by Rosie Thomas
By contrast, sex in the afternoon with my friend’s husband might be living, but it wasn’t my life.
‘I am real,’ I said.
Selwyn sat up, gently lifting me. We shifted backwards so that we leaned against the armchair and its little nimbus of feathers.
‘I am going to have to leave Polly, you know. I can’t go on being her younger brother and part-time son, and that’s what we’ve made of each other. I’m not saying I haven’t colluded in my own infantilizing, and that’s all the more reason why I should have the balls to end it.’
‘Polly loves you. You are her life. You can’t discard her after thirty years. I won’t be a part of that.’
‘There’ll be a terrible upheaval, but it will be the right thing to do. I want to marry you. I want to live with you, wake up and fall asleep with you, from as soon as possible until one of us dies.’
‘No,’ I said.
He looked straight into my eyes, into my head.
‘What did this afternoon mean to you?’
I glanced away. It had meant much more than I wanted him to know.
‘I’m sorry. It should never have happened,’ I whispered.
His fingers closed on my wrist. ‘Yes it should. That’s exactly my point. We haven’t got much longer.’
‘If we had just two more days or all eternity, Sel, it wouldn’t make any difference.’
I saw the hurt and disappointment in his face. I understood something of the complicated choreography linking him and Polly, and his lament for manhood. There is a lot of the selfish wild boy in Selwyn, but that is not all or even most of what he is.
‘You’ll change your mind,’ he said, kissing my face and neck and gently fastening the buttons he had undone.
That was how we left it.
The others came back to Mead, except for Colin, who is in America. The lights went on in the barn and the cottage and then before midnight the windows were all dark again.
I sat all evening on the sofa in front of the ashes of an unlit fire, my book closed on my knee.
NINE
Early the next morning, Miranda left the house. She put her overnight case in the boot of the car, thinking as she did so that it was weeks, possibly even months, since she had spent a night away from Mead.
She drove through a heavy sea fog that rubbed out everything more than a few feet beyond the car’s windscreen. On days like this the mist damped sound as well as scenery and the world seemed fleeced in grey wool. In Meddlett the shop was only just opening for the day’s business and not a soul was visible through the murk. She could just make out that the debris and black smudges of smoke damage from the Fifth had been tidied and washed away. The duck pond was a sheet of dull aluminium and the willow trees were spectres of themselves. She continued westwards out of the village, heading for the main road. She wasn’t running away from home, nothing of the kind. She was simply going to collect her mother from her sheltered flat, making sure while she was there that everything was in order, perhaps having a chat over a cup of tea with the warden, and then, when Joyce was ready, bringing her back to Mead for a few days’ holiday.
It would be better to leave Selwyn to himself for a while.
It was even better to be slipping temporarily out of his reach, since she already knew that she couldn’t behave properly around him.
She tried not to think that outside Mead, away from the confines of the walls and the defining views and the ticking of the hall clock, she felt like a snail abruptly prised from its shell.
After a few miles the light brightened and she glimpsed a line of traffic snaking ahead of her. A minute later the fog dispersed, as if it had never been. She switched on the radio and listened to the end of the Today programme.
Two hours later she was parking her car in one of the marked diagonal slots outside Joyce’s sheltered block. She walked up a paved path between clumps of municipally tended shrubbery and rang her mother’s doorbell. After quite a long time she heard the very slow approach of slippered feet and the clinking of locks. Joyce opened the door to a narrow slit governed by a chain fastening, and peered out.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.
Her voice was very hoarse, and even this question made her gasp for breath and then collapse into a coughing fit. Joyce unchained the door and shuffled backwards into her tiny hallway. Miranda took her arm and guided her into the living room. Her mother seemed to weigh next to nothing. She was all sharp bones and dry, hot skin. Miranda helped her into her chair, adjusted the gas fire and drew the rug over her knees.
‘I told you I was coming. Why didn’t you let me know that you’re not well?’
‘I did.’
It was almost impossible nowadays to distinguish what Joyce had done from what she thought she had done or had completely forgotten about.
Miranda knelt down beside her, holding the thin blue wrist in her fingers. The pulse seemed very fast and fluttery. ‘All right, Mum. I’m going to ring the warden and then perhaps we’ll get the doctor in to have a look at you. Shall I make you a hot drink first, though?’
‘I don’t like those new teabags she got me.’
‘We won’t have them, then. What about a cup of hot milk, or cocoa?’
‘Cocoa? Always reminds me of the Blitz. What are you doing here?’
Miranda smiled, with as much reassurance as she could summon. ‘I’ve come over to see you. Didn’t you want me to?’
Joyce’s eyes fixed on her. They were pale and watery, set in folds of inflamed red eyelid. She coughed again, but her gaze didn’t waver.
‘Have you still got Selwyn living in your barn?’
She was infallible. She might be well over eighty, feverish, intermittently forgetful, but she still possessed the uncanny and almost always unwelcome knack of placing her finger precisely on the most central of her daughter’s concerns. It had been the same for fifty-odd years.
Miranda nodded.
‘And his wife? What’s her name?’
‘Polly. Of course she’s there.’
Joyce shook her head. ‘What kind of arrangement is that, I’d like to know? What does your husband think about it?’
‘It’s a practical and cooperative set-up. Jake’s dead, Mum.’
‘That’s right. Younger than me. Never looked strong.’
‘I’m going to make us a cup of tea.’
Miranda went into the kitchen and while she was waiting for the kettle to boil she rang the accommodation’s warden. The warden told her she had been planning to ring this morning, and was very glad that she was already here. The doctor would be visiting Mrs Huggett later.
Out on the square of grass beneath the windows of the block Miranda saw a blackbird. It tilted its head towards her, staring sceptically out of one round eye.
She carried a tray with the teapot and two cups back into the living room. It was hot in there, with the papery smell of illness.
‘Here we are.’
Joyce stared at her. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’ve come over to see you.’
‘You’ve forgotten the tea cosy. That tea will be stone cold.’
Kieran pulled back his dreadlocks and wound them in a thin scarf. He straightened his fleece and did up the zip, then knocked on Mr Knight’s door. Mr Knight opened it immediately, frowned at Kieran’s site boots, and curtly indicated that he should take them off before following him into the kitchen. Mrs Knight was there and she smiled at him before pouring a welcome cup of hot coffee, and sliding over a plate of biscuits so it lay within easy reach.
The boss had told him that he was to call on Mr Knight this morning and formally notify him that AAS’s investigations at the Mead dig would be complete in two more days. Nothing further of any archaeological significance had been discovered in the immediate environs of the grave, and it seemed likely therefore that it had been a high-status burial site deliberately maintained apart from any village settlement. In due course Mr Knight and the county ar
chaeologist would be receiving copies of the AAS report on the excavation and the finds, with an evaluation of the probable importance of the now unfortunately destroyed grave site and its artefacts set in the context of the other Iron-Age civilizations of the area.
Then, after the archaeology team had finally withdrawn from the site and the county authorities had approved in writing the resumption of works, Mr Knight would be free to get his contractors back at any time.
Chris Carr had been adamant that he wouldn’t come to this meeting himself. This puzzled Kieran, because usually Dr Carr insisted on speaking to clients and landowners personally. However, quite a number of things about this dig were puzzling and some of them were positively uncomfortable. He wasn’t even going to speculate any further about Damon and Jessie and what they might have spilled out between them to the local lowlife, for example. The fight at the Fifth party had been bad, and in the end all he had got for suggesting that Jessie and his brother might have been implicated in the theft and violation was a couple of punches in the head. Kieran was still staying at his mother’s house for safety’s sake.
What was even worse, the fight had been broken up by none other than Mr Knight. Rather bravely, too, Kieran had to acknowledge. Damon’s mate Donny Spragg probably hadn’t been carrying a blade to the Meddlett Fifth bonfire and hog-roast, but then again it wasn’t impossible, and the lawyer couldn’t really have known either way. He’d just marched over, stood up to two much younger blokes and sent them packing. Kieran reflected that he should have been grateful for this, but the scene hadn’t shown him in a very good light, not with Jessie looking on. Therefore he couldn’t warm to Amos Knight. He didn’t like the way he was asking questions now and making notes of Kieran’s answers, probably twisting his words in some lawyer-like fashion as he did so.
Most troubling of all, though, was the loss of the wonderful grave goods of his imagination and the way that the delicate evidence of the surrounding site had been trampled to nothing.
The mere thought of that was enough almost to bring tears to his eyes.
Gloomily, Kieran reached out for one of the biscuits. It turned out to be unbelievably delicious, with dark chocolate outside and a centre filled with some kind of oozing ginger syrup. Way out of the Hob Nobs category. He wondered if it would be too much to help himself to another.
In the end Amos screwed the cap back on his fountain pen and stood up. Kieran thanked Katherine for the coffee and biscuits. She walked to the front door with him, and waited politely while he put his boots back on.
‘Thanks Mrs Knight,’ he mumbled as he stood up. ‘At least you’ll be able to get the building work going again. You’ll be moving into your new house in no time, I should think.’
‘We’ll see, Kieran,’ was all she said. He thought she was looking very serious today, as well as friendly and nice as she usually did.
When Katherine came back into the kitchen, Amos was already on the telephone to his builder.
‘No, I am not willing to accept any revised schedule. You’ll have to do better than that,’ he snapped.
Katherine collected up the coffee cups and slotted them into the dishwasher. Standing at the sink she looked out over the rim of Miranda’s garden and across open fields. A dense cloud of birds rose over the ploughland and wheeled in a lung-shaped phalanx across the whitish sky. She wondered how they achieved such precision, without some of them forgetting what they were supposed to do and colliding with the rest.
At last Amos put down his phone. He gathered up a sheaf of papers and began making rapid notes. Katherine drew out the chair opposite him and waited until he had finished scribbling.
When he looked up she said, ‘Amos, I want to talk to you.’
He put the papers aside at once, with only the ghost of a sigh.
Amos’s reputation required him to be good at listening to people and evaluating what they had to say. She guessed he would be expecting a short discussion about some aspect of the boys’ plans, or perhaps an expressed preference for granite over the brutal-looking polished concrete he and the architect had in mind for the new kitchen. She searched for the right words with which to begin. As it stretched beyond the point of normality the silence between them seemed to hollow out and grow brittle.
‘I don’t want this house,’ she said at last.
Amos’s eyes moved from her face to the pine fronts of the holiday cottage cupboards, then back again.
‘There’s a delay, yes, it’s unfortunate, but we won’t be here for ever.’
She placed her hands on the table. The rings briefly caught her attention. Engagement, wedding, and eternity, from their twenty-fifth anniversary. Eternity was a long time.
‘Not this house. The new one. I don’t want to build it. I don’t want to live in it. I’m sorry. I couldn’t not tell you so, once I was sure of it myself.’
Now he brought his elbow up to rest on the table, one finger curled against his lips, watching her and weighing up this disclosure.
‘I see,’ he said deliberately. ‘Once you were sure, you say? It’s a radical change of mind, isn’t it? May I ask what has prompted it?’
The measured nature of this response absolutely enraged her. They were discussing what would have been their future home, and she was his wife, not a witness making a deposition.
To stop herself from intemperately shouting at him she tried to recapture the certainty that she didn’t want to build or occupy the house, as well as the deep relief at not having to, that had come to her as she sat drinking Chris’s mug of tea in the bedroom of the flat in Bloomsbury.
Amos listened in attentive silence as she stumbled through a summary of her misgivings. It wasn’t easy to convey to him how the very thought of the house-to-be brought on claustrophobia, or how the architectural spaces waiting to be filled with things only fired up her longing to own fewer, not more, items of serious sculpture and considered furniture. Most of all she didn’t want to see all this spoil, the trophies of Amos’s success, heaped up on what had been the long resting place of the Iron-Age princess.
In any case Amos’s career in the law hadn’t been crowned with glory. She didn’t actually say this. It wouldn’t have helped. But it had always been in the back of her mind that a cottage somewhere, a little grey house with quiet square rooms, would have been more appropriate in the circumstances than this blinging construction of glass and turbines and eco-vanity.
Katherine finished by saying that what she really wanted was for the wind and the rain to go on playing over that acre of ground, and for the sun to be allowed to warm the grass.
‘If we did build this house, you know, I’m afraid it would only bring us bad luck,’ she murmured.
Even though it had turned into quite a long and impassioned speech, Katherine felt inarticulate in the face of her husband’s meticulous consideration. As she too often did. Amos sat still, reversing the Mont Blanc pen between his fingers.
‘Well?’ she prompted.
He frowned. ‘Bad luck. Bad luck? That’s the kind of dippy nonsense Miranda would believe in. It must be catching.’
‘This is nothing to do with Miranda. It’s to do with me, and what I want.’
The glimmer of surprise in his face was more eloquent than words. It came to her that he was totally unused to hearing her express what she wanted. And she knew that she probably had herself to blame for not having been more insistent.
‘So where do you want to live?’
‘What’s wrong with here?’
Amos didn’t actually look around the kitchen, or out to the view through the window. He didn’t need to.
‘Look. There’s a bloody great delay anyway. I’ve spoken to Rona and to McDade.’ These two were their architect and the main contractor. ‘He’s got our team on another job, the slippery little rat. I’m going to have to look at the clauses in the contract, see how to bring him back into line. There’ll be plenty of time for you and me to talk about this.’
He wasn�
�t attaching any significance to what she had said. He had dismissed her misgivings outright, assuming that she would change her mind in time.
He was wrong, though.
Katherine stood up.
‘I’m going out for a while. I need a long walk.’
There was a grove of pines leading from the road northwards in the direction of the distant beach. Katherine parked her car next to a National Trust kiosk and wound down the window. Salty air flooded in and she leaned her head back and briefly closed her eyes. Seagulls screamed overhead and an occasional raindrop pinged on the roof.
A gentle tap on the car door made her jump. She opened her eyes to see Chris.
She got out and they turned to walk down the sandy track, heading for the great bowl of space beyond the trees. Their boots crunched in sugary wet sand laced with grass. Katherine sucked in lungfuls of the clean wind, enjoying the rhythm of their steps and the way that Chris didn’t fire questions at her, or find it essential to speak at all.
‘Thanks for meeting me,’ she said after a while.
‘I’m skiving. I’m supposed to be at a site assessment in Breckland, but I sent one of the assistants instead. It feels rather good. I think I’ll do it more often.’
They negotiated a narrow path through the trees, scrambled up a steep incline where the exposed tree roots were polished by passing feet, and ran down to the point where a view opened up across an immense flat beach. In the distance, grey-white breakers raced towards the shoreline. An onshore wind blew straight into their faces and they hung briefly on the balls of their feet, clothes ballooning, leaning their bodies into its resistance. Katherine reached for the anchor of Chris’s hand and he reas-suringly took it, rubbing his thumb in the web of skin between her thumb and forefinger.
‘My girls used to love this beach when they were small. We brought them up here every summer for picnics and swimming,’ he said as they began to walk.
The coarse sand was the colour of dried clay, studded with all kinds of shells. Katherine noticed the elongated blue-black envelopes of razor clams. In the distance were the stick-figures of other walkers, and their dogs scudding through tidal drainage channels. She felt a strange, thrilling release of adrenalin that made her want to run too.
