Thackeray suddenly pushed away from her and strode to the front door without looking back.
“I need some air,” he said, before the front door slammed behind him, leaving Laura leaning against the window where he had been standing, too shocked to move.
“Oh, shit,” she said softly to herself. “One of these days I’ll blow this sky high, and then where will I be?”
Chapter Twelve
“So, do you want me to take you up there?” Laura asked her grandmother, trying to keep the tension she was feeling out of her voice. She was standing in the middle of Joyce’s tiny living room on what seemed to be becoming her daily ritual of a lunch-time visit to the Heights. Joyce had rung to say she needed a lift to the Project but when Laura had let herself into the bungalow she had found her grandmother sitting stock still in her favourite armchair, a look of frozen anger pinching her usually cheerful features. In front of her on the coffee table was a list of names and phone numbers. Laura’s two page feature, illustrated with photographs of the planners’ models of the new development on the Heights, was spread on the floor beside her with crucial passages outlined firmly in fluorescent marker. The telephone cord extended tightly from the plug in the wall to the apparatus on Joyce’s lap.
“I tried to get hold of you first thing,” Joyce had complained bitterly as soon as Laura had walked through the door. “How can you be so certain the Project is for the chop? Who told you?”
“Dave Spencer wouldn’t say yes or no,” Laura admitted. “I was reading between the lines when I wrote that. But I’d put money on it. They’re not interested in what the residents want. They want the whole thing wrapped up neatly so as not to frighten the yuppies they want to sell the new houses to. It stands to reason, Nan. You know what they’re like. They don’t want facilities for young junkies on the doorstep of the posh new executive homes.”
“The regeneration committee met yesterday,” Joyce said. “I did manage to find that out from Spencer’s secretary – or PA, as she calls herself.”
“Yes, I know, I heard that much in the office, but they didn’t issue any statement afterwards. Apparently Spencer and some of his precious committee have gone to London for meetings today.”
“The early flight,” Joyce said scornfully. “In my day we were lucky to get a train trip third class. They’ve gone to meetings at the department of the environment, according to little Miss Snooty.”
Laura could see the tears of frustration in her grandmother’s eyes.
“Did you try anyone else?” she asked, glancing at the long list of names and numbers on Joyce’s pad.
“I tried everyone I could think of,” Joyce admitted, slumping back in her chair and letting the phone slide across her knees. Laura took it off her gently and put it back in its place on a side table. The defeated look in Joyce’s eyes caught her breath.
“I’m too old, love, that’s the problem,” Joyce said. “All the folk I used to work with are long gone and no one else wants to know me. You can see why folk end up on the booze or drugs or on the rampage up here, can’t you? No one wants to listen to a word anyone on the Heights says. Me? They’ve forgotten Councillor Ackroyd. Now I’m just that stroppy old baggage who doesn’t want her bungalow knocked down. Standing in the way of progress, that’s what I’m doing now. You’ll see. Doesn’t your editor say as much in his editorial? “A great step forward for Bradfield’. I don’t know how he works that out.”
“It’s not over yet,” Laura said gently. “It’s only just beginning. Remember, no one outside the town hall’s seen the details of the plans till this morning. No one up here’s going to like it when they see it spread out like that in black and white. They may want the flats down but they don’t want to be thrown out of the area to make way for luxury housing. And there’ll be lots of people who’ll fight for the Project and what that’s doing for the kids.”
Laura knew that there had been a time when Joyce’s writ had run the length and breadth of the long polished corridors of Bradfield town hall, and even a time, for some years after she had retired, when if she wanted information for any of her many campaigns, friends and acquaintances would have produced it for her within hours. But gradually the number of councillors and officials she remembered and who remembered her had dwindled, and what Joyce still regarded as the golden age of municipal socialism had become an embarrassment to the new, young councillors. They were far too busy creating cabinets and executives and scheming about the powers of an elected mayor and the opportunities opened up by public-private partnerships. The new modernised town hall, Laura thought, must seem to Joyce like a foreign country. She had, inexorably, become an exile in her own land.
“Come on,” Laura said. “I’ll run you up the hill. Donna will be wondering where you are.”
Joyce tidied her papers on the table and folded the Gazette neatly into its original shape.
“She’s a good lass, is Donna,” she said as she got painfully to her feet. “We need a few more like her to stir this estate up. Most of them are so ground down with it all they’ll let Councillor Dave Spencer walk rough-shod over the lot of us if we don’t do summat dramatic.”
“I think the taste for marching on town halls may have died out,” Laura said carefully, as she helped the older woman manoeuvre her arms into her coat.
“We’ll see about that,” Joyce said. “At least we’ve got a reporter on our side, pet.”
Laura nodded, but with a sinking heart. Joyce might believe she carried some weight at the Gazette, but if Ted Grant had made up his mind on the issue of the Heights - and his editorial comment had been about as enthusiastic as Ted ever got for anything municipal - she knew only too well that there was going to be very little that she could do about it. She helped her grandmother lock up the house carefully and tucked her into the passenger seat of the car. Joyce’s increasing lack of mobility worried her more than she was prepared to admit to herself, and Joyce never admitted it at all, gritting her teeth against the pain of the arthritis which threatened to immobilise her completely. But Joyce, Laura reckoned, might have to give up the independence her small home afforded her even before the developers’ bulldozers moved in. And that would certainly break her heart.
Donna Maitland was sitting at one of the Project’s more upto-date computers when Joyce and Laura arrived. She gave a small wave of greeting as the older woman hobbled in, took her walking stick off her granddaughter and kissed her on the cheek. Eventually Donna turned away from the Internet pages she had been studying with fierce concentration. She picked up a sheaf of papers from the desk beside her and waved them at Joyce.
“I must have written to fifty of the bastards, all local companies, and not one of them’s even offered another clapped out computer for the kids to use,” she said. “Half of them haven’t even bothered to reply.”
“And we need a lot more than that,” Joyce said.
“I told them that when the redevelopment goes ahead we’ll be appealing for funds to rebuild this place and equip it properly,” Donna explained to Laura. “It’s obvious the bloody council’s going to do nowt for us, so I’m giving them plenty of warning that we hope local business will fill the gap. You can do us a bit of good an all, love, if you cover the story for us in t’Gazette.”
“I’ll do my best,” Laura said feeling overwhelmed by the weight of expectation the two women were placing on her. “In the meantime I’m going to be late back. I’ll see you later, Nan.”
“The council hasn’t actually said they won’t rebuild the Project yet,” Joyce said after the door had closed. She didn’t dare mention Laura’s conviction that Donna was right. But Donna shrugged, running a hand through blonde hair that had fallen across her eyes.