‘An hour?’
Frankie thought of Oscar Wilde. A handbag? It gave her a comforting private giggle. Margaret Shaw and Lady Augusta Bracknell. What a fabulous comedy of manners that would make. Who would play her mother? What a role! Her children thought their grandma to be lifted straight from the pages of a Roald Dahl story. When she was very little, Annabel had pointed to a Quentin Blake illustration of Aunt Spiker and said look! it’s Grandma!
‘Let me take your bags to your room. The kettle’s just boiled. I’ve written out everything – and been through it with the kids.’
‘Children.’
‘With the children.’ Frankie paused. ‘I’ve made supper for tonight and tomorrow night – that’s the snack drawer there. I’ve put Annabel’s fruit for school on the windowsill – there.’
‘You have labelled an apple?’
‘Well, the ki – children – put their fruit in a basket in the classroom. You see.’
‘I see.’
‘There’s Rich Tea for you. And real butter. And full milk.’ Frankie thought about what else what else what else. ‘Palmolive soap,’ she said quietly. ‘Vosene shampoo.’
‘Have you fixed that interminable draught in the bedroom?’
‘Yes,’ said Frankie. ‘I hope so. I put the electric blanket on your bed too.’
‘It’s May.’
‘It can get chilly in the evenings still. Here’s a map to Annabel’s school. And here’s Sam’s mobile-phone number.’
‘He has a mobile phone?’
‘For emergencies,’ Frankie lied. Actually, Frankie had bought Sam his phone because he desperately wanted one because everyone has one these days, Mum, everyone. However much she hated technology and couldn’t bear to see children obsessed by screens often at the expense of books, that her son could feel he was cool and that he belonged was something she yearned for him. Sam with his orthodontic braces and protruding ears and two left feet when it came to football.
‘I’d better go, Mum,’ she said. ‘Just call me, or have the kids-children call me, for the slightest thing.’ And she kissed her mother and gave her a squeeze if only to pre-empt Margaret from saying I raised two girls single-handedly, I’m sure I can cope with your offspring, Frankie.
* * *
Jenna needn’t have worried; Scott was at Vancouver airport with time enough to do a little work. He could have gone through to the lounge – they were flying him over business class – but the place he always favoured was right in the middle of the International terminal, in an amphitheatre of sorts dominated by the immense sculpture of The Spirit of Haida Gwaii, a vast jade-coloured bronze canoe filled with symbolic figures of First Nations legend. He sat on a lower tier and set his laptop up on his knees. Somehow, amidst the thrum of people in transit he could concentrate far better than in an airport lounge clogged with the conversations of self-important businessmen. He hadn’t checked his emails for a couple of days and ploughed through them, reading each carefully if only to answer them with his characteristic one or two spare sentences. His agent had emailed to say he needed to speak to him and it surprised Scott to see the missed calls on his phone from yesterday. Had he not checked it since then? He called him to apologize.
His relationship with his agent was a strong one stretching over almost two decades but the business side of his career bored Scott and he found himself listening to the sound of his agent’s voice rather the content of his words. For Scott, even in spoken tones, there was music to the human voice and just now, his agent talking combined with the rhythm of rush in the terminal. To his left, seated a tier up and in a world of their own, young lovers clung to each other, forehead to forehead, eyes transmitting the depth of their goodbye. To his right, his guitar. In his head, suddenly, an idea.
‘I have to go,’ he told his agent. ‘I need to work. I’ll call you from London.’
For a few minutes more, Scott focused fully on the couple, disparate melodies flitting through his mind as the music formed. But the young woman whispered to her lover and they both glared at Scott before moving away, hand in hand, disconcerted. Scott felt simultaneously awkward yet amused. He looked around, surprised that no one else was sitting here. He made another call.
‘Hey kiddo. It’s Scott.’
‘Hey man. I know it’s you – your name comes up, right?’
Scott always enjoyed the fact that the kids saw him as both cool and yet pretty dorky. It made mentoring them touching and amusing, alongside the work and responsibility.
‘I missed your call yesterday – I’m heading for the United Kingdom. But it’s cool for you to use the studio at the weekend. You guys need to focus, eh? Three songs in as many months does not make a great band, Jonah. It’s two and a half, really – you need to work on “She Moves”. You need a killer middle eight – not a middle bleugh.’
‘OK.’
It sounded to Scott as though Jonah was standing to attention. He didn’t want to compromise the kid’s confidence. ‘If you can do that,’ he continued, ‘I think “She Moves” might be your best song.’
‘Good enough for the Festival next year?’
‘You never know.’
‘Cool.’
‘Good,’ said Scott. ‘And Jonah – no wine, no women, no weed.’
Jonah’s protestations made Scott smile. The kids were fifteen, sixteen years old and touchingly serious about being the best band Pemberton had ever produced. They themselves decreed no distraction during band practice.
‘I’ll catch up with you next weekend,’ Scott said. ‘We’ll see if you’re ready to do a set at the Pony next month.’
Jonah’s gratitude tumbled out unchecked.
‘I have to go,’ Scott interjected. ‘They’ve called my flight.’
An airport terminal filled with all types ready to journey up to the skies and off into the world. Departures and arrivals, bound by time. Suitcases with condensed versions of home crammed inside. Stress and hurry, excitement, irritation, joy and sadness. For Scott, there was music in it all.
* * *
London changes quickly. Very quickly. Transient and restless, buildings and commerce and people are constantly in flux. In and out, up and down and out, at breakneck speed. When she lived there, Frankie saw this as a quality; that the city and its inhabitants were progressive and enterprising, pioneering even, and somehow more alive than in any other city. But that afternoon, the rush and pace seemed to blow through the streets malevolently, scuffing up the debris on the pavements, causing pedestrians to rustle against each other as if an ill wind was to blame. When she’d lived in London, Frankie had fed off the brittle energy. Now, back again, she felt bulldozed by it. Only nine months away from it all, suddenly she was the country mouse who didn’t know the etiquette of pavement pacing or jaywalking or cramming oneself into the nooks of a crowded underground carriage. She was walking and walking and not seeming to get anywhere. She was the foreigner now, the stranger in town – returning to a city inhabited by a multinational cabal in a self-centred rush. If Alice ever gave her the chance, she had a series planned for older readers called The Metromorph. As she melded herself into a space amongst the throng in the underground, she scrabbled around in her head and focused on the ideas she’d stored rather than the smells permeating from all those bodies.
A passenger standing right by her spat on the floor. She thought of Annabel and Sam and Norfolk and felt a pang for what was now home. She thought of the sea, the briny mass that had in recent months benevolently pushed its energy right into her when