by Rosie Thomas
Miranda nodded at the ladder. ‘May I look?’
He steadied it for her as she cautiously made her way upwards. The timber framing for stud walls was in place, forming notional rooms. In one of the spaces was the camp bed, with Selwyn’s clothes strewn around it. Polly’s were nowhere to be seen, presumably stored in the cardboard boxes stacked against the wall. A new window let into the roof slope gave an unexpected view of the copse shielding Amos’s site and the rooks’ nests held aloft in leafless branches.
Slowly but steadily a proper house, a home secure against the wind and weather, was emerging out of the tumbledown barn.
Miranda admired what Polly and Selwyn had done. She turned to Selwyn, who was leaning against the splintery outline of a wall.
‘You’re going to be happy here.’
‘Am I?’ His face was dark.
‘You and Polly,’ she said precisely.
‘Polly and I seem to have reached the point where happiness is way beyond our expectations. Mutual tolerance, possibly deteriorating to mutual avoidance, that’s the best we can hope for.’
Miranda didn’t want to hear this – and yet she did. A knot of dread and longing was forming beneath her ribs. She stared down at the floor of salvaged boards, where Selwyn was toeing a little heap of dust and shavings.
‘Long marriages…’ she began, without knowing where the sentence was going to take her. ‘Long partnerships, are more complicated – aren’t they? – than you could begin to envisage when you enter into them, when you’re full of optimism about life and airy notions about love and for ever. After thirty years the grooves of habit are worn so deep you feel interred by them. But now if you were actually to find yourself without them, without those rails, you might run off into the wilderness and perish.’
She was speaking almost wholly for herself, remembering how all the world had seemed a wilderness after Jake died. Without Polly, she was sure that Selwyn would be similarly lost. But he was impatient with her warning, and he wasn’t thinking about the riddles of any experience other than his own.
‘Barb, I was a crass oaf back in those days. I was so helpless, so self-absorbed, so hobbled by vanity and the fear that anyone might detect my uselessness that I made an impediment out of what was actually perfect freedom.’
‘That’s not how I remember it. You were very beautiful and funny and inspiring. Everyone wanted to be you or be with you.’
‘I was terrified of you finding me out. I was afraid to marry you. I let you go and I let Polly choose me instead. Then I fiddled around for thirty years, wasting her life as well as my own. Polly deserved better than me. If I’d married you, I’d have driven myself harder. For you, I’d have become Prime Minister.’
‘In that case, you’ve got me and Polly to thank that you aren’t. You haven’t got to deal with Afghanistan or the economy. That’s something, isn’t it?’ She tried to make him smile, but he wouldn’t. His eyes had been fixed on the pile of dust and shavings but now he lifted his head and looked straight at her.
‘God help me, Barbara. How have I cocked up so badly?’
‘You haven’t,’ she breathed.
She didn’t want to have this conversation across the camp bed; it was like talking over the prone body of her friends’ marriage. She made for the protruding top of the ladder and then looked down through the gaping hole at the long drop to the new cement floor. A rush of vertigo made her head swim.
‘I can’t climb down there.’
‘Yes, you can. I’ll go first.’
He descended and stopped with his shoulders sticking out of the hole.
‘Come on. I’ll be right below you. You can’t fall.’
‘I can’t do it.’
‘Come here.’
She edged towards him and he reached up for her hand. She took it and shuffled to the edge of the yawning hole, seeing how the ladder bounced as Selwyn shifted his weight on the rungs.
‘Close your eyes,’ he said. ‘Put your foot here.’ He grasped one ankle and placed it. Miranda heard an embarrassing whimper escaping from her own throat. Polly must climb up and down this ladder to go to bed, or just to change her socks. Blindly she shuffled the other foot on to the top rung. With her knuckles white on the uprights she opened her eyes to narrow slits and let Selwyn guide her feet down the successive rungs. At last she stood on the blessed firm ground. He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her on the mouth.
‘Fear is a protean creature,’ he murmured.
She refused to cling to him. ‘I’m all right now. Let’s go outside.’
They emerged into the yard. Miranda shook herself.
‘Let’s take a walk.’
Without speaking they passed out of the yard gate and took the path over wind-bitten grass to the little wood. Selwyn followed in her footsteps under the knitted trees and past the arms of dead brambles. The plateau with its belt of trees was completely deserted. The builders’ cabin was padlocked, and the site caravan also. Excavated earth stood in clayey heaps, and polythene sheeting flapped in the stronger gusts. They stood and looked at the holes in the ground, and the landscape beyond. The abandoned trenches contained only brown puddles and reflections of skidding clouds.
The absence of a house was underlined by a deeper absence that soughed in the trees and flattened the colourless grass.
Miranda had no coat, and she shivered.
‘I wish she had never been uncovered,’ she said. She wished the ground unbroken again, and the bones still lying in peace.
Selwyn took her hands and rubbed the knuckles to chafe warmth into them.
‘So do I. Two thousand years is a long time for her to have possessed a fine and private place. I’m sorry she had to be disturbed.’
Miranda completed the lines in her head. She had thought of them more than once since the princess and her treasures had been dug up and carried away from Mead.
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.
‘It’s done now,’ she said quietly.
And what wasn’t done, what about that?
Was it right to leave it that way, or between them should they set the sun running, as the poet believed?
Selwyn put his arm around her shoulders. ‘Let’s go back.’
She led the way in the other direction, along the track that would some day be Amos’s drive, all the way to the house and the front door under its peeling portico. Unthinkingly, she stroked her fingers over the russet bricks. Selwyn looked up at the old glass in the windows, the spines of roses hung with sparse orange hips, the tall chimneys and ribbed tiles on the roof.
The walls held warmth and the sheltering wings kept out the wind, so they lingered comfortably outside the front door.
‘Mead’s full of stories,’ Miranda said. ‘These two wings were added to the old farmhouse as the Meads made their way up in the world. Those rooms up there were for a maid and a manservant. The last addition was by the Victorian Meadowes who stuck on this elaborate porch so they could climb out of their carriage under shelter.’
They began to make a slow circuit, skirting spiny shrubs and looking inwards instead of out. At the side of one wing was an engraved block, reading ‘JM 1748’. In places the soft stone of lintels and sills was crumbling, the silica bedded in it faintly glinting. Windows were veiled with dust, and glazing bars shed layers of fading paint. They passed the back of Amos and Katherine’s cottage, where the windows were polished, and came into the yard again via the gate. Selwyn latched it behind them.
‘The carts were kept in your barn, then the carriage and horses, and in the end the cars. The yard man and a couple of farm workers lived in the cottages.’
‘I feel suitably feudal, milady,’ Selwyn grinned.
‘We’ve just made a complete tour of everything I own,’ Miranda pointed out.
‘It’s not a negligible possession.’
‘I know that.’ She linked her hand in his. ‘I still feel that I’
m only looking after it, for Jake.’
‘And then what will happen to it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Miranda said.
They went into the house, passing through the kitchen and into the hall. The clock struck four as they looked into the drawing room. The heavy curtains at one of the windows were still half closed, cold ashes scattered the hearth and the gloom of a winter’s afternoon stalked them.
‘Shall I get a fire going for you?’ Selwyn asked.
Miranda didn’t trust herself alone with him in front of the fire.
Their first time, thirty-odd years ago, had been one afternoon in her chill, oddly-angled bedsit, the only good feature of which had been a small open grate. As well as the fire there had been a deep-fringed pink lampshade and the scent of patchouli, marijuana, and a rancid Afghan coat.
There was something about the damp wood smoke and the filtered grey light of this afternoon that strongly reminded her of that day, and as she thought back to it the intervening time folded inwards on itself and then collapsed into nothing. Selwyn looked physically almost the same. She felt, even within her changed body, just as she had done in those days. Anything was possible.
‘Come with me, I’ll show you something,’ she said quickly.
She led the way down a passage to a cluttered room that Jake had used as an occasional study and for storing the farm accounts and other paperwork. The walls were lined with bookshelves, some of them enclosed by old-fashioned metal library grilles. The lowest level was made up of cupboards with blistered woodgrain varnish. A table in the window and a brass reading lamp were overlaid with dust. Miranda switched on the lamp and a rising cloud made them both cough a little. She began to search through a pile of folders that were stacked on a shelf. Selwyn browsed along the bookshelves, lifting a volume here and there and blowing dust off the fore-edge before opening stained leather covers.
‘Here it is,’ Miranda said.
She took a sepia photograph out of a folder and laid it under the light of the lamp. Selwyn was immersed in an old manuscript book that seemed brittle enough to fall apart in his hands. He turned over bound parchment sheets covered in spidery brown script.
‘But these letters are hundreds of years old,’ he said wonderingly.
‘They are the Mead archive. Family letters, account books, estate records. Jake was always threatening to get an expert in to sort and catalogue them. Come and look at this.’
He replaced the volume on the shelf beside its companions and peered over her shoulder.
The picture was of the yard at Mead. In the foreground was a cart loaded with hay. A horse stood in the traces, its harness garlanded with flowers. Two young girls in pinafores and straw hats, also wreathed in flowers, were perched on the back of the cart. A small group of men, one of them holding a pitchfork, solemnly gathered at the horse’s head. Behind them was Selwyn’s barn, the big doors propped open. Miranda pointed to the faded handwriting on the photograph’s reverse. It read ‘Estate picnic, August 1914. Jos. Green, d. France 1915’.
She turned it over again and they studied the faces from a summer’s day of almost a hundred years ago.
‘Which one is Jos Green?’ Selwyn murmured.
‘I don’t know. He wasn’t the only one. There are fifteen names from the estate on the First World War memorial in the church. Jake’s great-uncle’s is there too. It’s a lot of young men, for a place the size of Meddlett.’
Selwyn stooped to examine the picture more closely. The left-hand door of the barn stood wide, and in the shadows within, the glimmering bonnet of a car was clearly visible.
‘It’s a Rolls-Royce. Jake’s great-grandfather had a passion for them,’ Miranda told him.
‘A Silver Ghost,’ Selwyn agreed.
It was only a picture of a long-ago rural celebration, with girls in their Sunday best and farmhands enjoying an afternoon’s rest, but the photograph also captured a moment of profound change, with cars replacing horses and carts, and men about to march off to war. No wonder Miranda had wanted to show it to him. It made him look at the riddled old barn and the estate itself from a longer perspective. In that instant, his own headlong gallop of hours and days slowed and he heard the patient tread of history over these fields, stepping all the way back to the princess of the lceni.
‘You’re in love with Mead, aren’t you?’ he said wonderingly, properly acknowledging this truth for the first time.
‘I am,’ she agreed.
‘I am jealous of it. I want you to love me.’
He looked black, and Miranda laughed at him.
‘You can’t be jealous of a house. And I do love you.’
She put down the photograph. The shelves breathed dust and dry leather and old paper. He lifted her chin so that her face was tilted up to his.
‘I’m part of Mead now,’ he said. The bandage had slipped again, pushing down the outer edge of one dark eyebrow. He was wonderfully familiar to her and the connection was easy, silky, without the irritating abrasions of habit.
‘Yes, you are.’
Gently he rolled up the sleeves of her jersey and kissed the inside of her wrists. The blue skin inside the crook of her arm instantly developed a million new nerve endings, all of them alive to his mouth. She wondered if she had in fact been dead for years. Cryogenically frozen until this moment. Effectively, she must have been. He undid three buttons and found more inches of skin to kiss.
The ability to resist him finally deserted her.
He lifted his head and she heard herself say, ‘Don’t stop now. It’s too late, isn’t it?’
‘Where?’ he muttered thickly.
‘Here,’ she replied. ‘Now.’
The dust swirled in thicker clouds, enveloping them.
Everyone must be asleep.
Polly’s back from seeing her girls, Amos from business somewhere, Katherine from work.
And I can’t close my eyes on the certainty that Selwyn and I have done something indelible that has already changed Mead.
Yesterday, if anyone had asked me (who would that have been? I don’t discuss such things even with Polly or Katherine), I would have answered that I can perfectly well live without sex. I have done, since Jake died and even before that whilst he was ill, and I was the same person – only minus the inconvenient flashes of heat and the illogical, embarrassing behaviour characteristic of sexual desire – that I have always been.
But then today happens.
Remarkably, as well as being imperative to begin with, it turns out to be intricate, tender, and finally exalting. The only difference from the way it was when Selwyn and I were young is that it’s more resonant. Memories and experience function like extra receptors, opening little windows of pleasure related to other times and places, layering this event with bright slivers of the past and thereby increasing its intensity.
I have existed without sex. It’s not the same as living, of course.
I suddenly understand Selwyn’s sexual insistence, and its associated howl of dismay – I don’t want to give up either. I don’t want to grow old. I don’t want to lose this wordless language of desire and satisfaction that has been ours for decades.
I’m greedy and selfish and carnal.
And temporarily I am filled with wicked delight.
Afterwards, breathless and half choking on surprised laughter as well as dust particles, Selwyn dragged a tired cushion off an armchair and we propped our heads on it. The cover was torn and a few feathers drifted in the air above us. I lay with my face turned into his shoulder and my heart gradually slowed from its wild thumping.
‘How was I?’ Selwyn asked. The self-parody was only partial. I remembered what he had said about fear.
I laughed some more, lying loose in his arms.
‘Not bad.’
‘All my own work, you know. No chemicals involved.’ He examined my earlobe, frowning at close quarters. ‘I’d better warn you right now, it might not always be like that. I am an old man.’
&n
bsp; The assumption of again was already there. I should have pinched out the little bud there and then, hard and sharp between frosty fingers, but I was dizzy with warmth and sexual release and I only stretched out against him, my head against his chest, to hear the steady beating.
Selwyn murmured, ‘And as for you, Barbara Huggett, possessor of my heart, man and boy, you are more beautiful than you have ever been and I love you.’
I know that the skin of my upper arms puckers into tiny creases when I pinch it. There are vertical seams fringing my upper lip and nets of fine wrinkles around my eyes, but just for that moment I was prepared to believe him. Through the window I could see the smoky sky, and a frame of black twigs as fine as hair.
‘And I you,’ I admitted.
‘So what are we going to do?’ he whispered.
Belatedly, I marshalled my thoughts.
‘Secretly, we are going to place this afternoon’s precious bead on the necklace of our lives, where it will shine brightly and uniquely. There will be no others, but that will increase the brilliance of this single gem. We won’t talk about it again, but we’ll both remember it.’
My head fell an inch as he sharply exhaled.
‘You do talk bollocks, Mirry. Be real, can’t you?’
I thought about what real meant.
In a few days, Joyce would be arriving for one of her visits. Amos and Katherine were waiting for their building project to restart. I had accepted and banked Selwyn and Polly’s money for the barn, and spent some of it on repairs to the main chimneys, which otherwise would have been in imminent danger of collapse. The treasure might have been stolen, but there was still a significant archaeological site to be studied and chronicled. I was looking forward to that. It would soon be time to start making plans for Christmas. All these factors I drew up and ranged like a housewife placing storage jars on a shelf.
