Beacons

by Gregory Norminton

  ‘You petrol-head,’ Gareth said that night. He pushed his knees into the backs of mine as we snuggled down beneath the duvet. ‘What’ll all these kids do when the world runs out of oil?’

  ‘Up to them, entirely,’ I said. ‘But I’ll know that while we had it, my daughter got her share.’

  ■

  The Iceland Question came up when Clemmie was seventeen. She’d stayed behind to help me clear the table, something that should have made me suspicious straight away.

  ‘That thing we had, Mum, what’s it called? Tarte tartare?’

  ‘Tarte Tatin.’

  ‘It’s lush. Is it from a book?’

  ‘Oh no, someone showed me. I was about your age, actually …’

  But of course she already knew the story.

  My own mother was a child of poverty, raised on bread, porridge, potatoes, cabbage, and the occasional salt fish. Then came rationing, which was healthy but – unless you craved snoek and powdered egg – nobody’s idea of delicious. After The War, Dad was crippled by arthritis so Mum had to work full time, even during the stay-at-home fifties, and never caught up on the cooking front. I did understand that this, at least, wasn’t her fault, even as I gagged over stewed tripe. And then …

  Foreign holidays weren’t something my parents ever thought about (‘Catch me setting foot on a plane’) so I spent one summer holiday as a jeune fille au pair, in an attempt to improve my French. Astonishing, to the girl I was then, to meet people who approached eating with confident anticipation. I returned to people who said things like, ‘Fruit makes me run to the toilet’, but never mind: I had my recipes, including that for tarte Tatin.

  ‘To like be there and learn, that’s awesome,’ Clemmie said. ‘And you went all that way by yourself.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I’d like to do the same.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t care for French.’ She’d never made much effort, and in the end we’d withdrawn her from the subject.

  ‘Oh, not to France!’ Clemmie said loftily. ‘Anyway, there’s more to it than language. There’s seeing how they eat and dress and everything.’

  ‘Well, yes, but language helps with—’

  ‘And I won’t be alone. Not like you.’

  This was in March and I wasn’t aware that any holiday had been booked, so Clemmie now had my full attention. ‘Sorry, did I miss something? Is there a school trip?’

  ‘Phoebe’s going to Iceland. Her Mum says I can go.’

  ‘Iceland?’

  ‘It’s awesome. It’s like one of my passions.’

  This was the first I’d heard of Phoebe, Phoebe’s family or Clemmie’s passion for awesome Iceland. I went for the parent’s first line of defence: ‘You haven’t said yes, have you, Clemmie? Because I don’t know if we can afford—’

  ‘It’s only a week, Mum! And there’s no hotel bill or anything. Only a week, please, please …!’ She tilted her head, the better to flirt her dark blue eyes at me: Gar’s eyes. ‘You said if I got all my GCSEs …’

  ‘Yes—’

  ‘And I’ve still got my savings from last summer.’

  ‘Oh. Well done. But it’s not just me, Clemmie. There’s your father.’ Who I suspected wouldn’t be enthusiastic. As did Clemmie, evidently, since she’d launched her attack when he’d left the table.

  ‘But if it’s a promise, Mum?’

  ‘Don’t rush me,’ I said. ‘Let me find the right time. Why don’t you stack the dishwasher? Put me in a good mood.’

  ■

  Reykjavik, the online tour: Lego houses. Big skies. Blueberries. Akvavit. Fermenting shark meat. Half a smoked calf’s head, the eyelids sunk in grief over empty sockets. And Clemmie a vegetarian. I could only wish her luck.

  Nevertheless my impulse was to urge her to pack at once, carpe diem, all that. So why didn’t I? – me, with my famed bubbliness, my champagne-like effervescence? Because the problem wasn’t me. It was Gareth, and a conversation we’d had the week before.

  ‘Look at this,’ he’d said, holding out a magazine.

  ‘What?’ I was examining a torn cushion nobody had owned up to, wondering if it could be stitched.

  ‘It’s from a bloke at work.’ He waved it at me. ‘Do you realize we’re killing ourselves, just so a few tossers can get hammered in Prague?’

  Reluctantly I put down the cushion. The photo showed a young man, beer bottle in hand, lying on cobbles.

  ‘Drinking ourselves to death, you mean?’

  ‘Stag and hen parties.’ He tapped his finger on the caption, as if I couldn’t read for myself: Prague has long been a favoured destination.

  ‘Well, obviously. Cheap beer.’

  ‘Not once you’ve paid the—’ He stopped as if to gather himself together. ‘That’s not the point. The planet, Lisa, the planet can’t afford it.’

  I just opened my eyes very wide. Since when had my husband cared about the planet? He’d always been like me: enjoy what you can while you can.

  At the time I thought work must be getting to him, and also that he might have liked a stag party in Prague for himself. We were married long before that sort of thing became the fashion.

  ■

  I wondered how best to break the news about Iceland. Normally we’d talk things over in bed. If we could stay awake, that is, since we tended to leave it too late and crawl between the sheets comatose. One of those stupid habits you keep on with, knowing you’ll feel terrible the day after. I did the odd bit of agency work, here and there, which offered a degree of freedom: the tiring part was having to move on just as I’d got used to my workplace. Gareth worked for the council, juggling cuts and wondering when the axe would fall in his direction. He often brought work home with him, if not in his briefcase, then in his head; I’d hear him grinding his teeth during the night.

  He snuggled up behind me, spoonies, his hands clasped over my solar plexus. I was about to say, ‘Clemmie asked me something,’ when I realized: wrong time, wrong position. With my back turned I couldn’t gauge his expression, and he was sure to be overtired. Why hurry? It was Friday night, we had a weekend ahead of us. As we lay there, his breath whistling into my neck, I was revolving strategies. My resources were a movie or two, plus Gareth’s favourite meals: fish pie, roast lamb. Solid, comforting, unoriginal dishes that had brought many domestic wars to satisfactory conclusions and even dictated the terms of the peace.

  ■

  ‘No,’ Gareth said. ‘Absolutely not.’

  We were sitting in front of the telly, finishing up the fish pie, which he had just pronounced luscious. Rick Stein, eat your heart out. Clemmie, confined to home because of history coursework, had been told to go away and stay away. Otherwise, I thought she might be tempted to pout and whine, which would ruin everything. The movie hero, beaded with photogenic sweat, had survived the last of four car chases and seen the villain go hurtling off the road into the canyon (shots of car playing ducks-and-drakes with boulders, spinning in the air, last bounce, fireball). Fireball means the guy’s really, really dead.

  ‘Let’s not decide straight off,’ I hedged. ‘We’ve got time for a chat with Phoebe’s mum and dad.’

  ‘To tell them she’s not coming, you mean?’

  ‘Get to know them.’ I clasped his hands in mine, swinging them playfully to and fro. ‘C’mon, she’s old enough. When I was seventeen I went—’

  He startled me by shaking free of my grasp. ‘You were working, Lisa. Studying. And you took the ferry. It’s not the same thing.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was. Of course, kids expect—’

  ‘Everything. They expect everything. Just think of their carbon footprints – Clemmie’s been flying since she was six—’

  ‘But that’s lovely, that we’ve been able—’

  ‘No, it isn’t lovely.’

  There was a snotty little silence between us. I didn’t need a map to see where this was going, and it wasn’t Reykjavik.

  ‘I didn’t think you believed in
all that,’ I said, clearing away the remains of my futile feast.

  ‘We had training at work.’ He rubbed his eyes, always a sign that something’s got to him emotionally. ‘It is happening, you know. Global warming.’

  ‘You like visiting Karen.’

  Gareth looked at me as if I were simple-minded. ‘Did anybody say I didn’t?’

  On Sunday morning, while Clemmie was still sousing in bed, I asked him what I was supposed to tell her.

  He said, ‘The truth, of course.’

  ‘That her father won’t let her go?’

  ‘That I’m thinking of her future. Unlike Phoebe’s parents.’ He packed the last two words with contempt, as if he’d already met and despised them: thirty-stone chain-smokers, gunning the engine of their parked 4 x 4, passing round the pork scratchings as their exhaust fumes finished off an asthmatic trapped beneath the wheels.

  I said, ‘She’ll be happy if she goes to Reykjavik.’

  ‘Until she wants to go somewhere else.’

  ‘Can’t we make up for the flight? Turn the lights off more, walk more? All three of us.’

  ‘We should do that anyway. But it doesn’t balance out.’

  ‘You’re not wanting to cancel our holiday, are you?’

  He shot me a nasty look – ‘It isn’t booked yet’ – and I saw just how tough things were about to become.

  ‘She was promised a trip for passing her GCSEs,’ I said. ‘Promised.’ In fact the trip should have taken place the previous year, but Clemmie had fallen out with her best friend – a friendship yet to be mended – so someone else had taken her place. I said, ‘You know how hurt she was about Becky.’

  ‘OK, OK, I’ll talk with her when I get back.’

  ‘Back?’ Normally on a Sunday morning you couldn’t prise him from the breakfast table: he’d wrap himself round a full English, then wallow in the papers for a couple of hours.

  ‘There’s a meeting in the Breville Arms. About climate change. People from work are going.’

  ‘Could I go?’ I wanted to see his reaction, whether he thought me too much of a petrol-head to be let in the door.

  ‘If you were interested,’ he said with frigid patience, ‘of course you’d be welcome. And yes, before you ask, I’ll be walking there.’

  Already we seemed to have written ourselves a script.

  ■

  Where was the cheerful Lisa we all knew and loved? O where was Bubbly? Hunched over the PC is the answer, looking up sites on climate change, carbon footprints, reductions, offset, debates.

  Be positive. Clementine, you shall go to the Ball. Where you shall eat calf’s head and blueberries, and perhaps leave behind a single Ugg. I made a list:

  Conscious driving

  Freecycling

  Lights

  Jumpers

  Get out bikes

  When Gar came back from the Breville Arms, lamb fat was blistering in the oven, sending out thymey, garlicky gusts. I fluffed out my hair as I heard his key and stuck a glass of red in his hand almost before he’d got his coat off.

  He said, ‘Do you want to know?’

  And I said, ‘Yes, of course.’

  He spread out a wodge of photocopies on the table. I thought of Karen and her swatches. He talked me through headings and diagrams and I refrained from the cheap shot of asking how many forests had gone into the photocopier. He couldn’t stop me thinking, though. Nobody had proved any of this stuff. Theory, pure theory. Then a sick feeling. Suppose even half of it turned out to be true? Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

  ‘The thing is,’ Gareth said, ‘the longer we wait, the worse it’ll be. Are you with me or not?’

  I felt really sick then. He’d hit on one of my mother’s favourite themes: a stitch in time saves nine. I’d seen other women marry their parents and I’d thought, That’s one mistake I’m not likely to make. Yet here was Gareth gearing up to Fight a War and ready, if I showed promise, to cast me in the role of They.

  ‘Well, you may not believe this,’ I said, switching into Bubbly, ‘but I’ve done some research of my own,’ and I presented him with the list.

  ‘Jumpers?’

  ‘Instead of turning up the heat.’ I bent forward and kissed him. ‘If we did all this, everything, surely—’

  ‘You can’t bargain with—’

  ‘Gar. I promised. Let her go, please.’ He was looking obstinate. ‘Don’t you want her to trust us?’

  (This was bringing out the heavy artillery: Gareth was big on trust and openness in families.)

  ‘Of course I do,’ he said, and I saw him weakening.

  ‘If we let her down,’ I said, ‘she’ll only fly more later.’

  I thought this was common sense. Clemmie was a bright girl: she’d soon work out how to stage her own version of Coming out Bubbly. ‘We have to seem fair,’ I nagged. ‘Fair and reasonable.’

  Gareth stared into space. I held my breath.

  ‘Everything else goes, then,’ he said at last. ‘No flights for us, not ever again. I mean it, Lisa. We’ve got to be serious.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said meekly (I was already planning ways round it). And then the girl herself came into the kitchen saying she didn’t feel well, and I had to find out what that was about, and whether she wanted any lunch.

  ■

  When we got round to talking with Phoebe Doyle’s mother, we discovered she wasn’t accompanying the girls to Reykjavik. Mrs Doyle, who turned out to be Mrs Sigurdardottir (‘We always keep our own names’) had a married sister there with children of her own. The sister would meet our daughters off the plane, give them a shared room in her family home and keep an eye on them.

  ‘Will your sister be home during the day?’ Gareth asked.

  ‘Some of the time,’ said Mrs Sigurdardottir. ‘If the girls are sensible, they shouldn’t have any trouble. Reykjavik’s as safe as London.’

  ‘Safer, I’m sure,’ said Gareth politely. ‘But I’m not sure Clemmie’s sensible, and with the language problem—’

  ‘Oh, lots of people speak English. And Phoebe speaks Icelandic.’

  ‘Really?’ I was interested. ‘Clemmie didn’t mention that.’

  ‘Phoebe’s shy about it. Only talks with me when we’re alone.’ She grinned, shrugged. ‘But she’s fluent.’

  ‘Well, that’s reassuring,’ I said to Gareth, knowing that from his point of view it made no difference at all.

  Mrs Sigurdardottir added, ‘They’re thinking now about October half term, did Clemmie say? You can go away together this summer, if that’s what you planned.’ She smiled. ‘It won’t spoil your family holiday.’

  ■

  At the next stage I beat Gareth to the moral high ground: a house swap. He protested that swapping houses, in itself, had nothing ecological about it. I pointed out that we’d avoid the wasteful overheating, the little plastic bottles, the needless laundering of towels. And all the money we’d save by not using a hotel could be put towards solar panels.

  Gareth looked as if he suspected me of mockery. I said, ‘You do want solar, don’t you?’

  I’d been doing more homework, reading up: government schemes, solar fridges in Africa. What I understood of it was quite interesting, but I couldn’t help having doubts. Of course solar fridges were welcome. Real benefits, with immediate effect.

  What if the good wasn’t so visible? Suppose you had to make sacrifices just to stay the same?

  The last time we’d visited Karen, her leave fell in August. The furnace month. My wet bra rubbed a weal into my chest; I developed sweat rash each side of my neck, wherever my earrings touched. Two weeks of Italian eating and the most pleasurable experience I recalled afterwards was Karen’s air con: ambrosial, the kiss of a goddess. The impossibility of sleeping without it! There was a time before air con when Romans must have slept – they’d hardly have forged an empire, otherwise – but how could they go back to that now? Who’d blame them for not wanting to?

&nbs
p; Doing the right thing (said the websites) means not waiting for others to go first, but trusting them to follow and having faith in it all coming together in the end. Well! I thought. Try selling people that line! Most of us have been conned too often. We need to see something here, something now. Otherwise we squat tight on what we have, and can’t be budged: at least I’ll know my kid got her share. Limpets all of us, clinging to our familiar, limpetty rock.

  Or were there ways of running air con from solar panels? I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything.

  I showed Clemmie the house-swapping website. She seemed interested until Gareth said, ‘Only Britain,’ after which her gaze wandered. Pressed to contribute, she said she’d like a place with thatch.

  ‘Thatch? Punching above our weight, there,’ I said, and was immediately annoyed with myself. That was the sort of stunt my own parents used to pull: ask for input, then reject it. But Gareth agreed: owners of thatched cottages would probably be looking for something equally photogenic.

  I said, ‘We can have a place by the sea, though.’

  ‘Nobody’ll want ours,’ said Clemmie. I felt wounded on behalf of our house. Its roof might be humble slate, but surely …

  ‘Oh yes, they will,’ Gareth said. ‘It’s in London. London’s the magic word, the Open Sesame.’

  Open Sesame: my motto. I’d been shouting it all my adult life, beating down doors for all of us. Look at me now, though: dreaming of warm winds, of evening stars, of clinking glasses on a terrace overlooking the Amalfi coast. And settling for Devon.

  ■

  Please do not enter the loft as this space is private.

  I wondered why, in that case, they hadn’t fitted a padlock: there was the trapdoor, complete with loft ladder, staring us in the face as soon as we entered the master bedroom. Perhaps it was reverse psychology: they wanted us to go upstairs and find the shrivelled corpses of previous occupants, the Spirit of Bank Holiday Past.

  The owners had clearly done swaps before. There was a well-worn folder of lists and instructions: doctor, dentist, bus routes, local attractions, where to eat, how to operate the washing machine, the TV. The fridge contained wine, beer, salad, ham, cheese, butter, and a few packets from the chilled food section including (bless them) a veggie lasagne. Bread and fruit in chunky, retro baskets. ‘Summer visitors’ were warned not to light the Aga as this would heat the entire house. Instead we should use the mini-oven, or the portable plug-in hob.