Requiem

by Clare Francis

  Suddenly remembering the placard, Alice Knowles turned it round and held it up. It read: BAN DEADLY CHEMICALS – BAN ALDEB – BAN POISONS THAT KILL INNOCENT FARMERS.

  A photographer dutifully took a picture or two. A local radio reporter advanced on Alice and pointed a microphone at her. Daisy handed out press releases. But it was no good, she knew it was no good. The popular press didn’t like one-woman demos any more than they liked stories about obscure chemicals, shadowy unseen things neither they nor their readers knew or cared to know about, not when there were good old bogey men like nuclear power to pick on, not when they had tear-jerking pictures of children with leukaemia, not when they had villainous substances that were certified guaranteed all-bad, things like PCPs, CFCs and leaded petrol.

  Poor Alice. Husband dead of cancer. Only son fighting the disease. She’d believed that her evidence, with the opinion of two doctors, would be enough to get her some sort of justice; she’d imagined that the world would listen. Well, she’d learnt differently, and now she was going to be disappointed all over again.

  Not that the event was over. The agrochemical merchants had finally woken up to the fact that someone was saying nasty things about one of the products on their stand. A small bullish man had shoved his way through the onlookers and pushed his face close to Alice’s. Daisy couldn’t hear what was said, but Alice drew back, looking at once nervous and defiant, then, rallying, pulled herself up to her full height, which wasn’t very much, and stood her ground.

  Daisy stepped forward. ‘Can I help?’

  The bullish man spun round. ‘She’s got to go, or I’ll have to call the police.’

  Daisy was soothing. ‘She’s finished now, I think. Just making a point. Quite peaceably.’

  But he wasn’t having any of that. ‘Off – now. This minute.’

  ‘Well, of course, if that’s – ’

  Alice cut in: ‘I refuse to leave, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Right,’ said the bullish man, vibrating with sudden rage. ‘If that’s the way you want it, no problem. I’ll get the police to remove you forcibly.’ And elbowing his way past Daisy, he swept off into the rain.

  Not surprisingly, the pressmen had changed their minds about going and were now waiting patiently for their police-remove-lady pictures. They weren’t disappointed. It was an ugly little scene, and Daisy felt a lurch of humiliation for Alice Knowles. Once the two policemen had established that she wasn’t going to go willingly, they took an elbow each and marched her towards the showground entrance. As Daisy set off after them, she looked back and saw the bullish man pick up the placard and break it across his knee.

  It took quite a while to get Alice Knowles back into some sort of shape. Despite her brave front, she was badly shaken. She’d never experienced the police in anger before. Daisy drove her to a motorway café and fed her tea and biscuits for over an hour before deciding it was safe to take her back to the ground to collect her car.

  They sat in the Metro for a while, watching the rain course down the windscreen.

  Alice gave a deep sigh. ‘I suppose I’ve been a bit of an ass,’ she said.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that!’ Daisy said quickly. ‘A bit of an optimist maybe.’

  ‘I had to do something.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What next then?’

  ‘Well, I’ll have another go at the live wires in the ministry,’ said Daisy. ‘Beat them over the head, you know. Interrupt their tea break, remind them we’re not going to go away and give up.’

  ‘Do you really think they’ll listen?’

  It was hard to explain to people like Alice just how obtuse and convoluted were the workings of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. MAFF had until a few years ago worked entirely on the principle that pesticide manufacturers were all frightfully good honest chaps, and should be allowed to run their own chemical safety scheme on a voluntary basis, administered by the ministry’s Advisory Committee on Pesticides. The safety scheme was now legally enforced, which was a step in the right direction, but that didn’t prevent the activities of the ACP from being secretive, and their findings unchallengeable. Worse, there was no proper watchdog in the UK, nothing like the USA’s Environmental Protection Agency, no one to re-examine the manufacturer’s safety tests to make sure they had been sufficiently thorough, no one to challenge the widespread official view that chemicals were all right until they turned round and bit you. Ludicrously, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food was meant to represent not only the farmer and the agrochemical industry – groups whose interests were often diametrically opposed – but also the consumer. And though consumers might have a number of vague worries about the amount of chemicals in their food, it was the farming and agrochemical lobbies that had all the clout. Outsiders, people like the Knowleses, found it hard to understand just how low consumer interests came in the pecking order. Getting information out of the ACP or MAFF was like extracting a tasty bone from the teeth of a fierce dog: almost impossible without a large stick and a lot of muscle. Catch had neither.

  ‘We’ll get to them in the end,’ Daisy said with a conviction she didn’t entirely feel. ‘There’s our tame MP, Jimmy. He’s had four shots at getting a question at prime minister’s question time. Might be fifth time lucky.’

  ‘But it’s no good, is it? Any of it.’

  Daisy laughed. ‘Blimey, Alice, if I thought that, I might as well tie my ankles together and jump in the river.

  Honestly, I’d give up tomorrow if I thought I was getting nowhere. It’s just slow that’s all. Like swimming through wet concrete. But we’ll get there in the end. I do believe that, Alice, I do, really, otherwise I wouldn’t be bothering.’

  Alice was slumped in the seat. Her hair had dried into a grey frizz. She looked exhausted. ‘But they won’t even speak to us, will they? Won’t tell us anything. That’s not going to change, is it?’

  ‘Well – no, not for the moment,’ Daisy admitted. Incredibly, information on certain types of pesticides came under the Official Secrets Act because the chemicals had been developed from nerve gases. No good pointing out that almost every belligerent country in the world – and there were enough of them, God only knew – was well aware of how to produce nerve gases. No good arguing that information on this type of pesticide was freely available in the US. The British loved secrets. Correction: the British Establishment loved secrets – a different thing. The information that wasn’t protected by the Official Secrets Act was covered by that old stalwart of profit-making prevaricators – commercial confidentiality. MAFF and the pesticide manufacturers looked after each other very nicely, thank you. From the rosy picture the two of them painted, you’d never have thought there’d ever been a mishap, far less a disaster. No DDT, no 2,4,5-T, no dioxins. Very cosy, very frustrating, and very difficult to comprehend when all you wanted was the answer to a few simple questions like why and how, and can’t this be prevented from happening again.

  Alice blew into a handkerchief with a blast like a ship’s siren, and shook her head. ‘Just what will it take?’

  Daisy knew the answer to that. Cast-iron scientific proof in triplicate. A silenced agrochemical lobby (that would be the day). Further disaster.

  ‘They’re banning it in the States,’ Daisy reminded her. ‘It’ll get banned here in the end too.’

  ‘But when?’

  Daisy sighed. ‘Good question.’

  ‘What will it take?’ Alice repeated, almost to herself.

  ‘Money, I’m afraid, Alice. Pots of dough. On a scale I don’t even dare think about.’

  Alice nodded with weary resignation. She began to get out of the car. ‘I’ll send you a cheque when I can.’

  Daisy’s throat tightened. ‘Oh, Alice, don’t. Keep your money. You’ll be needing it.’

  Alice didn’t reply but climbed out and slammed the door.

  Daisy wound the window down and called after her: ‘Sure you’ll be all right?’

  Alice gave a
small wave and got into her car. Daisy watched to make sure she got away all right, thinking that if only worthiness and dedication were enough, then the Alices of this world would keep Catch going for ever. But Catch ran on hard cash, and it took a shocking number of small cheques from the likes of Alice to keep it afloat. And that was without any wild notions about an independent research programme.

  Put off by the rain, people were going home early and there were long queues of cars leaving the ground.

  A research programme or two … And a proper press office, professional parliamentary lobbyists, a national membership organization, a glossy newsletter … Well, the list was endless. All it needed was what Catch’s accountant liked to call a healthy injection of cash. But then what campaigning organization didn’t need that? The few outfits that had managed to trap a tame environmentally minded millionaire kept good and quiet about it – and who could blame them – and those that hadn’t, which was an awful lot, sat like alley cats, waiting to pounce on a passing moneypots, fully prepared to scratch each other’s eyes out in the process. Green campaigning wasn’t quite the benevolent business people imagined it to be.

  Finally getting away from the showground, Daisy pointed the Metro in the direction of London, thinking about money, wondering what she could salvage from her press campaign on the Knowles story, and doing her best to ignore the grinding noises coming from the suspension.

  Chapter 3

  DAVID WEINBERG AWOKE with a sense of alarm. It was a moment before he was able to identify the reason. It was the quiet; a pervasive and sinister sort of hush. For David, a Londoner born and bred, silence was unsettling: it was the world standing still, someone else getting a deal, and being dead and knowing all about it, all rolled into one.

  The sound of a car in the drive reassured him sufficiently to get up. His instinct was to reach for the phone and start worrying his way through the day, but he remembered this was Saturday, he was in the middle of Scotland and this was supposed to be a break, something people like him were meant to need, though he could never understand why, since leisure had never done anything for him except upset his stomach.

  Once dressed, he wandered downstairs in search of Nick. The house was quiet, the doors around the large flag-stoned hall open, no sounds issuing from the sunlit rooms. Only in the kitchen were there signs of life: coffee on a hot stand, croissants in a warming dish, butter and marmalade on the table. He helped himself to coffee, added forbidden sugar, and looked for the newspapers. Then he remembered: Nick had told him they didn’t arrive before late morning.

  Without the Financial Times the croissant tasted bland, the coffee flat. The kitchen was pleasant enough – Nick had always spent a lot of money on his homes – but if David couldn’t look at the share index then he would like some company. Shoving the last of the croissant into his mouth, picking up his coffee cup, he went in search of the household. The formal living room was, as expected, empty. The room was high and vaulted, with polished wood floors, Persian rugs, Victorian-style high-backed chairs, long damask-covered settees and a vast baronial fireplace crying out for stags’ heads which, this being Nick’s and Alusha’s house, it would never get.

  Nick called this the drawing room – a bit grand, David thought, even for such a grand room. There was something delightfully incongruous about Nick, whose family had never inhabited anything more impressive than a small lounge, talking about a drawing room as if he’d lived in one all his life. But then the Nick of Ashard House wasn’t the same boy that David had first met in the poky Chertsey semi all those years ago – and that was just as it should be. Of all his people, David had been – perhaps still was – proudest of Nick. Nick had made the most of himself; Nick, as David’s mother used to say, had made good. He’d never allowed himself to be taken in by the lunacy of fame and the endless flow of cash. Nick had gone his own way, in his own way.

  Standing behind one of the long settees was a large drinks trolley, thickly forested with bottles. At one time Nick’s way had included the drink, of course; but even then he had drunk with style, unobtrusively, almost secretively. Unlike Mel and Joe, there’d been no benders, no downhill races towards self-destruction, no stoking up on chemical cocktails. Not to say the drinking hadn’t been a big problem: it had. Nick had drunk steadily and with single-minded concentration, as if mastering a new skill, and it was only after two unproductive years that he’d frightened himself into doing something about it. But once he’d made up his mind to stop, that was it. As David knew to his cost, Nick could be determined when he chose to be.

  It was typical of Nick both to have such a lavishly stocked bar, and to have it in full view, where it would provide a constant reminder and maximum temptation.

  On the other side of the hall was the library, now a television and video room, which looked altogether more lived in than the drawing room. This too was empty. Back in the hall, David paused to glance at the visitors’ book, a thick leather-bound volume, already more than half full of signatures and comments from what seemed to be a fairly constant stream of guests. There were a few big names – actors, writers, new rich – but in the main it was Nick’s carefully chosen inner circle, none of whom, as David well knew, came from the music world. The dining room he didn’t bother to check, but went straight along the adjoining passage to the studio. The padded door was open, a sure sign that Nick was not at work, but David looked in all the same, just in case. He was curious to see if the setup had changed and, though he hardly admitted it even to himself, to see if there were signs of work in progress. In the twenty-eight years he’d handled Nick, David had never once asked when the next song was coming. He liked to think that that was one of the reasons he was still around.

  The studio was a fairly recent addition to the house, built when Nick had decided to move in permanently six years before. Like everything else Nick had a hand in, it was beautifully designed, though, unusually for him, the room was untidy. In the old days Nick had always been neat to the point of obsession, especially when it came to his work places, yet there were books scattered over almost every working surface, even the piano and synthesizer.

  David peered at the titles. There were books on organic farming, broadleaf forestry and environmental protection. Nick had been interested in things Green for a long time. As far back as the early seventies he’d marched in protest against whaling – or was it sealing?

  On another surface were two large expensive-looking books on, of all things, birds. The books were lying open to show large colour illustrations of such feathered friends as – David had to peer at the unfamiliar names – kites, buzzards and ospreys. Beside them was a loose-leaf student’s pad covered in Nick’s spidery scrawl. David couldn’t help glancing at it. Under the heading ‘Habitat’ were various notes on, as far as David could make out, the nesting habits of ospreys.

  He scanned the rest of the room. There was no sign of anything like work, no scattering of sheet manuscript. Sipping the last of his coffee, he returned to the open pad and stared thoughtfully at the bird notes. When Nick had first thought of burying himself up here David had been as keen as anyone for him and Alusha to find a place where they could get over the unpleasantness of the New York incident, and had gone out on a limb to encourage him, something he would normally have avoided. It was one thing to be responsible for people’s working lives – money and deals had neat conclusions – and quite another to interfere in their private affairs, which were always, but always, minefields of the most lethal kind. The mildest suggestion, the slightest offer of help, earned you nothing but resentment, hostility and a lifetime’s blame.

  Having broken his own rule and encouraged Nick, he had long since regretted it. He’d hoped this Scottish jaunt would mark the beginning of a new era of productivity, but far from stimulating Nick the place seemed gradually to have stultified him. The first three years had been all right – there’d been enough material for two albums – but more recently the flow had dropped to a trickle. Three songs
in two years, not enough for an album, and worst of all, unrecorded because, try as David might, he couldn’t get Nick near a recording studio.

  Nick had hinted that he was working on some experimental material – there was a chilling rumour that it was a modern opera-type piece using a choir, or something else equally uncommercial. Whatever, it was a project rarely mentioned and never seen, and consequently written off by David. Yet Nick seemed perfectly happy. To David, this was totally mystifying. How could Nick be happy if he wasn’t producing albums, wasn’t using his gift? How could he live without work?

  There was a sound from the passage, the door swung wide, and Nick strode in. He gave a start like a nervous animal, then a characteristically quiet smile spread across his face. ‘David! Looking for the action, were you?’ He gave a wry laugh. ‘Well, you won’t find it here, I’m afraid.’ This admission didn’t seem to upset him.

  David gave a slow shrug. ‘Just wondering where everyone was.’

  ‘We were down in the new garden, looking at the roses.’ Nick shot him an oblique glance. ‘You found some breakfast all right?’

  David raised his coffee cup in reply.

  ‘Sleep well?’

  David made a so-so gesture. ‘I was a bit worried when I woke up. It was so quiet I thought I might have bought it in my sleep.’

  Nick laughed at that. ‘No chance. You’ll die at ninety. Doing a deal with the undertaker.’

  ‘Don’t you find it quiet?’

  Nick perched himself on the edge of a table. ‘Too much to do. The estate, the gardens – you know. And people to stay. Alusha loves that. And so do I, of course,’ he added quickly in case David should think otherwise.

  Nick glanced towards the door and whispered in a theatrical voice: ‘Got a smoke?’

  ‘I gave up. Five years ago.’

  ‘Of course. So you did. I gave up – when was it?’

  ‘Four years ago. The year after me.’