by Rosie Thomas
Anyway, Jessie continued, quite a lot of these placard people…
‘You mean, as distinct from the thief people?’
‘Yeah, that’s right.’
…believed that it was a mistake to have opened up the grave at all, just for some house to be built, let alone to have removed the bones from their ancient resting place and bundled them away. The stuff, gold and whatever it was, belonged to Meddlett. But people were quite superstitious, as well. There was a lot of talk about the grave-opening bringing bad luck.
‘As in crop failure? Plagues of boils? The curse of Mead?’
He laughed as he took a last long toke from the joint. Smoke scorched his throat.
Jessie looked narrowly at him and then started work on a fresh construction.
‘All right, you rip it as much as you like. I’m just telling you, that’s what some people think. And maybe, just maybe, this business with your wife is the start. Have you thought about that? Perhaps she’s superstitious too.’
The dog snored in its armchair. The room was definitely warm now.
Another eternity passed.
‘You could say that the bad luck started right away, with the robbery. The security guard certainly would,’ Amos mused.
‘Yeah.’
They lapsed into silence again. In some way, this inconclusive talk had eased his heart. Mentioning Katherine and listening to Jessie’s theory had helped to put her at a little distance. He found he could begin to contemplate an interval without her.
In fact the whole world had receded, he noticed, and his bewilderment at the events of the last few days along with it. He listened to the winding music with minute attention. It was nothing like ‘Crawling King Snake’, but it was all right. Jessie’s head was bent, and he could see the pale skin of her scalp where the hair parted. She was very pretty. They seemed to have been talking for hours, and he was gradually overcome with the desire to be closer to her. The odd tricks that time was playing made it easy to forget years. Not much had intervened, after all, since he sat in Selwyn’s college rooms respectfully listening to the new Doors album and watching Miranda Huggett twining her fingers in the air. It was the same, all the same. Time and age. What did they matter? Amos slid off his chair and went to sit beside Jessie on the sofa. His arm circled her shoulders. She sighed a little, and he took this as a good sign. He began to kiss her.
Jessie lunged away from him.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ she yelled.
The dog woke up. It leaped off the chair and came straight at him, snarling. Amos crouched, arms raised to protect himself, the blood draining from his face and flooding out of his ventricles. His heart squeezed and fluttered, apparently on thin air.
Jessie grabbed Rafferty’s collar and hauled him off.
‘Shit. Stop that. I’m fucking sick of it. Can’t I just sit and have a smoke and a bit of a talk with someone, anyone, without them sticking their tongue down my throat? Even an old man like you?’
She threw down the tobacco tin. There were tears in her eyes. She looked like nothing more than a little girl having a tantrum.
Amos felt a suffocating wave of humiliation. The flare of hearty lust died, leaving him shaking. A point of sudden and absolute clarity in the midst of his peripheral confusion told him that his career as a lover of women had just ended. All those lunches, the little drinks dates, the enjoyable rituals of the chase leading to the smooth necks to be kissed and the buttons straining to be undone, all now lay behind him.
He was old.
This was where his sexual life effectively finished, in a grimy cottage at the end of a lane with an electric fire giving off its dry red glare and a tattooed girl crying with anger at him. He was old. He had no work to absorb him, no colleagues or clerk of chambers or dinners, no wife, no point. Even the dope he had just enjoyed smoking was much too strong for him. He felt an overwhelming desire to sleep, and yet his limbs twitched like a marionette’s and his eyes burned in their sockets. He was old. He rolled his tongue experimentally in the dry cave of his mouth and managed to speak.
‘I’m sorry. Really. I didn’t mean it. No, I did mean it, but I wish I hadn’t.’
Jessie sighed.
‘All right. Forget about it. It happens all the time, right?’
To Amos’s relief the dog retreated. It settled on its haunches and began licking its rear end.
‘You look pretty awful,’ Jessie said.
Amos slowly nodded his head. The urge to sleep was like being sucked into a swamp. He was going deeper. The ooze compressed his ribcage, making it difficult to breathe. The walk to the car, the depths of cold, the drive back to Mead, all were beyond him. Jessie was standing now, looming above him as he wilted sideways into spilled ash on the sofa cushions. She picked up a blanket from the dog’s chair and folded it over him.
‘I want to ask you something.’
‘What?’ she frowned.
‘Will you show me…your tattoo. Please?’
She seemed very tall. Seven feet high. Her face was a long way off, solemn, as unmoving as if it were carved out of stone.
Silently she undid the buttons of her coat and let it drop. With her right hand she grasped the hem of her jersey and in one smooth movement she peeled off the top layer and several more that clung beneath. She was naked to the waistband of her jeans.
The tattoo was a fine, lacy pattern of leaves. It rose from the shadowed hollow of her waist to cover one breast, tapering away into the tendrils that showed at her throat. The density of it made the other breast look marmoreal.
Time did its expanding trick again, the membrane stretching to a taut dome, tighter and further, then collapsing with a whisper. Amos exhaled a long breath.
‘Thank you. That is…magnificent.’
Offhandedly she bent and scraped up her clothes.
‘I’ve been called a lot of things. Never that. Come on, Rafferty.’
The dog’s molten glare as it went by him was the last thing Amos saw before the swamp closed over his head.
When he woke up there was grey light filtering through layers of window grime, which meant that it was not early. The landscape of the night’s vivid dreams was temporarily more real than the confined space of Jessie’s living room. He was very cold, and when he tried to sit up cramp seized his back and neck. The sofa cushions had printed themselves into his cheek, and his mouth was full of sand. He would have liked to plunge back into sleep, but he was much too uncomfortable. He began a yawn but stopped before his head split in half, then slowly levered himself off the cushions and achieved a semi-standing position. The jagged pain in his frontal lobes subsided to a dull ache. Wrapping his coat around him he plodded to the kitchen in search of a cup of tea. There was an open box of teabags on a shelf, and a half-pint carton of milk in an otherwise almost empty fridge. The window looked out on a thick tangle of bare twigs and some medium-sized evergreens, each one furred with frost. As he stood in the silence, he could just hear a car swishing past on the Meddlett road. The cold of the lino tiles struck up through his socks.
The mugful of hot tea made him feel better. A further brief exploration brought him to a downstairs bathroom, painted a clammy green colour. He rinsed his face in warm water and sleeked back his hair. When he returned to the kitchen the dog was there, licking up and crunching some sort of dry biscuit from its bowl. To his relief, it ignored him. He made himself a second mug of tea and as he drank it he heard footsteps overhead. A moment later Jessie descended the stairs. She was wearing a blue dressing gown like a child’s. She looked altogether childlike, blinking and frowning at him. She seemed too young and vulnerable to be living alone in this bleak cottage.
‘Well. Hi,’ she muttered.
‘I’m just going,’ he reassured her. ‘I needed a cup of tea first. Sorry if I’ve overstayed my welcome.’
She was opening a tin of dog food. The smell of it reached Amos and he swallowed hard. She forked chunks of brown meat into Rafferty’s bowl and threw the fo
rk into the sink.
‘It’s all right.’
‘What are you doing today?’
The memory of her bare breasts was still with him. He was fairly sure they had featured in his dreams, but this aspect of his interest in Jessie was now muddled with another, different response. The daylight kitchen, so chilly and bare of what he would consider essentials, and the sight of her pale ankles under the childish dressing gown, made him feel protective of her and even vaguely paternal. The question was the same one he might have asked Toby or Sam at some point during a university vacation.
‘Working,’ Jessie said, pointedly. ‘I’m on double shift again.’
She moved past him, drawing the blue edges of her dressing gown together. She was also thinking about last night’s tattoo episode, he understood. Now he felt like a pervert.
‘I’ll let you get your breakfast,’ he said. He rummaged in his coat pocket and found the car keys.
‘See you, then.’
He paused. ‘What was it we were smoking last night, by the way?’
‘Something stronger than you’re used to.’
He laughed at that. ‘I’m not used to anything at all, not any more. Do you know how old I am?’
‘Sixty?’
Amos cleared his throat. ‘Well, almost,’ he said.
The dog barked once, in approval, as he let himself out of the front door. He slithered down the concrete path to the parked Jaguar.
When he let himself back into the Mead cottage he noticed the bad smell immediately. He emptied the bin, threw out an arrangement of dead flowers, and sluiced away the khaki slime that had gathered in the vase. He picked up his phone and dialled Katherine, but as usual her mobile was switched to voicemail.
Katherine walked under chains of Christmas lights towards the bar where she was to meet Polly and Miranda. She passed glittering shop windows where clusters of satin and sequinned dresses turned the winter streets into the anterooms of a silent and static party, but she didn’t notice any of the displays. The three of us, she was thinking. We could almost be three women friends in a feel-good film, except that by this time of our lives you’d imagine there’d be nothing much to look forward to apart from the final credits. The audience blinking hard and blowing their noses before the lights come up to reveal their tears. But now it turns out that there’s a twist, and another twenty minutes of the movie yet to run.
She was so preoccupied with her thoughts that she walked right past the bar Miranda had chosen. She stopped several yards further on and retraced her steps. In the doorway she hesitated, peering into the throng. She noticed a slick waiter passing with his loaded tray of drinks and an eyebrow cocked at her as if to signal Please, not in here. You look all wrong. Couldn’t you find a nice teashop?
In defiance of him she lifted her head and marched into the thick of the crowd, searching the room for Polly and Miranda but finding no sign of them. She was the first to arrive.
It was a stroke of luck that four young men in dishevelled suits and no ties stood up just as she reached the far corner. She ducked behind one of them and secured the vacated table. As she sat down, a different waiter removed the empty glasses and swiped his cloth over the surface. He placed a long thin menu in front of her. The table was wedged beside the Christmas tree, and the lights were flashing on and off in a migraine-inducing way, but she found that if she twisted away and stared in the opposite direction she could just about exclude it from her field of vision.
So she saw Miranda as soon as she came in through the door. Of course Miranda didn’t hesitate even for a second. Several heads turned to watch her entrance, even now. Katherine waved to her, and Miranda lifted her elbows in acknowledgement. Her wrists and hands were loaded with carrier bags. She used the burden like a snowplough to open up her path through the mob.
‘Here you are,’ she gasped, letting fall the shopping. They hugged for a long moment, wordlessly touching cheeks, and then leaned back so they could study each other’s faces.
‘Here I am,’ Katherine agreed.
They squeezed hands and separated. Miranda sank into a chair.
‘How’s Joyce?’ Katherine asked quickly.
Miranda reported that Joyce was now sitting up in her hospital bed and telling anyone who passed by that before this she had never had a day’s illness in her life. The doctors were sure she would be well enough to come home for Christmas, and Miranda planned to bring her straight back to Mead.
‘So I took the opportunity to rush down here first, to buy presents, but mostly to see you, of course. And now that I can see you face to face instead of just listening on the phone, will you please tell me how you are?’
Their eyes met.
Katherine was touched and pleased that this cocktail meeting had been arranged, but she also felt awkward and quite distinctly exposed. As if she were standing up in her underwear, for the others’ scrutiny.
‘Let’s wait until Polly gets here,’ she demurred. She handed Miranda the menu to look at and they joked about the outlandish concoctions of Baileys and cinnamon and Kahlua and apple vodka. Miranda wondered if it would be completely unacceptable to order a plain gin and tonic.
‘Probably. I’m going to have a Long Sloe Christmas Screw,’ Katherine said.
Miranda looked startled. She wasn’t sure if Katherine was joking, or making a sly allusion. She wasn’t sure whether she actually knew Katherine at all.
Katherine reassured her. ‘I really am going to. It’s got sloe gin instead of vodka, and cranberry instead of orange. Don’t you love that?’
They looked up as Polly leaned over them.
‘I’ll have the same. With a sprig of mistletoe, if possible.’
She manoeuvred with difficulty into the confined space between the table and the flashing tree. She greeted Miranda with the lightest touch on her shoulder, then kissed Katherine, who had stood up to make room. Just as Miranda had done, Polly held her warmly and then studied her face. Katherine suffered this, understanding that her two friends were concerned for her and needed to reassure themselves that she was neither deeply miserable nor mad.
‘You look all right,’ Polly judged, after the scrutiny.
‘I am. How does Amos seem?’
Polly reached for one of Katherine’s hands and gripped it.
‘He’s hurt. And so are you, I should think. It’s the most painful thing that could happen.’
Miranda twisted sideways and found herself studying the tree and the plastic crystals suspended from fir branches to mimic icicles. The lights chased up and down the branches, ripples of red and purple and blue.
‘But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have done it,’ Polly murmured.
The waiter came and took their order. Miranda used the opportunity to collect herself, and turned to face Polly again. This was the first time they had seen each other face to face in almost two weeks, since Polly had left Mead to visit her children in London and the afternoon in Jake’s study had intervened.
When the drinks arrived, Katherine lifted her glass. It was decorated with a plastic sprig of holly.
‘Here’s to you both. Friends in need.’
‘Here’s to the wives,’ Polly responded.
They took a sip apiece and sat back.
‘I’m so sorry to sabotage everything. Your great scheme for Mead, Miranda,’ Katherine began. ‘Before we moved, Amos and I, I’d have said we were fine together. Not wonderful, I couldn’t have claimed that. Which of us could? I’m not asking you to tell me,’ she added hastily. ‘But I thought we were all right, otherwise for all our sakes I wouldn’t have risked selling up and coming to Mead. Anyway, you know Amos.’
They knew him very well. Polly nodded and Miranda twisted the holly sprig in the ruby-red depths of her drink.
‘After we came to live at Mead, our marriage changed. Or probably it would be more accurate to say that I changed.’
‘Changed how?’ Polly asked, raising an eyebrow.
Katherine tr
ied to explain. She had no sisters or daughters and it didn’t come easily, this opening up her most private feelings to other women, even to Miranda and Polly.
The other two listened, leaning forwards. Louder music had now started up and the noise level in the bar was rising, making it an effort for them to hear Katherine’s low voice.
She said that at Mead she had found her courage. Living there, she had fallen under a different influence. She said this seriously but glancing from one to the other, knowing that they would challenge her.
Polly did. ‘And whose influence would that be?’
‘I could say of the place itself. The spirit of it. Like falling under a spell.’
The princess was in all their thoughts, but they masked with smiles the idea that Katherine might be touched by her spirit. Miranda’s sceptical merriment was less pronounced than Polly’s, however. It wouldn’t have taken much to make her believe.
Katherine concluded, ‘Or I could just say that being closer to all of you finally opened my eyes. I stopped making the compromises that being Amos’s wife involves and decided to get a life of my own.’
‘And have you?’ This was Polly again.
She sighed. ‘I’ve hurt Amos, I’ve deeply upset our boys. I wouldn’t call wreaking such havoc a positive move, exactly. But it’s early days.’
The confession was unpractised but as honest as she could make it. Miranda had been twiddling her holly sprig, but now she lifted her head.
‘Is there someone else involved in all this? I don’t mean one of Amos’s. I mean for you?’
Polly had begun a laugh at this question, but it died away.
Two pairs of eyes fixed on Katherine, one astonished and the other unreadable. The floor now reverberated with the pounding music, and the lights chased each other in faster pulses.
‘There is! Tell us who it is,’ Miranda demanded.
Katherine enjoyed the moment of suspense. The other two sat on the edges of their chairs.
