No, that wasn’t fair. He’d pored through Meeks’s notes on the Leto Bundle with a will: history was part of his scheme, if only to be worked to his plans, and she was central to this process, to his take on it, he’d made it clear so many times. The past meant a lot to him. But what? It was a kind of scaffold for fantasy. And what about love? Was love part of history, too? Or perhaps not love, but desire? Was Kim some new sport of nature, speaking so intimately because he’d evolved to some other phase of evolution where that kind of talk meant something altogether different?
Kim said, ‘All of the Bundle is true. All of it’s got to be on show.’ He put his hand out towards her, lightly, to stop her flow. ‘Gramercy Poule’s dead keen on this film idea,’ he said. ‘She’s paying all expenses, my travel and such – she’s all worked up about HSWU – and Leto and the Bundle. She wants to write a song for it, too – and she’s got a producer interested. It’s just the opportunity we need. We can use it to put pressure on to make the Leto show huge – can’t we?’
He wanted her to come with him, he said, to put in her contribution on the historical background, to be the one who ‘knows it all’. ‘You make us legit, you know. You can give chapter and verse for stuff I just hear from voices in my head or see in my mind’s eye when I read through that stuff – don’t look so sad. You’re not sad. You’re not one of those sad cynics who think the world’ll never be different.’
But Hortense was shifting restlessly. She wanted to pass by all these words and ideas and wearisome work and anxieties and politics. Dimly, she wanted Kim to see his need of her differently, less instrumentally. Less commercially, for God’s sake.
‘What’s she like, Gramercy Poule?’ she asked. ‘You know I once met her . . . manager, I think it was, in the customs shed at an airport.’
‘You did?’
‘Yes, and I was with the Leto, too.’
‘You see, it’s meant to be.’
‘Is she any good – even our new director’s mission for the Museum doesn’t include pop promos. At least I don’t believe so.’
‘Don’t worry. Gramercy Poule’s not a head-banger. She was a big bad wild girl once upon a time – around fifteen years ago when she had her first big hit. But now she wants to do something more than be a rock star. She’s conscious, not like a lot of them. I like her stuff. She was one of the first singers I liked when I was little and she was still around when I was just about to go to college. I spent too much of my grant on her records.’ He laughed.
Hortense was still struggling to bring the conversation round to something personal, something that would fit with the vivid pictures that assailed her.
‘She probably fancies you.’
It hurt her, to be so glaring, so awkward, inviting her own destruction.
‘Naw, I want the same thing and more for HSWU – and she’s sympathetic to that. National identity – we need it, she says. She must’ve blokes coming out of her ears. Doesn’t need another one. And not me, I’m just a primary school teacher, remember.’
‘She’s probably insatiable – isn’t that what pop music’s all about?’
Kim leant over and placed his hand on her arm and squeezed it. ‘Probably, but I’m not in her sights. Hetty, I’ve a lot of other things on my mind. Why don’t you come? It’ll be great. Trust me.’
3
The Fellmoor Cluster
Ella saw the notice in the post office window:
URGENTLY NEEDED! ANIMAL HELPER
Do you care about animals? Fancy you could be Saint Francis, or Rolf Harris? Helper needed to look after (and talk with) assorted wild creatures – birds, ducks, geese, hedgehogs, squirrels, rabbits, ferrets, tortoises – in convalescence on nearby farm. Dogs and cats as well.
Ring 01837 954867 and ask for Monica.
Ella read it twice, then walked back up the street to the phone box, where Phoebe hung around with her friends after classes, taking calls from who knows who, and, amid the fumes of beer and piss and chips inside the confined space, dialled the number on the card.
At Feverel Court, Monica answered; she asked, ‘Have you any experience with handling animals? Pony trekking doesn’t count. We need more than a stable lass.’
Ella answered, carefully, that yes, before she came to this country, she was often occupied with many animals.
Monica, hearing the accent, surmised rightly, but asked anyway, ‘Where you from, then?’
‘Tirzah.’
‘Stay there, right?’
Monica pressed the secrecy button on the phone and said to Gramercy, ‘One of the refugee cluster from the town – a woman. Asking about the job.’
‘No shit,’ said Gramercy.
‘She won’t have any references.’
‘But we could have a look at her.’
‘They’re not meant to work. They get vouchers.’
‘Monica! I thought you cared. You said I could give some money to that . . . charity that works with them.’
‘Yes,’ said Monica, with a laugh. ‘To keep them over there.’
There were complications about Ella reaching Feverel Court, so eventually, Monica agreed to meet her in town. Monica would lay in supplies from the big, cut-price supermarket, and then give Ella a lift back to the house for the interview with Gramercy.
Ella was standing by the supermarket car park’s ticket machine, as agreed. One or two others from the cluster were working the car park, offering to wash cars while their owners were inside, shopping. They complained to Ella of slow demand.
‘They’re frightened of us, they see us and put their yellow crook lock on and take the radios with them inside.’
‘What can I say?’ shrugged Ella. ‘They have a point.’
The Advisory Council for Refugees and Asylum Seekers had been disappointed when they failed to help Ella and Phoebe stay in Enoch. But aspects of their experience (as Freddie tactfully put it) made the tribunal reviewing her permit of residency recommend a quiet, rural settlement. (Ella’s reaction: They think I’ll go on the game). At the converted railway station where they were billeted, some things did go missing (toothpaste was a favourite), while others would all of a sudden appear: a TV, a child’s coat, a computer with games. Their temporary accommodation lay to the west of the town, at the terminus of a branch line that had been used, till thirty years ago, to freight copper and tin worked in the mines that lay deeper within the wildernesses of Fellmoor; the fretwork wooden buildings, now freshly painted green and white by a group of volunteers, with all mod cons wired and plumbed in, the Ticket Office, Waiting Rooms, Guard’s, Station Manager’s and Lading Clerk’s offices, the Tea Room, and the Ladies and Gents, were providing a roof over their heads to six ad hoc families, including Ella and Phoebe. The children loved it: it was now summer, and the platforms, the grassy tracks, the rickety signalling box, even an abandoned caboose on the siding turned their new home into an outdoors playground. But for the adults, the communal sleeping, eating and living, prolonged the experience of the camps from which they had come, by different routes, and tempers were touchpapers.
The local authorities had earmarked some housing of their own on the moor, where the Tirzhaners would regain their privacy as well as their liberty. They would renovate the old barracks the miners used to live in during the winter weeks, when the journey home was too dark and bleak to undertake daily. But the necessary repairs had not yet begun; the county’s heritage representatives protested against the measure. It was bad enough turning the old railway station and goods yard into a refugee hostel, they declared; they could not but oppose any move to spend public money on restoring a local landmark, irreversibly changing the character of a picturesque ruin that offered a unique glimpse into a fascinating and now vanished industrial way of life and labour. A foreign ghetto, created overnight in the grim and frozen depths of Fellmoor, was doomed to turn into a sink estate, and bring endless trouble to its neighbours. How would the inhabitants live there? With no shops, no transport, no work? Far bette
r policy would be to split them up and distribute them singly here and there, to become stitched into the social fabric.
The arguments were well received; no building went forward.
Monica saw a slight, small, tidy woman, much older than she had expected; the previous applicants had indeed been stable lasses still in their dewy passion for muck and straw and steaming flanks and soft thick lips nuzzling. Ella was dressed in a collection of clothes deemed appropriate for a country resettlement, provided in the local authorities’ welcome pack: a good tailored herringbone tweed jacket, and lace-up waterproof boots. But underneath she was wearing a long, tie-dyed cheesecloth skirt; so it was apparent that she had no idea what hopeless social signals her combined hand-me-downs were making. Her face was roughened and brown as if wind-burned, but her hair, which was greying, was combed carefully into two smooth rolls and pinned, with a kind of bygone Parisian chic.
Ella got in the four-wheel drive with difficulty, the front seat was so high off the ground, and thanked Monica for picking her up.
‘You could hardly have walked! It’s three miles. And the bus service – completely run down of course.’
‘If you give me the work, I walk,’ said Ella. ‘Walking is no problem.’ She smiled, and Monica saw that she was younger than her ugly outfit conveyed, but that half her teeth were gone.
‘Oh God,’ she groaned inwardly. ‘Gramercy’ll give her the job, even if she’s never even laid eyes on a tortoise before. Damn that Phil. Damn him damn him. Because it’ll be me that has to cope with the fall out.’
Ella did not grasp Gramercy’s offered hand, until after a moment, in which she wanted to turn and run, but knew she must not.
is she one of the ones I robbed? she is she is that one she looks a bit different though so perhaps I’m confused was that the name? there was a singer that week on all the posters and Pontona was all inflamed about her Luigi told me I should try for some souvenirs he said she was hot and they’d fetch a good price so I should try and work that hotel that week and so I swapped with someone working there fate was smiling on me because that singer she came across me in the cupboard she looks different with clothes on but it’s the same one if she knows me like I know her she will attack me for what I did that night she will denounce me she will tell the people reviewing my case and seeing if I am fit to stay here with Phoebe
I took things the nightdress and the tights were best of all Luigi said he knew people who’d die for them
but maybe it’s a trick of the mind
maybe it’s like dying maybe I am dead now and in the other world it won’t be full of strangers but crowded with all the people you’ve ever known who’ve done things to you or you’ve done things to them eternity will be like perfect recall there’ll be no escape from familiarity going on and on repeating and repeating itself am I seeing a revenant when there’s only a woman I don’t know and who doesn’t know me? perhaps everything is still moving forward at random through time and space just as usual just as it should and we are unconnected and unknown to one another and shall remain so
unless
Monica made a pot of coffee as Gramercy began interviewing Ella, but, as soon as the singer encountered the older woman’s mute shyness, she found she was doing the talking, giving an account of herself, of Feverel Court, of its claims and burdens, of the animal sanctuary and Phil’s departure.
‘There’s a wolf cub there, too, Phil liberated from some children’s film that was being made down here – I didn’t mention it in the ad, because I didn’t want to frighten off applicants. A wolf! Do you understand?’
Ella nodded; though she was schooling her features not to betray first the panic, now the joy that recognition brings, her pupils widened, and Gramercy sensed again the tremor of some quick spirit moving beneath the basalt mask of the woman’s unresponsiveness.
‘It doesn’t alarm you?’
Ella shook her head.
‘Good. So, how did you get here?’ Gramercy then asked, changing tack.
Ella opened her bag and showed the cuttings from The Fanfare.
‘Oh my God, is that you? Is that your daughter?’
‘She’s very well, now. She is studying.’
Gramercy’s head bobbed enthusiastically at this: ‘Here?’
Ella gave the name of the college of further education in the town, and murmured, ‘Computer studies.’
Gramercy felt a choking in her throat, so Monica stepped in, saying, ‘Why don’t we go down to the sheds, and then Ella can see for herself what the problem is?’
Ella washed up her mug in the sink, set it on the drainer, and followed them into the garden.
After Gramercy employed her, then and there, Ella hardly knew where she’d begin. The stink and the crap, the wet straw and the maggoty feeding trays and bowls, the flurry of squawks and squeals and alarum cries, the mice skittering everywhere, the putrid ceres of the birds’ beaks, the rot on their claws, the bitten, torn, raw wounds, the patched and broken pens and holed and twisted chicken wire, the brimming eyes of wilting rabbits and furious squirrels, the yellow needles of the ferrets’ snarl, the curled, mangy rag of the cub, made her falter at the threshold of the sheds.
On her first day of work, when Ella returned on foot in working clothes, Monica took her down again to show her the ropes; she unlatched a wooden door into a lean-to, and showed her the equipment, ‘There’s stuff you’ll need – tools and products, disinfectants, rubber gloves, scrubbing brushes, you name it. There’s stuff to worm them and delouse them but you’ll have to show me to read the labels for you, I suppose. God knows what you have to do to them, and once you’ve got the place clean and respectable enough, we can at least call in the vet and then he can show you how to do it. But we’ll be in trouble if we call him now.
‘Phil didn’t hold with artificial methods – he believed in nature – so things got out of hand long before he upped and left. Just tell me what more you need, and I’ll have it supplied.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘If you can sort this lot out, and get us next year’s certificate without any problems, you’ll be worth more than your weight in gold.’
In a box-like kennel behind the sheds, under a tent of wire, Ella looked into scared yellow giglamps of the wolf cub, and smelled her rank fur as she stumbled clumsily towards them.
‘It’s not much of a life,’ said Monica. ‘That bastard Phil. I’d like to throttle him. Gramercy’s a prize idiot sometimes. Much too soft.’
Gramercy approached Ella in the sheds one day; it was the first really bright summer’s day since she’d been employed, and Ella was bringing out various feeders and dishes and troughs and water containers she’d scrubbed and scoured clean of slime; they were standing to drain and dry in the sunshine.
‘Nellie?’
For Gramercy had begun calling her so, soon after she began working at Feverel. ‘It feels right to me, do you mind?’ she’d said. And met with no refusal.
‘Yes, Madame?’
‘I wish you’d stop that. Say, yes, Gramercy.’
Nellie peeled off her rubber gloves, and obeyed her employer.
Gramercy continued, ‘There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you. I’ve got this ghastly insomnia and I woke up sort of twisted and now I’ve got a stiff neck – can you do massages?’
Nellie put a hand to her brow, and moved, out of the sun which was falling in her eyes.
‘You see,’ Gramercy went on, ‘you remind me of someone who once gave me the most fantastic massage in the world. I’ve always remembered it.’ She opened her hand where she was holding a piece of paper, ‘I kept it, as a memento, because I always wanted to find her again.’ In Gramercy’s hand lay the cleaner’s calling card from the Grand Hotel in Pontona: ‘This room has been serviced by . . .’ Then the writing, ‘Rosa’, followed by ‘Thank you’.
‘I’m not called Rosa.’
‘But you did work in Pontona. Phoebe told me, she said you lived there a while, on your way here. That’s why she
can speak that language as well, she told me so, she’s proud of it. She’s right to be. Wish I had her facility.’ Gramercy paused. ‘I think I saw Phoebe too, with you. Is it possible?’ She moved up to her employee, and tried to look into her eyes, but Nellie kept them averted.
‘It was for the medicine,’ she said, quietly.
‘Stop that,’ Gramercy came back quickly. ‘I don’t give a fuck about what you did. You think I’ve never lifted anything? I just wanted to know that it was you. I had a real sense it was, and I’m glad – I was right all along.’
‘You’ll tell Monica?’
‘I may be an idiot, but no. It’s our karma – yours and mine – I know who you are, and that’s what I wanted, that’s what I want.’ Her voice went whispery and she plucked at Nellie’s sleeve: ‘Use the downstairs shower when you’ve finished here and then, please, Nell darling, give me your special treatment again!’
Phoebe had heard of the plans for the refugee cluster at the college she was attending; she’d then accessed the website where the continuing, angry debate about the refugees was reported, and found the maps where the future distribution of families seeking to stay was indicated. She led Ella up Fellmoor to see the housing. They found two facing rows of speckled granite matchbox cottages, cutting slantwise across a flank of the old mineworkings; bushes sprouted from cracks in the fabric, and a herd of tiny horses, heads down, were munching the bristling gorse, stunted oak and fern that were spreading over the exposed scars in the granite. At the approach of the two women, one mare lifted her outsized head to eye them stolidly through a tangle of matted hoary hair, but stood her ground, with the others.
There was no sign of building work; the cottages looked vacant as skulls.
‘Is this really the place?’ Ella asked her daughter, who was pushing through, towards one of the barred windows.
Inside, scattered tins and bottles and charred sticks and fag ends bore witness to a long season of midnight parties, bonfires and booze.
The Leto Bundle Page 37