The Way Back Home. Freya North
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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.
‘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.
‘Fine,’ said Malachy. ‘It’ll be good to see you.’
Mildly frustrated with Jed for making him late setting off for work, Malachy cursed his brother under his breath. Not that he was expecting any clients. But still. He had standards and opening times and a novel to write and a business to run. And, now, his younger brother descending on him for the weekend. Which would mean long nights and bottles of wine and philosophizing and reminiscing and arguing and irritation and laughter. Malachy jumped into his car, noting that the de la Mares had long since left on the school run.
* * *
Oriana looked at her phone, deflated. The number she’d rung was unobtainable – the fact that it still had a name ascribed to it made this seem all the more blunt. How could she not have known that Cat had changed her number? Oriana tried the number again and then chucked the phone on the sofa in frustration before slumping down and reaching for it again as if giving the gadget a third and final chance.
Rachel pretended not to notice. ‘Do you want to use the proper phone?’ she asked, referring to the landline. She and Bernard shared one mobile ‘for emergencies’ and it rarely left the drawer of the desk in the hallway. If it was mobile, how could it be grounded and trustworthy?
‘I was just trying Cat,’ Oriana said, ‘but I think she’s changed her number.’
‘And she didn’t give you her new one?’ Rachel employed extravagant indignance on her daughter’s behalf but it backfired.
‘If she’d given me her new number, I wouldn’t be phoning her old one.’
Bernard looked up, aggrieved, and immediately Oriana regretted her snappiness.
‘Sorry.’
She vaguely recalled a mass-text from Cat with a new number a few months ago. She’d been on a stolen weekend with Casey, just outside Monterey, in their favourite fish restaurant, the sides open to the sea, a breeze from the surf bringing an ephemeral saltiness to the food. She remembered being so in the moment, so desperate for no interruption, for time to slow down, for the day to stretch and belong only to them, that when the text came she glanced at it and discarded it.
‘Sorry,’ she said to her mother and, privately, to Cat.
‘I thought she was living in the US too?’
‘She was – Colorado – but she came back about a year ago.’
‘You could phone Django,’ her mother suggested, but they both knew how the phone could ring at Cat’s uncle’s place and he might answer it, if he felt like it, or not, if he didn’t. Usually, he’d rage across the house simply to bury the phone in the sofa cushions to shut