The Road Home (26 page)

“Not blood, Chef.”

“And don’t argue with me. Just never do it. You’ve got till the end of the week to get your ducks in a line, or you’ll be out. You’ll be picking sprouts in fucking Lincolnshire.”

Later, when G.K. and Sophie had gone, Vitas said to Lev, “What is Lincolnshire?”

“Oh,” said Lev, “it’s the countryside somewhere.”

“I’d rather be there than here, then,” said Vitas. “I miss trees.”

The idea of the dam had washed against Lev’s heart, like silt. In his dreams he’d seen the schoolhouse in Auror floating on the water like a wooden boat, then slowly sinking, and, for a moment, he’d thought this vision of the slowly sinking schoolhouse oddly beautiful—until he realized that all the children, including Maya, were still inside it. Far off, on the water, he could hear them screaming.

He told Christy about the dam. Christy said he had to light a fag and make a cup of tea before he could bear to think about it. Then, with the cigarette and the strong tea in his hand, he said, “Public Works, Lev. You know, the very term terrifies me to the gills. Because you can never imagine anything good coming out of there. It’s meant to sound philanthropic, but what it signifies to me is some consortium of strangers replacing a thing you love with a thing you don’t need.”

Christy’s hand shook as he drank the tea, but he was holding himself together. The thing that seemed to be holding him together was a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of Van Gogh’s
Sunflowers
. He’d spread it over the table and he worked on it for hours and hours at a time, drinking tea and smoking. At the end of the conversation about the dam at Auror, he said, “The thing we’ve got to try not to lose is our reason. We mustn’t end up like this fella Vincent.”

Lev put off calling Rudi, in case the news from Auror was bad. Then, one Sunday morning, he felt he couldn’t put it off any longer and dialed the familiar number.

“Tchevi’s fixed!” Rudi announced triumphantly. “Now I suddenly love Germans. I kiss their arses. They make belts that fit.”

“She doesn’t creep anymore?”

“No. It’s like she’s been to dog-training school, come back a different animal! All I gotta do now is punch out the dents in the fenders and polish up the chrome. Then she’s good as new.”

Relief about the Tchevi seemed to have made Rudi impervious to any other misfortune. When the subject of the dam came up, he still sounded blithe. “Okay,” he said. “Lora got to see someone in Public Works. Not that bastard Rivas. Some thin creep with a squint. Dunno his rank. It’s possible it was low.”

“Tell me what he said.”

“Usual department crap. But I think it’s okay. He said a dam above Baryn had been a ‘provisional project’ for something like two years.”

“But nobody’s known about it?”

“I guess some people know. But Squinty told Lora there were no plans to
actuate
it. ‘Actuate,’ eh? That’s a typical Rivas word, isn’t it?”

“No immediate plans, or no plans ever?”

“You know Public Works, comrade. They don’t deal in concepts like ‘ever’ and ‘never.’ Everything’s
provisional
. I think there’s probably this team of celestial engineers going round designing dams and hydroelectric plants and reservoirs on every fucking river in the country, and they all coo over their drawings and imagine the prosperity these projects are going to bring and the rewards they’re going to get—and then nothing happens because there’s no money from Central Government. So there you are. I guess Auror’s pretty safe.”

Lev wanted to feel reassured by what Rudi had told him, but he sensed that the information was inadequate and this maddened him. He felt sure that if Marina had been alive, she would have ferreted out the truth. But now they were like everybody else—isolated by distance, at the mercy of a bureaucracy in which lying was still the chosen mode of communication.

“You’ve got to keep watch, Rudi,” said Lev, after a moment. “Watch for surveyors. If a survey team arrives, that’ll be the first sign.”

“Not necessarily. You know what those dozy government departments are like. They dispatch a few men with clipboards. They trudge up and down. They look important, so everybody starts panicking, but all they’re doing is measuring the length of their own dicks!”

Rudi laughed his habitual explosive and infectious laugh, but on this occasion Lev didn’t join in.

“Okay,” he said, “but if rumors about a dam at Baryn have got as far as the villages around Jor, then someone knows it’s going to happen. They
know
.”

Rudi’s laughter died and Lev heard him coughing.

“Well,” he said, “what more can we do? You tell me. ‘No plans to actuate’ means what it says, no? Unless Squinty was bullshitting.”

“There were ‘no plans to actuate’ the closure of the lumber yard.”

“That’s different. They ran out of fucking trees!”

“Just as they keep ‘running out’ of electricity. But build a hydroelectric plant above Baryn and you’ve got uninterrupted, renewable power for the whole region way into the future.”

“Except half the region will be drowned.”

“Exactly.”

Lev heard Rudi sigh. “I’ll keep my ear to the ground, Lev. I promise. Hope Rivas’s official car breaks down, so then he’ll have to hitch a ride in the Tchevi—and he’ll be at my mercy. But enough of all that. It tires me out, thinking what the world could do to us. Tell me about
l’amour,
Lev. Are you acting like a teenager? Are you spending all your hard-won cash on red roses?”

When Lev got home to Belisha Road late one Friday night, he found Christy sitting in front of two unopened cans of Guinness.

“Celebration,” he said, as soon as Lev came in. “Angela changed her mind. We can take Frankie to Silverstrand on Sunday.”

Lev took off his anorak and sat down. Kissing Sophie in the street, then watching her ride away from him, had left him feeling frustrated and cross. He’d felt almost violent toward her, capable of pushing her against a wall and fucking her right there in the street, like the desperate adolescent Rudi imagined him to be. In his mind, he accused her of playing games with him.

“After all that bloody palaver,” Christy continued, pouring the stout, “after making me suffer like that, she just phones up and says okay she’ll bring Frankie round Sunday morning and we can go to the sea if we want.”

Lev and Christy drank the Guinness. Christy laid his head on the heel of his hand. “I think she’s only agreeing,” he said quietly, “because Myerson-Hill’s taking her out somewhere and she doesn’t want Frankie to ruin their lovely romantic day. Expect they’re going to Hampton bloody Court in a barge, or something. But I don’t care. As long as we can have a beautiful day, I don’t mind.”

Lev smiled. He felt himself begin to transcend his frustrated mood. He imagined gulls bickering above a quayside and the scent of seaweed and a salt wind. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We will have a beautiful day.”

On the train to Silverstrand, Sophie suggested a game of I Spy.

“Are you sure you want to play that, darlin’?” Christy asked his daughter tenderly. “Because I’m not sure your spelling’s that good yet.”

Frankie didn’t reply, just pushed at Christy’s thin arm, trying to move him farther away from her.

“I bet her spelling’s brilliant,” said Sophie. “So: I spy with my little eye something beginning with . . . F.”

“What’s F?” said Frankie.

“You have to do phonetic stuff, Sophie,” said Christy. “That’s the alphabet she knows. F is
fuh.
”

“Oh, right,” said Sophie. “You can tell I’m a totally sad person upon whom nobody has fathered a child, can’t you? Okay, Frankie. Something beginning with
fuh
.”

As Sophie said this, she looked at Lev and giggled. He thought, She’s like some exotic dish that I don’t yet know how to make, but yearn for in my dreams. He turned away from her, moving his gaze to Frankie, who was staring worriedly out at the fields of Essex. She had a small, angular nose that she began to press up against the glass.

“Give up,” she said.

“No. Bollocks. Don’t give up,” said Sophie. “Something beginning with
fuh.
”

Frankie was wearing pink jeans with a pink top and a little furry body warmer. On her knee she carried a matching pink rucksack, which she’d refused to surrender as they’d boarded the train and now clutched tightly to her.

“Come on, Frankie,” said Sophie. “Something beginning with
fuh.
”

“Tree?” said Frankie.

“No. That begins with a T.”

“
Tuh,
” corrected Christy.

“Okay,
tuh
. You see? I’m rubbish at this game. Whose
name
here begins with
fuh?
”

“Give up,” said Frankie.

“No, no,” said Christy. “Just think.”

Frankie pushed again at Christy’s arm. Outside the window, Lev could see the winter plough, dusted with new green shoots, and squalls of dark birds wheeling above the hedgerows. Strong sunlight brightened the pale edges of woods and glimmered on flooded beds of bulrushes and reeds.

“You’re not looking in the right direction,” said Sophie to Frankie.

So Frankie turned away from the window and looked round at the people with her. Her gaze swept past Christy to two young women, drinking Stella and talking on their mobile phones. Lev saw her staring at their teeth, crunching Walkers crisps, then at their shiny mobiles, on which the sun glinted, as their heads moved restlessly about.

“Phone,” Frankie announced triumphantly.

Sophie smiled. “Good try,” she said. “Pretty good guess, girl. But the word ‘phone’ has a weird kind of beginning . . .”

“And it’s not a name, Frankie,” said Christy. “Sophie told you, this word is someone’s
name.
”

Frankie still refused to look at him.

“Give up,” she said again.

“No,” said Christy crossly. “You’re not bloody well giving up.”

“Mum says you shouldn’t swear,” said Frankie.

“Well, yer mum’s right. I shouldn’t. I’m sorry. But goodness me, is this what your mother lets you do these days, give up on everything before you’ve hardly begun?”

“No . . .”

“Okay. Now,
think,
then. There are four of us here and only one person’s name begins with
fuh
. Whose is it?”

“I don’t know his name,” said Frankie, looking at Lev.

“Yes, you do. I told you, darlin’. His name is Lev. That doesn’t begin with a
fuh,
does it? Nor does mine, nor does Sophie’s, so . . . ?”

She squirmed and slipped about in her seat. She hugged the pink rucksack to her, like a shield. After a while she said, “Frankie.”

“There you are, then!” said Christy. “
Fuh
for Frankie. Easy, you see? Wasn’t it? Easy as pie. Now sit up, darlin’. You just need to concentrate.”

Frankie let herself be pulled up, then she turned away and put her face close against the window once more. She said she didn’t want to play I Spy anymore. She said she was going to count the number of horses she saw in the fields.

Christy rubbed his eyes. Since Angela’s visit, his eczema had returned and crept to their rims and flamed them with a red crust. Under his breath he said to Lev, “They’re neglecting her education. I can feel that already.”

Lev didn’t feel like talking. Like Frankie, he wanted to watch the countryside beyond the train window. He wanted to remember, as the lines of hedges unrolled and isolated farms came and went, how this part of England had appeared to him from the bus that had brought him to London from Harwich on the early morning of his arrival, with Lydia beside him. He smiled as he recalled the commentary Lydia had begun, as soon as the sun rose, drawing his attention not to the shimmering wheat nor to the dark shade made here and there by English oaks in full leaf, nor to the stone churches, which so frequently appeared, but to the signs that came and went from view: “
LITTLE CHEF
,” she would say, “and look, Lev.
LITTLE CHEF
again! So many of these.” She murmured new words under her breath, like an actor saying lines. “
ROYAL MAIL DEPOT . . . KENDON PACKAGING . . . MULTIYORK . . . ATLAS AGGREGATES . . . NOTCUTTS GARDEN CENTER . . . PICK YOUR OWN . . .
”

“What is
PICK YOUR OWN
?” Lev remembered asking.

“Oh,” said Lydia. “I don’t know. I think it’s quite a puzzling sign because it appears grammatically incomplete.” She thought for some time, then sighed and said, “I’m sorry, Lev, I can’t translate
PICK YOUR OWN
yet. Perhaps I am deluded in my expectation of a translator’s job.”

It seemed long ago.

It was as if
that
Lev had been a different man. And he began to think how strange it was that the person Rudi still knew, the person Maya would remember, was this other Lev, this old, sorrowful anxious man. He wanted to apologize to them. He wanted to reassure them that he’d be better company now.

“Right,” said Christy, to break the silence. “Time for sandwiches.”

They arrived at Silverstrand near to midday, with the sun at its height, and hardly any wind, and they ran straight down toward the sea. The tide crept sedately in over a wide, beige-colored beach, chivvying the sand ripples, breaking in shallow wavelets, silvery-white under the arc of blue sky.

“Hey!” said Christy, grinning at the beautiful sight. “I think this is all right, everybody. Look at this, Frankie. Isn’t this a morsel of okay?”

She’d put down her rucksack. For the first time that day, her flinty eyes were bright. She made little hopping and skipping movements on the sand.

“Smell the ozone!” said Christy. “Or is it the bladder wrack, or the shells or what? I’ve never known. On the west coast of Ireland they always used to say, ‘Smell the ozone.’ ”

“It’s definitely ozone,” said Sophie. “And we’re in it. Breathe, Lev. Every breath cancels out forty fags.”

Suddenly, without warning, she snatched Lev’s hand and began to run with him toward the water, then turned and pushed him playfully forward, so that the waves almost surged over his feet. He resisted and tugged her to him. He wanted to pick her up and walk into the sea with her. He felt strong and wild, as though he could hold her in his arms above him, like a dancer.