Lovers and Newcomers (32 page)

Polly answered her phone, expecting it to be one of the twins but hoping it might be Ben with some news of Nic.

Katherine’s voice was shaking.

‘Where are you?’ Polly asked. ‘Are you all right?’

‘In a lay-by. Not really. I’ve left him.’

‘Is that for good, K?’

‘Yes. I’m really sorry.’

Polly asked her why on earth she was apologizing, and Katherine muttered something about not wanting to visit their problems on everyone else at Mead. Polly advised her with a touch of grimness that she shouldn’t waste too much time worrying about that.

She said quickly, ‘Listen, do you want me to come down to London and keep you company for a couple of days while you sort things out?’ The option became distinctly more appealing than staying in the barn.

Katherine said maybe, once she’d had some time to think, and Polly promised that she’d definitely come and would try to bring Mirry with her.

‘Tell you what. We’ll have a night out. Talk a lot and drink too many cocktails. It’ll be like old times.’

‘Miranda’s why I called, really. I forgot to give you a message from her.’

Katherine relayed the news about Joyce and why Miranda was so unusually absent from Mead.

‘Don’t be so concerned about everyone else all the time,’ Polly advised. ‘Save your energy for yourself, for once. And drive carefully, will you?’

Chelsea won three–nil. After the post-match analysis finished they watched the opening five minutes of a documentary. Amos stared fixedly at the screen.

‘Anything I can do?’ Selwyn asked.

Amos shook his head.

‘Is it serious?’ Selwyn persisted.

‘She’s left me.’

‘Christ. I’m sorry.’

Amos turned his head now. His eyes looked poached.

‘Are you?’

‘Yeah. Of course I am. You know.’

‘I know fuck all,’ Amos sighed. ‘Apparently.’

They watched the programme for a few more minutes, then Selwyn stood up. He put his hand briefly on Amos’s shoulder.

‘I’d get some sleep now, if I were you. It may all look quite different in the morning.’

‘What are you? Thought for the bloody Day?’

Selwyn shrugged and made for the door.

‘Sorry. I know you’re only trying to help,’ Amos muttered as he went.

‘That’s all right. You know where we are if you need anything.’

Polly made scrambled eggs and a pot of tea. She said nothing as Selwyn came in, but piled the eggs on the buttered toast and set a plate in front of him.

‘How is he?’ she asked later, when they had both finished eating.

‘Pissed. Angry.’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think it’s permanent?’

He did look at Polly now. Their eyes met across the cluttered table, and she realized with dismay crawling up her spine that her own future might not involve many more suppers or nights in the same bed as Selwyn. How had this happened, so suddenly and stealthily? Was it Miranda’s fault for recapturing Selwyn’s wandering attention, or her own, for not being someone different?

‘Yes, I do,’ she said sorrowfully.

She told him about Katherine’s call. Selwyn nodded, rubbing the flat of his hand up and down the back of his head so that dust fell in a shower. The bandage over the rocket burn had become a nuisance and now he wore just a pad of lint taped to the shaved skin where bristles of hair were already poking through. He looked so rumpled and familiar and dear to her that Polly got up and kissed his cheek. He didn’t respond, but nor did he push her away. Encouraged by this she mentioned, ‘I thought it was going to be Ben calling about Nicola.’

This did annoy him. He snapped, ‘Ben’s not a kid any more, you know. He’s got to sort out his own problems.’

Polly moved away. She told him the other piece of news, that Joyce had been taken to hospital and Miranda would be staying up there with her.

At once, Selwyn’s head jerked up so that he could see out of their new, tall windows to the main house.

He was searching for lights in the windows, willing them to shine. Polly saw it, and knew that he was wishing and longing for Miranda. She didn’t know what Miranda’s response might be, but the structure of long friendship and the foundations of the life they had planned at Mead now seemed built on quicksand.

She picked up the plates and cutlery and ferried them over to the sink. She did the washing up, using the small tasks to shield her dread. If Katherine and Amos’s long marriage could implode, what did the thirty years shared with Selwyn count for?

Ben’s words came back to her.
Keep your end up. Everyone needs something for themselves, Mum
. That’s what he had said, hadn’t he, more or less?

Everything she cared for and everything she owned, inextricably linked together, was tied up in this barn. That had been an unwise move, she now understood, and it had taken Ben, of all people, to point it out.

Sam and Toby

Like their father, the Knight boys were tall and well-built. In the tight confines of the Bloomsbury flat they gave the impression of needing to bend their necks and pin their elbows against their ribcages in order not to bump any extremities against the walls or the ceiling. Tonight this physical constraint was lent an extra dimension by their not knowing quite how to treat their mother. Going through the routines of cooking dinner, wrapped as usual in the faded Morris print apron that had seen service in several of their homes before this one, the sight of her was utterly familiar. But at the same time they had to couple this outward appearance of normality with the extraordinary fact that she had left their father, and was remaining calmly resistant to any suggestion that she might soon be ready to go back to him.

Katherine splashed wine into a sauté pan. Sam and Toby eyed her warily, holding themselves poised at the ready, as if her next move might be to play a bassoon solo or to open the window and hurl all the plates out into the street.

She opened a drawer and lifted out a sheaf of table mats.

‘Sam? Could you lay?’

‘Sure.’

‘Are we drinking wine? Toby, what would you like?’

‘Just a beer, thanks,’ he mumbled.

Over her head he exchanged a glance with Sam. It was a flash of mutual incomprehension, sharpened with embarrassment.

Katherine brought the dishes to the table and placed the open bottle of red wine on the silver coaster in the centre, making sure it was equidistant between the lit candles.

The boys helped themselves to food, their mother’s ever-excellent home cooking, and she poured herself a glass of wine.

‘Looks good,’ Sam commented, shaking out his napkin.

Katherine raised her glass to them.

The three of them had met separately, but this was the first time since the parents’ separation that they had all sat down together.

‘I don’t know what to propose,’ she said after a moment’s thought.

‘To our family,’ Toby said, with firm emphasis.

‘To us,’ Katherine amended, and they drank. ‘And to the future, whatever it is.’

Cutlery clinked as they settled down to eat, and through the drawn curtains muffled traffic noise seeped into the room.

‘Apropos of which,’ Sam began, after clearing his throat. ‘We want to talk to you, Mum. Not just for us but for Dad, as well.’

Their sons had been recruited, Katherine saw, into the movement to restore the status quo. Or more probably, to be fair to Amos, hadn’t been actively recruited but belonged to it naturally, because children – even adult children – wanted their parents to stay on the safe plateau of advanced middle age, preferably beaming side by side like the grey-haired bicycling couples on the back of porridge oats packets, leaving them free to enjoy their own more interesting lives. Children didn’t want to find the time and energy for worrying about awkward parental upheavals. Not if they didn’t have to.

The two of them kept exchanging glances. They had clearly worked out in advance what they might say to her, to cajole her back into the fold.

‘Go on,’ she said. Despite her intention to be attentive and receptive to whatever they had to say, because she loved them, a flicker of irritation rose within her. It burned higher because she did love them so much, flesh of her flesh. She took another sip of her wine, and waited.

‘Obviously it’s been difficult, with the move up to Mead and the house building being delayed and the publicity about the archaeological finds, and then the shock of the robbery,’ Toby offered. ‘Coming on top of the problem with Dad and the chambers. No wonder you feel unsettled.’

The irritation was already fading, replaced by her instinctive wish to make everything well for them again. Her conviction wavered.

‘I don’t know what I do feel,’ she confessed. ‘It’s confusing.’

Her younger son blinked. His mother was supposed to be just
there
, not to be battered by the winds of doubt or uncertainty.

How like Amos they both were. Studying their broad, flushed faces she could see their father’s certainty and confidence, and sense the mass of their shared male solidarity like granite under mountain turf.

‘We aren’t trying to tell you what to do, Mum. We just want to know what’s going on. To help, if we can. Dad’s fairly distraught. I’m sure you know that.’ This was Sam, always more diplomatic than his brother.

‘He wants you back home,’ Toby put in.

Katherine nodded.

‘Well?’ Toby persisted.

They were both eating quite heartily, she noticed. Her own plate lay untouched. Food had lost its importance lately, but wine was good. She cleared her throat.

‘I’m not going back.’

Saying it over their own dinner table with Amos’s empty chair facing her gave weight to the words. Sam reached out and put his hand over hers. A cow’s lick in his hair, above the right eyebrow, forever battled with his good haircut. An ancient chickenpox scar indented his forehead near the bridge of his nose.

‘Is it because of the other women?’

This was a bold acknowledgement. Sam and Toby both knew that their father had affairs, and Katherine knew that they knew, but they had never openly discussed it. In times of crisis the boys would put their arms around her shoulders more demonstratively than usual, and ask with extra emphasis if she needed any help with anything, but even when the threat of the harassment suit had compelled Amos to leave his chambers and initiated the whole process of removing to Mead, the subject had never been directly aired.

How English we are, she thought, and how conventional.

Even in their business suits as they were tonight, having come straight from work, her sons looked as if they ought to have a cricket bag or a pair of skis somewhere about them. They were decent, healthy, traditional men, slightly at odds with their own times. She had bred that conventional quality in them, she understood, and she felt a surge of compassion for them, as well as love. Their father was and always had been more outrageous and less forgivable.

She opened her eyes innocently wide. ‘What other women?’ It was an attempt to lighten the atmosphere by showing them that she wasn’t afraid to joke, but they both looked so appalled that she immediately felt sorry for being clumsy. She said quickly, ‘No, it’s not because of that. If it were, I’d have left long ago.’

Toby leaned forwards, steepling his fingers just as his father did.

‘Why, then?’

‘Why did I leave, or why am I not going back?’

‘Both. First one first.’

She drank some more wine. It had the effect of amplifying the rush of blood in her ears.

‘I left because being at Mead with Miranda and the others gave me an idea of how I might live differently from the way I have done up to now.’

They gazed at her, striving to decipher her meaning. She sliced a small portion of food, speared it with her fork and placed it in her mouth. It tasted of nothing. She chewed and swallowed, with difficulty.

‘Yet you’ve left Mead behind as well as Dad. Isn’t that a contradiction?’

Toby’s question was studiedly uninflected in tone.

‘Yes, I can see what you mean. I believed in the Mead idea and I’m really sorry to be the renegade. I wish it was working out the way Miranda dreamed, and I suppose it still could. Being there made me see myself differently, though, and you can’t unsee things once the light has gone on, can you?’ As gently as she could she added, ‘There is a completely different reason why I can’t go back.’

There was a second’s absolute silence. Even the traffic seemed stilled.

Neither of them would ask what the reason might be. Instead the table mats and candlestick bases seemed suddenly to become objects for close scrutiny. Her sons knew that she was about to say something they didn’t want to hear and would wish to have unsaid as soon as it was uttered, but Katherine had reached the point of truth and she clung to her conviction that it was time to speak it.

Into her head came the memory of the evening in Chris’s offices, when he had placed the torc about her neck and she had reached up to finger the heavy twists of metal as it lay against her skin. Some piece of alchemy had taken place and she had been transformed.

When their eyes had met and locked she hadn’t glanced away, or tried to apologize. She hadn’t even blushed. She had stared back at him, open as the excavated site, and leaping with life. She had been eager – greedy – and he had read that in her eyes and responded to her.

It struck her now that it was the first and only time in her life that she had felt no inhibitions.

It was at that moment that she had fallen in love with him. That was when, and that was what it was.

She was in love with Chris Carr and she wanted to be with him. She hadn’t seen him since their walk on the beach, they had only spoken briefly and inconclusively on the telephone, but now she wanted to leap out of her chair and rush to him. Under the table, out of sight, she clamped her fingers to the sides of her chair.

‘I have met someone else,’ she said. The drained words were hardly adequate, but to her sons she couldn’t give them the proper emphasis.

Sam and Toby weren’t glancing at each other now. Shocked, they looked straight back at her. They didn’t want to believe what she was telling them. She was their mother, not a women’s magazine feature on midlife crisis.