Lovers and Newcomers

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘I meant, I’m miserable being married to you.’

  A tide of terrible delight was rising in Katherine. It was such a relief to utter these irrevocable words. She had never even breathed such a thing to him before.

  Amos recoiled, exactly as if she had struck him. A dull flush rose from his throat to his cheeks, reddening his contused face still further. He looked down at his empty glass, then back at his wife, all the time swinging his head from side to side in a confused attempt to shake away the onset of pain. She stood very still, amazed to have reached this point so rapidly, and appalled by her capacity to hurt him. The brief delight was already dying within her.

  He was groping for words, but for once his lawyerly fluency deserted him. All that came out was a howl as he bellowed at her.

  ‘Go on then. Fuck off.’

  He turned his back and blundered off to the kitchen in search of more whisky.

  Katherine went upstairs and collected together a very few of her belongings. She noted, in a detached corner of her racing mind, that out of so many clothes and jewels and pairs of shoes there was nothing much she wanted to take with her. Her almost-empty overnight bag banged against her calves as she descended again.

  Tumbler in hand, Amos had placed himself between her and the front door. She thought that he might physically oppose her, even lash out, but she kept walking. He stood his ground and in the end she had to push past him, keeping her face averted. He put his free hand out to restrain her, but she shook it off.

  ‘Katherine…’ he began as the door opened on wet darkness.

  ‘No,’ she heard herself say. A small, hard, cold snap of a monosyllable.

  Then she was outside, crossing the cobbles to the yard gate. Her Audi was tucked out of sight behind Selwyn and Polly’s barn, where they all parked their cars. As the gate clinked shut behind her she heard his footsteps on the slippery stone. He stumbled and slid, half-falling with a heavy crash against the stone wall.

  The pain must have unleashed his rage. He began yelling after her. She caught only a few of the words.

  They were obscene and ugly and jagged with despair.

  Katherine reached her car, flung in the bag and collapsed into the driver’s seat. She reversed too fast, spun the wheel and skidded towards the driveway, crunching the forward wheel arch against a stone gatepost at the back of the barn as she did so. The clang of metal barely registered on her. She righted the car and accelerated under the arch of bare trees, out into the lane, and away towards Meddlett and London.

  Tears were pouring down her face.

  Selwyn and Polly stopped work and glanced at each other. Selwyn had been varnishing wood, and the windows were open to allow fumes to escape. He rested his brush on the open tin and as he did so the crunch of Katherine’s collision with the gatepost was audible from the other side of the barn.

  Polly slowly descended from a stepladder. Neither of them spoke. The miasma of the Knights’ scene bled in through all the cracks and chinks of the building and occupied the room with them. Selwyn took his brush to the sink and rinsed it in white spirit, then stuck it in a jar. Polly pretended to be examining her making good, but she was hoping that Selwyn would say something. Anything would have done: a murmur of concern for their friends, or one of his caustic comments about Amos, perhaps even an admission that problems took many forms and a reference to Nic’s pregnancy. Predictably Selwyn had greeted that piece of news with dismay, and irritation at Ben’s lack of common sense.

  But the silence extended. Selwyn couldn’t keep still. He walked from the sink to the alcove where his tools were stacked, back again to the sink, then to the front door, which he yanked open. He avoided looking at Polly.

  Amos must have retreated to the cottage. The curtains there were drawn, and the main house was in darkness.

  It was cold in the barn with the door and windows standing open. The clutter of building materials and dirty mugs and stacked planks was dispiriting. It was one thing to tackle the restoration of a wreck of a house aged thirty, full of energy and the desire to make a home for babies, but at almost sixty it was a different matter. They were too dejected and divided, Polly thought sadly. Selwyn stared at the windows of the house, as if he were willing them to blink alive with light. She watched him, but her neck and shoulders were tense with the readiness to look elsewhere as soon as he moved. He had started complaining that she was always staring at him.

  ‘I’m going over to see if Amos is all right,’ he muttered. He didn’t give Polly time to answer. She folded the stepladder with a bleak clank of the metal struts and leaned it against the wall.

  Amos opened the door and jerked his head to signal Selwyn inside. The television was on, turned up very loud. Selwyn shouted over it that he’d have wine, not whisky, and took the overfilled glass that Amos unsteadily handed him. They sat down in armchairs and watched Chelsea score a goal against Sheffield Wednesday.

  Polly answered her phone, expecting it to be one of the twins but hoping it might be Ben with some news of Nic.

  Katherine’s voice was shaking.

  ‘Where are you?’ Polly asked. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘In a lay-by. Not really. I’ve left him.’

  ‘Is that for good, K?’

  ‘Yes. I’m really sorry.’

  Polly asked her why on earth she was apologizing, and Katherine muttered something about not wanting to visit their problems on everyone else at Mead. Polly advised her with a touch of grimness that she shouldn’t waste too much time worrying about that.

  She said quickly, ‘Listen, do you want me to come down to London and keep you company for a couple of days while you sort things out?’ The option became distinctly more appealing than staying in the barn.

  Katherine said maybe, once she’d had some time to think, and Polly promised that she’d definitely come and would try to bring Mirry with her.

  ‘Tell you what. We’ll have a night out. Talk a lot and drink too many cocktails. It’ll be like old times.’

  ‘Miranda’s why I called, really. I forgot to give you a message from her.’

  Katherine relayed the news about Joyce and why Miranda was so unusually absent from Mead.

  ‘Don’t be so concerned about everyone else all the time,’ Polly advised. ‘Save your energy for yourself, for once. And drive carefully, will you?’

  Chelsea won three–nil. After the post-match analysis finished they watched the opening five minutes of a documentary. Amos stared fixedly at the screen.

  ‘Anything I can do?’ Selwyn asked.

  Amos shook his head.

  ‘Is it serious?’ Selwyn persisted.

  ‘She’s left me.’

  ‘Christ. I’m sorry.’

  Amos turned his head now. His eyes looked poached.

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yeah. Of course I am. You know.’

  ‘I know fuck all,’ Amos sighed. ‘Apparently.’

  They watched the programme for a few more minutes, then Selwyn stood up. He put his hand briefly on Amos’s shoulder.

  ‘I’d get some sleep now, if I were you. It may all look quite different in the morning.’

  ‘What are you? Thought for the bloody Day?’

  Selwyn shrugged and made for the door.

  ‘Sorry. I know you’re only trying to help,’ Amos muttered as he went.

  ‘That’s all right. You know where we are if you need anything.’

  Polly made scrambled eggs and a pot of tea. She said nothing as Selwyn came in, but piled the eggs on the buttered toast and set a plate in front of him.

  ‘How is he?’ she asked later, when they had both finished eating.

  ‘Pissed. Angry.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you think it’s permanent?’

  He did look at Polly now. Their eyes met across the cluttered table, and she realized with dismay crawling up her spine that her own future might not involve many more suppers or nights in the same bed as Selwyn. How had this happene
d, so suddenly and stealthily? Was it Miranda’s fault for recapturing Selwyn’s wandering attention, or her own, for not being someone different?

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she said sorrowfully.

  She told him about Katherine’s call. Selwyn nodded, rubbing the flat of his hand up and down the back of his head so that dust fell in a shower. The bandage over the rocket burn had become a nuisance and now he wore just a pad of lint taped to the shaved skin where bristles of hair were already poking through. He looked so rumpled and familiar and dear to her that Polly got up and kissed his cheek. He didn’t respond, but nor did he push her away. Encouraged by this she mentioned, ‘I thought it was going to be Ben calling about Nicola.’

  This did annoy him. He snapped, ‘Ben’s not a kid any more, you know. He’s got to sort out his own problems.’

  Polly moved away. She told him the other piece of news, that Joyce had been taken to hospital and Miranda would be staying up there with her.

  At once, Selwyn’s head jerked up so that he could see out of their new, tall windows to the main house.

  He was searching for lights in the windows, willing them to shine. Polly saw it, and knew that he was wishing and longing for Miranda. She didn’t know what Miranda’s response might be, but the structure of long friendship and the foundations of the life they had planned at Mead now seemed built on quicksand.

  She picked up the plates and cutlery and ferried them over to the sink. She did the washing up, using the small tasks to shield her dread. If Katherine and Amos’s long marriage could implode, what did the thirty years shared with Selwyn count for?

  Ben’s words came back to her. Keep your end up. Everyone needs something for themselves, Mum. That’s what he had said, hadn’t he, more or less?

  Everything she cared for and everything she owned, inextricably linked together, was tied up in this barn. That had been an unwise move, she now understood, and it had taken Ben, of all people, to point it out.

  Sam and Toby

  Like their father, the Knight boys were tall and well-built. In the tight confines of the Bloomsbury flat they gave the impression of needing to bend their necks and pin their elbows against their ribcages in order not to bump any extremities against the walls or the ceiling. Tonight this physical constraint was lent an extra dimension by their not knowing quite how to treat their mother. Going through the routines of cooking dinner, wrapped as usual in the faded Morris print apron that had seen service in several of their homes before this one, the sight of her was utterly familiar. But at the same time they had to couple this outward appearance of normality with the extraordinary fact that she had left their father, and was remaining calmly resistant to any suggestion that she might soon be ready to go back to him.

  Katherine splashed wine into a sauté pan. Sam and Toby eyed her warily, holding themselves poised at the ready, as if her next move might be to play a bassoon solo or to open the window and hurl all the plates out into the street.

  She opened a drawer and lifted out a sheaf of table mats.

  ‘Sam? Could you lay?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Are we drinking wine? Toby, what would you like?’

  ‘Just a beer, thanks,’ he mumbled.

  Over her head he exchanged a glance with Sam. It was a flash of mutual incomprehension, sharpened with embarrassment.

  Katherine brought the dishes to the table and placed the open bottle of red wine on the silver coaster in the centre, making sure it was equidistant between the lit candles.

  The boys helped themselves to food, their mother’s ever-excellent home cooking, and she poured herself a glass of wine.

  ‘Looks good,’ Sam commented, shaking out his napkin.

  Katherine raised her glass to them.

  The three of them had met separately, but this was the first time since the parents’ separation that they had all sat down together.

  ‘I don’t know what to propose,’ she said after a moment’s thought.

  ‘To our family,’ Toby said, with firm emphasis.

  ‘To us,’ Katherine amended, and they drank. ‘And to the future, whatever it is.’

  Cutlery clinked as they settled down to eat, and through the drawn curtains muffled traffic noise seeped into the room.

  ‘Apropos of which,’ Sam began, after clearing his throat. ‘We want to talk to you, Mum. Not just for us but for Dad, as well.’

  Their sons had been recruited, Katherine saw, into the movement to restore the status quo. Or more probably, to be fair to Amos, hadn’t been actively recruited but belonged to it naturally, because children – even adult children – wanted their parents to stay on the safe plateau of advanced middle age, preferably beaming side by side like the grey-haired bicycling couples on the back of porridge oats packets, leaving them free to enjoy their own more interesting lives. Children didn’t want to find the time and energy for worrying about awkward parental upheavals. Not if they didn’t have to.

  The two of them kept exchanging glances. They had clearly worked out in advance what they might say to her, to cajole her back into the fold.

  ‘Go on,’ she said. Despite her intention to be attentive and receptive to whatever they had to say, because she loved them, a flicker of irritation rose within her. It burned higher because she did love them so much, flesh of her flesh. She took another sip of her wine, and waited.

  ‘Obviously it’s been difficult, with the move up to Mead and the house building being delayed and the publicity about the archaeological finds, and then the shock of the robbery,’ Toby offered. ‘Coming on top of the problem with Dad and the chambers. No wonder you feel unsettled.’

  The irritation was already fading, replaced by her instinctive wish to make everything well for them again. Her conviction wavered.

  ‘I don’t know what I do feel,’ she confessed. ‘It’s confusing.’

  Her younger son blinked. His mother was supposed to be just there, not to be battered by the winds of doubt or uncertainty.

  How like Amos they both were. Studying their broad, flushed faces she could see their father’s certainty and confidence, and sense the mass of their shared male solidarity like granite under mountain turf.

  ‘We aren’t trying to tell you what to do, Mum. We just want to know what’s going on. To help, if we can. Dad’s fairly distraught. I’m sure you know that.’ This was Sam, always more diplomatic than his brother.

  ‘He wants you back home,’ Toby put in.

  Katherine nodded.

  ‘Well?’ Toby persisted.

  They were both eating quite heartily, she noticed. Her own plate lay untouched. Food had lost its importance lately, but wine was good. She cleared her throat.

  ‘I’m not going back.’

  Saying it over their own dinner table with Amos’s empty chair facing her gave weight to the words. Sam reached out and put his hand over hers. A cow’s lick in his hair, above the right eyebrow, forever battled with his good haircut. An ancient chickenpox scar indented his forehead near the bridge of his nose.

  ‘Is it because of the other women?’

  This was a bold acknowledgement. Sam and Toby both knew that their father had affairs, and Katherine knew that they knew, but they had never openly discussed it. In times of crisis the boys would put their arms around her shoulders more demonstratively than usual, and ask with extra emphasis if she needed any help with anything, but even when the threat of the harassment suit had compelled Amos to leave his chambers and initiated the whole process of removing to Mead, the subject had never been directly aired.

  How English we are, she thought, and how conventional.

  Even in their business suits as they were tonight, having come straight from work, her sons looked as if they ought to have a cricket bag or a pair of skis somewhere about them. They were decent, healthy, traditional men, slightly at odds with their own times. She had bred that conventional quality in them, she understood, and she felt a surge of compassion for them, as well as love. Their father was and
always had been more outrageous and less forgivable.

  She opened her eyes innocently wide. ‘What other women?’ It was an attempt to lighten the atmosphere by showing them that she wasn’t afraid to joke, but they both looked so appalled that she immediately felt sorry for being clumsy. She said quickly, ‘No, it’s not because of that. If it were, I’d have left long ago.’

  Toby leaned forwards, steepling his fingers just as his father did.

  ‘Why, then?’

  ‘Why did I leave, or why am I not going back?’

  ‘Both. First one first.’

  She drank some more wine. It had the effect of amplifying the rush of blood in her ears.

  ‘I left because being at Mead with Miranda and the others gave me an idea of how I might live differently from the way I have done up to now.’

  They gazed at her, striving to decipher her meaning. She sliced a small portion of food, speared it with her fork and placed it in her mouth. It tasted of nothing. She chewed and swallowed, with difficulty.

  ‘Yet you’ve left Mead behind as well as Dad. Isn’t that a contradiction?’

  Toby’s question was studiedly uninflected in tone.

  ‘Yes, I can see what you mean. I believed in the Mead idea and I’m really sorry to be the renegade. I wish it was working out the way Miranda dreamed, and I suppose it still could. Being there made me see myself differently, though, and you can’t unsee things once the light has gone on, can you?’ As gently as she could she added, ‘There is a completely different reason why I can’t go back.’

  There was a second’s absolute silence. Even the traffic seemed stilled.

  Neither of them would ask what the reason might be. Instead the table mats and candlestick bases seemed suddenly to become objects for close scrutiny. Her sons knew that she was about to say something they didn’t want to hear and would wish to have unsaid as soon as it was uttered, but Katherine had reached the point of truth and she clung to her conviction that it was time to speak it.

  Into her head came the memory of the evening in Chris’s offices, when he had placed the torc about her neck and she had reached up to finger the heavy twists of metal as it lay against her skin. Some piece of alchemy had taken place and she had been transformed.