The Road Home (42 page)

It was a while before Lev was allowed to meet Jasmina.

“She’s a very modest person,” Christy explained. “It would embarrass her to sleep with me at Belisha Road, with you in Frankie’s room.”

“Yes? You want me to stay away, Christy?”

“No, not at all, fella. It isn’t only that. I think she’s also frightened of Angela, of finding, like, the
residue
of Angela in the flat. You know? Or that Angela could turn up and whip the bed out from under- neath us!”

Then on a Sunday evening in June, warm and dry, Jasmina invited Lev to her house in Palmers Green. He and Christy drove there in Christy’s van, with the plumber’s gear clanking and jumping about behind them, like some toddlers’ orchestra trying to assemble itself. “Ah, shut up!” Christy yelled at this orchestra a couple of times. “Can’t hear meself drive.” And when, out along the North Circular Road, a wrench came flying forward between the seats and whacked the gear lever, Christy said, “Christ Almighty, will you look at that? I’ve never been able to control me tools. Never at all.”

They arrived at last in a quiet road of low, semidetached houses with bay windows and tended front gardens. Christy slowed the van, said, without moving his head, “See the net curtains twitch. Everybody knows everybody’s business here. Worse than Limerick. Looked on me as a scalawag when I first started coming to visit Jasmina. But now they’re all after me to refit their kitchens. I’ve got more popularity on this street than anywhere else on earth.”

As soon as they got out of the van, Jasmina’s front door opened and she came out into the evening sunshine with her arms held wide. Lev saw that she was a plump woman, whose sari seemed too tight for her body. Her eyes were magnified by the complicated lenses of her spectacles, but beneath these, a smile of some beauty was occurring. At the sight of her, Christy’s face blushed an all-over red. She embraced him, and Lev saw him almost disappear beneath or behind her when a gust of wind blew the loose folds of her sari round his narrow shoulders.

He emerged from her to introduce Lev.

“Welcome,” she said to Lev. “Come into the house. My God, it’s such beautiful weather, I can’t believe it. Come on, come on . . .”

Her path was made of some granite-like material with shards of mica that glittered in the soft light. Under the curving window, fat hydrangeas were poised on the brink of a blue flowering. Her front door was bright white PVC with a brass door knocker in the shape of a lion’s head.

From a carpeted hallway Jasmina led them into her front room, and here Christy turned to Lev and said, “Did you ever see something like this, Lev?”

The small room had been fitted out with glass shelving, running right round it to a height of six or seven feet. The shelves were lit from above with halogen spotlights, and on the shelves stood a vast collection of colored glass bottles, jugs, decanters, vases, and vials. With the bright lamps above and with the sun still offering a restless light through the mullion-paned window, the glassware appeared to tremble in a perpetual rainbow jive. Ruby reds flashed a shimmering radiance to their neighboring snarly pinks. Farther round, the dance was muted to purples, indigo blues, sea blues, aquamarines. Turn to the left and the entire wall shone bottle green, chartreuse green, silver, and lemon. Go to the west-facing window and you were drawn into honeyed ambers and yellows . . .

“My God,” said Lev. “Fantastic . . .”

Jasmina was pinching and plucking at her sari, to arrange it correctly. When she had it to her satisfaction, she smiled her transforming smile and said to Lev, “I call it my ‘loneliness room.’ It’s the kind of thing women do when they’re alone for a long time: collect glass. I started with a few pieces, then, somehow, I just carried on.”

“It’s lovely, though, Jas,” said Christy. “It was worth those years.”

“No, it wasn’t,” said Jasmina quickly, her smile vanishing. But Christy chose to ignore this.

“See, Lev,” he said, “it’s so nicely arranged, isn’t it? With the little hot lights, an’ all. And the way the see-through shelves reflect everything. I think it’s a work of art.”

“Yes,” said Lev. “I would say so. A work of art.”

“Well,” said Jasmina. “I suppose so. But it all has to be dusted. And once a month, I take every piece down and wash it and clean the shelves, top and bottom. It’s insane.”

“I love it,” said Christy. “I utterly and completely love it. Told Lev about it, didn’t I, fella? Told you about the room of colored glass.”

“Yes, you did. And I never saw anything like this.”

“Oh well,” said Jasmina, “in the sunlight I suppose it looks quite pretty. Now sit down, please. I shall bring us some nibbles.”

Christy and Lev didn’t sit, but stood in the middle of the room, still staring at the glass, shifting position now and then, like visitors at an exhibition. They didn’t speak. Lev was trying to imagine all the individual transactions that had led to a collection of this incredible size. It seemed to him that they must have taken up an entire lifetime. Felt astonishment at the idea of that much leisure, that much spare cash flying away into bottles and vials. Remembered a solitary blue glass jar he’d bought for Marina at the Baryn market and which had stood—still stood—on a table in their bedroom. Remembered Marina’s long-fingered hands shining it up with a rag, sometimes sticking flowers into it. Remembered her saying to him, “There’s something about that blue jar, Lev, that I love.”

Jasmina came back into the room and set down a pewter tray on the coffee table. On the tray was arranged a collection of small white dishes, filled with food. Between the dishes, on the shined-up pewter, Jasmina had sprinkled white rose petals. Her plump hands rippled tenderly over the food, making her bangles clink.

“Cocktail
koftas,
” she said. “Spicy cashews, quick-fried prawns, cucumber dip, spinach-and-ricotta
samosas
. Please help yourselves. I will get the vodka.”

She went out again, and Christy contemplated the white dishes and the strewn petals. “She got vodka for you,” he whispered. “I told her you liked a shot.”

Jasmina wanted to serve the supper at the back of the house, on the patio, but Christy said no, he liked to eat in here, watch the sun go down on all the restless colors. So they sat on the floor on bright cushions and Jasmina came and went with more and more dishes—enough food for ten people.

Though she drank only water, she served cold Indian beer in a tall jug, and Lev felt his mind fill up again with the sweetness of the present. He’d never tasted home-cooked Indian food before. He liked the way, as you ate, the
perfume
of it still visited your nostrils, the way you
inhaled
it as you swallowed and felt its transforming properties slide into your blood. After only a few mouthfuls, he fancied his hair was scented with coconut, his skin radiant with cumin and ginger.

The shimmering glassware sparkled at the edge of his vision. Jasmina’s voice was melodious, her vowels idiosyncratically perfect, as though she’d learned her English from some old sequestered duchess. And Lev could see that, whatever she was talking about, Christy was entranced. For a while, as they ate a lemon chicken dish with
dahl
and cauliflower, what she actually talked about was her job as a mortgage adviser at the Hertford and Ware Building Society, but the look of rapture on Christy’s face, the attentiveness of his gaze, never faltered.

“Jas does really important work,” he said. “Helpin’ people to get started on the property ladder. That’s philanthropy, I think.”

Lev saw Jasmina stretch out a hand and lay it gently on Christy’s wrist. “It’s not really,” she said. “I saw it like that when I started, but now I think mortgages are quite bad in many ways, especially very large ones.”

She turned to Lev and said, “We have a mountain of personal debt in this country. An Everest of debt. And every day the Hertford and Ware adds to the sum of it. I’m less and less comfortable with that, and more sympathetic toward the Muslims, whose law forbids them paying interest on loans, so they don’t go down the traditional mortgage route. I mean, on Friday I had a white couple in, trying to borrow
twenty-nine times
their salary. Where will it end?”

“It won’t end,” said Christy. “People will always long for things, and you help them to realize their longings, that’s all.”

“ ‘Loans for dreams,’ that’s what I call it,” said Jasmina. “The way I was brought up, you worked a lifetime to realize a dream. Then, at last, maybe you got it—like I’ve got this collection of glass. Now, in Britain, everybody wants it now, hurry-scurry: new house, new car, new fridge, new kitchen . . .”

“That’s where I come in,” said Christy proudly, pouring more beer. “I could get a year’s worth of work out of this one road, couldn’t I, Jas?”

Jasmina stroked Christy’s forehead, as she might have stroked the forehead of a feverish child. “Yes,” she said, “but not if you start drinking too much beer again . . .”

“Look, you provided the feckin’ beer, Jas. I’m just being a polite guest and drinkin’ what you’re offering.”

“And I hate it when you swear, Christy. You know I do.”

Christy seized Jasmina’s hand and pressed it to his mouth and kissed the palm. “Sorry,” he mumbled, between kisses. “I take it back. I unsay it. We’re having such a lovely time. And will you look at all the glass now, with just that last bit of sun on it, that
sunbeam?
Eh, Lev?”

“Yes, I see it. Very beautiful, Jasmina.”

“Only the mind of someone as exceptional as Jas could have contrived those colors.”

Now Lev saw Jasmina relax and the lovely smile returned. She let Christy hold her hand next to his heart and keep it there while he tried to guide another spoonful of
dahl
to his mouth. Lev noticed that, behind her glasses, Jasmina’s eyes were moist.

“You’re such a baby, Christy. Such a romantic. Isn’t he, Lev?”

“Yes. A romantic. Yes.”

“Who cares?” said Christy. “Does anybody care here? I mean, does anybody here care?”

“I care,” said Jasmina. “I don’t want you to change.”

“Listen to that,” said Christy, with a beatific grin on his face. “Isn’t that a pure peach of a thing to say? God Almighty. Will you marry me, Jasmina? Soon as my divorce becomes absolute, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”

Now there was a sudden silence in the room. Outside, there came the sound of kids riding skateboards up and down the street: the clatter of worn wheels, echoing laughter. Lev looked from Christy to Jasmina, saw her staring at him with her mouth open. Christy still held her hand against his narrow chest.

“Is that just something you’re saying, Christy?” asked Jasmina quietly.

“No,” said Christy. “Or at least, I am
saying it.
But it’s not a
just saying it
kind of thing. I’m saying it, Jasmina, and I mean it. I’d like you to marry me. I mean, if you’d like to, too . . .”

She turned her profile toward the window, where the last yellow flares of the sun were sinking through the dazzling lemon and amber spectrum of the glass. Then she turned back to Christy.

“Yes,” she said gravely. “I’d like to, too.”

Lev put down his fork. He held himself very still as he watched Jasmina and Christy lean in toward each other and cling together. The sight of Christy’s scorched hand clutching to his thin, white frame Jasmina’s plump, golden midriff moved Lev more than he could express, and when the couple kissed, he looked away. He let his gaze wander, once again, round Jasmina’s solitary accumulation of colored bottles. In any collector’s existence, he thought, there must come a moment when he or she says, “That’s it. It’s complete.” And he felt that such a moment had probably arrived.

20

Loans for Dreams

LEV WAS ON his way home from Panno’s at about one in the morning when he got a call on his mobile from Lora. He was by the gates to Highgate cemetery, where he noticed that someone had ditched a mound of rubbish in supermarket carrier bags. Ahead of him lay the darkness of Swains Lane.

Lora asked him to send more money. Her voice sounded far away. She said she was in despair about Rudi. Rudi’s depression now seemed to have got a hold on his body, making his bones ache and his muscles cramp and his feet sweat. She said he cried in his sleep.

Lev couldn’t stand to picture this. When he thought about his friend, he liked to imagine him laughing, arguing, drinking, slapping people’s shoulders with his huge paw of a hand. “I’ll send more,” he said right away.

“I hate to ask you, Lev. You’ve been generous to everybody,” said Lora. “But what I’m hoping, what I’m banking on, is if Rudi can get the Tchevi back on the road, he’ll stop feeling that everything’s over. Because that’s all he keeps saying to me: that our lives are
kaput,
like the car.”

Lev stood in the dark road, staring at the dim light shining in a window of one of the camper vans. He longed to tell Lora that his plan for the restaurant in Baryn was going to rescue them all, that Rudi would have an important role in it, but he didn’t dare say this, not yet, because he knew that his Great Idea had acquired no more real substance than when he’d first thought it up.

Lora now told Lev that she’d got a price on new tires and repair of the cooling system. If he could send £200, then the Tchevi could be back on the road within a week.

Two hundred pounds.

Already Lev was a week behind with Christy’s rent, two weeks behind with money to Ina. He began to walk down Swains Lane. He told Lora he could send the money after his next pay day, wondering as he said this how he’d live once it was gone.

He was level with the vans now. Saw, at the corner of his eye, two kids—one black and one white—come out from the dark space behind one of them, thought, It’s late for them to be on the street, thought they couldn’t be older than twelve, watched them go running down the road on the cemetery side.

“. . . he refuses to look out of the window,” Lora was saying. “He says he wishes someone would steal the Tchevi, so that he didn’t have to see it parked there . . .”

Into Lev’s mind streamed the memory of the Tchevi bumping down the sandy paths that led to Lake Essel and Rudi describing how he was going to stun the fish with its powerful headlights, and how the stunned fish had turned that odd electric blue—a poisonous blue?