‘Well, I’ll have to be photographed,’ Clare said, trying to sound as if it was going to be a cross she had to bear. ‘Probably with you, at some point, if that’s OK.’
Aha. So that was it. Miranda breathed a little easier and said, ‘No problem. Whatever I can do to help. And Daddy?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Shall I ask him when I see him? It won’t be for a few weeks.’
‘Darling, would you mind?’ said Clare. ‘I’m going to be so busy. It would be a real help. When the time comes.’
Mr Marlow could seldom be tempted out of his college at Cambridge. He had made ground-breaking discoveries about the metal trade in pre-Roman Britain. Once or twice a term, he invited Miranda to a college function, an evening that would act on her nervous system like some deadly drug used by Amazon Indians to paralyse piranha fish. Although she liked her father. He’d always been your stereotypical nutty professor, sweet and vague and good at losing things, and amazingly impressed when she found them for him. He seemed to like her, as well. If she asked him, he’d probably turn out for a photograph with her mother. Then scuttle back to his college on the next train.
Now that her role in this new drama was on the table, Miranda relaxed a little. She ate half a cherry tomato. It looked as if it had oil on it, so she left the other half.
For a while, she let herself believe that she just might have got away with it. Her mother was – bloody hell, she was positively hyper. Becoming a politician seemed to have induced a state of instant euphoria. Now Clare was glowing, excitable, up, up, UP. Her eyes sparkled. She was smiling constantly. Being nevertheless a tall and elegant woman, she came over rather like some crazed warrior queen. She even said something nice about her daughter’s new sweater.
For a silly moment, Miranda had wondered if the good news was going to be that her mother had found a new man and was going to propose divorcing her father. Which, in Miranda’s opinion, and the opinion of everyone else who knew them, would be the honest thing to do, since Mr and Mrs Marlow were living lives so far apart that they only met for Christmas and, as now seemed likely, the occasional photocall when Clare needed to look normal for the media.
‘How’s the Clerkenwell Swoosh?’ Clare asked her daughter.
‘We called it the Sweep,’ Miranda corrected her. ‘Swoosh had connotations of globalisation and capitalism.’
‘Very wise,’ Clare approved. ‘The Clerkenwell Sweep. Anyway, how’s it going?’
‘The planning inquiry began last week, we think it’ll take at least six months.’
‘That long?’
‘That’s par for the course, Mum. Planning is a long process. Just hearing the Church submissions about the graveyards will take a week. Six months is quite quick, really.’
‘Graveyards. Oh yes. Well, you’ll let me know if there’s anything I can do, won’t you?’
‘Oh, sure.’
‘Seriously, darling. I’ve met some bishops lately.’
Rats. The wonderful thing about urban renewal, when Miranda had drifted into the profession, was that her mother had almost no reason to be interested in it. Apart from the occasional argument about the right ingredients for the perfect shopping mall, there had been no grounds for maternal meddling in her career. Now she could see that Clare was set to become a control freak on a scale that would make Napoleon look laissez-faire, and, God help everyone, she would soon have the power.
‘So, how’s it going to be, being in politics?’ Miranda enquired, hoping to start a diversion.
‘Early days, of course,’ her mother mused. ‘I think I’ll have to wake them up a bit, of course.’
‘Pretty laid-back, are they?’
‘Yes, darling, you’re right, the old regime were so laidback they were practically horizontal. They’re in for a few surprises. I made it a condition of taking the post that they had a complete corporate makeover, new logo, new name, everything.’ She made it sound as if her department was due for compulsory hair-and-makeup. ‘Tell me,’ she dropped her voice confidentially, ‘what do you think of “Agraria”?’
‘Agraria?’
‘As a name.’
‘Name for the department? Oh – ah – great. Really great.’
‘Not too sort-of classical?’
‘More neutral. But modern. And efficient. I do like it.’
‘Excellent. There’s going to be such a lot to do, Miranda. Which is why I thought we should make some plans.’
Now what?
‘You’ve been working so hard, darling.’
‘Not more than usual,’ Miranda said, feeling doubts rising like floodwater.
‘Well, yes, you do really drive yourself, don’t you?’
‘Wonder where I got that from?’
‘I know, I know. I’m just as bad. A terrible role model for you.’ This was not looking good. Her mother never admitted anything. Nor did she ever play for sympathy. Unless something cosmic was coming down. ‘And it’s going to get worse. I’m preparing a very important announcement for the next round of pre-budget leaks and our people are going to be number-crunching night and day. I’ll have to be with them.’
‘Of course. Ordering in the curry at midnight, all that stuff.’
‘Is that what people do in your office?’
‘Oh yes. When we’ve got a big job on, we just get dinner for everybody from The Light of Kashmir. That way saves people sloping off early and leaving me to pull the whole thing together at 3am.’ Curry: total disaster. ‘I just have the raita, of course,’ she reassured her mother quickly.
‘Darling, I’m right, you know I am. You never used to eat curry. It’s got more calories than any other restaurant food, you know that. You must be stressed, if you’re turning to that kind of junk. You’re doing too much.’
Damn. She’d walked into that one, all right.
‘Do I look tired, then?’
In the normal way, Clare would have been the first to tell her daughter she looked as beaten-up as a marathon-runner’s socks. For some reason, that didn’t seem the right response now. What was needed here was not the motivational stun gun but something else. Concern! That was in the right area. A special kind of concern, a sort of soft, warm duvetlike, wrapping-up kind of impulse. Motherly concern! That was it. How the hell did the motherly stuff go? She had, she realised, suffered some loss of parenting skills.
‘You look fine,’ she told Miranda, groping for more words. ‘Terrific. But …’
‘But what?’ Here it comes. It’ll be the haircut. Or the streaks. Or the shoes. Fine? Terrific? What would have been the problem with pretty? Other people thought she was pretty. Tequila Boy thought she was pretty. Actually, what he’d said was, ‘Still pretty.’
‘I’d just like to spend some time with you,’ her mother was saying. Lamely, for God’s sake. ‘You know. A one-on-one or something. When all this is over. Over for a while anyway.’
‘Meaning?’
Motherly concern, motherly concern. ‘We could get away to relax a bit. Share a bit of downtime. I was thinking about a holiday, darling. Just a little one.’
‘A holiday?’ Holidays were not Miranda’s favourite. They gave you time to think. She was afraid to stop working for fear of finding out what her life added up to without work. Who needed the time to get bored? Or to be exposed to all that foreign food. Olive oil: fatal. And a holiday always put stress on a relationship, and her relationship with her mother … well, Miranda just didn’t want to go there.
She hadn’t had a holiday for at least five years. Her mother had a peculiar expression on her face, almost anxious, almost concerned, almost … maternal. Maybe this new job was going to change her. Miranda was not used to registering her mother’s interest, at least, not in this clichéd sort of way. ‘Where were you thinking of?’ she ventured.
‘I can’t do anything long-haul. And Europe would be a bit sensitive, given we’re going to have to take a stand on the New Common Agricultural Policy. But I thought, maybe a litt
le holiday together. I don’t know where the time goes. I never seem to see you. I thought … a weekend somewhere … a long weekend, of course.’
Miranda’s heart was touched, a sensation she usually tried to avoid. Her mother actually missed her. Actually wanted to be with her. Was actually proposing a weekend together. A weekend away. Well, how worm-like could you bear to feel, for just a weekend?
‘Somewhere really nice,’ Clare was saying. ‘Like a country house hotel or somewhere. We could just flop out and be pampered for a few days. Go for some walks, or something. Have a cream tea.’
A cream tea? My mother has just censured me for being in the presence of curry and ordered steamed fish, a glass of water and a salad with dressing on the side. She knows perfectly well there are enough calories in a cream tea to feed an African village for a week. Why am I not more suspicious, Miranda asked herself. Why do I think this is quite a decent idea? Why have I suddenly gone all silly and gullible?
Miranda felt a most definite yearning for things she wasn’t sure she’d ever experienced but still associated with comfort – things like old oak trees, satin eiderdowns and home-made jam. Subliminal visions of leafy lanes leading to half-timbered houses flashed across her mind. A Proustian blast of scents wafted past – new-mown grass, wet earth, roast lamb. All of which was bizarre, considering she’d been brought up on duvets, yoghurt and concrete.
There was no denying this multivalent craving. To her own surprise, she heard herself say, ‘What a great idea. A weekend in the country! That’d be just heaven, Mum.’
‘Really?’ Clare was blinking. She had been fully prepared for her daughter to pull that disparaging face she knew so well, to slump as if fatigued by the mere effort of communicating across the years that separated them, to let out that half-stifled noise between a sigh and a sneer, and to say she was really much too busy to take a weekend out and what was Clare thinking to have such a stupid idea?
‘Of course, really,’ Miranda followed up, downing the last of her peppermint tea and preparing to wrap up the encounter. ‘Would you like me to find a hotel? I could book for us. Just give me some dates. Get your assistant to give me some dates.’
Ten minutes later Clare’s car dropped Miranda at her office. After they parted, the new CEO of Agraria sank back in her seat in a strange reverie, the documents she’d brought for the drive untouched beside her. Her mind ran on with sunlight dappled through a canopy of leaves. Apple crumble. The noise a Wellington boot makes when the wearer knocks her foot against the doorstep to loosen its grip on her heel. A dog wagging its tail, a Labrador, of course.
Clare Marlow shook herself. Labradors, Wellingtons, apple crumble? Everything she hated about the bad old England. The whole concept was putrid with history, rotten with elitism. And dogs just smelled, even small ones.
Bamboo shoots, J P Tod’s, balsamic vinegar – that was the kind of world where she belonged. Low-maintenance, accessible, multicultural – the kind of world she would be allowing the rest of the country to share once responsible land use became a reality.
She had a seizure of doubt. A country house hotel! Was that really an appropriate choice for the head of Agraria? Suppose the press got hold of it? What could a Daily Mail columnist make of the CEO of Agraria telling farmers to give up on stewardship and sell their land for building, when she was all the time planning to nip off for a weekend of luxury rural tourism herself?
Clare considered her options. Could she turn the thing around to look like a fact-finding tour? Fact-finding? Had someone just given her a brain transplant? Fact-finding was so passé, so desperately Seventies. Now that facts were irrelevant, who the hell did fact-finding? Low-profile, that was the way to go. A low-profile family break. Play the privacy card.
And yet, the mere words ‘country house’had this strange magic. Even in the high-speed glass-walled lift back to her office in Agraria’s new headquarters the most hideous clichés crowded into her thoughts: curtains billowing in a summer breeze, swallows twittering under eaves, bees about their business in a herbaceous border, a country pub, for God’s sake.
‘Will you call my daughter,’ she asked her assistant, ‘and give her a weekend date some time around Easter? We’re planning a bit of a family break. She wants to book the hotel, which is fine, but perhaps you could suggest that assumed names would be appropriate? I’m not one of these people who just treats their family as a photo-opportunity. Privacy is the priority on this one.’
‘Yes, Minister,’ her assistant said. Clare felt a frisson of delight. Wonderful to hear for real something she’d only ever heard from actors on the television before. Like the first time you went to America and heard the phone ring just once, the way it did in Hollywood movies.
‘Have you got any cigarettes?’ Juri asked Tolvo as they stood wearily outside a barn at the end of their working day.
‘No.’
‘Have we got any paraffin?’
‘No.’
‘What are we eating tonight?’
‘Nothing, until we get some paraffin. Then we can have potatoes.’
‘Where are we?’
‘We’re in a place called Saxwold somewhere in England.’
‘You sure? Sounds like we’re in hell.’ And Juri punched his friend’s arm and laughed, his breath hanging in the cold air in clouds of steam.
Potatoes, pounds sterling, paraffin and cigarettes were now the four corners of the known world to them. During the hours of daylight, from 7am to 5pm, they stood beside a belt that carried a rumbling river of potatoes from a cold store and graded them, picking out the biggest and dropping them into blue plastic crates and letting the smaller ones flow on to the yellow crates at the end of the belt.
The work could be varied by carrying full crates to the lorries and fetching in more empty crates from the yard. The potatoes were as cold as lumps of ice, but sorting them was softer work than washing off the mud. The new kids did that. When they had been new, it had been their job. They also ate the potatoes, and one of the older men had worked out a way to distil something comfortingly close to vodka from the potato peel.
‘We need something to drink,’ Juri insisted when they got to their caravan. ‘It’ll thin our blood and stop it freezing. Why the fuck is it so cold here? Aren’t we thousands of miles south of Vilnius?’
‘Can’t be. They must have lied to us at school. Anyway, it’s not just the cold,’ Tolvo said. ‘It’s the wind and the wet. This temperature is above normal for Vilnius in winter, but with high humidity and a wind-chill factor, it feels colder. That’s all.’
‘Too fucking right it feels colder,’ said Juri.
They worked and slept in all their clothes, with two pairs of mittens on their hands, and if they took off anything to light a cigarette or take a piss, their exposed flesh still burned like fire.
The pounds sterling they collected at the end of each week from the labour contractor, who went first to the bungalow of awe-striking luxury at the far side of the farm, where his customer, Colin Burton, paid him in cash.
The boys got £1.80 an hour, ten hours a day, seven days a week, making £126 a week. In addition, they had a caravan to live in, with sleeping bags and a few utensils, and water from a standpipe and all the potatoes they could eat. They spent £5 a week on paraffin for the stove in the caravan, and bought the fuel and their cigarettes off the gang boss, who bought them off the contractor, who had had them sent up on his own minibus, which rattled up from London every week or so, when Colin called in more labour or some other guys gave up and went home. They got through a packet of cigarettes a day, each.
The money they kept in cash in their money belts, well hidden under layers of clothes. This was the only possibility. The other workers were from God knew where. Albanians, some of them. Arabs. Bulgarians, Romanians. Thieves, all of them. They’d come into your caravan in the night when you were asleep and steal your money from under your pillow. And stick a knife in you if you made any noise. So Tolvo and Juri had the
ir own knives.
All this lore had come to them from a man who was the son of someone who worked in a hospital with Tolvo’s mother, the same man who had sent them a map, a phone number, a card for the telephone and some British coins, so that once they’d got off the salt marshes on the coast, and found a signpost, and a telephone, they’d been able to call their contact, who had them picked up the next day, and taken straight to the farm, and introduced to the gang boss and the contractor, on his next visit. So they were protected, even if they were illegal.
The same man spoke enough English to talk to Colin about what he wanted done. Tolvo had some English as well, but it wasn’t the same, learning at school and talking to people. He had to try every word three or four times before he pronounced it well enough for the farmer to understand. Still, the man was always laughing, and when Tolvo tried to talk to him he laughed even more, so there was no harm done.
They were there for the money, and their reasons for the money were different. The men only talked about their reasons to themselves, each running an internal monologue from the moment they stepped out into the freezing mist that lay over the land in the morning. ‘If I can stick this for six months, I can go to university,’ Tolvo said silently in his thoughts. ‘If I can stick this for six months, I can go to university. If I go to university, I can be an astrophysicist. If I go to university, I can be an astrophysicist. I don’t have to work at the bus garage. I don’t have to work at the bus garage.’
‘This is for you, nephew or niece,’ said Juri to himself as his arms fell into the routine of tossing potatoes into the crates. ‘This is for you, nephew or niece. And you’d better be a good baby, after I’ve gone through all this for you. This is for you, big sister. This is for you, big sister. Even if you had to marry a useless idiot. Useless idiot.’ Juri’s sister was a teacher, and so was her husband. She had lost her first baby that summer. It died in the seventh month of her pregnancy, because, the doctor said, she had not had enough proper food. When she got pregnant again, his mother and his brother-in-law had sat him down for a talk.
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