by Rosie Thomas
The response was immediate, and vehement. ‘I’m not selling, or signing anything.’
‘I’m glad,’ Harriet said. ‘You certainly shouldn’t sell, and I’ve nothing for you to sign.’
The crack did widen then.
‘You can come in for five minutes, that’s all.’
Quickly, before she could change her mind, Harriet slipped in through the front door.
‘This way,’ Miss Bowlly sniffed. Harriet followed her down a short, gloomy hallway, into the kitchen at the back.
Fingers of indefinable familiarity had tugged at Harriet from the moment she had reached the front gate, but in the kitchen the association suddenly became clear. She looked slowly around her at the stacks of yellowing newspapers, the cardboard boxes filled with egg cartons and empty cereal packets and old telephone directories, the hoarded magazines and broken kitchen implements and domestic junk piled under a thick coating of dust on every flat surface in the room. Miss Bowlly’s house reminded her of Simon’s.
For a moment Harriet might have been back with him, behind the papered-over windows. There was the same beleaguered atmosphere, the same dusty scent of long entrenchment. She found herself wishing that she was indeed back in the old house, so that she might do things differently.
Miss Bowlly stared at her. Harriet knew the difference was that Simon could not defend himself against intruders, whereas she suspected that Miss Bowlly was capable of seeing off all comers. At close quarters she saw that Miss Bowlly was older than she had seemed at first glance, perhaps in her mid-seventies. She was wearing wellingtons, a tubular tweed skirt, and a brown hand-knitted cardigan.
‘It’s not supposed to be the House Beautiful,’ the old woman announced. ‘And I don’t know any Nettie Shaw. Said the first name that came into my head, to test your reaction. All liars, you people with your plans and schemes.’ She chuckled broadly, delighted with her little trick.
‘I do know Alison Shaw,’ Harriet said humbly. ‘She lives across in Everden, I’ve borrowed her cottage for a few days. Her mother’s dead, I couldn’t have known her name. But she might have been a friend of yours, mightn’t she?’
‘Well, she wasn’t. What do you want?’ And after a second’s gap while Harriet marshalled her questions, ‘Tea, I suppose?’
‘Thank you. Only if you were going to make some.’
The tea when it came was thick and brown, but more palatable than Simon’s. Harriet drank it and found herself answering questions rather than asking them as she had planned.
‘There’s no such thing as just being interested,’ Miss Bowlly told her at the end. ‘No such thing at all. What do you want?’
Harriet shrugged gently, evading the question. ‘Tell me why you won’t sell to Mr Bottrill?’
‘No one’s ever mentioned Mr Bottrill to me. It’s all done in the name of some company. But I’ve seen him snooping around here, following his young men in their nice coats. And no one’s mentioned selling either. Nothing as firm and solid as that. A site option’s what they call it. Tuppence ha’penny now, and twenty-five per cent of some pie in the sky if he gets his planning permission. I told them I wasn’t signing any agreement, and I didn’t want their nice slice of profit when the time came either.’
‘Why not?’ Harriet moved a little further forward on her rickety chair. Miss Bowlly gave her alarming chuckle.
‘Because I didn’t like them, simple as that. Nice as could be to start with, and then when I wouldn’t agree to what they wanted they started coming round here to threaten me, saying that lorries would be coming by here day and night, they’d be digging up all around to make roads, it would be noisy and dirty and dangerous and the place would be worth nothing anyway because they were going to build here whatever I did, so why didn’t I be a good girl and take something for nothing now, and move to a nice modern bungalow when the time came?’
Miss Bowlly clapped her hands on her knees, rocking with pleasure at the thought of her own stubbornness.
‘I decided they wouldn’t get any option on my property, and I wouldn’t sell either, not even if they offered me two million pounds. Which they won’t, see, because they don’t like tying up their capital in options.’ She screwed up her eyes and squinted through the slits at Harriet. Harriet recognised that Miss Bowlly knew exactly what she was talking about.
‘So I’m going to stay right here, and Castoria Developments can put their access road somewhere else, can’t they?’
The chuckle developed into a roar of laughter.
‘They don’t like it. They try all sorts of tricks, but I’m up to them all. You’re probably one, whatever you say.’
‘I’m not,’ Harriet said quietly. She drained the last of her brown tea and cleared a space to put the cup down. ‘But would you sell, to another group with a better scheme? One that took account of local needs, for example?’
‘No,’ Miss Bowlly said.
Their eyes met. It was Harriet who looked away first. She stood up, and stepped carefully around the boxes piled up on the floor.
‘Thank you for the tea.’
‘Remember what I said.’
She followed Harriet to the door, watched her while she latched the gate behind her, and continued to watch until Harriet had climbed the hill towards Everden. Harriet walked quickly, with her head up. She was whistling a little tune, and her arms swung in time with it.
At the cottage, in Alison’s television study, Harriet picked up the old-fashioned black telephone and dialled Charlie Thimbell’s number.
‘Charlie,’ she said, after they had exchanged greetings, ‘you owe me a favour.’ And Charlie, who had written up the irresistible Peacocks story and had accordingly reduced the value of Harriet’s shares for sale, could only agree that he did owe her a favour.
‘I’m calling it in,’ Harriet said.
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘I want some information. As much information as possible, about a company called Castoria Developments and about Keith Bottrill, and a projected development at Birdwood, near Everden, in Kent.’
‘Is that all?’ Charlie said drily.
‘For now.’
Charlie sighed and drew his book of addresses towards him. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Call me tomorrow, at this number.’
‘Where are you?’
‘At Everden, of course. Talk to you tomorrow.’
When Harriet hung up again, she was smiling. She opened the local directory. She would need a taxi to take her to the station. She would go to London for the day, pick up her own car, and do some investigation of her own.
She didn’t think about it as she waited for the taxi to arrive, but she no longer felt jealous of Alison’s occupation.
Nineteen
‘There’s a house,’ Harriet told Jane, ‘a Victorian Gothic folly with a turret, and a wrought-iron verandah, half falling down. It was built in the eighteen-seventies by a man called Farrow, who made his money as a soap manufacturer. The land is what’s left of his parkland.’
Jane was looking out of her front window. The Greek family directly opposite had painted the sooty old bricks of their house a brilliant canary-yellow colour. Its virulence seemed to beam straight into Jane’s living room, reflecting off her walls and seeping into dim corners.
‘You look better,’ Jane said. ‘And I thought it was just the country air.’
Harriet had driven up to the Hackney house at the end of the afternoon, colour in her cheeks and a folder of papers under her arm. Jane transferred her gaze from the yellow façade to Harriet’s face.
‘Go on. Tell me. You’ve seen a soap manufacturer’s falling-down Victorian folly somewhere in the depths of commuter Kent, and you want it?’
‘Yes, I want the house. But I want the land as well.’
‘To garden in? You’ve never even grown a pot of marigolds.’
‘All the land,’ Harriet said. ‘The development site.’
‘But …’ J
ane began to say something, and then she stopped. They were both aware of the soft and mysterious weight of Harriet’s money between them. Jane couldn’t guess what it might be capable of purchasing. ‘You’re not a property developer.’
‘Not the Bottrill kind, fortunately. But I have had an idea.’
Harriet opened her folder and spread the contents on Jane’s flokati rug beside Imogen in her basket. There were copies of planning regulations, developers’ prospectuses, and a mass of other material. Harriet had had a busy afternoon.
Jane picked up the nearest prospectus and glanced at a pastel-tinted drawing of gabled white houses set in wide, lush gardens. She put it down again, quickly, and looked instead at the back of sleeping Imogen’s head, where the dark fringe of baby hair curled in the tiny furrow of her neck. Then she looked up from Imogen, to Harriet.
Harriet’s face seemed to have changed completely. The bones that after the mugging had seemed ready to dissolve under the bruised flesh were firm again. The discoloration was fading, the swellings an irrelevance. It was the old Harriet.
Jane smiled, then. ‘What idea?’
‘If I can acquire the land somehow, as a capital investment – whatever parts of it that Bottrill doesn’t own options on, yet, because he won’t tie up his own capital until he’s sure of planning permission – and there’s at least one crucial parcel he can’t option, perhaps more, then I can put forward my own scheme, win over the local support, make Bottrill see that he can’t realise his own plans. He’ll have to back out and leave the field to me. Putting it at its simplest, that is.’
‘But you’re doing just the same as he is.’
‘No,’ Harriet said. ‘There’s a difference. I’m not planning to put up three-or four-bed executive houses, dumped into the landscape for a quick sale to outsiders who won’t put anything back into the local community at all. I’d like to see some starter homes, first offered to local couples, and a proportion of them available for rent. They’d be built in the local style, with none of those stained-wood windows. There’d be a mix of other buildings too, like in any real village – some bigger houses, a corner shop, perhaps a pub or a village hall, even some workshops.’
The words came faster. Her hands drew hipped roofs and streets and intersections in the air. Jane watched her, fascinated.
‘There could be a proportion of sheltered housing, a village green, a pond for ducks, if you like. I can raise the money for the development three times over, once I’ve acquired the land and been granted planning permission. There’ll be a return on investment, of course, substantial enough even though not as big as it would be on an executive dormitory.’
Jane held up her hand, stopping the flow. ‘Why do you want to do all this?’ She meant, You needn’t work at all. You could play with the money you’ve already got, enjoy yourself. You don’t have to teach The Catcher in the Rye to threatening schoolchildren.
Harriet answered simply. ‘Because it’s there. Because I saw it.’
‘Just as Meizu was there, and you saw that?’
Harriet remembered the shiver that had travelled down her spine when she first saw Simon’s game. She had felt it again as she walked with Alison around the dripping bulk of Birdwood House, past the boarded-up windows with their black graffiti hieroglyphs. Only she had weakly dismissed it as fear. As soon as she knew that what she had felt was not fear but intuition, confidence flowed back into Harriet like fresh blood in her veins. ‘Yes. Exactly like Meizu.’
The simplicity of her words didn’t mask the moment of exultation. Sitting as close to her as she was, Jane caught a strong whiff of Harriet’s fuel, compressed within her and ready to burn. The sense of it made her feel faintly awed. For the first time, she understood that it was not money that motivated Harriet at all, but a much older and rawer necessity. Winning.
It was not the attack in the subway that had collapsed Harriet’s bones and drained the vivacity out of her. It had been loss, and defeat.
Harriet was talking again. ‘I’d like to restore the house. Perhaps live in it myself, while the development’s under way. Couldn’t you and Imogen come too? Take your own half?’ She nodded through the window at the glaring yellow house. ‘You could leave the school, and this place. There’s a school in Everden, I saw it. It would be the perfect solution.’
There was generosity of a sweeping kind in the suggestion, Jane knew that. She knew also that there was no point in expressing hurt or irritation because Harriet did not understand that she might not want to subordinate herself to someone else’s grand scheme, to become a Birdwood appendage. It was simply Harriet’s way to see the bold outlines, and in the magnificence of the vision to overlook the small details.
‘Thank you for thinking of it,’ she said calmly. ‘But Imogen and I must make our own plans.’ And then, with reciprocal but much deeper and more painful generosity, she made her suggestion. Even though she suspected that Harriet would never even guess at how generous she was being.
‘If you’re really serious about all this, you should talk to David Howkins.’
‘Who?’ Harriet asked, as Jane had known she would.
‘David Howkins. He’s a builder, specialising in community projects. You met him here, once.’
‘Oh yes,’ Harriet said. ‘It was twice. He was wearing a blue shirt, the first time.’ She had imagined, very briefly, what it would be like to go home with him. It had been her first party after her separation from Leo. It had seemed a very long time ago, now. ‘Perhaps I will.’
‘How are you going to do it all?’ Jane asked, interested.
Harriet was candid. ‘I don’t know, yet. I’ll find a way. I’m hoping Charlie can help. I said he could call me here this evening, is that OK?’
‘Of course it is.’
It was only a few minutes later, when Jane was giving Imogen her bedtime feed and Harriet was standing in the window bay looking blankly out into the street, that she saw Charlie drawing up in his Citröen. Jenny was in the passenger seat.
‘Here is Charlie, and Jenny as well.’
Jane looked up, smooth-faced, ever hospitable. ‘Good.’
Harriet let them in. There had been the windfall of an unscheduled babysitter, and they had snatched at the opportunity. They would have a quick drink, and then leave Jane and Harriet in peace, go on to supper somewhere …
‘No you won’t,’ Jane said firmly. ‘You’ll stay here and eat with Harriet and me. Won’t they, Harriet?’
It was like one of the old evenings and unlike the careful dinner that Harriet had given in the Hampstead flat. Imogen was put to bed in her cot upstairs, and Jane made omelettes and salad while Charlie opened bottles of wine and poured liberal drinks. Harriet could see that he was pleased, and that he was keeping whatever it was that he was pleased about to himself until the right moment. She entered into the game, and asked no questions about his discoveries.
They ate at the kitchen table, looking out at the little square of garden and the patches of gardens and lighted windows belonging to the backs of the houses opposite. Harriet felt a rekindling affection for London, reassuring her that she was not running away to Birdwood. She was going out to Birdwood because there was something to do there, she was convinced of it.
She stopped thinking about it then. She ate, and talked, and laughed as they had done a long time ago.
At last, Jane made coffee and put the pot in the middle of the table. Charlie filled up the glasses with a theatrical flourish like a preface to his big speech, so that Jenny laughed at him. Her latest pregnancy was visible under her loose shirt, but she looked much better than she had done at Harriet’s dinner.
‘Past the worst,’ she had explained. Now she said, ‘Charlie’s just like Harry with a secret. He can’t wait to tell it. Go on, Charlie.’
Charlie raised his eyebrows and looked at each of them in turn.
‘Go on, Charlie,’ Harriet echoed. Her attention was refocussed, pin-sharp.
Charlie said, ‘I talke
d to someone who has a good friend inside the Castoria Development Company.’
The light from the lamp hanging low over Jane’s kitchen table drew them into a circle, like a cabal. Harriet felt a draught of excitement, potent as a drug, and knew that she had suffered from its withdrawal.
‘Who revealed some interesting details, after a certain amount of persuasion.’ Harriet knew that it was not her place to inquire too closely into what the methods of persuasion had been. She should take the information and use it, as the dues that Charlie owed her.
Charlie told them that Keith Bottrill had been in pursuit of the Birdwood site for almost five years. He had been slowly and painstakingly signing up a jigsaw puzzle of option agreements, fitting his potential acquisitions together, across what was most probably a forty-acre site. Charlie had not been able to discover from his informant exactly how much of the ground he had already placed under option, or even the exact dimensions of the site itself.
‘But I do know that he must be close to whatever he needs. He’s putting his plans forward to the county planning committee at their meeting in five weeks’ time. Once he has even outline planning permission, he’s more or less home and dry.’
Harriet nodded slowly. Five weeks was hardly long enough for her to set about acquiring her own options or even buying outright whatever land she might be able to discover. There was hardly time for her to appoint a team of architects, let alone to produce rival plans of her own.
Her only chance was to oppose the Castoria scheme at the planning committee stage, using whatever grounds she could come up with, and to lobby local support for her own tenuous proposal.
She thought of Everden, and the Wheatsheaf, the village shop, and decaying Birdwood House in its deceptive seclusion.
I can do that, she thought. I can do at least that much.
‘Two more things,’ Charlie said. He was trying to sound casual, but Harriet knew that he would have kept the good news until last.
‘There’s one parcel he does want and can’t get. Two acres straddling the natural lie of the main access road.’