The Road Home

by Rose Tremain

  Lev blew his nose. The bitter dregs of his sickness seemed to be lodged there. He wanted to throw the tissue away, but there was nowhere to throw it. He saw the constable pick up a clear plastic envelope and take a mobile phone out of it. He set the phone down in front of Lev. By its turquoise casing, Lev recognized it as his.

  “Or don’t you have any friends in England?” said the constable.

  Lev stared at the phone. Then he picked it up and held it tenderly in his hand. “I have friends,” he said.

  “Right. Suggest you call right away.”

  Lev drank the last of the tea. He punched in Christy’s number at Belisha Road. He heard the voicemail click in:

  Hello there. You’re through to Christy Slane. Try not to hang up before you’ve left a message or, if it’s urgent plumbing work you’re after, call me on me mobile, 07851 6022258. Be back to you shortly.

  “Christy,” said Lev. “It’s Lev. Got a bad problem. I try your mobile.”

  But Christy wasn’t picking up his mobile, either. Lev figured that he was probably still asleep, or else already gone out on one of his infrequent jobs. He left another message.

  “No luck?” said the constable.

  “He will call back.”

  “What? In five hours’ time? Okay. Up to you, if you want to spend them here. I don’t know what time you have to be at work, but if it were me, I’d try another number.”

  Lev was sweating now in the tropical heat of the room. He wiped his forehead. For a moment or two, the temptation to call Sophie visited him with a sudden stifling of his breath. But the knowledge that she’d probably refuse to help him made him lay this temptation aside. Sophie was with Howie Preece, anyway. Lev was sure she was. The whole Peccadilloes evening had been leading her there. She’d be lying next to his big, ugly head. His huge hand would be kneading her breast in his sleep . . .

  “Come on,” said the constable, “stop daydreaming. I’m beginning to be tired of you, Olev. Make another call.”

  Lev was back on the plastic chair in the corridor when he saw her arrive: his habitual savior, the plain woman whom two pampered English kids mocked with the cruel nickname Muesli. Here she came again, wearing a new beige coat, with her hair stylishly short but on her face the familiar, persecuted look, the look that said, All right. I forgive you one more time, Lev. But soon, very soon, you will have tested me too far . . .

  She sat down beside him.

  Aware of his ghostly appearance, of the smell of puke still on him, he hung his head, said, “I’m so sorry, Lydia. I’m sorry to have asked you to do this. I’ll pay you back, I promise.”

  “Well,” said Lydia, with a sniff, “I don’t know when you’re going to pay me back. I leave for Vienna tomorrow. You were very lucky to find me still here.”

  He looked at her profile, held aloof from him, then at her feet, neatly arranged side by side in their black court shoes. Tenderness toward her suddenly choked him. Only the thought that she’d soon be embarked on her new life with Pyotor Greszler and gone from his altogether prevented him breaking down into tears of shame at his own repeated and unsavory betrayals of her loyalty.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “All I do is cause you grief. I know. If only I hadn’t lost my wallet . . .”

  “It’s all right, Lev. Now, where do I pay the eighty pounds? I have a lot to do today, all my packing, then I’m going over to see Tom and Larissa to say good-bye. So . . .”

  “Did you bring cash, Lydia?”

  “Yes. I’m not an idiot, you know. Now, where do I pay?”

  They walked out into the rain.

  The Chelsea streets were unfamiliar to them both. Lev, shivering again, clung to Lydia’s arm, holding a flimsy umbrella. He walked without seeing, hoping vaguely that she knew where they were going, but she soon stopped and declared herself lost. She looked all around her, at the street of smart, white-painted houses, at wrought-iron balconies ornamented with topiary.

  “Pelham Crescent,” she said. “I don’t recall it.”

  To be warm again. To be clean. To eat something bland and sweet. To sleep for a while. These longings preoccupied Lev’s mind to the exclusion of all other thought. He saw Lydia staring at him, and perhaps she understood this, because she let go of the umbrella and ran toward a woman emerging from a Range Rover outside one of the fine front doors with its sentinel bay trees, and Lev heard her say, “Excuse me. Can you help me? Where is the tube, please? My friend is ill.”

  Lydia came back to Lev and led him forward like a child, found an Italian café near South Kensington Underground station, and sat him down on a wooden chair. She took off her beige coat and put it round his shoulders, and he felt the warmth of her body, still, in the silky coat lining. He heard her order coffee and pastries.

  “Lev,” she said, after a while, when he’d gobbled the first pastry and was warming his hands on the foaming coffee mug, “Lev, there’s only one thing that worries me.”

  He looked up at her: about-to-be-mistress of the famous Maestro Greszler, her days of knitting jumpers, subsisting on eggs, behind her. Without her, he’d still be sitting on a plastic chair in the police station. Without her, he might still be delivering kebab leaflets for Ahmed, sleeping in Kowalski’s yard . . .

  “Are you listening to me?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Whatever has happened—and I’m not going to make you explain it to me because I can feel that you don’t want to—whatever has happened, you have to stick with your job at GK Ashe. That is what most concerns me. That you’ll give up this job. And then I think you would be lost. So promise me you won’t.”

  Lev nodded. Then he said quietly, “I’ve been watching the chefs. Making notes. I’m going to collect all the recipes in a notebook.”

  “That’s very good. Very good. But you must stay in this restaurant, where G.K. helps you learn. In other places they might treat you like shit and you’d learn nothing. You must keep going on this track.”

  Lev was silent now. He wanted to tell Lydia how hard this was going to be, working with Sophie, seeing her day after day, catching the scent of her in the humid kitchen air, obeying her chef’s orders, watching her put on her football scarf to go home to Howie Preece’s bed . . .

  “Lev? You hear what I’m saying?”

  “Yes.”

  “When I’m in Vienna or Salzburg, I’m going to call you up and ask you what the chefs made today at GK Ashe and I hope you’re going to be able to answer.”

  “I will.”

  “Promise me?”

  “Yes. I promise.”

  “All right. Well, I’m going to go now. You’re near the tube. You remember? Just turn left out of here. Here’s change for the train.”

  Lydia stood up. She put three £1 coins down on the table. Gently, she took her coat from round Lev’s shoulders. Lev reached up, drew her face down toward his, and kissed her cheek, putting his lips softly among the moles.

  “Lydia,” he said, “you’ve been my good friend. I hope you’re going to be happy now. I hope you’re going to have the best life . . .”

  “Well,” she said, “at least I won’t be Muesli anymore. I shall have a little dignity. Not too much, so that it goes to my head. Just enough so that I can hold my head up.”

  “I know Pyotor Greszler will be good to you.”

  “Of course he will. Well, good-bye, Lev. I’ll send postcards. Send you pictures of Paris and New York.”

  “Good-bye, Lydia.”

  Lev watched as she walked away from the table, heard her footsteps, neat and regular as ever, click-clack, click-clack, click-clack, till she was out of the door and gone.

  It was after one o’clock when Lev climbed the stairs to the flat in Belisha Road. He called out to Christy, but there was no sign of him. Lev ran a bath and lay in it till it almost went cold. He fell in and out of an exhausted sleep. Then he dragged himself to his room, drew the curtains, got into bed, and closed his eyes.

  He dreamed about
Marina. He was back in the bad time of Marina’s supposed affair with Procurator Rivas. He was fly-fishing, with Rudi, on the river above Auror, on a summer evening, and they could see clusters of gnats, lit by the sinking sun, hovering above the water, and Rudi said, “They only live one day. I read that in a nature magazine. Imagine. They get to late afternoon, like now, and they start panicking and saying, ‘Where did the day fucking go?’ ”

  They fell into their old, familiar laughter. They were pulling grayling out of the river, happy as herons, and then they saw a figure on the opposite bank poaching on their fishing beat. It was Procurator Rivas.

  “Fuck him,” said Rudi. “Why doesn’t he stay behind his desk? I don’t want to see his legs. I thought all those Public Works people ended at the waist.”

  “He’s on our stretch,” said Lev. “Tell him to move downriver.”

  He stared at Rivas. He wore a cumbersome coat, a kind of padded oilskin, and this made his movements awkward.

  “Look at him,” said Rudi. “Look at his pathetic casting. Where’s he ever fished before? In the public drinking fountain?”

  Their laughter pealed out across the water and Rivas raised his head and Lev saw on his face an expression of pure spite. So they stopped laughing and Lev said, “Let’s go farther upriver.”

  They wound in their lines, began to load up their fishing gear and their bag of grayling, and then they saw that Procurator Rivas had hooked a fish and was trying to land it. His rod was bent in a frightening arc, as though it would snap at any minute, and he was breathing hard, struggling to wind in the fish, which pulled him farther and farther toward the water. He waded in up to his groin. His face was sweating. Then he let go of the rod and reached down into the river and lifted out the head and shoulders of Marina.

  Marina was naked, and her body was gray and slippery, like the bodies of the grayling. Her hair trailed on the shimmering surface of the water. Procurator Rivas tried to gather the slippery, gray-blue body to him, so that Marina’s head rested on his shoulder and her breasts sank against his barrel chest in the oilskin coat. He kissed her forehead, called her name: “Marina. Marina.” But she was a dead weight in his arms.

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Rudi. “Why can’t he see she’s been dead a long time? What an idiot. Why can’t he fucking see it?”

  Lev woke and it was dark in the room. A voice was saying his name. With the nightmare still filling his mind, he turned his head and saw Christy bending over him.

  “Lev,” he said. “I just got in, fella. Didn’t you oughta be at work?”

  Lev hurled himself up in the bed, slamming his head against the bottom of the upper bunk. “What time is it? What time is it?”

  “Well,” said Christy, “it’s after nine.”

  Nine? How could it be nine? How in the world could it be nine o’clock?

  “Nine, nighttime?”

  “Yes. Or perhaps you got the night off, did yer?”

  Lev switched on his light, rubbed his head. “Oh God . . .” he said. “Did G.K. call?”

  “Haven’t checked the voicemail yet. Shall I do that now?”

  Christy went to the living room. Lev grabbed his mobile and stared at the screen. No indication of a missed call. He dialed 901 and was told he had one saved message. Before he could switch this off, he heard Sophie’s voice—from weeks ago—saying, “Hi, sexy. Hope you can still move. Are all the guys in your country as wicked as you?”

  Lev deleted the message, slammed down his phone, began to tug on clean clothes.

  Nine o’clock.

  He was five hours late! The service would be coming up to full pitch. But everything would be slow, fatally slow, because the chefs would have had to do their own veg prep and G.K. would be going crazy . . .

  “No messages,” said Christy, at the door. “Only one from you, saying you had a problem, like. What was the —”

  “No time, Christy. Tell you later. Lost my wallet. Can you lend me some bus money?”

  “Sure,” said Christy, rummaging in his trouser pocket. “Full of cash, I am. Went out to Palmers bloody Green to fix a boiler. Took me all day, but it was worth it. Indian woman. Wearing a sari with all the trimmings. Disconcertingly beautiful, I found it. And she smelled delicious—sort of like bread sauce, you know? Her boiler should have been junked in about 1991, but I got it going. Jasmina, her name was. Jas-meena. She was so grateful she hung money on me, like on a bride.”

  “Good, Christy. Good.”

  “Jas-meena. Now I can get that Spider-Woman outfit Frankie wants.”

  Lev arrived at GK Ashe at ten minutes to ten.

  He entered the kitchen, tugging on his whites. G.K. whirled round and stared at him. Held high in his hand was an egg whisk, which began to drop cloudlets of beaten egg white onto the floor.

  “Chef . . .” stammered Lev, “. . . I’m so sorry. I fell asleep. Please forgive me. Will never happen again . . .”

  Lev saw G.K. look toward Sophie, who was engaged in some elaborate flambé. She didn’t glance at Lev, or at G.K.

  “So what’s fucking going on?” said G.K.

  “My fault, Chef,” said Lev. “I promise you, will never happen . . .”

  G.K. looked at his watch. More blobs of egg white dripped from the whisk. Then he said, “It’s nearly ten o’clock. Do you imagine we’ve sat around waiting for six hours for you to depith a marrow? You can take those whites off. And go home, as far as I’m concerned. We’ve done your work for you.”

  Lev looked helplessly around. Sophie now had her back to him, ostentatiously turned, the familiar sweet curve of her, with her arms moist in the kitchen heat.

  “You didn’t call me, Chef. Why you or Damian didn’t call?”

  “I’m not a fucking alarm service! I expect my staff to get to work without needing to be woken up. Now go home.”

  “No, Chef . . . I help Vitas with the wash —”

  “Vitas? He’s history. Gone to pick cabbages in East Anglia. Got a new nurse from Bongoland or somewhere. Hey, Nurse, where did you say you were from?”

  “Niger, Chef.”

  “That’s it. Pronounced Nee-shair. Unused to so much water. Rains unreliable there. But he’s doing okay. So leave him be, Lev. Just get in here tomorrow at three thirty and see me, right?”

  “Please, Chef. Let me do some work.”

  “No. I told you. We did your work. You’re superfluous. Go home.”

  G.K. turned back to his egg whisking. Lev stared at Sophie, paralyzed. She was now plating up her flambéed duck breasts, head bent low over her task. By each duck breast lay a julienne of carrots and zucchini. He watched her spoon juniper berries from the flambé pan and arrange them on the golden skin of the duck. She lifted the plates onto the hot counter. “Table four!” she called, and turned away.

  Lev took off his whites and hung them up. He saw the boy from Niger turn and stare at him. He walked out of the kitchen and stood by Damian’s bar, from where he could see into the restaurant. It was the usual Monday “clientele lite,” but at the far end, among a group of six or seven, with Damian fussing over them, he saw what he had expected to find: the big, gloating face of Howie Preece.

  16

  Exeunt All but Hamlet

  “IF PEOPLE DO lovely work and get paid a royal ransom for it, I’m fine with that,” said Christy Slane, “but look at this. Reminds me of the stuff they used to make with milk-bottle tops on Blue Peter.”

  Christy pushed a copy of a weekend color magazine across the table where they sat, drinking tea. It was late.

  Up Belisha Road came the sound of a posse of drunk youths kicking their way homeward round the rowan trees and through the litter. Lev read the headline: PREECE WRAPS IT UP. Underneath there was a photograph of a curved white panel into which had been inserted hundreds of lightbulbs. Lev stared at it. Then his eye moved down to the caption:

  Bubblewrap by Howie Preece, one of six new works on show at the Van de Merwe gallery. Preece employed two studio assistants to a
ssemble this complex asymmetrical construction out of epoxy resin and 60-watt bulbs.

  “Its fluid shape,” comments Nicholas van de Merwe, “suggests a cunning absence of rigidity. Preece’s explorations of the way one object, by mimetic appropriation, gives new meaning to another confirm him as one of the most interesting artists working in Britain today.”

  “See what I mean?” said Christy. “Frankie could’ve made that. Feckin’ lightbulbs!”

  “Preece didn’t even make it,” said Lev. “Studio assistants made it.”

  “Well. And that gets on a man’s tits, doesn’t it? Won’t get his fingernails dirty. Won’t put in the hours.”

  Lev turned the page of the magazine, saw a photograph of another work by Howie Preece, entitled Wimbledon. At first glance, it looked like a square of bright green turf, striped by the heavy roller of the lawnmower. He read the caption.

  Arduous hours went into the making of Wimbledon, assembled with more than eleven thousand one-inch nails. Preece comments: Nails present as a powerful signifier for the lawn tennis championships. What you have here is lethal grass.

  Lethal grass. Lev ran his fingers over the photograph. Had to admit there was an illusion of softness in it, even a kind of silky shine, such as a lawn wears after a night of dew. He turned the magazine round and showed it to Christy. “This one is better,” he said, “maybe quite clever . . .”

  Christy glanced at Wimbledon as he sipped his tea, and a drip from his cup fell onto the picture. He blotted it with his thin, scabbed hand. “What’s with Preece and Wimbledon?” he said. “He used tennis balls to make that DNA piece of shite. My guess is the man can’t master his top spin.”

  With the tea, Lev and Christy were eating chocolate digestive biscuits. They took one biscuit after another till the plate was empty. Then they stared at the plate. “I think that’s it,” said Christy. “I think we finished the packet. Got it from me ma, love of those. She used to be munching chocolate digestives in the dead of night. Said to me, ‘Life’s taken away me appetite, Christy, so it has. But somehow, I can still swallow those.’ ”