Lovers and Newcomers (41 page)

I told Selwyn about this, when I showed him the 1914 photograph with the estate workers and the young girls gathered in the sunlight in front of the barn, and Jake’s great-grandfather’s Silver Ghost just visible in the shadows within. An emblematic moment of change, history itself changing gear.

Selwyn claimed that I am in love with Mead, and he was jealous. I told him he couldn’t be jealous of a house, and we agreed that anyway he was part of it now.

Then he kissed the inside of my wrists, first one and then the other, and I knew I had been frozen until that very minute. Now I’m melted, and running away in all directions.

Nic is studying the carving of the memorial. There are no lachrymose angels or stone poppies. At the head of the tablet in bas-relief there is an old wagon, piled high with hay, and a pair of pitchforks bracket the names of the fifteen Meddlett dead. At the foot there is a lusty-looking bull, complete with a fine pair of horns. It is a rural tribute to men who never came home to the fields, and it always makes me feel sorrowful and at the same time uplifted.

‘Second Lieutenant George Edwin Anstruther Meadowe,’ Nic reads.

‘That was my husband’s great-uncle, his grandfather’s younger brother.’

‘He was twenty. That’s younger than me.’

‘Yes. Some of them were hardly more than children, look.’

There are three Coopers, and no fewer than four Greens, presumably brothers, or – as I always hope, for the mothers’ sake – perhaps only cousins.

Nic lifts her head, jams her hands deep into the pockets of her red coat. She mutters, ‘We’ve just got to get on with it, all of us, haven’t we? At least we’re alive for now.’

I can only agree with that.

After we have finished in the church we leave the car where it is and walk on up to the green, passing the pond with the row of ducks hesitating under the willow fronds like guests waiting to be introduced. There are coloured lightbulbs draping the front of the Griffin, and several of the houses have American-style Christmas wreaths adorning the front doors. The village looks picturesque, and Nic is impressed.

‘It’s like a film set, this place. You know, Richard Curtis. Someone comes over from America and falls in love.’

‘I know the film you mean.’

We reach the shop, and prominently taped in the window next to an invitation to all to join the 5K Family Fun Run on Boxing Day is a Meddlett Princess poster. Nic stops to read it. She has been taking an interest in our Iron-Age history since Colin told her about the find.

‘They’re so right. The treasure ought to stay where it was dug up. It should all be laid out in a museum right here, and then tourists would come and that would be good for the village and the shop and everything. Or maybe up at Mead? What about that? You could have the museum, and a virtual tour of the settlement, and – oh, souvenirs and teas. It’s a business opportunity. I’ll stay and be your car park attendant.’

These are not new ideas. Laughing, I explain to her that I don’t disagree with the protesters’ demands, but the remaining archaeological finds belong to the Crown and will probably be bought eventually by whichever museum can afford to acquire them, and the burial site itself doesn’t belong to me any longer, but to Amos.

And I also note that Nic may be joking, but still the idea that she would like to stay on up here is taking shape within her.

We progress inside the shop.

There is a queue at the post office counter and Mrs Spragg is behind the till. I say good morning to her and exchange nods with the other people I know. I collect Colin’s copy of the
Guardian
and put some cartons of milk and a bag of onions and some other supplies we need into a wire basket. Nic is buying chocolate and
heat
magazine. Someone shuffles and then stops in front of me.

‘Morning, Mrs Meadowe.’

I look up, and after a mental rummage I place the young man. He’s the archaeologist from the site, the serious one who made the discovery on that first morning. A long while ago.

‘Hello,’ I smile at him. I can’t remember his name, though. ‘Not working today?’

‘I’ll be starting on a site near Norwich straight after Christmas. I’ve got a couple of days off now. How’s everything up at the house? Has Mr Knight’s building work started again?’

‘Not yet.’

Nic comes up beside me. In her blaze of clashing colours and with her emphatic eyeliner she stands out like an urban beacon alongside everyone else’s olive-green padded country jackets and dun corduroys.

‘Hi?’ she chirps.

‘This is Nicola. And Nic, this is…’

‘Kieran,’ he promptly helps me. He’s a nice, polite boy.

I tell Nic that it was Kieran who first saw the princess’s bones as the digger blades cut into the earth and who called an immediate halt to the work. I remember the silence that fell, and Amos’s protestations, and later, the moment when we looked down into the trench and saw the skull filled with earth and the fragile bowl of her pelvis exposed to view after two thousand years.

Nic says how amazing, and Kieran mumbles about it being his job and therefore what he’s trained to do, and if only the rest of the burial goods hadn’t been stolen, the discovery would have been something really magnificent.

‘It makes me mad just thinking about it,’ he almost spits. His vehemence brings to mind his boss, the equally passionate Dr Carr, and then I automatically think of Katherine, and it’s a second or two before I realize that the other customers are listening. There is that suspension of activity that people display when they don’t want to be seen eavesdropping, but can’t continue their business and concentrate on other people’s at the same time. Stan Cooper, the builder who came to repoint the Mead brickwork for me, is standing with his back to us pretending to examine the newspaper headlines, and Mrs Spragg is holding a tub of margarine motionless over the till scanner. The postmistress is openly staring from behind her rampart of glass, and the queue is frozen.

Anger at the loss and despoilment rises in me again.

Do this Kieran and Christopher Carr think they have a monopoly on such feelings? Mead is mine and all its history, and I hate the violation as passionately as the archaeologists or the villagers do. But in the silent shop the fury quickly seeps away, replaced by the same discomfort that I always have here, an outsider denied the gift of anonymity. It’s mostly my own fault that I don’t fit in in Meddlett, but knowing this doesn’t make it any easier to deal with.

‘Me too,’ I say crisply.

Now Kieran looks uncomfortable too, and I’m sorry for that.

‘I know it’s just as much your loss and there’s nothing you can do about restoring the grave goods, Mrs Meadowe. I should try to be more philosophical, shouldn’t I?’

Nic rocks on her heels with her eyes resting on Kieran. Her short red coat has ridden up even further in front, where the bump sticks out, and there is an unfeasible length of bright blue leg on display. Stan Cooper picks up a copy of the
East Anglia Times
, Mrs Spragg swoops the marge over the till reader, and the postmistress serves the next customer in line. Someone pops their head in from outside and asks how much the bundles of kindling are.

Nic and I pay for our shopping and emerge again with Kieran on our heels.

‘Everyone was having a good old listen, weren’t they?’ she says.

‘I know. You have to get used to that.’

‘There are secrets and no secrets in places like Meddlett,’ Kieran observes. ‘Nice to see you, Mrs Meadowe. Say hello to Mrs Knight from me. See you around,’ he adds, this last to Nic, whilst trying not to let his gaze drop below her chin.

‘Yeah, probably,’ she calls after him.

Nic and I walk back to the car. On the drive home she says, ‘That shop was something else. I don’t know anything about the country, do I?’

‘Except from Richard Curtis films.’

‘I’ve lived in cities my whole life and even I know that must be all bollocks. Sorry.’ She pats her belly, and I get the impression she’s apologizing for her language to the baby as much as to me.

As I swing the car past the back of the barn, I see that Katherine’s car is parked beside Amos’s Jag. The front wheel arch is buckled and rusting. I knew from Amos that she was probably coming back today, but still I feel concern at the difficulty this return must present for the two of them. Nic and I carry our shopping in through the yard gate and I’m looking to see which lights are on in the three houses. There is a ring of damp sawdust on the cobbles to show where Selwyn has recently been at work, but I can’t hear anything except the rooks in the trees of the copse.

It’s beginning, I think. The New Mead Christmas, and God bless us every one.

In the cottage Katherine unpacked the dozen bags of shopping that Sam had carried in for her from the car. They had driven up from London together, and Toby would arrive later. Unwrapping packages and stowing them in the fridge and cupboards recalled the same sequences as performed at the other holiday cottage with Chris. Then and now she had bought the same tea and the same wholemeal bread as she always did, thus staunchly maintaining brand loyalty in the process of betraying her husband. She felt miserably confused.

But you
had
left him, she reminded herself. It wasn’t a betrayal in the strictest sense.

She was back today by negotiation, out of loyalty to her family, because it was Christmas. The oddness of her situation made her wonder if her life was really just measured out by supermarket trips, and meals prepared for men and for sons and for friends of her sons, and therefore did it actually matter which men were involved just as long as the beef was rare and the pastry crisp?

‘Mum?’ Sam was standing by the fridge. He was looking at her as if he feared she might be slightly mad. She had laughed out loud, she realized.

‘It’s all right,’ she told him.

The sink was stained and the plughole clogged with some kind of greasy debris. The floor felt both sticky and gritty underfoot, and the table was covered with a mass of newspapers and coffee cups and empty glasses. Amos didn’t have much experience of cleaning up after himself, but she thought the state of chaos he had allowed their home to descend into was a deliberate underlining of her dereliction.

He came in now, bearing the linen that she had sent him upstairs to collect off the bed. One glance into their room had settled the uncertainty that had gnawed at her, all the way from London and for days before that.

She wasn’t going to share a bed, or even a room with him.

It seemed impossible, but in the eighteen days since she had left the cottage, apparently he hadn’t thought of changing the sheets. Out of such omissions, she realized, came finality.

Amos was a womanizer and he drank too much, he was overbearing and deficient in sensibility, but those faults were embedded in him, the man she knew, and because they were familiar to her she could perhaps have gone on trying to overlook them. Just as, in his turn, he probably tried to overlook her no doubt comparable failings. Yet although he had begged and begged her to come back to Mead, not to desert him and the boys at Christmas because they all loved and needed her, he hadn’t thought enough about her and about her known preferences to have welcomed her back to a clean house.

There was only one spare twin bedroom in the cottage, in which the boys would be sleeping. She would have to ask Miranda for a bed in the house. Katherine longed for Miranda’s company right now, and Polly’s. When she looked out and saw Miranda crossing the yard with Nic, she had to stop herself from running out after them.

Amos stood helplessly with the sheets spilling out of his arms.

She directed him to the washing machine, and told him which cycle to use. The remaining jars and packets were put away in the proper places, then she swept up the spilled sugar and swilled out the sink. Sam slid away to watch television, but Amos still hovered in the kitchen. In the past, or in a parallel world, she would have had a meal under way by now.

‘I’m going across to see Miranda,’ Katherine said.

His face fell. ‘What for?’

‘I’m going to ask if she’ll give me a bed.’

‘But…’

She went to him, put her hands on his arms. It would be easier to capitulate and do what he wanted, but knowing this gave her the determination not to concede the ground already gained. She felt a little surprised at how hardhearted she could find it in herself to be.

‘Amos? I’ve come back for Christmas because you asked me to, and because I know the boys want me to be here, and because I don’t want just to discard our family. But you and me’ – as she said it she felt his bodily warmth through his sleeves and the palms of her hands, an engine completely separate from her own – ‘we’re not the same as we were, and it would be a mistake to pretend otherwise.’

He cleared his throat. ‘This is very humiliating, making your withdrawal from me so public. Is that what you intend? It’s understandable, as an act of retaliation for what has gone before. What I don’t understand is why you have left it until now.’

‘I left when I did, and I haven’t come back as a wife, only as a mother. Surely you don’t have to feel humiliated, Amos? You’re among friends here.’

He gave a gusty sigh. ‘All right. Toby said he’d be getting here about eight, depending on the traffic out of town. Shall I, ah, Sam and I, start putting some dinner together?’

It was one of those questions that expect an answer in the negative.

‘Good idea,’ Katherine smiled at him.

She paused outside their front door. Smoke rose from the chimneys on all three sides and there were lights in most of the windows. Sheets had been tacked at the new windows upstairs in the barn, presumably to offer the twins some privacy once they arrived. In spite of the proximity she had the impression of three redoubts, with the Knights and the Davieses respectively holed up within theirs, the pains and pleasures of other people’s families and lives as ever opaque to outsiders.

Miranda’s theory, that families were only a temporary intervention whereas friends should last for ever, seemed not be to holding up particularly well.