by Rosie Thomas
‘Christopher Carr.’
Their jaws dropped.
‘The archaeologist?’
‘Yes, him.’
Clapping her hands Polly cried, ‘Well, that’s good. Really good. The older you get, the better you’ll look to him.’
There was a beat of one second and then laughter exploded between them.
Miranda fell back in her chair, shaking with pure joy. With her face alight she looked twenty again. Polly’s features squeezed up into the noodle lady’s series of slanting lines and Katherine laughed too, thinking how good and nourishing it was to be with them both. Miranda’s theory of friendship was right, and her own musings as she walked from her office to the bar hadn’t been so far wrong.
Husbands, marriages, children, lovers, all these came and went. What you were left with was friends.
Their waiter saw them and was encouraged. This trio of sombre-looking old women were now acting like everyone else. Amazing, really, what just one drink could do.
‘Same again, ladies, is it?’ he called.
‘Oh, yes please,’ Katherine sighed.
Miranda dried her eyes with a folded cocktail napkin. Two girls wearing novelty reindeer antlers perched next to their table.
‘I want to hear more. Do tell us. Polly?’
But Polly’s broad face now made an arrangement of circles. Deaf to everything else, she was staring at someone across the room.
A girl was standing in three-quarters profile, listening without much of a show of interest to a boy who was commanding the attention of their group. When she shifted her weight it became obvious that she was about six months pregnant. Her tight black top was stretched over a prominent bump.
‘It’s her. There she is,’ Polly cried.
Katherine and Miranda turned their heads, not knowing who they were looking for.
For her size, Polly could move fast. She sprang out of her chair, almost colliding with the waiter. Reaching the girl’s side she grabbed her wrist and held it in an iron grip.
‘Nicola? Nic, what are you doing here?’
Nicola blushed dark red, then looked for a means of escape.
Polly blocked the way. ‘No, you don’t. You don’t have to run off. I just want to talk to you.’
Nicola now shook a curtain of hair across her eyes.
‘Why?’ she muttered.
The other people hesitated, trying to gauge what was going on.
‘OK, Nic?’ the leader of the boys asked.
‘Yeah.’
Still holding her arm, Polly moved to cut her off from her friends.
‘Just give me five minutes. Please?’ she begged, putting her mouth close to the girl’s ear so she didn’t have to shout over the infernal music.
‘What for?’
Polly took her other arm, turning her towards the door. ‘Come on. Come with me.’ She shuffled backwards, towing Nic with her so they looked like a pair of clumsy dancers.
‘Hey, stop that,’ Nic’s defender shouted. A dozen other people were now turning to stare at them.
‘It’s all right. It’s cool,’ Nic sighed over her shoulder. And to Polly, ‘Let’s go outside. Can’t hear yourself think in this place anyway.’
They emerged into the street and took up a position amongst the hardy smokers. Cold made a dark, damp shimmer on the pavement. Nic immediately began to shiver and Polly peeled off her thick cardigan and draped it over her shoulders. The girl stared at the ground and Polly chafed her hands, trying to rub some warmth and reason into her.
‘What is it you want, then?’ Nic demanded.
Polly wanted to know a hundred different things, but she made a start with, ‘Where have you been?’
She shrugged. ‘Around.’
‘Have you thought about Ben?’ Knowing how desperate he had been, Polly couldn’t believe the girl had not.
‘A bit, yeah.’
‘He thinks you probably had a termination.’
Nic winced. ‘He would. Well, I haven’t had an abortion. I’m going to have my baby.’
Polly let one of her hands go, but she held the other wrist like a handcuff. She put a finger to Nic’s jaw and turned her face so that she could look into it.
‘It’s your baby, yes,’ she murmured. ‘It is also Ben’s. And it’s my grandchild, too. You’re not alone in this, you know, if you don’t want to be. I’ll help you, so will Ben’s dad.’
Nic met her gaze. Polly knew that this was not going to be easy. The handful of times she had met this girl she had noticed how she observed their family with quiet, faintly eager curiosity, as if all the Davieses belonged to a species she had never before encountered at close quarters.
‘Where are you living, Nic?’
‘With a mate.’
‘Have you got enough money?’
The girl was shivering violently enough to shake her teeth loose.
‘No.’
‘Come back inside,’ Polly begged. She put an arm around her shoulders and tried to steer her, but Nic stood her ground.
‘Let me help you,’ Polly pleaded.
Then without warning Nic’s face crumpled and she began to cry.
Now Katherine emerged into the street. She saw Polly and Nic and came uncertainly towards them.
‘We were just wondering if everything’s all right?’
‘This is Ben’s girlfriend, Nicola. Ex-girlfriend, perhaps I should say.’
Katherine’s glance downwards took in the situation. She frowned in concern. ‘You can’t stand out here, it’s much too cold.’
Nic was weeping now without restraint, and one on either side they tried to hug her.
‘Don’t you want to go inside, back to your friends?’ Polly cajoled.
The girl shook her head, tears glinting on her cheeks. ‘I don’t really know them. Someone asked me to come for a drink, I turned up. It’s Christmas.’
Katherine caught Polly’s eye. She took charge of matters.
‘All right. I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’ll get our coats, collect Miranda, and take a taxi back to the flat. We’ll get warm, have something to eat, and then we’ll talk.’
Twenty minutes later they were there. Nic was placed in a corner of the sofa. Miranda extracted a pair of baby-blue cashmere socks from her mounds of Christmas shopping and put them on the girl’s icy feet. Polly brought her hot lemon and honey with a teaspoon of whisky, and Katherine made omelettes.
Nic stopped shivering and then her tears dried up. Her nose and eyelids were red and shiny but she looked better.
‘I’m sorry…’ she sniffed, but they stopped her.
They ate in their armchairs with plates balanced on their laps. Nic was quiet but the other three chatted and joked to make her feel comfortable. Katherine felt the glow in the room, and smiled.
Nic refused any further offers of help, though. At the end of the evening she insisted that she would go back to her friend’s flat and not spend the night at Katherine’s, although both she and Polly begged her to stay. She exchanged mobile numbers with Polly and promised, yeah, that she would keep in touch.
Polly went out to see her into the taxi.
‘I don’t want to put pressure on you. I think I can understand why you don’t want to involve Ben, although I wish you would,’ Polly had said, as lightly and humbly as she could. She folded a twenty pound note into Nic’s hand for the fare. ‘But it’s my grandchild, as well as your baby. I just want to make sure that everything is all right for you both.’
‘Of course,’ Nic replied. ‘I hear what you’re saying, Polly. Honestly.’ She leaned forwards and told the cab driver, ‘Kilburn, please,’ without being any more specific than that.
After she had gone, Polly helped Katherine and Miranda carry the dishes out to the kitchen.
Katherine smiled at her, ‘Thanks, Granny.’ Polly’s face made the series of circles again. ‘I know. How incredible.’
Miranda reached up on tiptoe and put glasses away in a cupboard.
What y
ou were left with was friends, Katherine thought.
And also, it now seemed, the possibility of grandchildren.
ELEVEN
Frost was rare at Mead, but now a covering of white rime stole the last remnants of colour from fields and branches. The world was reduced and refined to shades of silver, grey and graphite, appearing flat at a distance but under closer scrutiny revealing every twig and stone within a carapace of diamond brilliants. The sun rose in a brief flare of vermilion and set barely seven hours later between bars of lead and amethyst. Deserted and unvisited, the excavation trenches gaped at the sky and the puddles in the bottom froze as solid as the coins that had been taken from them.
Each successive morning the new glass in the barn windows bloomed with frost flowers. Polly heaped all their spare clothes as well as layers of covers on the bed. To work she and Selwyn wore gloves with the fingers cut off at the knuckles, doggedly continuing with the sawing and sanding that would eventually seal the place against the blades of frost. When they spoke, to confer about some aspect of the job in hand, their breath hung between them in billowing plumes.
From her mother’s flat, Miranda telephoned Polly and asked her to ask Selwyn if he would light fires in the main house to keep the place as warm as possible. He did as he was told, and thin spirals of smoke drifted from the old chimneys before dispersing into the cavernous cold.
All this time Selwyn was uncharacteristically quiet. Covertly observing him, Polly saw how he tried harder than ever to immerse himself in the work. His hands were busy and his shoulders hunched over the tools, but sometimes he would look up and let his gaze wander to the new windows and the view across the frostbound yard to Miranda’s house, where the fires glowed in empty rooms.
‘Joyce will be out of hospital any minute,’ Polly said, when the silence between them seemed to have lasted for days. ‘I wonder when Miranda will be bringing her back here?’
Selwyn didn’t look up. ‘I wouldn’t know. You’re the one who saw her in London, and you’ve spoken to her at least twice since then.’
I wish I’d seen her. I wish she would come back to Mead.
Was that the unspoken rider, Polly wondered? Or was she being unfair to him? It was possible that Selwyn’s longing for Miranda was nothing more than a jealous creation of her own imagination, born out of her deepening feelings of pointlessness and isolation. Miranda herself gave no indication that anything was going on. During the evening in the bar, and afterwards at Katherine’s flat, she had seemed a little quieter, perhaps more thoughtful than usual, but otherwise she was as warm as always and equally affectionate to Polly and to Katherine.
But Miranda was an actress, wasn’t she?
Polly also stared out of the barn windows at the silent frost. At what point, exactly, had their new home stopped offering even the possibility of homeliness and become a cage instead? Amos’s curtains were often closed at two o’clock in the afternoon, yet every light could be on at four in the morning as he blearily insisted on turning night into day. Katherine was presumably with her archaeologist. Polly remembered how Katherine had blushed and glowed when she confessed to her affair, and enviously wondered at the transformation that being in love could effect.
Miranda’s Mead experiment seemed to be ending in failure. Friendship turned out not to be the enduring force of her theory after all, but to be subsidiary to coupledom – either the pursuit of it, or the mourning for its loss.
How ordinary of us all, Polly thought. Disappointment swelled in her, and in that instant she felt a closer bond with Miranda than with Selwyn. She also ached for the balm of Colin’s company. At least he had promised her, and Miranda too, that he would be back in a day or so, and would stay at Mead for Christmas. Polly guessed that Christmas, as it often did, might draw several truths to the surface.
One afternoon, when they both happened to be in Miranda’s house at the same time, although they had been separately occupied with laundry and fire-laying, Selwyn came to the utility room to search Polly out.
‘I want to show you something. Come and see,’ he smiled.
He leaned against the door frame with his arms folded, thin and shaggy-haired, and apart from the lines in his face he looked exactly as he had done thirty years ago. She was so surprised, and so happy with this overture, that her heart leaped with love inside her.
She followed him down a passage to a room at the other end of the house that she had never been into before. Selwyn quickly kicked apart the remnants of an old fire and made a tripod of dry logs. He struck a match and a flame licked upwards. As soon as the fire caught, he took Polly’s hand and drew her across to the bookshelves.
At one end, protected by a grille still backed by tatters of cloth, she saw row upon row of ancient brown book spines. She opened the door and picked out one of the oldest-looking volumes, handling its disintegrating binding with the utmost care. Dust forced her to swallow a sneeze.
These books must have stood untouched for generations. She turned the pages with mounting eagerness, entirely forgetting Selwyn.
When she glanced up again, the fire was blazing.
He rubbed his hands on his trousers.
‘I knew you’d be interested,’ he said, nodding at the shelves and the clouded cupboards.
It suddenly dawned on Polly that he was making her an offer, sliding some unfamiliar currency across a divide, but she wasn’t sure if it was legal tender and whether it related to a trade in which she had any inclination to be involved.
In confusion she glanced down again at the book in her hand, and the loops and strokes of barely decipherable handwriting. She picked out a column of figures: 3 guineas; seven shillings and eight pence; 16 shillings. On the next page was a list of materials, 3 yards linsey for winter cape Joshua, 5 yards ribbon, to gown trimming.
She was looking at a book of household accounts. There was no date, only a month, August. She turned to the flyleaf and saw written there Mead House, 1714. The month and also the year of the death of Queen Anne.
Replacing the volume, she drew out another at random.
The hand here was different, much smaller and more crabbed, and the words were abbreviated to the point where they were almost in code. She gave up the attempt to decipher the first paragraph and slipped it back into its place, her interference betrayed by a broad smear in the shelf dust. The cupboard beneath the shelves, when she stooped to peer inside, revealed a tier of boxes. Some of the boxes sagged under the pressure of others and the corners had split open, showing the tantalizing strata of more papers. She slid one box out of the stack and lifted out the top layers of yellow parchment. These were letters. She unfolded one from its thick creases and read, This day Madam, Your obdt. Svt, Thos. Mead-Howe.
Polly’s heart hammered a rising cadence. It was beating so hard it felt like a foot kicking her ribs from within. When she was able to look up she saw Selwyn leaning over the fire, one arm stretched along the mantelpiece. He was gazing down into the flames, absorbed in his thoughts, and he jumped at the sound of her voice.
‘Sel? How did you know about these books? All the letters?’
‘Miranda showed me.’
Of course.
‘She said Jake was always planning to get an expert in to catalogue them. He put it off just too long.’
‘Have you ever heard of the Paston Letters?’ Polly asked.
Selwyn read a good deal, but his interests didn’t correspond with Polly’s.
‘Um. Yes, I think so. I couldn’t tell you any more than that, though.’
‘Those letters are the earliest surviving private correspondence of an English landed family. I’m not saying these records compare, they’re not nearly as old for one thing, but they look significant to me.’
Selwyn was staring at her, surprised by the passion of her interest even though he had planned the introduction. ‘I can see that. Do you think Jake knew?’
Polly ran her finger over the nearest row of spines.
‘He must
have done. He was such a private man, though. Cataloguers or researchers might have been too much of an invasion.’ She tilted her head, letting her eyes travel upwards. ‘The stories. Just think of all the stories there are here.’
‘I thought you would be interested,’ Selwyn repeated, with satisfaction. His eyes were twin sparks but she couldn’t read his expression. Her conviction deepened that he had brought her to look at this hidden library as the opening bid in some unspoken transaction. But she knew him so well: Selwyn was not a subtle man, nor was he a schemer. His probable thought had only been that she needed something, some food for the mind, exactly the same judgement that Ben had made, and old papers were the kind of thing that appealed to her. The simplicity of this calculation deeply touched her.
‘You were right,’ she murmured.
After dinner that same evening Selwyn fell asleep in his armchair, his head a little askew and a snore catching in his throat. Only a few months ago he would have derided such elderly behaviour, but now he was physically exhausted. Polly snatched up the telephone at the first ring so that he wouldn’t be disturbed. The caller was Colin.
‘Welcome back,’ she cried in delight. ‘Where are you? How was it?’
‘I’m in a cab from the airport. It was freezing cold over there.’
She laughed. ‘Wait till you get up here. It’s Siberian.’
‘That’s what I’m afraid of. Poll, have you done your Christmas shopping?’
Polly had decided that she was going to have to buy her presents locally. She hadn’t achieved a single purchase on the recent trip to London to see Katherine, and time was against her.
‘What do you think? No.’
He crowed with glee. ‘So forget the cold and the DIY for a couple of days. There’s been a flood in my block, so I’ve booked a suite in a gorgeous hotel in Mayfair. Come down in the morning, stay for a couple of days and we’ll shop and eat and pamper ourselves. Just the two of us? What d’you say?’
In the years when he lived with Stephen, Colin had made a point of avoiding Christmas. Usually they went on holiday to Bali or Vietnam, escaping the cycle of parties and glitter with which those people who didn’t have families or the benefit of belief embraced the season’s rituals. Because both Polly and Miranda had pleaded with him to be there, he was going to spend this Christmas at Mead. But he reckoned that two days in London was what he needed first. The only element of the annual mix which he really did enjoy was the shopping. He loved the crowds and the build-up of retail pressure and the extravagance of the displays, and he wasn’t going to miss out on that entirely.
