If at First

danglinghuge cascades of purple and white trumpet-flowers from stark skeletal boughs.
    He’d spent long hours renovating the estate for the first three years after he moved in, putting in new plants – angel trumpets, figs, ficus, palms, lilies, silk oaks, cedars, even a small orange grove at the rear: a hurried harlequin quilt thrown over the brown fungal rot of decay. The first two years after the temperature peaked were the worst. Grass survived, of course, and some evergreen trees, but the sudden year-round heat wiped out entire ecological systems right across the country. Arable land suffered the least; farms, and the new kibbutzes, adapted readily enough, switching to new varieties of crops and livestock. But that still left vast tracts of native countryside and forests and city parks and village greens looking like battlefields scoured by some apocalyptic chemical weapon.
    Repairs were uncoordinated, a patchwork of gross contrasts. It made travelling interesting, though.
    Greg and Eleanor emerged from the spinney into a rectangular clearing which sloped down to the water. The dying bonfire illuminated a semicircle of twenty small chalets, and a big stone building at the crest.
    ‘You live here?’ Eleanor asked, in a very neutral tone.
    ‘Yes,’ he agreed cautiously. The chalets had been built by an ambitious time-share company in conjunction with a golf course running along the back of the spinney, and a grandiose clubhouse/hotel perched between the two. But the whole enterprise was suddenly bumped out of business thanks to the PSP’s one-home law. The chalets were commandeered, the golf course returned to arable land, and the hotel transformed into thirty accommodation modules.
    Greg always thought the country had been bloody lucky the PSP never got round to a one-room law. The situation had become pretty drastic as the oceans started to rise. The polar melt plateaued eventually, but not before it displaced two million people in England alone.
    ‘I never asked,’ she said. ‘What is it you do?’
    He chuckled. ‘Greg Mandel’s Investigative Services, at your service.’
    ‘Investigative services? You mean, like a private detective? Angus told me you had a gland.’
    ‘That’s right. Of course it was nothing formal in the PSP decade. I didn’t go legit until after the Second Restoration.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Public ordinance number five seven five nine, oblique stroke nine two. By order of the President: no person implanted with a psi-enhancement gland may utilize their psi ability for financial gain. Not that many people could afford a private eye anyway. Not with Leopold Armstrong’s nineteenth-century ideology screwing up the economy. Bastard. I was also disbarred from working in any State enterprise, and social security was a joke, the PSP apparatchiks had taken it over, head to toe, by the time I was demobbed. Tell you, they didn’t like servicemen, and Mindstar veterans were an absolute no-go zone. The Party was running scared of us. As well they might.’
    ‘How did you manage?’
    ‘I had my Army pension for a couple of years after demob.’ He shrugged. ‘The PSP cancelled that soon enough. Fifth Austerity Act, if I recall rightly. I got by. Rutland’s always had an agriculture-based economy. There’s plenty of casual work to pick up on the farms, and the citrus groves were a boon; that and a few cash-only cases each year, it was enough.’
    Her face was solemn. ‘I never even saw any money until I was thirteen.’
    He put his arm round her shoulder, giving a little reassuring shake. ‘All over now.’
    She smiled with haunted eyes, wanting to believe. His arm remained.
    ‘Here we are,’ he said, ‘number six,’ and blipped the lock.
    The chalet’s design paid fleeting homage to the ideal of some ancient Alpine hunting lodge, an overhanging roof all along the front creating a tiny veranda-cum-porch. But its structure lackedgenuine Alpine ruggedness: prefab sections which looked like stout red-bark logs from the outside were now rotting badly, the windows had warped under the relentless assault of the new climate’s heat and humidity, there was no air-conditioning, and the slates moulted at an alarming rate in high winds. The sole source of electricity was a solar-cell strip which Greg had pasted to the roof. However, the main frame was sound; four by four hardwood timber, properly seasoned. He could never understand why that should be, perhaps the building inspectors