The Road Home

by Rose Tremain

He saw Sophie look round now—to see where he was, or only to try to spot which other famous faces were arriving? Howie Preece, too, swiveled his dome of a head, and Lev realized that it was the playwright himself they were greeting, the author of Peccadilloes, Andy Portman. They embraced him and clung to him and he to them, and Lev could imagine how Sophie would be reassuring him, wishing him luck, telling him the play was going to be brilliant, a winner, a groundbreaking moment in the history of British theater . . .

  Lev was weary. For days now—he didn’t know why—this tiredness had been killing him, giving him bad dreams, black thoughts, thoughts about Marina, a feeling of being adrift once again. “It comes back,” Ruby Constad had said, and she’d been right: his old feeling of misery was creeping in round the edges of things. He’d clung to his work, to Sophie, to the rhythm of his days, to the onset of the reluctant English spring, but now, in this bar, he just wanted to lie down and be carried away on some dark tide of sleep, to become invisible even to himself. Lev closed his eyes, but even as he laid his exhausted head against the hard wall, a voice announced that the performance of Peccadilloes would begin in five minutes.

  In the stalls, five or six rows back from the stage, Lev sat between Sophie and a bulky middle-aged man, stinking of some sickly aftershave, with jeweled rings on his fat fingers and a caramel-colored cashmere overcoat pushed down between his legs. The man’s right leg set up a nonstop bouncing and trembling so close to Lev’s seat that it made it shake. This trembling repulsed Lev. He longed to put out a hand to still it.

  He looked away from the man, toward Sophie’s profile in the near-darkness. He wanted the profile to turn toward him, but it didn’t move. The play had hardly begun, but already Sophie was rapt by her expectations, surrendering to her belief in the genius of Andy Portman.

  Lev turned back to face the stage. A purple light came up on a double bed. It seemed, at first, the only object there, but then, revealed in a dim corner, there was a white wardrobe, with, in ornate writing, the word Hers painted on it. Wardrobe and bed. Bed and wardrobe. Already there was something in these waiting objects that made the audience snigger.

  A man and a woman came on. They were about Lev’s age, with a cool air of prosperity, dressed in evening clothes. They sat down on either side of the bed and undressed and put on identical silky dressing gowns, the color of veal. The woman began to brush her hair. The man thumbed a magazine called AutoMagnate. While brushing and thumbing, they talked about their evening and how boring it had been and how everybody at the party had been “arseholes.” They made jokes about these arseholes, at which the audience laughed loudly. They left their smart clothes in two piles on the shiny wooden floor. (They were rich, but they didn’t seem to possess any coat hangers, just left their expensive things lying, as though evacuated from their bodies.) The wardrobe door remained shut.

  The woman, whose name was Deluda, began to kiss the man, whose name was Dicer. They lay on the bed in their silk night robes, touching each other. Then Dicer suddenly sat up and told Deluda he’d “forgotten to say good night to Bunny.” Deluda told him this didn’t matter, but he insisted that it did, that without his good night, Bunny would have bad dreams. He broke off from what had seemed to be a preamble to sex and went offstage. Deluda lay still for a moment, clearly frustrated and angry, then reached under the bed for a hidden gin bottle and took a long swig. Again, the audience tittered.

  After a few moments, Dicer came back. But not alone. With him was his daughter, Bunny, a child of nine or ten. He sat Bunny down between him and Deluda on the bed. Deluda hid her gin bottle. Bunny had a sleepy, dreamy look in her eye. Dicer told Deluda that Bunny was having nightmares.

  Deluda sighed. But she was Bunny’s mother. The parents, Dicer and Deluda, had to comfort Bunny. They began to tell her fairy tales from memory: “Once upon a time, in a lonely forest, there lived a cruel beast . . .” Dicer stroked her hair. Not long after the beginning of Beauty and the Beast she put a thumb into her mouth and seemed to be drifting off to sleep.

  Deluda, still yearning for sex with Dicer, ordered him to put Bunny back into her bed. He looked at Bunny asleep and stroked her face. Then, almost reluctantly, he took her up in his arms and carried her away. Deluda waited for Dicer, snuggling into her pillows as though they were a body beside her.

  Dicer returned from Bunny’s room at a run. He kissed Deluda and then mimed making love to her with desperate haste. She urged him to slow down. But he seemed to convey that he couldn’t hear her: he was inside his own head. His eyes were closed. He called Deluda his “little darling,” his “naughty rabbit.” The scene ended with Dicer shouting and screaming as he reached his climax and falling inert across the unsatisfied body of Deluda, who slowly extracted her arm from beneath Dicer’s weight and groped for the gin.

  The audience tried another snigger, then seemed to find this inappropriate and went quiet. The purple light began to fade.

  At Lev’s side, the bouncing leg was at last at rest, the jeweled right hand spread calmly across the meaty thigh. Lev looked up and round at the packed theater, heard in the near-darkness a rumbling far beneath him, as of an underground train accelerating out of a station. He reached out and stroked Sophie’s arm. For a second, he found himself sweetly reassured that it was still warm to his touch. But then Sophie jerked away from him, as though the stroking hurt or offended her. “What’s the problem?” she hissed. “Don’t you understand the scene?”

  Lev withdrew his hand. “I understand,” he said, and turned back to staring at the dark space above him and listening to the train moving away and to the near-silence it left behind.

  The next scene took place in an office boardroom of a company called PithCo. Dicer’s boss, a smart, suit-clad woman called Loyala, was urging some promotion for Dicer on the board of slick young men. She referred to Dicer as “a business brain par excellence, but also just the most regular guy you could ever wish to meet.” The board of young men looked bored. They sent Loyala out and began to discuss Dicer. But they were all preoccupied with other things. Their phones and their BlackBerrys kept ringing and bleeping. Two of them couldn’t seem to remember Dicer’s name. They referred to him as “Dick.” But they were in a hurry, so they all pronounced themselves in favor of his promotion, except one, a man, a little older than the rest, named Clariton.

  Everybody on the PithCo board turned to stare at Clariton. Clariton expressed what he called a “personal doubt” about Dicer, but when pressed to say what this was, all he could come up with was that he had a “feeling” about him. The mobiles chimed and flashed and beeped. Clariton was told that feelings were “unverifiable moments of consciousness and nothing more.” He had to give in and let his doubts about Dicer be overruled. A vote was taken. Dicer’s promotion was agreed upon.

  Dicer was then called in. When told of his promotion, he looked relieved. Then he began a speech about how twenty-first-century Britain was “a mucky place, a place adrift on a tide of moral uncertainty, a place that some of us don’t recognize any longer . . .” Then he said that he, Dicer, and the company, PithCo, had to resist this tide, make ethical decisions, behave with responsibility in a global world . . .

  At these words, while the heads of the board nodded their agreement, the bouncing and trembling of the leg next to Lev began again. The jeweled hand bounced with it. Jig, jig, jig, jig, jigger, jig, jig, jig . . . Jig, jig, jig, jig, jigger, jig, jig, jig . . .

  Lev thought, I won’t be able to bear this, I’ll have to strap his leg to the floor . . . And then what was going on in the scene slipped away from him and he began to consider how this might be done, how a leg might be immobilized in the darkness of a London theater, without anybody crying out, without causing undue pain, just to end the torment to its neighbor . . .

  When he focused again on the play, Deluda and Bunny were dressed for a journey and had come to say good-bye to Dicer. Lev had missed why they were leaving. Everybody appeared anguished. He watched the gestures of the girl play
ing Bunny. She was playing the scene, once more, as though she were in some distant, dreamlike sleep, all her own.

  She disappeared and Deluda disappeared. Now Dicer was alone. He sat at a computer. A big screen was lit behind him, on which what Dicer was seeing on his computer monitor was replicated. Dicer tapped and clicked. Images of naked children came and went, seen for a flickering second, then gone. Dicer kept searching for something, clicking on boxes marked View Merchandise. And now, on the giant screen, appeared an inflatable doll, made of rubber or latex, or some fleshlike substance: a young girl with no breasts and an open, rosebud mouth and a little slit between her legs. Dicer stared longingly at this girl doll. Lev could sense the audience staring at it, too. And the leg stopped. Jig, jig, jig, jig, jigger, jigger. Rest.

  On the screen, a box marked Customize appeared. Dicer clicked on this. Another box came up: Scan Photo. At his desk, Dicer was now becoming excited, his breathing labored. A photo of Bunny’s face appeared in close-up. She looked younger than she’d seemed onstage. Her mouth was open. Dicer raised both his arms, as if to embrace his daughter’s face. On the screen a box saying Confirm Customization came up, and Dicer clicked an arrow on the box and began to shout, “Customize!” He said it several times, with mounting passion: “Customize! Customize! Customize!”

  The audience had gone quiet. Lev looked at Sophie. Her face was calm and still. Lenny glittered on her arm. She seemed spellbound by all this “customize” business.

  Lev felt unbearably hot, suddenly, as if in the grip of some colossal embarrassment. He began to tug at the sleeve of his new suede jacket, to take it off. He was aware of being the only person in the auditorium not sitting obediently still, and the task of removing his jacket now seemed peculiarly difficult, as though he were trying to get himself out of a straitjacket. He tugged on the sleeve, pulled at the neck, tried to push away the lapels, felt his shoulder collide with the man with the bouncing leg, who flashed him a furious stare. But he had to get the jacket off or he was going to suffocate. He was going to faint. He longed for water on his brow, in his mouth, over his sweating body. He longed for a cold river, like the river that flowed down into Auror . . .

  “Lev!” he heard Sophie hiss. “For fuck’s sake . . .”

  The jacket was off now. At last. He felt cooler. Visions of the cold river faded in his mind. He looked up. What had he missed? Once again, he’d forgotten he was at a play. It had moved on and left him behind. But what did it matter? It was a disgusting play. It wasn’t even a proper play when a giant screen had to be used. It was a kind of half-film, wasn’t it? He looked away again, folded his jacket on his knee, glanced sideways at the leg. A tiny tremble, a shivery jig-jig-jig. Then stillness.

  On the stage Dicer was sitting at a candlelit dinner with Loyala. Loyala was talking fast and in a masterful kind of way, spouting words Lev couldn’t recognize. He supposed this was meant to be business language or jargon, or whatever people called it. It felt a bit like listening to Rudi talking about his “belts” and his “automatic drive,” without bothering to explain what these things were, as though the whole world was meant to know without ever being told. Except Rudi knew in his heart that no one else was interested, that his love affair with the Tchevi was a lonely thing, but here it became clear that Loyala thought her corporate-speak was seductive. She thought Dicer was fascinated. She was making a pitch for Dicer and she was using these things as her weapon—her superior knowledge of certain facts and percentages, her understanding and manipulation of terms.

  Lev looked at Dicer. From the actor’s expression, it seemed as though he was trying to follow Loyala, trying to let her seduction of him work, and at the end of the meal—when silent waiters came and went, bringing and removing empty plates—he was holding her hand across the table.

  Lev glanced down at his watch. Its tiny luminous hands told him that almost an hour had passed since the beginning of the play. But how long did plays last? Were they as long as ballets or concerts? Because this was all he knew of theater: old American soaps on the TV; one performance of Giselle by the Glic Ballet Company; a few visits to Jor, where Marina’s favorite folk singers, the Resurrectionists, often used to play.

  Wearily, Lev looked up. The bed appeared once more. Bed and wardrobe and the purple light. As though the play were beginning all over again . . .

  Dicer came in alone. He sat down on the bed, exactly as he’d done in Scene One. He took off his clothes and left them in a pile and put on the veal-colored silken robe.

  The play was beginning again. Only without Deluda.

  Lev closed his eyes. He tried to remember the words of Marina’s favorite song by the Resurrectionists. Something about drinking vodka in the morning, sleeping in the sun, feeling lonesome for the moon: “Oh, I’m so lonesome for the moon . . .”

  Lev opened his eyes. Dicer was walking toward the wardrobe now, the wardrobe marked Hers. He opened it, and there were coat hangers and there were dresses and skirts. Dicer moved these along the clothes rail, then from underneath them he dragged out an inflatable doll-child, with the face of his daughter, Bunny. He held the inflatable Bunny in his arms. He arranged her legs wide apart, curving round his legs. He pulled her to him and stuck his tongue into her open mouth. Then, baring his arse in the face of the audience, he began to mime fucking.

  The curtain fell. The lights in the auditorium came up.

  Lev sat very still. The clapping all around him was loud and enthusiastic. It felt as though the play might be over. But, of course, it wasn’t over. This was just the interval. Lev considered the word “interval” and thought, Did someone once understand that, in some circumstances, the “interval” had to become permanent, that what it temporarily ended couldn’t be returned to?

  Beside him, Sophie stood up. She touched Lev’s arm. “Bar,” she said. “Howie ordered champagne. Come on.”

  Obediently, Lev got to his feet. His body ached. He put on his jacket, whose newness was so pungent to him it was as though the suede were still part of the heifer, still grazing on pristine grass. Sophie pushed him on and they inched back toward the bar, where Lev could hear the sound of champagne corks popping.

  Now, suddenly, he heard a burst of laughter behind him. “Lev!” said Sophie. “You’ve still got the price tag on your jacket!”

  He felt her reach up and wrench away the label. That the people in the row behind him might have been staring at it all the way through the first bit of the play should have embarrassed him, he knew, but all he felt was the sweet absurdity of it and he began to laugh.

  “It’s not funny,” said Sophie. “This is a press night. It just makes you—and me—look like panty hose.”

  “I think it’s funny,” said Lev loudly. “I think it’s more funny than a purple bed.”

  “Ssh, Lev. Just keep moving. Keep moving forward.”

  “I think it’s more funny than a man wanting to fuck his daughter.”

  “Okay,” said Sophie, pushing past Lev. “There’s Howie. Follow me if you want some champagne.”

  “No,” said Lev. “I don’t want champagne. Why drink champagne? To celebrate why? To make a toast to this horrible play?”

  “Shut up, Lev. Please . . .”

  “You know, even the names are ridiculous. I know English enough to know this. ‘Dicer.’ ‘Deluda.’ Why couldn’t Portman think of better names?”

  The people round Lev were turning to stare at him. Sophie gripped his arm and tugged him toward the tall figure of Howie Preece, who was waving a champagne bottle above his head.

  Preece, whose single diamond earring glittered in the pencil spotlights, said, “Good girl. What a bun-fight. Have a dose of Bolly.”

  Sophie took the glass of champagne, and Howie Preece turned to pour another one. “This is Lev,” said Sophie quietly.

  Howie Preece kept pouring and didn’t look up. When the second glass was full, he offered it to Lev.

  “No, thank you,” said Lev.

  “Right. All the mor
e for us. I’m Howie Preece.”

  Lev nodded. He saw Howie Preece waiting for the thing to appear in his eyes—the awe or whatever he might have called it—the thing that people couldn’t help but reveal in his presence. And when he didn’t discover this awe in Lev’s face, Preece, for a moment, appeared disconcerted. He shifted his expectant gaze to Sophie. “That creature,” he said, “on your arm. What’s it meant to be?”

  “Oh,” said Sophie, “that’s Lenny the lizard. He kisses me good night.”

  “Yeah? How does he kiss you?”

  Sophie brought her arm to her face and let the sequined Lenny brush against her lips.

  Howie’s slug-white jowls dug themselves into a leer. “Sexy girl, Sophie, in’t she?” he said, as if to Lev, but still gazing at Sophie with large, sleepy eyes.

  Lev saw her blush. He wanted to . . . oh, he couldn’t say what he wanted to do, but the sight of her showing Lenny to Preece was bitter.

  “So,” said Sophie brightly, to Preece, “what d’you think of the first half?”

  “Well,” said Howie Preece, “it’s Portman. Portman’s a genius. He’s always right on the fuckin’ button. Bet half the fuckers in Chelsea are screwing their kids senseless.”

  “I think it’s brilliant,” said Sophie.

  Preece was about to speak again, but Lev snapped, “Why?”

  “What d’you mean, ‘Why’?”

  “Why you say this is brilliant, Sophie?”

  “Because I think it is.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it is. Because it’s radical and brave and —”

  “It’s shit,” said Lev.

  “Well, there’s a downer for Andy!” said Howie. “The man from a distant country thinks Peccadilloes is a piece of —”

  “I could kill this man!” said Lev.

  “Excuse me?” said Preece.

  “To see this: a father, a doll, his daughter . . . How can he show this?” Anger and misery swept through Lev like a rising tide of sickness. He jabbed a finger at Sophie—an authoritarian gesture he detested in other people—saw her try to recoil but be prevented by the crush in the bar. He knew he was becoming out of control, knew he should have tried to master his feelings, but why master feelings that, in this unreal world he’d just entered, felt real and true?