must be how Mum met him. A real poser. Everyone knows he has it off with just about every attractive woman he bumps into. And he’s a big-head about his sculpture. About how he’s received a new commission, which he’s working on in his studio. Sounds posh till you know it’s a poxy rat-hole. Actually, he spends most of his time drinking with a load of other layabouts in the Fleece in Stroud.’
‘And you think that he and your mother are …’
When the girl replied, her voice had become husky, as if she were going to cry. ‘Yeah, course. Don’t you know? Didn’t Mum ever tell you? Frank is definitely her boyfriend. She’s gone off with him, it’s obvious.’
‘But why do you think that? Did she tell you? Your mother never ever mentioned this Frank to me. What’s more, she never even hinted that she had a … that she was seeing someone.’
‘I found out by accident. One afternoon, our class was in Stroud doing a project on industrial archaeology. It was her day off, so I was surprised to see her. She seemed very much in a hurry, so she never saw me. She went into the old woollen mill off the High Street, the one that’s been turned into arty-farty workshops. She was using a key to unlock the door. That’s the same place that God’s gift to women Churchill has his studio in. When I asked her casually where she’d been that afternoon, she said she’d been shopping in Ciren. Why else would she be going into his studio, with her own key? And if that wasn’t the reason, why lie to me about it? So I wasn’t surprised at first when she skipped. I thought that after a bit, she’d want me to join her. But time’s gone on and she obviously doesn’t. I really miss her, Cat. If she loved me she’d miss me. If she loved me, she’d come back for me.’
Unlike the surrounding villages, such as Owlbury, gracefully unified by the famous yellow-grey Cotswold stone, Stroud had the air of being haphazardly put together from a box of bits left over from building various other places. There was a plate-glass fronted parade of shops from a nineteen-sixties new town, a Victorian pedimented assembly rooms from Glasgow or Leeds, a brick building society headquarters which had strayed from a by-pass somewhere in the Midlands, and a terrace of Georgian town-houses that might have been transplanted from Bath.
Catriona had visited the town on one other occasion, with Flora, on an expedition to buy some sort of herbal remedy for a childish ailment contracted by Charlotte. Catriona had often teased her sister on her devotion to homeopathy, herbalism, acupuncture, reflexology and other such alternative therapies, for which the town was notorious.
Afterwards they had had tea in a restaurant which rejoiced in the name Demeter’s Pantry. ‘So how does Bill stand on complementary medicine?’ she had asked Flora, somewhat disingenuously.
‘About where you’d imagine a loyal employee of Avalon Laboratories would stand,’ she had replied, tartly. ‘He thinks it’s all, to quote his elegant phrase, “a load of eyewash.”’
‘I thought,’ continued Catriona, impelled more by mischievousness than by any real interest in the subject, ‘that modern medical opinion was tending not to regard such things so dismissively?’
Flora snorted. ‘Maybe there is some enlightenment in some quarters. There are some GPs who also offer homeopathy, for instance. But drugs companies exist by selling drugs. They’re never going to promote a drugs-free therapy, for obvious reasons.’
‘But I bet they monitor such things, nevertheless. Surely if their research indicated that some of these treatments really worked, they’d have to take account of that in some way?’
Her sister had laughed derisively. ‘Honestly, Cat. For someone who’s such a brainbox, you’re awfully naïve sometimes. It’s those ivory towers you’ve inhabited for so long. Look, there’s research and then there’s research. For instance, you do research into Wordsworth. You discover a previously unknown manuscript. It contains, what? I know, a pornographic poem, yes, as explicit as anything in Rochester. What do you do?’
‘I’d suspect immediately it was a fake!’
‘OK. Apart from checking its authenticity. If you were satisfied it was genuine, you’d publish it, wouldn’t you? With all the usual critical apparatus.’
‘Of course. It would be as though a Force-Eight earthquake had hit Grasmere.’
‘You wouldn’t say that, as the blessed Wordsworth’s pure reputation as the poet of daffodils and misty mountains would be sullied, the manuscript should be suppressed?’
‘Of course not! I’d be fascinated that the sensuality that is latent in his work had fully emerged in some private moment. It’s such an intriguing idea, Flo!’
She laughed. ‘Cat, you’re a genuine scholar, a sea-green incorruptible. No one’s paying you to keep Wordsworth safe for generations of GCSE students. You’re not in hock to the Lakes poets industry, preserving their heritage of clean-living and mountain-walking for the coach parties that flock to worship at the shrine! But what if you were?’
Catriona smiled. ‘I see what you’re driving at, you devious woman. You mean, there are some scientists who might fudge their findings to preserve the status quo.’
‘Precisely. That’s what scientific research is for. To prove that what you, or rather the person who is paying you, would wish to be the result, is the result. Genetically modified crops? Absolutely safe. BSE? Absolutely not transmissible to human beings. Mobile phones? No problem. It happens over and over again. Until, that is, the weight of the evidence is such that even the scientists in the pay of the governments and the big corporations can’t ignore it or argue it away any longer, and then, of course, there’s a need for yet more research into ever-more expensive drugs to cure – or preferably to alleviate, there’s more profit in alleviation – AIDS, or vCJD, or any of the other horrid plagues that their masters have inflicted on us in the first place.’
Catriona had been genuinely taken aback by the hornet’s nest the discussion had stirred. She had never heard her sister speak so passionately, and yet so cynically on a matter of this kind. She told her as much.
And Flora had said, ‘I’ve been interested in these things for a long time. You just haven’t noticed before. I read a newspaper – a real one, the Guardian, not the Daily Mail. I listen every night without fail to the midnight news on Radio Four. I’m a member of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. I read books, too – not novels but serious stuff on the environment. For years you thought of me as just an empty-headed blonde. The air-stewardess factor, wasn’t it? You always thought my job was a joke. A glorified waitress, you said once. Remember those awful sexist adverts years ago for that airline? “I’m Flora, fly me!” I’m Flora, fuck me, more like. Well, it wasn’t like that. Not for me. I never had the time to fuck a passenger, never mind the inclination! At various times, I delivered a baby, I gave heart massage, I dealt with a fire in the galley. I was on two flights on which there were full-scale emergency landings: sirens, fire-tenders, chutes out, the works. I wasn’t ever hijacked, but that was a real and constant danger. And every time we took to the air, someone was sick, someone was drunk, someone was a pain in the arse, some unaccompanied minor needed a mummy to hug. Oh yes, and I had to serve drinks and meals non-stop!’
There had been defiant fire in her blue eyes as she had drunk up her tea, and a decisive clink as she had set down her cup.
‘Excuse me, are you Frank Churchill?’
The tall, sunburnt,
