by Rosie Thomas
With a younger woman, Chris could have a new family. He had claimed once that he didn’t want to start again, but she had no way of telling whether this was the truth.
It was raining harder now, and there was still a distance to drive back to the cottage.
‘Shall we go?’ he asked gently.
Katherine nodded, gathering up her bag and damp raincoat.
The next morning she woke reluctantly from a sleep that seemed deeper than usual, and it took several seconds to remember where she was. Then unwillingness for the impending separation from Chris flooded through her. She pressed closer against him and he held her in his arms.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Sadness.’
His mouth moved against her ear. ‘That’s always going to be with us. It’s the accumulation of experience, building up like scale inside a kettle. The more you learn, the harder it is to be thoughtlessly optimistic. We can learn to live with it, though.’
‘Do we have to? Isn’t there some product we can use just to fizz it away?’
‘I can think of something we might try.’ His hands slid over her. And for half an hour at least, it worked.
In the end, they couldn’t put off getting up any longer. Katherine knew before switching on her mobile that there would be several messages from Amos, and probably from the boys as well. Chris walked naked to the window and opened the curtains to the view of grey sky. She studied the set of his shoulders and the collar of flesh at his middle. His legs were furred with dark hair.
‘I have to go home. For Christmas, at least,’ she told him.
Without turning around he said, ‘I know you do.’
They ate breakfast together at the pine kitchen table. Afterwards they emptied the small residue of food into a bin liner and carried it out to the wheelie bin at the side of the house. Katherine’s car was where she had parked it two nights ago, with the wheels tracked sideways. Salt air had already touched the crumpled front wheel arch with rust. He put her small bag in the boot and held open the door for her. When she slid down the driver’s window he leaned in and kissed her.
‘After Christmas,’ she promised, although she didn’t know what.
He stood back and watched, with his hand raised, as she drove away.
The days crept by and Christmas came closer.
Katherine stayed in London, going to work and coming home each night to the Bloomsbury flat. She reorganized the charity’s main donor index and devised a major appeal to be launched in the New Year, impressing her colleagues with her flood of energy. In her spare time she went Christmas shopping, not quite able to resist the guilty impulse to buy more presents than usual for her sons. Toby and Sam came to see her again, separately as well as together, and she did her best to convince them that she was all right and so would they and Amos be, given time. She knew that they were disappointed in her, although they tried hard not to be.
She spoke to Chris every day, but even so when she was not immersed in her own work she was startlingly lonely. She hadn’t taken into account how the background reassurance of a long partnership fills all the waking hours.
She also talked to both Polly and Miranda, and she was pleased when they suggested coming to London to take her out.
‘Yes please, let’s do that,’ she agreed. Being away from Mead and separated from Amos made her understand how much her affection for both her friends had deepened.
Miranda was still with Joyce. Katherine asked Polly for news about Amos, and Polly told her all she knew, which was very little. She said that he seemed to spend most of his time watching television and drinking.
One night over a bottle of wine Amos confided to Selwyn that his sons were shocked and incredulous that their parents’ long marriage could shatter like this.
‘What am I supposed to say to them?’ Amos was at a loss for words, for possibly only the second or third time in his life.
‘Maybe it hasn’t shattered,’ Selwyn attempted. ‘Perhaps when you’ve both had a chance to think it over, you’ll be able to patch things up.’
Amos surveyed his surroundings. The cottage was no longer polished and pin-neat. There was a strong smell, partly relating to the overflowing bin in the kitchen but more to do with unopened windows and despair.
Selwyn added, ‘You should allow Katherine a bit of leeway. She’ll probably come around. She’s given you plenty of slack over the years, hasn’t she?’
‘For Christ’s sake. There’s a difference between taking a couple of minor diversions along the route and blowing up the whole fucking road. I always came home. I don’t know about you, but I have never suggested or considered that my marriage was for anything less than life. From this day forth, you know. But you and Polly never actually got married, did you?’
Selwyn rested his head in his hands. It was late, he was always tired, and there were knots here that were too serious for him to risk even the gentlest attempt at unpicking. Across the yard Miranda’s windows were still in darkness. He was unnerved to realize how deeply her absence was affecting him.
‘No. We never said those words. What difference does it make, after three decades of sharing a life?’
‘None, so it seems.’ Amos shook his head and refilled his glass. He had physically shrunk. His unironed shirt collar revealed the sad folds of his neck.
Back in the barn, Selwyn related this exchange to Polly. With Miranda and Colin both away, they had become unofficial caretakers of Amos.
‘You don’t think he’ll do anything stupid, do you?’ Selwyn wondered. He tightened the jaws of a bench vice and ran his fingers over a length of planking before taking up a plane.
‘If you mean shoot or poison himself, no, I don’t. He might drink himself to death, but that will take a while.’
Polly had come back from the house, where she had used the washing machine in the utility room off Miranda’s kitchen. Selwyn watched her place the plastic holdall that functioned as their laundry basket in a relatively undusty spot at the other end of their trestle table. She took out clean pairs of jeans and T-shirts, shook them with a sharp snap and refolded them in the air since there was nowhere clean enough to put them down. He couldn’t read her expression.
‘Poll?’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. Here.’
He stretched out a hand towards her and she hesitated for several seconds before reaching out for it. Her attention focused on the shirt hanging from her other hand.
Polly could have taken this brief connection of fingertips as an opportunity to talk, but she found herself unable to say even a word. The spectacle of Amos and Katherine loomed over her, as colossal and with as much rude impact as a film on an iMax screen. The projection was so close that the margins of the picture seemed to flicker over her own face, making her blink and want to screw up her eyes. She was afraid that if she spoke, the conversation might skid into a discussion about their own possible separation. Maybe, she thought, Selwyn was searching through the barriers for a way of introducing the subject.
After a moment he withdrew his hand. He returned to the bench and bent his shoulder to the plane. Ringlets of crisp woodshavings coiled to the floor.
By five minutes after closing time, the bar at the Griffin was almost empty. Earlier it had been crowded for the weekly quiz night, but now only the hard core of customers remained. Vin Clarke flapped a towel over the pumps and told the last half-dozen drinkers to get a move on because he had a bed to go to, even if the rest of them didn’t.
Amos had been sitting alone at a small table for two hours. Having summoned up the startling amount of energy and determination necessary to get himself out of the cottage, drive to Meddlett and enter the pub, knowing that if he sat at home any longer he would go mad, he had been greeted by a couple of curt nods and a muttered, ‘Evening. What’ll it be?’ from Vin himself. He passed the time by eavesdropping on the quiz.
The teams took it very seriously, huddling around the tables, shielding their
papers with bent arms and energetically sledging their competitors. A small flame of competitiveness rekindled in Amos and he toyed with the idea of making a single-handed late entry. Once Vin began reading out the questions, he was relieved that he had not, because he couldn’t answer any of them. He wasn’t at all clear on who Angelina was, let alone the names of her twins, and the five original members of Liberty X were also completely unknown to him.
The night’s prize (twenty pounds and a round on the house) was eventually scooped by the youngest and noisiest team, a gang of shaven-headed boys and their girlfriends.
Now the last pair of men heaved themselves off their bar stools and lumbered to the door. Vin gave Amos a meaningful look.
‘Everything all right up at the house, is it?’ he asked.
Amos nodded. The evening had left him feeling like the last living representative of an about-to-be extinct species. Now he came to think about it, the entire severed, twitching, unfamiliar rump of his once-familiar life was giving off the same impression.
‘Shame about that robbery. Must have left you pretty gutted,’ Vin observed, with immeasurable satisfaction. ‘No sign of them catching anyone, is there?’
Amos was surprised to remember that he had been so exercised about the excavation and the delay to his building project. Now the events were diminished and remote, as if he were observing them through the wrong end of a telescope. He hadn’t been to the site, or even thought much about it. Why had it never occurred to him that he would derive no satisfaction from any of his plans or projects if he had to see them through alone?
Hadn’t he ever considered that he might miss Katherine so much?
Even to see Selwyn and Polly together, fielding the tail ends of each other’s sentences and skirting through the tricky choreography of domestic life in their barn, made him squirm with jealousy and weary outrage.
How had this happened? When exactly had his wife hatched into the cool, detached and seemingly implacable creature who barely deigned to speak to him on the telephone?
Vin shrugged. There was no useful information to be gleaned here. He turned his back and began flicking switches. The bar was plunged into semi-darkness and Amos took this as the signal to leave. In the doorway he almost collided with Jessie, who was carrying a pile of glass ashtrays.
‘Hi?’ she said, looking behind him.
‘I’m on my own,’ he told her.
‘Thought you might have brought the guys from the commune to quiz night,’ she grinned.
‘It’s not a commune,’ he said automatically.
She dealt out the ashtrays and took off her apron.
‘Got your car here?’
‘Yes, I have.’
‘Give me a lift home? It’s bloody cold walking in this weather and he won’t drive me, even though I’m staff. Of course, if you hadn’t knocked me off my bike and squashed it flat I’d be able to ride home.’
‘I didn’t knock you off your…’ he began. Jessie let out a hoot of laughter.
‘We’ve done this routine already, haven’t we?’
Her face was bright with mockery and as his gaze slid southwards from her smile he noticed the tendrils of the intriguing tattoo.
‘Come on then,’ he relented.
Outside, the cold stopped them in their tracks. Freezing air flooded into Amos’s mouth and nose, prickling the membranes, and shrinking the skin on his bones. The silence was vast. Jessie tilted her head and stared up into the blue-black sky.
‘Look at that,’ she breathed.
The stars were luminous, chains and clouds of them, with the brightest and hardest pinned to the faint swirls of the most distant like gems on a net skirt.
Her small chin pointed upwards. ‘Makes you think, doesn’t it?’
The Jaguar was the only car left in the car park. Amos pointed his key fob and the lights obediently blinked at the soft clunk of the central locking.
‘Hang on,’ Jessie said. She unlatched a side door and the dog bounded out. It leaped up at her, paws planted on her chest, tongue slathering her face. ‘Raff. Get down, you silly bugger.’
As soon as Amos opened the car door the dog bounded inside, treading in the embrace of the front passenger seat as if it planned to take up residence. Jessie piled in and shouldered the animal into the back seat. She settled herself and sighed with satisfaction as Amos swung towards Mead. The dog’s head projected between them. It clicked its jaws and the tongue flagged out, trailing drool over the leather upholstery. The tarmac of the road, hedges and dipped branches of trees all glimmered with damp.
‘I love this. It’s just such a brilliant car. You must be pretty pleased with it,’ Jessie murmured. She stroked the dashboard and the plump curves of the seats.
Amos felt embarrassed by her frank lust for it. ‘It’s just a car.’
She directed the way to a turning off the road to Mead. The headlamps lit up an overgrown gateway and a cottage beyond it. Rafferty barked once in Amos’s ear. Jessie opened the door and swung her legs out.
‘You can come in for a bit, if you want.’
Amos saw no reason not to. He had nothing to hurry home for. The garden was a crisped wilderness of sharp twigs and branches that stabbed at his face. He ducked to avoid them and his feet skidded on the slippery path.
Inside, there was a kitchen in a state not much more squalid than his own. A light bulb flickered and Rafferty slobbered at some leftovers in a dog bowl. Jessie made two mugs of instant coffee without offering Amos a choice. She jerked her head and he followed her across the hallway into a living room. There were music posters layered on top of ancient flowery wallpaper, and black cobwebs in the angles of the ceiling. Jessie dived at an electric fire on the hearth and switched it on. The two bars fizzed a little and then glowed, a tiny source of optimism in the icy room. The main items of furniture were two armchairs and a sofa covered in some bristly dun material.
‘It’s a bit shit, but it’s home. Isn’t it, Raff?’
The dog bounded past them, a streak of black elastic, and took one of the armchairs.
‘What happened to sit, and heel? You ought to train that animal. It would be a kindness.’
‘You dissin’ mah dawg?’ Jessie murmured, equably enough. She pressed a couple of buttons on an MP3 player and some kind of noodling, tinkling music seeped out of minute speakers. ‘Have a seat,’ she nodded. Amos chose the second armchair and Jessie plumped down on the sofa. They both kept their coats on. From an inner pocket she produced her Golden Virginia tin and began a complicated process of licking and gluing papers. Amos watched her, but in his mind he was transported a long way back to nights with Selwyn, and Blue Peony parties, and Miranda dancing in her tiny skirts and suede waistcoats. In his day, he had been an acknowledged master of this particular craft.
Jessie lit the twisted end and sucked in a deep lungful. She closed her eyes and blew out smoke, then extended her arm.
‘You want some?’
He took the joint from her and she grinned at him over the rim of her coffee mug.
‘You’re all right, you know, for an old bloke. Like at the Fifth bonfire. Kieran was dead lucky you were there. Not many people would have weighed straight in like that, against Donny Spragg and Damon and that lot. You probably didn’t have a clue what you were up against, did you? How’s your mate, by the way, with the burn?’
Amos blinked, trying to recall. Selwyn had now discarded all the dressings. The hair on one side of his head remained shaggy, on the other side it was rakishly stubbled, bisected by a livid red scar.
‘Um, he’s all right.’
Jessie regarded him. ‘You look pissed off tonight. What’s up?’
Amos thought. A long time seemed to pass, during which his mind ranged widely over the possible answers. In the end, the simplest seemed the best choice.
‘My wife left me,’ he said.
Jessie sniffed, turning down the corners of her mouth in a knowing way. She reached out for the joint.
; ‘Sorry. Why’d she do that?’
The room was losing its glacial chill. He unbuttoned his coat.
‘I’ve no idea.’ For no apparent reason, or a thousand accumulated ones, he could have said. After another extended interval he added, ‘She says she doesn’t want to live in the house we’re building.’
This information appeared to strike some sort of a chord with Jessie.
‘Do you remember at the Fifth there were people with placards? Some of them got up in woad or whatever stuff ancient tribes wore?’
For some reason quite large sections of Amos’s memory now seemed to be melting or collapsing into each other, much more calamitously than the usual sporadic noun- and proper name-loss, but he did retain quite a sharp mental picture of the group of middle-aged people toting a plastic skeleton and waving home-made signs to do with honouring history. He had been sitting with this girl on a hay bale, and she had regaled him with rather good stories about Meddlett people and their doings. Now, with the same relish, she told him that there was quite a big protest movement getting up in the village about incomers desecrating local heritage and sticking up great big houses that no one wanted there. Mrs Hayes was part of it, the one who had been arrested for setting fire to her neighbour’s shed, and Mrs Spragg in the shop, not Donny’s ma, his aunt, and quite a lot of others. A couple of them had been in the Griffin tonight, hadn’t he realized?
No, he hadn’t.
And, he pointed out, if they were talking pillage, it wasn’t he or anyone else he knew who had crept up in the middle of the night, hit an innocent guard over the head and robbed the locals as well as himself of the major portion of their shared heritage.
He was quite pleased with this response, in the circumstances, but Jessie dismissed it with a shake of the head. He had to realize what he was dealing with, although it was difficult for townies to understand the nuances. No one was that amazed the stuff had got nicked. It was either pikey locals or immigrants who had done it, it was what happened around here, but what everyone was really united against were Amos’s sort.
