The Road Home (21 page)

A future.

Lev didn’t want to consider this. He’d come alive in the present. That was enough.

And now, on Christmas Day, Ina had her American wire cutters; Maya had her doll; and he had Sophie.

It was more than enough.

He made love to Sophie very slowly, with the soft morning light falling on them, and they slept again for a while. Then they got up and made breakfast side by side: a Spanish omelet, bread, and coffee. While they ate, Lev stared at all the colors of red and gold in Sophie’s hair and at her mouth on the rim of the heavy green coffee cup. He thought how much he would like to take her dancing.

She’d warned him it wouldn’t be a “normal” Christmas Day, because she was committed to spending most of it at Ferndale Heights care home, with the old people. She explained that few of the full-time staff wanted to work Christmas Day, so she’d volunteered for a six-hour shift. She’d said to Lev, “For some of the residents, they know it could be their last Christmas.”

Lev had asked her what she’d do there and she told him that she’d help prepare a Christmas meal and then they’d play games and have a singsong. She said, “They’ll all get squiffy on Asti Spumante and float backward in time, but I don’t care. When you’re old, nobody touches you, nobody listens to you—not in this bloody country. So that’s what I do: I touch and I listen. I comb their hair. I play clapping games with them. That’s a laugh and a half! I hear about life in a postwar prefab or in some crumbling stately pile. I play my guitar, and sometimes that makes them cry. My favorite person there is a woman called Ruby. She was brought up by nuns in India. She can still remember the convent school and her favorite nun, Sister Benedicta—every detail, every feeling.”

Lev had said he would come with her to Ferndale Heights, help with the meal and wash it up. When he said this, Sophie put her arms round his neck and said, “I knew you were good. Hardly anybody is good. But you are. I saw it in your face.”

They washed up the breakfast. They showered and got dressed, and Sophie put on makeup. She said the residents of Ferndale Heights were cheered up by the sight of shiny hair and nice lipstick and the smell of perfume. Lev wore his old leather jacket, because Sophie liked him in this garment and told him he looked sexy wearing it.

They walked hand in hand along Rossvale Road, going toward the tube station, staring in windows at Christmas trees and paper streamers and fake snow. Sophie carried her guitar in a canvas case. The sun put a shine on the black-painted railings and on the last plane leaves clustered in the gutter and on people wearing new knitwear and on dogs in new collars and leads.

A flower seller stood in the cold outside the driveway to Ferndale Heights. He wore fingerless gloves and a woolly hat pulled low over his brow. On trestles behind him, among buckets of tall roses and carnations, there was a clutch of poinsettia plants and Lev had to stop and stare at them.

“Okay, mate?” said the flower seller, clapping his hands together to warm them.

“Yes,” said Lev.

“Take a nice Yuletide offering to your relative?”

“Sorry,” said Lev.

He walked on, hurrying to catch Sophie up.

Ferndale Heights stood at the end of a quiet road in East Finchley, looking out over a vale of roofs. It was a three-story red-brick building with metal window frames. The brick was stained black in places where overflow pipes had dribbled down the walls onto a concrete path. Green lawns had been laid out around the path. Heavy-shouldered yews dripped the last of their poisonous berries onto the grass, where a few pigeons wandered.

“On fine days,” said Sophie, “it doesn’t look bad. There are worse places to die.”

Inside, the smell reminded Lev of the hospital where Marina had lain for so long: urine and disinfectant mingled, stale coffee, the faint suggestion of some recent, unidentifiable burning. Sophie took his hand. The place felt quiet, as if the residents were all slumbering, and Lev thought about Christy lying alone in Belisha Road, dosed up with his sleeping pills, keeping his room dark all day until darkness fell again.

Sophie led him down a corridor where each door had a name plate beside it: Mrs. Araminta Hollander, Capt. Berkeley Brotherton, Mrs. Pansy Adeane, Miss Joan Scott . . . From some of the rooms came the sounds of small afflictions: the clearing of throats, coughing, a voice crying softly into a telephone.

Lev and Sophie stopped in front of the last door, this one propped open, as if in anticipation of their arrival. Sophie knocked. The name beside the door was “Mrs. Ruby Constad.” They heard slow feet shuffling forward, then Lev saw a large woman, with curly gray hair and eyes that were still almost beautiful in the colorless dough of her face, standing before them. Round her neck was an ancient string of pearls. “Sophie dear,” she said. “Merry Christmas! Come in and sit down. Someone sent me some crystallized plums.”

They entered Ruby Constad’s small room, which was inhabited to its four corners by antique furniture and framed oil paintings, china ornaments and tarnished silverware. The bed was tidy, topped with an old-fashioned eiderdown covered with green brocade. A commode chair was pulled up close to it.

Sophie laid her guitar against an ornate fire screen that had no fire to screen. “Ruby,” said Sophie, “this is my friend Lev.”

Ruby Constad had taken up the box of plums and, with a fleshy hand that trembled slightly, offered it to Lev. She said, “I don’t know who sent these. Do take one. People send things wrongly addressed. Or the staff muddle everything up. They were probably really destined for Minty Hollander. Most things are.”

Lev obediently took a sugary plum. He didn’t particularly want to eat it, but there seemed no other thing to do with it, so he bit into it.

Ruby turned to Sophie and asked, “
What
did you call him?”

“Lev,” said Sophie.

“Lev? Is that foreign, or short for something?”

“Lev’s come to England to work. We work together at the restaurant I told you about. GK Ashe. D’you remember?”

“GK Ashe is the most peculiar name for a restaurant I’ve ever heard! Why didn’t he call it something sensible, like Wheeler’s?”

Sophie giggled. “Things have moved on, Ruby,” she said. “Restaurants have different kinds of names, different kinds of food.”

“What kind?”

“Modern food.”

“I used to like Wheeler’s. Oysters. Dover sole. We used to think those were quite modern. Do you like the plum, Lev?”

“The plum is good,” said Lev. “Thank you.”

Ruby Constad examined Lev’s features. He felt hot in the over-furnished room and tugged off his scarf. He saw Ruby’s attentive eyes gazing up at him.

“Well,” she whispered to Sophie, “he’s quite a dish.”

Sophie giggled again. She put a hand on Lev’s arm. “Ruby thinks you’re handsome,” she said, “and so do I.”

“Yes?” said Lev.

He heard the two women laughing. The sound filled the room. He smiled at the childish joy he heard in it. Ruby put down the box of plums and began to forage under the pillows on the bed. She pulled out an envelope and handed it to Sophie.

“Now,” she said. “This is for you. For being such a dear darling to a fat old woman. For brightening all our Sundays.”

Lev saw that Ruby’s eyes were suddenly brimming with tears. But she snatched a handkerchief from her cardigan sleeve and wiped them away.

Sophie looked down at the envelope. “Ruby . . .” she began.

“Now, don’t make a fuss and twaddle. Buy a new coat. That sheep’s rag of yours looks well past its sell date, or whatever they call it. Go on, open up the card.”

Ruby turned to Lev as Sophie began opening the envelope. He saw a check drop out of a Christmas card and Sophie bend to pick it up.

“In here,” said Ruby to Lev, “we’re all past our sell dates. Berkeley Brotherton is ninety-three.”

Sophie was staring at the check. She crossed to Ruby and put her arms round the wide bulk of her. “It’s far too much,” she said.

Ruby laid a kiss on Sophie’s scarlet hair. She said to Lev, “Sophie is the dearest girl.”

“I agree,” said Lev.

“She’s much nicer than my daughter. Alexandra never sings to me. Never helps me with the crossword. Never makes me laugh.”

Ruby invited them to sit down in her cluttered room. She installed herself on the commode chair. Lev perched on a low stool. “That’s a Kashmiri stool,” said Ruby. “I brought it back with me from India. Most of the silver is Indian, too.”

“Yes?”

“I expect Sophie told you I spent my youth in India—before Independence, when we had the viceroy and everything. I was in a welcome pageant for the viceroy at my school. We made a tableau. We made the word
WELCOME
in girls across the stage. I was one half of the O. I’ve never forgotten being half of an O. I sometimes think, That’s all your life has amounted to, Ruby Constad, being
half
of something. So silly, the things that remain with you, eh, Lev? Tell me what you remember.”

“Well, I can remember . . . My father used to tell me there were wood sprites in the forest behind our house, and —”

“Wood sprites? My goodness! I don’t think we have
them
in Britain. What did they look like?”

“I don’t know. The ghosts of dead people who have suffered. My father used to say, ‘They can become birds, become women.’ ”

“Oh dear. I wouldn’t like a sprite suddenly to become a woman. It could put you in a confusing situation.”

Lev smiled. “Yes. But I think they only became women in my father’s mind.”

“I see. In your father’s mind . . .”

“I never saw any wood sprite. I used to look and search. Like for a four-leaf clover. But I never found.”

Lev looked up to see the two women smiling approvingly at him.

Ruby reached out and took Sophie’s hand. “Darling,” she said, “how nice that you brought Lev to see me.” Then she turned back to Lev. “Sophie once brought another man, a gymnast. He offered to perform a backflip-flop-over, or something, but I had to say, ‘No, I really don’t think we’ve got the space for it in here.’ ”

Lev and Sophie helped in the kitchen, preparing sprouts, chopping and roasting parsnips, rolling sausages in bacon, while the turkey was cooking. Sophie made a bread sauce scented with cloves. Lev manufactured a bouillon from onions, potatoes, and sprout stalks. He then put the jar of gravy granules back into the cupboard and made a dark and fragrant
jus
—as he’d watched G. K. Ashe make it, using the bouillon, a splash of wine, and the caramelized residue in the roasting pan. The two South African girls filling in on Christmas Day gaped at this
jus
. “Wow,” they said. “That smells gorgeous. You guys saved us. We’re skeleton staff.”

When everything was ready, Lev made his way to the dining room, where the residents were now gathered, supervised by Mrs. McNaughton, the director of Ferndale Heights.

Of the seventeen inmates, five were in wheelchairs. Many of them struggled to control Parkinsonian jerking and trembling. Beside each place setting, a single Christmas cracker had been laid. The elegant woman known as Minty picked up her cracker, waved it around in her thin, jeweled claw of a hand, and announced, in a voice not unlike the Queen’s, “I just want to say . . . listen everyone . . . I just want to remind you that last year the cracker-pulling was completely uncoordinated. We have to pull the crackers
after
the turkey. That way, the gifts don’t fall into the food. All right? Did everybody hear?”

“Minty,” said an ancient man, wearing a new Fair Isle sweater over a frayed checked shirt, “if we pull the crackers after the food, we could, in some cases, be waiting until nightfall.”

“I mean,” said Minty, “after the
bulk
of us have finished.”

“You mean ‘the bulk of us
has
finished.’ ‘Bulk’ is a singular noun.”

“Shut up, Berkeley,” said Minty. “You’re a bloody singular noun and an irritating one at that.”

There were pockets of laughter round the table. Lev heard a hearing aid whine. “Hush,” said Mrs. McNaughton sweetly.

“I’m pulling my effin’ cracker now,” announced one of the wheelchair occupants. “I’m not bein’ dictated to by Mrs. High-and-Mighty. We’re all equal in here.” She offered one end of it to her neighbor, a man whose features reminded Lev of his father’s, in their gravitational pull toward melancholy.

“Naff off, Joan,” he hissed.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll pull it me blinkin’ self.”

“Joan!” shouted Minty. “Tut-tut!”

“It’s your fault for drawing attention to the ruddy crackers, Minty,” said Berkeley.

“All I want is a little bit of
order
on Christmas Day,” bleated Minty. “Otherwise it’s pure anarchy in here.”

The woman, Joan, took her cracker in both hands and began to pull. The cracker crumpled and stretched but didn’t burst.

Sophie arrived at Joan’s side. “Joan,” she said gently, “we’re serving up the meal in a minute or two. Do you want me to pull the cracker with you now, or do you want to wait?”

“I just want to pull it when I want to pull it, not when someone else says I can.”

“There’s always trouble at mealtimes,” said the wheelchair man, Douglas.

“She’s not making trouble,” said Sophie.

“Just because Miss Araminta once worked with Leslie Caron . . .”

“I liked Leslie Caron,” commented another woman.

“On to your Waterloo,” whispers my heart,

Pray I’ll be Wellington, not Bonaparte . . .

“Singing’s for later!” snapped Minty.

“Here she goes again,” said Joan, beginning to wrestle once more with her cracker.

“Let’s for God’s sake get the food,” said Douglas.

“Douglas is right,” said Mrs. McNaughton briskly. “Douglas is right. I shall say a grace and then we’re going to serve up.”

Joan reluctantly put her cracker down. One of the wheelchair residents gave in to a violent nodding. Mrs. McNaughton began to intone, “Thank you, O Lord, on this day of your Nativity . . .”

“It’s not the
Lord
’s nativity,” interrupted Berkeley. “It’s his son’s.”

“Oh, put a sock in it!” said Pansy.