The Way Back Home (2 page)

Paula de la Mare waved at him, before she hopped into her car, belting down the drive. Malachy followed, absent-mindedly creating acronyms from the letters on her car’s registration plate. At the bottom of the drive, she turned right, taking her girls to school. Malachy followed her a little way before joining the main road into Blenthrop.

Some idiot had dumped litter in the doorway of the White Peak Art Space; yesterday’s chips lay like flaccid fingers in the scrunch of sodden paper. He rummaged in his satchel for something suitable like a plastic bag. Phone. An apple. Slim leather diary (he refused to use his phone for anything other than calls). A tin of pencils, a spiral-bound notebook and a flashdrive. He had no plastic bag. The toe of his shoe would have to do. He shoved the takeaway detritus into the gutter and opened up the gallery.

It was always the weirdest feeling. It never diminished and it engulfed Malachy the moment he entered. The immediate stillness and quiet of the space contradicted by the undeniable sensation that, up until that very moment, they’d been alive; the paintings, the sculptures. If he’d turned up a minute earlier, or sneaked in through the back, he was certain he’d have caught them at it. Now, as every day, they were just figures frozen into their canvases, others quite literally turned to stone, bronze or, in the case of Dan Markson’s work, multicoloured polymer. It was like the characters in his novel – Malachy sensed they existed without him but whenever he returned to the manuscript, he found them exactly where he’d left them.

In the gallery, he straightened a couple of frames and adjusted the angle of a spotlight that was glaring off the glass of a watercolour. There were few emails to respond to and within the hour Malachy felt justified in inserting the flashdrive and clicking on the folder called ‘novel’, selecting from within it the file called ‘novel10.doc’.

‘Tenth draft in only fifteen years.’

He said it out loud, with contrived loftiness, laughed and took the piss out of himself, receiving the abuse well. All residual effects of the dream had gone, the details were forgotten. Until the next time.

* * *

None of his girlfriends knew this, but whenever Jed had sex in the morning, he always had Ian Dury playing in his head. He’d grown used to the soundtrack. It wasn’t a distraction and it didn’t irritate him; it was a brilliant song after all – as sexy in its funk as it was funny in its lyrics. It had started with Celine. She had been French, intense and passionate, and when she’d purred in his ear in the middle of his sleep,
wake up and make love with me
, that’s what kicked it all off.

Jed knew his current relationship was on the way out; from fizz to fizzle in eight months. It had been as awkward as it had been depressing last night, to be the only non-conversing table in a packed and buzzing restaurant. They checked their phones, ate, gazed around the room, checked their phones again, eavesdropped on other people’s conversations and barely looked at each other. Fiona went to bed when they arrived back at his flat. I’m tired, she’d said, as if it was Jed’s fault. He’d sat up late, finishing off the red wine he’d opened the night before, even though he’d forgotten to put a stopper in it and it really didn’t taste very good. Jed had thought, I’m too young to be one of those couples that go out for dinner and don’t speak. And then he thought, I’m too old to be frittering away time on a relationship like this. I have a headache, he thought, collapsing into bed and drifting to sleep before he could remember to kiss her goodnight let alone check she was even there.

But he woke, horny. It was natural, chemical. Ian Dury was goading him to have a proper wriggle in the naughty, naked nude. He sidled up to Fiona, his cock finding the soft dale between her buttock cheeks to nestle in. Unlike Ian Dury, however, it wasn’t lovemaking he wanted. Just a fuck. She moved a little, her breathing quickening as he ran his hand along her thigh, up her body, a squeeze of her breast before venturing downwards and between her legs. She was warm and moist and she let him manoeuvre her so that he could work his way into her from behind. No kissing. She had a thing – paranoia – about morning breath, which initially he’d found charming, then irritating but today just useful, as he didn’t want kissing and eye contact. He just wanted to come because soon enough she’d be gone.

She dumped Jed in a stutteringly over-verbose phone call that lunch-time. It’s not you, it’s me. I just need some space. Let’s just be friends. It’s fine, he kept saying, I’m fine with it. I agree. If something of such little substance was finally over, it really didn’t warrant this level of analysis or justifying. Don’t worry, he told her, don’t worry. I feel the same.

‘You feel the
same
?’ She sounded affronted, as if her self-esteem was dependent on him being crushed.

Jed sensed this. ‘I mean,’ he qualified, ‘if you’re
sure
. Take all the time you need.’

‘I’m sure,’ she said.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘OK.’ And for her benefit, he dropped his voice a tone or two. ‘Take care,’ he said.

‘You too,’ she said. ‘Friends?’

‘Friends.’

He had too many of these ‘friends’ with whom he had mercifully minimal contact. None had truly made the transition from girlfriend to friend. None had even re-formed into useful booty calls. Ultimately, none meant that much to him because none was the one who got away. He hadn’t seen her for such a long time, not since she moved to America a decade and a half ago.

Nine o’clock. Oriana felt pleased with herself. Apart from a vaguely recalled period of wakefulness in the small hours and despite the nap that her mother had tricked her into taking the previous afternoon, she’d slept through the clash of time zones and she’d slept well enough for it to feel truly like morning. There was no need to count the hours backwards and figure out what the
real
time was. She accepted that nine in the morning, GMT, was now the true time in her life. She looked at the dressing gown her mother had laid out for her. It was white towelling and had the crest of a hotel embroidered in navy on the breast pocket. My mum has become one of those people who actually
buy
the hotel robe. She didn’t know whether she should laugh or cringe at this. She did know she’d rather get dressed than put the thing on. This wasn’t her home and it wasn’t a hotel and she wasn’t comfortable mooching about in borrowed towelling robes. She opened the bedroom door and listened hard. The house appeared to be empty but still Oriana padded quietly, self-consciously, along the corridor to the bathroom. She thought, this is the type of carpet I fantasized about as a child. The colour of butterscotch and as softly dense and bouncy as a Walt Disney lamb. And the bathroom itself; warm, bright and spotless, with hotel toiletries placed neatly on the sink
and
the bath – additional prerequisites of her childhood dreams. And yet she could not remember her mother ever yearning for such things.

Showered and dressed with her hair in a towel turban, Oriana made her way downstairs. Stairs that don’t creak or groan, she mused, make one feel light and dainty. When she was young, her father had called her Fairy Elephant – such was the inadvertent noise she’d make even crossing the hallway of her childhood home. It was only when she was at the base of the stairs that she realized she wasn’t alone in the house. From behind the glazed door leading into the kitchen, she could hear the radio tuned low to something middle of the road. It must be Bernard. Had it been her mother, the volume would have been high on a talk show and Rachel would be joining in, or, as Bernard would have described it, having her tuppence worth.

‘Morning.’

Bernard looked up from the crossword and a mug of tea. He smiled his uncomplicated smile. ‘Good morning, love,’ he said. ‘Breakfast?’

Last night, Oriana had been too tired not to feel sick after a couple of mouthfuls and prior to that, she’d only snacked on the plane.

‘Yes, please.’

‘What would you like?’

She looked blankly around the kitchen. She had no idea, really.

‘Toast and tea?’ Bernard suggested. ‘Poached egg?’ He could hear hunger in her inability to decide. He chuckled. ‘Sit yourself down – have a look at six across.’

She couldn’t concentrate on crossword clues and watched Bernard at the stove. ‘I had a special poaching pan,’ she said, ‘in America.’

Bernard had a spoon, a saucepan of boiling water and a perfected technique.

‘Fancy that,’ he said, his tone genial.

Poached to perfection, Oriana thought, as she tucked in.

‘More toast?’

Oriana nodded because Bernard’s toast was cut into triangles, buttered thickly and placed in a toast rack. The taste was as comforting as it was delicious. English salty butter and builder’s tea. She had to concede that some things just didn’t travel well across the Atlantic.

‘What do you have for breakfast,’ Bernard asked, ‘over there?’

Oriana wondered why he was using the present tense. Being tactful, probably. She’d told them both last night that she was back in the UK for good or for whatever. She shrugged. ‘I used to just grab something,’ she said, ‘from a stall or a bakery, on my way to work.’

Bernard filled her mug with a strong brew the same colour as the brown teapot. He used a tea strainer. The tea strainer had a little holder of its own and the teapot was returned to a trivet on the table. He did like things just so, Bernard. Oriana knew that in itself was what had attracted her mother to this ordinary, gentle man. Her father placed used tea bags on windowsills and tore into loaves of bread with his hands and teeth. Her father once told her that plates were for the bourgeoisie.

‘You take your time,’ Bernard said and she knew he meant way beyond her eating breakfast at his table. ‘Your mother’ll not be long.’ And he returned to his crossword, instinctively knowing when to pour more tea, when to glance and smile. Privately, they both reflected that they liked this time, just the two of them. They’d rarely had it. They barely knew each other. Rachel, who could have been the conduit, had kept them separate.

After breakfast – and Bernard had insisted she went nowhere near the washing-up (plenty of time for that, love) – he sent Oriana out for a walk, explaining painstakingly the route around the block. His pedantry with directions had infuriated her when she’d been a teen. Boring old fart. Mum – he’s such an
old woman
! Now, though, she liked it. It was one less thing to think about – which way to go – because in recent months which direction to take had consumed her entirely. Today was a day just for putting one foot in front of the other, for allowing the sidewalk to turn back into a pavement, for acknowledging that driving on the left was actually right, for accepting that cars were tiny and the traffic lights and postboxes were different, more polite somehow, and that this was Derbyshire, not San Francisco, and that was the end of that.

* * *

‘Where is she?’

‘She’s out for a walk – just round the block. The Bigger Block. I told her the way.’

‘But round the block doesn’t take an hour, Bernard, not even the Bigger One, not even when your knee’s playing up.’

‘She’ll be fine.’

‘Something’s happened to her.’

‘Here? In Hathersage?’

‘Not here in Hathersage, Bernard. Out there –
over there
.’ Rachel gesticulated wildly as if America, her own homeland, was an annoying fly just to the left of her. ‘Something happened,’ she said. ‘That’s why she came back. That’s why she looks the way she does.’

‘Well,’ said Bernard, ‘she had a good breakfast. You can’t go far wrong on a full stomach.’

Rachel rolled her eyes and left the house.

The cacophony of tooting and the screeching of tyres tore into Oriana’s peaceful stroll.

‘Get in, honey!’ Her mother was trying to open the passenger door while leaning across the gearstick, buckled as she was by her safety belt and hampered by her capacious bag on the passenger seat. Rachel now had the door open and was lying on her handbag.

‘Oriana – get
in
.’

For a split second, Oriana actually thought about sitting on top of her – if the urgency in her mother’s voice was anything to go by. But Rachel had managed to straighten herself and hoick the bag into the back by the time Oriana sat herself down.

Her mother was agitated. ‘You can’t take an hour to walk around the block!’

‘Can’t I?’

‘No!’

‘No?’

‘No!
Not
without telling someone you’re going for a
long
walk.’

She’s serious, Oriana thought. She’s utterly serious. All those years when she didn’t know where I was and didn’t care what time I was back.

It was so preposterous. Surely her mother could see that? However, the irony appeared not to have confronted Rachel. But there again, Rachel had reinvented herself and parcelled away the past when she’d left Robin for Bernard. The car radio was on and Rachel bantered back vitriolically at the callers and the presenters, having her tuppence worth, all the way home.

‘I thought I’d come this weekend.’

‘Good morning, brother dear. Alone?’

‘Yes,’ Jed told Malachy. ‘Alone.’

‘You’re on your own, then? Again?’ Malachy looked at the phone as if Jed could see his expression which was playfully arch.

‘Yes,’ Jed laughed at himself. ‘Again.’

‘Which one was it?’

‘Fiona – the lawyer.’

‘Did I meet Fiona the lawyer?’

‘No,’ Jed said. ‘We were only together about eight months.’

‘Jesus – have I not seen you for eight months?’

‘Piss off – of course you have. I just didn’t bring Fiona to the house, that’s all.’

Malachy considered this. But there was no pattern to which girlfriends Jed brought home. Sometimes it was girls he wanted to impress, other times it was girls he wanted to unnerve, as if their reaction to the house was the ultimate litmus test.

‘Fine,’ said Malachy. ‘It’ll be good to see you.’

Mildly frustrated with Jed for making him late setting off for work, Malachy cursed his brother under his breath. Not that he was expecting any clients. But still. He had standards and opening times and a novel to write and a business to run. And, now, his younger brother descending on him for the weekend. Which would mean long nights and bottles of wine and philosophizing and reminiscing and arguing and irritation and laughter. Malachy jumped into his car, noting that the de la Mares had long since left on the school run.