by Phil Rickman
‘Yeh. Um…’ Might as well tell her. ‘Don’t think you’ve ever seen Kirsty, have you?’
‘Apart from in the wedding picture that used to be on your sideboard.’
‘She looked different then. Longer hair. And it’s dyed now. Dark red.’
Annie looked at him, a forefinger extended along one pale cheek.
‘Dark red hair? Black coat?’
‘You noticed her, then.’
‘On the box? Oh God, Francis.’
‘Yeh.’
‘Who was the man, with her?’
‘Her old man, Chris Symonds. Interesting the way they were sitting at the table right underneath the Countryside Defiance banner.’
‘So they knew they’d be on TV, and you’d see it.’ Annie folded the photocopy of the letter and stood up, allowing her hand to brush briefly against Bliss’s. ‘Come over later, if you can.’
14
Not Going
Borderlife: that was when the knife really went in.
A quarterly glossy, full of ads for luxury stuff that few local people would buy even if they could afford it. But then, Borderlife wasn’t aimed at local people. Getting off the school bus, Jane had seen the spring issue on the rack at the Eight Till Late. Hadn’t wanted to buy it, obviously, but the know-your-enemy instinct had kicked in with the picture of Ward Savitch on the front, sitting on a vintage Fergy tractor with The Court in the background, all misty, and the blurb Just Call Me A Reformed Townie.
OK, Jane had never actually met Savitch. Didn’t really want to, either, in case he turned out to have, you know, some level of basic charm or a prosthetic leg. But she was building up a file of news cuttings, background for the expose in a proper pub lication.
Borderlife had four pages, including about six pictures of the countryside looking lush, the enemy looking smug.
THE SAVITCH EFFECT
Lorna Mantle meets the man at the heart of the New Cotswolds
Jane had the magazine open on the floor by her bed and was lying across the width of the duvet, tensing up already.
How many lives must have been changed for ever by a quick flip through the property pages in a dentist’s waiting room. ‘Yes, I the secrets of pain owe all this to a broken tooth,’ Ward Savitch laughs, showing me around an estate that now extends to over 300 acres… and growing.
The advertisement for The Court at Ledwardine wasn’t the biggest on the page, but there was something about it that told the jaded City broker: This is the one.
‘I think it was the fact that I’d simply never heard of the place,’ he says. ‘I’d inspected properties all over Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire with an increasing sense of seen-it-all-before. But Herefordshire was a revelation.’
They all said that. Jane wrinkling her nose in distaste. What they meant was that Herefordshire was still up for grabs, whereas the Cotswolds had been firmly grabbed, no bargains left.
The term ‘New Cotswolds’ as applied to the pre-recession rush to buy property in Herefordshire is not always used approvingly, but Ward Savitch sees it as a challenge. ‘This county has a wealth of customs and traditions in danger of being lost for ever. I want to see growth of a kind which supports the old traditions and helps develop a society that will preserve them in a sympathetic and lasting way.’
Made you want to vomit.
After an extensive restoration of the former farmhouse and its grounds and outbuildings, Mr Savitch began breeding pheasants and organizing shooting weekends. Then, as he acquired more land, new luxury chalets were concealed in the dark woods, giving upmarket holidaymakers a taste of the wilds.
The action-holiday market was also catered for, with paintballing events, canoeing on the river, quad bikes and rough shooting. Many of the guests enjoyed themselves so much that they didn’t want to leave and went on to buy their own homes in the area, finding that it was possible to live on the Welsh Border without giving up their highpowered business ventures.
‘I realized there was a new energy here,’ says Mr Savitch, ‘and became more excited than I’d ever been in my life. I saw that, with the decline of agriculture, the countryside was literally being left to rot – by the damned townies. Well, you can call me a reformed townie – I’ve seen the light. In the Internet era we can do anything here that can be done in a city – and better.’
To prove this to City power-brokers, Mr Savitch has been organ-ising hugely popular ‘freshen-up’ weekends aimed at London-based professionals damaged by the recession and and desperate to make a new start.
Cornel and his mates? They were damaged all right, but not in ways they’d accept.
Ward Savitch certainly exudes an infectious vitality as he drives me in a bumpy old Land Rover across fields and along forestry tracks, where every chalet – and chalet is a poor term for these luxurious holiday homes – comes with over half an acre of wooded land, and full Wi-Fi broadband. They all have solar panels and Ward has plans for a small wind farm on the edge of his estate.
‘Oh, I’m as green as the next man,’ he says. ‘But I’m not into gimmicks and all that old hippie “good life” nonsense. The countryside isn’t a place for running away to. It’s a place to progress to. Surveys show that the largest proportion of incomers to Herefordshire in the past year have been from London.
‘Many are people with money, eager to invest it somewhere they can see it having an effect,’ says Mr Savitch. ‘I’ve lost nearly two stone since moving here and sleep better than I’ve ever done. Coming to the Border – I expect that to add at least fifteen years to my useful life.’
Useful life?
Solar panels and windmills for phoney green cred? Who was this Lorna Mantle? Had Savitch opened a bottle of vintage champagne afterwards and shagged her in the barn? Jane wasn’t laughing, because it got worse.
***
The secrets of pain The Savitch effect is already visible in the economic health of the county, in the demand for country-sports equipment and outward-bound accessories.
‘Mr Savitch has done great things for my business,’ says Kenny Mostyn, proprietor of camping and country sports suppliers Hardkit, who provides instructors at The Court. ‘I won’t deny we were in trouble before he came – the bank was pulling the plug – but we now have four flourishing retail outlets either side of the Welsh Border.’
‘Ward has been good news for us,’ says Lyndon Pierce, who represents Ledwardine on the Herefordshire Council. ‘He’s preserved the village economy in difficult times, and even attracted new business ventures. And this is just the start. A broad economic base means we should be able to go ahead with a major expansion programme that might otherwise have been in danger.’
At the bottom of the piece it said:
SEE FOR YOURSELF what Ward Savitch has achieved when The Court at Ledwardine is open to visitors over the Easter holiday period, culminating in a Family Fun Day on Bank Holiday Monday.
He had it all worked out. Winning the battle for hearts and minds. It was sick.
Jane slid the magazine under the bed, rolled onto her back, and a rogue sob came up like a hiccup. She lay looking up at where, when they’d first moved here and she’d claimed the attic as her apartment, she’d painted the white plastered spaces between the timbers in primary colours. The Mondrian Walls. The big statement. This is me, this is my space.
Just a kid, then. Not yet getting it that Ledwardine was all about bones of oak and creamy white skin and didn’t need chemical colours.
Or anybody like Ward Savitch. Ever.
Now there were sheets of white card taped between the timbers. She’d spent every evening for most of a week putting this together, using blow-ups of a large-scale OS map. Here was the village with the orchard marked out, as it had been centuries ago: a great circle around a much smaller community. The orchard still enclosing much of a Bronze Age henge. Roots of old apple trees wrapped around buried stones. It had to be.
She sat up, took the mobile from the bedside table and rang Ne
il Cooper, of the county archaeology department, at home. He answered on about the twelfth ring.
‘OK, look,’ Jane said, ‘I’m really sorry to be ringing you at night again, and I know your wife thinks we’ve got a thing going, but I need-’
‘No, she doesn’t, Jane,’ Neil Cooper said. ‘She’s seen you. She knows I’m far too much of a slippers-and-cocoa kind of guy for someone like you. In fact, Russell Brand would probably be too-’
‘Yeah, yeah, very amusing.’
Jane squirmed to the edge of the bed where she’d lost her virginity to Eirion Lewis. He was at university now, in Cardiff, came over most weekends, bless him, didn’t want to lose her. Russell Brand?
‘We’re moving as fast we can, Jane,’ Coops said, ‘but like I keep telling you, it’s not the only dig in the queue.’
Nearly all archaeology these days was rescue archaeology. They only ever got to look at places about to be buried for ever under a housing estate. What worried her was that if the council sanctioned plans for a superstore and upmarket housing – and Savitch had to be in on that somewhere – the henge would stay buried, like for good?
‘So what you’re saying is…’
‘It’s now looking doubtful this summer.’
‘So, like, if I wind up at uni in September, I miss everything.’
‘Jane-’
‘Sorry, I expect you’ve got things to do. I’ll go.’
‘I will keep you informed. I realize how much this means to you.’
Jane lay down with her head hanging over the side of the bed. Couldn’t seem to sleep these nights.
It was OK till you turned eighteen. OK to sound off about things you hated, knowing there was nothing you could really do about any of it. All those years of thinking how great it’d be when you were officially adult and nobody could restrict you any more. When, in fact, not being able to do anything was actually a kind of freedom. If you stood up now and accused your local councillor of being bent – which he was – he’d have you in court. The village and the henge… she’d tried to discuss it with some of the guys at school, and they didn’t get it. Didn’t remotely get it. None of them could wait to get the hell out of the places they’d grown up in, dreaming of London and Paris and New York and LA.
Maybe it was a pagan thing, that sense of place. That sense of attachment. Although even Mum was picking up on it now.
Jane had Googled Julian of Norwich last night and discovered a woman who, in an age when God was generally feared, had found the old guy polite, compassionate and…
… had even talked of Mother God. Which the theologians said was no more than a recognition of God’s nurturing of mankind. But, hey, come on, how far was this really from Mother Goddess?
All the blood was running to Jane’s head, almost on the floor by now, in a nest of hair. This whole university thing was like some insidious conspiracy by the lousy Government, just a way of keeping you off benefits for another three years, while hitting you with mega tuition fees. By the time she was out of it, there’d probably be thousands of qualified archaeologists who were all going to be Indiana Jones and…
Jane’s head hit the floor… she didn’t have to go.
Shocked and excited, she wriggled back onto the bed then rolled off it, stood up, went to the window. The village lights were coming on, twin lanterns either side of the main door of the Black Swan, fake gas lamps on the square. The lights you could see, the lights you couldn’t.
Jane’s eyes widened.
Wasn’t going?
That simple? A decision already made? On some level, it had been decided?
Holy shit.
She was breathing very fast now. OK, maybe not a question of deliberately fluffing the A levels. Probably make a point of doing well, getting the grades, just to show she could do it. And then just not going.
No shame in that. It was actually kind of radical. She could just go out and get a job. Any kind of job that would allow her to stay in Ledwardine and fight for what mattered.
Jane felt suddenly still inside and terrifyingly clear-headed. She needed to be absolutely direct about this. No shit. She’d give it a few minutes, then go down and tell Mum before she could change her mind. Hadn’t Mum, after all, dropped out of uni after getting pregnant? Hadn’t she even been known to say – long after Dad’s death in the car crash alongside the woman he’d been shagging – that maybe it was all meant?
Jane stood gazing down at her village. Which needed her. In this sick, withering world, it needed all the energy it could get.
She saw a small shadow emerge from the vicarage gate. Mum, in jeans and sweater, tripping across the market square. Of course – off to meet Lol in the Swan, like it was still the early days of their relationship, courtesies to observe. What was the matter with them, hovering around one another still? Everybody hovering, nobody doing anything.
OK, give them an hour or so and then go across to the Swan. Telling Mum in front of Lol, that would diffuse the effect.
Still in her cloud of knowing, Jane went downstairs to the kitchen, talked it over with Ethel, the cat.
Ethel was like, Yeah, but what about your career?
‘It’s just a word, Ethel.’
Jane stood for an uncertain moment in the cold kitchen, then went over to the fruit bowl on the dresser and took out an apple. Cut it in half – crossways – to reveal the pale green pentagram at its heart. Carried it out into the garden and held it in the cup of her hands, open to the rising moon, only a misty grey-blue smudge, but it would do.
She stood in the silence, expanding the apple pentagram in her mind until she was standing in the middle of it, watching it widen and become a white-golden aura, eventually enclosing the whole of Ledwardine.
And then Jane prayed to the Goddess, to become a channel for the cosmic energy which would make things happen.
15
Dead Game
Lol said, ‘Would Barry have to kill me with his bare hands if I put that on the fire?’
Merrily followed his gaze to the basket in the inglenook, black and ashy.
‘The big log?’
‘The only log.’
He was right. She couldn’t remember ever before seeing only one log in the inglenook at the Black Swan, famous for its apple-wood fires, smoke-sweetened air over the cobbled square. She shivered. In the beamed and panelled lounge bar, only half the wall lights were on. Enough for the eight or so customers whose sparse voices made soft echoes.
‘You might not like what Savitch is doing,’ Lol said, ‘but you really notice when one of his wealthy hunting parties leaves the village.’
‘Barry’s that dependent on them?’
Lol shrugged. He was wearing his fraying grey Gomer Parry Plant Hire sweatshirt. He had a spiral-bound notebook – his lyrics pad – and, beside it on the table, a pint she guessed was shandy, not yet half-drunk.
‘Smoking ban,’ Barry said from behind the bar. ‘Cheap supermarket booze. And now Fortress Hereford. Yeah, we are getting dependent on them. Seven fewer five-course dinners, bar takings down by a third. Put the bleedin’ log on, Laurence, I can always saw up an oak settle.’
Lol left the log alone. Merrily stared at bulky amiable Barry in the black suit and the bow tie.
‘Fortress Hereford?’
‘All farm doors locked at nightfall, shotguns loaded. Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me there’s another reason we’re nearly empty.’
‘What, because of-?’
‘Having your quad bike nicked is one thing, but getting killed like Mansel Bull is not a case for Farm Watch, as we know it.’
‘It’s not Texas, either,’ Merrily said. ‘Not yet.’
‘Civilization, vicar, has a thin skin. This is still a frontier. Face west, nothing but lonely Welsh hills. Don’t take much to send us to ground. See this?’
Barry slapped down a glossy flyer showing the winding Wye seen from above. A man in a hunting coat stood with his back to the camera, a riding crop in one hand. Under th
e photo it said:
W ORTH FIGHTING FOR?
Under that:
C OUNTRYSIDE D EFIANCE
Lol’s eyes flickered.
‘Who are they?’
‘The woman we saw on the box – Wiseman-France – she’s dined here a time or two, with clients. Professional PR, management consultant, not sure which, but you get the idea. You know the type. Move in and tell the hicks their interests are being ignored at national level because they’re not making their voices heard with sufficient eloquence.’
‘Mmm.’ Merrily nodded. ‘Then they offer their services free to give themselves a certain status in the community. Make them feel they belong. She’s created it, has she?’
‘She ain’t created the mood, but she’s given it a name,’ Barry said. ‘Don’t have to be thousands of people behind it, just a few dozen of the right people. The thousands will follow. And the money.’
‘Savitch?’
‘Put it this way… it was one of his minions brought the flyers in. I’m told it also comes in different languages. When the shooting parties come in from Europe, America, Japan they learn that the spiritual home of hunting since the eleventh century is under threat. You ask me, Defiance is pulling donations from US hunting and gun lobbies.’
‘ This is Savitch?’
‘Probably excites him. Life on the edge can be quite sexy when you’re living behind big walls with big guys around and a game-keeper in the lodge with a rack of shotguns.’
‘Spoken by a man who knows all about life on the edge,’ Merrily said.
‘This and that.’
‘You know Syd Spicer?’
It just came out. Barry’s expression didn’t change. Lol glanced at Merrily, curious. You could hear the tunk of a pool game over in the other bar. Barry came round the bar, raked over the fire in the dog-grate, picked up the apple log and dumped it on top.
‘The last good log,’ he said. ‘’Scuse me a minute.’
Lol’s spiral-bound lyrics pad was half-filled. Merrily remembered him buying it in Hereford, maybe two weeks ago, after a rare lunch at All Saints.
