‘So you’d be quite safe. Nobody would see you.’
‘You’re sure it isn’t far?’
How bizarre, Miranda thought. I’m feeling a bit protective here. She does look pathetic, all covered in slime and stuff. I’d be hysterical if it was me. Poor old Mum. She’d hate me to say that.
‘I’ll be back as soon as I can,’ she said, unwrapping her scarf and unzipping her parka. ‘Here. You can put these on. You’ve got your mobile, haven’t you?’
‘Haven’t you got yours?’
‘You’d better have it then, if it’s the only one we’ve got.’
And that, thought Miranda, as she turned back to investigate the remains of the bridge, is the most family-type conversation we’ve had for years. I feel quite like giving her a hug. Would she welcome a hug? Don’t be silly.
The bridge, she could see now that it was fallen, had been made of old railway sleepers, several used as piles and driven haphazardly into the bank at each side, and one balanced on their ends, making a path across the water. On the far side, one of the upended sleepers had broken away, causing the span to tip and fall. But the nearest end was solid, and over the stream, within easy reach, hung tree branches of promising size, and the collapsed pile itself was partly above water. Surely with a little daring …
‘Do be careful, darling!’ she heard her mother behind her as she stepped up on the fallen bridge. Slither, grab – skip! She was over the other side. Easy-peasy. Me Jane.
‘I’ll be back soon,’ she promised, and set off with a pleasant sense of having mastered a little bit of nature.
Being single by an English hedgerow in spring is a poignant experience. A lot of budding, swelling and unfurling was happening among the vegetation. The shining faces of violets, coy and flirtatious, were half-hidden by their heart-shaped leaves. Shy primroses, so pale and modest, were waiting to be discovered in the long grass by your feet, and above your head, great billows of white blossom showered petal confetti all over you.
Leaves bursting out of their buds, stems uncoiling like whips, growing tips of everything thrusting out everywhere. Everything was urgent, and blatant, and bent on display. Arums flashing open their green outer jackets, waving about a pale, penis-shaped item that was upstanding inside. Hairy young ferns uncurling their new shoots. Merkins of moss, breaking out in russet fuzz. Once your eye had seen and your mind had made the connections, every hedge was a great green orgy.
Nor were you the only one to have noticed. As Miranda swung along the path, she observed that birds were fluttering about in a frenzy. Tiny finches were dipping and twittering side by side on the same twig. Big soft doves cooed passionately in the tree tops. Magpies played kiss-chase from one field to the next. All in pairs, every one. Damn it, she was the only living thing in the landscape that wasn’t courting.
Clare, meanwhile, took a seat on the fallen tree. After she had picked every single minute green leaf of duckweed off her coat, she had nothing on her mind. There was nothing she could do, and nowhere she could go, having taken off both her waterlogged boots and both her wet socks and placed them neatly on the bark beside her. She could think about things, and, hating to waste even half an hour of time, she intended to think about things, especially the responsible land use strategy for Agraria, but her mind was unwilling and anyway, her Palm was at the hotel and she hadn’t even a pencil to write stuff down, so what was the point?
The sun was in her eyes. A large bee zoomed past, intent on something. Strange that a mere insect could seem so purposeful. Ridiculous, of course. What purpose could an insect have, after all?
Perhaps this accident would have an up-side. Miranda definitely seemed to be a bit more confident, now she had a mission and a role. She’d always needed to have her time structured. Left alone, her whole life would probably have just drifted away …
Something was looking at her. She had the-definite feeling of being watched. For a moment, Clare was sure it must be a photographer or a journalist or something. Damn! Where were they, whoever they were?
Good heavens, it was an animal. Quite a way off, up at the far end of the field. Some little brown animal was looking at her. She saw it when it moved. Very odd, the way it moved. Irregular, ungainly. Almost like a little kangaroo. Tee-tum, tee-tum. Then it paused, and sort of sat up. It did look very like a kangaroo, but smaller, of course, with longer ears.
Tee-tum, tee-tum, tee-tum. The animal was coming towards her again. Extraordinary, it didn’t seem worried. It was completely calm. And brown. Long ears with black tips. Rather beautiful, in a bizarre sort of way. It couldn’t possibly be a kangaroo, unless one had escaped from a wildlife park or something. Could it have rabies? Would it bite her? Was it angry?
Good Lord. Another one. Coming up the slope, rather quickly. Not exactly running. Bounding, really. Cutting easily through the long green grass, almost like a boat bobbing over the waves. A funny elliptical movement. Boing-boing-boing! Just as brown, ears just as long. More like a rabbit than a kangaroo, really.
Whatever they were, the two animals had seen each other. Getting closer. The first one stood up on its hind legs. The second one stopped for an instant and twitched its ears. Then it moved forward again.
Why, this was like being in the middle of a wildlife documentary. In her mind’s ear, she heard David Attenborough’s confidential murmur. ‘The two animals approach each other warily through the long grass …’
The two of them were face to face now. And jumping about. Trying to bop each other with their forelegs. Extraordinary. You’d have said the two rabbit things were dancing. Or maybe fighting. Leaping all over the field, now, making crazy shapes, tearing off in different directions with that curious lolloping run then they turned – zap! As quick as a whip, a corkscrew turn. So fast you could hardly believe you’d seen them do it. And standing up on their hind legs again and getting into a real boxing match.
As she watched, the shape of the creatures stirred some memories. Those long, long legs, jointed eccentrically; those long, long ears, tipped with black. The gleaming eyes on the side of the small head, the sinuous body, the magical speed of their movements.
Never in her life had Clare seen a hare, nor had she ever consciously noticed a photograph, a film or a sculpture of one. The March Hare who met Alice in Wonderland was not part of her heritage; her parents had felt that they knew their place and avoided all literature, especially that written for children, because it was the province of the upper classes and might damn them as having social pretensions. All the same, from a sludge of unremarked impressions and a long-denied share of the collective unconscious, Clare found the name. A hare. Two hares. Real, true, living, mad March hares, and she was a witness to their lunacy.
She was impressed with herself. For the benefit of no one, a beatific smile spread across her face, smoothing the forehead that had been wrinkled with anxiety for years and soothing the jaw that she habitually held tense and ready for denial. Her time instinct, which normally monitored the progress made on her enterprises in every waking minute, gently failed as she watched the animals leaping over the shining grass.
When eventually the hares cavorted out of her sight, Clare’s mind glided into a state not far from a waking dream. She was so seldom aware of the earth and sky that they were now a marvellous surprise. So wide a sky, so much light, so many clouds. And the damp ground, cool under her bare soles, giving off a rustle of tiny lives, of grass blades growing and insects bustling between them. It seemed reasonable to think that the world was full of wonders.
Miranda arrived some time later, with dry clothes and news of a taxi waiting at the end of the field. She found her mother looking surprisingly calm, and in an unprecedentedly good mood.
At the end of the afternoon, Tolvo and Juri transferred one precious sterling note from Tolvo’s money belt to his pocket, took their dictionary and set off down the lane, making for Great Saxwold. The village was a disappointment to them. The building which was definitely labelled ‘sho
p’was shut, and had obviously been shut for years. A careful search of all the other buildings did not turn up anything else resembling a place where two very hungry men would be able to buy a chicken. Nor was there evidence of a bus going to anywhere else that might have a shop.
They found a place that seemed to be a restaurant. There was a picture of some kind of bird on its sign. Tolvo tried to decipher what could have been the menu, written on a double-sided blackboard in the yard outside. The names of what might have been dishes were impossible to understand and the prices were enormous, much too much for food, almost enough to buy a car. As there were quite a few cars in the yard, they decided that this was some kind of car exchange, and trudged on.
For a while they stood by the roadside, hoping to hitch a ride from a passing motorist, but nothing came along except a truck driven by a thin small man who shook his head at Tolvo’s upraised thumb. In the end they went into the church.
‘This really isn’t too bad,’ said Tolvo, looking around the interior. ‘It’s obviously a poor village so they don’t have much gold, but they’re doing their best with these flowers.’
‘What are we doing?’ said Juri. ‘We can’t get a chicken here. There isn’t even a picture of a chicken in this place. Not even if I was hallucinating. Which I soon will be. Protein! God give me protein, with feathers on it. Please!’
‘There aren’t any chickens in the Bible. I’ve never heard that Jesus had anything to do with chickens.’
‘Exactly. This place is useless. Marx was absolutely right about religion. Unless you think you can arrange a miracle.’
‘At least we can sit down,’ Tolvo said. ‘They’ve got a lot of seats.’
‘Yes, we could sit down here. If you’ve got a well-fed arse to sit on all this wood. Can’t they afford cushions? What are those stupid things on the floor?’ Juri pointed at the line of tapestry kneelers in each pew, lovingly worked at the rate of two a year by the retired postmistress in Yattenham.
‘Foot rests? I don’t know.’
‘I thought you knew everything.’ Juri sat down on a pew and found it more welcoming than it looked. After a couple of minutes, he pulled up his feet and lay experimentally along the seat. ‘I suppose I can stand this. At least we’re not in that fucking caravan for a few hours. OK, I’m going to have a kip. If I can forget how hungry I am long enough to be able to get to sleep. I pray that God will stop me from having another nightmare about potatoes.’
He shut his eyes and immediately managed to slip into a doze. Tolvo, feeling bored with no one to talk to, stretched out on the next pew and soon found that it really was comfortable enough for a half-hour nap.
When he opened his eyes, an angel was leaning over the back of the pew and looking at him. She had the most kissable lips he had ever seen. She had enormous eyes and they were outlined in an extremely degenerate black. She had clouds of golden hair, with streaks of a decadent pink in it. A fallen angel, obviously. The kind he had always hoped to meet.
She spoke to him. He did not understand.
‘What are you doing here?’ she said, speaking more slowly. And in English. An English angel. Quick, quick, think of some English words.
‘Hello,’ he said, pulling himself up to a sitting position and then, because it seemed less than manly to sit, standing up before the celestial being.
‘Yes, hello?’ she answered him. She was trying to sound cynical. In an angelic voice, it sounded absolutely adorable. ‘I said, what are you doing here?’
‘Hello. Yes. What are we doing. We are doing – nothing.’
‘Why?’
‘Why?’
‘Yes, why? Why are you here doing nothing?’
‘Please excuse me because I don’t speak very well English.’
‘Are you a tourist?’
‘No. No tourist. We working.’
‘Working where?’
‘Farm.’
‘What farm? Colin Burton’s farm? Big man, red face? Over there?’
The angel raised her heavenly arm, sheathed in fabulously depraved black leather, and gestured in what might have been the direction of their farm, but after wandering around for hours Tolvo was not exactly sure. But her description, once he had translated it to himself, fitted the man with the money.
‘Big man, red face. Farm. We work. Yes.’
‘You’re picking potatoes on his farm?’
‘Potatoes. Yes. We work … potatoes.’
The dreadful word roused Juri, whose eyelids flickered open. Sensing trouble, he sat up in a hurry, which alarmed the angel, who jumped half out of her skin and uttered a whole banner of heavenly expletives.
‘What the fuck?’ Juri demanded in his own language. ‘Who is this? What is this? Am I dreaming?’
‘Who the fuck’s this?’ the angel demanded, in English.
‘We could be dreaming,’ Tolvo agreed, trying to calm his friend with a waving hand. ‘Just be cool a minute. Don’t frighten it.’ Then in English, he told the angel, ‘This my friend. Juri. His name. My friend.’
‘Toni,’ she said, extending an angelic hand to be shaken. Juri immediately shook it with a will, saying his name through a blatant grin. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ said the angel, sounding just like the people on the tapes at the language laboratory. But she was turning-radiantly towards Tolvo.
The hand was as light and warm and fragile as a feather from the wing of a cherubim. A naughty cherubim, obviously, since there was a black lace glove involved. Tolvo said his name.
‘Volvo?’ said the angel Toni, with a peal of golden giggles.
‘Tolvo. Finland name. My mother coming from Finland.’ Juri got him by the shoulders and hissed in his ear, ‘Does she know where we can buy a chicken?’
‘Shut up,’ said Tolvo.
‘Ask her. Go on. She must know.’ Juri had big hands and he grabbed you like a bear.
Tolvo winced and said, ‘Shut up, you idiot.’
‘You’re the idiot,’ Juri punched him in the arm in a manner that could only just be called friendly. ‘Go on, ask her. Since you’re getting on so well.’
‘What’s he saying?’ asked the angel Toni.
‘He says …’ Tolvo’s mind had got rusty through lack of use. ‘He says … please, we want to buy a chicken.’
‘A chicken?’ she repeated.
Tolvo said it again, taking care to pronounce each word correctly. Juri flapped his elbows and made clucking noises, which echoed irreverently from the ancient vaulted ceiling.
‘Why?’ asked the angel Toni. ‘Why do you want a chicken?’
‘Why? A chicken? To eating. To buy a chicken to eating. Do you know where …’
‘Are you hungry?’ demanded the angel Toni, miming eating with her black lace hands. A look of divine compassion was coming over her face. She looked more forgiving than ten thousand icons. A miracle could possibly be imminent.
‘Yes! Yes!’ This was from Juri, now also miming eating, though he managed to give his friend an encouraging shove in the kidney area as well.
‘Yes. We have hungry,’ Tolvo agreed, with what he hoped was romantic dignity.
‘Right. Well. Chicken. That’s easy. It’s your lucky day. We can definitely sort you out a chicken. Come with me. Today, Chickens R Us. Little do you know that I’ve just plucked six of the stinking little fuckers. Come on.’ And the angel was making for the church door, and beckoning them to follow, flapping her own elbows and clucking, in a paradisically pretty way. She had a small motorbike, and, with truly supernatural agility, she manoeuvred all three of them on to it and buzzed unsteadily away down another lane, in search of poultry.
10. Free Bees
At the news desk at the television studio in Norwich, the invitation to a wine-tasting at Château Saxwold, scheduled plumb in the middle of the great event vacuum of the Easter weekend, had been viewed as a godsend. The outside broadcast van, crowned with a white satellite dish, arrived early at the domaine office and was awarded a prime position in the car
park. The reporter with the Betty Boop eyelashes had herself filmed with Florian, who walked earnestly with her along the rows of sprouting vines, delighted to be able to bore for East Anglia on the subject of biodynamic agriculture.
Betty Boop then did a piece to camera, at the end of which she intended to take a swig of the 1999 Pinot and deliver a witty parody of a wine buff’s banter about its taste. Lulled by Florian’s oratory, she gulped the murky liquid with enthusiasm. When the wine hit her innocent taste buds it induced a violent spit, a convulsive retch and an extended oh-no second, followed by a disgusted ‘Fucking hell.’
‘It is rather young, still,’ Florian advised.
‘We’re all young,’ she spluttered. ‘You don’t have to be that rude with it. Have you got anything else this colour? I’m not paid enough to drink any more of that. Don’t you realise it tastes like cat’s piss?’
‘I’m a dog person,’ said Florian, with dignity.
Betty Boop repaired her makeup and completed the recording with a glass of diluted Lucozade, thoughtfully offered by one of the wine-maker’s nieces. Happily, this led to the filming of the whole tribe of moppets dancing on the lawn with Dido, and the dog, a sequence of sure-fire ratings candy that sweetened the atmosphere considerably.
‘Now, we just need some shots of the actual tasting itself,’ she told Florian. ‘And if you’re going to make a speech, or something.’
‘Sure,’ he said, making hasty plans.
The Visitor Centre was reasonably full by 7pm, since the day had turned cloudy in the late afternoon and an icy east wind had got up, making a good two hundred people aware that indoor amusement was the preferred option and the promise of a free drink would be well worth accepting. A locust-like swarm of Addleworth relations flew in to swell the crowd.
Florian watched with doting eyes while Dido organised the moppets to fill glasses and patter prettily around the gathering with bowls of crisps, peanuts and his sister’s artistic crostini that dribbled pesto down the eater’s wrist in a way that only a member of the Old Posh would endure with gallantry. By 7.30, when the free glasses had either been finished or tipped furtively out into the flower tubs, he judged that it would be wise to say a few words.
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