Love and Fallout (18 page)

April liked that, she made another note. I wanted to get her pen and cross it out again, but I couldn't. Everyone in the circle, particularly Angela, with her freshly cleaned glasses, was staring at me.

‘Anyway, we're getting them because that's the policy they agreed to, the MAD one, Mutually Agreed Disaster.'

Hang on, that didn't sound right. April looked up with the slightest of frowns. ‘Mutually Assured Destruction, do you mean?'

‘Yes, sorry.' I knew that, I knew that, I'd got a bit muddled that's all. Angela was still scrutinising me. I had to prove myself. I opened my mouth to speak again. ‘So on the subject of the um, NATO thingy… the thing is… other countries are supposed to get involved. So the Germans are having the SS-20s…'

‘I thought the SS-20 was Russian,' said April.

‘Oh yes, of course.' In my head a woman was ransacking the filing cabinets for information, but the files had got mixed up.

‘I mean the Polaris in Germany.'

Angela broke in to make a correction.

‘They have Pershing. NATO is countering Russian SS-20 with Cruise and Pershing based in Europe. The balance of terror.'

My face was going thermo nuclear. I remembered something Rori had said about Simone de Beauvoir and the existentialists.

‘You see, women can help rebalance the power. Women are eminent and men are transcendent but here women are able to reach transcendence too.' I paused. ‘Greenham is a subliminal place. I mean liminal…' That was one of the new words I'd noted in my exercise book. ‘It's a liminal place, and…'

Could it be that Di's usually calm face had taken on a troubled aspect? Angela blinked through her glasses. April's pen wasn't moving anymore. Outside the rain slowed to a stop.

‘What I mean is.' But I didn't know what I meant. The woman upstairs had run out of drawers to try and was lying exhausted on a chair, sweating.

April smiled kindly. ‘You've been very generous with your time. I should probably make a move while the rain's eased off.' She replaced the flask in her bag.

Di coughed. April gave a little start, as if she'd forgotten Di were there, which is what happened to the rest of us much of the time. Then she turned her reaction into a question, ‘Would you like to make any comment?'

Di nodded, ‘The weapons are an abomination,' she said, in her soft Welsh accent. ‘I'm here for my grandchildren.' There was something to be said for brevity.

Once April had ventured into the mud, Jean turned to her sewing box from which she produced a square of embroidery. ‘Never trust a journalist,' she declared, squinting to thread a needle.

April had seemed nice
.
‘But some of them want to know the facts, don't they?'
The mention of facts made me cringe.

‘What that woman was interested in was the usual: how we cook, where we defecate, how we keep clean, who's looking after our children, are we lesbians. I hate to sound cynical, Tessa, but I've been here long enough to learn that. Even the sympathetic ones need a story.'

‘But if we're nice to them they could tell other people.'

‘
Nice?
We're not here to ingratiate ourselves,' said Angela, directing her irritation at me.

‘I know but, if they knew we were just normal women.' I didn't like the edge to her voice, the way she could jump on things.

‘As opposed to what? What's
normal
?'

She got up then and went outside with Rori to discuss a speech they were giving at a women's group in Oxford, leaving me with Jean and my own feelings of inadequacy. Di continued to sit with us companionably, a Buddha in a woolly hat.

If Angela hadn't arrived I wouldn't have felt so nervous and made such a fool of myself. I dug my fingernails into my palm, recalling the awful rambling.

Jean lifted the calico. ‘How's it looking?' she asked, spreading out the fabric to reveal a bluebird and an emerald green butterfly. ‘I'm stealing part of the design from William Morris.'

‘It's beautiful.' I took off a glove and traced my forefinger over a silky primrose.

‘It's for the group at home, they'll frame it and sell it to raise funds. Can you sew, Tessa?'

‘Me? No.'

‘Ever wanted to learn?'

‘Isn't it a stereotype…?'

Jean turned the fabric to begin a new section and glanced at me over her half-moon specs. ‘Have you been speaking to Sam?' Sam got annoyed about what she called mother-earth syndrome because it made women passive and she said women weren't all about feelings and caring and birth bliss. ‘Sewing's a skill,' said Jean, ‘if anything it binds women together, gives us solidarity.'

Jean was failing to thread her needle in the poor light, so I threaded it for her, glad to be doing something useful. Being useful felt important, and I welcomed any chance to contribute to the camp. I could peel vegetables and collect water, even if the public speaking needed work.

‘What do you want to do with your life then, Tessa?'

Nobody had ever asked me that before. ‘The careers teacher at school said I should think about town planning. But I ended up at secretarial college.'

‘Did you want to be a town planner?'

‘No, but I was good at Geography. Anyway, I failed my A levels.' Too many nights thinking about Tony and not enough revision, ‘So Mum and Dad said I'd be better off learning a skill.'

Jean nipped at the calico with her needle, building dot-sized stitches into a pink bud. ‘And what did you think?'

April had left us her chocolate digestives, I nibbled on one and shrugged.

The secretarial college was grey and concrete and filled with rooms which were filled with typewriters. We approached them every morning, removed their covers, rolled in our carbons and awaited instructions from Mrs Manningtree who'd worked at ICI for twenty-five years and could reach 95 words per minute without corrections.
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party
she sang, as we stumbled about on our keyboards like people in a dark room groping for the lights. Upstairs in a high-ceilinged classroom with flaky green walls, Mrs Plume taught us Pitman shorthand. She also instructed us about filing systems, appointment scheduling, telephone manner and good business dress: if you are tall, don't wear a box-style jacket; always attend an interview in a skirt, even if you prefer to wear trousers. A court shoe with a medium heel is best.

‘You've got brains in your head,' said Jean. I felt doubtful. She gave another glance over the specs. ‘At my school we taught our girls to think, not type. No girl of mine ever learned to type unless she was going to write books for a living.'

Well I wasn't going to write books. I thought of Peggy at Hirschman & Luck – was Jean saying her working life was invalid?

‘There's nothing wrong with being a secretary,' I said.

‘Of course there isn't. As long as it's what you really want to do. Too many bright girls are farmed out for office fodder.'

Jean finished another stitch and bit the thread.

‘Do you want to have a go?' she asked as I rethreaded the needle with green silk.

‘Me? I'll spoil it.'

‘No you won't. We'll practise on scrap.'

She demonstrated how to mount the linen on a hoop so it was pulled taut, and then showed me a chain stitch.

‘You can retake A levels,' she said, supervising over my shoulder.

We sat like that for two hours or more, Di with her eyes closed, meditating perhaps, me and Jean sewing, the rain clouds racing overhead and darkening the tepee. And as we talked I forgot that my sleeping bag would probably be damp when I got back to my tent, that I'd have no dry clothes to change into and that even when I tried my best to prevent it, everything I owned would become slaked with watery mud.

15

A Collapsible Bike

Two days later when the weather had finally cleared to reveal fresh blue skies, Rori suggested we cycle to Newbury to use the showers at the public swimming pool. I didn't have a bike, but she said I could probably borrow Angela's.

We found Angela sitting outside her bender on an aged sofa cushion, writing purposefully into a spiral-bound notebook. She shaded her eyes from the winter sun when she saw us. The hood of her parka was down, exposing her fine blonde hair, which fell thinly, like water, as if it had been poured on from a jug. If she wasn't reading a huge theoretical tome she was writing letters and if she wasn't writing letters she was co-ordinating actions, and if she wasn't doing that she was campaigning for Pax Christi or arranging speaks.

‘What are you up to, Angel?' said Rori, who nicknamed everyone: Jean was Geni because she worked culinary magic, Sam was Tricks, Barbel was simply B or sometimes Barbie, which made me wonder if feminist mothers might not appreciate a Greenham dolly for their little girls, a rag-tag Barbie complete with change of jumper and detachable placard. Secretly I hoped Rori might one day find a nickname for me.

Angela laid down her biro, ‘It's a letter to the council, I'm working out how to get another standpipe. This is a peopled community, so the fire services should have a water point here in case of emergencies. That's the case I'm putting.'

‘Good idea, I could use a break from wheeling that barrow,' I said, wondering too late if that sounded like a moan, but wanting Angela to know I was doing my bit. Since the journalist's visit I'd felt awkward around her.

Rori explained our visit to Newbury and asked about the bike.

‘Only if it's all right,' I added.

‘Certainly,' she said getting up. ‘But I'll need it back by four. I'm doing a speak at the Friends Meeting House in Newbury. Jean was going to give me a lift but the van's out of operation.' The van had been parked up waiting for a mechanic from Ruby gate who hadn't yet materialised. It was one of the few problems Jean couldn't fix herself.

A moment later, Angela appeared with a canvas bag from which she removed a complicated metal contraption. It was only as she unfolded a wheel that I realised she was transforming the contraption into a bike.

‘Have you taken cycling proficiency training?'

Was that a joke? But Angela wasn't the type for messing about.

‘I used to have a bike when I was a kid.' It was my cousin's hand-me-down, rusty blue and two sizes too big. It never got much use.

With another move Angela secured the saddle and there it stood, a thing with alarmingly small wheels and a long stem on which the wide handlebars were fixed. ‘This is the lock,' she motioned to a plastic-covered cord. ‘And this is the key.
You'll need to keep it safe.'

‘Right.' I tucked the key into the back pocket of my jeans.

‘It only has three gears but you shouldn't need more.'

My large frame didn't compare well to that of the bike.

‘You really are an Angel,' said Rori, hugging her spontaneously. Angela looked pleased and alarmed in equal measures. You'd have thought she'd got used to all the hugging by now, it was a part of daily life – consoling hugs, joyous hugs, flirtatious hugs – but then Angela wasn't the sort to attract rushes of affection; contained, reserved and observing, zipped securely into her parka, attending to the world through her round glasses.

‘Can we bring you anything from town?' asked Rori as Angela settled back to her notebook.

‘I could do with another of these,' she said, raising her biro.

‘I'll get it,' I said, refusing her offer of 10p. ‘It's the least I can do.'

She thanked me and we exchanged a brief smile.

Only when we'd walked our bikes to the roadside and were safely out of sight did I offer my bottom experimentally to the saddle, which was higher than the handlebars, forcing me into a leaning stance. I spun the pedals, trying to settle my foot and the bike made a creak, obviously more used to Angela's light, boyish body.

‘You
can
ride a bike, can't you?' asked Rori, steering her racer in graceful loops.

‘Course,' I said, kicking the pedal into another accidental spin. ‘It's been a while that's all.' I'd never seen a bike like this before, let alone ridden one.

‘God, isn't blue sky glorious?' said Rori lifting her chin to the November sun. I agreed, afraid to look at the sky as I pushed off, afraid to look anywhere that wasn't the road ahead, swerving left to right as the bike gathered momentum.

‘That's it, let it flow,' Rori called, keeping me in sight like a duck with her duckling.

The bike clicked and wheezed. Rori chattered about how fantastic it was going to be to have a hot shower, and I did my best to let it flow.

‘It's good to see Angela looking brighter,' said Rori, appearing beside me. ‘She's been through a hard time, there was a bereavement in the family before she arrived at camp.'