Free The Heart of the Country by Fay Weldon Page B

jumped into the back seat without demur. And on they all went towards Glastonbury.
    ‘You again!’ he said. ‘Surprise, surprise!’ He’d been up and down the road four times, waiting for her.
    ‘I hope you don’t mind dogs,’ said Natalie. ‘I hope he doesn’t leave hairs on your nice new seats.’
    ‘My wife will hoover them up,’ said Angus. He was lying. ‘And I don’t mind anything so long as it’s to do with you.’
    He was getting fonder and fonder of Natalie by the minute. Female distress and incompetence, mixed with a soupçon of resistance, can do that to a man. Natalie wasn’t looking her best that morning. She had forgotten her make-up, the walk to school had flattened her hair and she had holes in her tights. It reassured him: she looked altogether approachable.
    ‘The truth of the matter is,’ she said, ‘I think my husband’s left home.’ She had to say it to someone. And so, at last, itbecame true.
    She wouldn’t go with Angus for a coffee. She said she had too much to do. He went all the way back to Waley and Rightly, estate agents, of which he was a director. Their offices nestled at the foot of Gurney Castle.

Cough, Cough, Wheeze, Gasp
    Natalie went to the bank, to ask for a loan.
    The bank manager, by name Jasper Jones, was a strikingly good-looking man in his early thirties, who would presently be moved to an urban branch and no doubt end up at Head Office. In the meantime he jogged along country lanes with as much confidence as if they had been dry streets, dodging cow pats and slurry pools, knowing his life would not include them for ever. On a better day Natalie would have attempted to charm him, raising her dark-lashed blue eyes to his, and so forth, but not today.
    ‘I would like to give you a loan, Mrs Harris,’ he said, ‘but there is no way I can, I’m afraid. If you came to me with any kind of security, or these days even without it but with some workable scheme for making money out of nothing, then of course I would look favourably upon a request to borrow. But just money out of the blue, for groceries? No. Social security does that kind of thing. I suggest you get down there before the office closes for lunch. Your house is not a security, as you may have thought, but a liability. There’s an Inland Revenue bill outstanding: did you not know that? Of some forty thousand pounds – the tax people move fast. They can sell the house over your head, and at a lot less than market value, if they so choose.’
    ‘They can’t do that. I live there,’ said Natalie. Now actually she was right, and she could have had a stop put on a compulsory sale through the courts, but who was there to tell her that? Not the bank manager. Harry had fraudulently built up an overdraft of eighteen thousand pounds, against a non-materializing million-pound order, and how else but by the rapid sale of the house was the bank manager to get his money back, after the Inland Revenue had taken their cut, and get to Head Office in the end. I am not saying this went through the front of Jasper Jones’ mind, but it sure as hell passed somewhere through the back, enabling him to reply, firmly:
    ‘They can and they do. They can sell everything except personal belongings, and I can assure you there’s not much they see as personal, except a toothbrush or so. There is nothing wrong with accepting social security, Mrs Harris. A quarter of the country now depends on it, one way or the other. Just 30 per cent of the population works: the other 70 per cent live off their earnings.’
    ‘But once you’re on it,’ asked Natalie, ever simple, ‘how do you get off?’
    ‘Ah!’ said Jasper Jones. ‘That’s the problem. And by the way we don’t encourage dogs in the bank. He seems very restless. Is he safe?’
    ‘He’s hungry,’ said Natalie.
    Natalie went to the DHSS offices and there saw one of their senior clerks, a single lady in her forties, who had gone straight from school into the social