The Road Home by Rose Tremain Read Free Book Online Page B

Ina often said. “Rust does my work for me. Rust makes everything delicate in time.”
    Lev leaned on the edge of the skip. Anxiety about Ina was something from which he’d always suffered, even as a child, noticing that, somehow—in a way that he couldn’t describe precisely—his mother appeared ghostly, as though, in the race through life, she was an entrant nobody had seen and who crept in last, always last, with worry in her eyes. Lev often wished this wasn’t so, but it
was
so. And now, for years, Ina had spent her days making jewelry for other women, women for whom one didn’t have to feel any particular sorrow, women with confident smiles and fashion boots, women who smoked and laughed and defied the world. Ina had never defied the world. She sat in shadow in a wood cabin, lit by a paraffin lamp that whispered like a living and breathing thing, and her workbench was covered with metal shavings and lengths of copper wire, and her hands were burned here and there by the hot torch and the soldering irons, and as time wound on her eyesight was becoming poor. Lev knew that nobody wanted to think about the day when that eyesight failed.
    “But she will see Princess Diana,” Lev told himself now. He could imagine Ina propping up the card at the back of her workbench and letting the white paraffin light illuminate the rose-blushed skin and the hesitant smile, then sitting back in her chair to gaze at these lost things and at the fascinating intricacy of the diamond tiara. And Maya would come into the cabin sometimes and stare at Diana, too. And once in a while—not often—the two of them might turn the card around to reread the words he’d written:
I am going to find a job today.
    Lev picked up his bag and heard the bottles clank. He cursed himself for daydreaming. Daydreaming may have been all right during the lunch hour at the Baryn lumber yard, but you couldn’t daydream and survive in cities like Glic or Jor, let alone in London. “Cities are fucking circuses,” Rudi once remarked, “and people like you and me are the dancing bears. So dance on, comrade, dance on, or feel the whip.”
    The heat was rising again. You could feel it coming off the stained pavement, see it shimmering above the cars. Lev prided himself on being strong—a strong, lean-limbed man—but now he felt himself begin to stagger. Sweat ran down his forehead. The other people in the street started to look grotesque to him, fat and mocking and sick. He’d somehow naively imagined that most English people would look something like Alec Guinness in
Bridge on the River Kwai,
thin and quizzical, with startled eyes; or like Margaret Thatcher, hurrying along with purpose, like an indigo bird. But now, in this place, they appeared indolent and ugly and their heads were shaved or their hair was dyed, and many of them sucked cans of cola as they walked, like anxious babies, and Lev thought that something catastrophic had happened to them—something nobody mentioned but which was there in their faces and in the clumsy, slouching way they moved.
    Lev walked into a cool, brightly lit place called Ahmed’s Kebabs. An Arab man was cleaning the tiled floor with bleach. Behind a counter, a gray cone of meat revolved on a perpendicular grill. A chill cabinet had been stocked with torn lettuce, chopped tomatoes, and breads of different kinds. A large glass-fronted fridge was filled with cans of cold drinks.
    Lev put down his bag, and the Arab man turned and looked at him while he squeezed out his mop.
    “Excuse me,” said Lev. “Do you have anything to give me?”
    The Arab man picked up the bucket and mop and took it behind the counter. Then he turned and examined Lev. His eyes were worried and wild, and his hair was glossy and disorderly, like Rudi’s.
    “Sit down,” he said.
    Against the counter were lined up three chrome-and-plastic stools, so Lev hoisted himself onto one of these and rested his arms on the cool countertop. The Arab man set