The Way Back Home. Freya North
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‘You couldn’t afford it anyway – they go for a fortune, these days.’
They peered at the pictures which, though in colour, were grainy. The main one was of the house – obviously taken during the summer months. There were four smaller photographs of interiors. Oriana considered them for some time.
‘I’m not even sure which one this is,’ Oriana said. ‘No one had a hi-tech kitchen like that when I was there.’
‘It’s Louis’, isn’t it?’ said Django, back.
‘Is it?’ said Oriana, grieving for Louis anew.
‘Look.’ He jabbed a finger at the final photo. ‘Where’s that then?’
The girls looked.
‘The oriel windows,’ Oriana said, ‘right at the top. But it can’t be Louis’.’
They read the details.
‘How on earth did they make three bedrooms out of his apartment?’ Oriana read on. ‘Two bathrooms, one en suite?’ She looked up at Cat and Django. ‘I loved it when it was Louis’. It was my place of choice for tea. It was always so genteel.’
Django laughed. ‘Fabulous old queen.’
Oriana turned to Cat. ‘Do you remember – after school – going for toast and to do homework at his kitchen table because it was so much quieter than downstairs?’
Cat looked at the details anew. ‘I can’t believe that this is Louis’ place. And yes, of course I remember.’
‘I practically lived there during exams,’ Oriana said.
‘Well – between Louis’ and ours,’ said Cat.
‘Two bathrooms and three bedrooms,’ Oriana marvelled again.
‘Crivens,’ Django murmured at the guide price.
‘Will you visit?’ Cat asked.
Oriana looked at her with exasperation.
‘I meant Windward,’ Cat said cautiously. She thought about it. It hadn’t been so long ago that she and Django had been estranged. However temporary it had been, it was hideous at the time. Oriana looked tired. Behind the smile and the teeth-whitening and Bobbi Brown cosmetics, it took an old friend little time to detect a degree of emotional exhaustion.
‘What’s the point? I haven’t spoken to my father in years. I rarely heard from him before that anyway. And I don’t know anyone there any more.’
It was only after Oriana had left, when Cat and Django were reviewing her visit, that they realized none of them had mentioned the boys. Not once. Not even when poring over the details of the apartment that had come up at Windward. The Bedwell brothers. Malachy and Jed. And Cat wondered whether they, like Robin, were dead to Oriana too.
The front door was never locked but Jed was always acutely aware how nowadays, Malachy’s was one of only three dwellings whose front door remained resolutely unlocked. Nearly all the other apartments in the old house had new security systems and even burglar alarms. Still, along the Corridor – running subterraneous through the house like a hollow crooked spine – the internal doors joining it were unlocked. That had been the very point, back at the end of the 1960s, when the pioneering group of artists and writers and musicians had rented Windward. There was to be flow, Windward ho – ideas and creativity, triumphs and failures, music and colour, characters invented and real – into and out of the rooms, through the windows, across the seasons, during the days and nights. Now, with only two of the original seven artists still living there, Windward was a quieter place. Apartments were much changed. White-collar people lived there now, quietly, privately. Music, if it could be heard at all, came in faint, civilized drifts from radios and sound systems, not resident musicians. Colour these days was polite Farrow & Ball, rollered to a perfect chalky finish; not Winsor & Newton oils squeezed direct from the tube and daubed in a glistening cacophony of hues. There was a distinction between day and night now, between your place and mine. These days, residents wouldn’t dream of entering without knocking.
Nowadays, Windward was sedate, like a peaceable old uncle whose youthful tattoos were hidden from view. Cars were either German coupes or four-wheel drives and were parked neatly, herringbone style. Not Jed’s, though. He parked as he’d been taught, when learning to drive at Windward – askew on the gravel like a skate on a turn. Malachy knew this wasn’t in defiance of the residents’ association standards, it was because Windward was still home to Jed. He couldn’t distinguish between the Windward of his youth and the place today. And he didn’t understand the importance of compliance, because there’d never been rules back then and there’d been harmony. Whenever Jed arrived, his car was flung as if he simply couldn’t bear to be in it a moment longer. Into his childhood home he’d barge, rolling into his older brother’s life, shedding bags, heading for the purple velvet sofa. Into it he’d collapse and sigh as if Bear Grylls himself would have been hard pressed to make light of such a journey home as Jed’s. Really, it should have irritated Malachy, but instead it always slightly amused him. Jed’s return to Windward was akin to that of an adventurer walking through the front door, having spent years exploring the wilds of somewhere far-flung and dangerous. Namely, Sheffield, forty minutes’ drive away.
‘Hey!’ said Jed.
Malachy was finishing off a paragraph on his laptop. Jed waited until his brother closed the lid on his work.
‘The novel?’
Malachy shrugged. He stretched and smiled. ‘Beer?’
‘Music to my ears,’ said Jed. He was now sitting with his arms outstretched as if he had beautiful girls nestling to either side. ‘I’ll get it,’ he said, energized by the thought, springing up from the sofa. He went to the kitchen and took two bottles of beer from the fridge. He noted that apart from beer, there was butter, unopened cheese and a lot of Greek yoghurt in the fridge. And not much else. He looked around. Blackening bananas. Washing-up. The cap was off the Henderson’s Relish.
‘What’s up with the cleaner?’
Malachy took the beer and had a sip. ‘I don’t have a cleaner any more.’
‘I can see,’ said Jed. ‘But why not?’ It was one luxury Jed would cut corners elsewhere in his life rather than relinquish.
Malachy shrugged.
‘What can your girlfriend think?’ Jed said, now noticing a general dustiness.
Malachy shrugged again. ‘I don’t have a girlfriend any more.’ He paused. ‘My girlfriend was my cleaner.’
Jed feared his beer might come out his nose. ‘You were shagging the cleaner?’
‘No,’ Malachy protested. ‘Well – yes. But don’t say it like that – it cheapens it. And she wasn’t “the cleaner” – she was Csilla.’
‘Was she a girlfriend who tidied up – or a cleaner who became a girlfriend?’
‘The latter,’ said Malachy.
Jed started chuckling. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just my cleaner is called Betty and she’s a hundred and forty and has whiskers.’
‘Csilla was twenty-four,’ said Malachy. ‘Hungarian, with a physics degree and a Lara Croft figure.’
‘Fuck,’ Jed murmured, impressed. ‘You’ve certainly shafted yourself – your house is a mess and your unmade bed’s empty.’ He was starting to notice that Malachy was shrugging a lot, not in an acquiescent way, but with apathy. ‘What happened then? Did she no longer tickle your fancy with her feather duster?’
Malachy watched his brother laughing. He’d