Fantasy for two, p.5
Fantasy for Two, page 5
‘You say you intend to stay here over the winter,’ she commented, turning back to the girl. ‘How will you manage to live? This isn’t a designated site; it doesn’t have running water or...’
‘There’s a standpipe in the field on the other side of the wood,’ the girl told her knowledgably, ‘and once he realises he can’t move us on then it will be up to the land-owner to make proper provision for us—bring in Portaloos and showers. If he doesn’t...’
She gave a small shrug and then told Mollie, ‘But he will. I know—’
‘Sylvie knows him well. Don’t you, my lovely?’ her boyfriend interrupted her with a knowing look.
‘I should do,’ she agreed with a small toss of her head. ‘After all, I lived with him for four years...’
Four years?
Four years. Mollie tried to conceal her shock.
The girl didn’t look any more than twenty or twenty-one at the very most, which meant that if, as she seemed to be implying, she and whoever owned the land had been lovers she could only have been around sixteen at the time she had begun to live with him.
A small group of men and women were approaching the gate from the wood and they stopped as they reached Mollie’s companions, one of them turning to the man to tell him, ‘We’ve parked up and now we’re off into town to Social Security to make sure they get the giros sorted out... Who’s she?’ he added, jerking his head in Mollie’s direction and then spitting out the gum he had been chewing.
Trying not to betray her distaste, Mollie answered him herself, explaining, ‘I’m a reporter with the local paper...’
‘A reporter...?’ the man mimicked tauntingly. ‘And with the local paper... My, my... When do you reckon the TV people will be down here?’ he asked the other man, turning his back on Mollie. ‘We need to get public opinion on our side, let people know that we’re here and that we intend to stay here. You know the kind of conniving bastards who own places like this. He could try to bring in people to shift us before news gets out that we’re here.’
‘Just let him try.’
This time it was the girl who was speaking, her face flushing and her eyes darkening with obvious emotion.
What had happened between them? Mollie found herself wondering sympathetically. Had she left him, or had he grown tired of her and thrown her out? What kind of man was he, anyway, to seduce a young girl of sixteen? And where were her parents, her family, the people who should have been guarding and protecting her?
‘Oh, he’ll try all right,’ her boyfriend announced softly. ‘But when he does we’ll be ready for him...’
Mollie frowned. Her instincts told her that there was more to this situation than met the eye, and that the young woman facing her had some kind of personal grudge against whoever owned this land.
If so, that was between her and him, she reminded herself firmly. She was here simply to report on the arrival of the travellers and the effect they were likely to have on the local community.
‘Be a great place to stage a rave,’ one of the small group at the gate remarked.
A small frown touched Mollie’s forehead.
‘Nah...it’s too remote,’ another of them remarked.
Out of the corner of her eye Mollie noticed a thin young girl approaching the couple she had been talking with. She was clutching a crying baby, and a toddler with a runny nose was clinging to her jean-clad legs.
She said something to the man that Mollie couldn’t catch, and when he shook his head she started to tug pleadingly on his arm as she began to cry.
‘But I’ll get the money. You know that...’ Mollie heard the girl protesting as he started to push her away.
She’d get the money for what? Mollie wondered suspiciously. Drugs?
Before she could pursue the thought a small boy came running up to them, panting, ‘Someone’s coming, in a Land Rover. He’s driven across the fields...’
The couple at the gate exchanged looks.
‘That will be him,’ the girl announced positively, and in her voice Mollie could hear elation as well as defiance.
She could now see the Land Rover as it crested the slope of the field on the opposite side of the road. It stopped a couple of yards short of the field gate. Mollie tensed as its door opened. She already knew who she was going to see getting out of it.
CHAPTER FOUR
SHE was right.
‘Does he own this land?’ she asked Sylvie darkly as she watched Alex striding towards them.
‘Yes,’ she acknowledged, without taking her eyes off him.
‘Sylvie!’
They might have been lovers once but there was certainly nothing remotely lover-like in Alex’s voice now, Mollie recognised as she heard the curt anger with which he addressed the other girl.
‘I suppose I should have guessed...’
‘I’m surprised you didn’t,’ she responded hardily, tilting her chin up at him and then tugging on the arm of her boyfriend as she drew Alex’s attention to him and demanded, ‘I expect you’ll remember Wayne?’
There was a small pause before Alex responded quietly.
‘Unfortunately, yes.’
As she watched the two men exchange a look she didn’t fully understand, Mollie felt a chill of apprehension ice down her spine, and then, with a taunting smile, Wayne jerked his thumb in the direction of the wood behind them and said mockingly, ‘Looks like we’re going to be neighbours...’
From the way Alex’s mouth hardened, Mollie wouldn’t have been surprised if he had retaliated physically, but instead he turned aside and said slowly to Sylvie, ‘It’s taken three years to redevelop this wood. The land was cleared voluntarily by teams of local enthusiasts. This summer, for the first time, it became home to several rare species of plants. You used to feel so passionately about conservation, Sylvie, what happened to you?’
‘You did. You happened to me,’ she responded fiercely, but Mollie could see the tears filling her eyes and her heart went out to her.
Impulsively she stepped forward. ‘They have a right to be here.’
Mollie wasn’t sure who looked the more surprised, Sylvie or Alex.
‘A right...what right...?’ he challenged her cynically.
‘The right of the common people to the land,’ Mollie retaliated.
Sylvie was smiling at her, her tears banished.
‘You see,’ she told Alex triumphantly. ‘Everyone isn’t on your side. We’re here now and we intend to stay and there’s nothing you can do about it.’
‘You can’t stay here, Sylvie. You know—’
Instinctively he ducked as someone threw a stone at him.
‘Looks like this time round might is on our side as well as right.’ Wayne smirked at him as a second and third stone followed the first.
‘You can’t stay here,’ Alex repeated, cursing under his breath as he only just managed to dodge one of the flying missiles. The group of men and women who had gathered to throw them had grown, Mollie recognised, alarm feathering along her spine as she realised that she as well as Alex was the object of their menacing looks and mutters.
‘Who’s going to stop us?’ Sylvie crowed. ‘Not you.’
‘No, not me,’ Alex agreed quietly. ‘But this country is run by the rule of the law, Sylvie, not the rule of force. The law protects my rights as a land-owner, just as I, as a land-owner, protect the rights of the families and living things that inhabit the land.’
‘We inhabit it now,’ Sylvie told him.
‘You’re destroying it,’ Alex retaliated coldly. ‘Look around you,’ he counselled her. ‘Look at that sapling over there. Yes, that’s the one,’ he agreed as both Sylvie and Mollie instinctively followed his gaze to where it rested on the damaged sapling Mollie had noticed earlier. ‘Until you arrived it was a living, breathing part of the landscape. Now it will die.’
‘We have to live and breathe too,’ Sylvie told him passionately.
‘Indeed. But not here.’
‘Then where? Where would you have us live, Alex? Some city slum neatly and tidily out of your way...out of your sight?’
Mollie saw Alex give her a calmly level look as he ignored the hail of stones and even clods of earth that were being hurled at them, and the angry chants of the growing crowd of antagonistic travellers.
‘You have a home, Sylvie, and—’
‘That isn’t a home, it’s a prison,’ she snapped back at him, ‘and you know it because you’re the one—’
Mollie gasped in shock as she heard someone fire a gun. One of the men in the crowd lowered a shotgun and, grinning insolently at Alex, announced, ‘Whoops, missed...this time.’
A handful of small sharp stones showered down on Mollie, thrown by a small child who stood laughing triumphantly as one of them struck her face. A much larger and potentially more lethal stone just missed Alex.
‘I hope you remember to write about this,’ she heard Alex telling her grittily as he grabbed hold of her arm and, before she could find the breath to protest or stop him, started to hustle her towards the Land Rover, using his body to shield her own from the battery of stones and lumps of earth that were being thrown at them.
‘Let go of me. I’ve got my own car,’ Mollie started to protest as he directed her across the road.
‘You mean you had,’ Alex told her trenchantly, and added, ‘If that’s it over there you won’t be going very far in it now; someone’s let the tyres down.’
To her dismay, Mollie saw that he was right.
Why had they damaged her car? She hadn’t done them any harm. She wasn’t the one who was antagonistic towards them.
‘It’s just part and parcel of their culture,’ she heard Alex telling her, as though he had read her mind.
‘My God, that was close,’ he added feelingly as a clod of earth sailed past his head, showering pieces of soil onto them both. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here before they decide to turn really nasty...’
‘I’m not going anywhere with you...’ Mollie began to say, but he wasn’t listening to her.
The Land Rover door was flung open and a harsh male voice commanded, ‘Get in.’
For a second Mollie hesitated, torn between pride and relief, pausing to give a backward glance over her shoulder at the mob behind them—for it could be called no less now.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ Alex warned her, accurately guessing what was going on in her mind. ‘They won’t listen to you. Half of them are high on drugs and the other half, even more dangerously, are high on the kick they get from being violent and self-righteous.’
And then, before she could say or do anything, he grabbed hold of her, virtually throwing her up into the Land Rover before slamming the door and then getting into the driver’s seat and starting up the engine.
‘You had no right to do that,’ Mollie protested as he swiftly turned the vehicle round and started to drive away.
‘Save it,’ Alex told her acerbically. ‘Or would you rather I turned back and threw you to the wolves?’
‘They’re not wolves,’ she began, ‘they’re...they’re people, human beings, with feelings...and...and rights...’
‘So are those who live around here,’ Alex countered.
He had a point, but it wasn’t one that Mollie wanted to listen to right now. She had, after all, always been on the side of the underdog, and now that she was safely away from the mob it was easy to ignore how threatening and intimidating they had been.
‘I suppose you’d like to have them all thrown in prison...or deported...’ she accused him.
He gave a dry bark of laughter.
‘Has anyone ever suggested you might be well advised to curb that over-active imagination of yours?’ he demanded, and then answered his own question with a rough, ‘No, I don’t suppose they have.
‘Listen, that mob, that crowd down there, might have amongst its number people who are genuinely peaceful. In fact, I’m sure it does. But it also contains a far more dangerous element. Wayne Ferris, for example—’
‘Sylvie’s boyfriend?’ Mollie interrupted him.
‘Sylvie’s boyfriend, yes,’ he agreed curtly.
‘Ferris is known to the police as a suspected drug dealer, although they’ve never been able to prove anything, and that’s why the situation isn’t as simple as you might think. It isn’t just about a homeless band of gentle travellers looking for somewhere to stay.’
‘Maybe not, but would you be so concerned if it wasn’t your land they were on, or if you and Sylvie hadn’t once been...?’
Uncomfortably Mollie looked away from him. As a reporter it was her responsibility, her duty, to remain unbiased and to report on the situation fairly, but she had to admit that her sympathies really lay with the travellers.
‘They just want somewhere to stay,’ she told him quietly, gasping in protest as the Land Rover bumped uncomfortably over the rutted track they were on.
‘Who told you that?’ he challenged her cynically. ‘If they just wanted “somewhere to stay”, as you put it, then why aren’t they applying for permission to stop at the designated site less than ten miles away at Little Barlow, where they’ve got proper facilities laid on? Why come here, where—’
He broke off and cursed under his breath. ‘Of course. I know who I’ve got to blame for that. Sylvie knows...’
He paused, and Mollie couldn’t resist suggesting, ‘Perhaps she has a grudge against you and she feels justified in...in...’ In hurting you as much as you’ve obviously hurt her, she wanted to say, but something stopped her. And, of course, that ‘something’ had nothing whatsoever to do with the small sharp pain that had begun deep inside her the moment she had recognised who Sylvie’s ex-lover actually was... nothing whatsoever. How could it?
They had crossed several fields now, and after driving across the last one they had moved onto a less bumpy track, leading towards a house which lay nestled in the small hollow beneath them.
‘What’s that?’ Mollie demanded as she stared at it, determined not to let him see how impressed she was both with the house’s setting and the house itself.
It was the kind of house she had dreamed of as a little girl. Palladian and lovely, elegant and timeless, set against a backdrop of rolling green English countryside, larger, perhaps, than her dream house had been...but still, despite its imposing size, retaining the air of homeliness which had taken her breath away at her first glimpse of it.
‘Home,’ Alex told her briefly, answering her question.
‘Home...your home? You can’t take me there,’ she protested, but he was ignoring her as the Land Rover rattled ever closer to the house.
They drove through a brick archway and into a paved courtyard complete with tubs and urns overflowing with a profusion of flowering plants. In the silence that followed the switching off of the Land Rover’s engine, Mollie could hear the drowsy, contented hum of bees. Through the open windows she could smell the scent of the flowers and feel the warmth of the sun in which the house basked, mellow and content.
In the building of this house man and nature had conspired together to create a harmonious picture of perfection, Mollie admitted reluctantly.
‘It’s this way,’ she heard Alex telling her. Dizzily she focused on him. She had been too preoccupied with taking in the picture made by the house to register the fact that he had walked round to her door and was now holding it open for her.
Silently she allowed him to direct her towards the house, which, it was obvious, they were entering through the domestic quarters. To her surprise, along the way he paused, automatically dead-heading some of the flowers in the tubs.
The domestic quarters had quite obviously been modernised very recently, Mollie acknowledged as she was ushered into a very large and comfortable kitchen, pristinely clean apart from the papers on the large rectangular table.
‘I’ve been working here whilst Jane is away,’ Alex told her. ‘Sit down. I’ll put the kettle on. I want to ring the police to...’
He would put the kettle on? Where was the battalion of staff she had assumed he must need?
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked Mollie quizzically.
‘Where is everyone? You said you’d put the kettle on,’ she blurted out. ‘You can’t live somewhere like this on your own...’
The dark eyebrows rose.
‘Why not? But no, you’re right. Normally speaking, I don’t. But Jane, my housekeeper, has had to take time off to look after her father, who’s recently had a heart attack, and the rest of the staff work nine to five and don’t live in. Now, which do you prefer—tea or coffee?’ he asked dutifully.
‘Er...coffee, please,’ Mollie heard herself responding.
Where on earth was Alex? Mollie wondered broodingly as she stared at her now empty coffee mug. Ten minutes ago he had left her, announcing that he had a couple of telephone calls to make, and he still hadn’t returned.
Her curiosity getting the better of her, Mollie got up and walked towards the kitchen door, opening it and stepping into the corridor that lay beyond it.
The house was larger than she had imagined, and even more impressive, and within seconds of stepping from the corridor into what turned out to be the main entrance hallway she had fallen hopelessly under its spell, wandering awestruck from room to room.
When Alex finally caught up with her she was standing in the middle of the green drawing room, an expression of beatific pleasure illuminating her face—an expression which faded to be replaced by one of truculent distrust as she saw Alex standing watching her.
‘You were gone ages...and I...I thought—’
‘Yes. I’m sorry. My phone calls took longer than I had expected,’ he interrupted her, generously accepting her face-saving excuse.
“The house has quite an interesting history,’ he told her, coming to stand beside her and adding, ‘It was originally built by this gentleman, whose portrait we have here.’ He gestured towards the oil painting that hung above the marble fireplace.
‘He built it using his wife’s money—that money being the reason he married her, I regret to say. Her portrait hangs in the gallery upstairs, along with those of all the other wives. If you come this way I’ll show you...’
