Whirligig (25 page)

Dinner took place – or rather, was performed – in the grand old dining room of MacGilp House under the square dusty outlines where family portraits had once hung. The party wallowed in artichoke mousse and picked its way through quail, then hoovered up lemon posset. Claypole had been seated next to a woman who had recently come to Loch Garvach to paint and recover from a painful divorce. They were rubbing along adequately until she said innocently, ‘It's so peaceful in this part of the world compared to London. You must love it here', and Claypole froze.

‘Peaceful?' he said, and turned to her. Her innocent expression was broken by his incredulity. ‘Brr. It is
not
peaceful!'

Her brow knitted, but he could not let it go. He spoke through gritted teeth.

‘The countryside is appallingly bloody noisy. In every corner of every valley, and on every patch of grass and in every inch of tree are the sounds of beast and bird and everything else fighting or fucking.'

The woman could only blink at him.

‘You only have to put your ear to the air, particularly at night. Doesn't take long to tune into the screeching and rustling and squawking and slithering that is breaking and beating all around you. The death and the sex perpetually pound and bite and gnaw away at you from every surface, behind and under every object, and in every damp nook and open space. It's deafening.'

The woman's eyes were welling up, but Claypole could not stop himself.

‘The only thing that these fuckers and fighters stop for is the rain. As soon as the rain stops, they're all at it again. A bigger one chasing a smaller one for one reason or another until one or other of their tiny hearts gives out and they get buggered or eaten. Then something smaller still will polish off every last scrap of them before sunrise.'

The woman was staring into her pudding, but Claypole did not notice. ‘I tell you, it's a multi-layered cacophony of orgy and murder. Peaceful? Brr.'

Claypole sipped his water and waited for the woman to agree with him. A few seconds passed before she began to cry gently into her lemon posset. He looked around him to see if anyone else had noticed, and went to place a surreptitious hand on her shoulder. She shrank away from him. So Claypole turned to his other side.

Instantly engaged in conversation by a stout and heavily pearled woman, he was asked what he was doing in Loch Garvach, and he told her. But just as she was beginning to give him the benefit of her opinions about wind farming, one of the Americans joined in with an observation about the wind farms in
California. Within seconds, the subject of wind farms engulfed the whole table.

‘So, Harry!' bellowed Banfield Haines so that all other conversations were cut short. ‘How is the world of wind?' His tone was mocking.

Harry finished his mouthful in a considered way and took a glug of wine before answering.

‘Wind farming has changed. It used to be a few crazy people in sandals desperately trying to get tiny projects off the ground in the face of ignorance and suspicion. It was still a bit like that when I started in the business ten years ago.' Here he looked significantly at Claypole. ‘Now it is like any other business. There is still ignorance and suspicion, but everyone thinks they know all about it.'

Haines frowned. ‘But we
do
know more about it these days. It's in the newspapers all the time.'

Harry snarled, and looked at Marian Pace. ‘Mm. Does that mean we are any the wiser?'

Haines scoffed, but his wife took up the baton. ‘What do you think of Peregrine's project, Harry? Do you think he'll get the go-ahead to spoil another chunk of Scotland?'

‘Ah, you're one of
them
,' Harry muttered darkly.

‘I don't know what you mean by that,' said Marian Pace archly, ‘but you have to admit, even if you think they're useful, that they are a ghastly scar on some of our most beautiful landscape.'

The words hung in the air. She looked around the table as if no one could possibly disagree with her. Harry stared into his wine.

‘Is that it?' he asked of his wine, quietly. The atmosphere suddenly chilled.

‘I'm sorry?' Haines knew bare-faced cheek when he
heard it, and could not but react. Claypole didn't know what to think. This was embarrassing, but was it also damaging to his interests? He knew the best policy was to remain quiet.

‘Who cares?!' Harry had raised his voice. It had the effect of bringing anyone who was not concentrating absolutely to attention. ‘Who cares whether it's beautiful or not?'

There was some harrumphing and shifting in seats. Coky attempted to diffuse.

‘Some people think they
are
beautiful, Marian. Me included. I –'

‘This could be the ugliest country in the world…' Harry interrupted. ‘The ugliest part of the ugliest country… and if wind farming wasn't a good thing to do, then it shouldn't be done. Never mind that there may or may not be a beauty in form and function. But, really… why are we having an aesthetic debate about a power station? No one says they don't like nuclear power because the power stations aren't very pretty!'

‘But,' Marian Pace leaned over the table, her face reddening, ‘wind farms are ugly!'

Harry smiled grimly. ‘Have you actually seen a wind farm?'

‘Of course.'

‘Where?'

‘Coming up here yesterday.'

Harry's smile was sly. ‘Oh yes. The one near Moffat, or the one in Cumbria? And the road from which you saw it… the M6… or the M74. Is a motorway a thing of beauty and a joy for ever?'

Marian Pace narrowed her eyes unpleasantly.

‘When you build a wind farm,' Harry slurred, ‘you have to set aside money to reinstate the land exactly –
exactly
– as it
was before you built it. You don't have to do that with a housing estate; you don't have to do that with a factory. But you have to do it with a wind farm. It's a very good idea, of course. It's completely unfair, but it is a good idea. If someone finds a better way of making electricity, in twenty-five years the wind farm gets taken down again with no harm done. What we've all got to get used to, and fast, is that we're not in the business of ruining the countryside to the benefit of cities, or the other way around. We are in the business of saving the entire world from total meltdown.'

Claypole wondered whether Harry had lost his audience by being over dramatic.

‘Shouldn't we be using less electricity instead of building more power stations?' asked the woman next to Claypole.

‘Yes!' Harry was shouting. ‘Absolutely. But we should be doing that as well as, not instead of, renewable electricity generation. We have to do everything to combat climate change. Energy efficiency, offshore wind, onshore wind, solar, tidal, the lot. We can't just pick and choose.'

The rest of the table was quiet. No one wanted to be the next target of Harry's righteous ire. He continued.

‘Our generation will be asked by the next, “What did you do in the war against global warming?” If the answer is nothing, or not enough, they will be incredulous. They will ask “Why not? You knew there was a problem… you knew that it was up to you… and yet you did nothing.” And they will not forgive us. They will hate us, and rightly.'

Claypole looked around. Some of Harry's audience were frowning. A few were leaning back sceptically. Some were trying to think of something else.

‘And frankly,' Harry continued, ‘if you don't think that's what we
are doing, then you can join the cab drivers, the oil and gas lobby, Nigel Lawson and a few disaffected scientists, and you will die in your ignorance and your self-interest.'

With that, he drained his wine.

‘You don't have to be a climate change denier,' said Marian Pace in a measured tone, ‘to want to question things. That's what a civilised society does.'

‘Yes, you can ask questions. But I've answered them. I am an expert, and I'm telling you that this is
the
major threat. Or,' he sneered, ‘are you so overweeningly arrogant, so convinced of your own rectitude on all things, that even when faced with an expert on a topic, you are happy to pronounce your views as if they carried equal weight?'

Marian Pace fumed.

‘What you think of as your wisdom comes only from what you have read in your ignorant, clod-hopping newspaper.'

‘Oh, Harry,' said Marian Pace with a savage laugh. ‘I can see now what you are. You're an eco-fascist.'

‘And you're a prig, deary.'

Harry sat back in his chair to intakes of breath around the table. The whole table was deathly quiet as they watched him refill his glass. Claypole was utterly torn. He wanted to see Harry embarrassed, and yet he wanted him to win the argument.

Banfield Haines was smooth. ‘No one here is saying there is
definitely
no such thing as climate change, I just–'

‘Oh, so you're just not sure?' Harry's tone was still challenging, although the volume had come down from fever pitch.

‘I just don't think the evidence – '

‘Balls. That's like saying you're not sure that the Earth orbits the sun because you haven't yourself been into space and watched it happen. On anything else, you'd take a scientist's word for it.'

Haines gave a supercilious smile. Claypole nearly grinned. Then he saw Coky. She was looking at Harry with pure love.

‘And that also means that you can't have Teflon saucepans. Or weather prediction. And you can't have nuclear power either. Because if Copernicus and Galileo hadn't stuck to their guns, there would be no Einstein.'

‘Pah,' said Haines and smiled grimly at one of the Americans.

‘You don't want to believe all the evidence – the vast amount of evidence – about global warming because it doesn't suit your purposes. You are self-interested. You'd rather things stayed the same because those are the conditions under which you have succeeded. You think the planet is all about you, and you think that the view and the environment are the same thing.'

‘OK,' said Marian Pace, her jaw set firm. ‘Let's talk about Galileo. Climate change is the scientific orthodoxy of our times. Most scientists believe that global warming is man-made, right?'

‘Yes. The vast majority.'

‘Well, most philosophers of the time of Galileo, and certainly everyone else, thought that the sun orbited the earth. He was the one who went against the orthodoxy, and has been proved to be right. Just because the majority of people think something is right, doesn't make it so. In fact, most scientific orthodoxies prove themselves to be wrong in the long run.'

‘Scientific orthodoxies are not fact. They are the interpretation of the facts. The data don't change. It's how we read them that changes. The world is getting hotter, and the weather is getting worse. Interpret that!'

Peregrine stood up. ‘Marvellous! I do like a debate,' he said, with absurd levity but also with a conclusive slap on the table. ‘Now, dancing!'

The MacGilp House ceilidh, it transpired, was open not just to the dinner guests, but to the inhabitants of the surrounding countryside. It was now ten o'clock and there were all ages and varieties of local arriving. When Claypole came into the ballroom, stocky white-haired women in quilted waistcoats were dancing with twenty-year-old farm hands. Girls of six with their grandfathers. Those not dancing sat on benches that lined the walls of the ballroom drinking tea, whisky or lager. A dance was announced, and an excited quickening of conversation enveloped the room. As the accordionist, drummer and fiddler played a few phrases of a jaunty tune, what had been a milling crowd formed quickly and effortlessly into lines. Claypole took a step back towards the wall, as Coky explained to several men and boys that she was going to sit this dance out. With an introductory wheeze from the squeezebox, the band started up and a beat later the dancers set off, wheeling and whirling and jigging. Claypole marvelled. This was not the stuffy ballet he had seen on ‘
Hogmanay Live
!' with po-faced and trussed-up dancers over-performing for the cameras. These were grinning and variously dressed folk of all generations, all dancing in their own styles but to a set pattern that
they all knew. The lines and groups swished and twirled in formation but not in uniform.

‘Are you going to dance?'

He had not realised that Coky was next to him.

‘Ooh. God. No. God.'

She laughed and touched his arm. It felt to Claypole like a sting.

‘My fault,' she said. ‘I should have taught you a few basics. It's not as scary as it looks.'

Claypole and Coky watched Harry Lightfoot, just a few feet from them, drunkenly but courteously swinging a nine-year-old in a frilly dress towards a bearded octogenarian in a kilt. The men bowed, and all three were smiling as they clapped in unison.

‘So, dinner,' said Claypole. ‘Pretty embarrassing.' They both watched Harry joining hands with one of the Americans, who whooped excitedly.