Lovers and Newcomers (12 page)

‘Mirry, let’s promise each other this minute in front of witnesses that whatever happens, this land business and prince business and the skulls and archaeology drama will not compromise our friendship. I solemnly promise there will be no tearoom, and certainly no fudge. Can you forgive me for happening to own the little acreage under which the bones have turned up?’

Miranda had never been immune to the force of his deliberate charm.

She answered solemnly, ‘I promise, too. And there’s nothing to forgive. The prince belongs to Mead itself, regardless of whose bit of turf he’s lying beneath. That’s what Jake would say.’

‘I wish he were here, too,’ Amos said. He sketched a sort of kiss in her direction and went back to his seat. Smiling dangerously over the rim of his glass, Selwyn studied him.

Polly’s mobile rang. She took it out and inspected the display.

‘Omie, hello darling. Are you all right?’

‘Doesn’t anyone else want another drink?’ Selwyn called out.

‘Yes, that’s Dad.’ Polly glanced up. ‘Sorry, all.
No
, Omie, that’s not what I meant. Of course I’m not apologizing to anyone for you ringing me. What’s the matter? Wait a minute.’ She got up and went out into the hall. They could hear her talking, and then she moved further away. Selwyn let his chair crash forward on to all four legs.

Katherine carried dishes to the sink, then leaned to look out into the yard. It was raining hard, and puddles glimmered in the porch light from their wing. Polly and Selwyn’s side was a darker slab of darkness.

‘Pretty bleak for the guard,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t like to be out there with only the dead for company, would you?’

‘They’re not going to come back,’ Colin said.

Miranda broke in, ‘No. Except, in a way they have, haven’t they? We’re thinking about them, peering down the centuries, dressing them in our minds in their necklaces and attaching stories to their lives and deaths. I can’t get that child’s skull and ribs out of my head.’

Amos took Katherine’s arm. ‘Come on, old girl. History’s all bones. We’re going to bed now.’

The Knights went out into the yard. Colin collected up his book and laptop, and said goodnight. Selwyn and Miranda were left alone.

‘Barb,’ Selwyn began softly, in the voice that he used only for her.

‘No.’

His mouth curled, making him look dangerous again. ‘Is that no generally, as a blanket edict, or in relation to something specific?’

Since the bathroom day, Miranda had avoided being alone with him. Now the possibility that Polly might step back into the room at any moment held her in a bubble of tension. Each of her senses was amplified. Miranda could imagine so vividly what it would be like if he left his chair, took her in his arms and put his mouth to the hollow formed by her collarbone, that it was as if he had actually done it. She swallowed, her mouth dry.

‘Just no,’ she whispered.

‘I want to touch you.’

‘I know.’

They listened to the rain.

‘What shall we do?’ he asked, as much of himself as to her.

‘We’ll live here at Mead, value our friendships, and get old together.’

There was a shocking crash as Selwyn’s glass hit the red tiles at his feet and smashed into fragments. Neither of them could have said for certain whether he had thrown it or accidentally let it fall.

‘I don’t want to get old.’

There was so much vehemence and bitterness in his voice that it frightened her. ‘I don’t want to hear any more about death. Jake’s dead, Stephen’s dead. There are skeletons at the bottom of the fucking garden. What happened to the fairies, then? I want to live now, Mirry. I want
you
.’

‘I know,’ she whispered again.

If Polly hadn’t come in at that moment, she would have gone to him.

‘That was Omie,’ Polly said. She flipped her phone shut.

‘Was it?’ Selwyn sounded dazed.

‘I just said it was. There’s broken glass all over the floor.’

He sighed. ‘I dropped my drink.’

‘Probably just as well.’ Polly had already gone for the dustpan. He took it from her and roughly swept up the broken pieces. Miranda stood up, very stiffly, as if all her joints hurt.

‘It’s been an interesting day, hasn’t it? I’m going to bed. Sleep well, you two,’ she said.

Polly and Selwyn lay on their bed under the tarpaulin. Water dripped steadily above their heads and ran off into an enamel bowl. The various drips into various receptacles around the room sounded like an elaborate piano exercise.

‘Are you ready?’ Selwyn asked.

‘Yes.’

He leaned up on one elbow, his shadow looming grotesquely on the opposite wall. He fiddled for a moment with the knob and then turned out the gas lamp. The mantle glowed red for two seconds and then they were in darkness.

‘Were you and Miranda arguing?’ Polly asked.

‘No.’

She waited, but he didn’t add anything.

She was intensely conscious of her heavy thigh and the six inches that separated their two bodies. If Selwyn and Miranda hadn’t been arguing there was something else going on, and that possibility worried her much more than routine squabbling. History meant that there was always a buried connection between the two of them, but Polly was beginning to realize that she had underestimated the pull of it. Living here as closely as they did, seeing each other constantly, was disinterring the ancient foundations.

The dripping seemed to grow louder, as if the drops were hitting her skull.

‘I’m concerned about Omie,’ she said at length, casting her fears in a less threatening mould.

Selwyn gave an impatient twitch. ‘That’s nothing very new. What is it this time?’

‘She’s angry with us. We’ve sold their home, moved up here. She says it’s as if we’ve abandoned them.’

There were five drips, then six. Three of them came very close together, almost as one.

‘Poll, our children are all adults. We’ve brought them to this point, healthy and educated and relatively normal. Or you have, mostly, I’m not claiming any particular glory for it. But we’ve got to let them live their own lives, now, and in the future. You can’t be their guardian and safety net for ever. Even you can’t do that.’

‘I could. Isn’t that what parents are meant to do?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Omie says she thinks there’s something up with Ben. Alph does, as well.’

Despite her anxiety, Polly felt drowsiness beginning to smother her. She was always tired, these days. She knew that her voice had taken on a meandering quality.

As if from a long way off she heard Selwyn say, in an impatient mutter, ‘If there’s something up with Ben, as Omie says, then we’ll hear about it.’

‘Yes,’ Polly finally agreed. She turned on to her side, away from him.

Selwyn lay on his back, unmoving.

FOUR

Gardening makes me think of Jake.

He’s here in all the stones and shadows of Mead – or rather his absence is, because rational recall often fails me and I look up expecting to see him, only to experience all over again a miniaturized spasm of shock and loss – but it is the garden that contains the most vivid memories.

The first time he brought me here, when we were newly in love and I could still hardly believe that there were no obstacles to our being together for ever, we sat against the wall of the house, over there on the wrought-iron bench where my discarded jacket and gardening apron now lie. It was the end of May, and the bricks were warm with the day’s sunshine. There were sprays of thick cream roses arching off the walls, and wood pigeons noisy in the trees.

‘Could you live here?’ Jake asked me.

It was like being asked if I thought I could endure Paradise.

‘You’re an urban woman,’ he said, when I asked why he doubted it. ‘You might get bored here with me. You might feel isolated from London, from acting and all the people you know and the life you’re used to.’

I told him that I loved him, and the only life I wanted was with him, and that was the truth.

I was turning forty and Jake was already sixty. I had had a modest success as a stage actress, but I knew that I was never going to be as good as a dozen of my contemporaries. Hollywood casting directors were never going to come calling. I had had numerous boyfriends and lovers after my first and only fiancé, Selwyn, but this sense of rightness with a man, of there being nothing to qualify or redeem in our relationship, was absolutely new to me.

Jake had been briefly married in his thirties but there had been no children, and his wife seemed to have made little impression on the house or indeed on him. After that, I assumed, there would have been girlfriends; after all I had met Jake at that most unpromising of romantic opportunities for a single woman, a dinner party given by a couple I had met on holiday. He had singled me out, and the next evening we went out to dinner on our own. It was hardly likely that I was the first to receive this sort of attention from him, but I believed him when he promised me that I would be the last.

Although he didn’t bring me here immediately I learned very quickly, just from the way he talked about it, that Jake was inseparable from Mead. And as soon as he did invite me and I began to know the place, I understood why.

He was offering me himself, and he didn’t do it lightly.

We sat on the wrought-iron bench and listened to the birds. The sun slowly sank, the bricks glowed as if they radiated their own light, and Jake turned to me.

‘Could you be a country wife, do you think?’

Yes, I told him.

It was not an isolated existence, in any case. My old friends and their children came to visit us. Even my mother came from time to time. She liked staying at Mead, and she and Jake got on well together even though she tended to make barbed remarks on the lines of some people not knowing they were born, and how iniquitous it was that ninety per cent of the land in this country belonged to less than ten per cent of the people.

Jake was more than equal to her. ‘Quite agree with you, Joyce,’ he used to nod. ‘It’s a lousy system. Getting rid of land, that’s what the Meadowes have been about for the last hundred and fifty years.’

She would laugh, impatient but disarmed.

I didn’t exactly choose not to involve myself in village affairs, but that was what happened. As Jake’s wife and the chatelaine of Mead I was in any case outside the circle of Meddlett women who gossiped about local events at a level of detail I couldn’t be bothered to absorb. Inevitably there were the sly hints and whispers about Jake, too, and his local affairs before we met. I didn’t want to hear any of these.

The women probably thought I was standoffish; it was true that I found the coffee mornings and book groups tedious and repetitive. There were a few county couples with whom we had dinner, but I didn’t play tennis or ride horses and so those women soon overlooked me. Jake also had his own circle of friends, mostly men of his own age who enjoyed fishing and bird-watching and were interested in land management and country politics, and he continued to involve himself with the parish council and the village church.

I found that I was happy and entirely fulfilled in the peaceful world Jake and I inhabited together. If I wanted a change of scenery I went to London, to the theatre or shopping, or just to gossip with Katherine or Colin or any one of a dozen other friends. Sometimes I even felt resentful when local commitments took up too much of Jake’s time. He did say he wished I would participate more, and so for several years we hosted Meddlett’s November the Fifth party until the annual bacchanalia finally got out of hand.

While I reflect on all this I have been wielding the shears in snapping bursts, within a thicket of honeysuckle growth that is blocking the light into the dining-room window.

I lean back to judge the effect and out of the corner of my eye see a figure coming towards me. Once again memory plays its trick of elision and I think it is Jake in his old tweed coat. A companionable greeting, nothing as formal as a word, takes shape in my head, and then the nudge of reality makes me blink and duck.

‘Let me go up the ladder and do the top bit for you,’ Colin says.

An ache has developed between my shoulder blades so I hand him the shears in silence and wipe my forehead with the back of my gardening glove.

Colin works more methodically, disentangling the excess growth before clipping it back. I hold the stepladder with one hand, and listen to the rooks in the trees along the drive. Very quickly the top of the shrub looks disciplined while the sides that I have butchered bristle with snapped twigs and dying tendrils. He dismounts and touches my shoulder.

‘Don’t you have anyone to come in and do this for you?’

‘Am I so bad at it?’ I smile.

‘It’s a lot of work.’

I glance about trying to see the house and its setting through his eyes.

The roses and lavender need attention, it’s true, and there are weeds sprouting between broken stone slabs. Jake was a knowledgeable gardener, whereas I am only trying to keep the place looking cared for. I don’t employ a regular handyman, even for a few hours a week. This is partly because of the money, but mostly because I don’t want anyone else working amongst Jake’s flowers. Gardeners have strong ideas of their own. I might come out one evening and find the old roses replaced with those variegated evergreens, the kind that look like shiny oilcloth splashed with bleach.

There
are
days when Mead is too much, even though looking after it is my only job. Sometimes I count up and there are half a dozen light bulbs waiting to be replaced in three different rooms. Blocked gutters are sending rainwater chutes down the old walls, and doors have warped in the winter’s damp so they no longer close properly.

Sell up
, demon voices immediately whisper in my ear.
Move to a modern apartment, somewhere with underfloor heating and windows that don’t rattle
.

I shan’t do that, of course.

At other times, much more consistently, I know that I can – and will – do anything to keep it going.