Free Marlford by Jacqueline Yallop Page A

get in.’
    They were back at the bags. Everything was as they had left it: shards of glass kicked into a corner, a window wedged open. They stared at the evidence, baffled by it, in the end, as much as relieved; it drew them back from the illusions of the manor’s interior, unexpectedly confirming the ordinariness of their arrival.
    â€˜And look – there’re lights here and everything. Look!’ Gadiel pointed above his head to a single bulb, brown with filth, stuck with flies, the most marvellous of discoveries.
    He found the switch and flicked it on; the bulb buzzedand gave out a dim glow, enough to grasp the extent of the kitchens, stores and pantries, small workrooms at the back of the manor, which led one from the other, looking out on to an internal courtyard through a row of wide windows. Pale blue paint peeled from the plaster; cupboards hunkered against practical brown tiles.
    Gadiel extracted a cobwebbed bundle of wax candles from the shelves and examined it solemnly. ‘We should borrow some of this stuff,’ he said, but there was little left to scavenge and they were steadfastly practical, looting nothing more than some string, a dish of clothes pegs and a bar of green soap, nibbled at the corners by mice.
    As they collected their things, Dan pulled a portable radio from one of the carrier bags, holding it up solemnly, a trophy. ‘We have to listen. They’ll be nearly there won’t they, already?’
    Gadiel flattened his hand over his mouth, making his voice crackly, distant. ‘Apollo 11, this is Houston…’
    They laughed together.
    They argued about the route back to the bedroom corridor, and, in the end, it may have been only by chance that they came upon the narrow, turning staircase that took them up. They paused at the barricade that marked the end of their part of the manor: the corridor was properly truncated here, bricked up with roughly cemented breeze blocks that prevented access to the wing in which the Bartons were still living.
    â€˜It’s not much, this.’ Gadiel tapped lightly on the barrier. ‘They’ll hear us. It might frighten her.’
    Dan held his candle high. ‘Who?’
    â€˜Ellie. I don’t want her to… you know, she might not like it.’ Gadiel leaned forwards, putting an ear against the breeze blocks.
    â€˜But that doesn’t matter.’ Dan spoke more loudly than he needed to. ‘What she thinks doesn’t matter – this is a political act, man.’
    â€˜Sssh.’ Gadiel flapped a hand to try to quieten him, and the candle flame leapt. He drew back from the barricade. ‘Of course it matters. She’s been nice to us. They gave us supper; we just turned up at the house and they gave us supper.’
    â€˜You make it sound biblical.’ Dan smirked. ‘Come on, Gadiel – we’re squatting. It’s a recognized form of protest. It’s a movement.’ He pressed his spectacles hard against his nose. ‘“ In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all .”’ He shrugged. ‘You see?’
    â€˜But it’s not as simple as that,’ Gadiel insisted. ‘Not here.’
    â€˜Come on, that’s Marx. Karl Marx. Don’t you believe in a new social order?’
    â€˜Yeah, I suppose.’
    â€˜Of course you do. That’s why we went travelling, isn’t it? To see something of the world, to make a difference.’
    â€˜I thought you just wanted to try out the van.’
    â€˜Oh, come on. I had bigger ideas than that.’
    â€˜Not till the van broke down and we turned up here, you didn’t.’ Gadiel grinned.
    â€˜Yeah, I did. But I knew you wouldn’t come if… Man, you see? I knew you’d be like this if I’d proposed a radical