Golden Hour (8 page)

A sign directly ahead says
Toutes directions
. The adjoining land, between the road and the railway line, has gone to waste. Thin dark weeds trap plastic wrappers, bright dots of color in the night.

A car slows as it passes, and the young mother calls out.

“You want a lift? We're heading for Brighton.”

“Thank you, no.”

He offers no further explanation. The car drives on.

Toby Clore, returning from abroad, notices every smallest detail of his homeland. England is as ugly as ever. The ugliness not in the buildings or the landscape, but in the absence of joy.

Toutes directions
. He follows the arrow. To his left a raised roadway over which the occasional car passes. Late at night now, and the pavements are empty. A steady stream of trucks rumbles by from the ferry. A road sign ahead offers Brighton, Seaford, Eastbourne. He was not telling the truth when he said he has no idea where he is going. He has several ideas. The strongest of these is that he is not going to Eastbourne, where his mother
lives, even though he has no money left and no means of supporting himself. Then after this comes a lesser idea, that he will make his way to the village of Edenfield. He went to prep school nearby, and has friends who live there. He has come back to a world where he is known.

He follows the road, now passing through an industrial zone. Many of the yards are abandoned, their offices boarded up. The Travis Perkins yard is stacked with building materials laid out in rows behind a high fence. A sign on the fence reads:
Anything you need to transform any landscape
. A grand promise indeed.

Give me a fleet of bulldozers, Travis Perkins. Give me flame throwers, and a giant incinerator. Let's take this landscape back to the Stone Age and start again. Oh, and this time leave out the people.

The long road stretches out ahead, lit by the white glow of truck headlights, the red glow of tail lights. How far is it to Edenfield? Five or six miles, no more. But not tonight.

He veers off the main road up a fork to the left. Here there's a car graveyard where the cars have been lifted up as if by a tidy giant and stacked close together in layers. On top of a blue steel container there sits a yellow Skoda pickup, wheelless and gutted, with a message painted on its doors:
If your car has a drama get your parts from Motorama
. This is a vehicle-dismantling yard.

A gap in the fence opposite leads to a stile. Toby climbs the stile, seeking some sheltered spot where he can lie down to sleep. Beyond the stile is the railway line, straight and gleaming in the moonlight. A red stop-light in the distance. He crosses the tracks, follows a narrow path round a building site. On one side a dense hedge, on the other, beyond a chain-link fence, a man-made mountain of fresh earth. He has no idea where he's
going, only the knowledge that where there are stiles there are footpaths, and where there are footpaths there are places people like to walk to.

The path climbs a rise, and all at once he's out of the dark tunnel, and there before him is the river. The dark gleam of water is edged with a broad band of chalky mud, all clearly visible in the light that never entirely leaves the sky. Town light, moon light, star light.

He walks the high embankment, following the river inland. Ahead he sees some kind of shelter in an open field. He tramps through dry thistles which scratch his calves, and comes to a strange brick ruin built on a wide concrete apron. It's low but substantial, a flattened pyramid of bricks, like a sacrificial altar. Beyond it is another ruin, made of upright iron girders supporting immense concrete beams and a concrete roof. There are no walls, only a strand of barbed wire fuzzy with sheep's wool. The underside of the concrete roof drips with white stalactites that crumble at the touch. Some of the concrete beams have collapsed, and lie at an angle.

There are sheep here, huddled up, asleep. They become agitated as Toby approaches, but he moves slowly and makes no noise and keeps himself some way away from them, and they settle down again. He takes out a ground sheet from his backpack and lays it on a patch of rough grass in one corner of the shelter. Then he stretches himself out on the ground, with his pack as his pillow, and composes himself for sleep.

He hears the breathing of the sheep, and the rumble of the trucks on the distant road. I'm back in England, he thinks. Safe, small, joyless England. Why have I come back?

The demon commands. I obey.

Then a smile forms on his face in the night, even as his punished
body cries out for sleep. He's remembering the little boy on the boat.

Maybe I am Jesus. Maybe I've returned from the wilderness to bring new life. The gospel according to Toby.

Sleep now, Toby. Sleep, demon.

Maggie Dutton wakes with a headache, a dull pain behind her ears and eyes. It's hard to get out of bed. Her head has grown too heavy to lift. Later it's hard to go in to work. Her feet stick to the ground.

What am I afraid of?

She loves her job. Ask anyone who knows her and that's what they'll tell you. Lucky Maggie to be paid for her passion. But a job isn't a life, and all of a sudden Maggie's in hiding from her life.

She swallows two paracetamol. One sticks briefly in her throat, leaving behind its bitter taste.

This has happened before. Call it a panic attack. The form it takes is a voice in the head, not her own voice, the sound of the heavy pain behind her eyes, saying,
You're losing it. You're losing it all
.

So she grips her hands tight on the kitchen table, on the steering wheel of the car, on the strap of her leather satchel, not knowing she's doing it. Fear of losing it all.

Feathery clouds in the pale blue sky as she walks from the car park past the railway station. Nesting rooks rising and falling in the tops of the sycamores that line Southover Road. She tries calling her best girlfriend Jo, but gets no answer and doesn't leave a message. Her head is still hurting as she keys in the code
and goes through the glass doors and climbs the wide stairs to the second floor.

Sam is already there, stirring his first cup of coffee of the day, the cramped little office wrapped round him like a coat. He looks up as Maggie enters and she can see from his eyes that he can't see it, the panic. He looks instead to see how she sees him, a sweet boy with more than a crush on her. It happens when you're squeezed together in a tiny office day after day.

“Good weekend?” he says.

“Not bad.” She drops her heavy satchel, sinks down into her chair, presses her fingers to her temples. The tray of new applications looks fuller than it was last thing Friday. There are Post-It notes on her desk with messages.

“Oh, God. The Westmeston barn conversion again.”

“It's the glazing bars. They want a decision today.”

“Get me a cup of coffee, Sam. I haven't woken up yet.”

“Coming up.”

For a few moments she has the office to herself. The pain is passing at last. So what was that about? Not about Andrew, surely? It's true she had half assumed he'd call when he got back to his place yesterday evening, and he didn't. But what's the big deal with that? She's been wanting to cool things down a bit. Slow things down.

Nothing has slowed down. Suddenly her life is going by at double speed, fast-forward to somewhere unknown. In seven days' time Andrew starts a new job just up the road here in Lewes, and if he's not living with her then they've split up, and if he's living with her then they're getting married.

That's stupid, isn't it? How can your entire future come down to a decision you make in six days?

Yesterday it seemed simple. Yesterday it was just a matter of
stopping the door closing on her. But he always calls in the evenings when they're apart, and yesterday he didn't call. What does that mean? Is he hurt? Is he angry? She doesn't want to hurt him or anger him.

So what do I want? I stay with Andrew for the rest of my life, and know it could have been so much better. Or I split up with Andrew and risk spending the rest of my life alone.

Sam returns with a mug of hot strong coffee.

“You look like hell, if you don't mind me saying so.”

“I feel like hell.”

“You know what, Maggie? You should marry me.”

Five years younger than her, so he can joke about it.

“What makes you think I want to marry anyone, Sam?”

“Oh, you know. People do.”

“Actually I'm okay with the marrying. But living with someone, that's hard.”

“You know why?”

“No, Sam. Tell me why.”

“Because you're a control freak. You need someone submissive who adores you.”

He poses with his hands spread, a soppy grin on his face. Maggie laughs. The panic is subsiding.

“I'd drive you nuts.”

“You don't know till you try. And I don't care that you're older than me. Actually, that's what I like about you.”

“Shut up, Sam. We've got work to do.”

But Sam's ridiculous act is doing her good. Shaming how much we all like being flattered.

So the day's work begins. There's the amended plans for the Southease bridge to check, and a batch of new plans for the alterations to F-Wing at the prison. Four household extension applications. Two conversions of outbuildings. Phone calls have
been logged over the weekend from neighbors reporting suspicious work on nearby properties.

“Have you checked the addresses, Sam?”

“No, not yet.”

“So what have you been doing?”

“Drinking my coffee. Tending to my boss's needs. Anyway, I only just got in.”

You can never tell what time anyone's got in now that they all work flexitime. But she knows Sam's not a slacker. He's already pulled over the list and opened up Map Explorer to check if any of the reported addresses require planning permission or listed building consent.

John Randall looks in from the Development Control Office outside. He's holding a stapled batch of papers.

“PPS5,” he says. “You need to run your eye over this.”

“I thought I had,” says Maggie. “What's the problem?”

“Policy HE1.3 is pretty racy stuff.” Randall lifts his eyebrows as he speaks. He's a humorist. “Heritage assets and climate change.”

Maggie takes the papers and reads the policy clause.

Where conflict between climate change objectives and the conservation of heritage assets is unavoidable, the public benefit of mitigating the effects of climate change should be weighed against any harm to the significance of heritage assets in accordance with the development management principles in this PPS and national policy on climate change.

“Terrific,” she says wearily. “So that's a big help.”

“If you ask me, I'd stay with PPG15.”

“I love PPG15. But that's not much use either.”

“The department's had a letter from the agent for the Harvey's
site development. The one you warned off making direct contact with the AAP. He's threatening legal action.”

“There's a surprise. Funny how it's always the crooks who send in the lawyers.”

“You are covered, Maggie?”

“It's all in the email record.”

Randall leaves. Maggie checks her diary. She's due to make her first site visit at 10 a.m., a house on Chapel Hill. She settles down to work through her in-tray.

Jo rings, responding to Maggie's missed call. Maggie takes her phone out into the little meeting room they call the Goldfish Bowl. Jo's just about the only person in the world she can tell.

“I've been going insane, Jo. Tell me I'm not crazy. I think maybe I am crazy. You know Andrew's got this new job? He starts next Monday. The idea was he was to move in with me. I mean, why wouldn't he move in? It makes all the sense in the world. Except yesterday I panicked. Now I come out in a sweat every time I think about it.”

Jo as always says the obvious thing.

“Do you love him enough to marry him?”

“I don't know,” Maggie wails. “And anyway, it's not just that. It's what if I don't find anyone better? If I don't find anyone better then I'll settle for Andrew.”

“You know what it says in the paper today?” says Jo. “It says women are at their most beautiful at thirty-one. You're at your peak.”

“Oh, Jo. I do love talking to you. Are you free at lunchtime?”

Not the kind of conversation you can squeeze into a few minutes. It turns out Jo is out all day at some rehearsal and won't be home till late tonight, so they fix to meet for lunch tomorrow.

Back in the office Sam asks to come with Maggie on the site
visit, but she says no. She needs him to stay and keep on top of the phones and emails. Work is piling up.

“I don't know what happened to this recession,” she says.

“You could look in on South Street while you're out,” says Sam. “Some kind of unauthorized work at Dean House.”

Walking across Lewes Maggie's spirits rise. She loves Lewes. Compared to Cardiff, where she worked before, which is almost all Victorian and Edwardian stock, Lewes is a treasure trove of architectural styles. Walk down just about any street and you'll see buildings studded with Caen stone robbed from the Priory at the time of the Reformation, flint walls over three hundred years old, mathematical tiles from the eighteenth century, Victorian decorative brickwork, right up to the blight of modern through-color render. There's a Georgian house on the High Street with a black mathematical tile high over a top window, look with binoculars and you can see a cat's paw printed in the ceramic glaze, made the day the tile was set out to dry two hundred years ago. When you know what to look for it's as if the streets are talking to you, as if all the people who ever lived here for the last thousand years are watching you go by. It actually gives her goose bumps to find a house like Castle Lodge where the knapped flints run round the corners. That's difficult work. All other flint walls trim the windows and the corners with brick. But all those years ago someone said, I don't care how long it takes, nap me flints on two faces and damn the expense. Then at the opposite end of the spectrum you have the prefabricated flint-and-concrete blocks used in the development of Baxter's Printworks in St. Nicholas's Lane. No conservation officer can have authorized that abomination.