Getting Home (42 page)

‘Ah!' cried the man from the Nature Triangle. ‘Copper! That explains everything. The red ghost moth is always found in areas where the soil is rich in copper.'

‘Isn't zinc supposed to be good for you?' asked Sonia Purkelli. ‘I thought it was a really important trace mineral that we all needed for fighting stress.'

Topaz smoothly nudged the meeting back on track. ‘In I small quantities, as I'm sure we're all aware, these heavy metals occur naturally. The trouble with Oak Hill is that they're present in huge quantities and in poisonous compounds. That report says the site's so toxic that nobody should even go on it without a full protective suit, a face mask and breathing equipment.'

‘Good God,' exclaimed Penelope Salmon.

Timidly, people took copies of the report and began turning pages as if the papers themselves were shedding carcinogens into the atmosphere.

‘To show you how this could affect the whole of Westwick, I've done some diagrams based on those in my husband's report.' Triumphantly, Stephanie unfurled the next page of her flip chart. Excellent invention, giving every new sub-heading a theatrical flourish. ‘With some help from Topaz on the graphics,' she added hastily. ‘You see that Oak Hill is – well, a hill, so it's higher ground than most of the area. What's happening is that the pollutants are getting washed down in rainwater through the drains, into the little river Hel here, which feeds the city water treatment plant in Helford, and then into the main river and down to the city. You may have noticed some of the willows along Riverview Drive looking a bit sick?'

‘Why yes,' Jemima Thorogood agreed, ‘they're yellow all year round.'

‘And at the Gaia Garden Centre,' – Stephanie turned a new page, showing them a vertical section of the land between the river and Oak Hill – ‘I found that the chemicals are at toxic-levels in the soil and in the water as well. The drains and the water pipes in Westwick date from when the area was built up eighty years ago, they're in pretty poor shape. It's possible, for instance, that when the drains flood in times of heavy rain, polluted water leaks into all the basements of the shops on Grove Parade.'

‘And the trucks,' prompted Mrs Funk with indignation. ‘The trucks driving down our Broadway.'

‘That's another thing. The soil being dug out of Oak Hill for the foundations of the buildings is being transported in ordinary open trucks to an infill site out somewhere on the Thirty-four. That soil is such a considerable bio-hazard that it can't legally be taken through a residential area.'

‘Well, they must stop it at once,' said Sonia Purkelli, colouring at her own boldness.

‘Isn't the soil going out to somewhere near Whitbridge?' ventured one of the students. ‘Near where the demonstration is on Strankley Ridge?'

‘I didn't know that,' Stephanie continued, ‘but it would be quite likely. You see, the Oak Hill Development Trust is made up of local businessmen – that's part of the reason the planning committee were so dumb, they've dealt with some of these guys for years, they're all in it together. Ted Parsons is one of the directors.'

‘And he was always such a friend to Erich and me,' Mrs Funk lamented.

‘And that's his wife on TV talking about baby milk and everything,' Mr Singh marvelled, hoping to distract the meeting from the issue of flooding on the Parade: It was true that every time rain fell in quantity the Kwality Korner Store, as well as Catchpole & Forge, Parsley & Thyme, Bon Ton, Grove Estates, Pot Pourri and the Bundles Baby Boutique, experienced about six inches of floodwater in the basement, for which only Pot Pourri was grateful since it saved the assistants having to water the plants. Mr Singh was forced to store his dried foods on upper shelves. If the water was bringing in chemicals which were so bad that they could not be driven past people's houses and labourers needed masks and oxygen to dig them up, what might it have done to his biscuits, and his rice and his apples?

‘And Chester Pike of Magno supermarkets is also a director, which is why I did not invite his wife to this meeting although she is our chair.' The idea of marginalising Lauren Pike was delicious. ‘The third director is Adam DeSouza, one of their associates, a lawyer who works for Pike. Magno are planning the biggest supermarket in the country at a site near Whitbridge, which is probably where the waste from Oak Hill is going.'

‘A conspiracy!' declared Mrs Funk. ‘A conspiracy to poison the whole country!'

‘I really think,' Topaz interjected, ‘that isn't too dramatic a description.'

‘We must do something,' the Nature Triangle demanded, smiting the table with his fist. ‘Make a protest.'

‘A petition!' Penelope Salmon proposed. ‘We can all sign it.'

‘We must protest,' Jemima Thorogood insisted, all of a sudden looking remarkably rejuvenated by enthusiasm. ‘We should have a demonstration. With banners and placards and chanting. Up and down the Broadway. I organised them for nuclear disarmament.'

‘You didn't do too well, then,' observed the Major.

‘Yes,' Stephanie agreed sweetly, ‘we must protest. But if we march down the Broadway, the only people who will take any notice are the
Helford and Westwick Courier,
and if we send in a petition with a thousand signatures the council can still ignore us. Now, what I would like to propose is something really ambitious. For a start, I think we should target Channel Ten.'

‘The TV won't cover this kind of issue,' declared Nature Triangle sourly. ‘We've tried to interest them before, they don't want to know.'

Rod cleared his throat and found the voice he'd been saving for King Lear by the time he got back to his real job. ‘Maybe I should introduce myself now,' he suggested.

The oyster bar was crammed to the gills, men in suits and women in suits shoulder to shoulder, throwing down champagne from silver tankards and pulling the legs off the new season's crabs. The room was panelled in mahogany and lit by twinkling cut-glass chandeliers. The floor in the basement bar was of reclaimed flagstones sprinkled with sawdust. Upstairs there were thick beige carpets and little mahogany-stalled booths around each table. The tablecloths were thick and white, the curtains dark brown brocade, deeply fringed. The walls were decorated with a collection of maritime paintings, quite famous although the canvases were restored to within an inch of their lives and gleamed slick with varnish by the light of the chandeliers.

The table Ted and Adam preferred was below a large canvas of a storm-tossed frigate. The brass plate proclaimed its title,
The Wreck of HMS Redoubtable off Newfoundland, 1792.
It was a stirring composition full of flying spray, broken spars, billowing sails and monstrous waves, and as Ted did not believe in omens he liked it because it was the most exciting picture in the whole restaurant, full of movement whereas the others were meticulous ship portraits and rather static. The artist had even included a couple of lost sailors plunging to their watery graves from the high gunwales, and a few luckier souls gesticulating in a tiny lifeboat.

Ted admired the lighting, the subdued glow of the ground glass mantle lamps, the pretty sparkle of the chandeliers, the little rainbows generated by the cut glass panels topping the mahogany screens between tables. The optimism of the past week had evaporated the day he came home and found Allie there again, ready to arraign him for another ridiculous photo shoot, but something sturdier had taken its place. She had left him once, he reasoned, she would do it again. All he had to do was give her a good reason.

‘Bevelled edges,' he informed Adam enthusiastically, forking into the luscious creaminess of his
coquilles St Jacques.
‘The edge of the glass panel is cut at an angle, giving a continuous prism which multiplies and refracts the light. We've got the same thing in the old doors at Sun Wharf. I was thinking of the same effect in some of the internal doors in the apartments. Won't cost much. Buyers just love that kind of little touch.'

Adam contemplated him coldly over the rim of an oyster shell, marvelling that the man could waste his energy on anything as irrelevant as the tastes of his market. Adam did not see the future occupants of Sun Wharf, or the future workers at Oak Hill, as having much claim to humanity. They were the. means by which the development companies acquired cash, no more. Whether they liked twinkly glass doors was of no importance.

‘Sun Wharf keeping you busy?' he enquired.

‘Busy enough,' Ted responded. Never, ever, admit you had too much to do. Rule 1. He was learning the corporate moves pretty fast.

‘Things settled down at home?'

Rule 2: Never, ever, admit to domestic problems. ‘Fine, fine. It was all done for the newspapers, you know. The old media game. They all have to play it.'

‘We were thinking, Ted, perhaps you needed to be able to focus more. With so much going on, Sun Wharf and so on.'

See Rule 1 above. ‘Hey, not me. This is my business, Adam. It's all meat and drink to me. This is what I love about it, going on site, getting my shoes muddy, talking to the man on the JCB …'

Adam sighed and discarded his last shell. At one point, earlier in the year, Ted had suggested they ask for their orders separately rather than in the French style of one huge ice platter studded with oysters to share. For an uncomfortable week Adam had suspected that Parsons might be able to get back the iron in his soul and the steel in his spine, pull something out and check his slide into outer darkness. Then he saw that there was no significance in the change, that his lunch companion had never noticed him creaming off the best oysters but for some reason wanted the liberty to order a different dish once in a while, like today's nursery food on a half-shell. Adam found this typical of the man's self-indulgent individualism; he just was not a team player.

A waiter took away their plates. ‘Ted.' Adam swept imaginary crumbs from the cloth with the side of his thick hand. ‘I'll get to the point. Chester wants you out of Oak Hill.'

‘Chester can go fuck himself,' Ted retorted instantly. ‘It's my project.' But he felt stabbed, fatally. He felt his confidence bleeding away through the puncture to his ego. His spine ran cold and his stomach squeezed around a gout of acid. He could easily have vomited, the warm white blend of sauce and. mashed potato from the
St Jacques
rose in his throat but he held it down. ‘It's my show,' he said again.

‘Was your show. You've lost the BSD's confidence, Ted. This Sun Wharf thing, he doesn't see it.'

‘Sure he sees it, he was all for it…'

‘He's prepared to let you go on with it if that's what you want to do, but you've got to get out of Oak Hill. We'll refinance. At this stage there'll be no problem with that.'

‘No, no problem at all,' Ted agreed with bitterness. ‘Now that I've found the site, and cleared the titles and piloted the project through all its potential hazards, now it's a copper-bottomed, five-star, 22-carat, money-making proposition, I should think new investors'll be beating down the doors.'

‘You can leave the rest of your stake in, so you'll certainly see some of your money back with a good return, I think. But we'd like you to resign. Quietly, no need to draw attention to it: You've enough on your plate of your own.'

‘Peace with honour,' sneered Ted. The waiter reappeared with two halves of a bifurcated lobster on beds of flouncing lettuce. The beast's long feelers trailed dramatically from the plates. ‘Fuck both of you. I won't do it.'

‘You ought to do it, Ted,' Adam seemed perfectly calm. There was no crack in his normal ingratiating superciliousness. He spoke with condescension which was irritated but not without tenderness, as if advising a wounded woman to accept her divorce settlement because her husband was never going to come back to her. The little lobster fork, almost invisible in his big hand, moved rhythmically between the shell and his mouth, conveying the succulent flesh to be eaten. ‘We can go through the motions and vote you off the board, but who wants that kind of hassle?'

‘Do you really know what I've put into Oak Hill?' Ted demanded. ‘Have you any understanding? All the years I've been in Westwick – what – twenty? twenty-one? all those relationships I've built up, the trust, the give and take, with people who were nothing but junior assistant surveyors when we first met, who're now chairs of this and officers of that. The guys who-actually made it happen for us; they trusted me, I trusted them. We'd been doing business twenty years. You'd have got nowhere without me, nowhere. I brought the project to you, I found the site …'

‘Nobody denies any of that, Ted. Your contribution is of paramount importance, crucial, of course. But it's over. We have to move on, you have to move on. Chester wants us to get into the Whitbridge development and you've dragged your feet. That might be called a mistake.'

‘Does he want to pull out of Tudor Homes too?' The scenario now in view was disturbing. This was no time for Tudor to suffer a capital amputation.

‘Not at this stage.' Adam was as emollient as ever but the menace in his words was unmistakable. ‘I get the feeling for some reason your heart just isn't in the Whitbridge thing. No sense trying to make water run uphill, is there? Chester's been talking to some people, he may go forward with them.'

‘What people? Belgrave? Harrier?'

‘I don't know what's in his mind for the future; Ted. But here we are, at the parting of the ways.' The lobster shell was empty. He put down his fork, reached into his briefcase which lay on the velvet banquette next to him and took out an envelope. ‘I drafted something for you. All you have to do is sign.'

‘I need to think,' Ted insisted, hoping from the depth of his heart that there was some way of turning this situation around.

‘Ted,' Adam urged, ‘there's nothing to think about. You have no choices here. If you make us throw you off the board there's nowhere to hide, we'll get more attention than we need, people will start sniffing around and the whole thing can go down the pan. You were always the one who was so concerned about the media, for God's sake. So this is it, this is the end of the road. We're being more than fair. Just sign the thing.'