telephone rang right on cue as she shut the door. It was F A W Capelli, Liaison Officer at the Foreign Office, a brisk, even voice, not too young, reeling out words which, when she tried to repeat them afterwards, seemed to have no meaning. ‘We expect things to move rapidly at this stage. The usual pattern is either an immediate resolution or possibly quite protracted negotiations,' she heard him say. ‘Controlling the time-scale is an important advantage, so we will be doing our utmost to bring things to the swiftest conclusion possible.'

After, he had hung up, she went to sit with Max. She would have liked to hold him, and draw some strength from the solid little body, but he never liked to be held. She watched him watch the TV, oblivious of the danger to his father. Would she have to explain to him? Stewart was not due back for another week, at least.

‘How strange,' her mother said when Stephanie called her and tiptoed through the facts. ‘What did he want to go to such an out-of-the-way place for?'

‘They were invited. All the biggest developments are in those kind of places. You remember the hotel they built in Poland?'

‘Business. Oh yes. Are you all right, dear? Is there anything you want me to do? There is a committee dinner this evening but I suppose I could—'

‘No, no. We're fine. There's no need to put yourself out.'

‘I could come over tomorrow …'

‘No, please. You stay where you are. We'll just have to wait and see how things develop. I'll call you tomorrow.' She hated to have her mother visit because she transplanted so badly. As a house guest, she was fidgety and unpleasable. From the height of her own motherhood, Stephanie was coming to understand that after the divorce her mother had painfully built a life for herself. It was admirable; many abandoned wives of that generation recited a daily litany of resentments and dedicated their lives to trashing men. Her mother had swallowed pain and waged war on hardship with a show of smiling serenity. She had painted a bright facade on her shame and presented it with such conviction that when another man had appeared he had taken her at face value as an elegant, independent woman; so there she stayed, petrified in competence. Only her daughters knew how fragile she was, how thin her veneer of calm. Her second marriage was a support to which she was clinging in terror. Sometimes Stephanie felt that her daughters reminded her of her dark years.

She made food for Max. She talked to him, her hollow happy words falling into the silence like water from a fountain. The sun poured over the table-top. The buds of her
Souvenir de la Malmaison
were blushing and swelling. Time is vague to a five-year-old, a long time could be two days or two weeks. He would never know about this. Stewart would be home before the time when it would be necessary to tell Max anything. It seemed wrong to be forced to make this monstrous calculation. The whole thing seemed wrong.

‘Ted – Chester.'

In the corner of Ted's office stood a tree in a tub, a tree which was meant to be living but had died. Its shrivelled brown leaves rustled spookily in the current from the air-conditioning vent. Ted swung around in his chair to get the miserable sight out of his eyeline. ‘Chester!' He responded with maximum cheer.

‘Ted, people here are looking at a site on the Thirty-four extension past Whitbridge. Adam'll fill you in – it's between two little places, Butterstream and …' there was a pause and a crackle on the line, ‘Strankley. There could be something out there for us.'

‘Got you. I'll take a look.'

About a year earlier, the BSD had stopped saying ‘our people' when referring to the site acquisition division of Magno; it became ‘people here'. At the same time, he started to talk about ‘us'. Ted anticipated the day that Chester would say ‘my people'and mean Tudor Homes. BSD was Adam's name for his boss. He had told Ted it was an old Afrikaaner acronym for Big Swinging Dick.

Ted keyed ‘Butterstream, 34X past Whitbridge'into his notebook and felt a tremor of premonition. Chester had nominated a notorious region. The extension of the 34 past Whitbridge had mired the Department of Transport in a public enquiry into the highway's route across an area known as Strankley Ridge.

Ted folded his arms and sat on the edge of his desk. He had three things on the walls of his office: a large abstract painting selected by the suite's decorator, forty-two brightly coloured rectangles in lines on a white ground; the original 1910 advertisment for homes in Maple Grove; and a map. On the map he traced the 34, which branched west from the city's orbital highway north of the 31. The 34 ought to have run in a straight line to meet the 52, leading due south from the Coffin. Instead it kinked southwards, as if avoiding the horror ahead.

Geographers first called the imploded industrial conurbation of five towns grouped along the coal seams and canals of the northwest the Coffin. It was a good name for a feature which was coffin-shaped, and distinguished by exhausted fuel, redundant industry and mass unemployment. People said a young man leaving school in the Coffin had a 60 per cent chance of remaining unemployed all his life.

The Transport Department wanted to extend the 34 logically to meet the 52 running south from the Coffin, through smiling irrelevant farmland, thousands of pointless pigs, millions of acres of unprofitable wheat and oil-seed rape, unviable villages, uneconomic copses and unfeasible water meadows. People did not like the idea. On a long chalk escarpment named Strankley Ridge stood a Neolithic stone circle which had become the focus of protest against the plans. It was an archaeological site entangled in protective legislation more hostile than razor wire.

The original path of the 34 veered to the southwest of this region, grazing the hallowed university town of Whitbridge. As Whitbridge University became a world-renowned centre for information science, the 34 swiftly became a principal artery of commerce, encrusted with bright plastic-cladded parks of modern enterprise. Ted visualised the earth thick with cables, the air crackling with radiation, a dementia of polarised ions streaming in all directions like the commuters through Central Station at 8 am and 6 pm.

The Coffin had no gaudy industrial parks. After riots, the government had targeted parts of the Coffin for urgent programmes of urban renewal. The putative investors demanded fast access to the 34 corridor; the pension funds which owned the farms in the way had been induced to sell.

The government had not moved fast enough. The high-speed trains hurtling to the city from Whitbridge had already tempted a small herd of maturing yuppies to move into the abandoned countryside dwellings. The husbands commuted every day, the wives colour-washed the farmhouse walls and limed the old oak beams, the children grew sturdy and freckled on honey sandwiches and country air. With all the cunning their MBAs suggested, these settlers were now fighting the road scheme, and with them ranged a motley army of native inhabitants, Green party anoraks, Iron Age researchers, a famous actress and two hundred eco-warriors who were encamped close to the stone circle on Strankley Ridge. This was the neighbourhood Chester Pike had selected for a new Magno supermarket, and where a supermarket appeared homes sprang up like mushrooms.

The face of one of the protestors, a veteran of several earlier demonstrations, had caught the eye of the media. Radiant as a dirty seraph, his photograph accompanied every report on the inquiry's progress. He appeared on TV shows next to fashionable comedians who were entranced by his innocence of shower gel and the name of the Transport minister. They called him Crusty and, to some sections of the population, he was a hero. Ted remembered that his daughter Cherish had his picture on her bedroom wall, in pride of place between the wet-eyed seal pup and Leonardo DiCaprio.

As he closed his notebook and sped out to his meeting, Ted's shoulders sagged in apprehension. He felt the shadow of public attention. He sensed his wife's sorcery looming close. Sixteen years he had shared his life with incubi like Crusty, ephemeral monsters summoned by the media to ravish the public mind until the day a fresh demon appeared to supplant them. Ted was forming the idea that his wife too was a creature of that half-life, and had just taken mortal shape to entrap him.

He was afraid of these gremlins and of the process which spawned them, he had an instinctive fear which nagged from his subconscious and would not be silenced by reason. Jealousy played a part, for he saw that his wife had the gift of calling up the devils and giving them names, and was rewarded for it. He had blamed those rewards for changing a fond girl to an ice queen whose contempt blasted to dust his naïve dreams of a family. It seemed as if some evil breath emanated from Channel Ten through his wife to his home and himself. Every time he and his children were rounded up for a magazine photograph a little of their lives drained away, while the media thing got stronger and tightened its grip on them all. Straying towards Strankley Ridge felt to Ted like yelling into the mouth of the dragon's cave.

He left his office, and his dead tree, and the sickly thicket behind his secretary and the senescent creepers in the atrium – an atrium, at last! Littered with dead leaves as it was, the atrium still thrilled him. If a man had an atrium could the Fortune 500 be far behind? He took a cab to the offices of the Oak Hill engineers, which also had an atrium, verdant and flowering, where he met Adam deSouza. They delivered the brief for a feasibility study and it went well, without hard questions, just a short assent to the limits of the specification.

They went to lunch. Agile with high confidence, they did into the discreet corner of their chosen oyster bar.

‘Whitbridge,' Ted began as their order arrived on a bed of crackling ice. ‘The Thirty-four extension. Chester talked to me this morning.'

‘The inquiry is expected to go on another couple of months, maybe three.' Adam's joyful gaze ran around the platter of oysters nestled in ice, assessing the molluscs for plumpness. He ate such dishes ritually in order of size, saving the biggest until last.

‘As long as that?'

‘Tsk. Waste of public money. Only people getting rich there are my colleagues, I'm afraid. The site we are interested in is about a mile further down the thirty-four, at Strankley. We are looking at it seriously. The result isn't really in any doubt, it's a question of the timing. Government's just playing along and changing the window dressing for the sake of public opinion.'

‘I guess. It's the press I don't like.'

Adam chose his first specimen and lifted it off the ice with due ceremony. ‘Me neither. Not that we've anything to hide in any way.'

Ted's unease suddenly returned, twice the size it had been in the morning. ‘We don't want too much interest in Oak Hill …'

‘No harm, no harm.' Energetically, Adam anointed the oyster with lemon juice.

‘It could look … it's the
history
of the site. We've agreed that the cost of investigation is prohibitive, I know, but looked at a certain way …' He was not getting through.

Adam was intent on his food. Three oysters down he registered a distressed silence in his companion and ruled, ‘That's why we undertook Oak Hill as a separate enterprise and set up the Trust. The Whitbridge thing will be a straightforward Tudor Homes show. No obvious connection.'

‘Strankley Ridge – it's a feeding frenzy for the media: Crusty, the inquiry, all of it. When the media get interest, people start digging around,
might
do a Dun and Bradstreet on us …'

‘They're very stupid, the media. Easy to get them in hand. Don't run away with the idea that there's anything like old-fashioned investigative journalism still going on. We'll allow for a few sweeteners here and there.' Adam swallowed his fifth choice, threw down the shell and picked up the next. ‘I'm feeling good about Oak Hill after this morning.'

‘Adam, I've got to say this, I haven't felt good about Oak Hill from the beginning.'

‘Your idea, as I recall.'

‘I agree, I agree absolutely.' Adam suddenly stopped feeding contentedly and fixed his companion with a glare as flinty as the oysters'shells. ‘I put the site up for consideration. But now …'

‘There's no risk. You heard the guys this morning. Natural biodegradation processes would have reduced toxic residues to undetectable levels. We're in the clear.'

‘But you and I know—'

‘What you and I know is for ourselves alone, Ted. What
do
we know, anyway? One set of experts says one thing, another says another. Who's to say what the actual truth is, really? What's eating you, all of a sudden?' Adam was icing Ted with his flat, blue-eyed stare. ‘Trying to rattle my cage?'