Savitch. ‘I’ve lost nearly two stone since moving here and sleep better than I’ve ever done. Coming to the Border – I expect that to add at least fifteen years to my useful life.’
Useful life?
Solar panels and windmills for phoney green cred? Who was this Lorna Mantle? Had Savitch opened a bottle of vintage champagne afterwards and shagged her in the barn? Jane wasn’t laughing, because it got worse.
The secrets of pain The Savitch effect is already visible in the economic health of the county, in the demand for country-sports equipment and outward-bound accessories.
‘Mr Savitch has done great things for my business,’ says Kenny Mostyn, proprietor of camping and country sports suppliers Hardkit, who provides instructors at The Court. ‘I won’t deny we were in trouble before he came – the bank was pulling the plug – but we now have four flourishing retail outlets either side of the Welsh Border.’
‘Ward has been good news for us,’ says Lyndon Pierce, who represents Ledwardine on the Herefordshire Council. ‘He’s preserved the village economy in difficult times, and even attracted new business ventures. And this is just the start. A broad economic base means we should be able to go ahead with a major expansion programme that might otherwise have been in danger.’
At the bottom of the piece it said:
SEE FOR YOURSELF what Ward Savitch has achieved when The Court at Ledwardine is open to visitors over the Easter holiday period, culminating in a Family Fun Day on Bank Holiday Monday.
He had it all worked out. Winning the battle for hearts and minds. It was sick.
Jane slid the magazine under the bed, rolled onto her back, and a rogue sob came up like a hiccup. She lay looking up at where, when they’d first moved here and she’d claimed the attic as her apartment, she’d painted the white plastered spaces between the timbers in primary colours. The Mondrian Walls. The big statement. This is me, this is my space.
Just a kid, then. Not yet getting it that Ledwardine was all about bones of oak and creamy white skin and didn’t need chemical colours.
Or anybody like Ward Savitch. Ever.
Now there were sheets of white card taped between the timbers. She’d spent every evening for most of a week putting this together, using blow-ups of a large-scale OS map. Here was the village with the orchard marked out, as it had been centuries ago: a great circle around a much smaller community. The orchard still enclosing much of a Bronze Age henge. Roots of old apple trees wrapped around buried stones. It had to be.
She sat up, took the mobile from the bedside table and rang Neil Cooper, of the county archaeology department, at home. He answered on about the twelfth ring.
‘OK, look,’ Jane said, ‘I’m really sorry to be ringing you at night again, and I know your wife thinks we’ve got a thing going, but I need-’
‘No, she doesn’t, Jane,’ Neil Cooper said. ‘She’s seen you. She knows I’m far too much of a slippers-and- cocoa kind of guy for someone like you. In fact, Russell Brand would probably be too-’
‘Yeah, yeah, very amusing.’
Jane squirmed to the edge of the bed where she’d lost her virginity to Eirion Lewis. He was at university now, in Cardiff, came over most weekends, bless him, didn’t want to lose her. Russell Brand?
‘We’re moving as fast we can, Jane,’ Coops said, ‘but like I keep telling you, it’s not the only dig in the queue.’
Nearly all archaeology these days was rescue archaeology. They only ever got to look at places about to be buried for ever under a housing estate. What worried her was that if the council sanctioned plans for a superstore and upmarket housing – and Savitch had to be in on that somewhere – the henge would stay buried, like for good?
‘So what you’re saying is…’
‘It’s now looking doubtful this summer.’
‘So, like, if I wind up at uni in September, I miss everything.’
‘Jane-’
‘Sorry, I expect you’ve got things to do. I’ll go.’
‘I will keep you informed. I realize how much this means to you.’
Jane lay down with her head hanging over the side of the bed. Couldn’t seem to sleep these nights.
It was OK till you turned eighteen. OK to sound off about things you hated, knowing there was nothing you could really do about any of it. All those years of thinking how great it’d be when you were officially adult and nobody could restrict you any more. When, in fact, not being able to do anything was actually a kind of freedom. If you stood up now and accused your local councillor of being bent – which he was – he’d have you in court. The village and the henge… she’d tried to discuss it with some of the guys at school, and they didn’t get it. Didn’t remotely get it. None of them could wait to get the hell out of the places they’d grown up in, dreaming of London and Paris and New York and LA.
Maybe it was a pagan thing, that sense of place. That sense of attachment. Although even Mum was picking up on it now.
Jane had Googled Julian of Norwich last night and discovered a woman who, in an age when God was generally feared, had found the old guy polite, compassionate and…
… had even talked of Mother God. Which the theologians said was no more than a recognition of God’s nurturing of mankind. But, hey, come on, how far was this really from Mother Goddess?
All the blood was running to Jane’s head, almost on the floor by now, in a nest of hair. This whole university thing was like some insidious conspiracy by the lousy Government, just a way of keeping you off benefits for another three years, while hitting you with mega tuition fees. By the time she was out of it, there’d probably be thousands of qualified archaeologists who were all going to be Indiana Jones and…
Jane’s head hit the floor… she didn’t have to go.
Shocked and excited, she wriggled back onto the bed then rolled off it, stood up, went to the window. The village lights were coming on, twin lanterns either side of the main door of the Black Swan, fake gas lamps on the square. The lights you could see, the lights you couldn’t.
Jane’s eyes widened.
Wasn’t going?
That simple? A decision already made? On some level, it had been decided?
Holy shit.
She was breathing very fast now. OK, maybe not a question of deliberately fluffing the A levels. Probably make a point of doing well, getting the grades, just to show she could do it. And then just not going.
No shame in that. It was actually kind of radical. She could just go out and get a job. Any kind of job that would allow her to stay in Ledwardine and fight for what mattered.
Jane felt suddenly still inside and terrifyingly clear-headed. She needed to be absolutely direct about this. No shit. She’d give it a few minutes, then go down and tell Mum before she could change her mind. Hadn’t Mum, after all, dropped out of uni after getting pregnant? Hadn’t she even been known to say – long after Dad’s death in the car crash alongside the woman he’d been shagging – that maybe it was all meant?
Jane stood gazing down at her village. Which needed her. In this sick, withering world, it needed all the energy it could get.
She saw a small shadow emerge from the vicarage gate. Mum, in jeans and sweater, tripping across the market square. Of course – off to meet Lol in the Swan, like it was still the early days of their relationship, courtesies to observe. What was the matter with them, hovering around one another still? Everybody hovering, nobody doing anything.
OK, give them an hour or so and then go across to the Swan. Telling Mum in front of Lol, that would diffuse the effect.
Still in her cloud of knowing, Jane went downstairs to the kitchen, talked it over with Ethel, the cat.
Ethel was like, Yeah, but what about your career?
‘It’s just a word, Ethel.’
Jane stood for an uncertain moment in the cold kitchen, then went over to the fruit bowl on the dresser and
