Lovers and Newcomers

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘Could you live here?’ Jake asked me.

  It was like being asked if I thought I could endure Paradise.

  ‘You’re an urban woman,’ he said, when I asked why he doubted it. ‘You might get bored here with me. You might feel isolated from London, from acting and all the people you know and the life you’re used to.’

  I told him that I loved him, and the only life I wanted was with him, and that was the truth.

  I was turning forty and Jake was already sixty. I had had a modest success as a stage actress, but I knew that I was never going to be as good as a dozen of my contemporaries. Hollywood casting directors were never going to come calling. I had had numerous boyfriends and lovers after my first and only fiancé, Selwyn, but this sense of rightness with a man, of there being nothing to qualify or redeem in our relationship, was absolutely new to me.

  Jake had been briefly married in his thirties but there had been no children, and his wife seemed to have made little impression on the house or indeed on him. After that, I assumed, there would have been girlfriends; after all I had met Jake at that most unpromising of romantic opportunities for a single woman, a dinner party given by a couple I had met on holiday. He had singled me out, and the next evening we went out to dinner on our own. It was hardly likely that I was the first to receive this sort of attention from him, but I believed him when he promised me that I would be the last.

  Although he didn’t bring me here immediately I learned very quickly, just from the way he talked about it, that Jake was inseparable from Mead. And as soon as he did invite me and I began to know the place, I understood why.

  He was offering me himself, and he didn’t do it lightly.

  We sat on the wrought-iron bench and listened to the birds. The sun slowly sank, the bricks glowed as if they radiated their own light, and Jake turned to me.

  ‘Could you be a country wife, do you think?’

  Yes, I told him.

  It was not an isolated existence, in any case. My old friends and their children came to visit us. Even my mother came from time to time. She liked staying at Mead, and she and Jake got on well together even though she tended to make barbed remarks on the lines of some people not knowing they were born, and how iniquitous it was that ninety per cent of the land in this country belonged to less than ten per cent of the people.

  Jake was more than equal to her. ‘Quite agree with you, Joyce,’ he used to nod. ‘It’s a lousy system. Getting rid of land, that’s what the Meadowes have been about for the last hundred and fifty years.’

  She would laugh, impatient but disarmed.

  I didn’t exactly choose not to involve myself in village affairs, but that was what happened. As Jake’s wife and the chatelaine of Mead I was in any case outside the circle of Meddlett women who gossiped about local events at a level of detail I couldn’t be bothered to absorb. Inevitably there were the sly hints and whispers about Jake, too, and his local affairs before we met. I didn’t want to hear any of these.

  The women probably thought I was standoffish; it was true that I found the coffee mornings and book groups tedious and repetitive. There were a few county couples with whom we had dinner, but I didn’t play tennis or ride horses and so those women soon overlooked me. Jake also had his own circle of friends, mostly men of his own age who enjoyed fishing and bird-watching and were interested in land management and country politics, and he continued to involve himself with the parish council and the village church.

  I found that I was happy and entirely fulfilled in the peaceful world Jake and I inhabited together. If I wanted a change of scenery I went to London, to the theatre or shopping, or just to gossip with Katherine or Colin or any one of a dozen other friends. Sometimes I even felt resentful when local commitments took up too much of Jake’s time. He did say he wished I would participate more, and so for several years we hosted Meddlett’s November the Fifth party until the annual bacchanalia finally got out of hand.

  While I reflect on all this I have been wielding the shears in snapping bursts, within a thicket of honeysuckle growth that is blocking the light into the dining-room window.

  I lean back to judge the effect and out of the corner of my eye see a figure coming towards me. Once again memory plays its trick of elision and I think it is Jake in his old tweed coat. A companionable greeting, nothing as formal as a word, takes shape in my head, and then the nudge of reality makes me blink and duck.

  ‘Let me go up the ladder and do the top bit for you,’ Colin says.

  An ache has developed between my shoulder blades so I hand him the shears in silence and wipe my forehead with the back of my gardening glove.

  Colin works more methodically, disentangling the excess growth before clipping it back. I hold the stepladder with one hand, and listen to the rooks in the trees along the drive. Very quickly the top of the shrub looks disciplined while the sides that I have butchered bristle with snapped twigs and dying tendrils. He dismounts and touches my shoulder.

  ‘Don’t you have anyone to come in and do this for you?’

  ‘Am I so bad at it?’ I smile.

  ‘It’s a lot of work.’

  I glance about trying to see the house and its setting through his eyes.

  The roses and lavender need attention, it’s true, and there are weeds sprouting between broken stone slabs. Jake was a knowledgeable gardener, whereas I am only trying to keep the place looking cared for. I don’t employ a regular handyman, even for a few hours a week. This is partly because of the money, but mostly because I don’t want anyone else working amongst Jake’s flowers. Gardeners have strong ideas of their own. I might come out one evening and find the old roses replaced with those variegated evergreens, the kind that look like shiny oilcloth splashed with bleach.

  There are days when Mead is too much, even though looking after it is my only job. Sometimes I count up and there are half a dozen light bulbs waiting to be replaced in three different rooms. Blocked gutters are sending rainwater chutes down the old walls, and doors have warped in the winter’s damp so they no longer close properly.

  Sell up, demon voices immediately whisper in my ear. Move to a modern apartment, somewhere with underfloor heating and windows that don’t rattle.

  I shan’t do that, of course.

  At other times, much more consistently, I know that I can – and will – do anything to keep it going.

  The idea of having Colin and the others to live here with me is part of that process of preservation. They choose to see it as a more emotional matter, Mirry gathering everyone together in her old hippy way, and it has that element of course. Who else can we look to, now that we have reached this time of our lives?

  But I am more practical than my old friends give me credit for.

  Colin leans the stepladder against the wall of the house. The exertion has brought some colour to his face, but I notice how thin he is. We all know that he has, or has had, prostate cancer, but I don’t think even Polly knows much more than that bald fact. Colin talks so little about himself.

  ‘Shall we go in and have a sandwich?’ I suggest.

  I want to feed him up, to mother him, but the idea of Colin, the most self-contained of men, welcoming any maternal attention from me is comical enough to make me smile.

  He looks up at the sky. It’s pale and luminous. Two days of rain and wind following the discovery of the burial site have now given way to a warm, damp stillness. The air smells of ploughed earth and leaf mould, and it’s hard to believe that the bracing sea is only six miles away.

  ‘I think I’d rather go for a walk. Indoors is a bit claustrophobic on a day like this.’

  I put away the ladder and the tools. Nowadays before we can set off on even a short impromptu walk we have to change our shoes and put on different jackets and Colin finds a flat tweed cap to cover his thinning hair. I note these signs of elderly caution only in passing, because I am getting used to them. We all display them, except for Selwyn. Selwyn, I think, would still set
out for Tibet at an hour’s notice without a backwards glance, and in the clothes he stood up in.

  Colin and I head down the drive together, tacitly steering away from the track that leads to the site. Earlier today Amos got in his Jaguar and raced off to protest the delay to his project at a meeting with the contractors, his architect, and the various senior representatives of the county authorities. He asked me if I would like to join them, but I assured him that I’d be quite happy to hear everything from him. The idea of sitting through a meeting with Amos on the boil and a row of local authority archaeological experts was not enticing.

  He’s not back yet.

  Katherine is in London, at the charity, and Polly and Selwyn are working on their house. There’s a cement mixer parked in the yard.

  Colin takes my arm. He has long legs, but he shortens his stride to match mine.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  I don’t want to walk into Meddlett. If we did we’d bump into people I know and for now I want Colin to myself.

  ‘Along the footpath and up the hill. We can look back at the house and the digging.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me some more of the history of this place?’ he says as we negotiate the path.

  I’m used to thinking of Mead’s story as Jake told it to me in our early days together. Now, unsettlingly but intriguingly, it has acquired an Iron-Age dimension. The past five hundred years once seemed time and depth enough, yet now they are foreshortened. I wonder if this is a diminishment, but what has been disinterred can’t be buried and forgotten all over again. I begin the story anyway, with the part I know.

  Jake’s ancestors were farmers in this part of the county, in a small way, from the time when records began. At the beginning of the fifteenth century we know there was a house on the site of this present one, probably no more than a huddle of stone walls and a couple of barns, because parish records detail the modest holding of land and the number of individuals who lived and worked there. A hundred years later, a record from the county assizes showed that one of the sons of the family had been imprisoned for thieving from travellers passing along the highway to Norwich.

  Jake was always greatly pleased with this detail of his ancestry.

  ‘I am descended from highwayman’s stock,’ he boasted.

  The upturn in the family fortunes came a hundred years later, when the wife and children of a wealthy London silk importer moved out of the city to escape the plague, arriving to stay with a sister who had married into a local landowning family. The silk merchant had no sons, and the current heir to Mead wooed and married the eldest daughter, a Miss Howe. With Miss Howe’s fortune, Jake’s ancestor bought hundreds of acres of adjoining land and began the informal enlargement of his farmhouse. The family name became Mead Howe, and eventually Meadowe.

  Over the next hundred years there was a slow ascent into the ranks of the gentry. The family acquired indoor servants, a coach was kept, and the horses stabled where Selwyn is now busy mixing concrete. Then came a pair of Victorian gamblers, father and son, who accelerated the decline of the family fortunes as much of the land was lost or sold to settle debts. By the time Jake’s amusing, cynical and profoundly lazy father died, there was nothing left but the house itself, the outbuildings and a modest acreage.

  Jake was the last of the Meadowes, and I inherited the estate from him. The remaining acres of land, apart from the portion I sold to Amos, are rented to a local farmer.

  Seeing the house and its setting, the more unworldly of my theatrical friends who came to stay assumed that I had married money, but that really was not the case. Jake made a modest income from farming and writing on country topics for rural interest magazines. I contributed a small amount from converting a couple of barns to make the holiday cottages where Amos and Katherine are now staying, and we were deeply content together. What I did marry was a much more primitive connection to the land and to a place that became unexpectedly important to me.

  Jake’s uncomplicated theory was that it was that much more important to me partly because I had so determinedly sidestepped the connection to my own history – if you can use the term to relate to a Midlands semi that my mother unsentimentally got rid of when I was in my early twenties. I was always welcome in her various flats after that, but none of them had any pretensions to being home, the way Mead became almost from the moment I set eyes on it.

  Jake wasn’t implying that I was an arriviste (although in Meddlett terms I most certainly am); he was just pleased and interested that I fell so much in love with his life and background, as well as with him. I didn’t have the outward appearance of a country wife and I don’t think he had been expecting anything of the kind.

  Colin walks with his shoulders slightly hunched, his hands in his pockets, listening.

  ‘Roulette, or cards? Or the horses?’ he asks when I come to the bit about the gamblers.

  ‘I’m not sure. All three, perhaps.’

  He says wonderingly, ‘You know, I never really asked Jake about his family history. He wouldn’t have volunteered it, would he? It’s a major trajectory, over six centuries. That’s a long time to be able to trace your forebears.’

  ‘Jake took it for granted. It’s the likes of you and me who find it so remarkable.’

  ‘Two generations, that’s how far back my family acquaintanceship goes.’

  Colin’s parents were Yorkshire schoolteachers, very proud and slightly respectful of their talented son. I remember them coming to see Colin receive his degree, and him posing afterwards in his gown and mortarboard, flanked by his smiling mother and father. I took the photograph with the camera his father handed to me.

  They acknowledged but never fully accepted that Colin was gay, and they died within a year of each other when he was still in his thirties.

  ‘Mine too,’ I say.

  I never saw my father after he left home.

  ‘That useless bugger? Don’t waste your wishing on him, love. He doesn’t deserve it,’ was my mother’s usual response to my questions.

  In the end, since he never tried to contact her or me, I took her advice.

  I knew her parents, my Nanny and Gamps, as tidy old people who sometimes looked after me for weekends, or whole weeks of the school holidays, in their miniature and sepulchrally quiet house in a village in Warwickshire. They liked Sunday Night at the London Palladium, and sitting in deckchairs in their back garden on fine afternoons. I loved them, in the undemonstrative way they favoured (they didn’t hold with kissing and hugging. That was for other folk, the sort who liked to make a show of things), but staying with them was boring.

  At home with my working mother I got fish fingers and tinned spaghetti on toast, which was what I liked to eat, but at Nanny and Gamps’s there was bright yellow haddock disgustingly cooked in milk, complete with skin and brackish foam, and mystifying lemon curd tart instead of Wagon Wheels or mini swiss rolls in red and silver foil.

  At my grandparents’ I coiled myself up and concentrated even harder on growing up as quickly as possible, in order to make my escape into a more glamorous world. I never doubted that I would do it. I must have been an unrewarding grandchild for them.

  Colin says, ‘We find Jake’s pedigree remarkable now. We didn’t back then, did we? Who cared about Amos’s background except as a good joke, or anything about that etiolated guy who lived on his staircase who was the grandson of a duke? None of us was interested in what had been or what had made us, except maybe in working out how to overthrow it. What was important was what we were going to make happen. That was the gift of our generation. The absolute conviction that we could change the world.’

  ‘Yes. It’s only since we failed to do that and then discovered that we were going to get old as well that we’ve started to be hungry for history.’

  ‘And that’ll be a tenner in the box, please,’ Colin says.

  ‘Damn.’

  What started out as a joke between Selwyn and Amos has gathered momentum at the New Mead (spok
en within the same quotation marks that we now employ for New Labour).

  Whenever any of us remarks that we are old, or mentions something that we did when we were young but can no longer enjoy or endorse, a fine is levied. It started at a pound, but that turned out not to be a sufficiently serious deterrent. There are plans to use the accumulated fund for the most unlikely group outing any of us can come up with. The current front-runner is a weekend’s extreme snowboarding in St Anton.

  ‘Jake never had any illusions about changing the world. He believed in micro initiatives like selling the estate cottages, so the people who lived in them and worked on the land could own their homes. He never went on a demo in his life. He poked fun at me about my agitprop days.’

  ‘Jake wasn’t a Boomer, he belonged to the previous generation. I bet he’d have gone on the countryside march, though.’

  I smile. ‘Yeah, he would. I went on it for him.’

  We cross the Meddlett road and climb a low hill crowned with a line of crooked oak trees. They are still holding on to their dun and yellow leaves, but through the thinning screen I can see the dense nodes of mistletoe. From the windows of Mead these trees are familiar sentries on the skyline.

  We turn to look back the way we have come. Colin is out of breath.

  ‘Look,’ I say unnecessarily.

  The land dips to the road, then unrolls all the way in front of us. There is the small natural plateau and vantage point that now belongs to Amos, and the fence that marks his boundary and mine. I have always known that it was a commanding spot. It seems obvious, now, that ancient people would have chosen it for the same reason.

  In the shelter of the trees Colin sits down to rest on the step of a stile.

  We can see the white tent, and people processing in and out of it. Without binoculars I can’t be sure but I assume the two figures who seem to be kneeling in prayer are in fact still patiently sieving earth from the grave. There are a couple of parked vans and a car, but no sign of any of Amos’s contractors.

  ‘And now six hundred years seems relatively modern. A mere interlude,’ Colin murmurs.