Lovers and Newcomers (50 page)

He nodded. He thought that the jars must have been buried or hidden amongst rocks by much earlier peoples, and then discovered and incorporated by the Iceni into their own rituals. The ground seemed to slide from under Katherine’s feet again. She peered into further, even more remote layers of prehistory.

She said, ‘For thousands of years, different peoples have been living and hunting and eating and drinking, growing their crops, hiding their treasures, dying and being buried, just on that one patch of ground.’

‘The more I study it, the more I realize what a rich site it is,’ Chris answered.

‘Does Miranda know about the pottery?’

She was thinking how interested Miranda would be in this latest discovery from her beloved Mead. She could almost hear her saying, ‘If only Jake were here. He would have loved this.’ She still talked about Jake as if he were only temporarily absent, but of Selwyn she spoke hardly at all.

‘Only you and I and my team know, as yet, and we haven’t had time to do any detailed examination because the police took so long to release the artefacts. So I haven’t said anything to Mrs Meadowe or your husband, but they will be able to read everything when I submit my report.’

Your husband. Chris didn’t like to call him Amos. Katherine knew it was because he was pained and embarrassed to think of the hurt he had caused him, and this distress gave rise to an odd formality. She had tried to tell Chris: You didn’t cause the end of my marriage, Amos and I did. I made the decision. He didn’t really accept her assurance, though. He was a very good man, she thought once more. A reticent but decent, moral man.

‘I don’t know what Amos intends,’ she said now.

In the six weeks since Selwyn’s death, following the first terrible days and the funeral, Amos hadn’t mentioned the new house at all. In the abandoned trenches the churned-up earth formed hard crests and then softened again with the winter cycle of frost and thaw. Like Miranda and Polly, Amos had fallen into a limbo at Mead. Without Selwyn amongst them, it was as if the dynamo that had lately powered the place had run down and stopped.

Katherine put the pieces of ancient pot back into the crate.

‘Let’s go home,’ she said to Chris.

Home was no longer the cottage at Mead, and now the separation from Amos was final she felt uncomfortable in the Bloomsbury flat. If she had a home at all in those glazed, grieving weeks of January, it was Chris’s terraced house near the city ring road. From the front bedroom windows the dirty white-bronze glare of the motorway lights was clearly visible, but the back was quiet, with a view of tall trees.

‘Make yourself comfortable,’ he said to her, often.

Chris liked to cook, she discovered. He clipped recipes from the colour supplements and picked up ingredients on the way home from work. Katherine sometimes lay on his sofa with a glass of wine, watching him through the open door of the kitchen as he stirred a wok. This experience, she wonderingly told him, was as exotic for her as a journey to Tibet.

Quite often they ate sitting on the sofa too; refilling each other’s glasses and talking across whatever was on television. Katherine realized how pleased she was to have withdrawn from the world of table mats, and crystal glasses that were too good to be put in the dishwasher. After their meal she would lazily postpone the washing up, stretching out instead with her feet in his lap.

He said once, ‘This is all anyone wants, you know. Anyone who isn’t a power-crazed megalomaniac, that is. Parties, date restaurants, singles bars, internet sites – they all exist ultimately to enable people to find just one other person to lie on the sofa and drink wine with.’

‘Wearing tracksuit bottoms,’ she said, indicating hers.

‘Of course.’

‘Where does sex fit in?’

Chris grinned. ‘Oh, somewhere on the menu. It’s not the ultimate driver, though. It’s a big mistake to make it that.’

‘We only think that because we’re old.’

‘Age has its benefits, then,’ he answered. ‘Hindsight being one of them.’

Tonight she drew the curtains and lit the coal-effect fire. There was a good smell of frying garlic. She looked into the kitchen.

‘Do I have time to speak to Polly?’

‘Yep.’

Katherine tried to call her every day. Sometimes Polly was calm, almost troublingly so. At others she sounded unhinged, as though grief rampaged through her and sabotaged all the structures of her being.

She confessed once, ‘I’m scared, Katherine. I wake up at three a.m. and remember all over again, and I have to stuff the sheet in my mouth to stop myself screaming. I’m frightened that if I do scream I’ll sound to myself like a lost person. But I don’t know how I’m going to live without him. How will I do it? Can you tell me? I don’t know anything, and I used to think I knew so much. I thought I’d made a watertight contract with my life. How mistaken can you be?’

Katherine tried to soothe her. ‘It will get better. You won’t always feel this bad. Shall I come and be with you? I could come right now, Poll.’

Polly’s voice rose. ‘No, I can’t bear to see you. Amos didn’t go and die, you had the luxury of deciding you didn’t want him, and now you’re in love with someone else.’

‘I know. It’s unfair,’ Katherine said humbly.

Polly had even been angry with Colin. In the first days after Selwyn died she couldn’t sleep or eat and her old friend had tried to persuade her that she must swallow some food and then take a sleeping pill. He even held out a spoon to her, as if she were a tiny child. She swatted his hand away and the food spilled on his clothes, and she had wept with the hollowness of pure desolation.

‘Stop it, Polly,’ he pleaded.

She rounded on him.

‘You don’t know what it’s like. Why couldn’t it have been me who died? Why is it me who is left behind?’

Knowing the selfishness of grief, he tried to reason with her.

‘I do know what you’re feeling. Stephen died. He was murdered, remember?’

She put her head in her hands. ‘I’m so sorry. But you and he, you weren’t living together then, you’d split up months before.’

Colin said, ‘I still loved him more than any person in the world. Except maybe for you, Polly.’

Her head snapped back. He saw that her face was contorted with anger.

‘Why is it you who is here, and not Selwyn?’

Not long after that Colin had gathered himself up and taken a job in America, telling Katherine that he was making it harder for Polly just by being at Mead.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Polly cried now to Katherine. ‘I’m ashamed of myself. I’m sorry to be so horrible, and so weak at the same time.’

‘You’re neither of those things. It’s grief. Is Mirry there?’

‘Miranda?’

The tone of Polly’s voice made Katherine say quickly, ‘What about the twins, or Ben? When it’s bad, why don’t you call them?’

‘Because when it’s bad I don’t want them to know how bad it can be. I want to try to protect them from that.’

Katherine didn’t say so, but she was reassured to hear this. The maternal instinct was still strong. It would take time, she thought, but in the end Polly would recover from her loss.

Tonight there was no answer from the barn, and Polly’s mobile was switched off. Katherine went back to the kitchen and stood behind Chris at the stove. Slowly she inclined her head until it rested against the breadth of his back.

In the barn Polly was surrounded by memories: Selwyn wielding a sledgehammer in a thick cloud of plaster dust, Selwyn crouched under the tarpaulin with rain spilling from the porous roof, Selwyn baring his teeth in a saurian smile on Christmas Eve as he welcomed everyone into the firelit room. Wherever Polly looked, there were pieces of him.

Alpha had printed Colin’s photograph of him flying past the start line of the Meddlett Fun Run on the last day of his life, and it was pinned to the wall next to the sink. But even if she were to go to some remote place where he had never set foot, she knew that her head would still be clamorous with his absence. In any case she couldn’t run away because she didn’t have enough money. Characteristically, Selwyn had left their financial affairs in worse shape than she might have predicted.

The three children had stayed on with her for a few days following the funeral. She was comforted by the solid weight of their bodies pressing against hers, and the smell of their skin, which now seemed hardly to have changed from babyhood. Alph and Omie suffered long bouts of crying and Polly held them as they wept, stroking their hair as she had done when they were little girls. Alph talked a lot on the telephone to Jaime. He was a doctor, her family now learned. He had offered to come up to Mead and do whatever he could to help, as had Omie’s Tom, but for now the Davieses clung to each other. It was too much to see anyone.

Ben was the one most changed by his father’s death. He might easily have chosen to be prostrated by it, but instead he moved quietly between the three women, trying on the new role of man of the house. He did his best to second-guess their needs, lighting the fires and bringing his mother cups of tea that she didn’t have the heart to tell him she didn’t want.

After ten days the twins had to go back to work. Ben stayed a little longer, until he heard that there was an opening on the magazine for a regular weekly film review.

‘Go on. Dad would want you to do it,’ Polly insisted.

Promising that he would come back at weekends, or at least whenever he didn’t have a movie to check out, Ben caught the coach back to London.

Nic stayed on at Mead until everyone returned from the funeral in Somerset, but then she told Polly and Miranda separately how grateful she was for their hospitality and announced that she was moving on.

Polly didn’t even know how to take this news.

‘I need you to tell me exactly where you’ll be living in London,’ she attempted.

Nic sat close beside her.

‘I’m not going back to London.’

‘Please, Nic. Don’t run off again,’ Polly begged. Nic’s heart twisted at the sight of her exhausted face and the purple pouches under her eyes.

‘I’m not going to run anywhere. Jessie needs a lodger, she asked me if I wanted the room. I’m moving in with her until after the baby’s born.’

Polly was too extinguished even to be surprised by this. All she could think of were obstacles.

‘What about your course? You need to finish it off, you need to be able to support yourself and…’

‘I can do the course work at a college up here. There’s sure to be somewhere nearby. In the meantime I’ll work for myself. You know, waxes and pedicures and that, locally. Card in the shop window, cash in hand. I’m good at what I do, and word will get around in a place like this. I’ll make enough money. I don’t need much.’

Polly thought about it. In the desolate landscape, a tiny light winked and began to glimmer.

‘You’ll be here? You and the baby? In Meddlett?’

‘That’s the general idea. I know I shouldn’t be asking this right now, but maybe you could help me with looking after the baby sometimes, while I’m working?’

Polly’s eyes narrowed to horizontal slits, her cheeks rounded into apples and her lips curved to show her teeth. For the first time in long days, she was smiling.

‘Oh Nic, of course I will. I’ll be here. We’ll make it all right for him.’

‘Him?’

‘Oh yes, it’s a boy. I’m certain of it.’

By the time February came, Polly was on her own in the barn. The beams creaked and the roof shivered in the gales. She took a bitter, comradely pleasure in the harshness of the weather. Sometimes she shook her fist at the dark grey whirling skies. Do what you want. Do your worst, she cried.

The telephone rang a good deal. When she didn’t feel like speaking to anyone she let the machine pick up and listened to the disembodied voice of one or other of her children or friends leaving a loving message. She was grateful for the net that proved able to hold her, but she was also detached from the outside world. She let the waves of anger and loss and fear wash over her, and she sluiced backwards and forwards with them like seaweed in the tide.

Katherine called her every day. Polly could hear the gulps in her voice as she tried to soften the high note of her own pure, humming happiness and offer instead the murmur of concerned sympathy.

‘I’m all right,’ Polly claimed. When a different admission forced its way out Katherine soothed her as best she could.

Every evening she gazed out at the yellow squares of lighted windows in the cottage across the yard, and in the main house. They usually blinked off early, leaving an outline of deeper blackness. It occurred to her that she and Amos and Miranda were like castaways on three adjacent islands, separated by a tidal race. But she also knew that this impression was distorted. In fact the other two regularly made the short crossing to her island, bringing supplies, news from the distant world, and the possibility of a condition other than solitude.

Amos came over to roost in Selwyn’s chair beside the oversized hearth. Firewood burned away to powdery ash with frightening speed, and then Polly would have to make yet another trip out to replenish the log basket. Amos propped his socked feet on a stool and drank the whisky he invariably brought with him. He was looking less well scrubbed and tailored these days. His shirts were left unironed and his trousers could have stood a visit to the drycleaners. He was usually disappointed to find that there was no more chance of a wifely hot supper in the barn than there was in the cottage. Polly had no appetite at all, and subsisted on cheese sandwiches and occasional boiled eggs. The waistbands of her skirts grew noticeably looser.

‘It’s the death diet,’ she said mordantly to Katherine.

Amos talked about the past. He reminisced about university, and his own attempts in the intervening years to jump out from Selwyn’s long shadow. ‘I never did manage it, did I? Now he’s gone, I’m more aware than ever of the difference in our relative stature.’

Polly listened with a dulled ear. Her own memories marched with her, most vividly in the endless insomniac nights.

‘Selwyn didn’t think of you as being in his shadow. You’re the one who was a success in life,’ she said.