by Rebecca Tope
I was speechless with nerves. It seemed that whatever I did, I was fated to be caught out, and reported.
Jeremy had been emerging from a shed, carrying a spade, and within a couple of minutes was digging strenuously in a weedy patch of ground that seemed to be destined for a new vegetable plot. He gave the impression of resenting the group touring the premises, conveniently averting his gaze from everything but the ground in front of him.
We were quite soon escorted to another field, containing geese and other poultry, with lavish overnight accommodation in clean new coops and runs. By day they roamed free, and the man in charge – Roger, his name was – explained at length about the virtues of geese, but also the necessity of firmly confining them. ‘They’d eat every morsel of our lovely young veg otherwise,’ he chuckled.
One or two people asked questions, while I felt increasingly uneasy. Thea and I had introduced ourselves as Sarah and Tom, having decided in the car that we couldn’t possibly give our real names. We were there as spies and intruders, which was a lot more fun for Thea than it was for me. I lived a mere twenty-five miles away. I ran a serious risk of being recognised by somebody, although I had to admit that it was unlikely that my precise identity would be spotted. Even though these people were in the same general ‘alternative’ world as Karen and I were, I knew I hadn’t performed a funeral for anybody from the community, apart from Greta Simmonds. Nobody had come to her Cotswold burial – which in itself was a reason for Thea’s insistence that we give them a look.
Lunch was predictably hearty, with plentiful vegetables, home-made bread and no meat. ‘Don’t you eat the geese?’ I asked Roger, who was sitting next to me.
‘We will do,’ he nodded, ‘but not until the winter.’
‘So vegetarianism isn’t a requirement for living here?’
‘Not at all. We don’t have requirements, as such. I thought Melanie had explained that.’ Melanie had given us a fifteen-minute spiel when we arrived, but since so much of it had been in strange jargon, I hadn’t listened very well.
‘But there are rules,’ I persisted, thinking I should justify my mendacious presence by trying to work out what went wrong for Mrs Simmonds. ‘How could there not be?’
‘It’s more subtle than that,’ he said patiently. ‘We aim to fit together without any coercion. Disagreements are resolved with discussion and proper process. The pressures are kept to a minimum, and since everyone is here quite willingly, with a clear understanding of how it all works, we have a very successful record for minimising conflict.’
‘There must be a few exceptions,’ I said. ‘There always is – it’s human nature.’
‘Of course,’ he conceded, with a nervous look around the table. A red-haired woman caught his eye and smiled, but I didn’t think she had heard what we were saying. Conversation was buzzing quite well, and I saw that Thea, on my other side, was chatting animatedly with a bearded man in his late sixties who I had already clocked as being the most interesting person we had encountered all day. It must be her old chum from the Cotswolds, I realised, pausing to speculate about the coincidence of meeting him again. I listened hard to catch some of their conversation, suddenly aware that he would know her as Thea Osborne and might upset things if he questioned why she was there as Sarah.
He was talking quietly, but I caught something about missing his garden, but having to face up to his own nature, which was not suited to living alone. Thea was obviously very interested, smiling at him encouragingly, and ignoring everyone else at the table.
‘So what do you do when someone rocks the boat?’ I turned back to Roger, remembering my reason for being there.
‘Well, we all do our utmost to identify the underlying difficulties and address them.’
‘You sound like a politician,’ I said irritably. ‘Surely it’s often a matter of personality, and you can’t change that.’
‘No, it’s a matter of learnt behaviour, which certainly can be changed.’ He sighed. ‘Almost always.’
‘Have you ever thrown anybody out?’
‘Not in those terms, but one or two people have left when it became clear that resolution was unfeasible.’
‘Why do you all talk like that?’ I demanded. ‘Do you all work in management, or something? Or social services? I would have thought with all these spades and animals around, you’d be much more down to earth.’
He blinked mildly at me, making me feel I’d been rather rude. ‘How else could I have said it?’
‘Well, I would have said something like – there have been people we can’t get along with, so they’ve left. Doesn’t that cover it?’
‘Maybe,’ he said doubtfully. I had a vivid image of their interminable conflict resolution sessions, where emotions were all reduced to long words and convoluted sentences. Nobody would ever shout or cry or throw anything. My brief acquaintance with Greta Simmonds had suggested a woman who might well enjoy throwing things once in a while.
I had to take the plunge. Why else had we come? ‘I did know somebody who was here,’ I ventured. ‘In fact, she died recently, I think. Greta, her name was. She was a distant friend of my aunt, or something. She seemed a nice woman, but I gather she didn’t stay here very long?’
His eyes bulged, and a piece of bread went down the wrong way. His violent coughing shook the whole table. If it was a diversionary tactic, he certainly went the whole hog. But when he finally cleared his windpipe, I reminded him of my question.
‘Greta was a very difficult person,’ he croaked. ‘Hypercritical – if that isn’t too jargonistic a term for you.’ It seemed I had finally managed to locate a nerve to touch. ‘Her motives for coming here turned out to be at odds with our intention. I mean, she didn’t have the same ethos as the rest of us. She found it difficult to commit to joining in the work. Her visitors behaved as if they were at a hotel. Most of them, anyhow,’ he amended. I thought of Jeremy, but couldn’t find a safe way of mentioning him. It seemed at least possible that nobody knew he was Greta Simmonds’ nephew, and it would be crass of me to give him away.
‘I see,’ I said. ‘As I say, I hardly knew her, but I gather she kept on a house somewhere, so she wasn’t homeless when she left here.’
‘That was a large part of the problem,’ Roger disclosed. ‘Everyone else sold their previous properties in order to invest in part-ownership here. That’s how it works. Greta displayed real lack of commitment by retaining her former home.’
‘So she didn’t put any money in here?’
‘Oh, yes. She put in quite a lot. That was another thing – she presented as a wealthy person, which jarred with several of the others. Quite a lot of people here are on benefits,’ he explained severely, as if this conferred a special sanctity.
‘Gosh! She must have been well heeled,’ I exclaimed.
‘Well, yes. I believe she managed to make some rather astute investments in the 1990s, and cashed them in just at the right time. Of course, she only had one of the smallest units, being on her own. Two bedrooms. And she had the rent from the house in the Cotswolds, to cover all her living expenses. She was very independent. Generous, too. She often said she had no wish to die with a large bank balance left unspent.’
‘But nobody liked her.’
‘I wouldn’t say that. We were sorry when she died. She was here for six years, after all. We regarded her as a fixture for most of that time.’
But you didn’t go to her funeral, I noted silently, even though she died during a visit to her old comrades at the community. I waited for this significant detail to be divulged, but it never came.
The main course concluded, we were presented with a large dish of preserved fruit – plums, gooseberries, raspberries, strawberries, all in syrup and coated with home-made yoghurt. I hadn’t noticed any cows. ‘Where do you get your milk?’ I asked, realising a change of subject was called for.
‘A farm half a mile away. The last dairy farm in the whole area. They make their own ice cream, and sell milk to lo
cal shops. As Melanie said, we do our best to source everything locally.’
‘Of course,’ I sighed.
‘Are you seriously interested in joining us?’ he asked, with quite understandable scepticism.
‘Oh…well…’ I stumbled, ‘it’s actually more Sarah’s idea than mine.’ The small betrayal quickly backfired.
‘Obviously, both partners have to be equally committed,’ he said sternly.
‘Obviously. Which is why we came for a proper look. To be frank, I’m not convinced it’s for me. I mean…it seems to be more suited to single people who would otherwise be living lonely, isolated lives. I can see it would be great for them. I’m impressed by the way you can be separate in your own little unit, but with friends and familiar faces just outside the door. Like a village.’
‘Right,’ he said doubtfully. ‘Although there’s a lot more to it than that.’
‘I suppose it’s the ideological aspect that I would have trouble with.’ It was true, despite my whole existence being founded on the ‘ideology’ of natural burial. At least that was a service that extended outwards to the wider society. This co-housing malarkey struck me as pretty inward-looking.
We had another little tour of the buildings after lunch. The heating system ran on wood, which shocked me. Roger explained about carbon capture and offsetting and sustainable management, but I continued to feel it was wrong. Anything that sent smoke into the sky – including cremation of dead bodies – was surely undesirable in the current climate. His spiel felt like rationalisation to me. ‘Where do you get the wood?’ I asked.
He waved an arm at a sizeable clump of trees a few fields away. ‘There are no trucks bringing it in,’ he assured the whole group. ‘No fossil fuels involved.’
‘So you plant a new tree every time you cut one down?’ I persisted. ‘But even then, you’ll run out long before the new ones have grown big enough to burn, won’t you?’
‘We’re looking into solar and wind,’ he said stiffly. ‘This is just an interim phase.’
‘Oh,’ I said, wondering if anybody present found that plausible.
I had no chance to speak to Thea until we were ushered back to the big sitting room where we were to discuss our thoughts about what we’d seen, in the final session of the day. She and I managed to hang back and exchange a few observations. ‘They’re a bit barmy,’ I ventured. ‘Don’t you think?’
‘It feels dreadfully unnatural,’ she agreed. ‘Sort of forced. Of course, they’re on display today, so they’re bound to be self-conscious. Did I hear you talking about Mrs Simmonds at lunch?’
‘That’s right. She wasn’t sufficiently committed, apparently. Sounds as if there was a real fatwa against her.’
‘They didn’t kill her, did they?’
‘Not directly, as far as I can tell. But they might have stressed her out enough for her artery to blow, or whatever it did. I wish we knew why she’d come back. It must have been pretty nasty for the people here to have her die on them.’
‘You’d think it would leave some sort of trace,’ she said. ‘It was only a fortnight ago, after all. They ought to be still talking about it.’
‘Not to prospective joiners. They’d be scared it would put people off.’
She shook her head. ‘They’ve got a waiting list a mile long. They think the whole world wants to come and join them. The point of today is for them to weed out the unsuitables.’
‘Like us.’
‘Exactly.’
‘So they’re not talking about it because they want to forget it.’
‘Which makes you wonder why young Jeremy’s here.’
‘He’s probably gone home by now,’ I said.
‘How?’
‘He’s got a bike. I had the impression he cycles long distances, but I must admit this is going rather far. His parents live the other side of Oxford somewhere.’
‘He seems so young to be roaming across England on his own.’
‘You think so? I’d have said he was seventeen. He looks pretty independent to me. And it’s the Easter holidays. Maybe they’ve given him some work for a few weeks. Casual labour.’
We all settled into saggy sofas and beanbags and window seats and waited for Melanie to do her stuff. We had a minute or two of ‘centring’, where everybody sat silently and gathered their thoughts. I had never been asked to do that in my life before, but I had to admit it was useful. I listened to other people’s breathing, and thought about the turbulence of the world outside, and how appealing many people would find this little enclave, with its own social organisation and well-intentioned members.
Then we went round the room, each person saying something about their impressions. Some of them had been before, and were well into the process of signing up as soon as a vacancy occurred. Others had wandered in on a whim, which was the line Thea and I had decided to take. She spoke before me, acting the part of Sarah with obvious relish.
‘Tom and I have only been together for a couple of years,’ she began. ‘We have properties we can sell, so money wouldn’t be a problem. We both have children who wouldn’t want to be here full-time, but obviously would visit quite a lot. I really like the farming, and would be more than happy to take a share of the work. I have worked with animals before.’
Melanie held up a hand and stopped her. ‘Sarah,’ she said with gentle reproach, ‘we covered most of that stuff this morning. This isn’t a job interview. What I’d like now is your feelings. Can you imagine yourself living in this community? What level of commitment do you think you feel at this moment?’
‘Well, to be really honest, I don’t think it would work. I think the pressures would outweigh the benefits where Tom and I are concerned. I notice you have a lot of unattached women here.’ She threw me a possessive look. ‘I’m afraid that would worry me.’
Melanie inhaled, and her curly hair quivered. ‘Well, thank you, Sarah, for being so honest. You have identified an issue that must, of course, be considered.’ She managed to convey that she thought it unlikely that I would be poached by any predatory females, but stranger things had happened.
Then it was my turn, and I saved everybody’s time by quickly confessing to a palpable lack of commitment. ‘I suppose we’re just not ready for something like this,’ I concluded. ‘But I am very grateful for the chance to get a closer look at what it would involve. You’ve all been very open and generous with your time.’
Melanie blossomed under this easy praise. ‘Thank you, Tom. That’s very kind of you.’
I glanced at my watch, finding it to be past three o’clock. ‘We do have to go quite soon,’ I said. ‘If that’s OK.’
‘Please don’t let us keep you. We’ve almost finished, anyway.’ Melanie swept the room, where another six people were waiting to have their say, and smiled tightly. ‘Are you planning to hear the others, or will you be leaving now?’ she asked sweetly.
I cocked an eyebrow at Thea and she began to flex her legs, preparatory to freeing herself from the beanbag that clasped her in its depths. ‘We’d better go now, I think,’ she said. ‘Sorry, everybody.’
At the door, we both turned back. ‘Good luck,’ said Thea to the room in general. ‘And thank you. It was extremely interesting.’
Outside, we stifled giggles and somehow managed to be holding hands when we got back to her car. ‘Oops – we’re still being Tom and Sarah,’ I said, feeling hot. ‘Better get back to reality.’
‘I knew it was you – I recognised the car,’ came a voice close by. Looking round, I finally located Jeremy Talbot standing between two woodpiles at the edge of the parking area. ‘What are you doing here?’
His accusing stare was locked onto Thea, as if he cared nothing for me and my part in his family’s trouble.
‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Hello, Jeremy. What a coincidence!’
‘Not really,’ he disagreed. ‘You’ve obviously come because of Auntie Greta – but why were you doing the tour with the wannabes? If she told you anything abou
t this place, she’d have warned you to keep clear.’ He spoke in a low voice, looking round for anybody likely to overhear. Thea and I moved closer to him, the sense of a conspiracy quite irresistible.
‘You don’t like it? So why are you working for them?’
He smiled a bitter smile. ‘For a start, it’s the last place my mum would think to look for me. And it’s easy money. They pay over the odds because they feel bad about my auntie. I don’t stay here. I’ve got a place a couple of miles away.’ He looked at Thea’s car again. ‘Your wing mirror’s cracked,’ he observed.
It was an uncanny echo of Thea’s daughter and her criticisms of my car. I snorted, wondering what it was about their generation that made it so satisfying to examine cars for defects. Finally he gave me a proper look. ‘You,’ he said. ‘I didn’t believe it when I saw you this morning. What’s your game?’
‘Much the same as yours, I imagine.’
‘What – hiding from my mother?’
‘No – checking out precisely what they had against your Auntie Greta.’
He gave me a look, full of suspicion and intelligence and bravado. ‘Why would you care about that?’
I groped helplessly for an answer, unable to explain it properly even to myself. It had to do, of course, with my situation regarding the police investigation, which I felt unable to explain to Jeremy – but there was also more to it than that. ‘I’m not sure, really. We saw there was an open day and it seemed too good a chance to miss.’
‘And you two – is something going on, then?’ The directness of the question sent my stomach into alarmed spasms.
‘Of course not,’ I snarled. ‘Mind your own business.’
‘Jeremy,’ Thea tried again. ‘We really haven’t any proper excuse for being here. It’s exactly as Drew said – we wanted to see for ourselves where Mrs Simmonds had been living. And when she actually died here, it…’ she tailed off, no better able to give an account of herself than I had been. ‘We just followed our gut feeling,’ she finished feebly.
‘They killed her,’ he said flatly. ‘When she came back to see them, being all friendly and nice, they rounded on her and killed her, like dogs.’
