by Rosie Thomas
When their eyes had met and locked she hadn’t glanced away, or tried to apologize. She hadn’t even blushed. She had stared back at him, open as the excavated site, and leaping with life. She had been eager – greedy – and he had read that in her eyes and responded to her.
It struck her now that it was the first and only time in her life that she had felt no inhibitions.
It was at that moment that she had fallen in love with him. That was when, and that was what it was.
She was in love with Chris Carr and she wanted to be with him. She hadn’t seen him since their walk on the beach, they had only spoken briefly and inconclusively on the telephone, but now she wanted to leap out of her chair and rush to him. Under the table, out of sight, she clamped her fingers to the sides of her chair.
‘I have met someone else,’ she said. The drained words were hardly adequate, but to her sons she couldn’t give them the proper emphasis.
Sam and Toby weren’t glancing at each other now. Shocked, they looked straight back at her. They didn’t want to believe what she was telling them. She was their mother, not a women’s magazine feature on midlife crisis.
‘Who is he?’
‘Do we know him?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘Are you,’ Toby frowned, ‘having an affair with this man?’
‘You’ve made the assumption that it’s a man,’ she pointed out with a touch of mischief.
Their faces froze in horrified disbelief. She repented again.
‘It is, in fact, but it might not have been. I’m not having an affair yet, but I’m not going to rule it out. A relationship with him, that is. I don’t want to rule anything out. That’s sort of the point. I’m being as honest as I can. Can you understand any of this, at all?’
She could see how difficult it was for them – more than difficult, positively distasteful – to make this dizzy shift in reckoning. She belonged at their father’s side, and if not there then in her office at the charity, or here in the flat cooking dinner in her William Morris print National Trust apron. The admission that she had just made set up all kinds of unwelcome speculations. Their mother had a mind of her own. Their mother made calculations for herself that did not number themselves as points one and two for consideration. Their mother almost certainly thought about sex. They were right on that one. Sex, she acknowledged to herself, occupied quite a large proportion of her waking thoughts these days.
This struck her as funny and she laughed as her sons gaped at her.
‘Does Dad know him, whoever he is?’
‘Not really.’ She thought she was justified in saying this. Amos had met him, that was all.
‘How long has it been going on?’
Katherine held up her hand. It was not so much answering her sons’ questions as recognizing the depth of disapprobation that lay behind them that was uncomfortable.
‘It doesn’t matter who he is and there’s nothing much going on at the moment. This is just as much about Amos and me, and the new house, and, well – just the age that the two of us are.’
Sombre-faced they listened to her while she tried to explain to them why she didn’t want to live in a sparkling new house built on top of the princess’s vandalized burial site, and how living at Mead had made her feel vital in a way she hadn’t done for many years, and finally that despite what she had just said, their parents’ long marriage had been not a failure but a success.
‘Do you still love Dad?’ Sam wanted to know.
‘Yes,’ she acknowledged, because she did. You did love people, when they had been the father of your children and embedded in your life for every day of thirty years. Even though they had not always behaved well, or considerately, or even thought about you that much, except as an accessory.
Now they were looking at each other again, the immediate rictus of embarrassment having passed.
‘This may be just a phase, then,’ Toby murmured.
She made no response to that.
She was reflecting again on how their conventional attitudes were her legacy. Yet her own exterior didn’t convey the full picture, as she was only just discovering, so by the same measure her sons’ appearances might mask surprising opposite tendencies. She was gripped by a fierce longing to discover what these might be. How well did she really know them, even though she had given birth to them and fed them and finally discharged them into the adult world?
Maybe in time all four of them would learn to see into each other instead of merely glancing at and then past the spaces they occupied.
A wave of optimism swept through her. The room seemed brighter, her sons less censorious.
‘You look happy,’ Sam told her wonderingly.
After they had gone, Katherine cleared the plates and scraped her almost untouched food into the kitchen pedal bin. She blew out the candles and collected up the place mats. Her shadow fell across the polished table top.
She picked up the phone and dialled his number. He answered on the second ring.
‘I want to see you,’ she said. ‘Is that still what you want?’
She could hear his breath in her ear. It was unbearable that he was a hundred miles away.
He said, ‘Are you sure about that? When?’
‘Yes, I’m sure. Tomorrow. As soon as possible. Now.’
Chris laughed, the sound warm inside her head. ‘OK.’
Toby and Sam walked to the Tube.
‘So, what do you think?’ Toby asked.
‘I think it’s like Mum said. And Dad’s given her quite a hard time, over the years, hasn’t he?’
‘In a way. But it hasn’t all been bad.’
They had been brought up to recognize that they were privileged because of Amos’s success. That had been Katherine’s doing, and she had always been clear that she included herself in this.
‘No, it hasn’t,’ Sam acknowledged.
‘I had a long talk on the phone to Alph Davies. She says her parents have been pretty rocky, and even more bonkers if that’s possible to imagine, since they went to live up there.’
‘It’s the stage they’re all at. They’re getting old and they don’t want to. They fear age, and death. Sex is a way of not thinking about death.’
Toby shrugged. This kind of speculation was not his métier.
They passed under a row of lights that marked the farthest limit of the recently illuminated Oxford Street Christmas decorations. A ragged star blinked on and off in a cobweb of cables. Every Christmas of their lives so far the Knight brothers had spent with their parents.
‘What will happen this year?’ Toby wondered.
‘Do you suppose Mum will want to be with Mr Mystery? If it comes to a choice, we’ll have to be with Dad. We can’t leave him on his own with a microwaved turkey feast for one, can we?’
‘No, we can’t do that, of course. Happy Christmas,’ Toby sighed.
DECEMBER
TEN
The drive out of London reminded Katherine of the afternoon in September when she and Amos had headed for the first proper Mead weekend. She had felt a knot of excited anticipation beneath her diaphragm then too, impossible to ignore and more intense than the circumstances called for. Her sense that something major was about to happen had grown, and the effect of it was to burnish the intervening events, lending them a texture in her memory that other momentous times in her life had never acquired.
She saw again the group of teenagers swarming out of the village bus shelter to jump on Amos’s Jaguar, the bar at the Griffin, the trampled grass in the shelter of the white tent as they stood on the lip of the grave and peered down at the princess’s uncovered bones.
Then came the moment when Chris placed the massive gold torc around her neck, and the sequence that led from there to the walk on the beach and the point where she said to Amos, I’m leaving you.
The events seemed inevitable in retrospect, but whenever she thought of this last, a ripple of disbelief ran through her.
She had
said it, and then she had actually done it. And now she was driving out of town at the end of a lightless December afternoon, passing over orange ribbons of elevated roads and into the slow current of motorway traffic, on her way to meet Christopher Carr once again. When they had dinner together he had joked about Manhattan or the moon, but as it turned out even a couple of nights together in rural Norfolk had been comically difficult to arrange.
It was two and a half weeks before Christmas. The boys and Amos wanted to know if she was coming home to Mead for the holiday, and she couldn’t tell them because she didn’t know herself. She was in the opposite corner to all the clockwork family holidays of the past.
Chris was busy. The Mead artefacts were in the hands of the Iron-Age experts, the bones were now boxed up and filed on the shelves at his offices. He had written his report on the finds that had been saved and on the loss of the remainder, and now other work had intervened. Much of it was routine, he told her, and none of it was as fascinating as the great discovery at Mead. Katherine listened intently. His work evidently absorbed him, just as Amos’s had done, but Chris talked about it more generously. And when he wasn’t working, his family made a series of calls on his time. In this last part of the Christmas term there were school plays and carol concerts and a disco. Then his ex-wife and her husband went shopping in New York, and while they were away his daughters came to stay with him.
‘I want to see you so much,’ he told her. ‘This isn’t very romantic, is it?’
‘It is, in a way. It’s ordinary life illuminated by pure amazement,’ Katherine smiled.
Finally, there was a site to be assessed in Lincolnshire. Chris told her how he had grabbed the job file for himself.
‘Meet me there?’ he asked, sounding diffident now that the moment had come.
‘Yes,’ she said without hesitation.
Chris mentioned booking a hotel, perhaps in Peterborough or Spalding.
Katherine saw the room as clearly as if she were already standing in it. There would be dark red Anaglypta beneath the dado, dark- and sludge-green Regency stripe above, a trouser press and a tiny kettle, a television behind shiny double doors with the laminated list of channels including an adult one, and the reek of illicit cigarettes trapped in the curtains.
An hour later he called her back and said he had found a rental cottage. The owner was happy to let it for a couple of nights off season.
‘It will be a bit more homely,’ Chris said. This word stayed in her head.
A home? Was this what they wanted together?
He did all this gently, with consideration for what she might want or expect, and she was appreciative. But she felt old. Long ago, with Amos and before him, just doing it had been the imperative, not making all the attached accommodations. Two people would have fallen behind a hedge or into the back of a car or under a pile of coats at a party. It was odd to have reached an age where the setting was significant. It had to be free from previous associations, and private, and appropriate to their maturity.
How unexpectedly complicated it all was.
Katherine was smiling as she peered into the traffic.
Complicated, but also exciting.
She had even bought new underwear. Lace yes, but not black. It was a sort of old rose colour, much more appropriate. Trying it on, she was surprised to see how much weight she had lost.
She reached the fen country. In the darkness on either side of the road she was aware of empty flat land seamed by dykes, and the sea like the end of the world ahead of her. There was a narrower road and a jumble of dark houses, a single white finger post suddenly rearing in the headlights. A mile or so further on the road petered out. There was a low building to one side and a square of light in a window.
The robot voice of her satnav informed her, ‘You have reached your destination.’
The setting didn’t matter so much after all, she discovered.
As soon as Chris opened the door she had a blurred impression of low ceilings and latched doors, the smell of bottled gas. But other impressions were much stronger. Hands and skin; breathing suddenly having become very difficult. A strange sensation beneath her breastbone, somewhere between a trapped hiccup and a cough, that when he stopped kissing her escaped as a bubble of pure, delighted laughter.
The stairs were very steep. He hit his head on a lintel and swore, until she put her mouth to his.
The bed, when they fell on to it, smelled damp.
Not much notice was taken of the rose-coloured lace.
The beard was a difference. But otherwise having sex with Dr Christopher Carr seemed both apt and oddly familiar, like a reprise of a soaring musical theme that she thought she had forgotten but which was in fact embedded in every cell of her body and her soul.
Afterwards they lay back, breathless and tangled up in the twist of unaired sheets. She rested her chin in the obliging hollow between his neck and shoulder.
Katherine was amused to realize that in the past half-hour she hadn’t given a thought to her wrinkles, or the folds of flesh around her belly. Chris didn’t appear all that much younger than she did, now they came to look candidly at each other. Bodies were admirable pieces of machinery. She was quite proud of hers, tonight, and the warmth and weight of his was welcome, separate but also comfortable, only representing a partial answer as yet to a series of questions. The full answer would no doubt come in time: if they were to have time.
His fingers knotted in her hair.
‘My barbarian,’ he said. That made her giggle. It would be hard to imagine anyone less barbaric than the woman she had been.
‘What’s funny?’ he lazily asked.
‘Sex, I suppose.’
‘I know,’ he breathed, rolling on to his side so he could look into her eyes. ‘I know.’
Affection and regard for him swelled up in her. He was a nice man. A good man. Was that faint praise, she wondered?
‘Do you know something else? I’m hungry,’ she said, after a while.
‘That may be a problem. There’s a pub in the village, though.’
But Katherine had done just as she would if she had been on her way to the old home in Richmond, or up to Mead. The boot of her car was full of supermarket carrier bags. Once they had put their clothes on again he carried the bags in for her.
‘You’re a miracle,’ Chris said, in genuine admiration.
The cottage wasn’t furnished with Miranda’s style, but there was an oven, and Katherine found pots and pans and crockery stacked in spidery cupboards. She cooked dinner, and Chris opened a bottle of wine and leaned against the sink and talked to her. The talk went on and on. They laughed, and then turned serious again. He looked at her, and she returned his stare. They were wondering, both of them, what was supposed to happen next now the first major thing had happened. But the kitchen was warm with the oven’s heat and the thin curtains were drawn. This is what we do, she thought. We make a domestic scene out of this temporary shell. Even in the warmth and yellow lamplight, though, the picture was fragile, as if a single breath might whirl it away.
The next day, she went with him to the site.
He gave her a hard hat and a hi-vis waistcoat to put on over her raincoat. They tramped across a raw field where a new estate of boxy houses would eventually rise.
‘If the developer doesn’t go bust first, that is,’ Chris said.
She watched him while he took measurements and soil samples. They were undemonstrative with each other in the presence of an architect and an engineer, but once, when no one was looking, Chris caught her hand and lightly ran his thumb over the bones of her wrist. This tiny gesture seemed to touch her as intimately as anything that had taken place between them the night before. He was a good talker, but she was learning that he was more eloquent with the unspoken. The opposite of Amos.
A thin shawl of rain came at them off the Wash.
‘Are you warm enough?’ he asked. He wanted her to sit in the car with the heater on but she preferred it
out here, with him. It felt companionable, although – like homely – that was an odd word to come to mind.
Wasn’t that what she already had, a home and a companion, and had done for the last thirty years?
On the drive back to the cottage they stopped at a café in the middle of a village. There was another long featureless street, but this place didn’t seem to have the teenage population of the place where she and Amos had had tea back in September. Or maybe on a day like this everyone between thirteen and twenty was indoors, smoking and listening to their MP3s. This café wasn’t organic with Victorian embellishments, like the other one. It was bleary with condensation and smelled of frying.
Katherine and Chris were eating soup. It was both salty and tasteless, with the powdery packet residue at the centre of occasional lumps.
‘Don’t say I don’t show you the world,’ Chris laughed, but he was apologizing at the same time, fearing that she might be critical of his choice although they had passed no other alternatives apart from a Chinese takeaway. Much of his life must consist of days like this, Katherine realized. Long drives to remote sites, and hasty meals taken en route. They still didn’t know much about each other, even though he was now officially her lover. She was faintly oppressed by the prospect of how much separate history lay behind them, and how much they still had to discover. It was like being given a text to study in a language not her mother tongue.
Outside, a young woman in a parka came by with her child. The child was dressed in a bright red all-in-one with the hood pulled up over a knitted hat, making it impossible to guess what sex it was. It was riding a tiny tricycle, pedalling furiously but still making such slow progress that the mother kept stopping to let it get ahead by a yard before two steps brought them parallel again. They were both intent on this journey, their cold-pinched features showing a strong resemblance. Sam had owned just such a trike when he was a toddler, and the snail’s-pace of days with a tiny child came vividly back to Katherine. A glance at Chris revealed that he was watching the pair too, with an expression she didn’t want to fathom. Neither of them spoke until the tricycle had passed out of the frame of the café window.
