Lovers and Newcomers (31 page)

As they sat with their hands linked, silently watching the swirl of seawater filling the creeks, the broad skies and silent empty marshes stretching around them seemed their own country.

Miranda waited by her mother’s hospital bed until Joyce finally fell asleep.

The GP, when she came, had been concerned about her breathing and the rising fever. An ambulance was called, and in the A & E department a diagnosis of pneumonia had been followed by a long wait for an in-patient bed to become free. When they finally reached it it was in a mixed ward full of mute, waxen old people and the sound of despairing coughing. Joyce held on to Miranda’s hand, saying very little.

The medical staff reported that she was weak, but not in immediate danger. A mask was fixed over her face and drips were connected to her blue arms.

Once she was definitely asleep Miranda slipped away, saying to the nurses that she would collect some of her mother’s belongings from home and bring them in for her. Back at the flat she took a tartan zipped suitcase down from the top of the wardrobe and blew a layer of dust off the lid. Guessing, she opened cupboards and found two nighties, underwear, a cracked washbag that she filled with toiletries from the bathroom. In the bottom drawer of the chest lay the cashmere cardigan jacket that Miranda had given her for her last birthday, still folded in the shop’s tissue paper. She packed the fleece dressing gown that hung behind the bedroom door and collected a pair of trodden-down slippers from the rug beside the bed. She stood for a moment with these in her hands, studying the imprint of her mother’s bare feet. The dark impression of heel and toes in beige fur-fabric was too intimate to be handled comfortably, just as it felt intrusive to be searching and selecting from amongst these predictable belongings. It was like going through the private possessions of a stranger who happened also to be her mother.

She put in the paperback novel – a historical romance – that was lying on the bedside table and zipped up the suitcase with a sense of relief. Everything in the flat was tidy and fairly clean, but the clothes and furniture and the few other items, from china knick-knacks to pot-bound house plants and a small row of paperbacks, all had the air of being perfunctorily assembled, as if their owner had lost interest in them as well as in the wider world. The flimsiness of this place of her mother’s, a temporary perch only a few wingbeats from the end of a long flight, made Miranda feel deeply sad. Not for the first time, she vowed to overcome Joyce’s blank refusals and make her come to live with her at Mead. In the cottage now occupied by Katherine and Amos, perhaps, if she refused to surrender her independence altogether.

There was nothing else here, as far as she could see, that Joyce might need for a short stay in hospital. Miranda carried the case out into the hall and made a quick check of doors and windows. She would be coming back later, to spend the night. This was where she would stay until Joyce was discharged. The houseman who admitted her had said antibiotics should bring the pneumonia under control, and if she could stay free of hospital infections she would recover quite quickly. As she glanced into the kitchen, her mobile rang. It was six o’clock. Through the lit window of the flat opposite, Miranda could see a very old woman, tottering in minute steps across the bright backdrop of her kitchen.

Glancing at the display she said, ‘Katherine? Hello?’

‘Yes, it’s me. Where are you, Mirry?’

‘At my mother’s.’

She explained what had happened and why she would be away from Mead for a few days. Katherine’s voice was warm with sympathy.

‘No,’ Miranda answered, ‘thanks. Nothing you can do. Everything should be all right in the house, and Colin’s back in a few days. Wait, though – you could just mention to Polly and Selwyn what’s happened?’

‘I’ll do that. Go on. Off you go back to the hospital.’

Miranda almost rang off, but she remembered just in time to ask if Katherine had called for any reason. There was a second’s silence before her reply. No, she said. Nothing important. Just hi.

They said goodbye. Miranda took the tartan suitcase out to her car.

Katherine sat in the bedroom at the cottage. What had seemed straightforward and inevitable this morning on the beach had now become dark and convoluted. She had been going to confide in Miranda, had even worked out the exact words she would use. The notion had been to confirm the reality of what she was doing by telling another person, but this was the way things happened. You got so immersed in your own concerns that you started thinking of other people almost as cardboard cut-outs to be moved about in the unfolding drama but then – chasteningly – you were reminded that they were busy on their own stage. Katherine was fond of Joyce, and hoped that she would soon be better. She was also concerned for Miranda herself, whom she knew to be troubled by the awkwardness of her relationship with her mother. Katherine’s own gentle, conventional mother had died of breast cancer ten years ago.

In any case, she decided now, her decision to speak to Miranda had probably only been a delaying tactic. Perhaps she had been hoping that her friend would dissuade her, tell her that she mustn’t do anything of the kind – was that it?

One thing she did know: she wasn’t going to approach Polly in the same way. Because there was something wrong between Polly and Selwyn, too. He was brittle and irritable with everyone, and cutting to Polly herself, whereas Polly had developed a kind of mute, imploring meekness around him that she was too clever to wear comfortably.

It isn’t until you come to live in each other’s pockets like this that you start to see all the cracks, Katherine thought. Miranda with her love and vivacity had convinced them that Mead would be the place where they could start to grow old, and Amos had taken the proposal and decorated it with his grand designs. She had gone along with his notions, because that was what she did, and to her surprise she had been the one who had been woken up by the change.

But it didn’t look now as if they would be seeing out as much as a season of the great Mead plan together. Katherine was sorry that out of all of them she was going to be the one who began the retreat.

When she came into the cottage, having said goodbye to Chris next to their parked cars on the beach road, Amos was sitting in an armchair with the whisky decanter at his elbow. She passed by him without speaking, and he had ignored her. Separately, in the hours that she had been out, they had been moving towards the crisis. Amos was no fool. He was intuitive, in his own bull-headed way, and he’d know that today had a different dimension from any of their previous crises, serious though some of them had been. Now she could hear him moving about downstairs, banging against furniture and shouldering through doorways.

If she didn’t go and confront him soon he would bring the fight upstairs to her.

She found him in the kitchen. He had shaken fresh ice out of the ice tray and there were cubes melting on the floor. His face was dark red.

‘Why do you have to drink so much?’ she asked in exasperation.

Amos had never been a drunk. But since he had been asked either to leave his chambers or face a harassment charge – the pearl-handled revolver no-option option, as he bitterly called it – he had been starting earlier and earlier in the day.

‘Because I’m fucking miserable, and it helps,’ he snarled.

His pain was so obvious that she put her hand out to him, exactly as if he were one of the boys come home from school with a problem that she could solve. For all these years her role had been to soothe and comfort these three men, and now she was going to be the cause of their suffering.

Amos shook it off. ‘Don’t minister to me. Don’t do your bloody concerned thing. I’ll just get on with it, thanks.’

‘All right.’ She took a cloth and mopped up the melted ice. He stumbled past her into the living room and flopped into his chair. She followed, and stood in front of him. She felt slightly ill with apprehension, and self-disgust. It would have been so much easier to go upstairs to the second bedroom and climb into bed. In the morning Amos would be sober, and they could pretend that what was wrong was not significant, and nothing much would change, and so she would hold on to the life she knew instead of reaching for the one she wanted.

It was remembering the brave, determined picture of herself that she had painted for Chris that made her hold her resolve.

There is a lot of ground I have to cover. I have to do it on my own.

Oh, please. Who did she think she was? Joan of Arc?

But she
had
said it.

‘Amos, I’m going to London tonight.’

‘What the hell for?’

He looked at her from under thickened eyelids. He knew what was coming, but he was going to make her say it.

‘I’m leaving you.’

He swirled his glass and threw down another inch of whisky. Then he laughed.

‘Why? Haven’t I earned enough money to keep you happy?’

She did him the favour of ignoring the question. ‘Amos, you say you’re miserable. Hasn’t it ever crossed your mind that I might be too?’

He laughed again, with desolation cracking his face. ‘If you are, we’ve got more in common than I thought. You seem to me as happy as a cow in clover.’

‘I meant, I’m miserable being married to you.’

A tide of terrible delight was rising in Katherine. It was such a relief to utter these irrevocable words. She had never even breathed such a thing to him before.

Amos recoiled, exactly as if she had struck him. A dull flush rose from his throat to his cheeks, reddening his contused face still further. He looked down at his empty glass, then back at his wife, all the time swinging his head from side to side in a confused attempt to shake away the onset of pain. She stood very still, amazed to have reached this point so rapidly, and appalled by her capacity to hurt him. The brief delight was already dying within her.

He was groping for words, but for once his lawyerly fluency deserted him. All that came out was a howl as he bellowed at her.

‘Go on then. Fuck off.’

He turned his back and blundered off to the kitchen in search of more whisky.

Katherine went upstairs and collected together a very few of her belongings. She noted, in a detached corner of her racing mind, that out of so many clothes and jewels and pairs of shoes there was nothing much she wanted to take with her. Her almost-empty overnight bag banged against her calves as she descended again.

Tumbler in hand, Amos had placed himself between her and the front door. She thought that he might physically oppose her, even lash out, but she kept walking. He stood his ground and in the end she had to push past him, keeping her face averted. He put his free hand out to restrain her, but she shook it off.

‘Katherine…’ he began as the door opened on wet darkness.

‘No,’ she heard herself say. A small, hard, cold snap of a monosyllable.

Then she was outside, crossing the cobbles to the yard gate. Her Audi was tucked out of sight behind Selwyn and Polly’s barn, where they all parked their cars. As the gate clinked shut behind her she heard his footsteps on the slippery stone. He stumbled and slid, half-falling with a heavy crash against the stone wall.

The pain must have unleashed his rage. He began yelling after her. She caught only a few of the words.

They were obscene and ugly and jagged with despair.

Katherine reached her car, flung in the bag and collapsed into the driver’s seat. She reversed too fast, spun the wheel and skidded towards the driveway, crunching the forward wheel arch against a stone gatepost at the back of the barn as she did so. The clang of metal barely registered on her. She righted the car and accelerated under the arch of bare trees, out into the lane, and away towards Meddlett and London.

Tears were pouring down her face.

Selwyn and Polly stopped work and glanced at each other. Selwyn had been varnishing wood, and the windows were open to allow fumes to escape. He rested his brush on the open tin and as he did so the crunch of Katherine’s collision with the gatepost was audible from the other side of the barn.

Polly slowly descended from a stepladder. Neither of them spoke. The miasma of the Knights’ scene bled in through all the cracks and chinks of the building and occupied the room with them. Selwyn took his brush to the sink and rinsed it in white spirit, then stuck it in a jar. Polly pretended to be examining her making good, but she was hoping that Selwyn would say something. Anything would have done: a murmur of concern for their friends, or one of his caustic comments about Amos, perhaps even an admission that problems took many forms and a reference to Nic’s pregnancy. Predictably Selwyn had greeted that piece of news with dismay, and irritation at Ben’s lack of common sense.

But the silence extended. Selwyn couldn’t keep still. He walked from the sink to the alcove where his tools were stacked, back again to the sink, then to the front door, which he yanked open. He avoided looking at Polly.

Amos must have retreated to the cottage. The curtains there were drawn, and the main house was in darkness.

It was cold in the barn with the door and windows standing open. The clutter of building materials and dirty mugs and stacked planks was dispiriting. It was one thing to tackle the restoration of a wreck of a house aged thirty, full of energy and the desire to make a home for babies, but at almost sixty it was a different matter. They were too dejected and divided, Polly thought sadly. Selwyn stared at the windows of the house, as if he were willing them to blink alive with light. She watched him, but her neck and shoulders were tense with the readiness to look elsewhere as soon as he moved. He had started complaining that she was always staring at him.

‘I’m going over to see if Amos is all right,’ he muttered. He didn’t give Polly time to answer. She folded the stepladder with a bleak clank of the metal struts and leaned it against the wall.

Amos opened the door and jerked his head to signal Selwyn inside. The television was on, turned up very loud. Selwyn shouted over it that he’d have wine, not whisky, and took the overfilled glass that Amos unsteadily handed him. They sat down in armchairs and watched Chelsea score a goal against Sheffield Wednesday.