The Road Home

by Rose Tremain

  He barely moved in her. His wanting of her had become so intense, he knew he’d come in seconds. She yelled at him to go faster, to hurt her. He tried to tell her no, he’d be gone, it’d be over, but she kept screaming at him, like the screaming was part of it, part of what she needed. So he let everything happen as she wanted it, and the pitch of it was so deep, the room went dark, and he fell forward on her, like an animal, spent and dying.

  In bed, she turned away from him and curled to sleep on her own. He lay awake and listened to the street sounds and to the quiet of her breathing and to his own heart, which was still beating hard enough for him to hear it. Then he got up and walked silently about her flat, examining her life in the near-darkness, aware that this was all he knew of her, this place he could barely see.

  He lay down eventually on her sofa, covered himself with his anorak, and tried to sleep. But his mind wouldn’t rest. To try to soothe it, he made soup recipes in his head: a fish soup with John Dory, whiting, squid, onions, tomatoes, and wine; a borlotti bean soup with parsley and lemon oil; a pea and potato soup made with ham stock and cloves; a minestrone with pancetta; a mushroom soup with sour cream . . . Putting together a smart court bouillon, priding himself on the ends and pieces of things he was able to use, he drifted to unconsciousness at last, just as the March dawn broke over London and the traffic on Kentish Town Road began its slow, maddening roar.

  Two hours later, when the morning arrived, Sophie was quiet, even sad-seeming. The crazy girl of the turquoise G-string had vanished. She stroked Lev’s face. Then she said, “Lev, I can’t go to Ferndale Heights on Sunday. My mum’s poorly, so I’ve got to go home to God- alming. Can you go without me?”

  “I don’t want to go without you.”

  “Please. See Ruby. She’s been ill, too. I was going to take her some fruit. Ruby would like to see you.”

  “No. Ruby likes to see you.”

  “I can’t, Lev. Haven’t been down to visit my mum for ages. Please go to Ferndale. Help them make a nice lunch. Get as many of the residents as you can out into the sunshine to see the daffodils. But especially talk to Ruby. She’s so lonely.”

  So he said, reluctantly, that he’d go on his own. When this was agreed, she thanked him and stroked his face again and said, “Okay, listen. Sunday week, there’s the press night of Andy Portman’s play Peccadilloes, at the Royal Court. It’s a must-go event. Do you want to come to it with me?”

  Lev looked at her. He didn’t want to have to think about her friends. He wanted to take her gently to bed, make love to her again in a tender way.

  “Lev. Tell me whether you want to come or not. If not, I’ll invite someone else.”

  “Yes? You invite, for instance, Howie Preece?”

  “No. All those people will be there, anyway. But I can’t go alone. We could go shopping, hey, buy you some nice stuff so you can look handsome for me at the press thing. Because you’re actually bloody tasty. You just need better clothes.”

  Lev lit a cigarette. His head hurt from his sleepless night. He looked down to see that his hand was shaking. He said, “Sophie, I have been asking myself . . . Do you truly like me . . . ?”

  “Lev,” said Sophie sharply, “don’t start on that. How much reassurance d’you need? I beg for it, don’t I? Look at me on the rug last night. God almighty, I was Miss Shameless. Wasn’t that a sign?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Course it was. Just because I won’t sleep in that kid’s bunk bed, with Christy Slane listening through the wall . . .”

  “Not that.”

  “What, then?”

  “Nothing. Only, I wish I knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “What to hope for.”

  “Just don’t be so anxious about it, Lev. Like, take it easy, okay? Everything will become clear. So tell me whether you want to come and see the play or not.”

  “Yes,” said Lev. “All right. I will. Now, will you come back to bed with me?”

  He saw her hesitate, but then she let him take her hand. They went into her bedroom and drew the curtains on the spring day. He held her chastely at first, like a girl, with her head lying on his shoulder.

  It rained on Sunday morning, and the residents of Ferndale Heights seemed subdued. “It’s Berkeley,” said Minty Hollander to Lev. “He’s in the Royal Free Hospital. He can be very argumentative, but we’re so short of men here, we’re all praying he pulls through.”

  “What’s wrong with Berkeley, Mrs. Hollander?”

  “Pneumonia, darling. The Old Person’s Friend. And, actually, Berkeley is—unlike some of us—what you could genuinely call an old person. But I do miss him.”

  Lev went to the kitchen and offered to help the kitchen staff, Mrs. Viggers and her daughter, Jane, make Sunday lunch. The two women, both wearing yellow overalls, stared at him, hands on their haunches, which were huge with flesh.

  “Who’re you, then?” asked Mrs. Viggers.

  “I am Lev. I helped here Christmas Day—with Sophie.”

  “Oh yeah, we heard about that: posh gravy, innit? You a chef, then?”

  “Training to be a chef.”

  “Well, we’re not ‘chefs,’ are we, Jane? We’re just nice plain cooks, but nobody’s ever complained.”

  Jane came close up to Lev and stared at him. She reached out a hand, as though she wanted to touch him, then withdrew it.

  “Jane!” snapped her mother. “Give the man a task. Give ’im the Paxo to mix.”

  Jane jumped. Her pouchy little eyes were moist and startled. Slowly, she reached up and took a packet out of a cupboard and handed it to Lev.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “Stuffin’, dear,” said Mrs. Viggers. “For the roast pork. Just mix it with water. Give ’im a bowl, Jane.”

  Lev looked at the packet, then laid it aside. He began walking round the kitchen, opening cupboards. He found a bag of dried apricots and a jar of dried rosemary and set them down on the worktop. He picked up some onions and parsley from the vegetable rack. “I make a stuffing with these,” he said. “You got bread for crumbs?”

  “Apricots? With pork?” said Mrs. Viggers. “They won’t eat that.”

  “They will,” said Lev, and began chopping.

  Mrs. Viggers shook her head as she reluctantly handed Lev a sliced white loaf, then moved away, but kept glancing at him from her task of peeling potatoes.

  “You got a visa then, Olev?” she said, after a while.

  Lev went on with his work. He threw butter into a pan and began to sweat off the onions and apricots with the herbs.

  “Bet ’e don’t ’ave no visa,” said Jane. “’E’s illegal.”

  “That it?” said Mrs. Viggers. “Asylum seeker, innit?”

  The apricots began to release their perfume. Lev made bread crumbs in the snarling old blender. He snatched the apricot pan off the heat, grabbed salt and pepper, and began to mix his stuffing. Then he said, “Can you show me the pork, please?”

  “Show ’im the joint, Jane. He doesn’t want to talk, and I know why . . .”

  Jane set the meat down on a dish, a vacuum-packed leg of pork boned and rolled and with a thick rind. At GK Ashe, Lev had watched G.K. scoring and preparing pork rind, and he took up a knife and sharpened it. The two women stared at him.

  “Aren’t you afraid, like, Immigration could come here and whack you down the nick?”

  “Whack me down the nick? What is that?”

  “He knows nothin’, bless ’im. You don’t know nothin’, luv. That Immigration, they’ve got officers everywhere, in disguise. I could be from them, for all you know. Then you’re done for. You’re back on the first plane.”

  “Yes? Back to what place?”

  “To wherever you came from: Bela-whatsit, Kazak-wherever.”

  Lev unpacked and dried the meat, loosened it from its strings, and laid in his stuffing. Then he scored the pork rind to strips narrow as matchsticks and began to rub in salt and mustard powder. He retied
the joint.

  “Mum,” said Jane. “’E’s makin’ lines.”

  Mrs. Viggers shuffled over to where Lev was working and rested her elbows on the chipped Formica top. Her breasts hung over her forearms. “If you’re trying to get it to crackle, don’t bother, dear. That meat never crackles. They put ’ormones in the swill so it stays rubbery.”

  “This will crackle,” said Lev.

  “And, anyway, they can’t eat bloody crackling. They hain’t got no bloody teeth!”

  “Okay,” said Lev. “But when is crisp, is light, you know. Then maybe they can crunch.”

  Jane Viggers had a satanic laugh. It came echoing out now in the dingy kitchen and made Lev shiver.

  “Crunch-crunch!” said Jane. “Crunch like a Crunchie bar!”

  “Don’t start, Jane Vig,” said Mrs. Viggers. Then to Lev she said, “Jane sometimes gives the wrong impression. But she’s as normal as steak and kidney pie.”

  Later, in Ruby Constad’s room, he said, “I think the cooks here are crazy.”

  “Are they?” said Ruby. “How fascinating.”

  “Jane is definitely crazy.”

  “I have heard a funny sound coming from the kitchens now and then. But perhaps it doesn’t matter with cooking.”

  “I think, to cook very well, you must be quite clever.”

  “Do you? That’s probably why I was never a proper cook. Not clever enough. I used to boil things—chicken and silverside of beef—and make dumplings. That was about all. Otherwise, after I was on my own, I ate Marks & Spencer ready meals.”

  Ruby looked pale and tired. She’d had a bout of gastric flu, she said, which was why she hadn’t been able to manage the roast pork. “I just ate a little of the stuffing, Lev,” she said. “With a couple of sprouts. That made a perfect small meal.”

  “I’m glad you like . . .”

  “Anyway, I’m on the mend now, but my sleep is very bad.”

  Lev said, “My friend Rudi, he always sleeps so well. Like a baby. He is lucky that way. But me, not.”

  “No. Well, it’s bad luck. It’s how you’re born, they say. And now I have such dreams, so full of guilt at how useless my life has been. Night after night. But what can I do about it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The only thing left I can do is alter my will. I have stacks of money—all inherited, nothing from any proper work. I could leave more to Africa. Or to some institution in my beloved India. I could endow something. Couldn’t I? What do you think, Lev? What’s the best thing I could do? I asked Berkeley—Captain Brotherton—but all he said was: ‘Don’t let the taxman get it.’ But I said, ‘Berkeley, who cares if the taxman gets it? Tax is roads, isn’t it, and hospitals and places for the homeless?’ But he couldn’t seem to see the value of those things. I expect it’s his upbringing, or his sheltered life in the Navy.”

  “What about money for your children?” Lev asked.

  Ruby shifted in her chair. She closed her eyes. “I hardly ever see my children,” she said. “This happens in some families. You think your children will always be there for you, but then you find you’re wrong. And you suddenly see it: you’re not even in their minds.”

  Lev waited for Ruby to say more. But she folded her heavily ringed hands across her bosom, like someone preparing for sleep. Lev sat silently near her feet, on the stool from Kashmir.

  “Enough about me,” she said after a while. “Tell me about your life.”

  Lev looked away. Outside, the rain had stopped and a weak sun fell onto the green spaces around them. “May I light a cigarette?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Ruby. “Put the ash in the potpourri dish. It needs chucking out, anyway.”

  Lev lit a Silk Cut. These days, when he had to spend so many hours without smoking, cigarettes had taken on the sweetness of mountain air. He inhaled deeply. Then he turned toward Ruby and said, “My life is a puzzle. Is that my word?”

  “I expect it may be, yes.”

  “I feel . . . I don’t know anything. I am waiting—you know? You understand me? Like I think, One day, Lev, you will know the future. You will see everything clear. I work and wait. But I know nothing.”

  “Tell me about the past.”

  Lev sighed. Then he began talking about Marina. Ruby listened attentively, now and then eating some of the grapes Lev had brought.

  “I see,” she said softly. “Your wife died. That changed everything.”

  “Yes.”

  Lev smoked quietly for a moment, then he said, “Before, I was a happy man. You know what I’m saying? I was okay, despite what happens in my country. Happy and strong, like Rudi. But now, sad inside. Sometimes, with Sophie, okay for a while. Laughing, kissing, everything. Then it comes back.”

  “I know. It comes back.”

  “Maybe for always. Who knows? This I would like to know, Ruby. Will I be free of this?”

  “Lev,” said Ruby, “when I was younger, I always told people the things I thought they wanted to hear. But I don’t do that anymore. It’s a cruel thing to do. So I can’t say to you now you will be free of it and move on, because I just don’t know the answer.”

  There was silence in the room. Lev finished his cigarette and stubbed it out among the dusty petals of the potpourri dish. Ruby’s old-fashioned bedside clock ticked on past three. The traffic on Finchley High Road made a distant, surging sound, like an angry river.

  After a while, Ruby reached out and took Lev’s hand in hers. She held it lightly, as though weighing it in her palm. “Thank you for coming to see me today,” she said. “Did I tell you I was brought up a Roman Catholic, by nuns in India?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh yes, of course I did. Well, sometimes I say prayers to the Virgin Mary. Just out of habit. I say them somewhere unlikely, like the bathroom. I remember when my husband was very ill I used to pray in the bathroom of our Knightsbridge flat. The wallpaper had a pattern of kingfishers on it, which I can see to this day. I have no real belief that my prayers go anywhere—they certainly weren’t answered when I prayed with the kingfishers—but the Virgin was always a dear sweet thing, with a lovely smile. Tonight, when I’m cleaning my teeth, I’ll have a word with her about you.”

  14

  Jig, Jig . . .

  IN THE NOISE and deep darkness of the Royal Court Theatre bar, Lev was striving to become invisible.

  He was leaning against a wall. The air he was forced to breathe had about it the overwhelming, gamey perfume of success. And Lev sensed that this was not mere innocent chatter that thrummed and trilled round him, carelessly thrown out: it was a studiously composed symphony of talk, a performance of conversation, which presupposed some silent, admiring audience, mute in the shadows, as Lev was, unregarded in his new suede jacket and stupidly expensive shirt.

  Although he’d arrived with Sophie and queued at the bar to get her a drink, she’d snatched up her vodka and tonic and turned away from him, pushing through the scrum to find her friends.

  It was as though she’d closed a door on him. So he decided to go in search of shadow. He turned his back on her, inching his way from the bar to this space by a wall. He let some minutes pass before he looked up to see where she had gone.

  He saw her close to her friend Sam Diaz-Morant, who was wearing one of her miniature hats, a spangled gold bowler, and whose laughter now and then floated clear of the conversation symphony’s bass notes, like the rattle of a tambourine.

  In the group talking to Sophie and Sam, Lev’s eye lit on a razored head, big and blue-toned under a pencil spotlight. He knew who this head belonged to: it belonged to Howie Preece.

  Sophie was wearing a new dress that looked as though it was made of shimmering spirit rags. With a dipping, uneven hemline, it was cut across her right shoulder into a tight bodice that lifted her full breasts and left bare her plump and irresistible left arm, where Lenny the lizard, who had been given a dusting of sequins for this one night, flashed fire from his tail. Lev had never seen Sophie loo
k quite like this. From the start of his love affair with her, he’d been in slavery to her clothes (sometimes even feeling an embarrassed sadness about the plain blouses and skirts Marina used to wear and which he’d thought so beguiling at the time), but this outfit was the wildest he’d seen. He knew Sophie knew how sexy she appeared. He knew she knew she looked whorish and that she didn’t care. Her mouth was a crimson pout, her thick curls new brash colors of auburn and plum. As Lev watched her, envy of Lenny, irrational as he knew this to be, invaded him. He wanted to be lying on Sophie’s arm, one with her scented skin, parading his sequined tail . . .

  Success. Celebrity. Christy had once remarked to Lev: “Life’s a feckin’ football match to the Brits now. They didn’t used to be like this, but now they are. If you can’t get your ball in the back of the net, you’re no one.” And Lev saw how right Christy had been. He wished there were other air than this rarefied, celebrated air to breathe, but as the minutes ticked down toward the start of the play, more and more luminous, scented people crammed into the bar, thickening the atmosphere still more with their perfumed exhalations. And they began to bring to Lev’s mind not only modern-day movie stars or sports stars, with perfectly toned bodies, but also the once-beautiful, absurdly dressed aristocrats of another era—the people his father used to revile as he ate his heel of salami in the Baryn lumber yard, the people who had brought about the suicidal stampede toward Communism—those long-dead members of the ancient nobility, sweeping forward, always forward, in their jewels and furs and pheasant-tail feathers, going toward lighted rooms, toward concerts and soirées, toward tencourse banquets, past the unseen poor . . .

  Lev took a sip of his vodka, and the tonic in it tasted like bitter marmalade. He wondered whether he was allowed to smoke here. He turned and looked toward the exit. He imagined himself walking out into Sloane Square and going down into the tube and riding the underground trains in silence till he reached Tufnell Park and the solace of his child’s room . . .