The Way Back Home (28 page)

‘Thank you,’ he said, as if it had been him phoning her for advice.

‘I need a favour,’ she said quickly, worrying he was going to end the call. ‘A hulking great huge one.’

Malachy wasn’t sure whether he was flattered or unnerved. It wasn’t about Jed, was it?

‘A crate of my belongings has just turned up in Hathersage, outside my mother’s house. She’s popping hernias as we speak.’

‘You want to store it in the cellar?’ It was said so matter-of-factly that it dispensed with the concept of it being much of a favour at all, let alone a liberty.

‘I’m in Sheffield. I just had a job interview.’

Malachy nodded at the phone again. ‘You want me to close up the gallery? And nip back to Windward? And unpack your worldlies for you?’ He paused. ‘You want me to leave my novel mid-chapter? Forgo all potential sales today?’

‘No!’ Oriana was appalled. ‘I just wanted to know if it was OK, in theory. I need to phone them and rearrange the delivery. I won’t trouble you – you needn’t be there. There’s not a huge amount. I just thought –’

He smiled. She was still just as easy to wind up. ‘It’s fine, silly. It’s fine.’

Oriana unfurled a coiled finger of bracken. Malachy calling her silly had always been a comfort in times of duress. ‘I’d better go,’ she said. In her mind’s eye, her mother was stamping and stropping and cursing her daughter this very moment. ‘Thank you, Malachy. And reread your good chapters. Bye.’

‘Bye then.’

The shipping company took Oriana’s crate away, with an arrangement to deliver two days later, on the Friday morning. Her mother didn’t want to speak to her.

Jed wasn’t keen on lending Oriana his car. Yes, she could drive him in to work and collect him. But what he really wanted was to prevent her going to Windward at all. If she went there, all the public-relations work he’d done promoting the merits of a new life in Sheffield might unravel. If she went there, she might clamber about her memories the way she used to clamber up and around the cedar. And she used to spend hours and hours doing that. Who might she want to be when she surfaced? And if she went to Windward, would Malachy be there?

It was over three weeks since she’d moved into his spare room, but he hadn’t once told her how he felt – still felt – about her. He hadn’t made a move on her. He’d come so close then retreated, spending wakeful hours in bed, turned on by her proximity, frustrated by his fantasies, silently and urgently powering his semen out of him so that he might at least sleep.

And he’d steered clear of even mentioning Malachy. It wasn’t so much an elephant in the room as a can of worms in the corner. If he could just keep the lid on it, he could establish and cement all that the present held for the future and make the past seem redundant.

‘I’ll pay for a tank of petrol,’ Oriana said, hugging her hands around her cup of morning tea.

‘No no.’ Jed brushed away her suggestion as he swept the spilled flakes of breakfast cereal off the table and into the palm of his hand. ‘It’s fine. Just drive carefully.’

Then he looked at her directly and she saw all the steel in Sheffield shoot through his eyes.

‘Maybe you’ll see your father when you’re there.’ It was below the belt but, he felt, a legal move. You hate Windward, remember? You hate it.

‘Malachy?’

He didn’t appear to be at home though the scent of toast was still fresh in the kitchen and the kettle was hot.

‘Hullo?’

Oriana walked through the apartment, calling out softly every few steps or so. Her drawings of the house had gone from the table in the ballroom. His bedroom door was closed. The navy pullover was still over the arm of the sofa. On various surfaces there were used mugs yet to be taken into the kitchen. Next to the Eames, the newspapers from last weekend were in a scatter on the floor. She went back into the hallway and opened the door that connected with the cavernous interior corridor.

As she headed for the cellar, she thought about the stories she’d shared with Paula as they’d walked back from not quite going into Louis’. It was as if drifts and details still lingered, whispering at her as she walked. Some to step over, others to turn towards. The bounce and thwack of green tennis ball against willow bat. The skid of roller skates and the tumble of limbs in the ensuing crash. The puff on a spliff, the echo of giggle and snorts. Hiding a folded five-pound note in crumbled masonry and seeing who’d find it first. Forgetting where it was. Remembering weeks later and feeling rich. And it was here – right here – where he kissed me.

Does Malachy remember this when he passes this point?

How long ago did he decide that he’d rather forget?

There was no door to the cellar, just oversized old hinges where once there had been one. There was light down there, the weak but warm glow from old bare bulbs which illuminated little but created a whole cast of strange ominous shadows. The unmistakable smell of chalky dampness seeped up the deep stone steps. Carefully and slowly, Oriana descended. At the bottom, she stood stock-still and just looked around. Monsters under dust sheets and piles of ghostly crockery. A table with a velvety layer of dust, two candelabra laced by cobwebs and a chair at one end pulled out a little as if Miss Havisham had just left. Boxes and crates marked with names long forgotten and others not known.

‘Boo!’

Oriana leapt. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ She hit Malachy and clung to him and laughed at herself and cursed him.

‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t resist.’ In the half-light of this shaded world of what had been forgotten and what was there to be kept, Malachy’s face was like a charcoal portrait. He could feel her penetrating gaze and he turned away from it, quickly touching the ribbon around his head. He had thought about not bothering with his eyepatch; it was dark enough down here that shadows would provide protection – for her as much as for himself.

It was so dusty. He cleared his throat.

‘There’s plenty of space – as you can see. Do you want to clear yourself a specific area?’

She looked around, peering into the gloom. She was relieved to see that there was no new order; no individual plots. However closed off and privatized the apartments above might now be, however formally delineated the car parking, down here in the cellar it was as gloriously disorganized and communal as it ever had been.

‘I’ll just fit in and around everyone else,’ she told him.

‘What time are they arriving?’

‘About ten-thirty.’

‘Are you sure you can manage on your own?’

‘Yes – absolutely.’

‘Because I’d better head off to the gallery now.’

‘I know. Go. You go. I’ll be fine. It’s not like I have to lock up when I leave.’

‘Why are we whispering?’

‘I don’t know.’

Might you kiss me, Malachy?

No. I’m going to turn away now. I’m going.

‘How’s Jed?’ Malachy’s normal voice, and the blunt timbre of his brother’s name, sounded abrupt now they were out and in the Corridor.

‘He’s fine,’ said Oriana. ‘He said he’d call you about coming to Sheffield for a drink.’

‘Sure,’ said Malachy and, as they walked, he hated himself for wondering have they? Are they? Perversely, he threw an image into his mind of them together, Oriana and Jed; together as they were today, and as they had been when they were fifteen.

Oriana stopped at the place where Malachy had kissed her, willing him to stop too, for the significance to hit him, for him to retrace his steps and join her. To recreate the stuff of dreams and what memories had been made from. But he just kept walking.

‘Malachy?’ she called after him. Finally he turned. They were a few yards apart but she didn’t want to leave that spot. She swept her hands out in front of her, all around her, as if to display where she was. She didn’t have to say, remember? Do you remember? Do you know where this is? Malachy’s heart heaved and surged and hurt. She was looking at him beseechingly, as if shyly pleading with him not to forget. He looked at her and let his breath go.

‘Come on,’ he said, though he only mouthed it. He held out his hand. ‘
Come on
.’ She walked slowly over to him, a little downcast, slipped her hand into his and let him lead her back out into the daylight.

* * *

The central sash window rattled as the lorry rumbled across the driveway and round to the side of the house. It could have been a tank for all the noise it created and the commotion it left in its wake. There were people whistling and shouting, there was the clang and slam of metal chains and vehicle doors, the blunt honking signifying the lorry’s reversing, the vulgar hiss of air brakes.

‘Some of us are trying to bloody paint!’ Robin yelled out of the window.

Was someone moving in? Moving out?

‘Oh dear God,’ he cursed. ‘What in the name of Christ is going on?’

He went through to the kitchen and looked out of the window to see a small forklift truck trundling down a ramp off the lorry. Above the din of the engine, three men were shouting as if they were fresh from Babel. With a groan and a wail, the lorry seemed to lower, like an elephant sinking to its knees.

‘How can I paint?
How can I paint?
’

Robin hammered his frustration at the window, banging until finally the men looked up. There they saw an old man with furious hair thumping at the glass, raising a clenched fist at them. They could see how his mouth was twisting around all manner of inaudible abuse. They put their hands to their ears as if to say, speak up, mate! We can’t hear you! So he struck at the window and swore and brandished his fist while the men grinned at him in good-humoured joshing.

‘What is going on?’ Oriana came around the side of the lorry.

‘Some old boy’s getting his knickers in a twist,’ the foreman laughed. But that particular old boy was now stock-still at his kitchen window, his arm still raised but immobilized. Similarly, Oriana faced the men in a frozen gawp before slowly turning and lifting her gaze until her eyes locked with Robin’s. She wasn’t sure if she was holding her breath or whether she just couldn’t breathe. She was unable to move. While the men, oblivious, unloaded the crate, Oriana and her father stared at each other.

Robin’s fist slowly unclenched. His wrist rotated and, like petals unfolding, his fingers fanned out and his hand moved from side to side. A small gesture of greeting, like a splice of turquoise sky through storm clouds.

As Oriana directed the men where to put what, as she drove back to Sheffield, as Jed chatted away in the pub that night, she thought of the missed moment with Malachy in the Corridor. But as she lay in her bed and felt her body soften into slumber, she could think of only one thing.

My father waved at me.

And I waved back.

It struck Oriana that, when she’d been living at Cat’s, she’d experienced an agoraphobia of sorts; not wanting to go out, preferring to stay in, to hunker down and hole up. Perhaps it had something to do with Cat’s place being very much a home. Initially this had been a great comfort to Oriana, having left hers in the United States and then finding the antithesis to exist at her mother’s. Eventually though, Cat’s set-up rubbed a newly exposed nerve in Oriana so raw that it became untenable, too painful, for her to stay. Every framed photograph dotted here and there at the Yorks’ could have been – perhaps should have been – of Oriana. Oriana and husband. Oriana and husband at jolly family get-togethers. Mr and Mrs on holiday. And with friends. The long, healthy history of Mr and Mrs. And the pride of place to the scans of their unborn child – from kidney bean to Baby Suckathumb in extraordinary ultrasonic images. Cat’s home was testimony to someone who was just like Oriana but who, unlike Oriana, had made clear decisions and wise choices, got her life together and was enjoying its bounty. It didn’t make her love Cat any the less, but it did amplify the disappointment she felt in – and for – herself.

At Jed’s it was different. It was a lovely flat in Nether Edge, paid for with wages that could comfortably cover Ocado deliveries, nights out and the top Sky package. Everything worked and it was clean. It had mod cons and home comforts. But it was impersonal. In essence, it was a decent two-bed flat that Oriana suspected looked just like this when Jed bought it and would remain so for the next owner. It was Jed’s place, but almost a month later it wasn’t Oriana’s home. Even though she had nowhere specific to go, it felt indulgent to be lounging indoors while she waited for news from the job interview, or
that
phone call from Cat which was imminent, or one from Malachy which would never come. It wasn’t the sort of interior for lolling anyway. It was a little like a hotel and, as such, she felt obliged to leave for most of the day.

Therefore, when Jed left for work each morning, Oriana wasn’t long behind him, not least because, after a week of rain, the weather now was fine. A balmy spring was truly established – in the air, in everyone’s step. Walking the mile and a half to the Botanical Gardens was a pleasure that didn’t diminish and it had become something of a daily ritual. It’s
free
, she’d told Ashlyn. All our museums are free too. And Ashlyn thought to herself, when did that happen – when did my friend feel so British again? In the fifteen years she’d known Oriana, she’d only ever heard her employ the third person when speaking of her birthplace.
Their
museums are free. Now
their
museums had become Oriana’s and Ashlyn thought she’d better plan a trip over there, to see what all the fuss was about. She thought about her honeymoon. And how fun it would be to visit the United Kingdom. And that mythical place Windward which, from Oriana’s tales, had to have been the best place in the world to grow up.

On a bench, in the sun,
The Times
read, cappuccino drunk, Oriana closed her eyes and raised her face. Is today the day when Cat and Ben’s baby will come? Is today the day that she’d land herself a job? There was an air of anticipation that made her fidget on her bench and, much as the sunlight on her face felt lovely, she couldn’t stay there. She checked her phone. Nothing. Not even a text. If she texted Ashlyn, she wouldn’t receive it till she woke up six hours later. She’d already sent a message to Cat who’d sent back one saying no news. If she texted Jed, he’d send a jaunty barrage back – which sometimes she liked and sometimes she was irritated by. Dear Jed. You’re like a puppy.