Green Grass by Raffaella Barker Page A

praise, Laura often thinks he would cease to function.
    â€˜Mmmm, this is delicious,’ she says, half because it is true and half because she knows that Dolly and Fred will not be commenting on their food; instead, both are rolling it around their plates, Fred creating a mound of food in the middle, Dolly spreading hers into spaghetti waves like a nest around the rim of the plate. Fortunately, Inigo is discussing some final details for the torn-up paper event in Hyde Park, which is to be staged next week.
    â€˜We’ll have to have a press release saying that spring is officially late this year,’ he is telling Laura, ‘and that the equinox in March didn’t count because the weather was too bad. I don’t think anyone will mind, do you?’
    â€˜No one you know will mind,’ agrees Laura, ‘but let’s not make a big thing of it or we’re going to look arrogant and stupid.’
    Fred, who has given up toying with his food, tipping his chair back, humming a song and looking catatonically bored, perks up at this interchange.
    â€˜Could I come and help with the installation? Icould miss school if Mum wrote me a note. They said any projects I did outside school were good anyway.’
    This is just the sort of thing that cheers Inigo up, and he does not harbour grudges, particularly when he is receiving praise or attention. Grinning like the Cheshire Cat, licking his thumbs to remove the last traces of Parmesan cheese, he turns towards Fred. ‘Do you think you’d like to help? I’d love to know how you think we can spread the stuff. There is literally tonnes of it coming on trucks.’
    Suddenly Fred and Inigo are talking loudly across the table. Both of them have pushed their plates aside, and they are an advertisement for a perfect father and son act. Wondering if she will ever become used to the schizophrenic speed with which children – and of course Inigo – can mood swing, Laura leaves them discussing whether to use shovels or a wind machine to disperse the paper across the park. Drifting into the kitchen, she makes a mental list of her own more mundane activities, the most important of which has only just occurred to her. The press will have a field day on art as litter unless she can contain this whole, hugely energetic display somehow. Imagine twenty tonnes of torn-up paper swirling on the April breeze. The mess will be appalling.
    Laura is at the sink, looking out at her smallhemmed-in garden, soft green in the April dusk, every plant dripping from the recent shower. A chaffinch dives out of the cherry blossom on the wall and into her mind flashes the long-ago image of the summer kitchen garden at Alf Harvey’s derelict house. The walls were tumbling on one side, but along the other three were planted huge, laden, espaliered cherry trees, and in her mind’s eye, Laura can see Guy up on a ladder draping them in fruit nets to keep the birds out. That’s what I need, she thinks suddenly, miles of fruit netting. I’ll ring Guy tomorrow and ask where to get it.
    Laura’s heart thuds as if she is making a clandestine plan. Why is the thought of making a call about fruit nets clandestine? And what about Guy? How will she get hold of him? It would be odd to ask Hedley for his telephone number. Maybe he’s in the book. She knows that Guy still farms the land around his father’s house, and lived nearby until the old man died. Now he lives in a watermill he converted near Crumbly village, and has turned the pastures around it into his thriving organic vegetable business. Laura knows what it looks like because Hedley had a brochure from Guy’s place in his study, complete with a small drawing of a pretty farmhouse set on the water. She tries to imagine life inside this picture-book house with Celia. But even imagining Celia herself presentsdifficulties. Laura cannot believe that Guy is married; she can’t really believe he