And now, thought Lady Mary, here was Sim making amends for the girl, and the others she supposed there must have been and, more than that, probably for his father’s whole life. Was it right? If it was right, was this the proper way to make the correction? Right or wrong? It was no use – she didn’t know.
The story of Ruth, Mrs Hedges’s brothel, her assault on Sir Bernard, causing his death – all that was to come out later. Then, Lady Mary would see more point in Sim’s giving up all he could of his inheritance. Just for now she calmly watched her family and guests moving about the graceful room, talking to each other. She straightened herself just a little and walked in.
29
The Temple of Fortune
It was the end of the summer holidays and Vanessa and Annie took Alec and Joanne to a Disney film. Melanie, who had popped down to London to examine her very new investment, was with them. After the film came the search for the burger and the special ice-cream and before they knew it they found themselves strolling in the afternoon sunshine across the bridge back to their own side of the Thames. To reach home they walked past Savernake Park where quite a crowd was watching its destruction. As they stopped to look the sun went in and the air became instantly chillier. Alec insisted on looking over the strengthened parapet the builders had erected all round the building site. They had grubbed up the park and gone deep down into the earth as they prepared to lay the foundations for the new Savernake Village.
Opposite, between the tall blocks of Savernake House and Rodwell House, hung a big, hand-painted banner, ‘Hands Off Savernake. Leave It For The People Of Kenton’. Les Dowell’s protests had received some support and some media coverage but the explanations of the Department of the Environment representative and Joe Banks had been smooth, plausible and above all successful. Joe Banks had not wanted to go on television or be in any other way prominently connected with the sale of the estate, but his masters at the development company had been stronger than he was.
‘Get on with it, Joe,’ Charles Head had told him crudely. ‘Technically, it’s over. One last push and you’ve done your job. A few words, then the seven million’s yours. Each syllable’s worth ten thousand at least.’
‘It’s all wrong,’ said a woman beside Annie. ‘All wrong. They say they can do good with the money, but however much it is, how long’s that going to last?’
‘Then there’s no money and no park,’ said an old man. ‘All for flaming yuppies. I’d shoot them. I would,’ he said, looking fiercely at Vanessa, as if she might disagree.
‘It’s depressing,’ said Vanessa. ‘I don’t want to look at it. Alec and Joanne,’ she appealed. ‘Let’s go home.’
But the children were fascinated by the three giant earth movers. Great scoops of earth were being pulled and dropped to one side. At the top of the great heap of scooped earth lay the metal skeleton of a climbing frame on its side. Below them the great teeth of a digger bit again, like a cannibal, into the tired London clay, dry and seemingly infertile, overtrodden for thousands of years by tens of thousands of feet.
‘It’s dreadful,’ Annie said.
‘Dreadful,’ echoed a voice behind her. Annie turned to see a familiar plump, wrinkled face.
‘Madame Katarina – having a walk, or did you come specially to see all this?’
‘My new partner, Mr Craig, and I are taking a stroll,’ said the clairvoyant. She made introductions.
‘You said I wasn’t going back,’ said Melanie.
‘You didn’t – immediately,’ said Madame Katarina.
‘They say the spirits don’t lie,’ Melanie said. ‘But they don’t tell the whole truth, do they?’
Max Craig laughed. ‘I’m sorry to say, you’re right. Hey?’ His sharp eyes caught sight of something lying in the pit below them.
Annie peered. ‘Whatever’s that?’
‘It’s like an eye, and a nose,’ Joanne said. The big-toothed scoop was descending again. The crowd was mesmerised. ‘It’s big – it’s like a big object,’ Vanessa said.
The scoop hit a large lump which seemed to have the shape of a vast nose and above it, the size of a dinner plate, what might have been an eye. As it struck there was a metallic clang. Annie keenly picked up the difference in tone between the earth and the object embedded in it.
‘Bronze!’ she exclaimed and began to gesture at the man in the cab of the excavator. He waved back cheekily, mouthing what looked like an invitation.
‘One of Geoff’s men there,’ Vanessa said. ‘He makes a point of hiring the obscene ones.’ She began to wave and shout. Max Craig waved his umbrella, then pointed it at the mysterious metal nose. Swivelling the scoop of the excavator the driver seized a mound of earth from one side, swung it over and dropped it on the spot from which the clang had come.
‘Oh, he’s burying it again,’ cried Joanne in disappointment. ‘I wanted to see what it was. Where’s Annie?’
Alec pointed. Annie was over on the other side of the park, having run round by the road. She was emerging through the gap between the two towers and now, standing behind the protective barrier on that side of the site, was looking round. She spotted the row of Portakabins to her left, pitched just outside the windows of the flats on the ground floor of Savernake House. The big gaping hole which had once been part of Savernake Park, was in front of them.
‘What’s she doing?’ wondered Vanessa.
‘She’s trying to get them to stop digging. She must think there’s something important down there – an archaeological site,’ Madame Katarina said.
Max Craig, clairvoyant to many financiers, said cynically, ‘If so, she’s got a fight on her hands. Property companies hate potential archaeological sites and busybodies trying to halt their work. Some insurers will insure against it, though the premiums are high, but in places like this I doubt if any firm would provide cover. Dig down anywhere in this sort of area of London and you’ll find something of historical interest.’
‘Ah – yes,’ Madame Katarina said dreamily, remembering something, a prediction she had once made. To Annie.
‘There’s your dad,’ cried Vanessa excitedly to the children. Geoff Doyle now stood on the edge of the pit he had dug, while Annie pointed towards the digger, which dumped another scoop of earth exactly where she was pointing. Now she tugged at Geoff’s jacket, speaking to him urgently. He looked down at her, talking angrily. ‘Why’s Annie pulling him?’ demanded Alec.
‘I think she’s trying to show him where that nose was,’ Joanne interpreted. ‘But he doesn’t want to look.’
Yet another scoop of earth landed on the spot where the nose and eye had been uncovered.
‘That man’s had his orders,’ Max Craig remarked drily.
‘Barbarians,’ said Madame Katarina.
‘If there’s anything there,’ he observed, ‘they’re not above coming back late at night, setting charges, putting a nightwatchman on it and blowing it up early in the morning.’
Annie could be seen shouting at Geoff Doyle, then, with some final expression of disgust, she turned and ran. She was red-faced and breathless when she got back. ‘He won’t do a thing,’ she gasped indignantly. ‘I think it’s a Roman temple. What can I do? I’d better ring the company.’
‘I doubt if that’ll work,’ Craig told her. ‘The best way is to get straight on to the Department of the Environment – and the British Museum. But, you see, they’ll be ahead of you. They’ll use explosives if they have to.’
‘How can they do something so criminal?’ she exclaimed.
‘Easily,’ he told her. ‘Let me explain. Nigel, your brother-in-law, has a heavy stake in this—’
‘I’m going to get a cab,’ Annie said emphatically. ‘I’m going straight to the British Museum—’
There was a clap of thunder. She ignored it. ‘I’ll find the appropriate curator and drag him over here—’ Another clap of thunder and a big flash of lightning interrupted her and stopped the excavator. As heavy rain began to fall they saw the man
in the cab climbing down.
Suddenly it was pouring. Vanessa pulled the children’s anorak hoods over their heads and said, ‘We’ve got to get home.’
Max Craig held his umbrella over Madame Katarina and the children. Joanne was shivering. He turned to the soaking-wet Annie and said, ‘This is your chance. If it keeps up it’ll give you time.’
Even now, two inches of water had materialised in the pits between the heavy mounds of earth. Annie grinned, turned her face up into the deluge, and said, ‘Thank you.’
There was another clap of thunder, a sheet of lightning. ‘Too close,’ breathed Vanessa.
‘It answered,’ said Max Craig. He pushed the umbrella handle into her hand and leapt into the road, stopping a taxi. They all clambered in except Annie, who plodded off, drenched, in the other direction, heading for the British Museum.
It rained for several days. By that time Annie’s efforts and insistence had ensured that work on the site was stopped.
It turned out that the middle of Savernake Park, a field during the Middle Ages, a squalid group of shacks since the seventeenth century, a private park since 1800 and a council estate since 1955 had been, during the years just before AD 100, the site of a temple set up by a certain Roman legion, soldiers of the Emperor Domitian. This temple was dedicated to the relatively obscure goddess Fortuna. It was her vast nose and huge eye that the digger had uncovered. The statue of the goddess proved to be of bronze, twenty feet tall with eyes like plates, nose like a small canoe, hair twisting and waving like big green pythons round her head. The Roman legion over whose temple she had presided appeared to have been a motley collection of Visigoths, Vandals, Angles, Saxons, Egyptians, Spaniards and Africans who followed many gods and cults. Perhaps, since they worshipped a huge pantheon of gods and goddesses – they had dog-faced gods and bull-gods, fountain-gods and mountain-gods, jackal-gods and elk-gods, three-breasted mother goddesses, murder-gods and suicide-gods and a whole rag, tag and bobtail collection of cults, mysteries, superstitions and fearful animistic rites – the goddess Fortuna was the only Roman deity all the legionaries could manage to get along with, since at all times men have known themselves to be subject to chance and fortune. Evidence from the site proved that Fortuna’s temple had been a popular place to worship and make sacrifices during the second century AD.
In the following year the excavated temple, which covered two acres of the eight-acre park dominated by the mighty bronze-green statue of Fortuna, was opened by the Prince of Wales. Joe Banks, still, after a mighty struggle, leader of Kenton Council, was photographed swapping a joke with the Princess of Wales, who also gave Mrs Roxanne Fuller, the Mayor, a great big hug. Les Dowell had previously introduced a motion in the council to have the site opened by an ordinary member of the public, preferably Mrs Walters, still living happily at Rodwell House – but he was out-voted.
There was a flurry of financial reorganisation following the discovery of the temple and the cancellation of the Savernake Village project. Redesigning the village round the temple would have been quite uneconomic. Also, as Charles Head disgustedly told Joe Banks, ‘You’d have all the hoi polloi marching about, staring at the residents.’
‘Oh, well,’ declared Joe Banks. ‘The council’ll just have to build a restaurant, sell concessions and so forth. It’ll bring in some revenue to help the borough.’ He paused. ‘It’s a proposition – are you interested?’
He was standing in Head’s office. Head rose from his desk menacingly. ‘Get out,’ he threatened. Joe Banks left instantly.
The affair practically ruined Geoff Doyle and wrecked Nigel Fellows’s chances of getting a majority shareholding in Samco (though he felt compensated by the delight of the birth of his daughter that year). It put Julian Vane’s company into bankruptcy, whereupon Tamsin left Julian. Geoff Doyle had an even worse time romantically – Cindy married him and gave him a hard life thereafter. He began to pine for Vanessa but Cindy’s father, deprived by the collapse of the time-share in Portugal and new car which would have been reward for his work on behalf of Savernake Developments, only encouraged his daughter to persecute her husband more.
It was Tom who discovered that from the roof of Annie’s house in Rutherford Street you could actually see Fortuna’s large head, turned towards Foxwell High Street. ‘To think that the goddess Fortuna presides over Kenton,’ remarked Vanessa, standing on the roof beside him. ‘Frankly, to look at the state of the place, you’d never believe it.’
‘Ah,’ said Annie. ‘But she’s been toppled for nearly two thousand years. Now she’s upright again.’
‘So are we,’ said Vanessa Gathercole. ‘And, what’s more, we got love—’
‘We got money—’ said Annie, for the restaurant had been out of debt since the week before.
‘And, in a way, you got revenge,’ said Tom Pointon. ‘Shall we get off this roof, now?’
A Note on the Author
HILARY BAILEY was born in 1936 and was educated at thirteen schools before attending Newnham College, Cambridge. Married with children, she entered the strange, uneasy world of ’60s science fiction, writing some twenty tales of imagination which were published in Britain, the USA, France and Germany. She has edited the magazine New Worlds and has regularly reviewed modern fiction for the Guardian. Her first novel was published in 1975 and she has since written twelve novels and a short biography. She lives in Ladbroke Grove, London.
Discover books by Hilary Bailey published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/HilaryBailey
After the Cabaret
All the Days of My Life
As Time Goes By
A Stranger to Herself
Cassandra
Connections
Elizabeth and Lily
Fifty-First State
Hannie Richards
In Search of Love, Money and Revenge
Mrs Rochester
Polly Put the Kettle On
Mrs Mulvaney
The Cry from Street to Street
Miles and Flora
The Strange Adventures of Charlotte Holmes
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,
London WC1B 3DP
First published in Great Britain 1990 by Macmillan London Ltd.
Copyright © 1990 Hilary Bailey
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise
make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means
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printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the
publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The moral right of the author is asserted.
ISBN: 9781448209248
eISBN: 9781448209255
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In Search of Love, Money & Revenge Page 38
