‘Oh don’t be ridiculous. What kind of fool do you think I am? Really, Oliver!’
‘But you won’t get her away from the drugs thing if you take her off to Suffolk,’ he reasoned. ‘Moving her to the country won’t help. They’re all doing stuff there.’
‘Not so easily and probably not in the college car park,’ Bel said. He recognised a resolute manner that his mother very rarely displayed. Hope of damage limitation began to drain away. ‘And don’t forget, Oliver,’ she dropped her voice almost to a whisper, ‘in a couple of years, when she’s eighteen, she’ll get her own money and I won’t be able to do anything about it. Do you want her to be giving all her inheritance to the drug dealers?’
Toni was an heiress, something Bel never talked about because the thought made her so anxious she felt faint. Mr Lumpkin’s brother, a gay man with a gift for property investment, had died before him and left his niece a small block of flats in Brighton and the accruing rents therefrom. Since his experience of life had led him to believe that all mothers were evil and that personal wisdom is perfectly formed well before the age of eighteen, he placed this little fortune in trust for Toni and made sure she would get all as soon as she was old enough to vote.
‘Don’t you see,’ Bel pleaded with her son, ‘this is my last chance to save her and get her into a good environment. If I wait any longer she’ll be legally an adult, she’ll have her own money and I won’t be able to do anything, will I?’
‘But you don’t have to panic,’ he tried to assure her. ‘It’s probably just a phase. Don’t worry. I’ll give you the money back, I’ll find another buyer …’
‘I do have to panic, Oliver. It’s now or never. What’s the matter with you, all of a sudden? It’s as if you’re annoyed that I want some of the nice quiet country life that you’ve been enjoying yourself the last few years. Let’s face it, I won’t be getting married again, will I?’ Now Bel shifted to her personal warp-speed overdrive, emotional blackmail. ‘You are my only son, after all. Why shouldn’t I live somewhere we can see each other every now and then without having to plan it like a military operation?’
Oliver sighed. Part of what he loved about living in the country was living his own life, with all the freedom he could desire to exist on the slimy cuisine of The Pigeon & Pipkin, to leave his sweatshirts unwashed and talk bollocks to Colin and Florian and any other companions who were less than his intellectual equals.
A mother, at this time of life, just cramped a man’s style. And his mother, unfortunately, was an absolute prize cramper. He could visualise the future too well.
Bel was capable of thinking up a dozen things a son could do for her every day. He could see his future with crystal clarity. Investigate the septic tank. Prune some savage rose. Change really fiddly light bulbs. Help her with shopping whose volume rivalled an international aid shipment. Talk to the tattooed thug at the garage about her car. Dig a vegetable garden. Get rid of the wasps’ nest. Would you just, another little job, and while you’ve got the ladder out. Fix this. Pick up that. Have a little word, dear. A man’s work was never done with a woman like Bel Hardcastle in the neighbourhood.
Nor would he ever hear the end of his filial obligations.
‘Wouldn’t you be happier somewhere like Cheltenham?’ was his final throw. ‘Suffolk’s quite flat, you know. And cold.’
‘And cheap,’ Bel had said in a decisive voice. ‘You need the money and I need a bargain. And a pension. Have you ever thought about what I’m going to live on in my old age?’
‘You had a pension.’
‘It’s with Mutual Probity and it’ll be worthless in a year, the way they’re going.’
‘You’re making a good living.’
‘It’s very up-and-down, doing people’s houses. And you have to have insurance, nowadays, and heaven knows what else. London’s become a nightmare. The last job I did the parking charges cost more than the plumbing. And I’ve got debts to pay.’
‘I’m not blaming you,’ he insisted. ‘Of course I understand. I just don’t see why you have to come and ruin my nice quiet country existence.’
‘Darling, you’ll hardly know I’m there. We’ll probably see each other less after I move in than we do now. Anyway, I’ve already bought it.’
‘But I can give you the money back,’ he said again, his heart once more sinking like an out-of-control elevator hurtling earthwards in a Hollywood thriller.
‘My mind’s made up,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to talk about it any more. I shall have enough to do making the place habitable. Really, Oliver, you should be grateful that somebody’s bought it at all. It’s nothing but a heap of rubble.’
Saxwold Old Farmhouse was, at that time, slightly more than a ruin but still nothing resembling a house. It lay at the far end of the twenty-acre home field, just some old walls, a pile of blackened stones with a couple of charred beams sticking out of it, and a lot of ivy trying to cover the farmhouse’s shame. Oliver had soon heard that the fire of 1997 had been started by the owner himself, faking an accident in his first attempt to solve his financial problems.
An old sepia photograph, or rather, a copy of an old sepia photograph in the bar at The Pigeon & Pipkin showed that it had once been a fine small manor house. Oliver had no inclination to restore it himself. Homemaking, he felt, was a woman’s job. Real men knew nothing of curtain headings and pargeting. ‘The cottage’ll do me,’ he had said.
Twenty acres seemed quite a large field until his mother moved to the other side of it. From the front door of his cottage he had a direct view of the collapsing corrugated iron lean-to that was to become his mother’s new kitchen. He had done very little to make his cottage comfortable, and Toni needed to complete her final term of school, so for a few trying months Bel supervised the rebuilding work from Putney by making constant telephone calls to her son.
Once the roof was on and the lavatory was installed, he saw her determined figure in new green Wellingtons, standing in the daily rain on the pile of rubble from which her kitchen would rise. He could hear her voice, a plaintive but persistent coo like that of a dove in lust, as she directed the builders.
Oliver heard another noise, even less sweet to his ears, the savage drone of a moped on which Toni raced up and down the lane. At heart, Oliver did love his mother, even if she cramped him. Toni, however, he detested. From the day she had arrived in his life, a sulking dead weight hanging from her father’s veiny hand, he had felt a loathing so passionate he was almost ashamed of it.
Bel liked old husbands. She had married two of them quite easily, having a muzzy smile, creamy skin, Slavic high spirits and a way of flirting as if she really, truly, honestly didn’t know what she was doing, all of which fitted exactly the ideals cherished by many men over the age of sixty. Given that her stepdaughter felt no responsibility to treat her decently, her son was the only young thing that Bel Hardcastle really liked. Even though he was throwing his money away on his farm, driving her crazy by turning up his nose at every girl he met and showing no interest whatever in giving her grandchildren.
Her first husband, Oliver’s father, an accomplished bon viveur, had fallen asleep at the wheel of his Jaguar on the road to a vineyard somewhere near Bordeaux, run into a tree and died when he was sixty-three, his wife thirty-seven and his son only eight. Her second husband, a bewildered but energetic widower in his sixties, had seemed like the perfect solution to all her difficulties, except that the surname he had to offer her was Lumpkin. He even came with a daughter, Antonia, then two years old and produced by her nanny with bows in her hair, who promised to complete the perfect boy-plus-girl family for which Bel had yearned.
They had ten happy years together before Mr Lumpkin, a clumsy man at the best of times, tripped over on a golf course in Majorca, knocked himself out and drowned in an artificial lake, making Bel a widow again, and not a rich one. Trustingly, she had spent her own money on Aubusson-style carpets and hand-painted murals at her husband’s London flat, not rea
lising that he did not exactly own it. He proved to be a life tenant only, and had died leaving her homeless and considerably poorer than when they married. Not to mention the problem of little Antonia.
The child was the only flaw in what had otherwise been a marriage of perfection. Bel had imagined that bringing up her stepdaughter would be a simple matter of handing over jam sandwiches three times a day and letting her play with the shifting population of adoring dogs and ungrateful cats that snoozed on various surfaces around their home.
She imagined that all children wanted what she had wanted, and indeed enjoyed, a childhood like a long sun-kissed dream devised by E. Nesbit. The parents’ role was to provide visits to the zoo, Beatrix Potter books to read together and, for a little girl, adorable puff-sleeved cotton frocks with smocking and sashes.
That regime, without, of course, the frocks, had raised Oliver successfully, but did not work on his new sister. In the year before Bel Hardcastle came into her life, Toni’s mother had left her, and her father, and disappeared. Bereaved, confused and two years old, Toni focused her feelings on the most blameable object in her universe, which was Bel.
From a very early age, Toni had seen herself as a ghetto child and taken a pugilistic attitude to her stepfamily. The terrible twos turned into the frightful fours, the screaming sevens and the traumatic twelves. By fifteen, she had developed hair like an electrocuted lavatory brush and mauve-lidded eyes, which glared menacingly at everyone who approached her.
Even in kindergarten, the things Toni could do to an adorable smocked frock were painful to behold. She said that zoos were cruel, and Beatrix Potter was one sick fuck. She was first suspended from school when she was five. Her main interests were vodka and black eyeliner, both of which she used to excess. When Bel moved her to Suffolk, rural life did not slow her down at all. Now her moped buzzed around Great Saxwold until the small hours of the morning, sounding like the attack of a mutant hornet.
‘Responsible land use,’ Clare Marlow said to the Adviser. He was now her own Adviser, on loan to Agraria from the Special Adviser’s department. ‘Talk me through the PM’s thinking on that.’
He coughed. ‘To be honest, it’s more the Chancellor. He’s thinking about making land reform a plank in his housing strategy. The main plank, actually.’
‘It was in the pre-pre-budget leaks,’ she said. ‘Anything new since then?’
He shrugged. ‘Population set to grow at about two hundred thousand a year. Or a million every five years, two million per decade. Housing costs in the South East up another 17% in the first quarter of this year. Bottom line – the price of a small family house within commuting distance of London is now enough to buy a Saudi prince a palace. Only answer, as the Chancellor sees it, is to build more houses. Only problem, no land to build on.’
‘Well, there is land, obviously.’ Clare Marlow went out of London when she had to drive to an airport to go on holiday. Even around the airports, she had noticed loads of land just lying around idle, with nothing but a few trees on it or some sheep that looked rather grey. So much better if all that waste ground was turned into hotels or a fourth runway or something.
She also had memories, from her childhood, of vast boring spaces out somewhere beyond the airports. Her parents had occasionally made duty visits to relatives in these regions, piling into their Standard Vanguard and toiling down a road signed to Basingstoke. These trips were not holidays. They were the duty an English soul pays resentfully to its blood ties. A holiday, to her mother and father, involved a charter flight to Spain. All England had to offer was tedious grass, pointless hedges, messy old trees, acres and acres of mud, and, of course, the rain. Why, the whole country was just rotting away out there.
‘Oh yes,’ he agreed, ‘there’s plenty of land. It’s the right sort of land that’s the problem.’
‘The right sort of land?’ Clare frowned, her brain-wheels spinning. ‘Shall we say: appropriate residential resource?’
‘Absolutely.’ God, the woman was worth her weight in gold. She was almost worth what they’d agreed to pay her. ‘Appropriate residential resource. Absolutely.’
‘Which is what?’
‘It’s not what people think it is.’
‘Well, things never are what people think they are. In what way?’
‘People think that … appropriate residential land is a brownfield site.’ Did she know what that was? She gave nothing away, it was hard to tell. ‘A place that’s been built on before.’
‘Old Army base, old airfield, old graveyard, old factory, old bus garage …’
‘You’ve got it.’ He thought about mentioning the Millennium Dome but decided against. OK, that had been a brownfield site, but people didn’t talk about the Dome now. The word had left the language. A chain of pseudo-French restaurants had renamed itself. At New Millbank, if it was necessary to mention a semi-spherical structure, people were going for ‘cupola’. ‘The King’s Cross cupola,’ he’d heard people say. Cupola was kinda cute, kinda European, kinda post-Tate-Modern. So … don’t mention the Dome.
‘But a brownfield site isn’t appropriate,’ Clare prompted him, wondering why he’d suddenly gone blank on her. She’d allowed forty minutes for this meeting. Ten seconds of silence was just a ghastly waste.
‘It’s the development cost,’ he explained. ‘Your people are working on a paper for you. Basically, greenfield sites are up to two-thirds cheaper to build on. No old drains to dig up, no old power lines to rip out, no existing structures to raze, no problems with chemical residues or anything like that. Just turn up on Day Zero and start building.’
‘I get that,’ she told him, trying not to sound impatient. ‘And this is Agraria’s problem why?’
‘Because …’ Here it was, the pitch, the big one, the real reason she’d been hired, the justification for the salary bigger than the national debt of a small country. ‘Most of the greenfield sites we’ve identified are actually agricultural land. There’s literally thousands of acres of redundant farmland out there, and we’ve got to find a way of getting hold of it.’
‘So? Can’t you buy it? Farmers aren’t averse to making money, are they?’
‘Well, actually yes, there is a faction you could actually say that about, according to the groups we’ve done in the rural communities. Bizarre attitudes, some of them. And there’s protective legislation, of course. Ghastly cat’s cradle of laws that go right back to World War Two. Labyrinth of planning regulations too. But the Chancellor’s office have done a brilliant job rationalising the whole nightmare, just sweeping away the old mess and putting in place a simple system of checks and balances administered directly from Whitehall, cutting out all that potential for provincial corruption and speeding up the whole process. That’ll be in the next pre-budget leak.’
‘So it’s a problem of perception, then?’
Yes! She was good, damn good! ‘Exactamente. It’s all down to information management, working with people’s expectations of the countryside, that kind of thing. People need to realise that our cities are living organisms and should not be contained by crude and insensitive planning legislation.’
She was making notes. The great thing about women ministers, he’d noticed, they made notes, rather than getting their assistants to ring up your assistants the next day and ask for your notes.
‘And what’s the problem with these people?’ Clare asked.
‘We’ve found that there’s a lot of clinging on to the old-style romantic ideas about the rural environment. Even after everything, the swine fever, the salmonella, the foot and mouth, the dioxin run-off, the tornadoes, the two-headed lambs, the radioactive sugar beet – after all of that, there’s this hard core that want to believe all that Victorian nonsense about a green and pleasant land. And there’s a lot of arrogance too. People think they’ve got a right to enjoy green space which they haven’t paid for.’
‘Well,’ she said, in a dangerously reasonable tone, ‘my predecessor didn’t help you ther
e.’
‘I know,’ he sighed, careful to keep the sigh regretful, not apologetic. ‘All those TV commercials for farm experience holidays and rural tourism.’
‘All that guff about landscape stewardship. Landscape stewardship! Nobody can pronounce that, what were they thinking?’
‘It seemed an appropriate response in that time frame. Back then, people didn’t appreciate that agriculture had a part to play in the bigger picture. That’s what the PM meant when he decided to look outside the political sector for a CEO.’
‘So what you’re telling me is – nix to all the Fieldcare policies, slam on the brakes, screaming wheels, whole new direction, why waste land growing grass when it could be your new patio?’
‘Basically, yes.’
‘Right,’ she said, rising to her feet in her eagerness to meet the new challenge. ‘Why isn’t that paper ready yet?’
She was holding out her hand to shake goodbye. He experienced something between an arm wrestle and martial arts throw, and found himself in the outer office, walking past her assistants on his way to the lifts. Oh, the joy of a corporate-sector appointee! The new Minister’s time-management skills were truly awesome. And she was so tall.
The new Minister sat down and called in her civil servants. They had been a disappointment to her. The Blob, as she was calling her predecessor for short, had at least hired in some younger faces, but they had not been the hottest graduates of their years. Some of them had degrees from the University of Exeter rather than from Oxbridge.
Exeter, Devon, indeed all the territory west of Basingstoke, Clare now regarded as her own personal Afghanistan, a godforsaken mountain fortress where the last of the fanatical terrorists were probably holed up in caves, wearing the Barbour instead of the burqa.
‘Responsible land use,’ she said to her staff. ‘That’s my strategic focus. Our priority targets will be in the South East. I want maps. Land-use maps. Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Warwickshire, Avon, Nottinghamshire, Cambridge, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk … basically, everything south of The Wash, excluding Wales. And Cornwall, you needn’t bother with that.’
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