Frozen Music (49 page)

The Wilsons' dog was dead. ‘How did it happen?'

‘It were in the way,' George said.

‘In the way of what?' I wondered.

‘Machinery,' George replied.

‘Oh. Oh dear, how dreadful. You must miss him.'

‘He were an old dog, but I miss him.'

Maybe it was the newly planted roses blooming against the cottage wall, or the warm sunshine of an Indian summer, but Rookery Cottage looked an altogether different place from the one I had visited two months earlier. The hens were still picking their way up and down the mud-track drive, but their harassed pecking had given way to a leisurely strut and there seemed to be a new shine to their feathers. Even the evidence of George's scrap business had been tidied away beneath a newly renovated open shed.

George had been out at the front when I arrived and in the space it took for us to reach the front door a white Ford Fiesta drove up and a middle-aged woman, her ample form clad in a dark-blue track suit, got out and hailed him. Having caught up with us she introduced herself to me, breathlessly, as Penny Perkins, Chair of the Save George and Dora's Home campaign. I looked at George.

‘It's the locals,' he muttered. ‘They've sort of taken up our cause, if you like.'

Penny Perkins's face relaxed into a pleased smile. ‘We had the local TV news down the other day. They were doing a follow-up.' She pronounced the last words carefully, as if she had just learnt them. ‘It was marvellous, actually. We all gathered round in George and Dora's kitchen and had a little singsong. Someone said it must have been like that during the war, that community spirit, everyone looking out for everyone else and keeping each other cheerful.'

She paused and Dora, who had appeared in the doorway, took the opportunity to point at me and say, ‘That there's Miss Fisher. She's the one from the paper.'

‘Oh, right. Well, we have a lot to thank you for, then,' Penny Perkins said. ‘Without you Dora and George might have lost their home already.' A frown creased her brow and she sighed. ‘But I'm almost forgetting. I came to tell you that they're saying now the building's going ahead for certain. You wouldn't believe it, would you, after everything. But Ted was down at the council offices and he heard Mary Trilby tell Joan and that's how Ted knew.'

I nodded. ‘I'm afraid it's true. As you know, your side lost the appeal against the compulsory purchase order and Terra Nova has decided to go ahead with the opera house project, so unless public opinion causes the council to relent I'm afraid the eviction will be enforced in the next few weeks.'

The gummy grin on Dora's face shrank to a frightened O. ‘What are you going to do?' The three of them turned and looked at me.

It was all very well to be considered a source of power, but this was ridiculous: I was a journalist, not God. Then again, maybe the differences had been somewhat blurred over the last couple of years. I
suggested we went inside. ‘I must tell you that I think the chances of the compulsory purchase
not
going ahead are slim.' I sat down at the kitchen table, taking the mug of tea handed to me by Dora.

‘But what about the media?' Penny Perkins spoke the word with the reverence normally reserved for the Almighty and she clearly expected a miracle.

I had to tell them: ‘There are limits to what we can achieve.' Penny seemed amazed, looking at me like a pilgrim who'd just seen her wine turned into water. ‘It doesn't mean we won't keep trying.' I attempted to soften the blow. ‘That's why I'm here now. We know we've got huge public support for George and Dora.' I nodded at them across the table. ‘But as I said, there are limits to what we can do. I'm sorry,' I added. Then I thought of Linus and I'm ashamed to say I wasn't so sure.

We drank our tea in gloomy silence interrupted only by the slurping as George sucked the liquid from his dunking biscuit. ‘I'm here to do a follow-up piece,' I said eventually. ‘Who knows what might come of a renewed campaign?'

‘You can show me with my jams,' Dora said.

‘Your jams?'

‘I've done them all summer. There's been a real run on them these last few weeks.' By way of explanation she waddled up to the larder, bringing out three different jams in their jars.

‘Dora's Real Country Apricot' I read on one. ‘Dora's Real Country Strawberry' and ‘Dora's Real Country Kiwi'. ‘Kiwi? You surely can't grow kiwi fruit around here? Come to think of it, what about the apricot? Do you buy the fruit?'

Dora winked at Penny. ‘'Course not. Whoever could afford that? No, I just buy the jam off the shelf. Then I put it in my own jars with my own label and no one knows the difference.'

‘It's not very honest.'

Dora looked at me reproachfully. ‘What harm is it doing? People like bringing back little souvenirs. We're quite the celebrities nowadays.' The thought seemed to cheer her up. ‘Shop jam's much nicer anyway, sweeter,' she added.

Penny Perkins nodded. ‘They are, you know. We get people coming from all over asking for George and Dora.'

‘It's good jam, that,' George muttered. ‘Nothing wrong with it at all.'

‘But surely making your own from local fruit would work out cheaper and so give you a higher profit?'

‘I can't be doing with all of that.' Dora shrugged. ‘That's what you've got your shops for. Now where do you want us for your picture?'

I sat in front of the computer, but instead of the blank screen I saw the new opera house rise in splendour above the lake, there to offer solace to generations, to educate and inspire. And there was Linus, its creator. His image was so real that I found myself whispering to him, little words of endearment that could only be thought up by a brain shrouded in mist, love-mist.

His image faded and in its place came a tumbledown cottage with roses round the door and rusty machine parts in an open shed at the front, and a surprisingly fertile vegetable plot at the back, Rookery Cottage. Now I saw George's sharp features and Dora's unlovely virtually toothless grin. But I was the attorney for the defence and my clients did not have to be lovable or even especially good to deserve my services. I struck the letters on the keyboard with the force of my heavy heart.

When he was a young boy Linus had often dreamt that he was big and powerful, and that he rescued his mother. He had never known just what it was he should have rescued her from, so in his dreams it varied. Sometimes it was from a giant with eyes the size of wagon wheels and teeth like slabs of granite (that had been when he was very young). Sometimes it was from Red Indians and once it had been a wolf. He saved her from robbers and kidnappers, and as he got older he found ways of curing what had made her sick. But always the dreams would end the same. His mother would open her eyes, and smile at him and say, ‘Thank you, Linus. Whatever would I have done without you.' For that brief moment he was a king, filled with pride
and happiness; complete. Then, as the dream subsided into reality he'd cry, drained, empty of hope, and each time the tears were more bitter than the last because the truth was that he would never save his mother. She was gone; for ever beyond his reach and, dream as he might, there was nothing, nothing at all he could do to change that. When it had mattered, when his mother had needed him, when he could have made a difference, he had been too young, too stupid, too small and puny and powerless. He grew up. He grew strong, but the sense of powerlessness remained.

But now, as he stood before the completed model of his opera house, he felt the same elation as when he had dreamt and found his mother's eyes smiling up at him, thanking him, her rescuer.

He had learnt from so many previous occasions that no drawings, no computer images could ever quite prepare you for the sight of the finished model. Sometimes it fell short of your expectations, at others it lived up to them, but rarely did it exceed them. This was one of those rare moments. His creation rose before him, perfect and true to life in every detail but size, and it was a beauty. He moved around the model table. Not only was the opera house gorgeous, but the days and nights spent working had made sure that it was perfect, too, for its purpose and for its setting by the lake. He bent down and peered into the main auditorium, the cocoon. Every acoustic panel was in place, every seat – stalls, dress circle and balconies. Even the lights were in place, perfect scale models of the chandeliers, which he had commissioned from Olle Holm, the glass sculptor. He straightened up and stood back, getting a whole view of the model. Then, before him, like an overlay on a computer image, came the vision of two old people who had lost their home. ‘An Englishman's home is his castle,' he mumbled. But not any more, it wasn't, and he, Linus, was party to the deconstruction of their lives. ‘Oh Esther,' he groaned. ‘What the hell am I doing?' And he felt like crying the way he had when he was a child who had just seen his dream slip away.

The compulsory purchase order against Rookery Cottage had gone through and the eviction notice was about to be served. I didn't know they served eviction notices at the weekends. Penny Perkins and her fellow campaigners were waiting for the council officer as he arrived, driving up to the gate in his red Vauxhall, and so was I and a photographer, Paul, from the paper. I had been talking to some of the protesters. ‘You must care deeply about George and Dora to do this?' I asked one.

The woman, in her twenties with lank mid-blonde hair, looked blankly at me. Then her brow cleared. ‘Yeah, them.' Course I do. I've seen them on telly. It's diabolical.'

‘I don't actually know the Wilsons,' a middle-aged woman in baggy jeans and a multicoloured knitted jersey confessed. ‘Not many of us around here do, but I simply couldn't sit idly by and let this kind of thing happen.'

A man, fiftyish and wearing a bright-blue V-neck sweater with a small eagle motif, told me he was the local publican. ‘We don't often see them down at the pub and when we do they keep themselves much to themselves, but you have to do your bit for the community, know what I mean.'

A man stepped out from behind the crowd and into the line of Paul's lens, pointing at the red Vauxhall. It was Barry Jones. A thinner Barry Jones with a less extravagantly bouffant hairstyle, but Barry Jones nevertheless. ‘This is it, girls and boys, so let's show 'em what we British are made of.' His voice soared above the din of a passing harvester as the campaigners formed a ring round the cottage. Fists were raised in victory salutes. The council officer stepped out from his
car and, with barely a glance in our direction, walked up to the gate and nailed the eviction notice to the post. Then he turned on his heels and walked back.

The campaigners, led by Penny and Barry Jones, were too busy shouting their slogan – ‘What do we want? Justice for George and Dora. When do we want it? Now!' – to notice that he had gone, his business done. When they did realise there was a moment's silence before one of the campaigners, a burly man in his sixties, balding and red-faced, took up the chant: ‘We shall not we shall not give in, we shall not we shall not give in.' That seemed to perk them up as they linked hands once more for the camera. Suddenly a huge cheer went up. I turned round to see if the notice had been torn down, but it was still there, neatly pinned to the gatepost. The cause of the good cheer was the arrival of the crew from a local TV station. Penny raised her fist. ‘What do we want? Justice for George and Dora. When do we want it? We want it now!' Lights, Camera, Go! Barry Jones linked arms with the nearest protester, a woman with long grey hair cascading down her back. ‘This is a human rights issue,' he pronounced and when he realised that the crew had missed it the first time, he said it again, twice, adding, ‘I care not a jot for my own safety,' as if he were expecting an armoured car full of secret police to storm through the gate at any time. The crew moved closer. ‘As I said, this is a human rights issue…' The protesters surged forward drowning out his words with their chanting.

‘Is this how Frankenstein would have felt, do you think?' I asked Paul, as I watched my unlovely creation form and swell before us.

‘Monsters don't have feelings,' he replied. ‘That's the point of them.'

‘But Frankenstein wasn't the monster. Frankenstein created the monster,' I explained. ‘Surely you knew that?'

‘Whatever.' Paul shrugged.

I hadn't reread my last article when it appeared the previous week, but I knew it by heart, line by manipulative line. And the line had been swallowed, gratefully, by our readers and the letters of support were arriving by the sackful. But it looked as if this time nothing I
could do would stop the eviction of the Wilsons from their home. For their sakes, if nothing else, maybe it was time to face up to the inevitable and stop campaigning. But would Charlie agree?

I had written to Linus, trying to explain my actions. I had avoided phoning because I knew that once I heard his voice I would melt: first it would be my heart, then my brain and finally the telephone receiver itself, until there was no logic, no determination, no creditable defence, but just a soggy mess of blood and guts and plastic. So I had written this letter instead.

Dear Linus,

I know you're very angry with me. I know you feel betrayed. I also know all too well what this project means to you and on one level I hate what I'm doing. And it's not as if the project is without its merits.

But are you sure that Stuart Lloyd's insistence on it being built on the land adjoining his estate is not more to do with personal ambitions than thoughts of the importance of bringing culture to the masses?

Dora and George Wilson are not the world's most attractive people. They don't contribute anything very special to the sum total of human greatness or happiness. They're not terribly bright, nor are they especially good. But Rookery Cottage is their home, the only one they've known. It's pretty well the only worthwhile thing they've ever had; as I said, God not having been overly generous with his gifts to them. There they are in all their frailty and they are powerless. I don't think there's anything worse than to be powerless.