The Way Back Home (5 page)

‘So,’ said Malachy. ‘Are you coming to the gallery tomorrow?

‘Er – no,’ said Jed as if he’d considered it. ‘It’s been a busy shitefest week.’

‘Some of us
also
have to work weekends, you know.’

‘Some of us have our brother’s flats to tidy up and clean,’ Jed countered, nodding at the fallen menu as if it was a case in point.

‘You don’t need to do that,’ said Malachy.

And Jed said, ‘I keep trying to tell you – there’s a meaningful distinction between need and want. I
want
to do it.’

His younger brother was mothering him. It should have irritated Malachy. Somehow, it didn’t.

‘I might pop in,’ Jed said, because around him, he could see what was needed and he could tell that it was what his brother wanted.

At first it had been the emails, perforating Oriana’s return to Derbyshire and compromising the watertightness of her claim to be content to leave and happy to be back. Skype she could blank, having disabled it on her iPad. But FaceTime – she could no more ignore that than she could answering the door when she knew the caller had already seen her inside. It was almost worth switching allegiance from apples to blackberries. Oh for the days of the brick, she thought, glancing at her mother and Bernard’s hefty shared mobile phone whilst looking at her iPhone with a mixture of loathing and anxiety as it attempted to beam Ashlyn into her mother’s front room.

Over the sea and far away. Whatever the weather. Wherever you may be. Across time. At any time. A superfast highway. It’s a small world and you can’t hide. Good morning! It’s afternoon. It’s raining and cold. It’s warm and breezy. We miss you. I don’t want to know that.

Oriana had even deleted the photos which defined the contacts in her phone. If it just read ‘Ashlyn’,
surely the request could be ignored, rejected more easily than if Ashlyn’s face, smiling and genial, accompanied such an invitation.

Ashlyn would like to FaceTime. Decline. Answer.

‘Oriana,’ said her mother, ‘aren’t you going to answer that?’ She said so in her ‘beggars can’t be choosers’ tone of voice that implied her socially deprived daughter ought really to invite any interaction into her life, even if only virtual.

‘Too late,’ said Oriana. But she was too late to switch her phone to silent before Ashlyn was trying again. Her mother raised her eyebrow. Bernard had two clues left in the crossword which were stumping him and the sound of the blimmin’ phone was a distraction. Not that he’d say so.

‘Oriana,’ said her mother; it wasn’t a question this time and Oriana felt herself diminish into her teenage self again. God – I’ve got to get out of here. Move. Leave.

Finally, she accepted Ashlyn’s call. She left the sitting room and went to her bedroom, the phone attempting to connect. She knew that Bernard would love to see it do so, to marvel at the technology, at this friend of Oriana’s who could bring San Francisco into his front room in Hathersage. But Oriana didn’t want them to meet, she didn’t want the crossover, she needed separation and privacy. She sat on her bed and Ashlyn, frozen in a particularly unflattering moment, gurned her way into the room fresh from breakfast in San Francisco. She had a different hairstyle. In the three weeks since Oriana had last seen her, Ashlyn had become chestnut brown, not blonde, and mid-length flicky, not long and straight.

‘You look amazing,’ said Oriana, holding her handset so that she wasn’t entirely in shot.

‘Excuse me?’

‘You look amazing!’ she repeated.

‘I look amazing?’ Ashlyn peered close to her phone as if trying to hear better. ‘Is that what you said?’

‘Yes,’ said Oriana. And only then did she realize how quietly she was talking. She felt uneasy talking any louder. She wasn’t in the comfort of her own home, nor the neutrality of a hotel; she was in her mother and Bernard’s house. This was borrowed space compartmentalized by paper-thin walls. She was in their spare room. It suddenly struck her that nowhere on earth did she have her own bedroom any more. She watched Ashlyn, could see the bay in the background, thought of the room over there that had been hers, now the realm of someone else who might have painted over every last vestige of Oriana.

Ashlyn on a sunny Friday morning. Oriana knew exactly what she’d just had from the bakery for breakfast and how it tasted. The aroma of the coffee. The feel of the paper bag. The scrunch and dunk as she tossed it into the trash can. The sensation of the cool spring air ascending from the bay being dissipated by the sun’s warmth. Long sleeves – but sunglasses, too.

She thought back to her own lunch – breakfast now an irrelevant memory. Egg sandwiches made by Bernard, eaten with Bernard and her mum in the kitchen. Celery sticks in a pint glass filled with a little salted water. A bowl of cherry tomatoes. A bottle of salad cream. Soft white bread that stuck to the roof of the mouth. A cup of steaming builder’s tea. And non-stop talk about what’s for tea. Friday night – fish supper. Bernard had been talking about it since elevenses. I like haddock m’self, he’d said. And your mother – she’s for the fishcakes. We both like a buttered bun and these days we share just the one portion of chips. (He’d patted at his heart, to qualify.) But you have what you like, love, whatever you like. Oriana had tried to say that just then with celery fibre caught between her teeth, she couldn’t possibly decide what she might feel like that evening. But that had only encouraged Bernard to list all the fish on offer which, to Oriana, might well have been all the fish in the sea.

‘Cod!’ she’d shouted to shut him up. ‘I’ll have cod and chips, OK?’ She’d ignored her mother staring sharply at her, she’d turned away from Bernard whose expression revealed the brunt of her retort.

‘Don’t feel you need to decide now,’ Bernard had said gently, as if it would be kinder just to pretend Oriana’s snappishness hadn’t happened. ‘Gerry might have a nice piece of hake. Or even plaice. Now that’s a nice fish – and he’ll do that in breadcrumbs, not batter.’

‘Cod.’ Oh my God. ‘Cod’s good.’

‘Well, cod it is then. And will that be a medium or a large? Or you could have the large with a medium chips. Or we could have a large chips between the three of us. And another buttered bun.’

Fuck the chips. Sod the cod. Stuff your stupid buttered bun. I don’t bloody know. I’m halfway through my lunch! Why would anyone want to know what they’re going to be ordering for their tea?

However, Oriana had said nothing. She’d smiled through gritted teeth but the short, sharp exhale had cut through to Bernard like a blast of a cold, ill wind and she’d seen how he’d been taken aback, hurt even, though he’d kept his polite smile up and had rounded off the conversation with a little anecdote about cod being so last year and coley being the new black. And she’d felt appalled that, even at thirty-four, in this house with her mother and Bernard, she was helpless not to revert to a bolshie teen. Life was going backwards. That wasn’t the idea at all.

‘Oriana?’

Ashlyn. Right here, now, in this room. Perhaps she thought the call had frozen; Oriana’s thoughts had rendered her motionless.

‘Hey,’ said Oriana, suddenly remembering to look up or all that Ashlyn would see was her bowed head with roots in need of colour or a good shampoo and condition at the very least.

‘You OK, babe?’

Oriana attempted to peer at her.

‘You sound kind of remote and you look kind of –’

‘Shit?’

‘No,’ Ashlyn laughed and, inopportunely, her face suddenly froze into a grimace. Her voice, though disembodied, came through and hit Oriana squarely. ‘You look kind of – wide-eyed and lonesome.’

Even in the tiny thumbnail of herself in the top of her screen, Oriana couldn’t dispute it. Wide-eyed and lonesome. Like the lyric to a country-and-western standard.

‘I’m still jet-lagged,’ Oriana said feebly, wondering if she’d been freeze-framed like Ashlyn. She hoped so – her friend wouldn’t see through the lie.

Ashlyn was back in motion, slightly jerky, but still herself. She didn’t seem to have heard Oriana. Instead, she’d flipped the viewfinder and was treating Oriana to a panorama of the bay. Oriana flinched.

‘Homesick?’ said Ashlyn.

‘A little.’

‘So, tell me – what you been up to? You working? You been going down memory lane? Caught up with your old buddies? You been back to that old house of yours?’

Oriana thought of Windward; how the place had so quickly become the stuff of legend to her circle in California. She’d used it as a way to win friends and impress. She’d never lied. The tiniest of details were drawn from life, every daub of colour, every line from a song, every name, every event – they were all true. The only dishonesty had been the tone of voice she’d used to narrate these vignettes of her childhood and youth. She had transposed the veracity and complexity of her original emotions into a panoply of perpetual, carefree happiness. Details which might smudge or darken the picture were left out. As far as any of her friends were concerned, Oriana had been blessed by a halcyon upbringing during which she’d been nurtured by a group of artists who were as loving as they were eccentric. She was admired, envied, for having grown up in the quirkiest place in the world: a commune which made the heyday of Haight-Ashbury seem positively suburban. And Woodstock downright dull. Yes, Jimi Hendrix played Woodstock – but he had stayed a month at Windward. Tell us more about Windward, Oriana! Tell us the stories you’ve already told. Again – tell us again. Rod Stewart wrote ‘You’re in My Heart’ there? Seriously? From the top room – the one with the turret? Ronnie Wood forgot to leave? Gillian Ayres painted the walls? Tom Stoppard stayed for a summer, Faye Dunaway for the winter? How cool is that?

‘You been back to Windward?’ Ashlyn was saying with an expansive grin. ‘Has it changed? Who’s still there? Can I FaceTime you when you’re next there? Do it from the iPad – you can give me a virtual tour.’

‘I haven’t been back,’ Oriana told her.

‘You
what
? Why not?’

‘Not yet,’ said Oriana. ‘But funnily enough I’m going there tomorrow.’

* * *

Tomorrow is now today. Yesterday, after medium cod and chips, and a buttered bun she had only a bite from, Oriana went to bed early and didn’t mention her plans – if she didn’t say them out loud, she could still change them. Even at the last minute she could entitle herself to a turn of heart and no one would be any the wiser. She might feel like seeing Cat instead. Or going to Meadowhall and browsing the shops. Perhaps a day trip to Manchester, to see how it’s changed.

‘May I borrow your car, Mum?’ The tang of malt vinegar on yesterday’s newsprint paper still lingered in the kitchen, counteracting any appetite for breakfast. ‘For the day?’ she qualified. ‘May I borrow your car for the day?’

Rachel scoured her daughter’s face but it was Bernard who read it first and knew instinctively what to say.

‘That’ll be fine, won’t it, Rachel?’ he said, downplaying any need for qualification.

‘Why?’ said her mother. ‘Where are you going?’

Bernard, though, stepped in quickly again. ‘We said we’d take the Vauxhall to Wakefield, didn’t we? We’ll not need Your Car.’

They had the two cars. His was called the Vauxhall. Rachel’s was called Your Car. He looked at Oriana. ‘We’re off to visit the Bennets,’ he said, with a quick complicit smile. He turned to his wife. ‘Oriana can take Your Car.’ He turned back to Oriana. ‘You take your mother’s car, love. You’re on the insurance – you may as well get your premium’s worth.’ He put a lump of sugar into his mug of tea and looked at his wife again. ‘It’s a good idea. It gets her out and about a bit. It’s a lovely day. We don’t want her to feel obliged to join us – on our trip to Wakefield. In the Vauxhall.’ He looked at Oriana. ‘And much as I know the Bennets would love to meet you – well, sitting around listening to us old folk gab – it’s no place for a young woman on the first Saturday in April. A fine one at that.’ He paused. Glanced from Rachel to Oriana while both women stared at him, stunned that he could be at once so subtle yet conniving.

‘You take your mother’s car,’ said Bernard a final time, ‘and have a nice day out.’ And, by the way he finished his tea, tapped both hands down on the table and declared
well now! the matter was resolved and no further information or discussion was required.

Even in the car, Oriana knew she could change her plans and simply turn up at Cat’s. Or go shopping at Meadowhall. Or reacquaint herself with Bakewell. Belper. Baslow. Eyam. Anywhere. Or just turn round and go nowhere. And yet no one, apart from Ashlyn, knew she was visiting Windward. She could just go there, drive in, drive out. Never step out of the car. No one would be any the wiser. A secret journey. And so she set off, travelling south, retracing the route she’d journeyed three weeks before.

She concentrated on the road, on the sound of the engine, the milometer racking up, the petrol gauge barely moving – dear little car. Would she turn right and go to Blenthrop? Perhaps just park in the car park and sit for a while? She drove on. Or – she could pull in just here, in the lay-by. Stretch her legs and fill her lungs and then decide whether it was really worth carrying on, all the way to Windward. But on she drove.

Eighteen years.

Whereas the sight of Blenthrop had disarmed her three weeks ago, this route back to Windward was as familiar as if she’d made it daily with no interval. As she neared, it seemed everything came into even sharper focus, even the coping stone still lying half hidden in goose grass at the foot of the left gate pillar. She indicated. She turned up the driveway. This was the first time she’d ever done so. She’d left Windward before she learned to drive.

You can’t see the house yet. You have to follow the private road a little way on, she told herself; poker straight until the sudden sweep to the right reveals the house, sitting sedate and solemn and magnetic. Peach-pale stone, seen as so extravagant and modern in 1789, when the Jacobean manor house was demolished and the current Georgian mansion was built. For the first time Oriana noticed the peculiar sight of neatly parked cars either side of the expansive gravelled sweep in front of the house, the vehicles positioned like ribs, like fish bones. And suddenly memories of last night’s cod brought with it a surge of nausea and a clammy coldness swept over her. She placed her forehead on the steering wheel.