So, an unexpected bonus of the straits in which we find ourselves, is the return of flora and fauna that were in serious trouble in my youth, in some unmanaged areas at least. In particular, solitary bees seem to be making a comeback, as well as butterflies and moths, and this has had a concomitant effect on bat and some bird populations. However larger birds are in decline as they are trapped for food.
Primrose stopped reading and started flicking at random through the pages. She wasn’t so interested in bees, or birds. There had to be juicier stuff than this.
A few pages on she found it.
Gloria knows her husband is having an affair with the Matron, but she doesn’t care. She is happy that he is happy elsewhere; literally as his trysts with Dorcas take them away from the farm. I warned her before she married him that material security was never going to be enough to outweigh the loss of freedom and stultifying tedium of being married to Spight and having to conform to his narrow definition of a woman’s place and a wife’s duties.
I think Gloria might be looking to have her own fun elsewhere too. There is a sparkle in her eye these days that goes beyond having a bit of time off from her husband, but she won’t tell me anything. I wish good luck to her, if so. I just hope she can remain discreet. I don’t think Spight would be as forgiving as she. At the moment, no doubt to assuage his guilt at betraying his marriage vows, he is nice as pie to Gloria, but I believe him to have an evil temper. There are stories that followed him from his time as Captain of the Militia, though none ever led to an inquiry or prosecution – not surprising as he either presides over or is cronies with all those who would be tasked with looking into such matters.
The joys of a small community and its intrigues. It feels like being back at my old secondary school, with all the secrets and illicit passions, requited and otherwise. I am grateful my own urges are abating as I age. Not that I don’t still have my moments from time to time. There was one time …
Primrose shut the book hurriedly. She did not want to know the details of Mrs Prendaghast’s sex life.
lamps had been lit against the dark
It had been a long day and night of meetings and briefings. Will had had barely two hours of sleep since he woke up in the bunker, nearly seventy-two hours before. His eyes stung from tiredness and his stomach was rumbling. They were due to return to Bodingleigh within the hour; he hoped someone had factored in a meal before then, as he hadn’t eaten since a bit of bread and cheese on their arrival.
He was sitting in the wood-panelled hallway of the rather grand safe house they had gone to after the blockade, the Major having decided it was too dangerous to risk journeying all the way back to the bunker in broad daylight. He had also wanted to finalise their plans for Stage Three face to face, a long process as teams across Devon and Cornwall were alerted and mobilised. Sunlight slanted in through the open door, the storm that had overtaken them as they drove away from Plymouth having moved east. The beams picked out specks of dust. Will let his gaze follow them. His eyelids drifted closed.
Somewhere deeper inside the house a telephone rang. It was a rare sound in Devon and brought him back to full awareness. He heard a voice answering it, there was a brief lull and then footsteps pounded down the corridor from the library in which they held their meetings.
It was one of the older Cornish agents, Merryn, who barked at him, ‘Where’s the Major?’
‘Outside on the terrace I think.’
‘Fetch him now, please.’
Will leaped up and ran out into baking sunshine. The Major was sitting on a low wall on the edge of a stone-flagged terrace, in close conversation with Mrs Mason. Behind them, a long swathe of meadow ended in sun-drenched woodland. Butterflies were dancing above the meadow. Steam rose from the rapidly drying stone. ’Major!’
‘What is it?’
‘There’s a phone call, sounds urgent.’
Mrs Mason and the Major exchanged a look before getting up to follow Will to the library.
The room was long and lined with bookcases stuffed with leather-bound books. There was no sign of a phone. Merryn beckoned them to the conference table in the centre of the room and told them to sit down. ‘You too,’ he said to Will as the boy headed for the door. Several others from the resistance were already there. From the looks on the faces of those already seated, the news was significant.
‘We’ve had a call from Bodingleigh.’
‘From who?’ Will blurted. ‘Mal?’
‘No. Somehow the bunker has been compromised. Mal has been taken to the fat farm and tortured. It’s probable our plans are now known by Spight. Enough, at least, to compromise them irraparably.’
‘Tortured?’ The Major’s face was ashen. ‘He’s only a boy!’
Will felt sick. Tortured ... That could so easily have been him. Poor Mal.
‘So far as they are concerned he is an agent of a foreign power,’ Merryn pointed out.
‘Foreign?’ The Major laughed bitterly, ‘Mal’s from Exeter!’
‘It doesn’t matter, Spight will spin it to make Mal seem like the advance guard of barbarian hordes, you know his style of rhetoric.’
Merryn paused to let his words sink in, then continued in a grim tone: ‘So, everything we’ve planned is in jeopardy. What do we do now?’
*
The itching was becoming unbearable. It was no good, she would have to do something about the bandages. Primrose put the journal back under the pillow where she had found it and climbed off the bed.
Mrs Prendaghast had given her some old tights to wear under the dress, to keep her warm in the chilly cottage, and once they were off Primrose thought her legs looked a lot less swollen than they had the day before, and certainly a lot less fat than they had been in some time. Hopefully it would be safe to take the dressings off and have a look at the punctures.
Taking them off her legs was reasonably straightforward. Her skin was lined and puckered from the tight wrappings, but otherwise looked smooth and unpuffy despite wounds that were different from how she’d expected; the skin had been pulled tight before it had been stitched up neatly.
In some places, the bandages stuck to her skin and she had to pull, which hurt, but she gritted her teeth and persevered. Once they were off, she removed the jumper and dress and managed to release one arm, but unwrapping the bandages from the other, or her torso, proved to be more than she could manage, as the ends were pinned out of reach. When she heard the front door close downstairs she froze, caught half-naked and wrapped in grubby linen strips, but then she heard Mrs Prendaghast calling her name softly and let out a pent-up breath. A moment later the teacher appeared in the doorway.
Primrose gestured at herself and said, ‘I kind of need a hand.’
Things proceeded much more easily with two of them. Before long she was standing in the middle of the bedroom naked and shivering in the cold, a pool of blood-stained linens around her feet. A few of the cuts had opened up during her initial struggles, but most of her smaller wounds had scabbed over and were healing nicely. She stopped twisting around and examining herself to catch Mrs Prendaghast looking at her oddly. They caught each other’s eye and Primrose blushed. She was so used to being treated like a piece of meat at the fat farm, she had lost all modesty years ago, but it must be odd for the teacher to have her former pupil standing there starkers. Something that was borne out by her next remark.
‘Well, Primrose, you’ve changed a little.’
‘It has been five years.’
‘There’s a mirror in the bathroom. Go and have a look.’
Mystified, Primrose went into the small bathroom adjoining the bedroom. The mirror in the cabinet showed her straggly hair and a grubby face, and a neck also in need of a good wash, but not much else as it cut her off at the shoulders. Alternately standing and kneeling on the edge of the old bath, she contorted and stretched until she could see the whole of her body.
She didn’t recognise herself. When she had had ‘treatment’ before, sh
e had been left looking very lumpy, with flaps of skin, pockets of fat and silvery stretch marks where she had shrunk. This time, it was as though she had been sculpted into one of those plastic dolls, the ones the younger girls at school used to fight over. Barbies. She looked like a Barbie doll. Some of her boobs were gone, but they were still full. Her waist was tiny and her bum shapely. Some time in the last couple of years she had grown taller, and it seemed to be all leg.
What to make of it? It made her feel strange. Slightly tingly and excited, but also confused and alien in her own body.
There was a towelling dressing gown hanging on the back of the door. Primrose put it on and returned to the bedroom, where Mrs Prendaghast was sitting on the bed. She patted the mattress beside her and Primrose sat.
‘It was my nephew who came here before. He had a message for me to pass on.’ Mrs Prendaghast took one of Primrose’s hands and held it loosely. ‘He wanted me to contact the resistance.’
‘The rebels?’ Primrose was shocked. ‘You can do that?’ A terrifying thought occurred to her. ‘Are you one of them?’ The rebels were violent brigands, determined to make everyone in Devon conform to some extreme agenda. She wasn’t sure what that agenda was, but everyone she knew had been saying bad things about it since as long as she could remember. She felt like pulling her hand away, but this was Mrs Prendaghast, who had given her sanctuary. She forced herself to stay still.
‘No, not exactly, at least not actively. I’m too old, and the Mayor keeps too close an eye on me because of my dubious past.’
The teacher had a past? That seemed so unlikely Primrose laughed out loud, then clapped her hands over her mouth in apology. ‘Really Mrs P?’
‘Yes, really.’
‘But you’re a respectable old widow! You’re the schoolteacher!’
‘Yes dear, but I’m also a lesbian, and these days that isn’t socially acceptable. You know what that means I suppose?’
Primrose knew – it was a common insult at the fat farm even among the girls who had sex with each other – and she blushed. ‘But you were married!’
‘Yes, to my wife. Gay marriage was allowed at the time.’
She had been standing there naked a matter of minutes ago, her hand was still warm from where the teacher had held it. Primrose blushed again and felt very uncomfortable. Mrs Prendaghast seemed to follow her thinking and laughed shortly.
‘Don’t worry, my dear. I said I was a lesbian, not a paedophile, you’re quite safe. But we’re getting off-topic. I am not an active member of the resistance, but I know some who are, and I know how to get a message through if need be. Last night my nephew wanted me to get a message out about a young man up at the farm who needs their help. It seems young Fred has been getting out of hand. I thought you should know it’s possible I’ll need to go out again.’
*
‘We have to rescue him.’
It was three hours later and they were no further along. The only good thing that had happened was that someone had thought to bring in a plate of sandwiches. Sickened by thoughts of what Mal must be going through, Will had at first been unable to eat, but after the plate had been in front of him for a while, and feeling he had nothing to contribute to the discussion besides making it clear he supported the Major’s plan for a rescue, he had nibbled listlessly at a cheese and pickle and found himself to be ravenous.
‘We’ve been through this already.’ Merryn, the dark and stocky Cornishman who had ordered him to fetch the Major, was growing tired and irritable and it showed in his voice. ‘We all agree we want to do something to help Mal, but blundering in to save him is not going to achieve our goals, and we’re so close! We’ve been planning this for years damn it!’
‘Yes, and why?’ the Major asked.
‘What?’
‘Why have we been planning it? Because we all agree Spight is like a toxic cloud, poisoning everything he touches, and we aren’t prepared to let events take their course. We’ve decided we’re better than he is, we’ve set ourselves on an elevated moral plane, and now we’re going to abandon one of our own? How does that make us superior to Spight?’
‘That’s a specious argument and you know it. Thousands … tens of thousands of people’s lives are going to be improved if we …’
‘So it’s a numbers game?’ the Major asked.
‘That’s not what I said.’
‘No, because I interrupted once I could see where you were going. Thousands of lives weighed up against one … blah blah blah.’
‘What we are losing sight of,’ said Mrs Mason, breaking in to what had become a tedious restating of positions already entrenched two hours before, ‘is that our plans have already been changed for us. We cannot proceed as we intended. We should be grateful we found out now, not after we returned to the bunker, or we could all be in Mal’s position. The point being, is there a way we can continue with Stage Two? Do we abandon everything we’ve worked and sacrificed for? Or is there a way to incorporate a rescue?’
This brought a fresh round of argument. Maps and flipcharts were brought out. Will laid his head down on his forearms on the table, just for a moment, and slept.
*
Primrose had to be replaced in the shipment, and Dorcas had Alise in mind. The girl was older, and less beautiful, but she had a more tractable temperament, demonstrated by the fact she was still present in her room, munching away on crackers and cheese as a snack to tide her over until lunch. More worrying was that the treatment had to be undertaken today and Alise would not be fully recovered before she had to leave for Dartmouth. Dorcas was a pragmatic and self-serving woman, not a deliberately cruel one, and she wouldn’t want one of her charges to suffer unnecessarily, but neither did she want to get on the rough side of Spight or his son-in-law. Alise would have to go, and she just hoped Spight wouldn’t spot the substitution.
Summoned from the gatehouse, Dr Harrow looked haggard, etched by all seventy-seven of his years. His activities of the previous night seemed to weigh heavy on him. Dorcas sympathised, but she couldn’t afford to show it, so she offered him an instant coffee and told him he was going to have a busy day, with a stern admonition to: ‘Mind you don’t make her too skinny. She’s going to need some reserves to get her through the journey, Spight says.’
Dr Harrow now looked old, haggard and unhappy, but also resigned. ‘I’ll need the girl’s charts. Has she been put on nil by mouth?’
‘Er, no, I’ll get Agnes on that right away.’
‘We might have to pump her stomach, don’t want to risk her choking.’ He looked up from checking through his bag to see what additional equipment he would need. ‘What happened to Primrose? I thought she was slated for this shipment? That was some of my best work.’
It was true the doctor took pride in his surgery. Conventional demand for his cosmetic services had died with the departure of people who could afford them and left him with no money to relocate; after several years making do as a GP he had jumped at the chance to work at the farm, with a comfortable home thrown in. Now he was too old to do anything else, she almost felt sorry for him.
She could hardly tell the doctor the girl was sick. With no credible alternative presenting itself, Dorcas plumped reluctantly for the truth.
‘We’ve mislaid her, temporarily. I’ve got people out looking for her. The girl’s family will bring her back if she turns up there, and she hasn’t had any visitors in all the time she’s been here so she can’t have any friends who would take her in. We’ll find her. But in case it isn’t before the shipment leaves, we need a back-up.’
‘Well well, little girl’s found her backbone under all that blubber eh?’ The doctor’s pinched features looked momentarily amused.
Irritated, Dorcas snapped, ‘Perhaps you’d like to check in on your other patient, see if he survived the night?’ She knew the prisoner in the larder was still alive, she had checked on him several times already, but pity for the doctor often switched abruptly to revulsion. She needed him,
and he was good at what he did, but his professional, doctorly callousness grated on what survived of her conscience.
Dr Harrow flinched and she knew she had hit some remaining nerve still connecting him to his Hippocratic Oath. Smiling icily, she swept out of the cramped office to which he had been summoned, shouting for Agnes to go and remove the plate of crackers and cheese from Alise’s grip.
*
When Will awoke, stormy-looking clouds were dimming the day outside the mullioned windows and lamps had been lit against the dark, casting warm pools of light across the room. The Major was shaking him by the shoulder.
‘Sorry, shouldn’t have gone to sleep.’ Will wiped at the corner of his mouth, where it felt like he had drooled a little. His neck was stiff.
‘Most sensible thing you could have done, in the circumstances.’
‘What’s happening?’
‘Nothing for now, at least not for you and me. We need more intel. I think the best thing we can do is go and check on your friend. I hear he’s been giving a little trouble.’
‘Friend?’ Head muzzy with sleep, he didn’t know what the Major meant.
‘The old man. He should be sobering up by now.’
‘God, I forgot all about him. Has anyone taken him anything to eat? Or drink?’ Will’s conscience was stricken. They had delivered the old man to the owner of the house when they arrived and Will had pretty much forgotten about him since.
The Major laughed. ‘Oh, he’s been well taken care of. But don’t expect any thanks.’
Will was led out into the rain and around to the back of the house, to a ramshackle outbuilding that looked like it was used to store tools.
‘We couldn’t let him in the house, too many sensitive conversations taking place,’ the Major explained. As they drew closer they could hear loud shouting. An angry stream of swearing.
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