Black skies would have made a more fitting backdrop, some monstrous winter storm that tore the house from its foundations, but as it transpired the moment he’d been dreading for twenty-five years came on a still, gentle morning in May.
Well, not the moment exactly, but the precursor of it. The beginning of the end.
It was the weekend and he and Beth were at the kitchen table in their pyjamas, drinking coffee and scrolling through the news on their phones, when she exclaimed: ‘Yay, the council’s finally given the go-ahead for the trail! Dulcie’s literally just got the email. Isn’t that fabulous?’
‘The trail. Right.’ This was as much as he could muster before his body went into a kind of arrest, a frankly terrifying sensation, as if he might look down and see his limbs crumble to dust in front of him.
Get a grip, Alex. You knew this would happen.
Ever since that damn campaign was launched two years ago, it had only ever been a matter of time, for Beth’s com- padres – Dulcie and Samira and the rest of them – were typical thirty- and forty-something Silver Vale women and mostly mums, which was to say committed to the point of psychotic.
‘Persistence beat resistance in the end then,’ he said with an approximation of good cheer.
‘Always does, Alex. Always does.’
That had been one of the slogans of the trail committee: ‘Persistence Beats Resistance’. There’d been something differ-
ent to begin with – ‘Take Back the Track’, maybe – but once it became clear that the council were playing silly buggers, fighting talk prevailed and suddenly they were all Churchill…
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