Love and Fallout (44 page)

‘Can't see you!' comes a voice from the back. Angela is presented with a chair and made to climb onto it.

‘You haven't come to listen to me, so I'll keep it short.'

‘Like you!' calls Giles of the flowered shirt. More laughter.

She thanks her creative team, the cider company, the performers, and says how proud she is to be involved with the festival. ‘And thanks to Alex for this fantastic cake, which I have no idea how to cut.' She smiles down, then raises her glass. ‘And here's to feeling good.' A cheer goes up. I'm pleased to be one of Angela's chosen; despite the fact I don't know who she is anymore. ‘To Angie!' someone calls, and we repeat the toast, raising our glasses high. There's still no sign of Pete, so I find Angela and wish her a happy birthday.

‘You're not fifty yet are you?' she asks, and I tell her I'm a little way off.

‘That's right, it's me and Rori who were close in age,' says Angela, taking a sip of her champagne. ‘I think I was a year older.'

‘Who's Rori?' asks Meredith eying her shining pile of pudding.

‘Aurora Fletcher,' says Angela. ‘A girl we knew at Greenham, looked a bit like the young Diana Mitford but with a tumble of curls. I think we were all half in love with her.' She takes another sip of champagne, eyes on the bubbles as they break in a fine column, and then her expression lightens. ‘She had quite a spirit. I remember once the two of us were giving a talk in Oxford…'

‘A speak?' I say.

‘That's it. A speak! God, I haven't thought of that for years. And after it was over she had a wild burst of energy and tried to make me stay up all night drinking; we'd met these students in a bar and she persuaded them to steal a punt and take it down the Cherwell. The college porter came out and read the riot act.' She smiles at the memory. ‘I suppose if she didn't have that reckless streak she might still be with us.'

‘What happened?' asks Meredith.

‘Isn't she the girl who drowned?' says Alex. Suddenly I don't want to be caught in the heaving swell of the orange tent, trapped in this conversation, but there's no way to escape.

‘It was very sad, but evidently they'd done it before…' says Angela, glancing at me as if to cue me in. But I'm not following what she's saying. She turns back to Meredith. ‘She was cliff diving with her friends, I think they call it tombstoning now. It was something they did every New Year when they stayed at her family home.'

‘God, how awful,' Meredith remarks. ‘How old was she?'

I'm watching Angela's lips moving but it's difficult to connect this with what she's saying. I'm remembering the afternoon that Jean told me; the heat of the brandy, the dreams of Rori wading into the freezing sea, stretching up her arms to be saved. My mind is struggling to untangle the conversation, groping for clarity like someone swimming through seaweed, and when I speak the conversation has drifted to another subject, away from the dead girl who no one could save. I address myself to Angela while the others are in discussion.

‘But I thought…' My throat is tight, and I force the words out, ‘I thought Rori drowned herself.'

She looks at me with a creased brow. ‘
Drowned
herself? Whatever made you think that? No, it was her and her friends. They had some insane ritual where they'd go down to the sea and jump in at dawn. Her mother told me. I got in touch with her after Greenham.' I think of Jocasta, pinning her photograph to the fence. ‘With everything that had happened, the family wanted to keep the press out of it as much as possible.'

Angela's words come filtering down to me as if from a great height and it's a moment before I can articulate anything. I lower my voice until it's barely audible and when I speak, it's almost to myself.

‘I always thought it was my fault. I was the one who drove her away.'

I stand there trying to make sense of it. ‘It was because of me that she went to Cornwall. After we had that…' I leave the sentence unfinished.

‘That scene over the serviceman?'

I nod, still ashamed to remember it.

Angela shakes her head. ‘She would have gone to Cornwall anyway, she went every year. Besides, she wasn't going to stay at Greenham much longer, I could see she was getting restless, the thing with the American was just a distraction. Oh, hang on, Tessa.' She looks at me with concern. ‘You didn't really think…'

But I did. I did really think, I did.

39

Peace

It's an August afternoon and we've spent a couple of hours wandering over a stretch of heathland, passing grasses and gorse and purple-flowering heather, stopping to read the information boards with their illustrations of nesting birds, Dartford Warblers, Woodlarks and Nightjars. When Maggie offered to take me for a day out, a pre-birthday treat, she said it was my choice, we could go anywhere, a health spa or the races or Kew Gardens. She didn't expect me to say Greenham Common.
The runway has been uprooted, cycle tracks and conservation ponds landscaped into the flat space, and the whole area is contained by a simple waist-high fence strung together between wooden posts.

We've nearly finished our picnic and I'm remembering what it was like setting off to Newbury on that first October day.

‘You told me I should have gone to Butlins.'

‘Did I?' She laughs and shakes her head. ‘I don't remember that. All I know is you were doing that secretarial job and then things didn't work out with…'

The sentence hovers before us, a dragonfly in the warm air.

‘Didn't work out with who?'

Two boys are running a kite, and I remember Jean telling me about the high winds that bowl over the unprotected expanse, strong ground winds that could have been disastrous if they were carrying pollutants. Maggie rolls a cherry stalk between her thumb and forefinger.

‘We never did talk about it, not really,' I remark, as lightly as possible.

After Holloway and then the eviction, I spent a few more weeks at the camp before going home, on Jean's advice, to re-sit my A-levels. Like the good head teacher she was, she encouraged me to think of my future, put my head down and work. There was no question of returning to an office, and I couldn't have sat transcribing the little tapes for Mr Hirschman because all that seemed like a lifetime ago. Mum and Dad didn't mind what I did, Mum wouldn't have minded if I'd set up my own clown school as long as I was out of
That Place
. Maggie and I patched things up without reference to Tony, and then I headed off to university in Leeds and threw myself into my politics degree, signing up to every society and action group going.

Maggie gives in with a sigh. ‘Go on then, what do you want to know?'

‘Tony Mercer,' I say, brushing my fingers against a knapweed flower, ‘why did you go out with him?'

‘It was years ago, I can hardly even remember.'

This isn't the truth, and she knows I know.

‘All right. All right.' She thinks. ‘That time I came to visit, when everyone was holding hands…'

‘Embracing the Base.'

‘That's it. I drove home in Mum's car. It took hours getting out of there behind the coaches, and when I put the key in the front door there was no one in. Mum and Dad were at work and the house felt, well, I felt, sort of… empty.'

I let the image of that sink in a moment. Young Maggie sitting on her bed, forlorn. Maggie didn't do forlorn.

‘I don't know what it was Tessa, honestly. I was bored. He was bored. I didn't even fancy him, but I felt left behind. You were off with your friends, saving the world, probably never coming back…'

‘But didn't you always say he had a wonky eye.'

‘Did I?' She laughs.

I say his name out loud, ‘Tony Mercer, I wonder what he's doing these days.'

‘He married a pharmacist and went to live in Leicester.'

I turn to her. ‘Did he? A pharmacist? You never said.'

She shrugs and offers me a last dip into the bag of cherries. ‘God, Tess, have you been carrying that around all these years?'

She asks how things are with Pete. I tell her they're improving slowly and think about our final visit to Valeria's Georgian house, that warm orange space where she assembles the chips and fragments of other peoples' relationships like mosaic pieces. We'd sat watching a shadow tick along the wall, lightening and darkening a shelf of books, and I'd glanced over at Pete, stiffly nodding at Valeria's suggestions. And when she'd talked about making time to share experiences together, breakfast in bed for example, we caught each other's eye, giving and receiving the same thought,
How did we get here?
In that exchange were the years of all our other exchanges, and I felt a gap was closing. Afterwards we went to a cafe in the square and drank coffee in the sunshine and watched other couples passing through Cambridge and didn't speak much. On the way home, when we stepped off the train, he took my hand.

The sun brings a spray of daisies into focus and I lick the sharp cherry juice from my fingers and tell Maggie about our new plans for Easy Green and the meetings Angela is helping organise.

‘Bit of luck bumping into her again,' she says before raising an eyebrow and adding, ‘maybe I did you a favour with that programme after all…'

We look at each other and laugh.

I close my eyes, feeling the sun on my neck spreading like a silk scarf, thinking of all those protesting women, wondering where they might be now and what they might be doing; the thousands who stood in the freezing mud holding hands around the base, the hundreds more who camped overnight or sat for months with their backs to the fence. The curious. The committed. The accidental.

After another few minutes the sun is lower and Maggie stretches. ‘I was thinking we might get a glass of wine in one of those Newbury pubs. That's if they let in the likes of you.'

She reaches for my hand to pull me up. But there's somewhere else I'd like to have a look at before we go.

The old GAMA compound is the only area that's still sealed off from the public. We can't see much through two layers of fencing, but Maggie and I have our faces to the wire and are trying to distinguish the faint shapes of the missile silos. Still camouflaged with grass, they suggest burial mounds, tombs from a lost civilisation. A notice reads:

SCHEDULED ANCIENT MONUMENT

THIS ENTIRE SITE (INCLUDING FENCES) IS PROTECTED UNDER THE SCHEDULED ANCIENT MONUMENT ACT. DAMAGE TO IT WILL INCUR UNLIMITED FINES AND IMPRISONMENT VIA THE CROWN COURT.

What are they monuments to: The Cold War? Peace? Perhaps they've been left as monuments to our worst uncertainties, all those possibilities we have to find ways of living with.

‘We made it to a Heritage site after all,' says Maggie as we stare in. ‘What did they do with the missiles in the end?'

‘Destroyed them. The Russians did a spot check to make sure the silos were empty, I remember reading that.'

The path is overgrown with clusters of fern and birch scrub.

I tell Maggie about driving through Reading in the van with Rori and Jean, and buying ladders to get over the fence, how we hid them in the woods until the dead of night. She likes the idea of Sam in her tutu vaulting over the fence.

The roll-top bath is long gone, of course, but on one of the silver birch I trace the strings from a bender embedded in the growing bark. There must be artifacts buried in the mud, left for archaeologists to dig up: an empty reel of yarn, a rusted fork, the detachable mouthpiece from a recorder.

‘So how about that drink?' says Maggie.

‘With you in a minute,' I say, and return to the fence, feeling for the photograph in my shoulder bag. I take one last look at it, at the creased faces of two young women with their arms slung around each other, laughing into the unexpected flash of a camera. A dove on a stick blurs in the background. I twist the fusewire so the photograph is secure, attach it to the fence, and leave it there to flutter in the late afternoon light.

Ackno
wledgements

Research for this novel was significantly aided by access to The Greenham Common Collection at The Women's Library, and The Imperial War Museum's Greenham sound archive. I would like particularly to acknowledge
Greenham Common: Women at the Wire
(Harford & Hopkins, eds);
Walking to Greenham
by Ann Pettitt (Honno);
Common Ground
by David Fairhall;
Thank you Greenham
by Kate Evans, and Beeban Kidron's documentary film,
Carry Greenham Home
.
Thank you to everyone who was generous with their time along the way, particularly Dr Sasha Rosenheil for answering my questions, and Ann Pettitt for reading the manuscript.

Various liberties have been taken in the name of fiction. Although a scene is set at the first ‘Embrace the Base' protest, the scene where the women climb the silos is not a representation of the actual New Year's Day protest. Amber gate and the other gates mentioned are invented, as are all their members.