Wild Weekend Page 20

  While she lay there, another animal thing ran out in the lane. It was a fox. In the half a second it took to cross the track, she saw it quite clearly. Just like the foxes in London, really. A bit more fly, maybe. Running ever so fast, legs a blur of motion, body strangely still, its tail trailing in that slinky way.

  Another fox ran across the road. Then another one. Then two together. Toni realised that she must be extremely drunk.

  After a while she realised that she was also really cold, and that it was a really cold night, and that the fields and everything were breathing out this horrible white mist stuff, so she defied the thorns and pulled herself out of the hedge to get back on her bike and finish the journey to this fucking stupid place that was supposed to be her home.

  The door of The Manor House crashed open because her stepmother had fixed it so it did that, probably to keep tabs on her, and the stairs were really slippery and dangerous, which was obviously another thing her stepmother had fixed on purpose to get at her. Toni fell down the stairs twice, but since God looks after fools and drunks and Gothly girls who’ve lost fifty quid playing pool, and since she was wearing her biker’s boots, no real harm was done. After she’d had a shower, and sat and listened to the Sisters of Mercy for a bit, she felt restored enough to rip the boots off and roll onto her mattress in the attic.

  The noise of the door woke Clare, just in time, because things were not going well in her dream world, where she was about to be dragged off to a blood-spattered torture chamber to discuss her involvement with Mutual Probity. She decided to sit up for a while and read the appendices to the new report. Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher … none of the great politicians had ever needed more than four hours of sleep a night.

  The nightmare had been hyper-real. Masked men with machine guns, who said they were the Fraud Squad, had dragged her out of bed at her home. She had been put in a holding cell full of ostriches that tried to peck her to death, then dragged through a howling mob into a courthouse where this mean judge, who looked exactly like the PE teacher who used to scream at her on the lacrosse pitch more than thirty years ago, told her she was a cancer on society. The prosecuting counsel, in a wig of snakes, demanded the maximum penalty of death by paper-shredder. She was being marched back to Holloway when she woke up. The gateway to the prison was looming over her and they were getting ready to pull out her fingernails.

  Since Toni had been way too drunk to find her headphones, the Sisters of Mercy howled inconsolably from the attic to add to Clare’s distress. I will forget Mutual Probity, she told herself. I will think about responsible land use and the new plan. But her thoughts refused to fall in with the strategy.

  I will find a name for this deal, she vowed. Strategic Land Development Plan – no, too blatant. Fields for the Future? Even worse. Planning the New Jerusalem? Good God, no. No, no, no. I’m too tired, I can’t think. There is nothing to be done about Mutual Probity now anyway. It wasn’t my fault, I did the best I could, I got out at the right time. Nothing is going to come my way from that one.

  The thought of Miranda came into her mind. Hesitantly. Her daughter was always so hesitant. Never said what she thought, never knew what she wanted. Not knowing what you want, of course, is the best way to make sure you never get it.

  In her own way, Clare loved her daughter. She wanted for Miranda the same things she had wanted for herself, a life of proud achievement. Why would any woman want anything else? Proud achievement gave you everything you could possibly want; it filled your time, healed your wounds, paid you plenty and gave you, on a daily basis, that electric tingle in the blood which came from beating the system.

  Clare could not imagine that Miranda might want something else for herself, something more complex, something she herself could hardly define. She could not imagine because she had declined to develop her imagination beyond the vision of her own fulfilment. Imagining things for other people was really quite dangerous. You could end up feeling for them, and then you were stuffed. So Clare’s imagination lived in a cage, and only broke out in her dreams.

  She was beginning to be afraid that Miranda was going to fail. The girl was so fragile. Her father’s influence. He’d spoiled her with sympathy. Now Miranda was a bravely maintained façade covering … what? Clare had never known. The only clue was that secret not-quite-smile that appeared sometimes, to tell you that the inner Miranda was working on something.

  Come to think of it, that not-quite-smile had appeared only a few hours ago. While the dreary young man who seemed attached to this place was going on about the history of Suffolk. Miranda obviously hadn’t realised that her mother was watching her, but it had been impossible to miss the way she had revived while he was talking. And he wasn’t a bad specimen. Not the sort of inbred three-nipple cousin-fucker you expected in the country.

  Romantic love was a concept that Clare despised. In fact, she despised emotion generally: chaotic, destructive stuff, the enemy of personal progress. Not that she hadn’t given romance her best shot. For a few years it had seemed to Clare that she really was in love with the man who became her husband. It was shortly after their marriage that she realised she’d been suckered by society. The man beside her had no interest in her. He was as terrified of her, and of the little bundle that was their son, as he was of the rest of the world. Even now, Miranda seemed to be the only part of his life of which he was not stammeringly afraid.

  What Clare had assumed was courtship on his part was only a desperate dash in the general direction of full humanity, in which he had almost immediately lost heart. The man she had loved, with his gentle eccentricity, dry wit and kind heart, had vanished and been replaced by a twitching, scurfy, subterranean creature forever scuttling under a book to avoid human contact.

  Romance, Clare concluded, was only a nineteenth-century device for the subjugation of women. A modern woman had no need to buy into her own oppression, only touch base with the externals for pragmatic reasons. After all, the world was not completely free of nineteenth-century attitudes, so a woman needed to go along with the pretence of love for the sake of a marriage, which was still a necessary evil.

  A tick in the marriage box was only something you had to have in order to protect yourself from the bad opinions of others. But who was to say that her daughter might not think differently? She’d always been on the soft side. In a playful sense, Miranda might actually enjoy a relationship with a man. Possibly even a man in the hotel business, although she ought to be able to do better.

  Still, since Miranda had to marry, it was good to know that she could respond in that way. If a life of achievement wasn’t going to be for her, perhaps she could still reflect some honour on her mother by landing a trophy husband.

  This thought was immensely comforting. The caterwauling music in the roof had stopped. Something was shrilling outside, probably a bird. It was quite a racket, but not really unpleasant. Clare decided to go back to bed. An extremely comfortable bed. Very attractive, with its flower-patterned quilt and lace-edged pillows. That old elitist look could work, in the right setting.

  All round, it was an extremely comfortable hotel. A good idea of hers. All her ideas were good. It was going to be OK.

  8. Sting City

  Bel woke early and ricocheted out from under her quilt, propelled by the excitement of the charade she was about to stage. She was running on a full tank of irrational indignation. Imagine! That silly woman thought she was in a hotel! Outrageous! And trailing her daughter along with her as if she was some girlfriend of Oliver’s! Why, it was practically fraud! Who did these people think they were? Thank goodness Oliver had worked out what was going on.

  So now, the only honourable option was the sting. The sting would redress this ridiculous insult. The sting would take care of that nasty bailiff man. The sting the two of them richly deserved. Hah! Did they think they were so clever, just because they were from London and went around in silly shoes and ugly jewellery? Well, they’d find out that country people
weren’t so stupid.

  While the sun was rising through the veils of mist, Bel dressed and padded downstairs. A mess of muddy boot-prints tracked up the hall and up the staircase. Toni, of course. Poor lost child. What to do about her? Swiftly, Bel fetched the mop and restored the entrance to hotel-like perfection, washing away her pangs of stepmotherly guilt as she did so.

  Next, the transformation of the dining room. Since she had spent the last few months set-dressing the house for the buyers she hoped would reward her as soon as she sold it on, all the accessories were to hand. The beautiful oak refectory table, meant to suggest elegant dinner parties, slithered readily across to the wall to become a serving surface. She bustled ingeniously around the ground floor collecting smaller tables. The dining chairs, high-backed, their broad seats upholstered in fresh checked linen so they begged the sitter to stay put, pour another glass and have a third helping, clustered around them with a will.

  Bel had always loved to entertain and the saddest part of being a widow was that you were expected to have nothing but twee little lunches with your girlfriends, instead of filling your house with party guests and spending a day loading crostini for them, or urging friends and family to come over for Sunday lunch and pulling a mighty roast out of the oven to reward their compliance.

  Years of hospitable marriage had endowed her house with everything it needed to meet the present challenge. She took the tablecloths and napkins out of her linen cupboard. The best silver, the silver she had inherited from her first husband, she picked out of the mahogany canteen that had only seen the light of day for Oliver’s christening and her second wedding.

  Flowers! Vases! She grabbed a coat and some boots, and went out into the garden with her secateurs to cut her newly planted daffodils, forage for primroses and bring down branches of blossom from the gnarled old tree at the far end of her land that had survived the builders. There were some cut-crystal tumblers which could hold posies for the tables.

  Then it was back to the kitchen. Bel had enjoyed being a full-on mother. It was more than ten years since Oliver had filled her house with hulking, monosyllabic and everhungry friends who would be transformed into appreciative young men by the simple offer of a cooked breakfast. Wistful for those days, she still filled her freezer with the supplies she needed to produce that transformation, and so quantities of sausages, bacon, black pudding, croissants, bread and orange juice were ready to be defrosted and deployed in the sting.

  Eggs, butter, tomatoes and mushrooms were there in the kitchen already, and as for jam – what woman who goes the whole nine yards with country living fails to fill a shelf or ten with jam? Damson, plum, rhubarb and ginger, apple and bramble … and the jam dishes, and the spoons, and the plates and the cups … It was a new pleasure to be able to produce this illusion of lavish hospitality from the things she had assembled in the course of doing what came naturally to a woman with a warm heart, pert taste buds and a liking for lovely possessions.

  ‘Fantastic!’ whispered Oliver as he arrived, a little bleary, when the sun was just above the hedges. ‘Mum, you’re a genius. It’s totally convincing. I’d book in here myself. And you’ve done all this in no time at all.’

  He brought the products of his time on the computer, seven printed cards. Inside a charming border of wild flowers, black and white with cross-hatching in lino-cut style, were two messages. Six cards read simply: Breakfast: £17, Full English Breakfast: £25. These he placed next to the daffodils on the small tables. The last card was smaller, and he placed it on the console table in the hall. It read: We regret we are unable to accept credit cards.

  ‘We’re being so naughty,’ said Bel, looking extremely pleased with herself.

  ‘Naughty?’ her son hissed, checking with the ormolu Empire mirror to see if he looked sufficiently like a waiter to pass in the full light of day. ‘Not as naughty as what that woman wants to do to my farm. To the whole bloody country. Are they awake yet?’

  From the innards of the house, the plumbing hissed into action. ‘Sounds like it,’ Bel suggested.

  ‘OK,’ said Oliver. ‘Let’s get ready to rumble.’

  At The Pigeon & Pipkin the day began grudgingly, with limp toast and tepid tea served in a corner of the bar where the smoke from last night’s cigarettes still fusted in the air. From the kitchen, the curses of the landlord’s wife, as she ripped open packs of frozen crabs ticks to mix with soya mince for the special dish of the day, Soft-Shell Ocean Pie, could be distinguished over the dragging tape of The Carpenters’Greatest Hits.

  Carole, Ashok and Video Guy were the only visible guests. They made bold to discuss their plans over the meal.

  ‘How exactly do you liberate bees?’ Carole asked.

  ‘Well, generally,’ said Ashok, ‘I just put on my freedom suit and, you know, turn over the hives so the tops kind of fall off and all the bees can get out.’

  ‘Can’t they get out anyway?’ asked Video Guy.

  ‘I suppose so,’ Ashok said. ‘I guess it is more kind of a symbolic gesture than an act of actual liberation.’

  ‘Where do they go when they’re liberated?’

  ‘Oh, they go off and swarm somewhere in the forest.’

  ‘What forest?’ the Video Guy asked.

  ‘I’m sure you have forests in England,’ said Ashok, smiling forgiveness.

  ‘There was a sign on the road,’ said Carole. ‘Some forest or other. We’d better be sure. I don’t want to find we’ve liberated thousands of bees to have them die of pesticides in the fields. Excuse me,’ this was to the landlord, who was cringing in their direction with a new pot of tea, ‘isn’t there some kind of forest round here?’

  ‘They call it Yattenham Forest,’ he said. ‘Out beyond the village, that way.’ He put down the teapot and gestured vaguely. ‘But there aren’t any trees. Well, there are some trees, some pines and sort of mixed woodland, I suppose, but not like you’d think in a forest.’

  ‘Not Hansel and Gretel,’ the Video Guy suggested.

  ‘They’ve talked about planting trees.’ Momentarily mystified by the folkloric allusion, the landlord hesitated, then decided to plough on. ‘Getting it back to be a proper woodland like it used to be, but nothing gets done, you see.’

  ‘But there are some trees?’ Ashok said.

  ‘Oh yes. There are some of them.’

  ‘That should be OK,’ Ashok reassured his companions. ‘As long as there are trees. The queen just finds a place and the rest of them just, like, gather around her. Then they build a real nest, up high, away from the bears, in the hollow trunk of the tree or something. That’s not decaff, is it?’ He turned to interrogate the landlord’s retreating back. ‘Can I get some decaff over here?’

  ‘You do know we don’t have bears?’ asked Video Guy.

  ‘Of course I know that.’ Ashok spoke with honeyed sincerity. ‘Bees are kind of instinctive, you know. They do what they’ve always done. So they’re always wanting to nest up in the trees, even when their natural predators have been hunted to extinction.’

  Hunted to extinction. He let the words lie there on the table, with the toast crumbs and the smeared residues of last night’s beer, accusing them. You Old Europeans. You’ve trashed your heritage already, and you’re so bad you’re taking issues with me now when I’ve come over here from a much better place to help you out. This is Baghdad all over again. Kosovo all over again. Normandy all over again.

  ‘So this freedom suit,’ Video Guy began.

  ‘I’m afraid I only have the one,’ said Ashok, wondering what to do about his piece of toast. ‘Is that actual butter?’

  ‘Sorry, yes,’ Carole told him. ‘You can have the marmalade. That doesn’t have animal products.’

  ‘Are you sure? Not even gelatine?’

  ‘What’s a freedom suit?’ asked Video Guy.

  ‘Well, it’s kind of an old biological warfare suit that somebody got from some army place, but some of the guys painted it up, so it does make the point about what we
’re doing. And of course it is pretty well sting-proof.’ Ashok peered closely at the label on a plastic-wrapped individual marmalade serving. ‘Are you sure this is animal-free?’

  ‘Meaning you’ve been stung?’ asked Video Guy.

  ‘No, no. Not at all. Least, I haven’t been stung yet, and I must have done twenty missions since we started the AASS. But like I say, there’s only the one suit. I could only get one in my luggage and stay under the weight you people allow on the plane.’

  ‘So, if I’ve got to film you, I’ve got to take a chance that when you liberate these bees they won’t come for me, they’ll just whizz off happily to find this forest without any trees? They get angry, bees, don’t they? My insurance doesn’t cover that kind of thing.’ Video Guy’s most lasting impression of bee behaviour came from old sci-fi films, in which maddened swarms usually pursued screaming blondes to a fatal outcome.

  ‘Don’t people die from bee stings?’ Carole demanded. ‘We don’t want that kind of negative publicity.’

  ‘Cheers,’ said Video Guy, feeling martyred enough to be entitled to take the last slice of toast.

  ‘There have been cases,’ Ashok admitted, ‘but only if the person who gets stung is allergic or something. Or maybe a baby.’ Cautiously, as if sudden death might occur at any moment, he opened the marmalade and spread some on his toast.

  ‘Well, that’s all right then,’ said Video Guy. ‘Unless I am a baby or something.’

  ‘Well, you’re certainly acting like one,’ Carole said.

  She weighed her options. Most important, they needed a video. Which would require a certain level of theatricality. Meaning a man in a freedom suit. But Video Guy was looking more than a little sick at the idea of recording a mass bee liberation without protective clothing. And there was only one suit.

  ‘I think we should do some kind of demo first,’ she said. ‘We should picket the place, maybe.’