The Way Back Home

by Freya North

  ‘Two shakes,’ he repeated, already buttoning up his coat. The truth was, he’d twice seen Oriana slink by the house, in one direction and then the other. He didn’t worry about Rachel. Rachel he knew. But Oriana had been in his thoughts all day.

  ‘Now,’ he said to himself, quietly shutting the front door and walking thoughtfully down the path. ‘If I were Oriana and I’d been this-a-way and then that-a-way – I’d likely as not come from this direction next.’ And off he went, feeling a swell of satisfaction when he came across her leaning like a teenager against a wall, smoking.

  ‘I don’t smoke!’ she said, hastily scrubbing out the cigarette and almost standing to attention, compounding the adolescent impression.

  ‘Well,’ said Bernard thoughtfully, ‘don’t mind if I do.’ And out from the inside pocket of his coat came a packet of Woodbines. He offered one to Oriana.

  ‘I really don’t smoke,’ she told him, declining.

  ‘Tense, are you?’

  ‘Yes. I suppose. Sorry.’

  ‘I understand.’ His tobacco smelt of olden days and solid men.

  ‘Doesn’t she drive you mad?’ The words tumbled unchecked. ‘Sorry.’

  He puffed thoughtfully. ‘Yes,’ he said evenly.

  ‘How have you put up with it for so long?’

  He considered his answer. ‘A walk around the block. My smokes. The Vauxhall,’ he listed. ‘I like order – and she only knew chaos. So she likes my order. I’m needed and I like that.’

  ‘And then I come back and mess it all up?’

  Bernard took another suck. Oriana liked the way, after every puff, he contemplated his cigarette as if it were a thing of beauty. He was enjoying it, it had purpose, it brought pleasure. She’d wasted her money on a packet of ten that tasted vile and that she’d end up binning.

  ‘I don’t think so, duck,’ Bernard said. ‘But yes – she’ll have seen it that way.’

  ‘I’m going to go to Cat and Ben’s. Cat – McCabe, as was – Django’s girl. Do you remember her?’

  ‘Not her – but Django, yes, of course.’

  ‘I’m going to go there – and sort myself out from there.’

  ‘Well – you’ll not be too far,’ said Bernard thoughtfully and then he looked troubled. ‘I’d’ve liked to look after both of you – back then. I do want you to know that. But in a rum way, I know that out of the two of you, it’s you who’s stronger, it’s you that can cope. You’re the one who’ll always be all right. It’s only ever been that way, Oriana. It’s something to marvel at.’

  Oriana shuddered. Bernard’s words, meant to comfort, made her feel so alone.

  ‘Better to be able to stand on your own two feet,’ he said, looking at her levelly, ‘than have to be propped up by someone else.’

  Oriana thought how Life appeared to be a long, steep flight of steps and while she tackled the relentless climb, everyone around her appeared to hop on and off an escalator.

  ‘I’m Rachel’s walking stick,’ he said, as if diplomatically rubbishing Oriana’s melancholia. ‘But don’t forget – Rachel’s needed a walking stick since she was a young woman. Permanent, like. And that’s something to be pitied.’

  Oriana thought, Bernard. She thought, I had no idea. And she felt very remorseful that all these years she’d disparaged him as a dull old fart. She thought, I don’t think I ever wrote ‘love to Bernard’ in any of my emails to my mother. She thought, I don’t know when his birthday is. She looked at him; his Woodbine was almost finished and he was regarding it gratefully. He noticed all the small things as much as he was able to put the big things in their place. He was a good man. She’d missed out years of knowing him and she felt ashamed. He walked away from the pavement and dropped the butt into the gutter, treading it down and nudging it right into the corner. Not many would notice it. Few would have done that.

  ‘Come on, pet – let’s walk back together.’ He crooked his elbow and Oriana slipped her arm through it. ‘For the last supper,’ he chuckled. ‘Ham and eggs for our teas,’ he said. ‘That’ll do you?’

  ‘That’ll do me,’ said Oriana.

  They walked on in affable silence, then Oriana stopped.

  ‘Bernard?’

  His open face waited.

  ‘I just wanted to – thank you,’ she said. ‘For this.’ She waved her hand around the time they’d just spent. ‘And for being her walking stick.’ He brushed it away and walked on. But Oriana didn’t. ‘And Bernard?’ He turned. ‘It’s just –’ She paused, then shrugged. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For – it all.’ He made it so easy for her to feel she could look at him straight. ‘Me. Her. Decades.’

  ‘Now now – let’s not get all poetic and dramatic,’ he said. ‘It’s not many who truly live the life they’ve chosen.’

  She wasn’t entirely sure if he was alluding to her or himself. His ambiguity was premeditated, of that she was sure.

  As they turned into the street and the house came in sight, it took her a couple of steps to realize he was tapping lightly at her sleeve. He was handing her something. A couple of banknotes.

  ‘No!’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, measured, almost stern.

  ‘I have money,’ she said.

  ‘And now you have a little more.’

  He opened the gate, walked ahead of her, opened the door and called through, I’m back, Rachel. Back home again.

  They ate ham and eggs awkwardly. The clink of cutlery against crockery loud and jarring in the loaded silence. Oriana could barely taste the food and a glass of water did nothing to ease the constriction in her throat. She stole a glance at Bernard, tucking in to his tea and she realized, he wasn’t unmindful at all. He was in the moment, enjoying every mouthful, admiring what was on his fork as it neared his mouth much in the way he had his cigarette as he’d taken it away from his lips. Oriana thought, he’s parked all his worries about my mum and me and the ridiculousness of it all because there’s food on the table and it’s hot, eat up.

  Suddenly she could taste. Salty meat, tart pineapple, crisp underside of fried egg, perfect yolk – runny on top of a firm platform. She knew she’d learned something that day – about him, about herself – to look below lightweight surface details to appreciate depth. She did it with art all the time; now she’d do so with people, with the smaller things in life.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Oriana, holding up her glass of water and wanting very much for Bernard to sense that she was toasting him. He raised his glass, slightly baffled. Rachel’s was empty and went untouched. Oriana’s phone rang – it was Cat. As desperate as she was to answer it, she didn’t. House rules. She was a guest at their table. And this was indeed the last supper. ‘Good health,’ she said.

  ‘You do know I haven’t seen your mother since – everything?’ Cat whispered as Oriana brought her into the house.

  ‘Look what the Oriana has brought in!’ said Oriana. ‘A Cat?’

  Bernard laughed. Rachel looked up, sank a little and rose out of the chair as if having to shrug off a great weight to do so. She walked over to Cat and kissed her solemnly on either cheek. ‘Catriona McCabe,’ she said.

  ‘It’s York now,’ said Oriana but Rachel ignored her.

  ‘Hullo, Mrs, um, Rachel.’

  ‘When are you due?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘Ten weeks – earlier if I ask Django to cook me one of his curries. How are you? You look well.’

  ‘I am well,’ Rachel said as if it was impudent to assume otherwise.

  ‘Hullo!’ Cat called over Rachel’s shoulder to Bernard. ‘I’m Cat. I don’t think we ever –’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Bernard, shaking her hand, with his other hand supportively at her elbow. ‘Lovely to see you – so – bonny.’

  And there they stood, looking from person to person, expressions changing in authenticity according to who was smiling at whom.

  ‘Shall I get my stuff?’ And Oriana wondered why she’d asked her mother.<
br />
  ‘I’ll help,’ said Cat, noticing. It had immediately evoked a barrage of incidents from their youth.

  ‘I just can’t do goodbyes!’ Rachel said suddenly, actually swiping the back of her hand across her brow. ‘I just can’t.’

  I know, thought Oriana. Oh, I know. You don’t do goodbyes. You just go.

  Her mother hugged her hard, spikily, too tight, no softness, no give.

  ‘Bernard – you do it!’ she said. So Bernard enfolded Oriana into the gentlest of bear hugs and kissed the top of her head.

  ‘I meant her bags, Bernard! Her bags. You take them to the car.’

  ‘We’re fine,’ Oriana, still within Bernard’s embrace, told Rachel. ‘We’re good. We understand.’

  Bernard again liked her ambiguity and, when Oriana looked back up the path as Cat closed the boot on her bags, he was still standing at the doorway. As they set off, she was pleased to see Bernard there still. And he waved and winked.

  * * *

  Ten weeks. Oriana lay on the futon on the floor of the new nursery ashamed that, in her prime childbearing years, she actually had no idea what Ten Weeks till Due Date actually involved. How long would Cat be happy for her to stay? Oriana felt slightly mortified that Cat would be the one going off to work while she’d be the one staying at home, with her feet up. That seemed a little skewed. Yet Cat and Ben had implored her to take all the time she needed.

  Ben’s a doctor, remember. He said you could stay. And he knows what’s best for his wife and unborn child.

  Under bedding that smelled fragrantly soft, Oriana looked at the paper border dancing a merry jig of pastel jungle animals all around the room. Say all the time she needed was more than ten weeks? In a fidget of tiredness that precluded sleep, Oriana tried to synchronize timetables for all of them. At Six Weeks to Go, Cat would be finishing work. Should Oriana ship out then or would her old friend be most grateful of her company at that time, of someone to help hoick her out of her chair and rub her ankles or the small of her back or iron tiny clothes and fold lots and lots of bouncy white towels? At Four and a Half Weeks to Go – that might well be when Cat would suddenly crave daytime silence and solitude. But that was probably when Ben would be most busy tying up loose ends in advance of paternity leave. So maybe that would be a crucial time to stay put? Would Cat perhaps want Oriana to stay all the way to ten weeks, just in case she went into labour and Ben wasn’t there to drive her to the hospital? And what if the baby had no intention of sticking to the countdown? Say the baby came early? Really early. And then she thought, if the baby could give the parents little notice of its arrival, could the parents also give me scant notice of my departure?

  She wanted to think, all in good time. But even now on her first night, so comfortable after a joyful evening during which shared reminiscing – of their pasts both in the UK and the USA – gave her a sense of solidity, the countdown had already begun.

  Benign lions. Cuddly tigers. Plump bouncing elephants and jovial giraffes. Oriana gazed at the wallpaper frieze. Two by two they ringed the room, ready to comfort and guard Baby. Smiling crocodiles, with fluttery eyelashes and Hook’s watch invisible but ticking, unmistakably ticking, deep inside.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  This made Malachy’s job hard. Harder than a week of slow sales. He gave each item in the portfolio a considered look, though he could have leafed through it in moments, had the young artist not been at his side, expectant. They came into the gallery unannounced, uninvited, perhaps two or three times a month, throughout the year. Some were fresh out of art college, some had been painting for decades. Sometimes, it was the relatives of artists long dead, lugging in work they didn’t care for in the hope it would net them a fluke fortune. Once, a mother brought in her four-year-old’s daubings. It was very much this gallery they targeted – the reputation of the White Peak Art Space having grown over recent years. Ever since all that press about David Merifield being shortlisted for the Turner Prize – a local artist with no formal training who had brought his work in on spec and who Malachy had tirelessly championed. Today, though, there’d be no prizes, no wall space – and, realistically, not much of a future – for this artist.

  ‘I like to chew things,’ he told Malachy.

  Until that moment, Malachy had assumed it was papier mâché stuck in globs to the boards. He peered closer. What was that? Well-masticated supermarket receipts apparently. And on that one? Enormous clumps of used chewing gum: pulled and twisted, then rolled in pencil filings and cigarette ash. Jesus, a chicken’s wishbone.

  ‘I thought you could write something like: Archie Dunfold likes to choose what he chews. Or maybe the other way around. Chews what he chooses.’

  ‘What’s this one called? Chewbacca?’ asked Malachy sarcastically, staring at pulverized cigarettes stuck to the board with stickers saying ‘Special Offer’.

  ‘Yes, it is!’ the artist said. ‘You see? You get me. I knew it. You get me.’

  Christ alive, thought Malachy. He needs to be sectioned. ‘Leave it with me – I’ll have a think.’

  The artist started walking away backwards saying cool! cool!

  ‘Your portfolio?’ Malachy said.

  ‘Oh – thought you just said to leave it with you?’

  ‘No – when I said that, I meant –’ Malachy thought, I do not want this person’s germs in my gallery a moment longer. ‘It’s best if you take it with you. I’ve seen it – it’s unforgettable.’

  Oriana would be in stitches.

  The thought came out of nowhere and stayed.

  It’s just the sort of thing that would tickle her.

  It was mid-week and, while the effects of the previous weekend were still acute, they were no longer constant and his thoughts for Oriana had softened. He’d never see her again anyway – so what point was there to feel anything other than a nostalgic tenderness towards her? His feelings for Jed, though, remained serrated; so sharp he had banished his brother from his thoughts for both their sakes.

  He looked over at Robin’s work. People came from afar to see them. He’d had offers, some sizeable. One day, he’d accept one. He enjoyed the paintings, here on the walls of the gallery. He wasn’t entirely happy that the new one – of Rachel – lingered in the spare room facing the wall. Something happened to the paint when Robin transferred it from tube to canvas, when it mutated from medium to expression, from colour to meaning, from material to ephemeral. It was an alchemy of sorts. But it generated the opposite of gold, whatever that was. Even with Kate and Emma’s editing, there remained a darkness enmeshed within that work which not even the fingertips of a child could palliate.

  Having tapped it against his chin whilst deep in thought, finally Malachy put his flashdrive into the computer. If there were no further interruptions from tobacco-chewing non-artists, and no more distractions of paintings in spare rooms, he intended to work on his novel. He’d had a productive evening the night before, reshaping the first quarter and introducing a new character. However, though the scene was set with a notepad and pencil to one side and a fresh cup of tea to the other, a cushion behind his back and his mobile phone on mute, the words on the screen blurred into a background pattern as a whorl of sweet recall swept over him.

  He laughed out loud.

  ‘You mad thing,’ he said quietly, vividly seeing her again, as she’d been then.

  Oriana had been struggling with Hamlet for her English GCSE.

  ‘Hamlet is rubbish,’ she’d been saying for months. ‘He’s a berk. And the play is crap!’

  ‘Oriana – that’s blasphemy.’

  ‘He gets his knickers in a twist the whole time.’

  ‘He’s Hamlet – he’s allowed to.’

  ‘He just bangs on and on. And he’s so morose. To be or not to be – well, my advice is don’t. Don’t bloody bother to bloody be, mate! Stop asking such pseudo philosophical questions and just piss off back to Wittenberg. Get over yourself! Get a life and for God’s sake don’t bloody live at hom
e with your slag mum and evil stepdad.’

  Malachy laughed now as he’d laughed then. He remembered exactly what he’d said to her.

  ‘You know – if you had the guts – you could write that in the exam. Perhaps hold off the expletives, though. A mate of mine – did you meet Jonno? – that’s how he won his place at Cambridge. He had to write an essay on courage. He put his name and candidate number at the top of four blank pages but didn’t write a thing. Then, on the very last line of the last page, he wrote This is courage.’

  ‘Do you dare me?’ Oriana asked, looking at him askance, sparkling at the thought.

  ‘I don’t need to,’ he said, slipping his hand into hers, ‘you’re the daring one.’

  They’d walked through to the brook which demarcated the Windward boundary, taking the path the deer trod through the bluebells. Always follow the path of least destruction was a favourite saying of Malachy’s. He said it to Oriana again that day and she laughed and biffed him and said oh shut up, Malachy. You and your deep-and-meaningfuls.

  ‘I’ll go easy on the swearing,’ she said, ‘in the essay – but I’ll write it in my own way. I’ll be true to how I feel.’

  ‘Always be true to how you feel,’ Malachy said.

  ‘You sound like Polonius – to thine own self be true,’ she groaned. ‘Polonius is a rubbish character anyway – Shakespeare must’ve run out of ideas and resorted to churning out a bunch of clichés. Neither a borrower nor a lender be … Brevity is the soul of wit – well, old Wills didn’t take note of that, did he!’

  Malachy looked at her. Her face open, guileless, so very pretty.

  ‘You do know those so-called clichés came about because of the play? They didn’t exist before? Shakespeare coined them? There was, indeed, method in the madness?’

  It was difficult to tell if she knew or not. They locked eyes. He came in close to her face, backed off a bit and scrutinized her expression. Did she know? Was she joshing? And then he saw it: just the most fleeting twitch of her top lip, a barely perceptible flare of her nostril. And then she laughed and punched his arm again and took his hand, weaving her fingers around his, and they walked on.