Getting Home (50 page)

‘Huh?'
Allie almost dropped the cup, slopping coffee on the worktop.

‘My house is going to be demolished,' Stephanie repeated, suddenly feeling as if champagne were running in her veins instead of blood. There was a warm patch on her thigh where Rod had touched her. She caught Allie's gaze, noting that the true colour of the eyes was a dismal muddy grey. ‘You know, the house which you picked out for me, Allie. For me, and my husband and our baby. Because you were my friend, you said, you picked this house for us. And now it's going to be knocked down so they can build a road to the new business park. At Oak Hill.' In her mind's ear, Stephanie heard four million people gasp in outrage.

Allie was white with surprise and making a strange gurgling sound. As if trying to call a waiter, she was waving at the gallery while she was out of shot. The light on Camera Three suddenly shone again.

‘Get ready,' mutrered Crusty to the eco-warrior next to him in the audience. ‘Get ready,' he warned Gemma. ‘About a minute now. Pass it on.'

‘Stephanie,' Allie broke in with relief, ‘I'm going to have to stop you right there. We're having a little technical problem—'

‘No you aren't,' Stephanie told her, standing up and leaning over the counter. ‘The problem you're going to have, Allie, is that you were a director of this Oak Hill Business Park, so you're not just a lousy excuse for a friend, you're also responsible …' From the corner of her eye she saw a banner appear in the audience. GREED KILLS, it read. Jemima Thorogood was holding it up with both hands, waving it from side to side. She saw more people standing up, unwrapping their coats and pulling out their hidden weapons – ‘Responsible, in fact, for trying to poison at least ten thousand people …'

Allie jumped off her stool and ran out to the front of the spotlit stage. With malicious attentiveness, the operator in charge of Camera Three swung around and followed her. ‘Cut!' she shouted, waving with both arms to the impervious gallery. ‘Cut it! Cut it now! This woman's crazy! Get security …' A paint ball exploded by her feet and she jumped. A string of lighted firecrackers sailed through the air and landed behind her. Allie saw herself on a monitor, a lank-haired, paint-spattered, gesticulating scarecrow, and she screamed.

As Stephanie recoiled from the firecrackers she found Rod beside her, scooping her protectively to his side. ‘Brava!' he whispered, ducking to dodge a flour bomb. ‘Now let's get the hell out of here.'

Eco-warriors waving banners were climbing over the seats and jumping on the stage. ‘Forward!' shouted Crusty, tearing off his hat and tossing it into the crowd. A dog had appeared from somewhere, barking in ecstary. People at the back were throwing toilet rolls. Topaz jumped on one of the sofas, waving the flag of the New Green Army.

‘Rock and
roll,'
muttered the senior producer in the gallery happily. ‘We can stay with this a minute or two. Grass-roots reaction. All good television, I think.'

The riot in the Channel Ten studios, when local campaigners protesting against plans to develop a toxic site in Westwick were joined by the mercenaries of the New Green Army under their famous leader, Crusty, was blessed a thousand times by the compilers of the midday, six-o'clock and evening news bulletins, who-had live footage to engage their audiences, and by all the newspaper editors, who slapped a large picture of Crusty on their front pages. Crusty had one arm around Clara Funk, who held a placard insisting PEOPLE FIRST.

An inquiry into the Oak Hill Development Trust was immediately ordered by the environment department, and by Sunday the supplements had geared up to crucify Helford & Westwick Council, with Chester Pike and Adam DeSouza nailed up each side as the accompanying thieves. Ted Parsons was highlighted as the heroic whistle-blower who had resigned his directorship and left his wife rather than see profits put above public health.

Stephanie stayed in bed that Sunday morning. She felt oddly fragile. Max, of course, said nothing, but padded to the kitchen to make her coffee and bring it up on a tray with a bowl of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes and a red leaf from the garden. Whereupon she found herself crying. The day had been the day she had dreamed of for six whole months, the day Mr Capelli called from the Foreign Office to announce that the negotiations were over and Stewart was coming home. She had been bursting into tears at odd moments ever since; tears of joy, she told herself, knowing that there were other emotions involved as well. Fear, for instance, and a little shame for having fallen short of perfect fidelity, and sadness for the bold, independent self she feared she would now have to put in a basket and file away. But mostly joy. Joy for Stewart, and for herself and her son, alone and undefended no more.

Stewart Sands, who was awarded a copy of the
Sunday Post
by the first secretary of the Embassy in Moscow before boarding his Aeroflot flight home, looked at the picture of Crusty and discovered it meant less to him than if it had been an alien from another universe. The world to which he was returning seemed bizarre.

Stephanie and Max were there to meet him at the airport. Stephanie thought he looked thinner, warier and calmer. Stewart thought that his wife had somehow regained the enchanting something which had captivated him the first moment he saw her. It was a bewitching, thrilling, indefinable quality, the vital essence of her, which he thought he must have overlooked for a few years in all the hurly-burly of young parenthood. He felt he might be able to make sense of the world again.

Stephanie knew that her husband had overlooked nothing. She had lost herself for a while in Westwick, allowed her spirit to follow a chimera, the seductive dream of an ideal life which had no existence at all except in the minds of people who felt their lives were less than ideal and sought to buy their way into perfection. As soon as she sensed that her husband had reoriented himself, she told him she wanted to move back into the city.

Allie Parsons was arrested for obstructing the emergency services in doing their duty. She was released without charge, but betrayed to the media by an indignant police officer and slimed in the tabloids over her connection with the now notorious Oak Hill Trust. Sacked by Channel Ten, she moved to Los Angeles to make a new career, lost ten years from her age and married a plastic surgeon.

The senior producer of
Family First
seized on Rod Fuller and ensured that he followed his sensational debut with a tri-partite documentary on urban renewal which won them the Prix Italia. Rod then found himself propelled to Channel Ten's flagship news programme. Maria d'Amico took over
Family First.
Eighteen months later Rod and Maria got married, with Sweetheart as a still-dubious bridesmaid. In their pre-nuptial agreement they pledged never to court the curse of
Hey!
magazine by allowing it into their lovely home.

Topaz Lieberman decamped to Strankley Ridge to be with Crusty, but after a winter of boiling water to wash clothes and trying in vain to stop the eco-warriors treading mud into the yurt she moved back to her family, arguing that a presence in the city was essential for the next phase of the revolution. Damon Parsons also joined the New Green Army. The horse was soon an unrecognisably well-turned-out animal, the brown parts of its coat glowing like new chestnuts and its mane neatly pulled to a length of nine inches. To ensure the Army's self-sufficiency, widen their skill resources, keep the horse shod and enjoy hammering things, Damon signed on for a vocational degree in blacksmithing at Whitbridge University.

Harrier Homes took over the remains of Tudor Homes and allowed Ted to resign with dignity and a pay-off which he considered perfectly reasonable. He moved in with Gemma and they were robustly happy, although the cat terrorised Moron and Ted found that the pain of living in a botched modernisation was like having a tooth abscess.

When the Sun Wharf project was completed they moved into an apartment there with their five girls, and argued about the roof-terrace, which Gemma wanted to plant as a urban jungle and Ted saw in more formal terms. She called him borings. He called her unreasonablet. She called him controlling. He called her impractical. She stuffed a handful of manure down the neck of his shirt. Flora demanded silence for. the completion of her project on Psychotherapy and the Practice of Martial Arts.

The manure was not as well rotted as it should have been. Ted took a lengthy shower, was encouraged to find that the plumbing functioned perfectly and retired to his own territory, his study, where he unpacked the sad crate of his personal things from his office at Tudor Homes. Jackson Kerr's advertisement for the second phase of Maple Grove houses was dusty but unscathed.

‘Maple Grove,'
it proclaimed in lettering with fanciful serifs such as was used in story-book illustrations:

The Healthiest Place in the World – annual death rate under 6 per thousand.

Only 20 minutes from the City Centre

Close to Westwick Green station.

The Estate is built on Gravelly Soil and has the most approved Sanitary Arrangements.

Cozy Comfort

A Green Location

About 500 houses on the Estate, all in the picturesque

Dutch Farm style of Architecture.
A Garden to every House
Hot and cold water to every House
Good cheap Day Schools on the estate
Peace assured by the Vigilance Committee

Also: St Nicholas's Church

A Club for Ladies and Gentlemen

General Stores and Provisioners

Tennis Courts

Masquerades every month

Regular Dances

A School of Art

The Tudor Theatre

A Ladies'Discussion Society

A Natural History Society

Weekly lectures on Scientific, Literary and Political
subjects

Several new houses now available at reasonable prices

These attractions were listed around a picture of a woman dressed very much like the milkmaids in the nursery rhyme books of the period, with a spotless long apron tied around her tiny waist and a pretty white cap pulled low over her hair, although a few curling wisps escaped to frame her little upturned nose. Two smiling infants crowded at her skirts, the boy dangling a wooden soldier, the girl cradling a doll, both gazing adoringly up at their mamma, and behind this Madonna-like tableau billowed a garden of flowering shrubs and a tree-crowned hillside. The actual houses, Ted noticed for the first time, were not pictured at all.

He took it out to the living room, intending to find a place for it on the brand new, freshly plastered, papered and painted wall which had never been pierced by a picture pin before.

‘Look at this,' he suggested to his newly extended family.

‘Oh, that's
so
pretty,' Molly sighed.

‘It's
so
bullshit,' her mother retorted.

‘But it is a really pretty picture,' said Flora.

‘It's old,' sniffed Chalice.

‘It can't be old, its Princess Di,' protested Cherish.

‘No, it's old,' Ted told them. ‘It was the original advertisement for Maple Grove, printed in a newspaper before our house in Church Vale was even built. It must be – oh – seventy years old at least. Where shall we hang it?' He was happy that he was getting the hang of hands-on parenting at last.

‘Nowhere,' ruled Topaz. ‘It belongs in a museum.'

In a few more years, Whitbridge swallowed up Ambleford, and the stone circle at Strankley Ridge was allowed to decorate the central reservation of a new traffic interchange. A leisure consortium took fibreglass casts of the standing stones and made them part of a new theme park, The Stone Age Experience.

Westwick did not change. Westwick never really changed. New families moved in and barbecued together in summer. The thrush in the flowering crab in New Farm Rise built a nest every year and successfully launched its young into the sky. The Oak Hill site was dedicated to an experimental green-tech project exploring the ability of trees to absorb soil pollutants. Groves of willow, poplar and alder were planted, with the intention of felling them in due time to enable the land to be profitably utilised.

First published in 1998 by Little, Brown

This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world

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ISBN 978-1-4472-3092-2 EPUB
ISBN 978-1-4472-3091-5 POD

Copyright © Celia Brayfield, 1998

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