Lovers and Newcomers (21 page)

They were in the sitting room at the cottage. It wasn’t a large room, and the possessions that they had brought with them from London crowded alongside Miranda’s holiday-home furnishings. There were framed graduation photographs of Sam and Toby, and even one of her wedding day. She was wearing a long dress and a short veil, and Amos was in morning dress. Trying to see it through Chris’s eyes she thought how conventional it must all look, and how deeply, deeply married. Prickles of discomfort and giddy anticipation ran up and down her spine. She was looking at her wedding-day self as if at someone she had once talked to at a party and discovered she had little in common with.

Amos drank a gin and tonic. Chris refused a beer or even a cup of tea. He apologized to Amos for the loss of the rest of the treasure. He said that it was very difficult to keep big discoveries like this one secret. There were always collectors who were avid for antiquities and criminals who were ready to steal to supply them.

He added that there was a glimmer of good news, at least for the Knights and their house. The grave had been so comprehensively ransacked and vandalized, there was little point in making a more detailed archaeological study. It was possible that the county archaeologist might order some further ground sampling across the wider site, but Chris and he were in agreement that the burial enclosure was likely to have been at a little distance from the main settlement and so it was unlikely that any more significant finds would be made.

He spoke quietly, unlike Amos.

Amos was still smarting from the showing he had made in the radio interview, but he was the opposite of subdued. He demanded to know why and how the news of the discovery had leaked out, and insisted that he was holding Dr Carr personally responsible.

‘As site director I am personally responsible, yes. But I think I can reassure you that none of our people leaked the information.’

Amos’s face reddened. ‘Are you implying that it might have been
me
? Or my wife, or any of us here? If you are drawing any such inference, I would advise you to be very careful of what you do say and to be quite certain that you could fully substantiate any such accusation.’

Katherine couldn’t look at him. Her feelings were in turmoil, but there was a level voice in her ear that she had heard before.

Do you admire your husband’s determination, or do you actually hate him?

Since they had come to live at Mead and she had been seeing him alongside Miranda and Selwyn and the others, she had felt a space opening between them. Amos’s energy was prodigious, yes, but it took no account of her or anyone else. He could be the living embodiment of selfishness, yet his drive to get what he wanted could still impress her. She was churned in his wake, taking her chances in the currents that swirled around him, but it took so much of her energy to keep their marriage above water. She was tired of all the effort involved. With a new detachment, she found herself wondering whether his girlfriends came to feel the same about him, or whether his force field of personal vigour was what attracted and held them. Maybe the latest one, or more correctly the one who had resisted him and caused all the trouble, possessed some equal but contradictory determination of her own.

She must do, Katherine decided. In the abstract, she could almost admire her.

‘I am not suggesting that at all,’ Chris was saying. His voice was still low.

He reminded them that the police were making their enquiries, and it wasn’t impossible that they might find whoever was responsible and eventually recover the treasure. He didn’t add that even that eventuality could not restore the archaeological context that was so important to him.

Katherine wished that Amos could be even faintly aware of the dimensions of anyone else’s loss, or of any concerns but his own.

‘I have been speaking to the senior police officer involved,’ Amos said, importantly. ‘I have asked him for information about what happens next.’

Chris was gathering himself to leave. Don’t go, Katherine longed to say, even though she also wanted nothing more than for this excruciating meeting to be over.

‘Once the police have finished their investigation, we’ll probably only need a few more days, a week at the most, on the site. You’ll want to let your contractor know about that,’ Chris said as he stood up.

‘If I can get them to bloody well come back again this side of Christmas,’ Amos rejoined.

She shook hands with Chris. ‘See you again, Mrs Knight,’ he smiled at her.

While Amos was hustling their visitor to the door, the phone rang.

‘K, it’s Mirry. Come over later and watch the news? We’re on, apparently. Unless anything bigger than the stolen treasure of Mead happens in the meantime.’

‘All right,’ Katherine said.

Amos tramped in again. ‘Christ Almighty. When is this ever going to end?’

He poured himself another drink and sat down.

After dinner the six of them gathered in front of Miranda’s television. Colin had made an omelette and a salad for himself and Miranda, Polly and Selwyn had eaten a microwaved meal from the stock of them laid on in the barn, while Katherine had silently cooked a pork fillet with braised fennel for Amos, followed by a rather good piece of Ticklemore cheese.

‘Aren’t you eating?’ he had asked, glancing across at her empty plate.

‘I’m not very hungry.’

There wasn’t quite enough room for them all to sit. Selwyn arranged himself on the floor, resting his back against Miranda’s shins. She could see the grey hairs spiralling from the crown of his head, sprinkled in with the black.

‘Do you remember how we used to watch
Top of the Pops
, every week, without fail?’ Polly laughed. It had been a regular television date. They crammed into someone’s room and shook the static out of a portable aerial to discover which record was that week’s number one.

‘Babs was the real number one,’ Selwyn sighed.

‘The number one what?’

‘Pan’s Person,’ Amos and Selwyn chorused.

After the main news came the point where the newsreader twinkled, ‘Time to join our news teams where
you
are.’

‘Get on with it,’ Selwyn shouted at the screen.

‘Stop talking, I can’t hear,’ Katherine said. In a minute Chris might appear on the screen and she didn’t want to miss one tenth of a second of him.

The third item in the regional bulletin was the Meddlett story. A young woman in a trench coat, standing with the screened excavation and the copse in the background, was urgently describing to camera how the Iron-Age burial site had been uncovered in the course of construction work.

‘Look, it’s our field,’ Miranda exclaimed, sitting further forward.

‘So it is. Not Peru at all,’ Colin teased.

‘Please, hush,’ Katherine begged.

The reporter announced that last night thieves armed with metal detectors had attacked this secret location (‘Not that secret any longer, is it?’ Amos snorted), overpowered a guard, and made off with a major haul of gold and other priceless archaeological remains.

Then Chris appeared.

Katherine leaned forward, causing Polly, who was squeezed on the sofa next to her, to give her a curious glance.

‘This is a serious loss,’ Chris said. His face filled the screen.

He described how the rare quality of the two pieces already recovered indicated that this was the grave of a great tribal leader. Even if the stolen items were recovered, he said, the opportunity to learn about the history of the burial, and the life of the people who had committed their chief and her treasure to the ground, was now lost for ever. They all listened. Neither Amos nor Selwyn attempted a dismissive joke.

Katherine settled very slowly back against the cushions. She realized that the tight feeling in her chest, the sensation of breathlessness, was
pride
.

‘He did that well,’ Miranda said as the news anchor replaced Chris. Her face creased with vivid concern. ‘I wish those pieces hadn’t been taken from here. Now no one knows where they’ll end up. Philadelphia, or Munich, or just a bank vault. It’s a violation.’

‘Maybe it will all be recovered,’ Katherine said quietly.

The phone rang yet again. Colin was nearest. ‘Shall I?’ he asked Miranda.

‘Another journalist?’ she wondered.

‘Mead House. Hello,
Joyce
? Is that you? How good to hear you. Yes, yes, this is Colin. I’m well, thank you. Yes. I know, we’ve just been watching it. Of course, yes, she’s right here. Hold on.’

He held out the receiver to Miranda.

‘Your mother.’

‘Oh, holy moly, I know I should have called her,’ Miranda murmured as she took it. ‘Mum? Mum, hello? Listen, I
am
speaking up. Are you all right? What’s happened? I was going to call you in the morning, I thought this would be too late for you.’

Joyce Huggett, on the other hand, was audible to all of them. She must have been shouting at the top of her voice. ‘Too late? It’s ten thirty-five, Barbara. I’m eighty-six, not six.’

Selwyn laughed. ‘Joyce, you’re going to see us all off,’ he called out.

‘You’ve got Selwyn with you. I can hear his voice. What’s happening down there? You’re not back with him again?’

She had forgiven him, in the end, for jilting her only child. Over the years Joyce had shown more interest in Selwyn’s doings than in any of Miranda’s other friends, even her eventual husband.

Three of them snuffled with laughter. Miranda frowned at them.

‘Mum, you’ve forgotten. Polly and Selwyn live here nowadays. In the barn.’

‘The barn? How uncomfortable. Won’t you let them in the house?’

‘Of course they come in the house. They’re here right now.’

Joyce’s confusion could be selective. Certainly her deafness was. Whatever the case Miranda tried never to argue with or even contradict her mother, not any longer. That had been the pattern for too many years. She hurried on, ‘Are you all right? Are you taking your pills?’

Joyce ignored her. ‘Susan Palmer rang me, five minutes ago. You remember Susan?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Yes, you do. She married my cousin who died of an asthma attack before he turned forty. After Kenneth died she had a terrible time. Luckily for her she took up with a dentist in the end, and they moved to King’s Lynn. He’s retired now, of course.’

‘What did she call you about?’ Miranda asked patiently.

‘Who?’

‘Susan Palmer.’

‘I’m about to tell you, Barbara. Don’t rush me. She rang to say she heard something about Mead on her local news. What’s going on?’

‘You might have told me,’ Joyce complained, as soon as Miranda finished telling her.

Joyce still lived alone, near to where she had grown up and spent most of her life, in a small block of council sheltered accommodation. She had refused many times to move closer to Mead, although she sometimes agreed to a visit. Her dogged independence, as her old friends and her health and memory slowly deserted her, was what she clung to.

‘I know, Mum. I’m sorry. It’s been a stupid day. Shall I drive up and see you? I could come tomorrow.’

‘I’ve my chiropody appointment tomorrow.’

‘Well, the day after? Or why don’t you come here and stay? I could easily pick you up and bring you over.’

The others were leaving. As always, when Selwyn left the room he seemed to take some of the light and warmth with him. Katherine went quietly in Amos’s wake. Colin remained, sitting at one end of the sofa watching
Newsnight
with the volume off.

Miranda could clearly see her mother as she would be now, in her small living room with her large telly dominating the stuffy space, a cup of milky tea with biscuit crumbs in the saucer, her potted plants on the windowsill and the newspaper folded on the tablecloth. As a result she felt the usual awkward weight of guilty sympathy, and a prickly, inarticulate love that seemed to have revealed itself too late and was too unwieldy to admit.

‘I don’t know. I don’t feel like making plans,’ Joyce was mumbling.

She could swing in seconds from irritability to what sounded in Miranda’s ears like something close to despair.

‘All right, Mum,’ Miranda soothed.

Joyce agreed that she might think of a visit to Mead, maybe in a week or so when her feet weren’t hurting so much.

‘That’s good,’ Miranda said. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow, after the chiropodist’s been. Are you going to bed now?’

‘Bed? Why? What time is it?’

‘Don’t worry.’

‘Say hello to Selwyn from me,’ Joyce shouted, before she hung up.

Colin held out his arms. Miranda folded herself beside him and he rested his chin on her hair.

‘Old age is horrible,’ Miranda murmured.

They were not old, not yet, and the towering confidence of their generation had been such that they had not expected the indignity to befall them. Gathering at Mead, occupying themselves with their houses, and their changing relationships to one another and the world, was an act of defiance. But across a gulf of time, the Warrior Princess and Joyce Huggett both demonstrated the futility of that defiance.

In the Griffin, the last of the evening’s handful of customers were filtering away. Kieran sat in the window with the remains of a pint of cider, while Vin collected dirty glasses. Kieran had only slipped in in time for last orders, to avoid making himself the target of any more village questioning. He was finding it difficult to steer a course between his professional obligations, which he took seriously, and having been born and brought up in Meddlett. Even his own mother had been on at him all evening, trying to get him to tell her what was really going on with the treasure up at Mead. He had said he only knew what was on the news, which was a lie evident to both of them. Luckily his brother Damon was nowhere to be seen. The only person he really had to see was Jessie, which was why he was here.

She came in from the kitchen, in her black work top and trousers, now covered by a stained apron. She carried an aerosol spray and a cloth with her and she began spritzing and shining the tables. She ignored him until all the other tables were done. He lifted his now empty glass, to indicate that she could do this one too.