The Way Back Home

by Freya North

  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.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘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.

  * * *

  Oriana looked at her phone, deflated. The number she’d rung was unobtainable – the fact that it still had a name ascribed to it made this seem all the more blunt. How could she not have known that Cat had changed her number? Oriana tried the number again and then ch
ucked the phone on the sofa in frustration before slumping down and reaching for it again as if giving the gadget a third and final chance.

  Rachel pretended not to notice. ‘Do you want to use the proper phone?’ she asked, referring to the landline. She and Bernard shared one mobile ‘for emergencies’ and it rarely left the drawer of the desk in the hallway. If it was mobile, how could it be grounded and trustworthy?

  ‘I was just trying Cat,’ Oriana said, ‘but I think she’s changed her number.’

  ‘And she didn’t give you her new one?’ Rachel employed extravagant indignance on her daughter’s behalf but it backfired.

  ‘If she’d given me her new number, I wouldn’t be phoning her old one.’

  Bernard looked up, aggrieved, and immediately Oriana regretted her snappiness.

  ‘Sorry.’

  She vaguely recalled a mass-text from Cat with a new number a few months ago. She’d been on a stolen weekend with Casey, just outside Monterey, in their favourite fish restaurant, the sides open to the sea, a breeze from the surf bringing an ephemeral saltiness to the food. She remembered being so in the moment, so desperate for no interruption, for time to slow down, for the day to stretch and belong only to them, that when the text came she glanced at it and discarded it.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said to her mother and, privately, to Cat.

  ‘I thought she was living in the US too?’

  ‘She was – Colorado – but she came back about a year ago.’

  ‘You could phone Django,’ her mother suggested, but they both knew how the phone could ring at Cat’s uncle’s place and he might answer it, if he felt like it, or not, if he didn’t. Usually, he’d rage across the house simply to bury the phone in the sofa cushions to shut the damn thing up.

  ‘Seven, four, nine,’ Oriana chanted, ‘six, eight, two.’ Django McCabe’s phone number was one of the few still inscribed into her memory. She’d known it from a time long before SIM cards made memorizing numbers outdated and pointless.

  ‘He’s poorly, you know,’ Rachel said, ‘from what I’ve heard.’

  Oriana thought, I could always drive over there – I loved Django. But she didn’t want to. When one had lived away from one’s roots for so long, returning always revealed such an unexpected acceleration in the ageing of those left behind. Her mother. Bernard. They always looked so much older than she anticipated. And Django – whom Oriana remembered so vividly and fondly as robust and larger than life – she simply didn’t want to see him shriven and ill and aged.

  Facebook. In recent weeks, she’d stayed sensibly away from Facebook much as she’d avoided Alice Trenton in the school playground – the cool girl, the mean girl; get too close and you’re trapped. Facebook was similar, thrilling and oppressive in equal measure. The choice was between Django and Facebook. The former brought with it intimacy, the latter intrusion, and Oriana wanted to steer clear of both. There again, Facebook afforded her invisibility. She reached for her iPad which, at her behest, Bernard had gingerly had a play on the night before, his index finger out rigid while his remaining fingers and thumb were scrunched into a fist, as if merely pointing at the screen might deliver an electric shock.

  Facebook. She signed in. Sixteen trillion notifications and a newsfeed jammed with peculiar app suggestions and people she hardly knew gloating about virtual farms and aquariums and poker games; photos of babies and smiling and beaches and the wild and wacky times that apparently defined everyone else’s lives. She typed in ‘Ca’. And sure enough, up came ‘Cat McCabe’ but, just above her, ‘Casey’ too. He was minute, his photo hardly recognizable at this size. Do not click on ‘Casey’. There is no need and there is no point.

  With the iPad on her lap, Oriana pushed her hands under her thighs and stared and stared at the screen until the wave of nausea passed and she felt her breathing regulate. She should have unfriended him. She was aware that, if she did so now, he probably wouldn’t even notice. She clicked on Cat and sent a message.

  I’m back in Derbyshire – call me! I can’t find your new number xxxx

  A little white lie on Facebook was so pale it practically didn’t exist.

  Bernard announced he was off out for a stroll. It was only when Rachel cleared her throat for the second time that Oriana realized there was something brewing.

  ‘Cup of tea, Mum?’ Clever.

  ‘No. Not now.’ It wasn’t tea brewing. Rachel appeared awkward and spoke fast. ‘I was saying to Bernard last night how lovely it is to have you home. And we both want you to know you can stay as long as you like and take all the time you need – you know, to find a job and your feet and somewhere to live and what it is that you want to do.’

  ‘Thank you.’ It suddenly seemed prudent to sound genuine, guileless. But from Rachel’s penetrating stare, Oriana knew she saw right through it.

  Oriana felt irked. Four days in the last five years, a similar average over the past eighteen years, and already she’s had enough of me. ‘What you mean is, it’s been nice seeing me but you think I should get a job, ship out and get on with it.’

  Rachel tutted. ‘Honestly – why must you be so defensive?’

  Oriana thought, I’ve got to get out of here. Then she thought, but I have nowhere else to go. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said and it wasn’t to apologize, it was to qualify. ‘It’s just it sounded like you don’t want me here.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ her mother said, ‘but I really don’t know what you’re even doing here.’

  For years, Oriana had felt better about her relationship with her mother by believing, quite categorically, that her mother had been in the wrong. Now it was obvious that in this current situation, Rachel was actually quite right. ‘Why have you come back?’ she asked. ‘Why give up a charmed life? What happened to Casey – I’m assuming you guys are through?’

  Oriana sighed and shrugged as if it was no big deal and just a tiresome topic. ‘It was time for a change,’ she shrugged. ‘It was hard for a while – but I’ve moved on. And I don’t really want to talk about it.’

  ‘And you’re OK?’

  ‘It was my call. I’m fine.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Look at me!’

  ‘You’re thin.’

  ‘Thin’s good! I’m fit.’

  ‘You’re too thin – for you.’

  ‘Nonsense. I eat like a horse – you’ve watched me! Two poached eggs and toast for breakfast. Seconds at supper. Bernard’s “nice biscuit” at regular intervals throughout the day.’

  ‘You look like you’ve been in the wars,’ Rachel said in Bernard’s voice. Her transatlantic accent might have been tempered by four decades of Derbyshire, but some phrases would simply never suit her.

  ‘Mother, I’m fine,’ Oriana said. ‘Casey is fine too. We’re still great friends – but I had to come back. You know – work, tax, stuff. And I’m thirty-four.’

  ‘Time waits for no man.’ Rachel channelled Bernard again. She felt irritated. Her daughter had just said emphatically, convincingly, that she was fine. The thinness, the paleness – perhaps that was just how Oriana in her thirties was meant to look. ‘Now you’re back – for good – will you go see Robin?’

  The name hung like a dead man on the gallows, and silent, loaded looks swung back and forth between mother and daughter.

  ‘Now you’re back – you ought to.’

  ‘Why would he even know that I’m back?’

  ‘He doesn’t. He wouldn’t.’ Rachel paused. ‘But this isn’t a holiday, a flying visit. You have a duty.’

  Oriana had to take a moment. A knot of accusations and retorts were loaded onto the tip of her tongue and aimed dangerously at Rachel. She bit it.

  ‘You don’t keep in touch? At all?’ Rachel said.

  ‘You know I don’t. You know that.’

  ‘I just thought—’

  ‘Well, don’t.’

  ‘You’re a lot older now, Oriana – and he’s not getting any younger.’

  ‘What’s tha
t meant to mean?’

  ‘It means—’

  ‘Have you seen him?’ Oriana made the notion sound just as preposterous.

  ‘No – but that’s different.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘He’s your father – for all his faults, he is still your father.’

  How long? When was the last time? Oriana rifled through fading memories, their chronology confused, as if sifting through a disintegrating pile of documents.

  ‘Louis Bayford’s funeral,’ Oriana said.

  Her mother paused. ‘That was the last time I saw him, myself. But you didn’t stay. You left straight after the service. You disappeared. He never knew you were there.’

  Nor did Malachy or Jed. Oriana plucked at the seam on a scatter cushion. That funeral. Five years ago? Six? She had sat at the back of the church, away from everyone, hiding down into her coat, fighting the urge to stare at the backs of their heads, Jed and Malachy; praying neither would turn and see her. She couldn’t even remember seeing her father there.