by Ian Watson
“How about a beer?” Ed had the softest of accents, dilute transatlantic. “Or something stronger?” He was tall with greying hair cut short, slatey eyes, thin nose, almost invisible pastel lips, and a neat salt-and-pepper moustache without which his face might have looked as though an eraser had been at work on it. Ed rarely got worked up about anything and was very literal-minded. Equally, he was hospitable in his quiet way. He was wearing slacks and a brown jogging top.
“No thanks, I had a can during the match. And there’s a village hall meeting this evening – pub afterwards.”
“Match?”
“Swansea versus Cardiff. Rugby, man!” At least it hadn’t been snowing there, even if the All Whites had behaved like a blizzard.
“Of course. You’re a Welshman.”
“Rugby and the Labour Party: both in my blood.” Not that Gareth, coming from Cardiff, could speak a word of Welsh. He was no mountain-man.
He recollected Jeni telling him something that had ruffled his feathers. If he challenged Ed, that would be research . Jeni should approve.
“What’s this I hear about your chaps going round telling the Brits they buy from not to vote Labour, then?”
“Doing what?”
“When your USAF chaps spend some money in an antique shop or whatnot, they tell the owner not to vote Labour or he’ll go out of business.”
Ed said vaguely, “Oh, I guess they have political education classes on base. It helps the new arrivals cope with culture shock.”
Jeni had got the story from the man who ran Treasure & Trash in Churtington. “The Yanks hate Labour,” he’d told her. “They’re being told that if Britain ever kicks out the nukes, then everything will go, down to the last paperclip.” Businesses such as antique shops relied for eighty per cent of their turnover on US personnel; not that the Americans were squandering money or being rooked – they could easily resell whatever they shipped back to the States for two or three times the price.
“It’s a bit interfering, I’d say.”
“I don’t really know about that,” replied Ed, “but you could ask Melfort’s own new arrivals. I hear a family moved into the school house yesterday; though really they’re instructed not to talk about what happens on base.”
“You and Mary’ll be helping these new ones get their bearings?”
“Us? No, not specially. Billeting isn’t housing management. We just live here. I don’t know them. Of course, if they want to ask anything of us, or the Diamonds –”
“Ah. On the subject of asking for things –”
However, Ed lacked a power drill. Gareth got back to Old Roses in time to catch the five o’clock news headlines on local radio, which Nancy was listening to in the kitchen.
A suspected terrorist bomb explosion near the peace camp at RAF Kerthrop; there’d been one death and serious injuries to members of the local hunt. Gareth’s heart sank.
He hardly heard the items which followed: more about the closure of the Suez Canal to Western shipping by the militant Islamic coup leaders in Egypt; Soviet protests at the strafing of their anti-submarine cruiser by aircraft of the US 6th Fleet; that sabotaged tanker still ablaze off the Cape.
Hadn’t Jeni said she was going to the peace camp today? Her car was outside. Should he call round?
Knowing her, if she hadn’t heard the news she might rush off to Kerthrop and miss tonight’s meeting. That would be a damn shame so close to the AGM.
What if hunt members from Melfort had been among the casualties? Even if not, committee members might well be acquainted with the victims. His stock and Jeni’s could nosedive by association with the outrage. He needed to know the details.
Ten past five. Tom Tate usually opened the White Lion up promptly at six, unlike certain other village pubs. Eager for trade in tight times.
Nine
The phone crackled as if pigeons were prancing on the wire. Jeni banged the ear-piece.
“Say that again, Mal. I can’t hear.”
Outside, dusk was gloaming, but the inch of snow that had fallen had mostly melted. Jeni had fled the peace camp shortly after the … incident. She’d spent all afternoon at home. At first she’d sat numbly, feeling lost, then to distract herself she’d begun to mark a heap of history essays. These had to be done in any event. On Monday John Clare resumed after the half-term break.
The essays were about the British Revolution of 1805. No such revolution ever took place, yet there were umpteen reasons for a revolution then – as good as any of the reasons for the French Revolution of 1789, which did occur. Jeni had dreamed this theme up as a stimulating exercise for the Fourth Year. For once she had tuned her radio to an offshore pirate station playing pop. Every hour on the hour there was still news of multiple crises, mainly in the Med and Near East. For once she tried to blank the news out.
More pigeons on the line. “What did you say earlier, Mal?” (Thump.)
“… MOD police and USAF security police. They turned the camp over. Did as much damage as they reasonably could.”
“Oh no.”
“Looks worse than it is. Took Jizz away for questioning. Took our visitors’ book.”
Jeni’s stable had been tastefully converted: exposed beams, whitewashed stone walls, stripped pine floor and staircase leading up to bedroom and bath. Slim storage heaters, wrap-around techno-kitchen. She’d furnished the living room with a second-hand tufty wool suite in dark brown, an old roll-top desk, a glass-fronted bookcase. No need for a table and dining chairs; she wouldn’t be hosting dinner parties. Guests could eat buffet-style. Nor had she rented a TV. TV bathed you in images and opinions, but somehow she understood information better from a radio. From Radio Four, anyway, her usual broadcasting tipple. Or perhaps she was prejudiced because TV captured you, immobilized you, stopped you from doing anything else but drink it in, submit yourself to it.
On the floor sprawled a large numdah rug from Oxfam, showing a naively woven tree with a score of doves perched in the branches. Mostly this reminded her of peace, occasionally of a chestnut tree in Somerville College gardens. On one wall hung a blow-up of the famous photo of Lenin addressing workers from a wooden stand – famous because Trotsky’s image, just below, had been obliterated from later printings of the photo.
“They arrested Gisela? On what charge?”
“To assist enquiries, eh? They seem convinced the wire was dynamited. Bombed. How else could it have blown up? They’re still out there in the floodlights sifting the soil. Couple of plain-clothes blokes followed me down to the phone box. You’d better steer clear for a few days.”
“At a time like this, steer clear? You need support. Solidarity. I’ve every right to visit –”
Oh, this was Mal’s peculiarity acting up again. Events were overloading him, so he was trying to scare people off till he could cope again. Mind, she’d fled the scene herself – otherwise she felt she might fly apart. Maybe Mal was trying to protect her.
“Don’t tell me about rights. You brought us the truth about our rights, all nicely typed out – at least till the hounds and gee-gees shredded it. Not that our friends didn’t scrupulously pick up every scrap. Just in case it’s a commie explosives manual.”
Crackle-splatter-piss. Now a gang of doves were pecking the line.
“I can handle it,” she thought she heard; then she was listening to the buzzing of a put-down phone.
Had someone – Gisela? – really stuffed explosives under the wire? Set them off bloody-mindedly to coincide with the hunt?
Had the fox in its agony and terror bitten through some booby-trapped fuse wire?
Jeni remembered the snake which had writhed through her own entrails, and the imaginary pit in the road. As she shuddered with the recollection, a twitch of movement caught the corner of her eye. The branches of the numdah tree were asquirm with curled-up slippery venomous vipers, giant millipedes, coiling worms, vile black creatures –
No! Doves. White doves. Of peace.
The air stan
k of rotting, wet, mouldy wood buried underground for centuries, as though the room was floored with coffin boards.
The rug had rucked up and slid towards the phone. She must have skidded it as she was hurrying to answer Mal’s call. She advanced to stamp the numdah back into its proper place – and stopped, terrified that if she stood on the weave right now there might be nothing beneath. Just a dark hole. With something at the bottom of the hole. Something big and simmering and foul. Or a pool of liquified dead flesh that was still alive.
Oh there was foulness, all right! The evil of M-16s and F-111s, the nuclear evil!
Skirting the rug, she stooped quickly and tugged it back again. It lay obediently on clear-varnished pristine golden pine.
She stirred the bowl of pot-pourri on the window sill till her room smelled sweet again. The pot-pourri was a present from Nancy; the dried petals came from Else and Anne Poulson and other roses with women’s names that grew in the back garden. Jeni sometimes fancied that these roses contained the women in spirit, imagined that the women, when dead, had been burned to ash and buried under the first hybrid plant, magically to nourish the namesake bloom.
“Why don’t they like pot-pourri in Ulster, eh?” she asked herself aloud, and answered her own question in an Ian Paisley boom (played on the windpipe organ): “No – Popery!” She laughed. Even to herself her laugh sounded sick.
The MOD had taken away the visitors’ book, but that needn’t bother her. Meg the Mini had been logged time and again by the MOD. Whenever any vehicles called at the camp, a Transit van would cruise slowly by. It occured to Jeni that her phone might well be tapped. Probably was. Perhaps she ought to be grateful to Telecom for all the static? How could an eavesdropper understand conversations when she had her own work cut out half of the time?
It was Gareth, rather than the police, who rang her doorbell at quarter to eight. Jeni grabbed her pink anorak from the peg and stepped out.
“You’ve heard about that business at Kerthrop?” he asked.
She simply nodded, not quite wanting to tell him that she’d been present.
“I nipped up to the White Lion earlier. Village is humming about your camp, and the hunt.”
“My camp? It’s yours too, Gareth. What are people saying?” – as they headed up the street of cottages towards the green.
“Chap from Thrushby, dead – head sliced off. Jim Jackson-Thorpe, brother of our beloved County Councillor’ll never walk again. Minor injuries galore. Several horses destroyed on the spot. Sounds like a ruddy massacre. A bomb.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Mal phoned.”
“Sounds like a bomb to me. That’s what the news said. Mrs Parkes had her cheek cut open by flying wire. Another inch, and she’d have lost an eye. John Touchbrook had his leg slashed and his horse all cut up.”
John Touchbrook was on the village hall committee…. Had Mrs Parkes recognized Jeni on the bridlepath?
“A bomb’s bad news, Jeni. Terrorism. We should dissociate ourselves. They’ll come down on that camp like a ton of bricks.”
“Mal says they already started.”
“What price an Easter demo now?” She fancied she detected an edge of relief mixed with his anxiety, which prompted her to wonder who else a bomb might gratify, for other reasons. Not that it had been a bomb at all.
“Neat way of aborting the festival, wouldn’t you say?” she asked. “Department of Dirty Tricks strikes again.”
“You surely don’t think –!”
“I don’t know. Don’t forget the Greenham microwaves.”
Radiation had been beamed out of Greenham at the peace camps on occasions when police and troops were conspicuous by their absence for hours. That started in the winter of ’84-’85. A radiologist brought in by the wimmin at Green Gate had measured microwave levels a hundred times normal background. Result: nosebleeds, confusion, irregular menstruation, headaches, sun-burn at night. The wimmin were being “cooked”.
“If that story’s true,” grunted Gareth. “New Scientist said the National Radiological Protection Board were able to reassure the Greenham women. I showed you the article. You’ve never dug out any confirmation about this radiologist of yours. I think it’s like those stories about yellow rain in Asia. Bee shit, actually.”
“I remember that article! Photo of ‘Red Ken’ Livingstone ‘with reasons to thank the NRPB’, and not a word about why. Photo of Greenpeace, given a clean bill of health after they’d been checking on radioactive discharge into the Irish Sea. Their dinghy didn’t make the geiger counters buzz that day; whoopee. Photo of the wimmin who were so surprised to find that the NRPB employs top females. Fine reassuring stuff. Moral: even the loony left loves the NRPB, so obviously it needs more funding.”
“Come on now, New Scientist’s not like that. It’s always opening cans of worms. And Tom Dalyell writes for it.”
He seemed disposed to argue; and she realized why. Technicalities. To distract her.
“Our friends could use some moral support, Gareth. I’ll phone round tonight to see who can get there. Will you and Nancy drive down with me tomorrow?”
“I suppose we ought to. Though if it was a bomb…”
“If! And whose bomb was it?”
“Mm.”
They walked in silence across the green towards the long wooden shingle-roofed hall where light glowed and a few cars already stood on the forecourt. Other cars and a Land Rover were drawn up outside the White Lion, illuminated by a string of coloured fairground bulbs and by the floodlit inn sign. Other lights, or blue TV glow, showed in steep-roofed ironstone cottages. Dingy white ducks sailed, squabbling, on the pond. A lone goat, tethered on a long chain to the mid-way lamp post, cropped coarse grass. The sky wasn’t too doleful now; stars winked through open rifts.
Could the wire possibly have acted as an aerial to lure ball lightning? Gareth taught physics … he ought to know the answer. Why bother even asking? The lightning had burst out of the soil.
Right now the peace camp seemed no distance away at all, as though shifting the site of the village all those hundreds of misty years ago had made not one scrap of difference … to whatever had squirmed beneath her rug. To the thing which might burst out wherever the pressure and the irritation mounted – wherever the flimsy surface was punctured.
You needed to scratch an itch. You even needed to make it bleed. You couldn’t stop yourself. What was the greatest irritant hereabouts? The US base, of course. That’s why she had to go there as soon as possible – so as to release the pressure there and not here. Unless … it was already too late to choose where?
She almost halted in her tracks. What on earth was going through her mind? Just now she could hardly follow her own thoughts. These weren’t thoughts at all. They were more like visceral surges, ugly tensions as if she was about to have a period. A bad period.
“Won’t you be coming to the pub after, then?” She caught the pleading note in Gareth’s voice. Generally about half of the committee adjourned to the White Lion following the meeting. “You could phone round tomorrow morning. Saturday; catch people in.”
Aha. Often a spot of idiot banter was directed at the two resident “reds”. “If you’re true Socialists why don’t you go and live in Russia” – that sort of thing. Tonight, the mood might be ugly. Gareth was on edge.
Ten
Gareth wasn’t sure whether to feel relieved or peeved at the poor attendance in the village hall that evening. Apart from Jeni and himself there were only five others. There was Chairman George Vaux, and their current secretary Marianne Bennett – Gareth knew she wasn’t too anxious to be re-elected. Shy Clare Fox was blinking at her minutes – Jeni could do better than Clare any day. Plus there was Betty Gibson representing the WI, and Bert Morris.
Apologies from treasurer Ralph Underdown who was on business in Scotland; but he’d already given George copies of the balance sheet for distribution. Apologies also from Ian Yardle
y, a fuddy-duddy church stalwart who wouldn’t have dreamed of going drinking afterwards (never mind that the vicar drank). No other apologies, but Marianne mentioned that John Touchbrook was tragically indisposed. Nuff said. The atmosphere cooled a few degrees.
It warmed gratifyingly as soon as Gareth suggested his solution to their financial dilemma. Income was way down due to a moratorium on disco lettings to outsiders. There had been too many brawls, too much vandalism, and even a stabbing outside Thrushby village hall.
“I should like to propose a wine and cheese evening,” he said. “By way of a farewell to winter! That’ll bring everyone out of the woodwork. How about two weeks from tonight? Nancy and I will gladly organize it, and I’m sure Jeni’ll pitch in.”
He expounded to general approval on which volunteers he would persuade to do what.
Jeni darted him a pained look. “How about beer and sausages instead? You won’t get the council house people turning out in droves for wine.”
“Oh, we’ll lay on some canned beer.”
Was she going to object again? He could guess why. “Wine and cheese” meant that Tories would turn out en masse, whereas the working class would stay at home. But this was a matter of fund-raising. Wine and cheese made money; you had to face facts.
Fortunately Jeni just nodded and sat hunched into herself. The meeting ambled on for an hour and a quarter in all.
The bar was crowded. Darts board busy; skittles table likewise. Standing room only. A suntanned nude wearing a skirt of peanut packets simpered at Gareth as he got the first round of halves in.
“Met the new Yanks yet?” he heard Bert asking Marianne.
Bert was the only “genuine” working class member of the committee, though he would never hint how he voted. Stocky, grizzle-haired, with mild blue eyes, Bert worked for farmer Vaux and lived in a tied cottage. George Vaux himself, with his ex-RAF handlebar moustache, was stout, florid-faced and gentlemanly but not prosperous. His place could do with a lick of paint, and he’d recently got rid of half of his milking herd because of the quotas. Bert and George mucked in together on first-name terms, though there was still an edge of social difference. George was also chairman of the Parish Council, and Gareth cultivated him when he could.