Lovers and Newcomers

by Rosie Thomas

  The third item in the regional bulletin was the Meddlett story. A young woman in a trench coat, standing with the screened excavation and the copse in the background, was urgently describing to camera how the Iron-Age burial site had been uncovered in the course of construction work.

  ‘Look, it’s our field,’ Miranda exclaimed, sitting further forward.

  ‘So it is. Not Peru at all,’ Colin teased.

  ‘Please, hush,’ Katherine begged.

  The reporter announced that last night thieves armed with metal detectors had attacked this secret location (‘Not that secret any longer, is it?’ Amos snorted), overpowered a guard, and made off with a major haul of gold and other priceless archaeological remains.

  Then Chris appeared.

  Katherine leaned forward, causing Polly, who was squeezed on the sofa next to her, to give her a curious glance.

  ‘This is a serious loss,’ Chris said. His face filled the screen.

  He described how the rare quality of the two pieces already recovered indicated that this was the grave of a great tribal leader. Even if the stolen items were recovered, he said, the opportunity to learn about the history of the burial, and the life of the people who had committed their chief and her treasure to the ground, was now lost for ever. They all listened. Neither Amos nor Selwyn attempted a dismissive joke.

  Katherine settled very slowly back against the cushions. She realized that the tight feeling in her chest, the sensation of breathlessness, was pride.

  ‘He did that well,’ Miranda said as the news anchor replaced Chris. Her face creased with vivid concern. ‘I wish those pieces hadn’t been taken from here. Now no one knows where they’ll end up. Philadelphia, or Munich, or just a bank vault. It’s a violation.’

  ‘Maybe it will all be recovered,’ Katherine said quietly.

  The phone rang yet again. Colin was nearest. ‘Shall I?’ he asked Miranda.

  ‘Another journalist?’ she wondered.

  ‘Mead House. Hello, Joyce? Is that you? How good to hear you. Yes, yes, this is Colin. I’m well, thank you. Yes. I know, we’ve just been watching it. Of course, yes, she’s right here. Hold on.’

  He held out the receiver to Miranda.

  ‘Your mother.’

  ‘Oh, holy moly, I know I should have called her,’ Miranda murmured as she took it. ‘Mum? Mum, hello? Listen, I am speaking up. Are you all right? What’s happened? I was going to call you in the morning, I thought this would be too late for you.’

  Joyce Huggett, on the other hand, was audible to all of them. She must have been shouting at the top of her voice. ‘Too late? It’s ten thirty-five, Barbara. I’m eighty-six, not six.’

  Selwyn laughed. ‘Joyce, you’re going to see us all off,’ he called out.

  ‘You’ve got Selwyn with you. I can hear his voice. What’s happening down there? You’re not back with him again?’

  She had forgiven him, in the end, for jilting her only child. Over the years Joyce had shown more interest in Selwyn’s doings than in any of Miranda’s other friends, even her eventual husband.

  Three of them snuffled with laughter. Miranda frowned at them.

  ‘Mum, you’ve forgotten. Polly and Selwyn live here nowadays. In the barn.’

  ‘The barn? How uncomfortable. Won’t you let them in the house?’

  ‘Of course they come in the house. They’re here right now.’

  Joyce’s confusion could be selective. Certainly her deafness was. Whatever the case Miranda tried never to argue with or even contradict her mother, not any longer. That had been the pattern for too many years. She hurried on, ‘Are you all right? Are you taking your pills?’

  Joyce ignored her. ‘Susan Palmer rang me, five minutes ago. You remember Susan?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Yes, you do. She married my cousin who died of an asthma attack before he turned forty. After Kenneth died she had a terrible time. Luckily for her she took up with a dentist in the end, and they moved to King’s Lynn. He’s retired now, of course.’

  ‘What did she call you about?’ Miranda asked patiently.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Susan Palmer.’

  ‘I’m about to tell you, Barbara. Don’t rush me. She rang to say she heard something about Mead on her local news. What’s going on?’

  ‘You might have told me,’ Joyce complained, as soon as Miranda finished telling her.

  Joyce still lived alone, near to where she had grown up and spent most of her life, in a small block of council sheltered accommodation. She had refused many times to move closer to Mead, although she sometimes agreed to a visit. Her dogged independence, as her old friends and her health and memory slowly deserted her, was what she clung to.

  ‘I know, Mum. I’m sorry. It’s been a stupid day. Shall I drive up and see you? I could come tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ve my chiropody appointment tomorrow.’

  ‘Well, the day after? Or why don’t you come here and stay? I could easily pick you up and bring you over.’

  The others were leaving. As always, when Selwyn left the room he seemed to take some of the light and warmth with him. Katherine went quietly in Amos’s wake. Colin remained, sitting at one end of the sofa watching Newsnight with the volume off.

  Miranda could clearly see her mother as she would be now, in her small living room with her large telly dominating the stuffy space, a cup of milky tea with biscuit crumbs in the saucer, her potted plants on the windowsill and the newspaper folded on the tablecloth. As a result she felt the usual awkward weight of guilty sympathy, and a prickly, inarticulate love that seemed to have revealed itself too late and was too unwieldy to admit.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t feel like making plans,’ Joyce was mumbling.

  She could swing in seconds from irritability to what sounded in Miranda’s ears like something close to despair.

  ‘All right, Mum,’ Miranda soothed.

  Joyce agreed that she might think of a visit to Mead, maybe in a week or so when her feet weren’t hurting so much.

  ‘That’s good,’ Miranda said. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow, after the chiropodist’s been. Are you going to bed now?’

  ‘Bed? Why? What time is it?’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘Say hello to Selwyn from me,’ Joyce shouted, before she hung up.

  Colin held out his arms. Miranda folded herself beside him and he rested his chin on her hair.

  ‘Old age is horrible,’ Miranda murmured.

  They were not old, not yet, and the towering confidence of their generation had been such that they had not expected the indignity to befall them. Gathering at Mead, occupying themselves with their houses, and their changing relationships to one another and the world, was an act of defiance. But across a gulf of time, the Warrior Princess and Joyce Huggett both demonstrated the futility of that defiance.

  In the Griffin, the last of the evening’s handful of customers were filtering away. Kieran sat in the window with the remains of a pint of cider, while Vin collected dirty glasses. Kieran had only slipped in in time for last orders, to avoid making himself the target of any more village questioning. He was finding it difficult to steer a course between his professional obligations, which he took seriously, and having been born and brought up in Meddlett. Even his own mother had been on at him all evening, trying to get him to tell her what was really going on with the treasure up at Mead. He had said he only knew what was on the news, which was a lie evident to both of them. Luckily his brother Damon was nowhere to be seen. The only person he really had to see was Jessie, which was why he was here.

  She came in from the kitchen, in her black work top and trousers, now covered by a stained apron. She carried an aerosol spray and a cloth with her and she began spritzing and shining the tables. She ignored him until all the other tables were done. He lifted his now empty glass, to indicate that she could do this one too.

  ‘Where’s Damon?’ he asked.

  ‘How should I know?
’

  ‘You haven’t seen him?’

  Jessie turned the shocking voltage of her glare on him. Her lower lip stuck out, ripe and shiny.

  ‘We split, remember. That’s that. Good riddance, as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘That’s not answering the question.’

  ‘What are you, fucking CID all of a sudden? I haven’t got to answer your questions, Kieran Kennedy.’

  Geza looked in, wearing a khaki camouflage parka over bleached jeans.

  ‘I am going now. I will be in the caravan if you want something,’ he told her, frowning at Kieran. Geza lived in a static caravan parked on a field past the council houses, far enough from the picturesque end of Meddlett.

  ‘Yeah. I’m all right, mate. See you, Geza’.

  ‘Not him as well?’ Kieran muttered.

  She looked on him with scorn. ‘He’s gay, you knob.’

  ‘Have you seen Damon? I want to know exactly what you told him about Mead and the princess. After I gave you a lift and told you to keep it to yourself, and everything. What have you done?’

  Jessie lifted her head. ‘Princess?’

  ‘Haven’t you seen the news?’

  ‘Listen, geek boy. I’ve been working all day, or else I’ve been at my place listening to my music and having a well-earned kip. There’s been a load of people in here, and a lot of talk about stuff being nicked off your secret excavation. What else should I know?’

  He gestured in disbelief. ‘The burial site. She’s a tribal chieftain of the Iceni. We found the skeleton. I did, in fact.’ He couldn’t resist trying to impress her with that, which was a joke, Jessie of all people. ‘She was buried with ceremonial goods, gold and coins, an amazing shield, and someone heard about it and came last night and ripped off everything we hadn’t already recovered. How can that be, Jessie? Why don’t you tell me how?’

  Jessie undid her apron and dropped it on the table. She was smiling now, a dazzling slice of lips and teeth that utterly transformed her. ‘A princess, eh?’

  Kieran didn’t look at the low scoop of her T-shirt, or the exposed fronds of her tattoo.

  Jessie waltzed in a slow circle. ‘Ah, I love the sound of that. A proper role model, as they say. We could do with one, around here. Who was she, archaeology man? What was she like?’

  He was annoyed by her failure to grasp the significance of the loss. He felt it as deeply as if that stupendous torc and the coins and the imagined splendour of the lost goods had all belonged to him personally, and as if they had been snatched out of his reverent hands and the gold and the precious shreds of prehistory carelessly thrown to the four winds. Fury blazed up in him. He grabbed her wrist, above the hygiene dressing she was obliged to wear for work.

  ‘What have you done?’ he demanded.

  Jessie’s smile instantly turned to a scowl. She snatched her hand back and hit him full in the face. He gasped with the pain and the indignity.

  ‘Don’t touch me. You and your stupid dig and your degree, pissy prehistory and geeky job, and poncing around the place like the batty professor. Damon is worth ten of you, and he’s a useless piece of shit. Now fuck off. You and your brother.’

  She stormed out of the bar. Out in the pub yard she let Rafferty out of the store shed where the dog had spent the evening lying on a pile of flatpack boxes. They disappeared into the night.

  Kieran sat nursing his pride and his stinging face. Vin appeared through the bead curtain separating the bar from the kitchen.

  ‘Still here, are you? Haven’t you got no home to go to?’

  NOVEMBER

  SEVEN

  The last few days of October trickled away, the nights lengthening dramatically and the light even at midday seeming as grey and filmy as old cobwebs. Rooks noisily debated in the bare trees.

  The police withdrew from the site, leaving a sea of mud. The archaeologists returned and sadly picked over what remained. Another handful of coins was uncovered, fused amongst the fragments of the earthenware jar that had once contained them, but the meagreness of this remaining hoard only emphasized the imagined lustre of what was missing.

  Katherine was in her office in London when Chris called her. He was in London too, he told her, showing the torc and the shield to interested experts. They agreed to meet for dinner that evening in an Italian restaurant. She shielded the phone handset as they spoke, conscious of her colleagues at the adjacent desks, surprised to find herself making these furtive arrangements even though she had longed for his call.

  She hurried home first, to the small flat in Bloomsbury she and Amos had bought as a pied-à-terre following the move to Mead. She stood for a long time looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, wondering how a woman in the second half of her fifties prepared for an evening like this one. Her dating days had been short-lived, and were decades in the past. Her drawers and cupboards contained what now looked like expensive camouflage – clothes to conceal ripples and bulges, to present a modest face to the world, to hide within. Plenty of taupe and black. Nothing gaudy or flamboyant or, God forbid, sexy. For a moment she played with the idea of calling Miranda for advice. But she already knew what Miranda would say.

  ‘No, K, not a little black dress. Much too obvious.’

  She opened her lingerie drawer, then catching on to the subtext of her own imagining she slammed it shut again with her cheeks burning. This was all racing ahead of her, too fast, too eagerly. She should call him now and cancel. Definitely. She looked for her mobile.

  Hesitating, with the phone in her hand, she thought a little harder.

  It was unlikely that Chris would take very precise note of what she was wearing, given that he didn’t seem to worry too much about his own clothes (North Face). It was only a dinner, and no promises had been made. Underwear was not yet and might never be relevant, so the absence of Agent Provocateur was not a crucial factor.

  Besides, whatever she wore it would not make her beautiful, or sexy. Clothes were just clothing. She felt sexy tonight, therefore she was. This last wanton thought made her smile, an unaccustomed slow beat of private amusement.

  She put on scent, trousers, heels, a cashmere sweater. She was just doing up her coat (camel, Max Mara) when her phone rang. She reached for it. It would be him, of course. She hadn’t changed her mind; he had.

  ‘Hi, Mum.’

  It was Sam, her elder son. He was the one who resembled her, whereas Toby took after Amos. She was close to both her boys, but they seemed lately to have floated off into a universe of work, peopled by friends she had never met, and sub-cultures and private languages that in no way touched on the family world.

  ‘Dad told me you’re down here. I thought you might like a drink or the cinema?’

  ‘I would have done. But I’m having dinner with a friend.’

  ‘Where are you meeting her?’

  An obvious assumption. Katherine thought quickly. She’d better not mention the restaurant in case Sam breezily suggested looking in on them. Her mind went blank of any other of a million possible venues.

  ‘Mum?’

  She mumbled that they were meeting first at the British Museum (this coming to mind because Chris had told her it was where he would be this afternoon), and then they planned to find somewhere nearby.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Sam asked, after a pause.

  It had been one tiny lie, but delivered with massive ineptitude. She was no good at this, she realized.

  ‘Of course I am. Just in a hurry, darling. Shall I call you tomorrow?’

  She was on her way. Katherine finished doing up her coat, walked out into the street and hailed a taxi. She felt that she might as well have been wearing a sign around her neck. A Woman on the Brink of Adultery.

  Mead was a good winter house. With its low-set windows and thick walls it could be dark in summer, but as the year’s sun and warmth sank away it seemed to settle on its haunches and happily turn inwards. Fires warmed the old chimney breasts, wood ash powdered the stone hearths, pools of y
ellow lamp light glowed in the rooms. Miranda always relished the point at which autumn dipped into winter. She ordered books from Amazon, piled up the cushions on her sofas and drew the curtains, preparing for her own version of hibernation.

  ‘Are we Green or Mauby in this household?’ Selwyn demanded on the same evening that Katherine and Chris met for dinner.

  ‘What?’

  A couple of days before, Selwyn and Polly had been talking to Vin Clarke in the Griffin.

  He had told them the long history of the Fifth of November festival in Meddlett. Under Elizabeth I the area surrounding the village had been home to a number of devout Catholic families. The Lord Chamberlain at the time of Guy Fawkes had also been a local man, and following the discovery of the Catesby plotters in November 1605, fighting had broken out between the Lord Chamberlain’s estate workers and supporters, and the sons and servants of Catholic families. One man from each side had been killed. Their names were Green and Mauby, and in the modern commemoration of the events, two men from the village, dressed up as their historic counterparts, took their places at the head of two ragged troops of followers and led them through the streets by a traditional route, rapping on doors as they passed to call out more followers.

  Each year, by the time they reached the blazing bonfire most of the village and dozens of people from beyond would be dancing and singing in one or other of the groups. The mock battle that followed was supposed to be genteelly choreographed, but had occasionally been known to develop into something closer to a real fight. Over the years, the ferocity depended on which villagers and outside factions were currently opposing each other and how much drink they had consumed.

  ‘Which one?’ Selwyn repeated now. Polly looked up from her book. The three of them were sitting by the fire in Miranda’s drawing room. Colin was away.

  ‘Neither,’ Miranda snapped.

  ‘Must be one or the other,’ Selwyn said reasonably. ‘According to Vin in the pub, everyone around Meddlett knows which side they belong on. Like Montague and Capulet, Rangers or Celtic. You can’t just pick a team, you have to have it in your blood.’