The Litten Path

by James Clarke

  “Naturally they’ve pushed the writ through. The bastards couldn’t have me lurking around.”

  “I thought you had their ear. And I know you’re not elected but you still have friends, no?”

  “Allies disperse, darling.”

  “I’m not a child.”

  “I still don’t expect you to understand everything, Evie.”

  His greasy fingers in the olive dish. All her life, Evie’s father had thought little of her. “Try me,” she said. “You could even trust me.”

  Clive licked his fingers and poured more wine into his mug. He’d smashed all the glasses that week. “The easiest way of putting it would be to say I made a call that cost,” he said at last.

  “Personally? Financially?”

  “The latter. Although one could make a case for the former.”

  “So, you’re guilty of . . . ?”

  Clive raised his hands. “A man should never have to admit a thing like this to his little girl . . .”

  “What?”

  “Culpability.”

  “I’m no girl.”

  As if in agreement, Evie’s father presented her with his smouldering cigar. His hair was bushy, mane-like round the edges, balding centrally as he clung to what was left in that pathetic way some men have. Evie’s mouth filled with smoke.

  Clive said, “Best you think of this as a chance to regroup.”

  But she wasn’t letting him off the hook that easily. “It’s been worrying Duncan,” she said gently. “He’s been moved away from all his friends. He keeps talking about being held back at school. I don’t know what to say to him.”

  Clive shuffled to the settee. “My boy,” he said, touching the sleeping Duncan’s toe. “Do you know, Evelyn, you started calling me by my first name when you were eight years old. You said it suited me better.”

  “You never corrected me.”

  “It’s important for women to be allowed to stick to their guns.”

  She could have struck him.

  “You’d wriggle out of my arms every time I tried to hug you. I thought there was something seriously wrong.”

  And maybe there was. Evie remembered hating to be touched, and now that she was older she hated people thinking they understood her. She was the spawn of such a regrettable soul, a corpulent liar with a coloboma of the left iris. Her father’s shirt buttons looked ready to burst as he sat back down and reclined in his wooden chair.

  “But you will have it your way,” he said, smiling at her, then adding abruptly: “I was approached.”

  “How do you mean?”

  Clive’s laugh was sodden and asthmatic. Evie poured the remains of her mug into his.

  “An opportunity. Blasted friend of Bram’s. Irishman.” Her father belched.

  “You’re excused.”

  He didn’t thank her.

  “Sheehan. Point man for a consortium named Atlantia. They’ve bought land in and around High Wycombe. A regeneration project.”

  “What, for housing?”

  “Yes, good.” Clive nodded at Evie’s perception. “Low cost abodes, very profitable. But they’ve longer-term margins in mind. Ever hear of Chandigarh?”

  Evie shook her head.

  “North of India. Designed by Corbusier, laid out in sectors. Skelmersdale, Milton Keynes?”

  “Do I look stupid?”

  “No comment.” Clive flashed his top teeth. “Point is, they’re all new towns, planned cities. Atlantia are trying to develop something similar. Sheehan laid it all out: they want to build a mega-complex for the nineties, a new conurbation but done right this time. Wycombe’s close to London, it’s voted blue since the fifties. Prime candidate, really, reward its loyalty. First they plan the housing, generate the capital, then the contracts will be up for tender. Good news for the shareholders . . .” Clive rubbed his index fingers and thumbs. “As long as they invest the right way.”

  He winked at her.

  “And Sheehan came to you?”

  “Bram pointed him my way. We scratch each’s others backs, as you know.”

  Not the only thing Bram scratched.

  “Still, it’s not just out of loyalty. I do have some uses, despite what the women in my life might think.” Clive licked the corners of his chapped mouth. “I know the relevant councillors,” he said. “Nigel Burt’s the chair of the committee. He’s the green light man for the county and I know him from Brasenose.” Clive pursed his lips. “A boat club man.”

  “Another club?”

  “Piers Gaveston isn’t for everyone, dearest.”

  The two of them shared an amused raising of eyebrows, then Clive said, “But before you start complaining, it’s always been like this in Britain. Things only happen when somebody who knows somebody makes a call.”

  “I suppose clubs are only a bad thing if you’re not a member.”

  Clive nodded. “For those that belong come the spoils, and those that don’t . . .”

  He didn’t need to finish his sentence.

  “You might also consider the possibility that I believed in the project. Believe, I should say. I think it’ll be good for the economy.”

  “You mean your cut was good enough to convince you as to the merits of the cause.”

  Clive’s face was impassive.

  “Yet here we are in France,” said Evie.

  Her father made a butterfly out of his hands and flapped its wings. “The planning committee refused the Atlantia bid. Opportunistic and aggressive, they said.”

  “So much for Brasenose Burt.”

  “The man’s a shit.”

  “Couldn’t Bram have a word?”

  Clive went into the kitchen, where Evie heard him selecting another bottle of wine from the cupboard. When he returned she went herself, sloshed some wine into her mug then hid the bottle. She ran a glass of water and placed it on the table in front of her father.

  “It wouldn’t do to have a visible link,” Clive said. “Silent investors in projects like this can’t have ties to cabinet. You should have heard the committee’s response. The proposed Atlantia Project will impact on flooding and spoil the view in an area of outstanding natural beauty.”

  “Is that not the case?”

  “Who gives a fuck when there’s that much money at stake?”

  Evie shook her head. “Their very words?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me. I suppose the people of High Wycombe might like adders and whatever the hell else lives there. Newts. They’re endangered, aren’t they?”

  “Life getting in the way of profit.”

  “Quite.”

  “Well that’s laudable,” said Evie. “Though I think what you mean to say is the committee turned the application down because you weren’t as persuasive as you’d thought. What happened to the money, Clive?”

  That butterfly again.

  “I thought the nature of a bribe was it bought you what you wanted.”

  “Well, if you must know, I gave Burt half then stuck the rest on an each-way in the autumn weekend at Ascot. Christmas was coming and your mother wanted a new dress.”

  “Fucking hell.”

  “The rest was supposed to come out of my winnings. Don’t forget, another person in my life’s almost ready for university. The money to keep you in knickers and baked beans has to come from somewhere, you know.”

  So it was her fault. Anger rising, Evie thought of the snow outside the chalet, its weight settling, a gust stampeding down the gradient of Mont Blanc as if forced by a great drover on the other side of the valley.

  “What possessed you, Dad?”

  “Dad now, is it? I didn’t think I was going to lose. The rest of our income went on trying to get the collateral back.”

  “They fixed the race?”

  “Let’s just say I
was led to believe the odds had been consolidated one way in advance.”

  “Jesus, you’re not giving an interview. Who gave you the tip?”

  Clive crossed his arms.

  “I said who?”

  “This is what you call a pointed silence, Evie.”

  “Meaning you don’t know.”

  “Meaning I know who it came from but I’m more interested in finding out why it was wrong.”

  That strange eye was hooded by the drink. “For the record,” Clive said. “I have always won far more than I lost.”

  “Noted and accredited.”

  “And I hope someday that you’ll do me the courtesy of being as candid about your own life,” he said. “Darling, too wit . . .” God, Evie loathed his lawyer shtick . . . “I also hope you’ll be as transparent with your own progeny, should you be unfortunate enough to have any yourself.”

  This was why he would truly never be Dad. They drank until he fell asleep. Once Evie had grown tired of the snoring, she roused Clive to the bathroom and stood in the hallway listening to him piss. She peered around the creaking door to check he was OK when she heard him gagging on his toothbrush, noting that his trousers were falling down. Even old Etonians had builder’s bottoms.

  Finally alone, Evie visited the chalet window. The Alps appeared paranormal in the dimness; each hump could have been Bram lying next to her on a snatched weekend afternoon, when he was bored and she was desperate to be complicit in something secretive and adult, considered as a woman, attended to. That bastard had said nothing about any of this.

  She’d pleaded with her parents to be allowed to stay at home but hadn’t been able to say why. This was because the reality was that London was all she knew, change can be horrifying and she was lovesick. None of which are easily articulated sentiments.

  “Daddy, please,” she’d said, abasing herself with the informal noun.

  “And stay where, Evelyn? You have met your mother?”

  So had everybody else. Fiona Swarsby was a size six, aged sixty, who had owned a walk-in wardrobe since the age of fifteen. Evie’s mother had discarded her played-out husband and children like a used tissue. Divorce wasn’t the done thing, far too public. Bram set her up in Highgate. Suitable digs, Evie often thought, for a woman who might as well have lived on a distant volcanic island of velour, sequins and purple drapes, her diet consisting of fox, boar and venison, the cutest children from the villages of the supplicating natives.

  So Bram was coming to Evie’s mother’s rescue. Handsome Bram. Dependable Bram. The motorboat had glided up the river while his moisturised hands rested against Evie’s hips, that final time. Evie remembered their silence in the quiet, certain Bram didn’t want to cuddle yet still vainly trying to clasp a moment of closeness before it was time to get dressed again. Bram’s forgotten damp became a gel on the insides of her thighs, his sticky disdain plastered up the uneven shape of a curve-less body that embarrassed her. She had run to the toilet. Nauseous, spent.

  She might as well have been moved to the North Pole. “Oh, Evelyn,” Fiona had said to Evie. “You can’t seriously expect me to be looking after you at my age.” Then she let Bram help her to the car, Bram glancing up at Evie from below: a strung-out face in a Muswell Hill window. He’d smiled. Smiled! Although it was Evie who laughed last, because not one of them expected the vodka and paracetamol:

  Not Duncan with his fingers down her gullet.

  Not Clive clucking in the taxi to St Thomas’.

  Not Fiona, calling her a silly girl.

  Nor Bram, ignoring the phone call, never receiving the letter Evie wrote to him, threatening to go public about their affair. The letter was found the next morning, folded inside the front cover of her copy of Catch-22, rather than mid-way, saving the page as she had originally left it.

  “What’s going on? Why aren’t you in school?”

  Next to the little red tree, Lawrence was being confronted by a man. The man had his hands on Lawrence’s shoulders. Evie headed over. She was drunk, she realised. She was also furious.

  Lawrence spied her first. His face was flushed, mouth as gormless as one of Clive’s Koi carp the day Evie saw them disappear down that heron’s throat. She tapped the stranger on the arm. As the man let go of Lawrence and whirled round to face her, Evie’s heart skipped. The stranger wore a plastic mask that only part-covered his bloated face. He had a convict’s shaven head, the roughness of which was exacerbated by a scraggy beard and a blue stain dotting one of his cheeks.

  Evie stepped back. So did the man.

  “Jesus,” he exclaimed. “No way.”

  She could have said the same thing. He was absolutely ghastly, a guy let loose from its bonfire: the Yorkshire bloody Ripper. He was about to grab her, he must be, so Evie drew her foot back and kicked him between the legs as hard as she could. The man made a funny exhalation and folded over, sinking to his knees, forehead meeting the ground as if in prayer. Evie felt like a little girl again, back on Brighton pier, watching the pennies spewing into the cash flow after she’d shoulder-barged the coin pusher’s glass. The arcade attendant coming her way, scooping her booty into her pockets before escaping to the yielding terrain of the pebbled beach.

  You win!

  “Come on!” she cried. Lawrence was trying to speak to the man, but it was hardly the time for gloating. Evie pulled him by the hand. “Hurry up!”

  “That were my dad!”

  “What?” They were really running. Their shoes beat the trail that wound into Barnes’ Wood like a huge unspooled tape measure. Yard by yard, they hurried, through the bracken stage ahead of copse and shade, skipping through leaf and fern, the very air exciting. What was anything? It was everything. Evie slapped Duncan around the head as she passed him, and he fell in behind her and Lawrence, both the boys dead-weights in her wake. Because no man could hold a candle. Evie was the renegade of Litten Hill.

  PART TWO

  Flattened Stones, Scrambled Heights

  9

  Well this was certainly different, buzzing in a loose convoy down the A1 towards Sheffield, in the front seat next to Joyce Stride, of all people. A few other girls were in the back, boards between their knees, handwritten slogans on sticks and collection buckets gaping in the footwells. Shell had her finger pressed against the A to Z to stop it wobbling on her leg, pressuring the kinked channels meshing colourfully across both pages. She murmured odd place names as the carriageway flashed by outside. Tilts, Blaxton and Hickleton. Levitt Hagg, Micklebring and Maltby.

  “Regarding the issue of the name,” Joyce was saying. She was a stuffy sort who could be found making comments at the back of the welfare on Friday nights. “I think it’s worth noting that Barnsley ladies are the B.W.A.P.C. And I think it’d make us sound more official if we came up with something similar.”

  “What’s that stand for again?” said Shell.

  Joyce tutted. “Barnsley Woman against Pit Closures.”

  Shell tutted back.

  “Womankind it must mean.”

  “Get off wi’ you. I always said they were odd in Barnsley, an’ no wonder if there’s only one set of tits to go round all them blokes.”

  “Shell!”

  “Oh give over, Joyce. You’re a hair splitter yourself, half the time. Climb off your soapbox and have a laugh.”

  Joyce had a sickly face. It was her veins, they were so prominent that on a cold day she could have been sculpted out of blue cheese. Today her neck was strained, tortoise-like, with nerves. It was because they’d taken her husband’s crappy hatchback without permission. Although Jed Stride was a public milksop who’d hardly give Joyce the grief she was expecting for taking the car, she was practically in bits over it. Shell angled the oblong mirror in the sun guard but none of the others thought to meet her eye in it.

  “I’ve said before,” she said. “I’m not against giving ourse
lves a name. Fact is I think it’s a good idea. But we’ll have to come up with something better than B.W.A.P.C. Hardly rolls off the tongue now, does it. I’ll get my thinking cap on, come up with something snappy.”

  Olive Butterworth, cramped in the middle of the back seat, piped up. “As long as it’s better than Scargill’s Slags, I’ll be happy. That’s what police called us at the rally. Never damped us spirits, mind.”

  Motherly, currant-bun Olive had attended the big All Women’s do earlier that month and wouldn’t stop going on about it. Pretending not to hear, Shell made a show of changing the radio station. Scritti Politti were more like it. She turned in her seat and winked back at Jan.

  “I’ll just be glad when all this is over,” said Joyce, shaking the fringe of her mushroom haircut from her eyes. “I’ve better ways to spend my weekends than begging for loose change.”

  “And there were me thinking you were enjoying a day out with your mates,” said Olive, nudging Linda Parkes, who’d fallen asleep. Linda stirred, sounding like she’d a mouthful of glue. Olive giggled and so did Shell, covering her mouth with one hand.

  Joyce said, “Why should I value that? I must live half a mile from the lot of you. I can pop round any time I like.”

  “Assuming we let you in,” said Shell.

  “I could come admire that carpet of yours while I’m at it, Michelle.”

  “An feel the back of my hand an’ all if you like.”

  “Girls,” simpered Olive, winding down the window. “You’re hardly being ladylike.”

  Joyce got all huffy. “Try telling her that.”

  Olive’s ginger hair blew prettily about her face. A pattern of corny badges were pinned up the front of her cardigan, which, though buttoned up, failed to conceal her pronounced belly. She went, “You needn’t worry, Joyce. Jed won’t mind you taking car.”