The Road Home

by Rose Tremain

  “Do you work here?” she asked Lev.

  “Lev is our chef,” said Ruby proudly.

  “Oh, right,” said Alexandra.

  “Ma can’t eat proper food anymore, can you, Ma?” said Noel.

  “No,” said Ruby. “I can’t. But I know the meals have become wonderful since Lev took over. Tell about the menus, Lev. It will amuse my guests.”

  My guests. This was how she referred to her son and daughter. Lev hovered by the door, noted a bunch of cheap carnations, still in their paper, resting on one of the Indian tables. “Well,” he began, “it’s silly, really. In our new menus we try to describe how everything is fresh —”

  “Yes, but you’re not saying it right,” said Ruby. “You see, Simone, the girl who helps Lev in the kitchen, writes the menus and she deliberately puts in outrageous words, so we get, say, ‘non-crap homemade crumble’ or ‘sorbet recipe jacked from a famous chef’ and lots more fun like that.”

  The “guests” smiled weakly, wearily. Ruby’s face on the pillow was the color of suet. “Don’t you think that’s funny?” she asked her children.

  “Not really,” said Noel. “Not if you can’t eat any of it.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” said Ruby. “It’s cheered everybody up. That’s what matters.”

  Ruby lay back on her pillow. She’d told Lev that talking tired her, that she liked to lie there, dreaming about the past, feeling that she wasn’t anywhere solid or real—certainly not at Ferndale Heights— but in a land of her own imaginings, where the sky could be any color she chose. “I see wonderful things,” she’d said. “I see white vestments blowing about on a washing line; I see elephants being sprayed with water by their mahouts; I see vultures perching on enormous rocks . . .”

  Lev knew that the “guests” were waiting for him to leave. He offered to find a vase for the carnations, but Ruby said, “No, no, I’ve got plenty of vases. Alex will do it. Won’t you, darling?”

  “Sure,” said the daughter, Alexandra.

  But she didn’t move from her chair. It was, thought Lev, as though standing up on her pale, dry legs was a private act, something she refused to let a stranger witness.

  Now Lev and Marina were in a large room, and the sun fell in rectangles on a scented floor that was carpeted with sawdust. Together they were brushing away this sawdust to reveal some solid parquet blocks underneath. “This is the space,” Marina kept saying. “This is the space.”

  Then she told him that the sunlit room had once been a piano shop. Until recently it had been crammed with musical instruments and cases full of sheet music. “Elgar used to live here,” she said, “before he was famous.”

  The dream was pleasant, with no sad edge to it. Little by little, the sawdust was swept away into a far corner and the wood underneath it began to shine. And Marina kept extolling the virtues of the empty piano shop. “It’s full of light,” she said, “and there’s a fireplace— look, Lev. I think you can get fifteen or sixteen tables in here and still have room for your bar.”

  Lev wanted to ask her where his kitchen was going to be.

  He understood that there was another room, behind the piano shop, where Elgar had once lain in a narrow bed, hearing music stir in his brain, but Lev dreaded to find this room dark and cramped, with the composer’s coffin in it, so he let the door to it remain shut and never mentioned the kitchen. But the sweeping of the beautiful room went on, and the snick-snick of the brooms was a gentle sound . . .

  Lev woke up from this dream feeling comfortable and happy, but as he stood making tea in the kitchen, he began to realize that the dream had come as a reminder, a reminder that, back in Auror, nothing had moved forward. Although—thanks to the money he’d managed to send—the Tchevi was back on the road, Rudi was still in a silent, angry mood. He’d told Lev his days as a driver were numbered, that he wasn’t prepared to tangle with “the fucking taxi Mafia in Baryn and their crap cars.” Had said it was beneath the Tchevi’s dignity. Said he’d rather lie down and die.

  Then there was the tormenting question of the flats in Baryn. Lora had been given an appointment with an official at the Office of Rehousing, who hadn’t hesitated a moment before taking her £50 bribe, but had said he couldn’t promise anything with a view of the river and suggested she return in a month’s time. As she’d gone out of the door, he’d made a gesture with his hand, rubbing his thumb against the pads of his fingers.

  “He’s gray as a rat, then?”

  “I guess.”

  “I’ll send another fifty,” said Lev.

  Lora told him she’d been out to the site and that nothing was being started yet, no sign of any building work where the flats were meant to be. She said the land was being used as “garbage facility,” with gulls and foxes scavenging there.

  “Maybe that means the Auror dam’s postponed?”

  “No, Lev. Not at all. Surveyors and engineers are up and down the river all the time. We’ve been told they’re starting work this winter. We’ll find ourselves homeless and nobody will care.”

  He longed to tell her that he had it all worked out, that if he could just keep working till January or February, he’d have made the money he needed to get his great enterprise started, but somehow he couldn’t lay the plan before them, didn’t dare to, felt afraid they wouldn’t see it as he saw it—as salvation. What he dreaded most was that Rudi would laugh at it. “A posh restaurant in Baryn! Well, that’s a pig’s testicle of an idea, comrade. Who’s your fucking clientele? You think the citizens of that poor dump of a town can afford to pay for capitalist food?”

  Lev told himself that when he was back there, face to face with Rudi, when he had the money, when he’d found premises that he liked, then it would become real to everybody. Then they wouldn’t laugh. But his dream about the piano shop now indicated to him that the things he’d let himself imagine—the wholesome fire, the automatic success of the venture—were still only that: empty imaginings. The beauty of the sunlight, the scented room with its wooden floor, the presence of Marina in the dream—all these had consoled him, but what did they really express except a longing to snatch back the life he’d lost?

  Late one night, as Lev shuffled in, aching, hurting, almost bent from his day at Ferndale and his stint at Panno’s, his phone rang and it was Rudi.

  “Okay,” said Rudi. “Lora says you got a ‘scheme.’ So what is the fucking scheme? Why aren’t you saying?”

  Rudi had been drinking. His speech was nasal, punctuated with flying spit. Lev sat down on his bed, kicked off his shoes, brought his feet up, and let his back rest against the giraffe pillows. “I’m not saying,” he said, as calmly as he could, “because the scheme depends on a sum of money I don’t yet have.”

  “So why bother mentioning it to Lora? Arsehole! Why get her hopes up?”

  “Why are you calling me an arsehole? Because you’ve got hold of some vodka for sterilization?”

  He hoped the old joke would soften Rudi’s mood, but it didn’t.

  “I drink,” Rudi said, “because my life is shit and because you’re making everything worse, tantalizing us all with your so-called scheme.”

  “Well, perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I only wanted to reassure Lora —”

  “No, you shouldn’t have fucking mentioned it. But you didn’t think, did you? You’re so fired up with your life in fucking London, you don’t remember anymore what it’s like here, do you?”

  Lev sighed. He wished he wasn’t so dog tired. “I remember what it’s like,” he said. “That’s why I’m trying to come up with something to change it.”

  “Come up with what? Why you spin some fuckin’ mystery around it? You planning to build Buckingham Palace in the Baryn municipal square? Or what?”

  “Rudi,” said Lev, “listen to me. All I’m saying is, you’ve just got to have faith.”

  “Know what?” said Rudi. “That’s exactly what I don’t have. I don’t have faith in you anymore. None! In fact, I was saying to Lora,
I agree with Ina now, I don’t think you’re ever coming back. Sure, you’ll send us money from time to time—a few handouts for the poor suckers left behind—but you don’t care about any of us, not about me or Lora, not even about Maya.”

  “Take that back, Rudi!”

  “Why? It’s what I believe. You’re like everybody who goes to the West: you’ve turned into a selfish bastard. You used to be a good man, a good friend —”

  “I am still a good friend. Who helped you get the Tchevi mended?”

  “Sure. I bow down. I kiss your arse. But it’s just money, comrade. And that’s easy for you now. Send money, send money, send money! Easy as farting. In fact, I expect you’ve got money dribbling out of all your orifices now. But the day of reckoning’s coming—or haven’t you understood?”

  “What ‘day of reckoning’? Why are you doing this, Rudi?”

  “Doin’ what?”

  “Getting this mad at me.”

  “Because you’ve left it too late! Too fucking late! I don’t believe in the future anymore. Nor does your mother, in case you hadn’t noticed. So you keep your precious ‘scheme.’ You stay and have a nice life in England. Screw a few more English girls, why don’t you? Forget about us because, I’m telling you, we’ve all forgotten about you!”

  Rudi hung up. Lev lay there, cradling the phone. Told himself again that Rudi was drunk, that none of what he was saying counted for much. Yet he couldn’t help but feel this, feel the terror of this in the cavity of his soul—that he should be forgotten. He put out an arm, wanting to hold something, clutch something to his exhausted body, but there was nothing on the bed, only his own frame, laid out there, with his feet in old, worn socks.

  Now he felt it all around him, this forgetting. Everybody from home had turned away from him. Even Lydia.

  He’d sent another check to her parents’ address in Yarbl, but it had never been cashed. He’d called her mobile five or six times, but she had never answered it. He suspected, now, that when she saw his name appear on the display, she just switched off her phone. He’d left messages apologizing for asking for money that night of the mugging, told her he hadn’t been in his right mind after what had happened on Swains Lane, begged her to call back. But no return call had ever come.

  He tried one more time, on a Sunday morning. Heard the number ringing. Imagined some spacious hotel room in Brussels or Amsterdam. Longed to hear her telling him excitedly about yet another glorious marbled bathroom, another robe, soft as velvet.

  But it clicked in, her familiar voicemail:

  You’ve reached Lydia, personal assistant to Maestro Pyotor Greszler. I’m sorry that I’m not able to take this call. Please call back later or leave a message.

  Lev sighed. He spoke softly into the phone. “Lydia,” he said, “it’s Lev. I’ve left a lot of messages. I don’t want to pester you. I’m sure you have a busy schedule, but I want to know that you’ve forgiven me.”

  He paused here. Then he said, “I’d really like to talk to you. I’d like to know how you are . . . That’s all, I guess. Except I feel . . . I don’t know how to put this. I feel as though everybody from home has just . . . let me go. And this is . . . well, it feels unbearable.”

  He was about to hang up here, but then he added, “Oh yes, and I have a question for you. Did you ever finish that ‘jumper’ you were knitting on the bus? Because I never saw you wearing it. I’d love to know if you ever made the sleeves.”

  He waited. Part of him hoped—expected—that she’d call back straightaway, if only to tell him about the jumper. He sat with his mobile on his knee, smoking and looking out at Belisha Road, where sleet was falling. “Call,” he begged her silently. But time drifted on and no call came.

  He got up and made tea. He knew he shouldn’t be surprised that now, finally, Lydia didn’t want to be connected to him anymore. And yet he was surprised. He’d always assumed that Lydia and Pyotor Greszler were going to play some part in his future life, but perhaps, after all, this wasn’t going to happen. Perhaps, from now on, there would be only her accusing silence.

  He was tempted to dial her mobile again, but he was afraid, suddenly, to trespass into a different time zone, afraid to wake her.

  One morning, when Lev arrived at Ferndale Heights, Mrs. McNaughton called him into her office. “Mrs. Constad was moved to St. John’s last night,” she said. “I promised I’d ask you to go and see her.”

  “St. John’s?”

  “St. John’s Hospice. Not far from here. Go today. I’ll help Simone prepare the suppers so you can get away after lunch.”

  Lev sat silently on the hard chair he’d been offered. Mrs. McNaughton said, “St. John’s is a good place. Run by Catholic nuns. Mrs. Constad was brought up a Roman Catholic, in a convent in India, so I expect she’ll feel quite at home. But, of course, for you, it’s bound to be upsetting.”

  Lev nodded. He thought of the sullen middle-aged children sitting immovable by the bed and hoped they wouldn’t be there.

  “Did you know,” said Lev, “that Mrs. Constad was part of a welcome pageant the convent gave for the viceroy?”

  “No. I didn’t know that.”

  “Yes, she was. She was one half of the O in ‘Welcome.’ ”

  St. John’s Hospice was dark, with curtains drawn against the bright day. It smelled of incense candles and of something else: the old, familiar stench of the cancer ward.

  Lev gave his name to a nun wearing a plastic apron over her habit. He was told to wait on a chair in the small entrance lobby. An old man opposite him also waited, carrying a bunch of lilac wrapped in newspaper, and this made Lev conscious of the absence of any gift for Ruby Constad. And then he remembered the things he used to take to Marina when she was dying: wild flowers sometimes, but more often objects she’d been attached to and now missed, family photographs, Maya’s first drawings, a Mickey Mouse clock, a green magnifying glass, a wooden bird . . .

  “Come with me, sir. You can see Mrs. Constad now. But as you’re not family, please don’t stay more than a few minutes. We’re trying to keep her very peaceful.”

  Lev followed the nun down a corridor deliberately kept dark and lit only with pools of flickering tea lights. It was so silent that his own footsteps sounded loud and heavy, the footsteps of someone who wasn’t supposed to be there. He felt breathless, slightly sick. He thought longingly of the fresh breeze outside in the street.

  Ruby’s room was very small—a cell. The bed was high and the body in it kept from falling out by metal bars. A dim lamp was on, and by the bed were a small night table and a worn, rush-seated chair. Above it, on the white wall, a wooden cross.

  Ruby lay on her back, with her nose pointing sternly into the air. Her hands were folded over her chest, as though arranged there by one of the sisters. Just perceptible beneath the hands was the slow rise and fall of her breath.

  Lev stood and looked down at her. Dying had never seemed—in his presence, at least—to pitch Ruby Constad into the kind of agony suffered by Marina. It was as though she’d sat quietly with death as her companion, refusing food, turning the pages of her photograph album, and when the last page was turned, she’d come here, to St. John’s, to the semidarkness that preceded the final and absolute one.

  Lev said her name and the hands stirred, but her head didn’t move.

  “Who is it?” The voice was high, almost squeaky, like a child’s voice.

  “It’s Lev.”

  Now the head turned and Ruby looked up. Lev wondered whether, in the low light, she could see him. He sat on the chair, and brought his face nearer to hers.

  “Oh yes . . .” she said at last. “I told the sisters: he’s the one with the beautiful gray hair.”

  There was a smile on her lips. Her breath was sour.

  “Now . . .” she said. “Now . . .”

  Her hands clutched the metal bars and she tried to pull herself up in the bed, but her breathing immediately became stifled and she began to retch. On the night table there was
a kidney bowl and Lev held it under her chin as she spat a thread of foul-smelling phlegm into it. She sank back onto the pillows.

  “Old age is not for sissies,” she said. “Who said that? I can’t remember. But they were right.”

  Lev wiped her mouth and set the bowl aside. He wished he’d brought fat branches of lilac so that they could bury their faces in its scent.

  He waited. With the back of his hand, he gently stroked Ruby’s temple. After a while, she said, “On that night-table thing . . . by the water glass . . . is an envelope, Lev. It’s for you. Can you see it?”

  He sensed that the stroking consoled her, was reluctant therefore to take his hand away, but he could see the envelope and he picked it up. On it, in wispy writing, were the words For Lev.

  “I’ve found it,” he said.

  “Well, it’s for you. It’s a check. Only a small one. It’s to help you set up your restaurant in . . . whatever that town is called . . .”

  “Baryn.”

  “Baryn. That’s it. Don’t open the envelope now. Otherwise you may start arguing with me and I’m too weak to argue. So this is what you must do. Are you listening?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go to the bank with it straightaway. You do have a bank account, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Clerkenwell branch.”

  “Right. Go now and pay the check in. When I die, my bank account will be frozen, so you must present the check before then. D’you understand, Lev?”

  Lev looked down at the envelope. It weighed almost nothing, yet felt heavy in his hands. He couldn’t now recall what he’d done—if anything—to earn this gift. He was about to say that he couldn’t accept it, that it wasn’t right for Ruby to give checks to people she hardly knew, when the door of the cell opened and the nun wearing the plastic apron came in. The scented, flickering light from the passage made a timid entrance into the room and Lev felt this as a kind of relief, as though, in the yellow candles, the essence of life itself were burning.