Lovers and Newcomers (53 page)
A few walkers and runners appeared between the trees. Ahead of Colin were a young couple deep in conversation and a tall distinguished-looking black man in a dark overcoat. A girl ran past, pink earmuffs over her head, her feet in silver trainers pounding steadily on the path. Puffs of breath clouded in front of her. A fur-coated mother and a child in a snow-suit came in the opposite direction, the child solemnly trundling a wheeled dog. Colin noted the features and dress of each person, conscious of how he would appear if any of the passers-by had chosen to pay the same degree of attention to him. They would see a thin, somewhat abstracted man of late middle-age, a little too precise in the arrangement of his silk-lined cashmere scarf and the exact width of his overcoat lapels. Disliking this bloodless picture, Colin immediately stuck his hands into the pockets of his coat and tried to loosen himself into a slouch. This didn’t please him either. He knew that he thought too much about himself, and had too little beyond work and working relationships and New York arts to occupy his mind.
He was a sad old man, he reflected, not as brave about being ill as he would wish, and lonely again even though he had stimulating work and a wide circle of acquaintances. Even Melanie, the director’s assistant, talked more than she listened.
He had only himself to blame for this, of course. To ask questions of other people rather than confiding in them betrayed an absence of trust and a fear of intimacy.
The only place where he felt properly at home was at Mead, with Polly and the others, yet still he resisted every temptation to speak or even to think of the place as his home. He was protecting himself, as always since parting from Stephen, from the possibility of caring too much or settling too comfortably in any place with anyone.
But he did think
about
Mead, all the time, and now the decades of memories shared with Selwyn, and the last months they had spent there together, seemed as vivid and precious as anything else in his life.
Walking under the bare trees of Central Park, Colin felt severely homesick for the old house and the views over ancient land, as well as for Polly’s company, and his friends who were still alive.
In the pocket of his overcoat was a beach pebble, and he turned it over and over as he pondered. It was viciously cold out here and he wished he had a hat with him. He took one hand out of his pocket and drew his collar and the folds of scarf closer up to his chin.
There was a barely audible
swoosh
and a disturbance in the air at his shoulder. A rollerblader swept past, missing Colin’s arm by a mere inch. Colin raised the arm in a gesture that was half defence and half retaliation. He was still holding the pebble, and it slipped between his gloved fingers and spun to the ground.
There was another
swoosh
as a second rollerblader came up behind him. This time there was a scrunch of grit beneath the rubber front stops as he came to a dead halt.
‘You dropped something,’ the skater called. He stooped down, reached between his splayed boots and picked up the pebble. The man took the time to examine it thoroughly before handing it over.
‘Keepsake, huh?’ he asked.
The stone was a chunk of quartz that he and Stephen had picked up when they were walking together on Brighton beach, way back at the beginning of their time together. Colin had remarked on the stone’s very rough heart-shape, and Stephen had taken it to a gemstone cutter who had cut and polished it. Stephen had later presented the cloudy heart to him, with a little speech about not having a heart of stone.
After Stephen was murdered, Colin almost always carried it with him. It wasn’t a talisman, exactly. But he liked to keep it at hand.
‘Yes.’ He took the heart and dropped it into his pocket. ‘Thanks.’
The first rollerblader had vanished. This one wore tight lycra leggings, a black Puffa and a knitted beanie. He seemed supernaturally tall, perched on top of his skates. He studied Colin from a height.
‘Pretty cold today,’ he said.
Colin agreed.
‘Which way you heading?’
‘I’m just taking a walk.’
The man was young, somewhere in his early twenties. He had a wide mouth, the upper lip as full as the lower, with prominently defined margins to both that made Colin think of a piece of primitive sculpture. His large nose sloped to his forehead with no indentation at the bridge. It wasn’t easy to place his accent.
‘I’ll roll along with you,’ he said in a companionable way. Colin began walking, and the man swooped ahead, executed a turn and sped back to his side. He was a graceful mover.
‘You British?’
‘Yes. Where are you from?’
It was a long time since Colin had made one of these connections. He took a certain amount of care to avoid the possibility, even. But he had not forgotten how they went, and the old flare of anticipation ran through him all over again. How optimistic the spirit is, he thought, even though the body is otherwise.
The skater said, ‘I am from Brazil. My family is in Rio. My name is Carlos.’
They moved on, the man slicing ahead, making a leg change, curving backwards to Colin’s side again. Colin fell into this rhythm until they passed a line of benches, all of them empty.
‘Is it too cold to sit for a few minutes?’ Carlos asked.
They turned aside from the path.
They were talking about Carlos’s unrewarding job as a barista and his forthcoming audition for a modern dance company, when Colin’s BlackBerry alerted him to a message. He apologized for the interruption and checked the screen.
Nic’s baby boy born 6.07 p.m., named Leo Selwyn. All well xxxxx granny
Colin crowed aloud, threw the phone up and snatched it out of the air again.
He stared at the picture Polly had sent. It showed a tiny tomato-faced infant swaddled in a white blanket and held tightly in a pair of young arms.
How important this baby was. He had no real link with Nic beyond his liking for her and her somewhat surprising attachment to him, but he felt a sudden surge of protective love for Selwyn’s newborn namesake that was almost as strong as for a child of his own unrealized child.
‘Good news?’ Carlos asked.
‘My dearest friend has a new grandson.’
Carlos peered at the photograph. His thigh briefly touched Colin’s as he leaned inwards. ‘Hey. That calls for a celebration.’
Colin thumbed a reply to Polly.
Best granny in the world. Kiss to Nic and the baby. Back very soon, Cx
He hesitated for a second and then moved the cursor over to
back
. He deleted the word and replaced it with
home
. He realized that he was smiling.
‘Do you want to uh, go somewhere?’ Carlos asked when Colin slipped the phone back into his overcoat pocket and heard it clink against the stone. Carlos ran his blades experimentally forwards and backwards and then rocked his boots so the wheels spun free.
‘I can’t do anything,’ Colin said.
The words were a denial, though. He could do things.
He was thinking of the windows of FAO Schwarz, the drive from London up to Mead, Leo Selwyn asleep in his hospital crib. He saw Polly’s round face and heard Miranda’s hoot of laughter. He wanted to see them all, but before that, right now, he wanted a glass of champagne – several glasses – and some company, maybe a bar, a place and scenery that he understood, and the touch and taste of another person’s skin. It was as if the lowering sky had split clean open, and a bright shaft of strong sunlight struck through.
Carlos lazily smiled back at him.
‘There are ways and means, man.’
March came and then April, the last week of April bringing a green bloom to the countryside as Polly absorbed herself in sheaves of letters and creaking account books.
The more she read, the more deeply she was drawn out of her own life and into another world. Far from being a confined space, Jake’s study now became the entrance to a colonnade of years, each one marked off by summer in the fields, harvest, the Fifth procession, then Advent and Christmas, Lent and Easter, and the recorded dates of ploughing and sowing and rabbit shooting and occasional hunting. Polly noted the bills for the twice-yearly visits of the piano tuner, the chimney sweep and the knife-grinder. A horse-drawn mower was used to cut what had then been wide lawns, the horse’s hooves wrapped in sacking so they would not mark the green velvet grass. In one Victorian account book, neatly itemized, she found the total expenditure for a grand dinner for county neighbours at which Lord Lockington and his lady had been entertained just after their marriage.
These were Mead’s glory days. After this the account books and farm records grew scrappy, as the head of the family turned to gambling to meet his debts. There were no more bouts of ambitious entertaining recorded.
These estate records had been kept by successive generations of Meadowe men, farmers and lately gentry. Their wives and daughters were glimpsed only through mentions of glazing to ‘Mary’s glass house’ or the purchase of a pony, ‘Amelia’s tenth birthday’. For generation after generation these women had kept house, given birth to children and brought up families, playing their part on the estate as it grew and then declined again, but the last chatelaine before Miranda, Jake’s mother, Gwen, was the only one to have left anything like a first-person account of herself. Dating from the Second World War, it was no more than a worn notebook filled with irregular scribbled jottings.
Jake’s father had been away in the services, like most of the men in the county. So far Polly had found only two or three letters from him, interleaved between the pages of the notebook. They were written from London and mentioned ‘this outfit’ and ‘liaison work’, but they were rather formal, unlike his late uncle’s loving missives from the trenches in France. It was Gwen’s garden diary that Polly found totally absorbing. She had evidently been a plantswoman. There were lists of plants,
Helleborus n., Ilex argentea, M. grandiflora
, references to pruning roses and dividing clumps of bergenia, and to planting 250 narcissi bulbs in a single afternoon. ‘My dear bit of garden,’ she wrote in the spring of 1940. But the country was at war, and food had to be grown in place of flowers. Without confiding even a line of complaint to her diary, Gwen Meadowe grubbed up her perennials and scented shrubs and planted potatoes and onions in their place, helped by one old man from Meddlett and a series of land girls who were billeted with her. Gwen wrote pithily about these various Doras and Eileens, describing one Molly as ‘a very troublesome girl. But a merry, likeable nuisance’.
Polly looked up after she read this, and thoughtfully stretched the cramps out of her neck. She felt a distinct and growing kinship with Gwen in her solitary pursuits, and this historical Mead with its desecrated gardens grew more real than the version that actually sheltered her.
Satisfaction, even a muted version of happiness, was transforming Polly. To be absorbed in work like this, to realize that a whole afternoon had passed without numbering the hours, was a pleasure she hadn’t known for a long time. Selwyn was gone and the pain of losing him shifted inside her like a cumbersome load, but today the weight of it didn’t quite crush the breath out of her.
Outside, the rose branches that framed the window were covered with tender green and bronze leaves, and sprays of unopened buds nodded in the wind. Perhaps this very climber was one of those tended by Gwen Meadowe, who had been quietly relieved to note in her garden diary that there was no food crop that could usefully be grown in its place.
Polly knew how she was going to start her book. It would begin in 1945, with the estate and village VE Day celebrations held in the barn where she now lived, and it would work backwards from Gwen to her mother-in-law, who had been chauffeured through the narrow lanes in the Silver Ghost that had once been garaged in the same barn. Perhaps that Mrs Meadowe of the Great War would have written letters to her son at the Front in what was now Miranda’s drawing room, and in the same room her husband’s grandmother might have worked out the dinner menu to impress Lord and Lady Lockington and the rest of the county grandees.
Polly would trace the history of the house by telling its story backwards, through the decades of two or three centuries, as far as these records and whatever others she could unearth would allow her to go. The perspective was a long one. She puffed out her cheeks in awe just in contemplating it, but at the same time a distinct thrill ran through her.
There was a patch of blue sky visible above the trees.
She stood up, easing her painful hip. She wanted to talk to Miranda.
She picked her way through the ordered avenues of her research documents and walked through the quiet house. The drawing-room door stood slightly ajar.
‘That you, Poll?’ Miranda called out.
Joyce was asleep on the Knole sofa, her back and head propped on a pile of cushions. Her jaw had dropped open and she snored lightly. She had grown very frail lately, and increasingly forgetful. Sometimes in a lucid moment she announced that she must get back to her own place because she had had quite enough of being in Miranda’s house, draughty old pile. But she soon forgot the intention. Nobody had any real expectation that she would be able to live on her own again.
Miranda was reading, curled up in an armchair. She looked smaller, a quieter and more watchful version of the bright spirit she had been. The room was scented with cold wood smoke and white lilac in a huge vase that stood on a side table.
I have been attending very thoroughly to my own grief, Polly realized, but I haven’t given much consideration to Miranda, who loved him too.
Affection and sympathy for her friend touched her heart.
‘Have you been working all this time?’ Miranda wondered.
Polly nodded. She went over to the grand piano in the corner of the room and lifted the lid. She played a few notes, very softly. They keys were yellow and split and the instrument was badly out of tune.
