The Way Back Home

Last night, Oriana had been too tired not to feel sick after a couple of mouthfuls and prior to that, she’d only snacked on the plane.

‘Yes, please.’

‘What would you like?’

She looked blankly around the kitchen. She had no idea, really.

‘Toast and tea?’ Bernard suggested. ‘Poached egg?’ He could hear hunger in her inability to decide. He chuckled. ‘Sit yourself down – have a look at six across.’

She couldn’t concentrate on crossword clues and watched Bernard at the stove. ‘I had a special poaching pan,’ she said, ‘in America.’

Bernard had a spoon, a saucepan of boiling water and a perfected technique.

‘Fancy that,’ he said, his tone genial.

Poached to perfection, Oriana thought, as she tucked in.

‘More toast?’

Oriana nodded because Bernard’s toast was cut into triangles, buttered thickly and placed in a toast rack. The taste was as comforting as it was delicious. English salty butter and builder’s tea. She had to concede that some things just didn’t travel well across the Atlantic.

‘What do you have for breakfast,’ Bernard asked, ‘over there?’

Oriana wondered why he was using the present tense. Being tactful, probably. She’d told them both last night that she was back in the UK for good or for whatever. She shrugged. ‘I used to just grab something,’ she said, ‘from a stall or a bakery, on my way to work.’

Bernard filled her mug with a strong brew the same colour as the brown teapot. He used a tea strainer. The tea strainer had a little holder of its own and the teapot was returned to a trivet on the table. He did like things just so, Bernard. Oriana knew that in itself was what had attracted her mother to this ordinary, gentle man. Her father placed used tea bags on windowsills and tore into loaves of bread with his hands and teeth. Her father once told her that plates were for the bourgeoisie.

‘You take your time,’ Bernard said and she knew he meant way beyond her eating breakfast at his table. ‘Your mother’ll not be long.’ And he returned to his crossword, instinctively knowing when to pour more tea, when to glance and smile. Privately, they both reflected that they liked this time, just the two of them. They’d rarely had it. They barely knew each other. Rachel, who could have been the conduit, had kept them separate.

After breakfast – and Bernard had insisted she went nowhere near the washing-up (plenty of time for that, love) – he sent Oriana out for a walk, explaining painstakingly the route around the block. His pedantry with directions had infuriated her when she’d been a teen. Boring old fart. Mum – he’s such an old woman! Now, though, she liked it. It was one less thing to think about – which way to go – because in recent months which direction to take had consumed her entirely. Today was a day just for putting one foot in front of the other, for allowing the sidewalk to turn back into a pavement, for acknowledging that driving on the left was actually right, for accepting that cars were tiny and the traffic lights and postboxes were different, more polite somehow, and that this was Derbyshire, not San Francisco, and that was the end of that.

* * *

‘Where is she?’

‘She’s out for a walk – just round the block. The Bigger Block. I told her the way.’

‘But round the block doesn’t take an hour, Bernard, not even the Bigger One, not even when your knee’s playing up.’

‘She’ll be fine.’

‘Something’s happened to her.’

‘Here? In Hathersage?’

‘Not here in Hathersage, Bernard. Out there – over there.’ Rachel gesticulated wildly as if America, her own homeland, was an annoying fly just to the left of her. ‘Something happened,’ she said. ‘That’s why she came back. That’s why she looks the way she does.’

‘Well,’ said Bernard, ‘she had a good breakfast. You can’t go far wrong on a full stomach.’

Rachel rolled her eyes and left the house.

The cacophony of tooting and the screeching of tyres tore into Oriana’s peaceful stroll.

‘Get in, honey!’ Her mother was trying to open the passenger door while leaning across the gearstick, buckled as she was by her safety belt and hampered by her capacious bag on the passenger seat. Rachel now had the door open and was lying on her handbag.

‘Oriana – get in.’

For a split second, Oriana actually thought about sitting on top of her – if the urgency in her mother’s voice was anything to go by. But Rachel had managed to straighten herself and hoick the bag into the back by the time Oriana sat herself down.

Her mother was agitated. ‘You can’t take an hour to walk around the block!’

‘Can’t I?’

‘No!’

‘No?’

‘No! Not without telling someone you’re going for a long walk.’

She’s serious, Oriana thought. She’s utterly serious. All those years when she didn’t know where I was and didn’t care what time I was back.

It was so preposterous. Surely her mother could see that? However, the irony appeared not to have confronted Rachel. But there again, Rachel had reinvented herself and parcelled away the past when she’d left Robin for Bernard. The car radio was on and Rachel bantered back vitriolically at the callers and the presenters, having her tuppence worth, all the way home.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_853ef1ad-dcbe-553c-af95-8d1d1df5da3a)

‘I thought I’d come this weekend.’

‘Good morning, brother dear. Alone?’

‘Yes,’ Jed told Malachy. ‘Alone.’

‘You’re on your own, then? Again?’ Malachy looked at the phone as if Jed could see his expression which was playfully arch.

‘Yes,’ Jed laughed at himself. ‘Again.’

‘Which one was it?’

‘Fiona – the lawyer.’

‘Did I meet Fiona the lawyer?’

‘No,’ Jed said. ‘We were only together about eight months.’

‘Jesus – have I not seen you for eight months?’

‘Piss off – of course you have. I just didn’t bring Fiona to the house, that’s all.’

Malachy considered this. But there was no pattern to which girlfriends Jed brought home. Sometimes it was girls he wanted to impress, other times it was girls he wanted to unnerve, as if their reaction to the house was the ultimate litmus test.