Love and Fallout (35 page)

‘And of course I was terribly religious in those days,' she says.

‘Were you?' I reply, remembering only too well.

‘Oh yes. I wanted to be Joan of Arc. I'd be in my little tent saying one novena after another for the deliverance of the world. Life was all about the struggle.'

Protest means sacrifice
, her words come back to me across the years.

‘I thought you had it all worked out.'

‘Did you?' She seems genuinely surprised.

‘You always knew what was what. I remember arriving that first night and you were sitting at the fire with your parka on reading the paper
…
'

She groans. ‘God, that coat…'

‘And I was this girl who'd just got off the bus from Stevenage, and hardly knew which way was up.'

She laughs and sets down her cup. ‘When I look back it makes me think of that Bob Dylan lyric,
I was so much older then.
' She looks into her coffee, ‘I felt quite shabby afterwards about the way I went on.'

‘Did you?' My fork wavers and her eyes lift from the cup to meet mine. By the way she's regarding me it's clear what she means is,
The way I went on at you
. Whatever I was expecting from a meeting with Angela, it certainly wasn't a confession.

‘I was so uncompromising. Clinging to my rosary beads, clinging to a cause, but the fact was, at that time I was mired in these terrible feelings of grief, and other complicated emotions I couldn't sort out.' She doesn't explain what these emotions relate to, but she says something of the grief. ‘It was a bad year, 1982. Me and my dad, we'd always had a difficult relationship, if you can call it a relationship, and I feared him, but even so I wanted him to be proud. Or if not that, I wanted him to understand me a little. But then suddenly he was dead, heart attack, and no chance to put things right, none of those father-daughter conversations I'd longed for, so I threw myself into saving the world.' The phrase strikes me and I file it away. ‘Not that I wasn't sincere, I was probably too sincere and I believed in disarmament passionately, but there were other complicating factors.'

Her face is briefly shadowed like the young Angela's, and I feel compelled to lighten it.

‘Well, let's be honest, you had your work cut out with me. I was all over the place. Do you remember rescuing me when Barbel tried to bleach my hair?'

She laughs. ‘You did attract a certain amount of calamity. Even so, talk about uptight, I was the living definition.'

What happened, I want to ask her, what happened to the girl in the parka and the little round glasses? Maybe it's related to the gold cross at her throat, maybe the patron saint of tortured young women came down and performed a miracle over her. As if anticipating these questions she says, ‘If I hadn't got myself a decent psychotherapist in the States I probably wouldn't be here. I think that saved me, I honestly do.'

The sun makes a stripe on the table. I think of
Valeria and her tranquilly decorated sitting room, and take a bite of fish, trying to reorganise my head. This is Angela; this is not Angela.

‘Better than Greenham stew?' she asks.

‘Much.' The salad has a lemon dressing and its tang complements the smoky tuna and croutons. We recall some of the meals from the camp and Angela recounts an incident I didn't know about when Vicky the animal rights fanatic caught Jean sitting in the camp van with a Chinese takeaway and went berserk. We discuss Jean fondly.

‘You know who else I used to like?' says Angela. ‘That lady who hardly spoke. What was her name, the Welsh woman?'

‘Di.' I picture her at the roadside with her placard or quietly trailing a rubbish sack.

Angela smiles. ‘That's it. She had the right idea; just got on with it.' She takes another sip from her coffee.

Has this become marginalia to her? It would surprise her to know how deeply those weeks have imbedded themselves in my life, and yet the experience affected her too, she's said as much – only not in the way I'd assumed, and that knowledge makes me suddenly unsteady, wrong-footed. She tells me that Barbel went on to become a filmmaker, they exchanged Christmas cards for a while before losing touch. I think of Rori but don't mention her, and neither does Angela. I want to ask Angela what it was like living in America and I want to know who she is now, because this whole encounter has been different, very different from the way I imagined it. But she has an eye on her watch and says she ought to get moving, that she's sorry we don't have more time. ‘What are you up to now?' she asks. I'm about to mention the Stop the Cuts rally in Trafalgar Square but this news might interest a very different Angela, so I tell her I'll prepare my notes for meeting the Adams Foundation. She fastens the buckle on her leather shoulder bag which bears the monogram of an Italian design house. For a split second I'm calculating what it might cost.

‘Will you let me think about Easy Green?' she says. ‘There may be something I could suggest.'

‘Yes of course, that's kind.'

What hasn't changed is her ability to take charge convincingly: I can imagine her directing teams of people with absolute assurance, covering each agenda point with swift clarity.

‘It's been great to see you, Tessa,' she says warmly, and I lean forwards to kiss her cheek. It's as if we're lost best friends, not two women who begrudgingly shared a muddy tract of land. In my head I remove her from the frame in which she's been stuck all these years, holding a copy of John Stuart Mill's collected essays at the fireside, frowning at me when she thinks I'm not looking. We promise to email and she disappears into the sunshine, a gleam of light coming off the Thames behind her.

After she's gone, I take a walk along the riverside and stop at a bench beside a carousel which is playing a Simon & Garfunkel melody with the jaunty grind of an old-fashioned organ. Its painted horses are rider-less except for a girl and her boyfriend, his arms wrapped around her waist as the horses rise and dip. A white passenger boat glides underneath Hungerford bridge, and as it emerges Angela's phrase
Saving the world
re-enters my head. The girl I knew with the closed, intense face has gone. But that Angela has been travelling with me all my life and now that she's transformed into an advertising director who wears immaculately tailored suits and shakes her head despairingly at her former self, I can't help feeling unsettled, and something more than that. Although difficult to admit, the word that comes to mind is cheated.

As I'm turning this over, my mobile rings and Pippa's name flashes up. We chat for a few minutes; I try to describe my encounter with Angela, and Pippa's listening but I sense she's waiting to break in. She does at the next pause.

‘Grace has got tickets for this gallery thing tonight, it's completely last minute but she's asked if I want to be her plus one. It starts at six.'

The carousel is no longer rotating and another melody plays as it awaits new passengers.

‘Shall we meet earlier then?'

She's tentative. ‘Thing is, we're in Portobello, so by the time I get to you it'll probably be time to go back again, because we have to get changed and everything.' She hesitates and it's difficult to know if this is the truth or if she doesn't want to see me. ‘But I mean, I don't have to go, you know, it would be nice to meet up…'

Come and see me,
I want to say.
I miss you.
‘Never mind, you go and enjoy it, love.'

‘What will you do?'

‘Oh, I'll be all right, I'm sitting in the sunshine. And there's a rally I was going to drop by at.'

‘Oh yeah,' she says, and her voice takes on a strain of fatigue. ‘What is it this time?'

31

Fires

After Reading police station they moved us back to Newbury and I was put in a cell with Barbel, Sam and two members of Sapphire gate: Nel, a yawning woman in her twenties who kept saying how much she wanted a spliff, and Bernice, a red-haired American with a gutsy laugh who reminded me of a grown-up orphan Annie. There we stayed, eating shepherds pie from plastic bowls and rearranging our limbs periodically in the cold space. Our hearing took place the day after Boxing Day in a panelled room where we were asked to confirm our names, charged with breaching the peace, and instructed to return in a fortnight for trial. Then they released us into the fresh December morning.

On the steps of the magistrates' court our supporters had gathered. A woman I didn't know thrust a limp handful of snowdrops at me, their stems wrapped in damp newspaper, while another woman with a port-wine birthmark kissed my cheek and called me sister. I kept hold of Barbel's hand as the world rushed at us: the biting wind, the white roofless sky, and the swell of women singing songs from the camp and chanting
We Don't Want Cruise!
their fists punching the air. I stood in the middle of them like a fake celebrity, shaken to the root by the police cells, the clanging doors, the keys. I looked about.

‘Where's Rori?' I said, raising my voice above the crowd, searching the faces. We blinked at a photographer's flash and his colleague asked me how I felt. I tried to make sense of the scene. She wasn't there. During the slow hours of confinement, I'd replayed the memory of her running away, and finally concluded that it must have been a moment of panic, that she'd have regretted it and would come to make her peace.

One of the supporters pushed towards us, rosy-cheeked and smiling in a purple suede coat. ‘We came in the van,' she said. She meant the camp van, which had been entrusted to another woman from Amber gate.

‘You're not insured to drive it,' said Jean, taking the keys from her.

‘It's all right, we've got lots of cars,' she answered, as if Jean had made an entirely different remark, ‘everyone will get a lift.'

The last time we'd seen it, the van had been white – or whiteish – but as we followed the girl in the suede coat, we saw an enormous daisy blooming in green emulsion from the bonnet.

‘We did it this morning,' said the girl. ‘It wasn't just me,' she added modestly, ‘some of the others helped.'

Walking behind Jean, we circled the van. A spider's web had been painted on the side door beside yet more flowers, and the back doors were newly branded with a red CND emblem. Every member of LAWE would know where to target their rotten eggs.

Jean sighed. ‘Let's get back,' she said, hooking a strand of silver hair behind her ear and settling into the driver's seat. I climbed in gingerly behind Barbel, my ankle still tender, and our new supporters rearranged a collapsible ladder to make room. They wanted to know what it had been like on the silos, how the police had treated us, if we knew that we could justify our action by using the 1969 Genocide Act, which incorporated aspects of the Geneva Convention. On and on they went while Jean drove us out of the town centre, its Christmas decorations and strings of colourless bulbs drab in the daylight. I rested my head against Barbel's shoulder, and as she fielded questions I let my mind work against the questions of the last forty-eight hours. Why hadn't Rori come? Perhaps she'd felt too ashamed? That was probably it, she'd be back at camp, waiting for us. The girl in the suede coat hypothesised about political policy using whatever she'd picked up from her International Relations course at UCL, and suddenly I felt older than her mother.

A fire made the only point of brightness in the dull afternoon as we followed the track towards the congregated women, the ground churned to slurry by the work of so many extra boots. Our settlement had grown. A number of Ruby and Sapphire gaters had joined Amber gate. I recognised Bernice, my red-haired cell mate, and a hoard of new visitors had arrived too. A sheet of blue plastic served as weather protection, decorated with snakes of bedraggled tinsel, and under it a dozen women sheltered from the drizzle which flecked the air like iron filings. A donated armchair had been dragged to the fireside, one armrest gashed and spilling yellow sponge, and it stood beside other oddments of furniture, the trestle tables, and an old pushchair with the hood protecting a pile of blankets. Stackable plastic chairs, the sort you'd see in school halls, were scattered higgledy piggledy in the mud and the rubbish heap had grown mountainous, over-spilling with Sainsbury's bags knotted at the handles. Di moved around with a black bin liner doing her best to collect refuse. Another group of women sheltered from the wind under golfing umbrellas.

Stripped of its chocolate Santas, the Christmas tree stood where we'd left it, listing more noticeably to one side, a toy elephant, once fluffy but now soggy, attached to its uppermost branch. Inside a shopping trolley, pots were piled high, a frying pan driven into their midst, flaking with skins of fried egg, and an empty gas canister lay on its side in the mud beside a camping stove on which a pot of soup bubbled. I'd been looking forward to the gypsy homeliness of the camp with its rich smell of wood smoke and earth, the silver birch crackling with birds – but now my heart dipped.

One of the visitors got up and offered me her crate, its ridges filled with milky mud, and I sat down without argument. The fire blazed high as a bonfire. Where was Rori? Was she collecting wood or making a rare trip to the standpipe? We needed to talk in private. During the van journey I'd been rehearsing our meeting in my head. It was going to be difficult, but I knew I had to forgive her because she was bound to be feeling terrible too, as terrible as I'd felt in the police cells without her.