Love and Fallout (14 page)

‘What's happening?' I asked.

‘Sapphire-gaters,' said Barbel, tightening her lips.

‘What are they doing here? This is our action.'

She shrugged. ‘The news travels.'

A loaded gravel truck faced the blockade, poised to enter the compound. There were already two policemen on the scene and the younger began gabbling into the radio at his shoulder when he saw us coming. The truck driver pressed his horn. Then pressed it again. The older policeman went over to the cab window to speak to the driver and the chanting came with greater force.
We say no! We say no!
My guts quivered. The Sapphire-gaters were younger than our lot, a scrum of boisterous fresh-faced girls, some with punk hair, others with shaven heads, raucous and quite patently unafraid. One had a spider's web drawn across her face in purple eye-liner. Or it could have been felt tip.

‘Oh dear,' said Barbel. ‘At Sapphire gate they are quite, hmm, what's your word.'

‘Rowdy?' I suggested over the new chanting which had risen in volume, despite the voices of Ruby and Amber singers, who were attempting a peace song.

‘No. I can't think.'

The young policeman kept talking on his radio, while his colleague came forwards, caped against the cold, hands held up in black gloves.

‘Stay back please, ladies.'

Angela and Rori were near the front with Jean. We all moved forwards.

‘I'm asking you to stay back, I don't want to charge you with obstructing the public highway.'

‘Blood on your hands!' called one of the Sapphire-gaters for no particular reason.

‘Provocative,' said Barbel with relief.

‘My colleague is calling for back-up,' a policeman informed Jean.

Barbel took my arm and we jostled nearer the front.

‘Women!' shouted the Sapphire-gaters.

A few members of our group ran forwards to occupy the section of clear road between the heap of bodies already blockading and the wheels of the truck. The driver edged forwards to close the space, but the policeman gave a warning gesture, forcing him to reverse. That was it. The women darted in, taking position in the blockade while the policemen tried to keep them back and the truck driver leaned on his horn. ‘Clear out the way you silly bitch!' he shouted, as another woman skipped in front of him. The students dashed ahead and sat down.

‘Come on,' said Barbel pulling me towards the rows of women. I couldn't see Rori's pink hat.

‘Pack in tight!' called a woman at my ear.

‘Stay back!' ordered the policeman.

‘Here you are,' said a voice from the ground, offering a hand to help me down. I squashed in, half falling on her, but she only laughed.

‘I'm Debbie.' She sat cross-legged wearing a sheepskin coat and a blue hat. On the hat she'd sewn a CND badge, the stitching loose at one corner.

‘Are you from Sapphire gate?'

‘No, I'm local, but my mate is, Cat.'

She leaned forward to reveal Cat, who stared ahead, her scalp shaven but for one long rat's tail striping her neck.

‘How long have you been here?' I asked Debbie over the noise.

‘I don't know, an hour.'

Other women were collapsing around us.

‘Take care of the goddess!' someone called. No one quite knew what to do with the papier mache doll, but she obviously couldn't sit in the blockade or she'd get her head crushed in, so instead she was passed to the grannies against the bomb, and remained tethered, robes streaming in the wind, while her owners sat down in the mesh of bodies.

‘They don't know what to do,' said Debbie of the policemen. ‘Look at them!' It was true; the young one with the radio was spinning around like a farmhand failing to herd cattle. Debbie began joining in loudly with the singing. I caught sight of a pink hat which might have been Rori's.

After two more songs a man cycled up to the front, dismounted and scratched his head. He was middle-aged, wearing bicycle clips. He tried wheeling around the arms and legs. ‘Excuse me,' he said, pushing through. ‘Excuse me. I've got to get to work. Excuse me.' But he and his bike were stuck.

‘No chance,' said a woman at the back. ‘Take the day off.' Laughter. The man with the bike tried to wheel nearer.

‘Can't you get me in?' he shouted to the soldiers at the gate. But the soldiers pretended they hadn't heard.

‘How many children are you going to kill today?' asked a woman.

‘I work in the canteen,' said the man. He got back on his bike and cycled away.

11

Bolognese

Keeping in mind Valeria's advice about communication, I've sent my apologies to the Heston Fields committee and am preparing a meal this evening, a proper sit-down-and-talk meal. Cooking opens up a pocket of calm. Everything happens mechanically, my body obeying the bolognese-making habits of a lifetime, onions chopped and fizzing in oil, perfuming the kitchen as they slide around a cast iron pot. I pour a glass of Rioja, set the table for two and bring in a few sweet peas from the garden, arranging them in a yellow jug on the kitchen table. Dom's at band practice and the house is quiet but for the radio and the background laughter of a panel game.

The phone rings and I let it go to answer machine. It's Mum. She speaks in a rush, sending her love, but as usual she tries to cram too much information on the tape and it cuts off. Her voice – chatty, warm, reliable – causes me stop and stare through the kitchen window.

Six-thirty comes and Pete isn't home. I finish my glass of wine. Seven arrives and seven-thirty. I pour another and send him a text. Eight o'clock passes. I boil a small amount of spaghetti for myself and drain it, then regard it without appetite, leave it in the colander and settle on the old sofa beside the garden door. It's a worn chintz, something that once belonged to Pete's parents. I'm intending to make a list of grant application letters, but the list turns into a doodle and I get lost in a network of loops and boxes while evening springs up over the garden.

He comes in at nine-thirty. ‘Sitting in the dark?' he says, turning on the standard lamp and draping his jacket over a chair. At the sink he fills a glass with cold water and drinks it down.

‘You might have said you were going to be late.'

‘Sorry. I went for a pint with Bill. Switched my phone off.'

‘Right.'

‘Thought you were at one of your meetings anyway.'

‘Cancelled it.'

He says he's eaten so I go about spooning the Bolognese into a bowl for the fridge. He takes a fork and tastes it.

‘Delicious.'

‘It's only Bolognese.'

He sighs, sits down at the kitchen table and pours himself a glass of wine while I busy about making more noise than is necessary. After a tense pause he speaks. ‘Look, we've got the Ofsted inspectors in next week and I can't handle this right now, Tessa. I've told you I'm sorry about all that make-over stuff. I don't know what else to say.'

‘Sorry won't make everything slot nicely back into place.' I'm making room in the fridge for the cling-film-covered bowl. This wasn't how we were supposed to start off, and I definitely wasn't going to dig at him, but now the words are out.

He shakes his head as if at some private joke. ‘Everything wasn't nicely in place.'

By this time we should be on the sofa side by side. This was supposed to be our turning point. I'd imagined laying my head on his chest, him stroking my hair.

‘What d'you mean?' I say, closing the fridge. He's rotating his wine glass in small circles from the base. He gives me his weary face, shakes his head again and sighs.

‘I'm not one of your kids, Pete, I don't want the Mr Perry treatment.'

‘You
know
what the problem is: you're never here. You're always in a meeting, or at a committee, or off at some climate camp or other.'

‘Twice, I went to the climate camp twice. And I've asked you to come to things.'

‘I don't want to spend my evenings around more tables or my weekend in a tent.'

‘You used to love camping.'

‘We were younger then.'

‘You want me to sit watching telly with you all night.'

‘No.'

‘What then?'

He looks at me squarely. ‘I want a wife.'

His words go into me. ‘What am I, a mirage?' I lean back on the counter.

‘You're married to your campaigns. If it's not saving the post office it's the library and if it's not that it's rescuing a patch of scrubby field no one's bothered about.'

‘
You're
not bothered about.'

‘Don't you get enough of it at work all day?'

He stands up and goes to look out at the garden. One of the doors is open, it's a warm night but the perfume from the honeysuckle bush isn't soothing us. He massages the muscles at his neck.

‘So I'm a disappointment,' I say to his back.

‘No, no of course not. Don't be defensive.'

He's right, that is defensive, but I feel defensive. I pick up the colander of cold spaghetti and slide it into the bin. It has congealed, solid and contoured like a section of brain. ‘You want a woman who has facials and hair appointments and spends Saturday in the shops.'

‘It's not about how you look.'

‘No? It is from where I'm standing.'

‘It's the way you go about things. You don't have to save the world all by yourself. It's not always down to you.'
That expression again, saving the world, the same one Maggie used. He softens his voice. ‘I know you care and I respect that. But it's…' He stalls for the words, ‘You're constantly distracted by the next great cause, as if your life depended on it.' He turns to face me. ‘What's it for? You might as well still be living on that common for all I see of you, and when I do you're preoccupied, always on a mission. It's like an obsession, this need to be do-gooding all the time.'

‘Do-gooding?'

He rakes a hand through his hair. ‘What else is it?'

‘I like to have a purpose that's all.' I'm still holding the colander. ‘You want me to be someone else.'

‘No.'

‘Yes you do, why else did you agree to that programme?'

‘A bit of make-up and some new clobber, is that such a drama? It was supposed to be a treat. Honestly. We've been through this…' It doesn't matter how many times we've been through it, it still hurts. He shakes his head as if he's decided something. ‘But I tell you what, I don't want to live like this any more, I'm sick of you carrying on like a one woman United Nations. I'm sick of ethical bananas and carbon footprints and hemp bloody shower gel. I don't want a goat for Christmas. I don't want to walk around my own house in the winter wearing three jumpers. I want to fill the bath up, I want to…'

‘You want, you want.
Why don't you just have done and trade me in for someone else then?'

He recoils as if he's been struck, and the flutter that passes across his face exposes him. Because this is the man I've been married to for twenty-four years, I understand what the flutter signifies: it's guilt.

‘Have you..?'

‘No.'

In the still kitchen his breathing comes heavily. I'm at the sink holding the colander. He picks up the wine glass again and drinks. Oh my God. Surely not, that's mad isn't it? This is Pete, my husband, solid, bearded, practical Pete, Mr Perry, Head of History. The silence shivers between us, there's a sudden sick feeling in my stomach.

‘Is there…?' I can't say the words
someone
else
because they're too surreal. He blinks at me.

‘Will you say something!' My voice is so loud it startles us both.

‘It's over,' he says.

‘What's over?' The colander is a dead weight.

He takes a deep breath and whatever it is he's going to say, I don't want to hear, but it's too late because he's saying it anyway. Or trying to.

‘I did something stupid. It's over now, not that it was… it didn't mean anything… I stopped it, it could have gone on, but I didn't let it.'

It's an effort to match him to the words. The mouth moving is Pete's because it's the same one that reminds me we need to buy milk, but the words coming out are foreign. I have the odd sensation of being in a badly dubbed film. What my husband should be saying is, Let's forget about all this make-over rubbish and start again, but what he's actually saying is… what is he saying?

‘You had an affair?' He's staring at me like someone hungry pleading for a morsel of food. I repeat the question.

‘Not that no… it was more of an accidental… fling.'