Wild Weekend Page 4

  ‘Fantastic!’ the Adviser encouraged her, already seeing his triumphant return to the office with the new minister’s head. ‘And responsible land use, that’s the buzzword at the Treasury.’

  ‘We must talk about the package,’ she segued, nifty as a tango diva.

  ‘Of course, of course.’ She had thrown him. Clare Marlow also had a fine instinct for the use of silence. She paused, mouth half open, as if ready to deliver the key word, waiting for his offer.

  There are no silences in The West Wing. The Adviser panicked. Words piled up against his teeth, scorched his tongue, broke free of his lips and spouted over the table. He gabbled. He garbled. He actually uttered the upper limit of the figures he had been authorised to indicate.

  Clare Marlow shut her mouth. She allowed the light of inspiration to burn down behind her eyes. Slowly and blatantly, she checked the restaurant door for the arrival of a more interesting contact. She flashed recognition at a couple of people she might have known at nearby tables. She sighed a gentle sigh, the sigh a mother allows herself when she picks up her baby and finds it needs changing, again. Poor thing, can’t help it.

  ‘That’s just ballpark, of course,’ he twittered helplessly. ‘There is some flexibility, a bonus tariff, performance-related, of course.’

  She put him through another thirty seconds of silence, then uttered the figures she required.

  The blank area in the middle of the Adviser’s face seemed to spread until he looked as if paralysis stretched from ear to ear.

  She shrugged. Her right hand twitched slightly towards her cold cup of camomile tea.

  ‘Ah …’ He was gasping like a doomed goldfish. ‘Ah … of course. Of course. Ah … I’ll put that to them. Report back. Shouldn’t be a problem. May need to put in a few tweaks …’

  ‘It shouldn’t be a problem,’ she repeated back to him.

  ‘Ah … no. No problem at all. That I can foresee. So …’

  ‘You can report back,’ she encouraged him, a hint of warmth appearing in her face.

  ‘Certainly. Will do.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Ah …’

  Was there something else? She let her left eyebrow ask the question with a light, ironic twitch.

  ‘A constituency.’

  ‘Meaning …’

  ‘We need to get you elected.’

  ‘Well, yes. Naturally.’ Of course I did not forget that.

  ‘There’s a by-election coming up in North London. Safe as houses. Absolute heartland. Shouldn’t be a problem.’

  ‘Good. Now. About the brand.’

  Clare racked up the tension for another couple of minutes, then allowed her eyes to roll up and to the right, body language for ‘I’m having the Big Idea now.’

  ‘Responsible land use. Ethical production. Global viability,’ she intoned the new mantra. ‘We need a name that says all that. How about …’

  The Adviser was quivering like a racing greyhound waiting for the hare.

  ‘Agraria,’ said Clare Marlow. Just a shade of a drawl on the middle ‘a’, just a hint of projection on the final diphthong.

  ‘Genius,’ the Adviser breathed. ‘Agraria. They’ll love it.’

  In the taxi on her way back to Mutual Probity, Clare had a moment of proper pride. ‘You’ve come a long way, baby,’ she said to herself, ‘and now the sky’s the limit.’ Westminster. The Cabinet, I should hope. My crowning achievements start here. No cocktail apron for me.

  She looked out on the grey winter streets of London. Where had it all gone right? Clare had no memory of an epiphany. Memories of any kind just took up space in the mental hard drive. Nostalgia was death. To have a past at all was to deny yourself a future. She was not in the habit of looking back over her life, but just then she was curious to see if there had been some great defining moment when she had rejected the cocktail apron and set out on the road to glory.

  All that came to mind was a conversation she had had at school with a girl with fluffy fair hair, a lazy, irritating girl who had been memorable mostly for the idiotic excuses she made for forgetting her homework, a girl who had never got more than a C for anything, whose greatest gifts were for mucking about and fooling around, and who was prime suspect when the swimming pool was emptied, or a fire alarm set off, or on the never-to-be-forgotten morning when the marble bust of the school’s founder was discovered wearing a pair of red lace knickers on its head.

  The whole school community, down to the first years and the cleaners, understood that the Clares of this world were not expected to mix with creatures like the fluffy girl. The whole community except the despised one herself. Somehow they had ended up on the same sofa in the sixth-form common room, on a day towards the end of the great summer cycle of exams. Even in their fast-track London girls’school, where the inmates were lashed ruthlessly in intellectual blinkers towards scholarships to Oxford and Cambridge, there is a whiff of Saturnalia in the air on a day like that.

  The fluffy girl, obviously too stupid to understand the taboo she was breaking, said to Clare, ‘What are you going to do when you’re grown up?’

  Clare returned the accepted response. ‘Oh, I don’t know.’

  ‘You’ll go to university, won’t you?’ the fluffy girl pushed her luck.

  ‘My mother says it’s silly to look too clever,’ Clare said.

  ‘So does mine. Boys don’t like it, do they?’ And the fluffy girl had smiled, half to herself, as if she had extracted the answer she had wanted, and Clare, at the age of sixteen, had had a lightbulb moment and decided that she was not fluffy, and never would be fluffy, and would never make excuses, or get a C, or listen to her mother, or do anything else that the fluffy girls of this world did. Being too clever, and looking too clever, were going to be her life’s work.

  ‘But that’s bollocks, isn’t it?’ she said confidently. And the word ‘bollocks’, which passed for an obscenity in their world, made the fluffy girl giggle.

  Clare never giggled. Giggling was frowned upon at that school. Giggling was frowned upon at Cambridge. Giggling was for the fluffy girls. That small noise, echoing unexpectedly down the years, gave her a warm sense of superiority. Her favourite feeling.

  Naturally, Oliver’s first move was to buy a tractor. A shiny blue and yellow tractor, the boy’s toy to end all boy’s toys. Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow – I’m a farmer and I can get on my tractor and ride it down to the pub. Every morning, it twinkled at him joyfully from the dim interior of the concrete general-purpose building He had never considered money so well spent.

  ‘You could have got a grant for that,’ pointed out Florian Addleworth in The Pigeon & Pipkin one evening.

  ‘You should’ve come to see me,’ said Colin Burton. ‘I was looking to get a buyer for my mine. She’s a bit light for what I want, now I’m sticking with the pigs. I could’ve moved up to a bigger one and you could have had mine cheap.’

  ‘Mm,’ said Oliver. ‘I’ve heard yours, of course.’

  Nothing was said for a minute or so. Oliver looked at his two new neighbours and they looked at him. Florian took a diplomatic sip of his pint.

  ‘You’ve heard it, have you?’ said Jimmy, another farmer whose land bordered Oliver’s, a wiry man with bowed legs in worn jeans and a gap between his two front teeth that made his smile look more humorous than he intended. Nobody was sure how he got his nickname, Jimmy the String; maybe because he was so thin and so sinewy, or maybe because he preferred baling twine to any other material for leading his dog, closing his gates, lacing his trainers and keeping on the doors of his Land Rover.

  ‘Yup,’ said Oliver.

  They all three raised their glasses. Oliver reflected that the tractor he heard growling around the edges of his farm in the early morning sounded as sick as it was possible for an engine to be when it was still capable of running. Florian, Colin and Jimmy reflected that this new wallet wasn’t half the fool he looked. The landlord, who was doing what he always did and listening to the conversation w
hile fiddling about with his glass-washing machine at the far end of the bar, decided that the wallet was going to give Colin Burton a run for his money, and about time too.

  The sixth person in the pub was the local vet, Lucy Vinny. Being a woman, and unaware of the rules of conversation between men, she said to Colin, ‘Half the county must be able to hear that heap of old iron. What is it with you, Colin? Every piece of machinery you’ve got on that farm of yours seems to start with problems the day you buy it.’

  This was considered by all the four men to be quite unnecessarily candid a remark.

  ‘Anyone know what the score is?’ Oliver asked immediately.

  ‘Nil–nil,’ said Florian. ‘Five minutes of the first half to go.’

  ‘Still time, then,’ added Colin.

  ‘Yup, early days.’ Oliver agreed.

  Jimmy said, ‘Best get one in soon, eh?’

  Oliver and Florian, not wishing to appear elitist, had been talking about the soccer match between Norwich City and Ipswich Town, while Colin and Jimmy, who regarded soccer as having being ruined by celebrity pussies while rugby remained the sport of unsullied low-profile manliness, were interested in the France v Wales international at Cardiff. All four suspected that they were at cross purposes but chose not to go there. Especially not with a woman listening.

  After this bonding moment, it was determined in the pub that Oliver was better than the average wallet, and in fact probably a good bloke, and certainly worthy of being helped out when he needed it. Which he obviously would, sooner or later and almost certainly sooner.

  Oliver knew a lot about farming. His goal was to run the best organic farm in England and, with his heart set on this destiny, he had learned all he could from books and from the Internet.

  ‘Isn’t there a college for people like you?’ his mother had asked, when she had reluctantly accepted that her son was not going to be a glorious banker for ever. ‘Agricultural college, or something. Where young farmers go to learn the latest techniques.’

  ‘The latest techniques are ruining the land and producing food that makes people ill,’ he informed her. ‘It’s the ancient farming methods I’m interested in.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure they teach those too,’ his mother had argued, her voice tailing off because she knew that she had bred the stubbornest creature on earth and there was really no point trying to talk to him once he’d made up his mind.

  Oliver had no desire to learn in the company of others. It seemed an uncomfortably intimate idea and a pointless waste of time. Instead, like a Victorian philanthropist obsessed with reforming streetwalkers, Oliver fantasised of the tawdry fields, cruelly exploited by agribusiness, which would grow green and innocent again under his benevolent care.

  Now he had found the fallen woman of his dreams. Saxwold New Farm, at the end of Saxwold Farm Lane, near the village of Great Saxwold in the county of Suffolk, was, he assumed, a prosperous homestead once. Now it had been reduced almost to dust by the demands of the frozen pea industry.

  The hedges had been grubbed out and only a few rusting wire fences marked the borders of the fields. Docks and ragwort, the ugliest and most invasive of weeds, plants more at home on urban wasteland, were taking over the grass. Here and there a few trees had survived, those too gnarled to be worth felling.

  Where the land should have sloped prettily down to the bend of a small stream that meandered through it, the copses and thickets had been cleared and the naked shoulders of the earth were eroding down to a marsh.

  Over all this desolation stood the ruin of the old farmhouse, some canting walls bodged together from old cobbles and new bricks, half a roof, a pile of masonry and two fallen beams poking out like fractured bones. At the opposite end of the spread was the farmyard, the tractor’s concrete palace and the barn, roofed in rusting corrugated iron. It had been used to store pesticides.

  Finally, on the lane, standing upright as if traumatised by witnessing the rape of the land around it, was a small cottage built of red brick and flint, its walls bowing visibly under the weight of a lurid new tile roof. At the back was a neglected garden garnished with the rusty carcass of a car.

  Around the edge of his land curved the lane, leading to the ruin. Up the lane and a few minutes down the B237 road in the direction of Yattenham St Mary lay the rest of the village of Great Saxwold, a handful of dwellings in the same brick-and-flint. One housed a dead shop, with sun-bleached, flyblown advertisements for Vimto and the Daily Telegraph still curling at the windows. Another was a former school, now three luxury apartments for weekenders. No one had got around to taking down the blistered red sign for the post office, long since rationalised and its letter boxes gagged with steel plates. The village huddled protectively around its last remaining amenity, The Pigeon & Pipkin.

  The present management of this pub had installed slippery, fake-mahogany armchairs and gaudy brass chandeliers, hoping to emulate a traditional urban wine bar trying to emulate a traditional country inn. Oliver decided that, since his days as a serious drinker were now behind him, the vulgarity of The Pigeon & Pipkin was not a material issue.

  His crusade of redemption began immediately. Money was no object when he at last indulged his fantasies. Colin, Florian and Jimmy watched with open mouths as the helicopter which Oliver had hired circled their land for a morning, while the co-pilot took photographs from the air that revealed the ancient field boundaries.

  After some pleasant hours on the Internet, Oliver found a dowser who was recruited to search for stopped-up springs; then he hired a digger to excavate a pond. He had the recent pantiles ripped off the cottage roof and called in a thatcher to restore the cottage and the barn to their traditional splendour.

  The master plan for Saxwold New Farm had been elaborated over years. The sad fields of weeds would be ploughed in and mulch crops planted to transform the soil from a sour, black crust to a rich, light loam. He had long yearned to sow comfrey and now he could ride out on his tractor to scatter the seeds.

  He passed glorious wind-scoured days marking out the mediaeval hedge banks, on which he reinstated hundreds of hawthorn and hazel bushes. On the stream banks he installed copses of alder and young oaks. Finally, he bought a ton of wildflower seeds to mix with fine grasses and scattered them rapturously on the meadows-to-be. Nothing in his whole life had made him happier than watching that first mist of green appear over the dark earth.

  The first phase, the redemption of the land, he then considered complete. Next he planned to have sheep, a traditional lowland Suffolk breed, broad-backed, black-faced, dainty-footed, all set to nibble his new-grown grass and grow fat just as their ancestors had done since before the Romans whacked down the A12 from Londinium to Camulodumum.

  In this frenzy of biological redemption, Oliver lost his taste for numbers. He spent money like a drunken sailor. Or, indeed, a drunken banker, which was exactly what he almost became. Unopened bank statements found their way into the kindling basket and were used to light his roaring log fires. The radio woke him at 6.20 with Farming Today, when his spine was still as stiff as a concrete post from dragging sacks of seeds aboard the tractor the day before, and he collapsed into bed at nine every evening, intoxicated with environmental righteousness and several pints of Foulsham’s India Pale Ale. Finance seemed a far-off unreality, part of the hellish life he had left behind. Visits to his on-line investment sites were made less and less frequently; the need to check any of the balances of his affairs seemed quite unreal. So when his holdings underperformed, Oliver never noticed.

  His lavish-style of farming, however, was much commented upon at The Pigeon & Pipkin and, since it had been accepted by all who drank there that that Oliver Hardcastle was a good bloke, the community decided to step in to save him from himself.

  ‘You want to have a word with Florian,’ Colin advised him. ‘He sounds like a right pussy, of course, but I’ve never known anyone get more out of the Ministry bog-roll.’

  ‘Bog-roll?’ Oliver muttered, feelin
g the sweet refreshment of his first gulp of Foulsham’s radiating through his weary body.

  ‘The paper comes out of the Ministry,’ Colin expanded. ‘About grants and stuff. If there’s a grant for it, Florian’ll find it.’

  Oliver looked to Jimmy for confirmation. Colin’s methods, he had discovered, were not his. Jimmy’s methods were not his either, but Jimmy, and his father and his great-uncle before him, had farmed the same land at Saxwold for more than seventy years.

  Jimmy did not waste energy in conversation. When the silence became unbearable, he finally squeezed out a sentence. ‘Florian’s a good man for the paperwork.’

  Colin decided it was time for unpalatable truths. Next to him, he pointed out in what he considered to be a confidential tone, Florian was the richest farmer in the area, having obtained a huge government grant to plant a vineyard according to biodynamic principles. His business plan counted on the fact that he and his key workers, who were in fact his brother and his brother’s wife, and their five children between the ages of eleven and one, would qualify for an impressive range of benefits. His new dark green Range Rover gleamed in the car park.

  ‘Look at that place of his,’ Colin continued, forking in the last of his Salmon and Tuna Cobbler. ‘Says it all. Painted up to the tits, top-of-the-range equipment, no expense spared.’

  ‘I thought he’d … well, you know. I thought his family helped him out.’

  ‘I thought you said you were supposed to be a banker?’ said Colin. ‘People like the Addleworths never take a punt with their own money. But you bankers don’t like us farmers very much. So the Addleworths send their sons to these universities to learn how to get money out of the government. And whatever they paid for young Florian’s education, it’s worth every penny. I mean, British wine? Who’s going to drink the stuff? But you can get a hell of a lot of money for making it.’