by Rosie Thomas
‘So why don’t you go to the Wheatsheaf at lunchtimes?’ Harriet asked as they sat down.
‘Not on Sundays. It gets full of people in complicated jerseys who talk about the property market. We’re only an hour’s commute from Victoria, you know.’
‘It feels much further,’ Harriet mused. ‘How much do you know about Keith Bottrill? Stop Bottrill, rather.’
‘There’s not much to know. No one is even certain whether he actually owns the piece of land this new town’s supposed to be going up on. There’s a half-hearted move to stop him, I think. Real David and Goliath stuff.’
‘The Everden Association.’
‘That sounds like it.’
‘I saw the poster in the shop. It looked like a notice for the playgroup bring-and-buy.’
‘That’s certainly it. Would you like some wine? Beer?’
Harriet held out her glass. She was thinking. ‘Are you involved in it?’
Alison gave a hollow laugh. She waved a hand at her notes and files and the dictaphone perched on top. ‘I’ve got time to enter a battle in which nobody quite knows who the two sides are or on what bit of land the fight’s going to be held? Besides, this is a small country. People need somewhere to live. Why not alongside the village of Everden, Kent?’
‘Courtesy of Keith Bottrill? You know who he is?’
Alison laughed again, genuinely now. ‘It’ll be courtesy of someone or other. Bottrill or clones of him put together by your friends the Landwiths or people like them.’
‘They’re not my friends.’
‘I’m sorry, that was stupid.’ Alison put her hand out, contrite. ‘If you’re interested, we could walk over this afternoon and have a look at the site he’s supposed to have bought. It’s pretty over there.’
Harriet said, ‘Yes, I’d like that. A walk would be a good idea.’
She knew that she needed the exercise. She still felt, uncomfortably, as if she wanted to run or to fight.
By the time they had finished their simple meal and cleared it away, it had begun to rain. Dark spots marked the stone path to the front gate.
‘Waterproofs time,’ Alison said unconcernedly. But Harriet only had her pale wool Nicole Farhi coat. Alison lent her a pair of Wellington boots and a deeply creased and scuffed Barbour jacket.
‘I feel as if I’m going to a point-to-point.’
Alison stared critically at her. ‘You don’t much look it. You’ll have to work on getting a few more broken veins and an authentic perm.’
They took a small road that led away from the village between tall hedges. The rain and the dim light intensified the new green of the hawthorn leaves. They walked mostly in companionable silence, listening to the clop of their footfalls on the road. For about a mile they climbed a shallow incline, their view of the fields and little copses obstructed by the enclosing hedge. The road grew dark and shiny with rain, and moisture dripped from the twigs and overhanging branches. Only one car passed them, a Golf driven much too fast. They pressed themselves against the wet bank to let it pass in a jet of fine spray.
‘Wheatsheaf Sunday lunchtime people,’ Alison said sourly.
Harriet shrugged as they walked on. She was thinking about the image of England that Linda had missed in Santa Monica. It was a soft, greeny-grey place, just like this. Linda would like Everden. It was a real place, with edges and a middle, not just a collection of fine houses like Little Shelley.
They came to the top of the hill. On the other side the ground stretched away in smooth folds, big fields bordered by oak trees, the ribbed surface of plough alternating with pasture. The land rose again in the near distance up to the crown of a thickly wooded hill, enclosing a sheltered hollow too gently contoured to be called a valley.
It began to rain more heavily. Fine grey shawls of it swept in from the north. The view was masked, and then revealed again.
Alison beckoned Harriet to a field gate. They leaned over the bars of it, watching the rain and the changing patterns of light.
‘Can you see down there?’ Alison stood on the bottom bar of the gate and pointed. ‘The chimneys of a house, just in that belt of trees?’
Harriet followed the direction of her finger. Grey chimneys were just visible over the tops of huge, old trees. The new growth of leaves did not yet mask the untidy clumps of rooks’ nests in the top branches.
‘The land goes with the house. The house has been empty for five years, perhaps a bit more. When I was a kid the same family had owned the place for ever. Then it was sold, and sold again. I don’t think either of the last owners ever really lived in it. They were probably trying to work their own deals for developing the land. I think the house is in a poor structural state now. That would be in the owners’ interest, wouldn’t it, claiming that it’s uninhabitable?’
‘What’s it called?’
‘Birdwood.’
‘And where will the new town be?’
Alison made a sweep with her hand. It covered the ploughed and bitten-green fields, the stand of trees, and all the land in a circle around the house.
Harriet saw it. There would be a crop of red and yellow brick houses with dormer windows like eyebrows in the new tiled roofs and tiny porches jostling one another. There would be patches of garden turning their backs behind raw fencing, and rotary washing lines, and television aerials. There would be none of the proper, old glue of Everden to hold the new building blocks together, no shop, no proper pub, no centre. The new-town people would have to get in their cars and drive somewhere else to find a centre. They would simply occupy their red and yellow houses in the middle of the quiet grey landscape.
‘They can’t.’ Harriet said. ‘There’s no reason to create a town there.’
‘Bottrill has a reason.’
‘Can we go down and have a closer look?’
It was raining hard. Harriet’s hair was plastered to her head. Alison seemed unaffected by the weather but she asked. ‘Are you sure you want to?’
‘Yes. I want to.’
They began to walk on, down the gentle hill. As they went on Harriet saw that the apparent remoteness of the house in its hollow was an illusion. They turned a corner and another village was revealed as an outcrop of houses around a church tower. From the opposite side of the road Everden was also visible. To Harriet the old villages looked like comfortable, settled accretions around their two churches. The thought of the rash of hard new houses at the third point of the triangle seemed the more incongruous. It was further than it had looked from the top of the slope to Birdwood. They were very wet when they reached the stone gateposts of the house. A heavy iron gate stood half open. The sagging corner of it had dragged a furrow in the driveway. The only sound was water dripping from the branches.
Harriet turned in a circle. The Birdwood hollow had become secluded again. Only trees and fields were visible.
‘Show me the house,’ she murmured to Alison.
They walked up the driveway shoulder to shoulder, trying to step quietly, like intruders. The house emerged from behind its trees. Harriet saw a big, square, stone-faced façade, windows asymmetrically placed, a pillared portico, the far corner of the building rounding out into a little turret. She crossed a stretch of gravel that had erupted into thickets of weeds and looked down the southern face of the building. A verandah in a complicated design of wrought iron was half-shrouded in creepers. Turning back to where Alison stood Harriet noticed that the boarded-up windows of the ground-floor rooms had been sprayed with black aerosol paint, CAZ & FRAX, and indecipherable symbols, over and over again. She shivered involuntarily and then remembered the association of graffiti with tunnels, deserted urban corners, and felt sad for being dispossessed of the city that had always been home.
‘What do you think?’ Alison was standing with her head back, her hands in the pockets of her mackintosh.
Birdwood House was part minuscule château, part Victorian Gothic folly, wholly neglected. Broken slates scattered amongst the weeds indicat
ed holes in the roof. The interior must be in worse condition than the shell, Harriet thought.
‘Sad,’ she answered. ‘Sad to see a house rotting away. Sadder still to think of hideous little houses covering it, and all its land.’
The garden was a dripping mass of heavy foliage. There must once have been a properly gloomy Victorian shrubbery, but now it was a tangle of leathery evergreens and bare, twiggy branches. Around a rough oval of shaggy grass were massed hydrangea bushes, last year’s dead heads standing out as fists of sullen khaki.
‘They need not be hideous,’ Alison said mildly. ‘They might be perfectly nice.’
‘Nice?’
‘Okay, decent. Serviceable houses in a pretty piece of countryside for people who need somewhere to live. Why not?’
‘No reason. I just know not. I can feel it.’
‘All I can feel is rain running down the back of my neck. Can we go home now?’
Harriet hesitated. She took another long look at the closed façade, averting her gaze from the black scribbles that disfigured its blind eyes.
Finally she said, ‘Let’s go, then. There’s nothing to be done here.’ They walked through the downpour back to Everden.
In the early evening Alison began to gather up her work and pack it into her briefcase. Harriet sat at the long table watching her.
‘I want to be back in town by about eight,’ Alison told her. ‘What are you going to do? You can stay here as long as you like, you know that.’
‘Thank you,’ Harriet said. ‘I’d like to stay for a bit, if you’ll let me.’
She couldn’t go back to Hampstead, to the rooms that seemed a shell in comparison with the homeliness of Alison’s cottage, and she had no idea where else to turn. She looked at Alison’s preparations for her working week with sudden suffocating envy. Alison had preoccupations, challenges to meet, reasons for leaving and hurrying and using her resources. It seemed inconceivable to Harriet that she herself had none of these things, and at the same time she knew that she must make herself conceive it, because it was the truth.
She listened numbly to Alison’s instructions about the boiler and the hot water supply and the security bolts.
‘Will you be all right here by yourself?’ Alison asked, already half out of the front door with her briefcase. Harriet glared at it, as if it was a badge of office of which she had been stripped.
‘Of course I will. Go on. Thanks for everything.’
‘I’ll have to take the car, you know.’
Harriet had accepted Alison’s offer of a lift from Hampstead.
‘So if I need to go anywhere I can walk or call a taxi or get a train. Go on.’
‘Will you be here when I get back on Friday?’
‘If you don’t mind me being …’
‘I’d like to. See you then.’ Alison smiled at her, and closed the door.
Harriet listened to the car receding up the lane. When she could hear it no longer the silence seemed so absolute that she was momentarily afraid, and then overtaken by an awareness of loss and disappointment more powerful than anything she had felt since Robin’s moment of victory. She put her hand out to the back of a chair to steady herself, then half sat and half fell into it. She folded her arms on the table and let her head drop forward to rest on them.
Harriet cried, giving herself up to a fit of weeping like a perverse luxury. She cried for a long time, but at length she lifted her head and looked around the kitchen through the slits of swollen eyelids. She had the sudden sense of apartness from herself, as if she was perched somewhere on the shelves of the old dresser, surveying herself from amongst the plates and flowered china cups. She saw her own hunched shoulders and distorted face, and the irregular wet patch that she had made on the tabletop, and she disliked what she saw.
Harriet took a long, ragged breath. Then she went slowly upstairs to the bathroom. She washed her face in icy water, combed her hair and put on a lick of make-up. Then she changed her sweater in the blue-painted bedroom. Without another glance at her reflection she took Alison’s old Barbour off the peg behind the kitchen door, made sure the windows were locked in the way Alison wanted, locked the front door securely behind her, and set off down the lane towards the Wheatsheaf.
The fire was lit again and the landlord seemed to be polishing the same glass, but the bar was almost empty. Sunday evenings were clearly not as popular as lunchtimes. Harriet bought herself a drink and sat down in a corner. Slowly, in ones and twos, the locals began to drift in. Tentatively, unsure of the protocol of the country pub, Harriet nodded and smiled at the darts players of the night before.
She was rewarded with the question, ‘Al gone back to London and left you, then?’
‘Yes. I’m going to stay on for a few more days.’
‘To improve your darts?’
Harriet smiled again, accepting the joke.
As she had hoped it would, conversation became general, and she was drawn into it. Within a few minutes she was able to ask her intended questions.
‘What do people think about the development on the Birdwood site? Are many of them involved in the Stop Bottrill campaign?’ After that she had only to listen, and nod her head.
She learned that no one was in favour of the plan, but no one knew exactly what was proposed, or who really owned the site, or what planning permission had been granted or applied for. The opposition campaign was being run by a village committee that included the vicar and the chairman of the parish council. Whatever truth was discernible was distorted by rumour and exaggeration and hearsay.
‘Why are you so interested?’ someone asked, with evident suspicion. Harriet became the focus of the room’s attention.
‘It’s only interest,’ she said lightly. ‘Alison and I had a walk over there this afternoon. It’s a beautiful piece of country.’
A girl in a denim jacket who hadn’t spoken before suddenly lifted her head. She had a thin face half hidden by waves of colourless hair. ‘Yeah. And they’ll put beautiful houses on it with fancy names like the Tudor or the Devenish or something, three or four bedrooms and two bathrooms and a joined-on garage, and the young executives will come and live in them and catch the train up to town every morning and their wives will shop in London or Canterbury and park their Volvos out in the street there. There’s nothing over on Birdwood for the local people, is there? No houses for people from round here who haven’t got a hundred thousand for a Tudor, nor a hundred and twenty for the cottages down the end there that some incomer’ll buy and knock together to make one big house out of two decent little ones that would have done for Mick and me.’
Her boyfriend put his big hand on her knee. She took a defiant gulp from her half-pint beer mug after her long speech and retreated behind her waterfall of hair.
‘That doesn’t mean Alison, you know,’ someone said kindly to Harriet. ‘The place is hers by right because it was her dad’s. But what Susan says is true enough. There’s no houses round here that the young people can afford. It’s all executives, isn’t it?’
Harriet was quiet. She was assimilating the fact that houses that looked to her like ugly little boxes disfiguring a pretty piece of countryside might equally appear to Mick and his girl as pinnacles of unattainable executive luxury.
I’ve forgotten, she thought. I’ve forgotten what it was like not to be rich.
‘If you’re interested in all this village politics, you could always go and talk to the vicar.’ Ron or Geoff the darts player told her.
I don’t want to forget. Harriet was remembering the beach in Crete, where all things had promised to be equal.
‘Or old Miss Bowlly,’ Geoff or Ron’s counterpart added.
‘Who is Miss Bowlly?’
Miss Bowlly, Harriet learned, was an elderly lady who lived in a small house on a little patch of land at the end of the Birdwood site. Opinion had it that Miss Bowlly’s two acres of ground straddled the only feasible route for the new access road, that without Miss Bowlly’s corner
of ground as part of the package the entire Birdwood development was impracticable, that Miss Bowlly had been offered millions, that she had refused even to contemplate selling and had chased the negotiators away with a shovel. Harriet also deduced that all of this could be mere rumour, just like everything else connected with Keith Bottrill’s development scheme. Probably Bottrill intended it to be so. And then one day the bulldozers would move in.
Harriet finished up her second drink. She edged out of her chair in the corner, nodded a series of good-nights to her new acquaintances, and left the discussion to meander on without her.
In the morning, Harriet was up early. She judged that there was no point yet in paying a call on the vicar. Instead she walked out of the village and up the gentle hill to the point where Birdwood House was just visible in its fringe of trees. The rain had stopped overnight and the sky was lighter pearl-grey over the opposite lip of hillside. The view was clearer, and Harriet could distinguish a grey cottage over to the right of the big house. She followed the road onwards, down the hill and past the rutted driveway. She walked on until she came to the cottage. There was a low wall separating it from the road, a square of scrubby garden overlooked by windows heavily shrouded in greyish net. Harriet put her fingers to the catch of the gate. At once, with alarming rapidity, the front door opened. A small, square woman confronted her.
‘Miss Bowlly?’ Harriet asked pleasantly.
The response was neither friendly nor encouraging. ‘What do you want?’
‘I’m a friend of Alison Shaw’s.’ Harriet had decided that the local approach was the best one.
‘Never heard of her,’ Miss Bowlly snapped. The door almost closed, then reopened a crack.
‘Nettie Shaw?’
‘Alison’s her daughter,’ Harriet guessed.
The crack yielded no further, but Miss Bowlly demanded, ‘Well?’
‘I wondered if I could come in and talk to you for five minutes.’