by Rosie Thomas
The corners of the rooms held a flotsam of screwed-up newspapers, broken chairs and swept-up plaster. In one room a broom leant at an angle against a wall as if the sweeper had suddenly found himself unequal to the task; in another an ancient garden rake had been similarly abandoned.
Harriet and Alison walked on, in silence, until they came to the farthest reaches and found the stone-floored kitchens where the big old flat butler’s sinks sheltered colonies of spiders, and blue-green crusted deposits were frozen under the copper taps. On the farthest wall a dresser with racks and hooks for a huge dinner service was empty except for cobwebs.
‘Let’s look upstairs,’ Harriet whispered.
They went back again and climbed the stairs to the gallery. Alison put her fingers out automatically to the banister rail, and then quickly withdrew them, padded with dust. The windows of the bedrooms leading off the gallery were unscreened, and the evening light filtering through the murky glass seemed dazzling after the darkness below. Harriet clicked off the torch. They put their heads back and looked up at the broken ceilings and the cornices leprous with damp, and at the fireplaces littered with rubbish and the doors of yawning cupboards that sagged on their hinges to reveal blistered brown interiors and shelves lined with yellow sheets of newspaper. The walls of successive bedrooms were a gallery of wallpapers, fading roses, and birds in leaf garlands and peeling toile de Jouy shepherdesses.
Another staircase, narrow and bending at an awkward angle under the pitch of the roof, brought them to the top floor and the maids’ bedrooms. The little black grates up here were narrow, almost slits, looking hardly big enough to burn two coals at a time. The floors of splintering boards were puddled with ugly, greenish patches of slimy moss, and when they looked up this time they could see the whitish evening sky through the rotting beams and broken slates. Birds were circling overhead, preparing to roost in the tall trees. Harriet thought of their predecessors, generations ago, who had given the house its name.
Finally, at the highest corner of the house, they came to the little half-rounded room at the top of the turret.
‘I wanted to come up here,’ Harriet murmured.
Tiny leaded window’s with arched tops gave a view over a two-hundred-degree sweep of the surrounding countryside. Harriet bent down to look through one of them, out at the houses and prosperous farms and the twists of roads marked by the double lines of hawthorn hedges.
The turret room had the feel of an observatory, or the lookout point of a much older building, a fortress or a castle.
‘Mr Farrow’s castle,’ she said aloud. Almost directly beneath her, in the middle of the wide vista, she could see Miss Bowlly’s cottage.
Alison was angry. ‘It’s a crime,’ she said. ‘Letting it decay like this.’
‘Didn’t you know that the house belonged to Everden?’
‘No. Not until you told me. I’m not surprised no one talks about it.’
Charlie Thimbell’s guess had been right, of course. Harriet had learned from her round of discreet visits that Everden was not proud of its neglect of Birdwood House. But, as the vicar had sighingly told her, it was an impossible position to find themselves in. The house had been willed to the village, in perpetuity, but there were no resources available to maintain it. No one had even hinted as much, but Harriet knew that they would let it slip until it was past saving, and then they would quietly and regretfully sell it. The demolition men with their ball and chain would move in, to make way for the new, profitable houses. Keith Bottrill was waiting.
‘Can we go, now?’ Alison asked. ‘It’s extremely depressing.’
‘Or equally challenging,’ Harriet answered. ‘Yes, let’s go home.’
They descended through the house. Through the clumping of their feet on the old boards Harriet imagined that she could hear other noises: the insidious drip of water, the crack of timbers and the sudden rattle of falling plaster, the sounds of Birdwood House falling into ruins.
She thought of her money like concrete, that she could pour in to shore it up.
My castle.
Would Everden part with it, in exchange for a fitting extension to the village? Or would they prefer to see Keith Bottrill demolish it altogether? Harriet didn’t believe so. Alison’s dismay at what she had seen fuelled her optimism. As she locked the double doors on the dust and the damp once more, she was thinking that Birdwood House would interest David Howkins.
It was a soft, grey evening and the darkness came quickly. Alison and Harriet needed the torch again as they walked back up the lane to the cottage.
When Alison pushed open her front door, they saw a brown envelope lying on the doormat just inside. Alison picked it up and peered at it. When she saw the name on the front she handed it to Harriet.
‘For you.’
There was a single sheet of cheap lined writing paper folded inside.
Harriet read the brief message. It was written in an old-fashioned, carefully crossed and dotted script.
Dear Miss Peacock, I do not intend to accept your proposal. Money cannot buy everything, whatever you may believe. It will not buy you my house and land.
Yours, E.V. Bowlly.
And she read it again, to make sure. Without Miss Bowlly’s land, Harriet knew she didn’t have any ammunition at all with which to mount her attack against Keith Bottrill. All the ideas and architects’ schemes and posters were hot air if she didn’t control the wedge of property that drove into the site. If she had offered Miss Bowlly less money, she thought. Or offered it in a different way, or handled her more subtly. Harriet could have shouted aloud in her disappointment and frustration.
Alison stared at her. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Miss Bowlly won’t sell.’
Alison breathed, ‘Oh dear. Is that the end of it, then?’
The question answered itself within Harriet, immediately and clearly. It wasn’t the end, of course. She would get what she wanted somehow, sooner or later.
‘No. Certainly not. We’ll have to bluff it somehow, win the village over, do it just by getting public opinion behind us.’ She folded Miss Bowlly’s note and stuffed it into her pocket. ‘Alison, have you got any champagne?’
‘There might be a bottle somewhere.’
‘Then let’s open it and drink to the Birdwood Development, Phase One, and to hell with everything else.’
Alison shook her head at her, but she was smiling. ‘All right. If you say so. Phase One, by sleight of hand.’
Twenty
Everden village hall was a four-square breeze-block building standing back from the main street, a little beyond the Wheatsheaf, on its own fenced patch of rough grass. A notice-board beside the gate gave details of a Summer Fayre and the cricket team’s summer fixtures, but the centre of the board was occupied by a poster, square black lettering on a not-quite-fluorescent pale green backdrop.
The words read, ACTION FOR EVERDEN. Beneath the heading was a date and a time, invitation to a public meeting to be held in Everden village hall. Harriet had had her poster professionally designed. It could not have looked more different from the Everden Association’s pale pink message that she had first seen in the village shop, and identified with the playgroup’s bring-and-buy sale.
She did not look at the green poster as she passed it. It was familiar, and there were copies of it at every prominent point in and around the village. She took a short cut across the hummocks of grass, her attention fixed on the door of the hall. But once she was inside, she did stop. She was subjecting the hall and the arrangements that had been made to critical examination.
The hall’s stacking chairs were arranged in loose semi-circles around the platform at the opposite end. Straight lines were formal and intimidating. She wanted the Everden residents and ratepayers to feel that this was their meeting, not hers. She walked a few steps forward now and rearranged the seats in the back row, pushing them a little further apart. If only a few people came the hall should at least look as full as possibl
e; if there was a crowd, more chairs could be hurried in from the store behind the stage. There were fewer chairs than the number of people she was hoping her meeting would attract; it would look good to have to augment the seating.
The walls displayed more of the green posters, and between them there were big, grainy, blown-up photographs. On the left-hand side were pictures of Bottrill developments, and on the right pictures of some of David Howkins’ completed schemes, and of the half-finished development that Harriet had visited. She was pleased by the contrast they made. Over the platform hung a big banner. She was pleased with the banner, too; it had the right home-made village-celebration feel. The hand-painted words read, REACTION AGAINST BOTTRILL IS ACTION FOR EVERDEN. Harriet would not let a good slogan go to waste just because David Howkins had made mild fun of her for coining it.
Underneath the banner, sitting at a trestle table, David Howkins and Anthony Fell, the principal architect, were drinking beer out of cans and waiting for her. David’s feet were propped on the table, inches away from the architects’ scale model of the proposed Birdwood development. Only Harriet, David and the architects team knew just how hastily the model had been put together.
David waved his beer can at her.
‘Everything to your satisfaction?’
‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ Harriet said. She was nervous, and admitting the nervousness to herself instead of trying to suppress it, as she might once have done. She was late because she had set out once from Alison’s cottage and then turned back again to change her formal suit with its wide shoulders for something softer. She looked at her watch now. The meeting was timed to start in half an hour. If she judged village curiosity rightly, the first sightseers would begin to drift in at any minute.
‘Would you like a beer?’ Anthony Fell drawled.
‘No thanks.’ Harriet ignored her sharp inclination to tell them to sit up properly and put the beer cans away. That was her own style, not theirs. She settled for making a few more adjustments to the chairs, then took her place on the platform beside the two men. They waited, with the banner above their heads drifting in the draught from the open door.
What if no one comes, Harriet thought, no one at all? What then?
But they did come, almost as soon as the anxiety took hold of her. They filtered in slowly, in couples and trios, occupying the seats farthest from the platform first, murmuring in low voices almost as if they were in church, peering at the three of them on the platform. As soon as the first arrivals took their places Anthony and David became businesslike, sitting behind their model with its matchbox houses and tiny, fuzzy green trees, but none of the Everden people ventured up on to the platform to examine the layout. Afterwards, Harriet resolved, she must encourage every single one of them to come and look. It didn’t matter that the dimensions of the site itself were based on conjecture, that the little model cottages in their rural streets had been hastily borrowed from the models of other developments, that the whole layout represented an idea instead of miniature reality. It was the idea that Harriet wanted to sell. She wanted the people of Everden to admire her bubble. Once they admired it, she could begin work.
As the half-hour passed the murmur of conversation swelled to a loud buzz, the earlier arrivals began to wave to latecomers, chairs were rattled together, the occupants of the platform were stared at more openly. Looking calmly back at the rows of faces, while David and his partner talked in low voices beside her, Harriet saw that her audience was made up of all kinds of people. Young couples sat alongside businessmen in suits and women in earrings and old ladies with ridged white perms, waiting to hear what she had come to say.
There was no real resemblance at all, but Harriet was suddenly reminded of a Peacocks’ shareholders’ meeting. And the thought brought a bite of pure, delicious adrenalin into her blood.
Over the heads of the vicar, Tom Frost and the other parish councillors, her friends from the Wheatsheaf and more faces that she didn’t recognise, Harriet saw Alison sitting at the back of the hall. It was a Wednesday evening and Harriet had not expected to see her, but she was glad that she had come. She was remembering the question that Alison had asked her, and her warning. But it came to her now that what made her happy was doing this; she was happy at this instant. She was doing what she was good at, and it was enough to make herself content with that.
Alison lifted her hand, as if she read her thoughts, and made a small, ironic salute. Miss Bowlly stumped in, alone, and sat on the far side of the hall. Her small-mammal look was particularly pronounced. Harriet gave her a welcoming smile that she hoped was untinged by either disappointment or acquisitiveness.
Harriet looked at her watch once more. At the stroke of an hour she stood up. She was nervous, but her nervousness was an ingredient of this biting high. On her feet she felt tall, and elastic, as if she could stretch to touch what had once been out of her grasp. The hum of talk diminished, falling away into silence.
Harriet said simply, ‘Good evening. Thank you for taking the trouble to come here tonight. I hope we won’t keep you too long, but I believe that what you are going to hear is important for Everden and for the new community on the Birdwood site.’
As she spoke she knew that they were all watching her face. She didn’t smile or frown; the tiny muscles worked smoothly under the clear, healed skin. She thought, They can look. There’s no harm. Some of them had come to stare at Meizu Girl, the old tabloid name still trailed her. They were looking at a name that had been linked with Caspar Jensen’s; the men in suits would know the Peacocks’ story, part or all of it. Harriet found that she was indifferent. If they had come to the hall because they had read about her or seen her picture in the newspapers, if they had come out of curiosity, then her name had at least achieved something. They would stay to listen, she would make them hear.
Harriet’s fingers separated and spread, as if she would lift them to touch the outline of her features, but she held them still and flat on the top of the trestle table. There was a lump at the angle of her jaw, an imperfection in the knitting of the bone, but it was detectable only to her own touch. There was no swelling to see, her eyes had reappeared from the yellow cushions of flesh. The face was the old one. She had been attacked and she had recovered, that was all. She forgot, now, the associations of defeat.
It was a public face, but she could spend its currency this evening and live behind it as it suited her. If it helped to bring her Birdwood then she was grateful to it; if she was happy now it must be in the realisation that this hall gave her satisfaction.
‘Let me explain the idea,’ Harriet said to the listeners.
She began by describing the village laid out in miniature in front of her. She did lift her fingers this time, to touch the roofs of the little houses and to trace the narrow streets.
Harriet talked about Birdwood as if it already existed, making it sound as real as Everden itself, and she took her audience on a tour of it. ‘Here is the village green,’ she said, ‘and these, here, are bigger family houses, and here are starter cottages, for rent or partial purchase.’ She never said, Here will be. She described the workshops as if the knitwear designers and potters were already at work, and the community centre under its steep pitched roof as if the activities programme was fully under way and the toddlers of Birdwood were happily playing in the enclosed garden.
The people sitting in their loose lines gave her their full attention.
Listening to her, Alison could not help but be admiring. Harriet possessed remarkable, infectious conviction. Up until now Alison had been privately convinced that the entire Birdwood scheme was an elaborate fantasy of Harriet’s. She had mistrusted the watery utopianism of it as much as the clear opportunism of the Bottrill scheme, but she had made no comment. She had assumed that the planning and the preparations provided a necessary outlet for Harriet’s energies after Peacocks; she had also assumed that the plans would come to nothing. But this evening, for the first time, it occurred to her that
the Birdwood development might be more than a fantasy. When she had first met Harriet, she had been struck by her single-mindedness, and her absolute determination to say what she intended and in the way she thought best. It had made her an awkward but interesting interviewee; the same determination tonight conjured Birdwood village out of the air, solid as brick and stone. It had persuaded Anthony Fell, the community architect about whom Alison had read something admiring, somewhere, to rush a model together and to come and sit on a platform in front of the curious and suspicious of Everden. It was, already, some kind of an achievement.
Alison folded her arms and tipped back an inch in her chair, waiting to see what would happen next. She remembered Harriet telling her that the same conclusions in life could be reached by going straight for them with full force, or by hoping to be swept there. The thought of Harriet being swept anywhere made her smile.
Harriet talked for another five minutes. She spoke fluently but simply as if to a single listener instead of a roomful. At the end of her guided tour she introduced Anthony and David, and made a gesture of handing the meeting over to Anthony. When she sat down there was a small silence, as of disappointment.
Alison thought, That was extremely good.
The meeting went on. The architect explained his theories of new, integrated communities and David spoke briefly about their previous collaborations, pointing to the big photographs on the right-hand wall.
The audience began to fidget. Chairs creaked, and there was a rustle of whispering and yawning. But when Harriet stood up again there was silence. The man in front of Alison leaned forward, to hear better.
