The auctioneer said: ‘Lot seventeen.’
Motes of dust drifted in the light from the mock-gothic windows. A few people were sitting on some of the hard chairs facing the auctioneer’s podium, but none of them moved. A few more, maybe ten of them, stood around the margins of the floor as if they didn’t want to get involved. None of them stirred. Towards the back, in the shadows under the room’s empty gallery, there was a cough.
Oliver Hardcastle, a man used to outbreaks of mass frenzy on an hourly basis, was impressed. ‘See,’ he said to himself, ‘you’re in the country. People know what’s what. They’re down-to-earth. Grounded. Rooted. In balance with nature. People here don’t wear themselves to frazzles running around chasing massive profits that are only virtual illusions existing in electronic space anyway. These people are real.’
‘Lot seventeen is Saxwold New Farm. Farm buildings comprising a two-bedroom cottage of traditional brick and flint, with a recent pantile roof, set around a concrete yard with a barn of the same construction, plus a concrete-block general-purpose building.’
Farm. Farm. What a beautiful word it was. What a beautiful thing it would be. What a beautiful life he would have when the farm was his. Oliver’s feet began to creep along the scarred floorboards, unconsciously taking him towards the front of the room, inspired by his eagerness to own the farm, and be real, and be one of this crowd who were listening to the auctioneer and knowing what they knew and saying nothing.
‘One hundred and twenty-one acres, nine fields of handy sizes within a ring fence.’ Acres! Acres! The true and ancient measure of England! He would have acres, rolling acres, and he would care for them and cultivate them and stride over them and be a proud, free man who owned his own land and supported his own being, instead of a slave in bondage in a cube farm, who toiled for global masters and lived off the labour of other slaves, a mass of humanity even more wretched than he, the people who produced his food, whose faces he would never know.
‘With—’ The auctioneer paused to check with the paper in his hand. ‘Fifteen acres registered for Arable Aid.’ And as if to gloss over this minor embarrassment, he picked up speed again and continued, ‘All the main services are connected. Approached by a farm lane off the B237 through Yattenham St Mary, and the lot includes farmhouse itself partly demolished since the fire of 1997.’
Around the auction room, a few heads nodded. Yes, we know. Evidently, everyone in the room knew Saxwold New Farm, the lane to it, the concrete-block general-purpose building (useful size, that), the cottage and the ruined farmhouse. Everyone in the room remembered the fire of 1997 and knew how it had started, and why. Helluva blaze, they could have seen the smoke from Ipswich.
Everyone knew the score except the youngish bloke standing over at the side, the one in the waxed jacket that was practically luminous with newness and had never been scratched by a thorn or splattered by a tractor in its extremely short life. The youngish bloke clutching his bidding number with eyes lit up as if he had backed a horse in the Grand National and was watching it come in six lengths ahead. Another wallet from London looking for a weekend place for Lucy and the sprogs. His sort didn’t want to know. That bloke was Oliver Hardcastle.
The auctioneer drew a deep breath. ‘Who’ll start me off?’ he appealed. ‘Who’ll start me off at four hundred?’
Oliver looked around the room, at the faces which were far better than him at giving nothing away, faces reddened by the wind and pinched by the cold outside, chins drawn down into jacket collars as if to stop the mouths from speaking up, hands stuffed into jacket pockets to prevent them getting loose and giving way to expression.
‘Four hundred,’ the auctioneer pumped up his optimism. ‘Four hundred, ladies and gentlemen.’
More dust settled on the carved mahogany garland over the main door. Somebody coughed again. Somebody else coughed. The auction was taking place in February, peak season for viruses. The first cougher got a couple more in.
‘Four hundred now,’ the auctioneer repeated.
‘Stuff the bloody tax,’ growled a voice at the back of the room.
Some murmurs of congratulation for this opinion. The reason for the sale had been advertised, the list of lots proclaimed it. By order of the Inland Revenue, meaning their bailiffs had seized the property in lieu of unpaid taxes. That much Oliver had learned already.
Oliver felt his heart beating. He had bought a shirt, a soft shirt in lumberjack checks, mostly brown, to go under the waxed jacket, and his heart was thumping so hard that it felt as if it was going to pop off the shirt buttons. Not less than four hundred, surely? Here he was, a man whose daily grind involved unleashing tidal waves of wealth around the globe without a twinge of anxiety, and he was standing in a country auction room on the edge of cardiac arrest for less than half a mil sterling. Amazing.
‘Three hundred, then,’ the auctioneer conceded. ‘Who’ll start me off at three hundred?’
The coughing had stopped and a judgemental silence began to settle like a rain cloud spoiling a summer’s day.
‘Three hundred?’ The auctioneer raised his eyes to the back of the room, then flourished his arm in triumph. ‘Three hundred! At the back, there, thank you, sir.’
A few heads turned. A few people looked at Oliver, not that he noticed. A few chuckles resounded and above them a loud and cheerful voice accused, ‘You took that off the wall, you bugger.’
The auctioneer blushed. He was a man of thirty-ish, pale-faced, with a thin neck standing loose in his shirt collar. The flush of shame spread in seconds.
The man standing next to Oliver smiled. It was a smile of boyish delight, such as was frequently seen in 1950s advertisements for chocolate bars.
Then, sensing bewilderment by his right elbow, he leaned towards Oliver and whispered, ‘He means the auctioneer made it up. Imaginary bidder. They do it to get things moving when the room’s a bit cold.’
‘That’s a fantastic price,’ argued the auctioneer.
‘Too right, it is,’ agreed the cheerful voice of his challenger. ‘Your fantasy price, you mean.’ Oliver saw that the voice belonged to a broad man who had spread out over several seats in the front row, turning round now to spar with the rest of the audience.
‘It’s worth a whole lot more,’ the auctioneer said, his courage fading as his embarrassment bloomed.
‘But where’s the money going, eh? That’s the question, isn’t it? Bastards put old Frank out of business, didn’t they? Damned if they’re getting my money for that.’
Some growls of approval greeted this explanation, and the broad man turned around on his seats to see the extent of his support.
‘There’s a reserve set,’ the auctioneer explained. ‘Below three hundred I cannot go. They’ll be selling in London if it don’t fetch the right price here.’
At the word ‘London’, distaste rippled through the room like a seismic disturbance. ‘Of course,’ Oliver explained to himself, ‘they want to keep the land in local ownership. But when I’m the owner, I’ll be local, so that’ll be OK. What they’re afraid of is some pension fund snapping it up.’
The broad man turned around again, agitated.
‘Don’t look at me,’ he pleaded to the nearest rows of onlookers. ‘Don’t you go looking at me.’
‘Go on, Colin, you know you want to.’ This was from the boyish smiler beside Oliver, who spoke in a pleasant light tenor and an accent as hopelessly posh as a Wimbledon announcer.
‘Yeah, go on,’ agreed a few other voices.
‘More trouble than it’s worth, it’s got to be,’ the broad man said at once. ‘Frank was a good enough farmer. If he couldn’t keep going, nobody could.’
‘So, gentlemen.’ The auctioneer regained his fragile authority. ‘Do I have an opening bid? At three hundred thousand pounds, Saxwold New Farm?’
Oliver’s heart threatened to crack open his ribcage. He took a grip on the white laminated card bearing his bidder number, and twitched it.
‘Three hundred? Anybody?’ The auctioneer was looking everywhere but at him. Oliver raised his card blatantly, then felt panic and waved the card above his head at arm’s length.
‘Over here,’ called the posh speaker, distinctly surprised.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, for the last time of asking …’ The auctioneer had his gavel hand in the air and was scanning the far horizon.
‘Over here,’ called the posh voice again, waving to catch the auctioneer’s eye.
‘Oil’ The broad man heaved himself to his feet to get the auctioneer’s attention and pointed in Oliver’s direction. ‘Over there. You’ve got a live one.’
‘Oh gosh, so sorry,’ the auctioneer mumbled, dropping his programme as he apologised. ‘Are you bidding, sir?’
‘Yes,’ said Oliver, hearing his own voice hoarse with relief. ‘I am bidding.’
‘Three hundred thousand pounds, then?’
Oliver nodded and flashed his card definitively at shoulder height.
‘Thank you, sir. I have an opening bid of three hundred, can I hear three-fifty?’
‘Get over yourself,’ the posh speaker suggested.
The auctioneer persisted. ‘Any more? Any advance on three hundred thousand pounds? Are we all done?’
‘Course we’re all done,’ said the broad man over his shoulder, for now he had turned around again and was leaning over his chair-back, eyeballing Oliver with bullock-like curiosity.
‘To you, sir, gentleman at the front here, let me just get a note of your number, gentleman at the front, on a maiden bid, Saxwold New Farm at three hundred thousand pounds … sold!’
For an instant, a heart attack seemed like a real possibility. Something in Oliver’s chest leaped like a salmon, his ears buzzed, the room went misty and he felt dizzy. A farm. He had bought a farm. He was, technically at least, a farmer. His dreams were about to come true.
A hand as subtle as a spade slapped him on the shoulder, and its partner, he realised, was advancing to be shaken. They belonged to the broad man, who had heaved over in his direction through the startled crowd.
‘You’ll be just down the road of me,’ he said, curiosity radiating uncontrollably from a red face embellished with a craggy nose.
‘Don’t tell him that,’ the posh one advised. ‘He hasn’t signed the cheque yet.’ He was a willowy individual who seemed to sway as he spoke.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ Oliver said, shaking the spade-like hand as firmly as he could.
‘Not half as pleased as I am to meet you,’ said the broad man, only partly joking. ‘They were all on at me to buy old Frank’s place, but I’ve got enough to get on with of my own. So you’re welcome and good luck.’
Oliver wanted to ask what had happened to old Frank, but the moment did not seem right.
‘This is Colin Burton,’ said the willowy one. Even in the gloom of the auction room, you could still see that his pale face was thickly freckled and his hair was worn in a ponytail. More like a romantic poet than a son of the soil. ‘His land is next to yours. And I’m Florian Addleworth. You’ll find me up the road, other side of the village.’
‘Oliver Hardcastle,’ he introduced himself.
‘So, welcome to Saxwold.’
‘Thank you.’ So much, thought Oliver, for all that stereotypical rubbish about country people keeping to themselves and resenting strangers and having bad manners. I’m getting downright social grace here.
‘You’ll be weekending?’
‘Er, no. I hope not. I’ll be living on the farm.’
‘Don’t mind us,’ said Florian, the willowy one. ‘We’re just nosey.’
‘That’s us, all right.’ The broad one was watching carefully, to see how much prying was acceptable among the middle classes.
‘So you’ll be living on the farm,’ Florian prompted. ‘And …’
‘Yes and … well, and farming. I hope.’
‘Farming?’
‘Farming, eh?’
‘You can come over and laugh at me any time,’ Oliver proposed.
‘We’ll do that, don’t you worry,’ said Colin.
‘You’ve farmed before?’ enquired Florian, as if this would be the only possible excuse.
‘No. Never. Not yet. So it’ll be a bit of a learning curve.’
‘Learning curve,’ Colin repeated, as if delighted to have discovered such an apt and tactful expression. ‘Well, we all gotta go through them sometime, don’t we?’
‘Lot eighteen,’ called the auctioneer, with a stern glance in their direction. ‘Lot eighteen, arable land at Bungay, with planning permission …’
‘You’ll come and have a drink?’ Colin suggested, rolling back a step like a wary steer in case the suggestion was badly received. ‘You’ve done that before, I hope.’
‘Oh yes. Great,’ said Oliver. ‘Er, yes. Great.’ He shut up, suddenly fearful that whatever he said was going to brand him as everything he himself despised, and allowed his new neighbours to conduct him out of the auction room and off to a pub, with a short courtesy stop at the office for the signing of the cheque.
‘I am a farmer,’ he told himself, his hand trembling with ecstasy as he signed his name. ‘I’m a farmer. I’ve cracked it.’ And he felt good, as if for the first time in his thirty-four years his planets were lining up for the great cosmic conjunction that would propel him inevitably towards a real life.
‘You’re going to do what?’ asked the Managing Director of his bank when news of his leaving flashed up to board level.
‘Farm,’ said Oliver, smiling because he still couldn’t stop, even though the cheque had cleared and the deeds to Saxwold New Farm were on his desk at home. ‘I’ve bought a farm and I’m going to be a farmer.’
‘You’re mad,’ said the MD, not smiling.
‘I can afford to be,’ Oliver pointed out.
‘Nobody can afford to be that crazy.’ The MD still wasn’t smiling. ‘Don’t come back here when it all goes pear-shaped. You were a very promising analyst, we fast-tracked you from the day you joined.’
‘Yes,’ Oliver agreed. ‘And I am grateful.’
‘You’ve had the highest bonuses in our UK office. You were going to be promoted to the board in six months. And this is all you can think to do.’
‘It was all I ever wanted to do,’ Oliver told him.
‘Pity you didn’t share your thoughts with us a bit earlier.’ Now the MD was looking downright sour. ‘We wouldn’t have wasted our resources if we’d known there was going to be a loyalty issue.’
‘Which is why I didn’t tell you,’ Oliver said. ‘And anyway, you never asked. Nobody has ever asked me what I really wanted to do. Nobody here can imagine anybody wanting to do anything other than work for this bank and get big bonuses.’
‘So what’s your problem?’ asked the MD, moving from sour to thunderous.
‘It’s your problem,’ Oliver informed him. ‘I haven’t a problem in the world, right now.’
‘You’re mad,’ said the MD again. Oliver decided it was time to clear his desk and leave. His colleagues watched him in silence.
‘You want to do what?’ said the woman who called herself the woman in his life. She was, in Oliver’s opinion, a nice-ish person apart from the chronic hearing problem. He found that he met an extraordinary number of women who had hearing problems.
He was a pleasant-looking man, in a brown-haired, brown-eyed kind of way, added to which there was something about him that gave people a feeling of confidence and security. Whenever he explained his life’s mission to a woman, giving due emphasis to its incompatibility with any kind of pairing off or settling down, she assumed the kind of vague, non-specific smile that deaf people who can’t hear often use to cover up the fact that they aren’t following the conversation.
It could not be alleged that the women with whom he had this conversation were in any way predatory or manipulative, but when Oliver said, ‘I don’t want a relationship’or ‘I don’t want a girlfriend’ or even ‘Look, I’m sorry but I don’t actually want you,’ he never said it loudly enough for them to hear him, in the larger sense. It seemed as if their aural nerves only transmitted the key words, ‘relationship’, ‘girlfriend’and ‘you’.
Oliver didn’t hold the women wholly responsible for this problem. In his heart, he knew that he wasn’t getting through because the bits of his soul were still lying around, unconnected, waiting to be bolted together. His identity was a work in progress. Doing what he had to do, to become what he wanted to be, left him with his real self still a blueprint. He looked good, but he was nothing but a heap of unresolved paradoxes and unexplored desires.
The results of this communication failure were often distressing, and sometimes quite ugly. Often, women immediately invested their confidence in him and looked forward to a lifetime of shared security.
The woman now standing in his flat had managed to get further than all the rest. She had moved a lot of her clothes into his wardrobe and was on to the final phase of assimilation, contriving for him to meet her friends and making noises about her family. He was getting out at the right time.
‘I’m going to be a farmer,’ he repeated.
‘You can’t. You can’t be a farmer, you live in London.’
‘I’m not going to live in London any more.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Where else would you live?’
‘I told you. I’ve bought a farm. In the country. In Suffolk. I’m going to be a farmer.’
‘And what am I supposed to do?’
‘Well, whatever you like. Come down at weekends, maybe.’
She was standing with her back to the wall of glass that was considered the most desirable feature of his flat, which was, properly speaking and without exaggeration, a penthouse. Through the wall of glass, he had panoramic views of the Thames. All the way from Westminster to the flood barriers. A mass of dirty water, known to be largely recycled human waste, fringed with high-rise workplaces and more glass-walled living spaces, and beyond them the less-than-premium development sites still forested with cranes, all bound together with coiling snakes of traffic and overcast with a haze of rubber particles, vehicle emissions and mass human exhalation including particles of mucus, phlegm and water vapour bearing over three million different viruses. Oliver sincerely hated this view and couldn’t wait to sell it. Nor, he realised, could he wait to get away from the woman standing in front of it. From all women, in fact. As far away as possible. They were just too damn difficult.
‘I’d rather throw myself off your bloody balcony,’ she announced.
Oliver sighed. Near his solar plexus, an express elevator hurtled earthwards. The day had already been too long, and the night would be even longer if he didn’t handle things right.
‘Look,’ he said, in what he thought was a kind, placatory and decent manner. ‘Why don’t you take a couple of hours, get your things all packed, and then I’ll call you a taxi?’
She burst into tears. They always did that. It made him feel dreadful.
Miranda Marlow also felt dreadful, in a flat, insignificant, lowly and wet kind of way. In fact, she felt like a worm. Never, as long as she’d been a conscious adult, had Miranda been able to get off the phone after a call from her mother without getting that old invertebrate feeling. The instant she heard the maternal ‘hello’it was as if her arms and legs disappeared, her world view readjusted to a height of one millimetre and a mantle of slime covered her entire body.
‘How are you?’ Clare Marlow had asked.
The best answer was something short and unlikely to attract attention. ‘Fine,’ Miranda had replied.
‘Good. I thought we should have lunch.’
‘Ah …’ Miranda knew well that her diary was as windowless as a prison cell. ‘Could we make it dinner? Only …’
‘You know it’s bad for your metabolism to eat after seven,’ Clare had replied.
‘It’s just I’ve got a lot on at the moment …’
‘People won’t respect you for having bad time-management skills.’
‘We’re doing the big presentation today and …’
‘You can delegate. Women never want to delegate, why is that?’
‘I can’t delegate my own project.’
‘I’ve got something important I need to discuss with you. Don’t sigh like that. We need to be in touch with each other.’
‘Yup, we do that,’ Miranda had answered, making sure it came out too bland to rile her mother but sarcastic enough to satisfy herself. ‘How’s next week for you?’
‘Useless. It’ll have to be the beginning of next month.’
‘Really urgent, then.’
‘Everything’s really urgent, isn’t it? You just have to learn to prioritise.’
And so they made a date and Miranda felt like a worm.
‘She said we needed to be in touch with each other,’ she told her best friend, Dido Hastings, as they reclined, side by side, on her sofa, waiting to get the energy to get up and go out. Again.
‘Maybe she just wants to see you.’
‘Maybe there is life on Mars.’
‘She is your mother.’
‘You don’t have to make excuses for her. You wouldn’t swap, would you?’
‘Your mum’s your mum, isn’t she? Anyway, you wouldn’t swap either.’ Dido’s mother manifested herself in their lives in one of two ways. Either it was calls to say she was going shopping in Barcelona and did Dido want to come, or it was calls from the exclusive detox-clinic-of-the-month saying she’d just admitted herself and did Dido want to visit.
‘I know her, you see,’ Miranda went on. ‘My mother wants to have lunch urgently, which means that she wants to get me on side for something that she’s already planned.’
‘She must want you to help with something. I think that’s nice. Isn’t it nice?’
‘Well, yes, and whatever it is I do want to help her if I can but …’
‘It’s the being planned that you don’t like.’
‘It’s the knowing I’m just another item on her To Do list. That’s what I don’t like.’
‘Well, my mum doesn’t do To Do lists. I think you’re lucky.’
‘My mum made me do my first To Do list when I was five. I think you’re lucky. Shall we go to the Thai or the bar? I’ve got that presentation thing tomorrow, I need an early night. Oh, God, why can’t I stop organising all the time?’
‘Because you can’t,’ said Dido. ‘Because I never organise anything and you get antsy. Because you wouldn’t be you if you didn’t try so hard. God, I wish I had your problems.’
Miranda strove for perfection. Dido did not strive at all. Miranda had built a career, Dido had been washed through fifteen jobs in seven years as if being borne along like a leaf by the force of life itself. Miranda had a flat, and Dido was often to be found staying there because she had moved in with a man, rented out her own flat, and then changed her mind about the man.
They looked like an odd couple. Miranda had her hips so well controlled that hipsters just slipped off them and Dido had a backside that made people think of the urban myth about being able to rest a pint of beer on a well-shaped bum. Miranda had organised hair; it was short and did what it was told. Dido had such long and tangled hair that everyone believed it was extensions.
Miranda’s place was a large room within walking distance of her office. ‘I like living in a handbag,’ she told people. ‘The design is just perfect. What else could I want?’ She had three white walls. A wood floor. A great painting. A witty statement lamp. There was also a day bed, in red velvet, where Dido slept. And a bathroom. Actually, a wet room, grouted impeccably because Miranda had taken an afternoon off work to supervise the process. The main room was six metres square, which they considered very decent.
‘Some people have a picture in the attic,’ Dido had once said to Miranda. ‘But you’ve got me.’ She was an optimist to the last lymphocyte in the marrow of her bones. Dido would give money to a homeless man who was begging on the street and be absolutely sure he was Brad Pitt doing research for his next movie. Miranda would give money to a homeless man who was begging on the street and be absolutely sure he was a crack-head and she was only helping him to die.
When the effort of striving got too much, Miranda would give herself a spa weekend or a holiday, determined to master the art of creative vegetation that came so naturally to Dido. Lately she had felt the perfection thing taking over. She had caught herself wishing she could make sushi. All those little grains of rice, so utterly controlled. Her fingers itched to slice and roll and wrap things in seaweed. She knew that this was mad, but she didn’t know how to stop.
Of course, the striving could be tough on the people who loved her, although, as Miranda saw it, they didn’t really love her, just her illusion of perfection. Except for Dido. Dido had known her from years back, before the perfection sickness set in.
It made things worse that Miranda was in the brave-new-world business. Her job was to explain to people why they should want to live in the places that her bosses had designed for them. Her employers were an international planning group and her early night was needed so she would be able to present their latest triumph, an award-winning scheme to build a new corporate headquarters, with associated fitness centre, retail facilities, crèche, brasserie and car park, in the centre of London.
It went well. The audience, press and planners both, seemed impressed. Afterwards they stood around in huddles, murmuring respectfully. Even the media took note. She was interviewed for a TV news programme.
‘And now here’s the spokeswoman for the new Clerkenwell Sweep, Miranda Marlow. They’re calling it “The Bedpan”, Miranda. Local residents have complained about the building, they say it’s ugly, they say it’s not in keeping with the rest of Clerkenwell, the Wren squares, the Hawksmoor churches. How do you feel about that?’
Hurt, thought Miranda. Wounded to the quick, stabbed in the soft white underbelly. But I’m good with pain. I expected this criticism and I know what to do. She smiled at the interviewer, a clear-eyed, open-hearted smile of pure agony, and spoke to the green fur sausage that covered the microphone. ‘The local people we have spoken to are as excited about the Sweep as we are, and they’re proud that Clerkenwell will have one of the most beautiful modern buildings in Europe.’
It sounded so right. Even as she heard herself, she believed it. One useful thing she had inherited from her mother was the extraordinary gift of sounding right. Not bossy, domineering, dictatorial right. Just simple, obvious, law-of-the-universe right.
She sounded right but she knew, in the deep space of her consciousness, that she was wrong. It was true that she herself adored the Clerkenwell Sweep. So did its architect, and their boss in Denver, and most of the rest of the architectural profession. ‘A waking dream of vernacular cosmopolitanism,’ that was the consensus.
It was also true, however, that nobody had actually asked the people of Clerkenwell for their views. The ruling from Denver was that people were always defensive when presented with change and in the mass they had no imagination. Therefore there was no reason to seek their views.
As a building, the Sweep was a star. As a place to work or live in or go for lunch or fall in love or play with children or die with dignity – well, Miranda could not bear to think about that sort of thing. She was as sensitive as a spring flower. The only way she could get through life was to wrap herself up in beauty.
Every morning she battled through the crowds at her station, and had to insulate herself in a book from the compressed humanity in her train. She struggled to the office on teeming pavements, feeling that people around her were angry, savage and in despair, and their pain hurt her so much she had to concentrate on the pictures of the beautiful buildings all around her office to blot it out. And it was only a few more degrees of agony to move from these Londoners, who hadn’t enough air to breathe or ground to stand upon or reasons for living, to AIDS orphans in Africa or street children in Manila or people dying by the roadside in Calcutta.
There was nothing to be done about any of this, and if she thought about it for more than a second she was buried in an avalanche of suffering. So she chose her thoughts carefully, and got by on giving all her attention to the Clerkenwell Sweep, and anything else that claimed to be beautiful and came with the promise of hope.
Miranda knew a lot about art and architecture and design. She craved things that looked good because looking was more comfortable than feeling. In her ideal day, she got through without feeling anything at all. Her perfect 24 hours was filled with images. Images were low-risk, low-maintenance, low-stress. Images could not make you feel like a worm. Find the right image and life could be bearable.
She had the picture of the Sweep firmly in her mind, silver-scaled, gleaming in the sunlight, a huge round-sided edifice surrounded by the puny figures of its human admirers. She herself had put these tiny plastic people on the model, to indicate that people were going to love it. They were little ant-like creatures gawping in awe. Local residents. Good decoration. Like trees, one of those accessories that clients always expected an architectural model to have, but nothing to which you actually committed the firm, or put in the specification. Easy to put people on a model; impossible to think about how people had to live.
‘But surely,’ the interviewer pressed on. ‘But surely …’
Her grey eyes regarded him. He groped for words. Her eyes widened, her fine eyebrows raised themselves. ‘The most beautiful modern building in Europe,’ she almost repeated. ‘We believe London deserves the Sweep. With the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Louvre in Paris, the Pearl Tower in Shanghai, it will be a symbol of the vibrant life of the city.’
‘Attracting thousands of tourists,’ the interviewer found himself saying. ‘A world-class monumental must-see.’
‘Exactly.’ Now Miranda felt relieved and wanted to smile. She had to frown to stop it happening. Smiling on television, her mother had taught her, would make her look lightweight. It was bad enough that she wasn’t particularly tall. And her hair was so fair there was no real choice except to be blonde. And her face did sort of line up with current aesthetic norms of prettiness, even if her nose could look a bit of a courgette in full profile.
‘Thank you, Miranda Marlow, spokesman for the proposed Clerkenwell Sweep. The planning enquiry opens today …’ As he burbled his conclusion at the green sausage, the interviewer realised that he’d been de-railed. Just how he couldn’t exactly say, but the damn woman had subverted his argument. He was sure he hadn’t meant to back the Sweep. But the way she said it, it had felt so right. And now she was standing there all calm and normal, making him feel silly for being worried.
‘Thank you so much for that,’ said Miranda. ‘You must have done a lot of research.’
‘Uh …’ Now the interviewer was absolutely sure he was being heisted but there was nothing going on you could actually identify. You just set out for one place and mysteriously ended up in another.
‘Do call if you’d like to do a follow-up.’ She gave him her card. Miranda Marlow, Group Communications, Urban Phoenix Group UK. A little red phoenix logo. Acclaimed international town-planners just ripe for a good documentary. The idea spontaneously manifested itself in the interviewer’s mind, just as the Sweep was undoubtedly destined to manifest itself in the middle of Clerkenwell … but when? ‘We’re anticipating the enquiry will last about six months,’ she said, before he asked.
‘Ah …’ The interviewer found himself talking to empty air. Miranda had escaped. She walked quickly down a curving alley, saw a café and plunged into it. A few minutes later she emerged, carrying a ham and cheese croissant in a paper bag. Croissants were good for anxiety. She hailed a taxi and cruised back to her office, eating quickly to finish the evil thing and get rid of the evidence before anyone could guess what she had been doing.
Once, when her mother had been trying to cheer her up, she had said, ‘It’s easy to be successful, Miranda. Just look at all the idiots who manage it.’ The words sank into the soft depths of Miranda’s young mind and stayed there, inhibiting all her gentle instincts. For Miranda was not at all her mother’s daughter. Her heart was sweet, caring and tender. If Clare had a real lust for power, her daughter had a true craving for peace and harmony. So Miranda lived in a painful state of tension, trying to over-ride her true self and follow her parental programming. Croissant attacks were the main symptom.
‘What’s the matter with me?’ she asked Dido, that evening, flopping onto her sofa with exhaustion after hounding herself through another day of perfectionism. ‘Why can’t I just slow down, chill out, let go?’
‘Because you’re not like that,’ said Dido, reasonably. ‘You’re high-energy, high-creativity, high-achieving …’
‘No I’m not. I just flog myself through stuff because I’m afraid of screwing up.’
‘But that’s fine,’ said Dido; whose attention was wandering towards her own ambition of renewing her manicure before going out for the evening.
‘No it isn’t,’ said Miranda. ‘I’m turning into the sort of person who totally creeps me out. Did I tell you what I said to Will?’
Will, until recently, had been her boyfriend-since-college. They had made what Miranda had thought was a mutual decision to break up, move on, and stay friends. A few months of careful, content-free chats on the phone and then, out of nowhere, Will had had a real anger-management failure and snarled ‘Oh, get a life!’ at her. She had found herself saying, ‘I don’t have to – I have a lifestyle.’
‘I mean, how could I have said that? It’s just … creepy. I mean, isn’t it?’
Dido was raking though an old wash bag full of nail varnishes. ‘No it isn’t,’ she said in an absent tone. ‘He was just being nasty because he’d found out you were seeing somebody younger.’
‘It wasn’t serious,’ she protested.
‘None of them are serious, are they?’ said Dido. ‘But it’s none of Will’s business, is it?’
‘You’re sure it doesn’t say that I can’t be serious myself? If I’m hanging with some non-serious boyfriend?’ Boyfriend? Ouch. Miranda was beginning to find that word a bit juvenile.
‘Nah,’ Dido reassured her. ‘It just means that you’re not all banged-up in a Big Thing. You are free to accept a better offer. But not from Will. Nothing wrong with that.’
‘My mother,’ said Miranda, ‘doesn’t buy it. That’ll be why she wants lunch. The best thing about Will was she couldn’t be on my case about not having anyone. I bet that’s what this is about. She doesn’t buy non-serious.’
‘Your mother doesn’t buy anything. Except those pointy shoes, I suppose. I can’t believe she actually sends out a gofer for them. Just tell her you’ll get serious in your own good time.’ Dido began to paint her nails. Choosing one colour had been too much for her that evening. She was doing every finger in a different shade.
Miranda had a hideously familiar and usually absolutely accurate feeling that her mother was about to weigh in for another round of troubleshooting her life for her.
A little later, she and Dido found themselves in a reasonably sophisticated place in Soho, where Miranda waved to attract the attention of the Tequila Boy. He was olive-skinned and mean-looking, in a prettyish, Johnny-Depp’s-secret-lovechild kind of way, and he wore his shot glasses on bandoliers over his shoulders and the bottles attached to his belt, in the area where hips are found on meatier men.
‘Will you sort us out a couple of blacks?’ she said sweetly.
‘Two blacks for the ladies,’ said Tequila Boy, popping the glasses out of his harnessings with a flourish.
‘Where are you from?’ she asked.
‘How do you know I’m from somewhere?’ he countered, juggling the bottle out of its holster.
‘Just a wild guess.’
‘A wild guess, eh?’ He poured two shots, with a lot more style than precision.
‘I kind of like wild stuff.’ She mopped up a few drops of spillage with a fingertip, and licked it. ‘What time do you finish?’
‘Late.’
‘Too late?’ They exchanged a friendly quota of eye contact.
‘Maybe not too late. Some of us go over the road to …’ And he named the nearby club that went on all night.
‘I might see you there,’ Miranda said, thinking what-the-hell, the Urban Phoenix owed her a late night or ten.
‘You might see me there,’ Tequila Boy pouted, capping off the bottle.
‘OK,’ she sighed, ‘so tell me a time.’
Dido watched with wide eyes as her friend’s new date sauntered off to his next customer.
‘I bet he’s a great dancer,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe you just did that again. That’s just … wicked.’
‘Wicked is good, I’m OK with wicked. It’s serious I don’t like.’ Miranda shrugged. Waiters, barmen, Tequila Boys – they made her feel like Samantha in Sex And the City – sexy, grown-up and … in control.