Wild Weekend Read online

  Whatever Dido had felt, whatever had drawn her across the Covent Garden pavement like an invisible string, whatever spell had taken hold of the two of them and wrapped them in its magic bubble and kept them safe from the crushing great ugly world outside, Miranda had never felt it. If it hadn’t been for Dido, she would never have believed that there was such a phenomenon. Things like that just didn’t happen. To her.

  But since they happened to Dido, and since her friend was now sitting on the floor looking up at her, transfigured like a martyred saint in a painting, Miranda felt the force. And the force made her say, ‘Well. OK. I can’t say no, can I? We can work something out. But it’s got to be the pub – definitely. Mother will just go postal if it’s more than the car. You know what she’s like.’

  And Dido squeaked with joy, and leaped up and ran on the spot, her feet thumping the floor softly in her flopping angora bedsocks, and flung her arms round Miranda’s neck, getting curls in her fennel tea.

  ‘Oh hooray! Oh, thank you so-o-o-o-o-o much! Oh, it’s going to be so-o-o-o-o much fun. Oh, you really really are an angel!’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said a little later. ‘About your mum. I’ve got very good with mums now. I shall charm her. You’ll see.’

  ‘You’d better.’

  ‘What are you going to do, anyway? On this weekend. You and your mum. What do you usually do when you have a holiday?’

  ‘We never have holidays. She’s too busy. Or I’m too busy. This is a first. First on an adult-to-adult basis, anyway.’

  A nostalgic sequence started emerging from Miranda’s memory. Holidays before her mother changed. Gîtes in France, apartments in Spain, visiting friends in England. There hadn’t been much money, she realised from a mature perspective, but the old Mum had been pretty clever. Especially in her pony period. Miranda winced slightly. To think, she’d once had a pony period.

  ‘Didn’t you used to go on those pony camps?’ said Dido. ‘I used to be so jealous. And your mum. She used to be a real Marbella cowgirl.’

  ‘That was then,’ Miranda said firmly. ‘That was the old Mum.’

  In accordance with the rota at the parish church of St Oswin in Great Saxwold, Bel Hardcastle was doing the flowers for the Easter weekend. The occupation raised her close to her own personal nirvana. To Bel, no work of human hands anywhere in the world surpassed the glory of an English country church decorated for Easter. The soaring swathes of blossom, the golden blaze of daffodils, the ivy trails, the moss nests, the scarlet early tulips, the occasional glory of a precocious crown imperial, the little pots of violets and primroses done by the children. It was all absolute bliss. This year, it would be bliss as art-directed by her.

  Her pleasure did not have much to do with God. Bel didn’t dare believe in God. Her parents had both renounced their religions for love of each other. Both her husbands had been vaguely negative about the idea and her son was a robust atheist. All the men in her life agreed that religion had been the cause of all the wars in history and all the cruelty, barbarism and genocide that went with them.

  And the actual facts about Easter were really quite distasteful. Crucifixion seemed like a ghastly thing to celebrate and it quite put her off churches that they all contained statues of a man being tortured like that. And resurrection? Well, that was just silly. And the hymns weren’t nice either, not even the old ones. The green hill couldn’t be far enough away for her.

  Nevertheless, the process of bedecking the church with the traditional tributes from her garden made her rapturous with joy. It meant that she was part of the village, an admirable and gracious and traditional part. Maybe it was widowhood, and all the anxieties that came with it; maybe it was racial memory, from generations of ancestors who had never been part of their own community, only part of its ghetto, and had kept their wealth portable and their expectations low and their heads down for centuries, but Bel wanted passionately to belong. The fact that this weekend, Easter weekend no less, had fallen to her in the rota, seemed like God’s official blessing on her new status as the châtelaine of The Manor House.

  Naturally, she had conscripted Oliver to help. He was leaning off a ladder trying to get a grip on a branch of frothy yellow forsythia and steadying himself with his free hand, which was wrapped around a carved griffin’s head. From this vantage point, he noticed a muscular man dressed in denim standing at the South Door.

  People normally came through the South Door rather flustered, having had to prise open the wire mesh gates that stopped swallows nesting in the vaulted roof of the porch in unsanitary numbers. They would stand there hesitantly, getting ready to drink in ancient peace and looking about them for the famous twelfth-century font carved with a bas-relief of John the Baptist.

  This man was showing no readiness to quaff deep draughts of ancient peace, nor any curiosity about the font. He walked into the apse with a menacing lack of hesitation.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Oliver asked in a sturdy voice indicating that he would stand no nonsense, even if his mother had bullied him up a ladder with a bunch of flowers.

  ‘Not you, sir,’ the man replied, in a familiar voice indicating that any man who had allowed himself to be bullied up a ladder was beneath his consideration. ‘The lady. If this is Mrs Annabel Lumpkin.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Bel squeaked. ‘However did you find me?’

  ‘Young lady at the house told me you might be down here,’ the man continued. ‘I’m from the court. I left some papers with her when I came by a few weeks ago. Did you by any chance have time to look at them?’

  ‘Ah …’ Bel flapped her hands. All her life, when things had failed to work as they should, she had flapped her hands as if she believed that stirring up the air would somehow whip up a solution to her dilemma. She had flapped her hands over flooded carburettors, burnt toast and the deaths of both her husbands. It hadn’t worked then and, she realised with a ghastly freezing sensation in her stomach, it wasn’t going to work now.

  If there was one mannerism which Oliver observed in his mother that drove him absolutely crazy it was the flapping of her hands. He took them personally. Every frantic phalange felt like a disaster appeal aimed straight at his soft filial underbelly. His usual response to a maternal hand-flap was to stomp away in a morose silence and come back only when he was quite, quite sure that the danger of emotional blackmail had receded.

  This time, however, he was up a ladder, with a branch of blossom in one hand and a leering gargoyle in the other. It was not an ideal position for a dignified exit. In fact, since the West Door and the Vestry were both locked, the only way out of the church was past the large man in denim. He was one hundred per cent trapped in a hand-flap situation. There was nothing to do but take charge.

  Oliver speared the flower arrangement with the forsythia branch, more or less in the position that his mother had been trying to describe to him, then let go of the griffin and came down the ladder.

  ‘Oliver Hardcastle,’ he said, shaking the bailiff’s hand firmly. ‘This is my mother. It seems that her affairs have got into a bit of a mess lately.’

  ‘Yes, it does,’ the bailiff replied, smooth as custard. ‘I’ve got another of these notices here. And another one came into the office just as I was leaving. I’ll have to be back with that next week now.’

  Manly and capable, Oliver took charge of the papers. His eye briefly grazed the sum owing. It was in five figures. Smaller than his own overdraft, but bigger, much bigger, than all the spare cash he could lay his hands on just at that moment.

  ‘What’s the form in a situation like this?’ he continued, trying to exude man-to-man confidence.

  ‘Well, the debtor pays the sum owing,’ the bailiff answered, with more than a hint of sarcasm. ‘Unless the debtor hasn’t got the money, in which case the court will consider a request for time to pay.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Oliver, sensing that his mother’s hands had ceased to flap. ‘Time to pay. How does that work?’

  ‘You fill out thi
s form.’ The bailiff, like a magician, flourished more paper from its hiding place. ‘Giving a statement of your financial affairs. You make a proposal to pay and the court accepts what it considers is reasonable.’

  ‘By instalments,’ Oliver suggested with a hopeful nod.

  ‘By instalments, certainly, but in this case, in view of the sum involved and since there has been a notice outstanding quite a few weeks already, it would be best to send the first payment with the application.’

  ‘What sort of money would they be …’

  ‘Five hundred should do it. Cash or banker’s draft.’

  From behind him, Oliver heard his mother squeak again. ‘No problem,’ he said firmly. ‘Thank you so much for explaining all that. We’ll get something to you by Monday. No, it’s Easter, isn’t it?’

  ‘Looks like it,’ said the bailiff dryly, indicating the rioting daffodils all around him.

  ‘Monday’s the bank holiday. Tuesday. Is the court open on Tuesday?’

  ‘Tuesday as ever is,’ the bailiff said, furling the rest of his documents into his briefcase with a jovial flourish. ‘I’ll say good afternoon, sir. Madam.’

  Once they had heard the tinny slam of the swallow-prevention door, Bel let out a wail, the sort of noise a kitten might make when it felt in need of a saucer of real milk and had been offered a saucer of soya-based kitten formula instead. ‘Awful man! How could he? The Vicar might have come in,’ she protested.

  ‘He’s only doing his job,’ Oliver said. Bel wailed again. There was no hope for it, he was going to have to put his arm round her. ‘Surely someone can lend you five hundred pounds?’

  ‘No, they can’t.’ She sniffed and sniffed again. ‘I’ve borrowed every penny I can, Oliver. I must be on some list of naughty people, now. The last time I went to the hole in the wall the machine ate my card. I hate those things. Why can’t we all go back to chequebooks? Much nicer.’

  ‘Because everyone always wrote cheques when they hadn’t got any money,’ Oliver sighed. That very morning, his bank’s computer had sent him a letter to tell him that if he put any of his cards in their holes in the wall, they too would be consumed by the machines. He could feel his mother’s breathing getting irregular. Any minute now she was going to cry. The one thing he hated more than the hand-flapping was crying.

  ‘Let’s go to the pub,’ he said, giving her a hug. ‘I can buy us a drink, at least.’

  ‘I haven’t finished the flowers,’ she protested, indicating the ancient flagstone floor still littered with foliage. ‘And I promised the Vicar you’d help me with the bell ropes.’

  ‘What bell ropes?’ he asked, feeling suddenly weary. Much too weary to be leaping around St Oswin’s Norman bell tower like Quasimodo. Which was no doubt what his mother had pledged him to do.

  6. Finding the Right Occasion

  It had been very difficult to find the right occasion.

  ‘I need to be the headline speaker at an event that’s appropriate to the message,’ Clare instructed her staff. They looked uneasy.

  ‘There’s always the invitation to the Royal Agricultural Show,’ one of them ventured.

  ‘I don’t want to be photographed with any cows. Not now, not ever.’

  The group winced.

  ‘National Farmers’ Union conference? Always gets a lot of coverage.’

  ‘Farmers are not the target audience,’ she said, trying hard not to snarl. ‘We anticipate resistance from the farming lobby. That’s why it’s important to plant our flag in the moral high ground from the beginning.’

  The staff promised to look into the question and trailed back to their desks. In the normal run of life, the Minister for Agriculture never made headline speeches. He turned a blind eye to the state of his realm and a deaf ear to the needs of his petitioners and kept his head down. This need to speak on an issue of national importance was totally out of line.

  In the end, Clare herself had to spend a midnight hour on the Internet to find the right event. The Royal Conservation Society conference struck her as ideal. Staged at the right time and the right place – just before Easter, in some cavernous public hall handy for the Westminster TV studios. She had the Adviser phone and offer her presence.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he said, bearish all of a sudden. ‘Conservationists can be a bit blinkered. Maybe you could open an agricultural college or …’

  ‘And stand up and tell all the young who’re studying to be farmers that they’re wasting their time and getting into debt for nothing?’

  ‘Oh, yes, well. There is that. But you could just not make a big announcement. Low-profile it. Just publish the report, draft a bill and let it take its course through Parliament without anyone wanting to start a public debate or anything.’

  Low-profile? No. No. No. This is about profile. Profile is all. With profile I have power, without it I am powerless. I need television and I need it now.

  ‘I know I’m new to this,’ she said, without a smile, ‘but it looks to me as if the one way to start a debate is to give the impression that you’re trying to avoid having one. There will be a public debate about this, whether we seek it or not, and that being so, I want to control it from the start. Our agenda, not theirs.’

  ‘Dangerous,’ the Adviser muttered.

  ‘Danger is my business,’ she told him, as if neither of them were aware that Mutual Probity had collapsed into insolvency, her successor had been arrested at his mock-Tudor mansion in Surrey and a Bank of England investigation was about to start. ‘I think, rather than take questions after the speech, we can set up a separate press conference. Not so intrusive. We don’t want to look as if we’re hijacking the whole event. There are rooms in that building, aren’t there?’

  And so Clare Marlow, CEO of Agraria, addressed the conference of the Royal Conservation Society on the theme of ‘Unlocking Our Land’. Two thousand delegates filled the auditorium. It was hard to see much through the lights, but they seemed docile enough. A lot of youngish, deconstructed types in V-neck fleeces, a few grey heads. As she had guessed, not much diversity, not even many women. So much the worse for them. Time to wake up their ideas.

  When she had given the Adviser the first draft of the speech, he had admitted that it was the most scintillating moral tap dance he had ever read.

  There was applause when she was introduced. Polite. Mystified, understandably. Perhaps even wary. Probably the first time a senior politician had taken notice of them without being forced into it by a demonstration.

  ‘Our land is the most precious resource that we in Britain have,’ came somewhere near the beginning. The audience was silent. No argument there.

  ‘In past generations, we thought of our land as our essence, what Britain was all about.’ The past! That great evil, the resort of war, depression, slavery, famine and barbarism! Who could want to continue what had gone on in the past?

  ‘But what is a nation? Its land or its people? And who does the land really belong to? And what is the price that we are paying for their ownership?’ Paying a price. Us and them. Always pushed the right buttons, those ideas.

  Time to introduce the report. Country Life: A Cost-Benefit Analysis. Infrastructure. Subsidies. The real cost of a rural road, per mile. The real cost of a school bus, per pupil. The price of a British lettuce compared to a Spanish one. To sum up: high-quality open spaces in minority ownership, given over to producing food nobody wanted at prices nobody could afford.

  She moved on rapidly to the implications. Food quality. Health and safety issues. Bad management. Global inequality. There was still silence among the audience. Being experienced in corporate apathy, it didn’t worry her. It was exhilarating, putting over the argument that had been devised so carefully by the light of so much midnight oil. She was rolling out the facts like troops into battle, sending them out on the offensive with victory in sight.

  ‘We must ask ourselves, is it right that ownership of the land with highest amenity value should remain sterile in the hands of
a few individuals who are paid by the many simply to keep that resource for themselves?’

  Something like a soft growl sounded from the hall. The space had a hideous echo. Difficult to tell if it was one person talking, or several muttering, or a consensus gathering strength.

  ‘Let us look at this issue from the other side,’ she said. ‘While millions of acres of redundant land are being preserved as if they were holy relics …’

  The growl grew loud and harsh. Did somebody shout? At the side of the stage she saw a white face. The Adviser. If he was going to funk at the first speech, he should make himself invisible.

  Don’t get shrill. Do a Maggie, drop the pitch. She started with the numbers, aiming for a good strong contralto. ‘The need for land is growing. Our cities are becoming more densely populated, with all the social evils of overcrowding that that implies …’

  Good, the audience were silent again. She was on firm ground. Crime. Violence. Drug and alcohol abuse. Mental health. Imploding social services. Hospitals, schools, transport, blah-blah-blah, blah-blah-blah. Totally attack-proof. No grounds for disagreement whatsoever.

  Then on to house prices. Tricky, but she’d identified the right approach. Rattle the cage. Risky, but it was the only way. Boom and bust. Affordable housing, key workers. Crashing prices. Nation of debtors set to become a nation of bankrupts.

  Meaning was a wonderful thing. Put two facts together – but what were facts? A fact was just the information you needed at the time. Put two of them together, any two, and any fool would feel proud of himself for finding the link. Meaning was pixie dust, meaning was moonshine, meaning was the leprechaun’s pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Meaning only existed because people wanted to find it.

  Between any two facts, most fools would find the same link. Add a third and the whole thing turned into DNA, the self-perpetuating spiral, the secret of life, pulling in facts by itself, making bonds at random, on and on for ever, spinning out meaning to infinity, letting everybody believe they were wise and omnipotent and in charge of the process. When really, they were just children playing a computer game, pressing buttons to make things happen in the world of unreality they’d bought at a store all the time.