‘In that case …’ He took a deep breath and ventured on to the territory that Lucy held most sacred. ‘I was wondering about your horses.’
Back in the pub, Colin and Jimmy turned their attention to the landlord.
‘You’ll be putting them nutters out,’ Colin told him.
‘They’re out already,’ the landlord said, wilfully obtuse.
‘Then when they come back, you put’em out,’ said Colin. ‘They can sleep in their damn van, if they’re so keen.’
9. Enter the Easter Bunny
‘The egg,’ said Florian, holding up a fine large specimen, ‘is the symbol of new life, of the fertility of nature, of light emerging from darkness, of ideas coming to the surface from the depths of consciousness, of the putting into action of the plans made during the winter.’
In developing the offices of Château Saxwold, he had diverted a torrent of public money into the restoration of a mass of semi-derelict farm buildings much larger than Oliver’s modest establishment. Another desolate collection of ruins had been transformed into a handsome complex of warm red-brick structures, most of which were called a Centre. The purpose of each building was explained by a plaque, written in gold copperplate on the domaine colour of dark blue. The door of each building was flanked by a barrel tub planted with yellow primulas.
The former cow shed was the Education Centre, wired for everything and ready to welcome teams of local schoolchildren learning geography, if they ever had time off from their tests. Florian also organised seminars for other cultivators interested in biodynamic growing. The diary was on the wall. April 30: How Moist Is Moist? May 28: Let Your Humus Decide. June 25: The Do’s and Don’ts of Mulching.
The original farmhouse had been designated the Accommodation Centre, a rambling mass of rooms through which Addleworth relations perpetually drifted in search of their spouses, their children, their host, their car keys and their missing Wellington boots.
A great barn had become the Visitor Centre, containing a poster display of wine-making in Suffolk since Roman times, a massive and cobwebbed old wine press imported from France, a cider press of local oak, and a sales desk loaded with corkscrews and vintage charts imprinted with the domaine logo, and equipped with the latest devices for parting fools from their money. It was here that Florian sat on Good Friday morning, with his eldest nephew, a paint box and a basket of eggs.
‘I think we should have a ritual,’ he said, while the child wriggled with boredom. ‘I think we should paint eggs to honour the Goddess, and place them on the altar.’
‘I think that’s stupid,’ said his nephew, frowning. ‘I hate eggs. They smell. Or if they aren’t cooked, they’re all runny. They’re disgusting.’
‘No they aren’t,’ said Florian. ‘They’re a miracle. Every one. Every egg contains everything you need to grow a chicken. It’s a new-life pack. Just add a cockerel to fertilise it and a mother hen to keep it warm, and there you go.’
‘I don’t want to paint eggs,’ said his nephew firmly. ‘I want to watch Cavegirl.’
‘Your mother says you’re not allowed,’ said Florian. His nephew pouted, and folded his arms, and leaned back on the back legs of his chair, kicked the table leg, and fell backwards, cracking his head on the flagstones, whereupon he yelled to the limit of his lung capacity.
‘You see,’ said Florian, choosing a paintbrush. ‘You shouldn’t diss the Goddess. Flowers appear on the earth where she walks.’
As if he had conjured her, Dido appeared in the doorway, her finger outstretched for the bell, the full sun of a glorious spring morning backlighting her form, so it seemed that they were having a visitation from Rossetti’s Beatrice.
Dido had woken late but enthusiastically, and run out into Great Saxwold to embrace the beauty of the day, which enthusiastically embraced her back. She drifted towards the church, wandered around the churchyard reading gravestones and feeling pleasantly sad about the shortness of life, especially for infants born before the discovery of antibiotics.
In a while, Toni buzzed up on her moped, grouching into the wind at having to water the fucking church flowers for her fucking stepmother. Dido, not wishing to embarrass her unlucky opponent of the night before, lurked out of sight, behind an ancient yew.
Once the moped had droned away, she went into the church and spent half an hour sitting in an old pew admiring the flowers and accumulating rapture while she tried to think of a good reason to wait until the evening before finding Florian again. Instead, she could only think of reasons why she should proceed directly to Château Saxwold, without passing Go or collecting anything other than a couple of violets from the hedge, which now nestled in the top buttonhole of her blouse.
‘Hello,’ she said to him, while the rest of the world whirled away into infinite irrelevance. ‘You invited me. Do you remember?’
‘Yes,’ he said, as the radiance of the utter rightness of her being there shone around them. ‘Hello.’
‘I know it’s this evening, your wine-tasting, but I thought I’d come early.’
‘How terrific.’
‘I could help you get ready, maybe.’
‘Yes, you could.’
‘I was in the area, you see. I came with some friends.’
‘That was lucky.’
‘Yes, it was, wasn’t it?’
‘Oh God,’ said his nephew, catching the drift of the conversation immediately, and getting up from the floor. Indignantly, he rubbed his head as he stomped towards the door. ‘If you’re going to be stupid, I’m going to watch Cavegirl.’
‘All right,’ said Florian. ‘Off you go. This lady can help me paint the eggs.’
‘All right, then, I will,’ the child replied.
A zephyr of concern crossed Dido’s face. For a moment, a fault line appeared in the radiant rightness of everything.
‘He’s only my nephew,’ Florian said quickly. ‘I’m babysitting while my sister’s gone shopping.’
‘Oh, good,’ she said. ‘I love painting.’
He picked up the chair that the child had overturned and she radiated into it.
‘I love painting too,’ he said, choosing the palest, the smoothest, the most symmetrical egg in the basket specially for her. And together they picked out clean brushes, and tinkled them in water, and thought about colours. Chrome Yellow. Lemon Yellow. Burnt Sienna. Ultramarine. Crimson Lake. Pink. They were all glorious. Impossible to choose.
‘What goddess were you talking about?’ Dido asked, at last going for Cerulean Blue and thinking of a swirl around the pointy end of her egg.
Florian decided to tiptoe into the issue, in case anything should dim the rightness. ‘It’s Easter, you see. Which was originally the festival of the spring equinox. There used to be a pagan celebration for it. Welcoming the season of new growth and everything.’
‘Pagan festivals,’ murmured Dido, bringing her brush towards the egg.
‘It was called Eostar, after the goddess Ostara. She was the Saxon goddess of spring and the moon. All about fertility and potential.’
‘Before Christianity screwed everything up,’ said Dido, feeling a strange tingling somewhere above the top of her jeans. ‘What is an equinox? I can’t ever remember.’
‘When day and night are of equal length. The old religion of England was all based on what people observed about the stars, so it was linked to the moon and the sun and everything. Then Christianity came and sort of overlaid it all. Then science comes along and we just graft that on again. So they borrowed Ostara’s name for oestrogen.’
Was that a bit brutal? Florian quivered with anxiety, until Dido made a sound like the chuckle of crystal stream water running over pebbles of pink-and-white quartz. ‘That’s so clever,’ she said. She loved to be lectured, provided it wasn’t about getting a life or checking her credit card statements and stupid stuff like that.
‘And terribly English, when you think about it. Don’t sweep away all the old things, just graft on the new and let the old
beliefs kind of grow through them. Organic culture, almost. Or just a fudge, depending how you look on it.’
‘Do you sell fudge?’ Dido asked, feeling that a little confectionery would go down very well after all this exhausting chat about hormones.
‘Actually, we do. I’ve made a range flavoured with traditional cordials. Cowslip Sack. Sloe Gin. Rowan Malmsey. They’re quite good, you must try some.’
‘Have you got cowslips?’ she asked. Cowslips! Desperately romantic. When they got married, she could carry a posy of them. What colour were they, anyway? ‘They are flowers, aren’t they?’
‘Oh yes. They’re endangered, of course. We have got some in the wild, but I had to grow them specially for the fudge. Ostara had a hare’s head, and she laid eggs. So there’s your Easter bunny.’
‘Wow, that is so cool,’ said Dido. The paint had dried on her brush while she was listening. Definitely, a tingling like fairy dust all around the upper pelvic area. And she just loved the idea of magic and religion and science all flowing together into a great belief system binding all the ages and all the races of humanity together. It was all so beautiful it made her want to dance.
‘In a way,’ said Florian, who loved to be listened to more than anything else, ‘I like to think we’re part of the same process here. Helping to find a new balance between modern science and ancient wisdom. Working within modern agricultural policy to bring the needs of the world into equilibrium with the forces of nature.’
‘That was in the leaflet you gave me.’
She had read his leaflet! Was it the equinoctial forces that made him feel as if fireworks were going off somewhere under his heart?
‘So,’ Dido continued hopefully, washing off her paintbrush and thinking about starting with Cerulean Blue again, ‘did you really say you were going to have a pagan festival?’
‘I was thinking of it. I usually just do private rituals for the equinoxes. Just me and whoever’s here who wants to come. But with the tasting and everything, the house is going to be full, so I thought maybe we should celebrate the vernal equinox. I’ve been reading about meditation to stimulate the crops. Imagine how powerful it would be to have a group meditation out in the fields somewhere, under the full moon, harnessing the energy of the stars and planets …’
The eggs did get painted, some hours later, by Florian’s sister and her younger children, while the seigneur showed Dido around his domaine in the hazy afternoon sunshine, and they munched on the cowslip fudge.
‘Are you sure this is a path?’ Clare was feeling tired. They had been walking for hours. Three hours? Four hours? It was all very pretty, all the green plants and everything, but they didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.
‘Yes, of course I’m sure,’ said Miranda, irritated. Did her mother think she couldn’t read a map?
Her navigation, of course, was faultless. The map was something else. Oliver had been way ahead of them. What was the first thing people wanted to do when they got out in the country? Go for a walk. Very well, a walk they should have. He had sat up far into the night, plotting a route that was not merely circular, but snaked around the Manor in a spiral, taking in all the least pleasant aspects of the landscape and dodging in and out of woodland so that there was never a view of anything that might be enough of a landmark to make them realise they were going round in a circle. Nor would they be able to see what hazards were coming up ahead …
Clare had had the worst of it, because she started walking in front of her daughter. Years of being trailed by assistants made her feel that one step ahead was her natural place. Miranda walked behind her mother, which made her feel like a five-year-old even before her legs started to ache. All the same, she could see a few of the dangers before falling into them. And she had the map.
The path went uphill quite often, but never seemed to come down, except when it suddenly plunged into what looked like a pretty sort of dell but was actually a complete swamp of bottomless mud that pulled your boots off as you struggled through it. When they had waded through that, the path almost disappeared in a thicket of brambles, treacherously undergrown by stinging nettles which were only six inches high but vicious all the same.
Clare started to complain at that point, but even she had to admit that the map was perfectly clear so they pushed on through, getting scratched severely on the way. For a long while they skirted an enormous field given over to pigs, from which the smell, carried firmly over to them by a prevailing breeze, was revolting.
Now they had reached a stream, very prettily full of yellow irises and green duckweed, over which the way was plainly indicated by a narrow white-painted bridge. The span was a single plank, with handrails on either side that were hardly more than battens nailed to narrow wooden posts.
‘Look,’ Miranda showed her mother the map, ‘we cross here, then turn left and go through this forest bit, and then we’re there.’
‘It looks very old,’ Clare said, stepping onto the bridge with hesitation. ‘You don’t suppose it could be rotten?’
‘It’s just weathered,’ Miranda assured her. ‘It’s probably been here twenty years.’
‘That’s what I mean.’
‘It would be fenced off if it wasn’t safe.’
‘I suppose it would.’
Cautiously, Clare took a few steps. The bridge, overhung with budding alder branches, trembled slightly. Upstream, something plopped into the water.
‘Oh!’ cried Clare. ‘What was that?’
‘Probably only a duck,’ said Miranda, watching some small creature cruise determinedly away downstream and disappear. Maybe it was a water rat. The idea of saying the word ‘rat’to her mother had its appeal, but she didn’t want to be wantonly cruel. So she fibbed. It felt curiously pleasant.
Clare was shuffling across the bridge saying, ‘I really don’t think this is safe,’ when the edifice proved her right. There was a crack, a crunch, a noise of rotting wood crumbling, and the plank tipped, the handrail was twisted away, and Clare lost her balance, screamed, and fell into the water. Which was shallow, but horribly muddy, full of sinister twiggy things, and cold. She splashed frantically. Some birds flew out of the tree tops, screeching in alarm.
‘Don’t panic!’ Miranda called, seeing a way down the stream bank.
‘That is the most irritating thing you could possibly say,’ her mother shouted. ‘Get me out of here.’
‘All right, all right. I’m coming.’
But she was still at the top of the bank when her mother found her feet, realised that when she stood the water hardly came above her knees, felt ridiculous and waded grimly to the edge of the stream. Miranda could at least help her scramble back onto dry ground.
With muddy feet, slimy legs, wet clothes and a green veil of duckweed pretty much all over, Clare was not the picture of elegance.
‘Oh no. What are we going to do now?’ Miranda said. Dilemmas involving mud were new to both of them. ‘Your clothes are all wet.’
‘Yes, they are,’ Clare agreed, trying not to sound as angry as she felt. ‘And I’m freezing cold already. That mud! It was full of … things! Horrible!’
With disgusted fingertips, she pulled off one of her boots and tried to wipe off a hank of green algae with a wisp of long grass. Grass! How could she possibly have anything to do with grass? Normally, the only grass with which she would welcome contact was the organic wheatgrass bought in by the juice bar near Agraria’s offices: £15 a tray.
‘We can’t go on, unless we can find another way over that stream thing,’ said Miranda. ‘But if we turn back … we’ve been out for hours. We’ll have to walk miles.’
‘Then that’s what we’ll have to do, won’t we? God! These people! No concept of safety or maintenance. How could they leave a bridge in that condition? They could be sued.’
‘We’re not far from the village. If we could just get over the stream somewhere, I could …’ Ridiculous Girl Guide situation! Miranda despised Girl Guides. Ludicrous Enid Blyton anac
hronism, probably just a cover-up for lezzie old schoolteachers who hadn’t realised that all that was over and it was cool to be out.
‘If it had been anybody except me, their ass would be sued from here to … kingdom come.’ Her mother wasn’t listening. So what else was new?
‘I’m sure we could get a taxi in the village,’ Miranda insisted.
‘Taxi! Are you out of your mind? I’m not having anyone see me in this state.’ The words were fired off like a thirty-second burst from an AK47. ‘I’m a public figure, Miranda. I have to project an image, convey authority, give people confidence. I can’t go splashing around in wet clothes covered in mud.’
‘But it’s three hours’walk back to the hotel,’ Miranda argued, consulting the map again. ‘And we are close to the next village now. There must be a taxi somewhere.’
‘There is no way in this world I am going into any village like this,’ said Clare, tossing her dripping boot aside with a spasm of her muddy hand. She picked accusingly at the top of her sock, trying to convince the garment that it had a duty to strip itself off without any further input from her.
‘But I could go, and then I could get a taxi. I can leave you my parka. You can sit somewhere in the sun, and I’ll be back in half an hour with some dry clothes.’
They considered this solution. ‘That could work,’ her mother admitted.
‘I think it’s the best idea,’ Miranda urged. ‘Look, there’s that tree thing.’ She pointed uncertainly at the trunk of an old alder that had long ago fallen by the stream bank and now promised to make an inoffensive seat. As she did not normally meet fallen trees, she wasn’t sure what to call it. ‘It does look quite dry. You could sit on it, maybe.’
‘The weather isn’t too bad,’ her mother admitted.
‘I can’t think of anything else. I mean, it’s not like a lot of people must come this way.’
‘Well, obviously, if people came this way, the bridge would have fallen in before now. That must be why they thought they could get away with it.’
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