‘How are you doing, Stella?’
‘Have you come straight from Cripplegate?’
‘Pretty much,’ Fel said.
‘Drinks. Would you like a drink?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘I’ve got juices, Rose’s Lime, Vimto.’
Fel laughed.
Stella’s smile was uncertain. ‘You all drink Vimto, don’t you? At least, Georgy does.’ She shot a look at me.
‘It’s fine, Stella. They do all drink Vimto. It’s practically a religion.’
‘Do you have a beer?’
Stella blinked at Fel. ‘Of course.’
‘Fel drinks alcohol.’
‘Oh.’
‘And Vimto,’ said Fel. ‘But a beer would be lovely.’
‘Stuart, can you go and get Fel a beer from the fridge next door?’
I slipped off my shoes and stowed them under the bench just inside the back door. I crossed the dining room to the heavy, lime-green fridge-freezer. The room was nothing like I remembered. Stella had it fitted out with subfloor heating under marble, and a set of wilfully eccentric pieces from Portobello Road Market had taken the place of the old cupboards. This evening, in preparation for the gathering, the room was all lit up with tea-lights and candles. It looked like Stella was trying too hard. I returned to the tiny galley kitchen with Fel’s bottle of Pils. ‘Is there an opener?’
Fel, recognising the brand, took the bottle, screwed off the cap and stuck her tongue out at me.
‘Now, Felicine, do go and sit down. Stuart, give me a hand.’ Stella thrust a handful of coriander at me. Some of it dropped on the floor. ‘Here,’ she said, pulling a chopping board down and over the sink: the fit was precarious but there was no other surface to use. She had already taken the dining table out of action with place settings and glasses for Vimto and wine. ‘Can you manage there?’ She fished about in an open drawer and fetched out a mezzaluna. ‘As fine as you can.’
‘A knife would be better. I need one hand to steady the board.’
She found me a knife too small for the job; I sawed away at the stuff in my fist, pressing down to keep the board in place.
‘Oh dear,’ said Stella, gazing at the mess her cooking had made of the kitchen. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’
‘It all smells fantastic.’
‘Everything smells fantastic when it starts to burn.’
‘There. Is that fine enough? Good. Now, what else is there to do?’ Having got through that labour with my fingers still intact, I was game for anything.
Because the Bund only ever ate meat of its own devising – vegetal meat, efficient, sterile and relatively homogenous – Stella had elected to stick to vegetarian food. She was not a bad cook, but she was out of practice and the recipes she had chosen – I read them over her shoulder out of books with titles like The Incredible Spice Wunderkammer and Adventures on the Cardamom Route – had far too many stages to them.
‘Just grind all that into a paste and fry it,’ I told her, pointing to a particularly knotted passage in Under the Tamarind Tree. ‘Make life simpler for yourself.’
‘But it’ll burn!’
‘It won’t burn, it’ll be full of liquid from the onion. Just toss it about in some oil until the water evaporates.’
She looked up at me with wide eyes. ‘You think so?’
‘Go and talk to Fel,’ I said. ‘She’s on her own in there. I can fix this.’
She kissed me on the cheek.
It was easy enough to handle. Stella had forgotten the rice. It was still soaking in far too much cold water. I drained half of it off, added cardamom and butter and salt, and was just sealing the pan with a sheet of foil when the back door opened and Bob and Jim came in.
‘I found him,’ Jim bellowed, putting his arms around me. ‘I found Dad, bet you can’t guess where.’
‘How’d you get in?’
‘Some pillock left the garden door open.’
I wanted Jim to be still and let me look at him: I had seen him twice in the past two years, both vanishingly brief encounters on his way through London, and none of us had received so much as a letter from him since he’d been selected for the army’s Space Force. He had just finished a month in purdah at a submarine base in the Firth of Forth, doing whatever passed for basic training in that bizarre and brand-new organisation. Tomorrow was Christmas Day and he was off by air for Woomera and the rocket construction effort there. After that, there was no telling when we would see him again. If all went well, the next time we saw him he would be on television: first Yorkshireman in space.
If Jim’s ebullience hadn’t already given him away, his breath certainly would have. ‘Good drink?’ I asked him.
‘Should have come with us, bro.’
I wrestled Jim off, one hand still steadying the rice pan. ‘Christ, you’ll have me tipping this over.’
Jim laughed and ruffled my hair.
‘How’re you doing, Stu?’ Bob’s face was flushed, maybe from the sudden heat of the kitchen, more likely from however many hours he had spent drinking with Jim.
‘Go through. Take your shoes off. There’s beers in the fridge.’
Stella appeared at the living-room door and hugged the new arrivals. Once the rice pan was sealed, I set it on a low heat, checked my watch and followed the others into the dining room.
Stella’s new dining table was very smalclass="underline" a find from her scavenging expeditions in search of props for DARE. She told us it hailed from the mortuary of a defunct hospital. The zinc wrapping was tarnished here and there, and you could not help but try to guess which had been the table’s head end and which the other.
Fel sat at the end of the table, Jim near her and Stella next to him. ‘Food in fifteen minutes,’ I announced, taking a seat opposite Jim. Dad sat beside me. This left the chair at the head of the table vacant for Georgy.
‘I don’t know where he can have got to,’ said Stella, finding things to fret about. ‘He said he’d be here to help.’
Fel must have asked Jim something about his work because the next thing I knew he was moving all the glasses about the table in an effort to explain the hydrodynamics of small nuclear devices.
Bob was aghast. ‘Should you be telling us any of this, lad?’
Jim laughed. ‘It’s no secret, Dad. The ship’s half-built.
You half-built it!’
Bob smiled a guarded little smile. ‘Only shift work, son.’
‘Anyway,’ said Jim, ‘I dare say if you lot had wanted, you’d have blasted off years ago and this Earth’d be riddled with holes like a Swiss cheese.’
I looked from Jim to Fel, unsure what was going on.
Jim saw me and shrugged. ‘The Bund, I mean.’
Fel smiled him a cold smile. ‘Blowing things up is not our style.’
Jim laughed and raised his beer. ‘Trusting us to do the heavy lifting, eh?’
‘We don’t trust you to do anything,’ Fel said, holding my brother’s gaze.
No one knew how to react – no one, that is, but Jim, who met my eye and whistled his appreciation. ‘Got a live one here.’
‘Bob?’ Stella placed her fingertips on the table: a subtle call-to-order. ‘How was Betty?’
Bob met Stella’s smile with a rare smile of his own but he said nothing.
Jim filled the silence so quickly, there might not have been any silence at all. ‘I thought she looked jolly fine. Stuart?’
‘I saw her last month,’ I said. ‘She seemed – well, she seemed healthy, didn’t she, Fel?
‘God, she must have been glad you were there, Felicine!’ Jim exclaimed, thumping the table. He pronounced her name to rhyme with ‘twine’. ‘The daughter she never had.’
What that was supposed to mean, I had no idea, but Fel took it in good part: ‘How much have you drunk?’ she asked him, laughing.