Going Home Page 12

  ‘It’s Mum and Dad,’ I heard Jess cry from the sitting room.

  Our front door is heavy and old. As I heaved it open, I said ‘Hello, how’s the roof? Is it in the…’ But the words died on my lips when I saw their faces.

  ‘Not now, Lizzy darling,’ said Mum, as Dad shuffled past me without saying anything. ‘We just need to discuss something. Give us five minutes. Ooh, you’ve made the tea, Gibbo. Bless you. Where’s Chin?’

  ‘Out,’ I said, fear rising. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Nothing, we just need to…Where’s Mike? And Rosalie?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mum. They’ve been out all day.’

  Mum took off her hat and fluffed up her hair. ‘I’ll be along in a minute. Don’t worry, darling, Dad’s fine. It’s…’ her voice faded away. ‘We’re fine.’

  I was left in the hall, gazing after them as they disappeared into the study and shut the door. A floorboard creaked and all was silent again. I couldn’t wait out here so I went into the sitting room, chewing a painful hangnail.

  Tom was in the doorway, obviously having seen everything. His face was set, eyes hooded. ‘They’ll be out in a minute? What’s it about?’

  I shook my head.

  Gibbo was on the sofa reading the local paper. I sat down in a battered armchair and Tom put a cup of tea for me on the low bookshelf that ran along the wall beside me. I smiled at him, and he grimaced, then smiled back. We were in this together.

  Next to the teacup was a photo of Dad, Tony and Mike as teenagers, all huge ears, buck teeth and long spindly legs, with a chubby, long-haired, gorgeous little Chin. The boys were leaning over with their hands on their knees, smiling, and Chin was holding up a teddy bear at the camera. The house was in the background, and in the top left corner an open window flashed as it caught the sun. My grandmother was leaning out, a tiny figure, waving. It’s one of my favourite photographs. I picked it up and looked at it, drinking in every detail. Mum and Dad were talking loudly in the study.

  Suddenly there were footsteps across the courtyard again. The door swung open and Chin appeared. She looked defiantly at Gibbo, who tossed his (slightly matted) hair and went back to reading the Wareham and Crozier Gazette, with the apparent concentration of one for whom every page holds the location of buried treasure.

  I looked at Chin through narrowed eyes. ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Where’s Mike?’ she said grimly.

  ‘He’s gone into town,’ said Jess, getting up. ‘Hello, Aunty dearest, have you had a nice day? Have some tea.’ She poured a cup and handed it to Chin, who still stood in the centre of the room.

  ‘Are John and Suzy back? I’ve got to find Mike. This is terrible,’ she said.

  ‘What is, Chin?’ said Tom, alert.

  ‘I’ve just had a drink with David Eliot,’ Chin said, turning to me.

  ‘I knew it!’ said Gibbo, throwing down the paper. ‘I knew you would!’

  ‘Shut up, Gibbo!’ said Tom. ‘Of course you knew she did! We saw her, you complete idiot!’

  ‘You saw me?’ said Chin. ‘When?’

  ‘In the Neptune. We were in the Radcliffe. We saw you both arrive,’ said Jess wearily. ‘Gibbo and Lizzy both think you’re having a secret affair. Me and Tom don’t. Chin, did you know his real name was Norman Gibson?’

  Chin spluttered. Drops of tea flew out of her cup and into the fire, where they hissed on the logs. She glared at Gibbo. ‘Of course I’m not having an affair with him! Please! Sometimes I wonder if growing all that hair takes up space in your brain.’

  ‘You snobbish, stuck-up, thinks-a-scarf-is-a-really-important-work-of-art spoilt little princess!’ yelled Gibbo, leaping to his feet.

  ‘Yes,’ said Chin, holding up her hand. ‘Look, Gibbo, I don’t have time for this now. We’ll sort it out later.’ Suddenly she looked tired. ‘We will. We both know that, frankly, you’re lucky to get me. Do sit down. Honestly.’

  Gibbo did as he was told, rather more relaxed. ‘Maybe. But you know why you’re with me too, you randy little whore.’

  Chin blushed and almost giggled.

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Tom, covering his ears. ‘Please don’t talk about your sex life. I’m begging you.’

  ‘I’ll go with that,’ said Jess.

  The door opened again, and in came Dad. My heart contracted. I seemed to see him properly for the first time in years. His hair wasn’t the light brown I’d always known it to be: it was grey. He stooped. Suddenly he looked about twenty years older. He rested his hand on the old dresser where we kept the family photographs, and looked as if he was trying to work out what to say. ‘I’m afraid there’s been some rather bad news,’ he began.

  Mum came in behind him, and caught hold of his sleeve. She had been crying.

  I looked round at everyone: Chin, now sitting next to Gibbo on the sofa, underneath the watercolour sketch of my great-great-grandmother who looked so like her; Tom, sliding his tiny mobile phone over and under his fingers; and Jess, her curly hair bobbing up and down as she nodded at Dad.

  ‘It’s rather complicated, and I still can’t quite believe it, but…to cut a long story short, I’ve done something incredibly stupid. Well, several incredibly stupid things.’

  Mum seemed about to say something, but my father gently eased away her hand in a protective, rather than dismissive gesture. He stopped and stared at the floor.

  ‘I’m afraid we’ve got to sell Keeper House. As soon as possible,’ he said.

  Spring

  TWELVE

  Memo

  To: Elizabeth Deborah Walter (a.k.a. Me)

  From: Elizabeth Deborah Walter (a.k.a. Me)

  Subject: Money-raising Plan to Avert SOKH (Sale of Keeper House)

  1. Do a sponsored trek to the jungle and raise cash.

  2. Have a bring-and-buy sale where someone brings a piece of Dresden china or a small old Norse chessman and it turns out to be worth millions of pounds – this was always happening in Blue Peter during their bring-and-buy sale appeal of 1985; sick children, old ladies who had no money or hordes of Brownies would leap around and say, ‘I can finally buy a new Brownie Hut.’

  3. Sell flat and release valuable equity something or other.

  4. Become a prostitute.

  5. Marry a millionaire.

  Monumental Films, the company I work for, has glamorous but impractical offices just north of Oxford Street, in that secret, pretty area to the west of Charlotte Street. Glamorous, because they’re in a lovely old Georgian town-house, with high, stuccoed ceilings and original fireplaces; impractical, because it was built as a home for Georgians, not as offices for people to run a multinational film company in the twenty-first century. The Americans can’t understand how we operate out of a building where you can’t knock two rooms together to make a screening room because it’s listed – and they’re right, I think, much as I love it. There’s a primary school next door, in a beautiful old Victorian building, complete with neo-Gothic bricked arches and tiny steeples on its roof, which I look out on to from my desk. I can see the children playing in their break and I often wonder who lives round there. It seems such an unlikely place to go home to, right in the heart of London, a stone’s throw from Soho on one side and the formality of Regent’s Park on the other. Who are those children’s parents? The people who run all those crazy little Spanish bars on Hanway Street? Lap-dancers from Spearmint Rhino? Shopkeepers who live above their own newsagent’s or drycleaner’s?

  One morning in late January, I was gazing out of the window in a desultory fashion, mulling over my Save Keeper House memo instead of preparing notes for that afternoon’s meeting. The idea that home and my parents were only a short journey up the motorway was as remote as those comforting, warm things always are in the alcohol-free, dark and bitter days of January, when you are back to being a London girl who has a job, bills to pay, wears high heels that are uncomfortable but gorgeous, likes champagne cocktails, runs for the bus (and rarely gets the
re in time, mainly because of the high heels). The memory of Christmas seemed from a different age, although it was only a few weeks ago. Almost as if vignettes from those few days were playing somewhere in an altered universe, suspended in a snowglobe, as if characters like Rosalie and Gibbo didn’t exist in real life, we had conjured them up in our imagination. And, anyway, as I had to keep reminding myself, Keeper House might not be home for much longer.

  It was breaktime at the school and the children were huddled together like a group of penguins. It was a freezing day, dull and cold, and I pitied them, having to spend their break out in the playground rather than lying on a sofa in front of the TV. That is one of the blessings of being a grown-up: no organized sports, and no having to play outside. Otherwise it might be nice to be eight again without anything major to worry about.

  The house had been on the market for two weeks. I still couldn’t understand why the roof problem and our insurance shortfall were so incompatible that we had to clear out. But, of course, us being us, I didn’t ask and no one told me. Instead I lived in hourly terror that someone would put in an offer. Conversely, when I heard from my parents that people had been to look round and hadn’t offered, I was cross. Who could see that house and not want to live in it? What idiot could walk through the wood-panelled hall into the sitting room, see the huge fireplace, the battered old chairs, the snowdrops at the edge of the kitchen garden and the lawn and say, ‘No, this isn’t quite right, I’m after something nicer’?

  So I’d decided to Take Action. Even if it came to nothing it would stop me sitting at work chewing biros till the ink exploded in my mouth. Instead I would sit at work and stare out of the window, formulating master plans of Wellington-like cunning and strategy. It was a legitimate excuse, I decided, for not doing any work. Only the list wasn’t going very well. To recap:

  Do a sponsored trek to the jungle and raise cash. Or pay someone else to. I would rather eat my desk than trek through a jungle.

  Bring-and-buy sale. Unfortunately I don’t remember the Wareham one producing anything more than several chipped floral plates, lots of jam (80 per cent of which was my grandmother’s), and bizarre cream plastic kitchen accessories from the 1950s.

  Sell flat. Well, my maths is not great, but even I know a one-bedroom flat behind an off-licence on the Edgware Road (dodgy end) does not equate in value to a six-bedroom house in the English countryside.

  Prostitution. My least favourite option, but if I charged fifty pounds a time I could buy Keeper House after ten thousand punters. Or maybe if I got a few regular clients and charged them £200 for the whole night, that would be (pause to work it out on the calculator) £200 x 7 times a week – I could give it up after 357.142857 weeks, which is 6.86813 years. Blimey. I’d always thought being a proz was a not-ideal but quite easy way to make money. Au contraire.

  Marry a millionaire. Unlikely – but millionaires have to marry someone, don’t they?

  The script for Big Yellow Taxi, the project I was working on and the cause of roughly 40 per cent of my chewed pens, slid off my lap and on to the floor as I bit my lip, scribbled a couple of things down and went back to staring at the children. Suddenly the bell rang and they all jumped into a line.

  ‘Hey, Lizzy,’ said my friend Ash, as I scrabbled on the scratchy blue carpet tiles for the pages. ‘What on earth are you doing?’

  ‘Being useless,’ I said, arms full of paper.

  ‘I wondered what you were doing this lunchtime,’ said Ash. ‘Sally and me are going to the pub.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said, shuffling the sheafs into some semblance of order and clacking them smartly on the desk. ‘I’m too busy, I’m afraid. I’ve got to make notes for our big meeting about Big Yellow Taxi this afternoon.’

  Ash peered over my shoulder to look at my nicely printed memo. ‘“Become a prostitute…Marry a millionaire,”’ he read out slowly. ‘What are you on about?

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Tell me something. Who’s coming to the meeting with Jaden? It’s not terrifying Fran, is it?’

  ‘You set it up, Lizzy, not me,’ said Ash, lolling against the door of the office I shared with Lily, our boss. ‘You’re the golden meeting organizer, who organises meetings, who Lily loves so much, and who is so obliging she starts sleeping with the scriptwriter to get really creatively close to the project—’

  I sprang up, pushed Ash away from the door, and slammed it. ‘Shut up, Ash,’ I hissed. ‘No one knows about me and Jaden. It is not a big deal, I’ve slept with him twice. So be quiet. If I hear anyone else knows I’m pulling your fingernails out one by one.’

  Ash laughed, maddeningly. ‘Oh, this is well good. I’ve got you exactly where I want you, haven’t I, golden girl Lizzy? Show me your bra and I won’t say a word.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes! Or I’ll tell Lily.’

  ‘No,’ I said briskly. I tucked my pen behind my ear. ‘I’d rather lose my job, thanks. Go away now, please.’

  Ash didn’t move. Instead he swung his lanky frame into Lily’s chair and wheeled himself over towards me. ‘So, how is it going with Jaden? Go on, tell me. I’m being nice, not annoying.’

  ‘Urgh,’ I said wearily.

  ‘Urgh?’ Ash repeated. ‘That’s good. Wow, you must be really pleased. I’ll mention you said that this afternoon.’

  ‘No, I don’t mean urgh Jaden, I mean urgh in general. It’s just…It’s nothing. That’s why I’m not talking about it. I mean…I might see him again, I’m not ruling it out. But it’s not going to last. It’s just a bit of fun.’

  Ash was the wrong person to have this conversation with – he’s the one bloke I know who thinks commitment and long-term relationships are lovely and good, not things to run screaming from into the hills. He looked at me reproachfully, in the way men do if you admit you’re not 100 per cent keen on one of their own sex. As if to say, ‘You’re lucky someone picked you at all. We do the dumping, not you.’

  ‘Oh, Ash. He’s nice, but…’ I didn’t want to sound like someone who uses men then casts them off at whim. ‘We’re just friends who’ve slept together a couple of times. No big deal. He doesn’t want more. Neither do I.’

  ‘Why?’

  I tried to look brave and sad, like Audrey Hepburn. ‘Because…because of last time. David.’

  ‘But that was six months ago.’ Ash was nonplussed. ‘And he treated you like shit.’

  ‘It wasn’t six months…’ It was more, and I should have been over it by now. But I couldn’t say what I really thought, which was that the idea of being with someone who wasn’t David was just so wrong it was best not to think about it. And use Jaden as a distraction from having to think about anyone else.

  ‘Anyway,’ Ash continued, leaning back in his chair and changing the subject with the insouciance of man. ‘I wanted to catch up with you about Lola. Remember, that girl from Victoria’s Pikey party? Do you think you could get me her number?’

  He ran his hands through his hair, in a slightly self-conscious gesture. I considered best how to answer. Should I refrain from pointing out, for the third time, that he should just give up and stop trying to get her to go out with him? Ash is gorgeous, but I worry about him. He needs a nice, well-intentioned quiet girl who thinks he is Mr Charisma, but he keeps falling for credit-card-wielding harpies who expect him to fly them to St Kitts regularly.

  ‘Oh, decisions, decisions,’ I said vaguely. I waved my notes at the window. ‘Look at the little children. See how they play.’

  ‘Seriously, Lizzy, I really like her. What about it. Will you call Victoria for me?’

  ‘Twiglets! In my desk! Fantastic!’ I said, changing the subject cunningly. I opened the bag. ‘Want one? I was thinking, you know,’ I continued, ‘Lily wants to see the rewrites Jaden’s been working on, but I still don’t think he’s nailed it yet.’

  ‘Oh, yes, he has,’ Ash said, leaping joyfully upon my unwitting faux pas and making a fnaar-ish face. ‘He certainly has nailed it. All over his flat, s
o I hear. Especially in the hall. Cor! Oh, he most certainly—’

  ‘Do be quiet,’ I said, with asperity, congratulating myself on having successfully led him away from Lola. ‘Shut up now, please.’

  ‘But you still haven’t said. How much do you like him? Are you going to start going out, d’you think?’

  People are so nosy, I thought. I’m not engaged to Jaden, I’m not even seeing him, and just because Ash happens to know what’s gone on he thinks he can ask me all about it. ‘No, it’s something different. You know? That’s why it’s nice.’

  ‘I’m not saying you’re about to marry him,’ Ash said. ‘But…well…’

  It was true that since Christmas I’d started seeing more of Jaden, rather than just sleeping with him by accident, which was what I’d done before Christmas. It was also true that I was project-managing the script he was working on. It was true too that no one at work, apart from me, Jaden and Ash ‘Mouth of the South’ Ghosh knew about it, but it wasn’t that big a deal. I liked Jaden, but talking about it with anyone made it sound like it was going somewhere, and it wasn’t. I’d never had a non-relationship before. It was great.

  However, Jaden was coming in for a meeting that afternoon with Lily, Ash, the script consultant, Fran from the New York office – producer/kick-ass scary, once slept with one of Lily’s boyfriends – and me. I had to tell him and Fran that the concept still wasn’t working, and we needed to decide how to approach the next stage of development. Added to that there were several weird things about seeing more of Jaden, which meant I was constantly on the verge of laughing every time I saw him, and unable to decide whether he was wise or bonkers but a good shag.