The Road Home

by Rose Tremain

  So, it was going to be a story about the dead. Probably this was why Lydia had selected it as her Christmas present to him: knowing him better than he’d ever admitted, seeing him still haunted by his father, by his old life at the mill, by Marina.

  And now haunted by yet other things: by the kitchen at GK Ashe, by the black trees outside the windows of Sophie’s flat, by the flare of happiness that had lit up a pathway and then gone out . . .

  Better to read on, though, to try to become immersed in Hamlet, than to think about all that. Lev waded through speeches where meaning went out suddenly, just like the happiness flare.

  It was about to speak when the cock crew.

  Lev closed his eyes and let the book fall. It was so absurdly difficult. This difficulty was of a different order from most day-to-day things. But Lev felt Lydia’s critical eye on him, a look that said, Don’t let me down, don’t do what you always do and set me aside. So he tried to obey her. Picked the book up again, struggled on . . .

  A king and queen came whirling in with their retinue, but what was their connection to the ghost? What was an “imperial jointress”? Who were Young Fortinbras and Old Norway? What were “suits of woe”? Back and forth to the notes. Then he skipped on, not lingering on Old Norway, to get to Hamlet himself, as if thinking, Once he’s alone and talking directly to us, all might be clear. Stared at the words Exeunt all but Hamlet.

  Lev lit a cigarette. He took the smoke deep into him, imagining Hamlet alone on the stage now, ready to speak what was in his heart. He’d be young. Probably about thirty. Young and thin, like the boys who used to come down to the Baryn lumber yard in winter, looking for work. Not princes of Denmark: boys who’d never known work. They used to stand around, silent in the low light, watching the shrieking saw coughing out sparks and orange dust as it ate into the pines. Imagining how it would be to join this world where men labored through every season—in snowfall, under arc lights on black afternoons, in driving rain and raw cold, in the first song-struck days of spring—and took home money, week by week. Lev hated to see them there, didn’t like to look at their faces. Afraid to see his own face in theirs.

  . . . O God! God!

  How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable

  Seem to me all the uses of this world!

  This was better. He could understand more words.

  . . . Heaven and earth!

  Must I remember?

  Remember what? Back and forth, back and forth to the notes, his mind a saw, trying to shriek through a tough bark of words.

  A little month . . .

  . . . within a month . . .

  She married.

  So that was it. A woman’s treachery! As it would be, thought Lev. Because it’s what the women do that kills us. On our own, even out in the cold dark of the lumber yard, we men survive. We stamp our feet in the snow. We drink tea out of old flasks. Someone tells a joke. Our shoulders ache like the shoulders of an ox under the eternal yoke. But we shake each other’s hands, plan fishing trips, get drunk together, carry on . . .

  Lev heard the doorbell ringing, but didn’t move. It was past midnight.

  . . . married with my uncle,

  My father’s brother; but no more like my father

  Than I to Hercules . . .

  The bell rang and rang. Wearily, Lev climbed out of his bunk and shuffled to the door. He picked up the intercom.

  “It’s Sophie. Let me in, Lev.”

  He said nothing, did nothing, just held the intercom receiver to his ear, as though waiting for some further instruction.

  “Lev. Please let me come up.”

  Already he was feeling it, that thing he felt when he heard the choke in her voice. He wanted to send her away, shut himself out from everything that belonged to her, everything that surrounded her—her celebrity friends with their crass achievements, the disdain they showed him—but he just wasn’t able to send her away, not when she talked to him in that sexy voice of hers.

  He pressed the door release. Heard her footsteps on the stairs. Opened the flat door and retreated to his room, as if here, where she’d never deigned to sleep, he’d be safe from her. Fumbled for a cigarette.

  She stood at the door and looked at him. Her cheeks were pink from the night air, her hair flattened by her cycling helmet. But he could smell the kitchen on her, the beautiful steel kitchen from which he was now cast out. He lit the cigarette, picked up the copy of Hamlet, which had fallen onto the floor, folded down the corner of the page he’d reached.

  It is not, nor it cannot come to good.

  “Wow,” said Sophie. “You reading Hamlet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t it difficult for you?”

  “Sure. Everything is difficult.”

  She looked hot and awkward, standing in the door, wearing her cycle gear. She began unwinding her scarf. That same yellow scarf: the one he’d always loved. Lev looked away from her. She came and sat down on the floor, where Frankie’s shop had once stood. She was wearing red-and-black-striped stockings and black boots. She took off her black velvet jacket.

  “Lev,” she said gently, “I came to say I’m sorry about it all.”

  “Yes?”

  “I didn’t mean it to go like this. But—I don’t know . . . it’s like Howie’s just overwhelmed me. I’ve never felt so ridiculously in love before.”

  She lowered her head. She seemed contrite, like a child. Lev thought that it wasn’t difficult to imagine Preece’s body crushing hers. She looked up and said, “I want us to be friends, Lev. You mean a lot to me and I really want us to stay friends.”

  Friends.

  A little month . . .

  . . . within a month . . .

  Not anything like a month. A matter of days . . . hours. She had a new lover, a man so rich and famous he could buy her anything she asked for. He had nothing. No love. No job. Nothing. He smoked and stared at her. Knew this silent stare discomforted her.

  “Lev?”

  He stared at her knees. Wanted to put his hand there, let it move slowly upward, find the stocking top, pause there, wait to see what she did, hear her breath once more, close to his . . .

  “I know it’s really tough on you, what G.K. decided,” she said. “It’s very tough, and I’m sorry. I didn’t ask him to do that, but I guess it wouldn’t have worked any other way . . .”

  Lev smoked. He just didn’t want to talk to her.

  “Lev, please. Try to understand?”

  He looked not at her face, with its dimples and its high color, only at her clothes and her body beneath: the red skirt tight across her rounded stomach, a jumper of the same red color, soft over her breasts; remembered the turquoise bra and G-string, her arse lifted toward him in front of her fire . . .

  “I mean, I tried to tell you, quite a few times, that it would never’ve worked, long term. All my friends knew that. I knew it. Because we’re too different. But we had some nice times, didn’t we? That day at Silverstrand?”

  Was she wearing a G-string now? Did she lift herself like that, crouched on all fours, like a raunchy, smooth-skinned bitch, for Howie Preece? Did she beg him to hurt her?

  “Remember Christy and Frankie jumping in the surf? The way the sun shone?”

  Yes, but the sun had gone in. Had she forgotten that? Or hadn’t she noticed? Just as now she sat there chatting to him—almost brightly—as though he had no feelings, no longing, no lingering susceptibility . . .

  “Lev, please, please talk to me . . .”

  He stubbed out the cigarette. Got down on his knees. Still didn’t look at her face. Slammed out one arm, surprising her with the sudden movement, pressing her collarbone, pinning her against the wall. With the other hand, pushed up between her thighs, finding the stocking top, the hard bud of the provocative suspender belt, the solid flesh . . .

  She tried to push him away.

  He was over her now, his head nudging the wall beside hers, his hand finding . . . no G-string . . . no knickers . . . no
thing . . . just her briny cunt, open to the world. So he told himself she was a whore, told himself what he already knew, that she was no better than a prostitute, no more decent than the brothel scum he and Rudi used to visit in Baryn, long ago. She was English: that was the only difference. But Christy had been right: English girls were racist, promiscuous, shameless. They—she, all of them—deserved what he was going to do. They deserved shame.

  “Lev, we can’t do this anymore . . .”

  She was Howie Preece’s girl. His faceful of jowls lay beside hers on the pillow. His tongue explored her mouth. When he woke, he heard her irresistible voice, guided her hand to his preening cock . . .

  “Lev . . .”

  He was unmoved, hard as knucklebone. Hadn’t she always been violent with him in their fucking?

  He pressed her down now, onto the green carpet, her curls touching the door of the Wendy house. Closed his eyes. Closed his eyes and kissed her, like she’d once kissed him in the crowded pub, months ago, his teeth grinding against hers. And as he searched her mouth, he felt her tongue . . . despite everything . . . despite his present cruelty . . . begin to tangle with his, a remembered passion seeming to flood back into her, her resistance to him weakening, altering . . .

  He hauled her legs up, up till her calves were resting on his back. Never left her mouth, not for a second. She was half crying, moaning, but not in fear—he could tell, couldn’t he? Couldn’t he tell that her fear was gone and she had it all back, her appetite, her insatiable, irresistible greed for the male . . .

  Sophie.

  Howie Preece’s whore, moaning like a fox. Beneath him and ready . . .

  When he slammed into her, she was silky as oil. Straightaway, she began to move with him. She clung to him. He fastened his sinewy arms round her, pitched and rocked like a boat plunging through a humped sea, heard her head knocking against the child’s wooden house, felt her boots kick and bruise his arse, and liked it, liked the pain, pressed down on his thigh bones, to get even deeper in.

  He still wouldn’t open his eyes to see her. Didn’t want to feel love for her. Told himself she was his animal, nothing more. She bit his lip, the vixen, drew blood, bit again. Harsh pain, but he felt this begin to trigger him. Oh God . . . Blood all over their chins. Wanted to curse and swear and say her name, heard words choked out of his blood-filled mouth. Then the trigger tightened, eased, tightened again, trembled, tightened hard, and slammed home.

  He surfaced from darkness to feel her sliding out from under him, pushing him firmly aside.

  He turned and saw her refastening one of her striped stockings, her sweet head bent over the task. Felt remorse, pure and deep.

  “Sophie,” he said, “I’m sorry. I was rough. I didn’t mean . . .”

  She didn’t reply, just went on with the tasks of fixing her stockings, smoothing down her skirt.

  “Sophie,” he began again, “did I hurt you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You did.” Turned away from him, picked up the velvet jacket and tugged it on.

  He got to his feet, went to her, and tried to hold her. She pulled away, snatched up the scarf from the floor, started to wind it round her neck and chin.

  Remorse and shame. His body still trembling from the delirium of fucking her, but the shame flooding in . . .

  She moved to the door. The blood on her face covered by the scarf.

  He reached for her hand. A single caress. A gesture of forgiveness, of recognition that their old passion was still there; that was all he asked.

  But she pulled her hand away. “Good-bye, Lev,” she said. “And please don’t come round to the flat, or anything. It’s better if we never see each other again.”

  17

  Lady Muck of the Vegetable World

  “MIDGE” MIDGHAM BROUGHT the old Land Rover round to the three caravans at seven-thirty in the morning. He picked up his foreign workers and drove them out to his thirty-acre asparagus spread, where the tractor and the rig waited.

  The tractor had to haul the rig in a straight line down the furrows. No use letting it buck or slide out of alignment. And it had to go nice and slow, letting the asparagus cutters—the human hardware—keep pace. Housed in the wide steel arms of the rig were plastic crates: five, six in a line, depending on how many cutters were following. The system was simple but effective. The cutters bent down and cut with a knife, making sure there was no wastage, that they sliced each stem just under the earth—not a prodigal inch above it—massed a bunch of stems in their left hands, as if they were gathering flowers, then laid the bunch carefully in the crates, spears all facing the same way. In the old days, hundreds of man-hours had been wasted decanting the full baskets carried by the pickers into boxes at the field’s edge. With the rig, the asparagus was cut and crated in one smooth operation. Twice a day, the crates were loaded into the Land Rover and driven down to the chiller in Midge’s barn.

  The owner of the spread had to be vigilant, that was all. Midge drove the tractor with his big belly squashed up against the wheel and his neck half bent round most of the time, keeping watch on how the cutters were working. If he saw anybody throwing the spears into the crates, he’d yell at them.

  “Now, yew listen up,” he’d told them on their first day. “Asparagus en’t sugar beet! It en’t blusted Brussels sprouts. It’s got a good pedigree. It’s Lady Muck of the vegetable world: grows overnight, needs harvesting fast, or it go to seed. And it damage easily. So yew treat it with respect. Yew tug your forelocks to it, or you’ll be off this blusted farm.”

  Midge told his farmer friends at the Longmire Arms: “These bors from Eastern Europe, they’re used to fieldwork. At home, as kids, I reckon they’d be up at dawn to feed the family chickens, same thing after school, milk the cows, water the cabbages, all that carry-on . . . So they’re decent pickers, see, because they understand the land.”

  Of the two young Chinese men, Sonny and Jimmy Ming, Midge said, “Denno ’bout them. Can’t seem to get their tongues around the language. And Sonny Ming, he cuts too high up the stem because he’s dreaming half the blusted time. But they’re good-natured. I give ’em that. Laugh a lot, they do. Den’t know what at, but who cares? And they never seem to mind the rain.”

  But this year Midge had only seven cutters when he could have done with nine or ten, because the asparagus was showing up nice, after a spring that had been just wet enough and after his seaweed mulch, spread on in late autumn, had been broken down by hard winter frosts. The crop had just the right amount of body to it—stems not too fat, not too spindly—and this April was warm; you could practically see the stuff growing. So when Vitas came to him and asked him to take on his friend, Lev, a man in his forties, he’d said, “Awright by me, Vitas, if he don’t mind sharing a van with the Mings. And if he’ll put his back into it.”

  Lev didn’t mind sharing the leaky old caravan. He didn’t mind any of it, chose to regard the discomfort as a punishment for the way he’d wrecked the life he’d had in London. Because it had been a beautiful life—he saw this now. His friendship with Christy Slane, their tea-and-toast conviviality, had been consoling. He’d begun to love his work. He’d been favored by a beautiful, sexy girl; a girl who spent half her Sundays working for no money in a care home for the elderly. And now he’d lost them all.

  “I screwed up, comrade,” he told Rudi. “That old anger of mine made me act like an imbecile. It’s like I put lumps of coal into everybody’s hands.”

  “Well,” said Rudi, “love makes people mad. Don’t be too harsh with yourself.”

  “Why not?” said Lev. “I deserve it. I half-strangled Sophie in that theater, and then . . .”

  “And then what?”

  “When she came round to see me, I was rough. You know what I’m saying? I told myself she wanted it because she’d always been quite hot for me. But I guess it wasn’t really far from rape.”

  Rudi was silent. Lev could imagine him worrying what to say. After a while, he heard a heavy sigh and Rudi
mumbled, “Men are having a tough time in this century. We just don’t seem to know where we fucking are.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you where I am,” said Lev. “I’m back with the dispossessed.”

  There were no curtains at the caravan windows, so most mornings Lev woke at six, when it got light. He made tea on the two-ring burner and usually took the mug outside, to escape the fug of the caravan, to watch the sun come up behind a stand of poplars and feel the fresh air on his face.

  It rained often. The field where the vans stood was always muddy, from the trudging back and forth of the gang of workers. This half-acre of mud reached to where a washing line sagged between two posts, usually draped with towels, cheap bed linen, frayed T-shirts, gray underwear, took in a rubbish heap of pallets, boxes, timber offcuts, lengths of gray piping, steel brackets and plastic shelving, and a Portaloo, narrow as a phone box, jacked up on some concrete blocks. Once a week, the toilet was emptied and refilled with olive-green detergent, sharp in your nose as a dry martini.

  Drinking tea and smoking, Lev walked out to where the grass shone with dew, toward hawthorn hedges and a field of raspberry canes, still almost bare of leaf. Beyond the canes, a lush meadow on rising ground, where Midge’s geese sometimes wandered, bickered, and lay down, like snow-white meringues. Beyond this, the poplars and the big sky. Standing in this place, Longmire Farm, in the quiet of morning, Lev now and again felt something of what Vitas had described to him—that it was all right, better than a thousand other places, despite the mud, like a corner of England from long ago.

  But his back ached. Not just from bending all day in the asparagus fields but from the bed he’d been allocated. Everything in his caravan was old, worn, used, stained. Lev slept on a block of petrified foam rubber, which, in the daytime, was kicked upward into a rigid fold, to form bulky bench seating for a pull-down Formica table. The foam was upholstered in a prickly brown weave. Lev’s thin nylon undersheet slithered around on this weave. All night, his body itched and rolled about. He thought longingly of his bunk at Belisha Road and remembered how, when he’d said good-bye to Christy, he’d felt like weeping.