by Rosie Thomas
Polly helped the twins to clear the dinner plates. The bike wheel had left a black smudge on the white wall.
‘Are you really all right, Mum? You do look a bit sad,’ Omie said. ‘Is it because of Benj?’
Polly wondered how much to admit to. She didn’t want to burden them with her dim, pessimistic misgivings about Mead.
She smiled. ‘I’m fine. But it’s a bombshell, Ben’s news, isn’t it? Thinking about a baby makes me miss the days when you were little.’ This was an elision, but it contained a seam of truth.
Alpha clapped her hands. ‘I know, let’s look at the photos.’
‘What, now?’ Polly wasn’t sure whether she wanted to suffer the pain-pricks of a trip down memory lane. Omega seized on the idea, however.
‘Oh, yes. When we were little.’
The intimation of another generation affected them, too. They weren’t quite ready, yet, to say goodbye to their own childhood.
Alpha fetched her iBook. Characteristically she had digitalized the Davies photo archive so it was available at a click. Equally characteristically Omega kept her pictures pasted between the floral covers of a Cath Kidston album.
They settled at the screen, their heads close together. Their mingled scent was of sweet perfumes, hair products, a faint hint of smoke.
They looked at the pictures of sandy children shivering and grinning underneath towels and beside windbreaks. There were tents pitched in the field behind the old house, reminders of games of cricket, picnics, birthday parties, dogs and kittens, adults asleep on sofas on Christmas afternoons, gappy smiles followed by versions in which new teeth appeared too large for childish faces. There were teenagers with attitude in every line of their bodies and outfits, gap-year hobos, and graduation portraits. Mostly, the pictures could have belonged to any family of a certain type in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Polly noted that their lives as captured seemed to have been one long celebration.
Missing altogether were any of the darker moments, including the successive deaths of four grandparents. The appearances of the older generation simply grew less frequent and then one by one petered out altogether, as if they were still absent-mindedly loitering just out of shot instead of having made their final departure. The past was preserved as a hymn to conventional happiness and it was left to the observer to murmur the counterpoint.
For this reason one picture caught Polly’s attention.
She put her fingers on Alpha’s wrist, delaying the next click of the mouse.
Their first summer in the house, Selwyn hammered together a rough timber arbour in the garden and Polly planted a golden hop to scramble over it.
In this photograph, a wooden trestle table and benches were drawn up under the shady arbour. The table was covered with a blue checked cloth and a dozen wine bottles stood amongst a clutter of plates and glasses and the debris of a Sunday lunch.
Polly was sitting at the far end of the table, a straw hat tipped back from her face. Ben sat beside her in his highchair, a winsome mass of blond curls. Alpha and Omega loomed in the foreground, two peas mugging for the camera, all stretched mouths and stuck-out tongues.
‘I love this one. Don’t we look sweet?’
‘I think we look quite annoying.’
Katherine sat in profile, her hair casually drawn up in a way that revealed her long throat and delicate jaw. She had been beautiful, back then. She was listening with a serious face to something Jake was telling her. It was right at the beginning of Jake and Miranda, maybe even the first time she had introduced him to the group. Miranda herself was just visible, on the opposite side of the frame from the twins, a cloud of dark hair and a thin crescent of pale cheek like a new moon. Her gesticulating hand was a blur, as was the figure of little Toby Knight, caught in the act of squirming down to escape from the table. The back of Amos’s head, thatched with thick hair, was turned to the camera.
The central places were taken by Colin and Stephen. They looked freakishly well turned out, in pale linen jackets and expensive shirts, and there was a suggestion of detachment about both of them. Stephen’s fingers caressed the stem of his glass, Colin’s eyes seemed to be on him. Selwyn had taken the picture.
Polly was pregnant. No one knew except Selwyn. She had miscarried a few days later, at thirteen weeks. The dark memory ran counter to this sunny snapshot of lunch in the country.
She also worked out that this was most probably the occasion that had marked the beginning of the break-up of the old group.
Sam and Toby Knight were boisterous boys and they had spent the whole day fighting each other and the Davies children. The twins had whined and cried and demanded attention. Amos and Selwyn had both drunk too much. Polly remembered clearly that Stephen had been fastidiously polite for the whole weekend visit, but she hadn’t had a moment of Colin to herself, which was what she craved.
There was never a serious falling out, or even a real disagreement that she could remember. Selwyn and Amos had always sparred but they also colluded in the way that men did, taking each other’s declarations of success and satisfaction with life at face value, in exchange for the same courtesy. What actually happened was that Miranda and Jake gradually withdrew to Mead, and Colin and Stephen lived in a way that was increasingly unfathomable to married straight people. Children or childlessness came between the four couples.
It was left to the three women and Colin to keep in touch via Christmas cards and intermittent phone calls. Then Jake died, and Stephen was murdered. Amos’s fine career was abruptly halted, and Selwyn and she finally and irrevocably ran out of money. Now those who were left had come back together again, at Miranda’s eloquent suggestion, to pick up the old threads and weave a new pattern.
Omega checked the screen again to see what was holding her mother’s attention. ‘Ah, it’s the New Mead posse. Is that why you’re interested in this one, Mum?’
‘I suppose so. Look at us all.’
‘Colin was very gorgeous in those days.’
‘Yes, he was.’
‘Shall I print you off a copy?’ Alpha asked.
‘Yes, please.’
‘Matt or glossy?’
‘Whatever you’ve got.’
The printer whirred and the bright photograph slid out of the machine. Alpha waved it in the air to dry the ink, and trimmed the margins with the kitchen scissors.
‘Thank you,’ Polly said.
After Omie had gone home, Alpha pulled the sofa out into a bed and made it up with clean sheets and a spare pillow from her own bed. She ran her mother a hot bath, and once Polly was pinkly installed under the duvet she brought her a mug of camomile tea. This reversal of roles made them both smile.
After Alpha had withdrawn to her bedroom, Polly heard her having a long murmured telephone conversation, presumably with Jaime.
Before she fell asleep she listened, through the drone of traffic, to the fizz and crackle of the last of the November the Fifth fireworks displays. She thought about Nic, and hoped that whatever decision she made about her pregnancy would be the right one for her.
Rather than meeting at the offices of the listings magazine, Ben had suggested a little city park. Polly guessed that he quite naturally didn’t want his mother turning up in her country woollies at his funky place of work, and agreed without question. She arrived early, because it had been much easier to find the place than Ben’s convoluted directions had suggested. She made her way slowly under a lattice of bare branches to sit down on an empty bench. The park was a tiny triangle of paths and worn grass wedged between high walls and iron railings. Bricked into one of the walls she noticed the carved stone outlines of lancet windows, and when she half-turned she saw that the base of the wall behind her was lined with a row of weathered tombstones. The names and dates were barely legible, but she managed to decipher elegantly carved numerals, 1792. French Revolution, she noted automatically. This scuffed space trapped between office buildings had once been the graveyard of a cit
y church; the church itself had probably been bombed beyond repair in 1940.
Polly rested her plastic bags of shopping at her feet and sat quietly, thinking about the plague hospital that had once stood a few hundred yards from this spot, and the walls of the City of London that lay the same distance in the opposite direction. She had wandered through these streets before her children were born, when she had been researching a history of the plague. The book had had a respectable sale, but was now out of print. She knew that office blocks and shopping malls were built over plague pits all over this part of the city. Reflecting on time and history brought her thoughts back in a different direction to Mead, and to Amos’s house that would eventually rise over the princess’s grave. She wondered if the stolen grave goods would ever be recovered, and reflected sorrowfully that they probably would not.
An old man shuffled along inside the railings that separated the park from the road. On the benches opposite, a pair of office workers ate sandwiches from Tupperware boxes and an Asian man in a white knitted cap intently read a thick book. Polly was soothed by the peace of the tiny enclosure, where even the intermittent wail of sirens and roar of traffic were muffled. She fitted in quite nicely here, after all; with her clothes and various burdens she could easily pass as a bag lady. The idea made her laugh, and laughter was restorative. It seemed warm in the middle of the city, after Mead, where the winds off the sea constantly scoured the fields and rain lashed the lanes and paths into seams of mud. She tilted her head towards the opaque sky and let her eyes close.
‘Are you ready?’ a voice shouted.
Her eyes snapped open and she saw the old man standing in front of her. His clothes were a map of stains and his eyes stared out of a bush of hair and beard. A strong smell blew off him.
‘I don’t know. I don’t really think so,’ Polly admitted.
‘You should be. Or you’ll be sorry.’ He shook his fist in the air, acting true to type and berating some invisible authority. ‘Get out of here. Go on, shove off. Leave us alone, I tell you.’
Behind him, Polly saw Ben approaching. With his cycling clothes and festoons of belongings Ben fitted in here too, in the kingdom of the slightly dispossessed.
‘Here’s my son,’ Polly said to the tramp.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ the old man said to Ben. ‘Won’t take any more of your time.’ He drifted away to the Asian man, who ignored him, and the secretaries, who snapped shut their boxes and pulled their coats closer around them. ‘Get ready,’ he yelled at the sky.
Ben dropped his bags next to Polly’s. ‘Mum, you always start chatting to people. You’re a properly friendly person.’
‘I wasn’t really chatting.’
Ben undid the bags and showed her the cardboard cups of soup insulated in corrugated sleeves, bread rolls and a plastic tub of ready-cut fruit salad. She was sure he would have forgotten about offering to bring a picnic, and she was touched that he hadn’t and also ashamed of herself for doubting him. He dealt out paper napkins and plastic spoons, and ordered her to eat up before the soup got cold. From early childhood Ben always had been kind, even thoughtful in his special off-beam way. Polly thought he would make a decent father, although probably, sadly, not in partnership with Nicola.
‘Good place,’ she said, blowing on her first spoonful of soup.
‘Yeah. I like thinking of all the people from around here who used to come to the church, long ago, you know? Like, shopkeepers and street sweepers and – what were they? – night-soil men. All their names in the parish register, right? Births and marriages, and then dead and buried here. I was wondering what would have happened to all the old dead bodies when they turned this into a park?’ He nodded at the tombstones.
‘They’d have been decently excavated by the contractors, examined by archaeologists, eventually given a respectful reburial somewhere else. The procedures are quite tightly regulated.’
Polly knew about this from her research into the plague sites, and also from the recent events at Mead. She had known more about the laws that governed the excavation of bodies even than Amos, but she had modestly kept this knowledge to herself.
Ben turned his familiar beam of wide-spectrum radiance upon her. He was still wearing his cycling helmet.
‘I knew you’d be able to tell me. You always know things, Mum. I remember being so proud of you when I was little because you were really clever. Other people’s mums made salads and came on school outings, but you wrote books.’
‘Wait a minute, I made salads too, and I remember more than one class trip to see the lions of Longleat,’ she laughed.
‘Yeah, you were supermother.’
Ben threw a few crumbs of bread to the waiting pigeons. They were scabby, unlustrous birds, some of them with scaly fused knobs for feet. She wondered if they formed a sort of avian dispossessed, then decided as they gobbled the bread that they were very much in possession of this urban patch. There were no sparrows or starlings to be seen, and their only rivals for the territory were the beady seagulls drawn up on a white-splashed wall. The sight of them made her think of Mead yet again. Unsettlingly, it seemed to draw her back only to push her away, attracting and repelling.
‘You should write another book, it would be a good way of keeping your end up,’ Ben remarked.
She turned to look at him in surprise. Was her recent relegation to the margins so evident that even Ben was noticing it?
‘What end? Do I need one of my own, do you think?’
He blinked. ‘You know, I mean with Dad being so obsessive about the barn, don’t tell me he isn’t, and that joint set-up with all those old mates of yours, and me and the twins not being with you so much and everything. With the writing you’d have something for yourself, wouldn’t you? Everyone needs that,’ he said judiciously. ‘Why did you stop, anyway?’
‘I found it harder and harder to make the proper time for it, I suppose. I don’t like half-doing things, and I was.’
She had been subsumed into Selwyn, into attending to his projects and acknowledging his glamour, answering his wide-mouthed, hot-skinned insistence that she was there, his steady right hand, always, or whenever he needed her. That was what had happened. She had been sucked into steering their ramshackle ship, and she had done it willingly, but ever since they had been at Mead she had been wondering if they were about to capsize in treacherous currents.
No. Whatever happened she and Selwyn would stay afloat. She’d see to that.
‘You should think about it, Mum.’
Polly leaned against her unpredictable son, filled with affection for him. ‘Listen to you, my life coach. Maybe you’re right. We’ll see. Anyway, I thought we’d come here to talk about you and Nic.’
‘Ah.’ Ben puffed out a long breath as his smile faded. ‘I dunno. What can I do, Mum? Half the time I’m thinking, you know, what happens is what will happen.’
This was like him. Sometimes he was hyper-optimistic, at others drowning in gloom, and yet on occasions he could be perfectly balanced and sanguine. She put her hand over his.
‘Yes,’ she said gently. ‘Let’s take it as it comes.’
Ben nodded. He spread a fresh square of paper on her knee, opened the plastic tub and gave her a tiny wooden prong. They took turns to stab at the chunks of fruit as the pigeons lost interest and hobbled away.
‘It bloody hurts,’ Selwyn complained.
‘Sit still.’
Miranda was changing the dressing on his head. The singed hair had been cut away from the burn. She lifted off the padding, checked for signs of infection, applied fresh antiseptic, and renewed the bandage.
‘There.’
The actual injury was superficial, but a single inch to the right and the rocket could have blinded him, or worse. A sense of might-have-been stalked them both, as palpable in the room as a third person.
Selwyn watched her as she put away the first-aid box. The empty house was quiet, except for the ticking clocks and the wind in the chimneys. As she pas
sed again behind his chair Miranda put her hand on his shoulder and Selwyn caught her fingers. Instead of breaking away she stooped and quickly kissed the top of his head, avoiding the rakish bandage. She should have moved aside then, but she couldn’t help laying her cheek on the spot where she had kissed him. He took her other hand, drawing her arms down over his shoulders. She closed her eyes and buried her mouth in his hair.
They remained like that for a long moment, listening to one another’s breathing.
‘It’s not unlimited, you know,’ Selwyn said in a low voice.
Miranda knew, but she still asked ‘What?’
‘Time. We’ve got maybe twelve, fifteen more summers? Calculating on an average sort of life span? You’ll have longer, being female.’
She thought of the years as a tunnel, dappled green as if made of entwined summer branches. It was a lengthy tunnel, but the distance lying behind was measurable. And the distance left to travel was much shorter than that.
‘There’s still a quarter of our lives left.’
‘Three-quarters has gone.’
‘Sel, I’m trying to cheer you up. Do cooperate. Half full’s better than half empty.’
‘I don’t need a rallying call. I’m working out how much there is that I want to do before it’s too late. There are a lot of things.’
‘Do a bungee jump? Run a marathon?’
‘Neither of those.’
His quietness rebuked her. She lifted her head and moved out of his reach. None of the avenues down which the conversation might have moved felt neutral enough. She wondered how long they could realistically continue to skirt around each other like this. What had seemed black and white only a month ago was now, increasingly, infinitely grey.
Selwyn sighed, tweaking his dressing to make it sit more comfortably over his temple. ‘Come over and have a look at what we’ve done in the barn. There’s been more progress.’
They walked across the yard together.
Selwyn and a plasterer had been hard at work. The downstairs space was now mostly enclosed by smooth walls from which sprouted tufts of electrical cable. One end of the big room was open, under the restored roof, all the way up to the fine beams of the barn. At the other end, under a lower ceiling, was the embryo of a kitchen. Between the two areas, a ladder rose through a hole into the upper space, which would be divided into bedrooms and bathrooms. Now enclosed by solid walls and a door that locked, Chemical Ali had given way to a proper flushing lavatory.
