by Rosie Thomas
This year I’m enchanted by the way that all the previously empty rooms of the house are warm and lamplit, and that when I look into them I don’t know if I am going to come across Joyce and Amos watching television and grumbling at cross-purposes about declining standards in broadcasting, or Nic watching YouTube on Colin’s laptop while he tapes swathes of fir branches to a mantelpiece. In Jake’s study I will almost certainly find Polly poring over old letters with her bifocals pushed down her nose and a scarf wound around her throat for warmth. If she is there I back out, nodding generalized approval and smiling vaguely. It’s not easy to behave normally in Polly’s company, what with the broad undertow of guilt about my behaviour and specific anxiety about what Joyce saw the other evening. My mother hasn’t come out with any mention of it yet, but I can’t be sure she won’t.
Since she came back from London with Colin, bringing the pregnant girl, Nic, with them, Polly has seemed her usual generous self. She is touchingly solicitous over Nic, and she was admiring of the results of Selwyn’s last huge efforts to finish off the barn. But I know that she is watching him, and me. I can feel her eyes on my back, observing and assessing.
Back in the kitchen I might find Selwyn himself, paging restlessly through my newspaper and thawing out after a bout of sawing in the yard. The floors of reclaimed wood have been laid throughout the barn and so Polly has decreed that from now on the messiest work has to be done outside. I think she is surprised by the way he meekly complies with her orders. His eyes follow me over the top of the paper as I move between the larder and the oven. We are all watching one another.
My ungloved fingers have gone numb. I clap them to get the blood flowing and as I turn from the grave I see Nic threading her way between the headstones. She asked if she could come with me in the car to the village, and tactfully she went in to take a look at the church while I came across to Jake. She’s wearing a bright red short coat, blue woolly tights and a plum-coloured knitted hat, and the brilliance of this get-up bleeds into the surrounding air so that she seems enveloped by a sort of fuzzy electrical field. She stops beside me, head on one side and a hand resting on her bump as she studies the inscription on the headstone. It gives just his name and dates.
‘You must have been lonely after he died.’
‘I was, a little,’ I admit.
And so the plan was conceived to bring my old friends up here to Mead. It’s only since they arrived that I have been able to assess how cut off Jake and I had become, and now they are here I so much want them to stay. I think again with a twist of apprehension that this Christmas celebration will be an interval of peace before whatever seismic upheavals the new year must bring. Knowing this makes the prospect seem even more precious to me.
‘Didn’t you want to have kids?’ she wonders.
She’s an unusual girl, this Nic. Her bluntness seems almost deliberate, as if she has made a decision not to be the tactful type, but she can also be outstandingly kind. She’ll sit for an hour and more and massage my mother’s swollen feet and ankles, and the other day she gave her a pedicure complete with a startling fluorescent polish that Joyce is inordinately pleased with.
‘Have a look at my feet,’ she keeps calling out to the milkman or the window cleaner or whoever else drops in to wish us the compliments of the season. Their wheels used barely to stop turning on the gravel before they were off again, but lately the household has become much more interesting to them and, like the vicar, they tend to linger in the hope of a chat and, no doubt, some gossip to circulate in the village.
Nic adoringly tracks Colin around the house. Luckily Selwyn has stopped doing it with me, now Polly is back from London, or we would look like the participants in some complicated game. She spent hours with him while they sprayed winter foliage with silver paint to twist into decorations, asking him endless questions about New York and which celebrities he has met. They exchange names I’ve never heard of. But she’s sensitive enough to leave him alone when she guesses he might be getting tired of her, or just tired.
‘Children didn’t happen,’ I tell her.
‘Hm,’ she says, rubbing her belly.
Nic has already said that she never really considered a termination because, as she put it, her own mother had kept her in the days when she had much less going for her. Mind you, she hadn’t done a lot for her since that time, she sniffed, but the gift of life and all that, you can’t deny it.
‘You have to admire our Nic,’ Colin said in private to me, and I rather do.
She wanders a couple of steps to the next headstones, which belong to Jake’s father and mother, and his grandparents lie next to them. The Meadowes were not a prolific clan in the last century; Jake and his father were both only children. Nic reads all the names, and then tilts her head to take in the other burial plots and the fine tower of the church. She rocks on her heels and coughs a cloud into the icy air.
‘All your family, all in one place,’ she says in wonderment. ‘I mean, roots like this, must make you feel special.’
‘It’s my husband’s family. Joyce is all there is of mine,’ I remind her.
‘Your mum’s great. She’s not like a real old person. I know what you mean, though. I used to feel dead envious of Ben because he had his sisters and a mum and dad and they were all really close, and into looking after each other. Polly’s so kind and sort of reliable without being judgemental, isn’t she? She’s the kind of mum you’d go for if you could buy a pattern and knit yourself one. Maybe that’s why Ben’s pretty hopeless, though. He’s never had to sort things out for himself, has he?’
‘I don’t know about that,’ I say, diplomatically.
Nic sighs. ‘I’d quite like my kid to have a family.’
‘But it will do, won’t it? Its grandmother could hardly be more eager for it.’
‘Yeah. But, you know. You can’t rely too much on other people. I’ve basically got to do it myself. At the end of the day Ben is Polly’s son, and me and Ben – that’s never going to happen, trust me. I’m dreading him getting here, to be honest. It’s been so peaceful and lovely the last couple of days, just hanging out with you and Colin and Polly, and as soon as he arrives there’s going to be all the drama.’ She’s shivering now, and glumly chewing her lower lip as she stares at Jake’s grandparents’ grave.
‘It might not be so bad. You’re in the house with me and Colin, Ben’s in the barn with his family. We’ll make it all right, between us.’ I take her arm. ‘Come on, you’re getting cold. Did you see the memorial in the church?’
‘No.’
‘It’s a good one. Let’s go and look.’
The dim interior is scented with dusty hassocks, spilled wax from the children’s Christingle service, and a large Christmas tree. The same nativity scene is put out every year, a circle of carved wooden animals surrounding a plaster Mary and Joseph and a swaddled plaster Christ child in a straw manger. The memorial tablet is on the south wall, so Nic and I pass behind the pews and down the side aisle to reach it.
I told Selwyn about this, when I showed him the 1914 photograph with the estate workers and the young girls gathered in the sunlight in front of the barn, and Jake’s great-grandfather’s Silver Ghost just visible in the shadows within. An emblematic moment of change, history itself changing gear.
Selwyn claimed that I am in love with Mead, and he was jealous. I told him he couldn’t be jealous of a house, and we agreed that anyway he was part of it now.
Then he kissed the inside of my wrists, first one and then the other, and I knew I had been frozen until that very minute. Now I’m melted, and running away in all directions.
Nic is studying the carving of the memorial. There are no lachrymose angels or stone poppies. At the head of the tablet in bas-relief there is an old wagon, piled high with hay, and a pair of pitchforks bracket the names of the fifteen Meddlett dead. At the foot there is a lusty-looking bull, complete with a fine pair of horns. It is a rural tribute to men who never came home to the f
ields, and it always makes me feel sorrowful and at the same time uplifted.
‘Second Lieutenant George Edwin Anstruther Meadowe,’ Nic reads.
‘That was my husband’s great-uncle, his grandfather’s younger brother.’
‘He was twenty. That’s younger than me.’
‘Yes. Some of them were hardly more than children, look.’
There are three Coopers, and no fewer than four Greens, presumably brothers, or – as I always hope, for the mothers’ sake – perhaps only cousins.
Nic lifts her head, jams her hands deep into the pockets of her red coat. She mutters, ‘We’ve just got to get on with it, all of us, haven’t we? At least we’re alive for now.’
I can only agree with that.
After we have finished in the church we leave the car where it is and walk on up to the green, passing the pond with the row of ducks hesitating under the willow fronds like guests waiting to be introduced. There are coloured lightbulbs draping the front of the Griffin, and several of the houses have American-style Christmas wreaths adorning the front doors. The village looks picturesque, and Nic is impressed.
‘It’s like a film set, this place. You know, Richard Curtis. Someone comes over from America and falls in love.’
‘I know the film you mean.’
We reach the shop, and prominently taped in the window next to an invitation to all to join the 5K Family Fun Run on Boxing Day is a Meddlett Princess poster. Nic stops to read it. She has been taking an interest in our Iron-Age history since Colin told her about the find.
‘They’re so right. The treasure ought to stay where it was dug up. It should all be laid out in a museum right here, and then tourists would come and that would be good for the village and the shop and everything. Or maybe up at Mead? What about that? You could have the museum, and a virtual tour of the settlement, and – oh, souvenirs and teas. It’s a business opportunity. I’ll stay and be your car park attendant.’
These are not new ideas. Laughing, I explain to her that I don’t disagree with the protesters’ demands, but the remaining archaeological finds belong to the Crown and will probably be bought eventually by whichever museum can afford to acquire them, and the burial site itself doesn’t belong to me any longer, but to Amos.
And I also note that Nic may be joking, but still the idea that she would like to stay on up here is taking shape within her.
We progress inside the shop.
There is a queue at the post office counter and Mrs Spragg is behind the till. I say good morning to her and exchange nods with the other people I know. I collect Colin’s copy of the Guardian and put some cartons of milk and a bag of onions and some other supplies we need into a wire basket. Nic is buying chocolate and heat magazine. Someone shuffles and then stops in front of me.
‘Morning, Mrs Meadowe.’
I look up, and after a mental rummage I place the young man. He’s the archaeologist from the site, the serious one who made the discovery on that first morning. A long while ago.
‘Hello,’ I smile at him. I can’t remember his name, though. ‘Not working today?’
‘I’ll be starting on a site near Norwich straight after Christmas. I’ve got a couple of days off now. How’s everything up at the house? Has Mr Knight’s building work started again?’
‘Not yet.’
Nic comes up beside me. In her blaze of clashing colours and with her emphatic eyeliner she stands out like an urban beacon alongside everyone else’s olive-green padded country jackets and dun corduroys.
‘Hi?’ she chirps.
‘This is Nicola. And Nic, this is…’
‘Kieran,’ he promptly helps me. He’s a nice, polite boy.
I tell Nic that it was Kieran who first saw the princess’s bones as the digger blades cut into the earth and who called an immediate halt to the work. I remember the silence that fell, and Amos’s protestations, and later, the moment when we looked down into the trench and saw the skull filled with earth and the fragile bowl of her pelvis exposed to view after two thousand years.
Nic says how amazing, and Kieran mumbles about it being his job and therefore what he’s trained to do, and if only the rest of the burial goods hadn’t been stolen, the discovery would have been something really magnificent.
‘It makes me mad just thinking about it,’ he almost spits. His vehemence brings to mind his boss, the equally passionate Dr Carr, and then I automatically think of Katherine, and it’s a second or two before I realize that the other customers are listening. There is that suspension of activity that people display when they don’t want to be seen eavesdropping, but can’t continue their business and concentrate on other people’s at the same time. Stan Cooper, the builder who came to repoint the Mead brickwork for me, is standing with his back to us pretending to examine the newspaper headlines, and Mrs Spragg is holding a tub of margarine motionless over the till scanner. The postmistress is openly staring from behind her rampart of glass, and the queue is frozen.
Anger at the loss and despoilment rises in me again.
Do this Kieran and Christopher Carr think they have a monopoly on such feelings? Mead is mine and all its history, and I hate the violation as passionately as the archaeologists or the villagers do. But in the silent shop the fury quickly seeps away, replaced by the same discomfort that I always have here, an outsider denied the gift of anonymity. It’s mostly my own fault that I don’t fit in in Meddlett, but knowing this doesn’t make it any easier to deal with.
‘Me too,’ I say crisply.
Now Kieran looks uncomfortable too, and I’m sorry for that.
‘I know it’s just as much your loss and there’s nothing you can do about restoring the grave goods, Mrs Meadowe. I should try to be more philosophical, shouldn’t I?’
Nic rocks on her heels with her eyes resting on Kieran. Her short red coat has ridden up even further in front, where the bump sticks out, and there is an unfeasible length of bright blue leg on display. Stan Cooper picks up a copy of the East Anglia Times, Mrs Spragg swoops the marge over the till reader, and the postmistress serves the next customer in line. Someone pops their head in from outside and asks how much the bundles of kindling are.
Nic and I pay for our shopping and emerge again with Kieran on our heels.
‘Everyone was having a good old listen, weren’t they?’ she says.
‘I know. You have to get used to that.’
‘There are secrets and no secrets in places like Meddlett,’ Kieran observes. ‘Nice to see you, Mrs Meadowe. Say hello to Mrs Knight from me. See you around,’ he adds, this last to Nic, whilst trying not to let his gaze drop below her chin.
‘Yeah, probably,’ she calls after him.
Nic and I walk back to the car. On the drive home she says, ‘That shop was something else. I don’t know anything about the country, do I?’
‘Except from Richard Curtis films.’
‘I’ve lived in cities my whole life and even I know that must be all bollocks. Sorry.’ She pats her belly, and I get the impression she’s apologizing for her language to the baby as much as to me.
As I swing the car past the back of the barn, I see that Katherine’s car is parked beside Amos’s Jag. The front wheel arch is buckled and rusting. I knew from Amos that she was probably coming back today, but still I feel concern at the difficulty this return must present for the two of them. Nic and I carry our shopping in through the yard gate and I’m looking to see which lights are on in the three houses. There is a ring of damp sawdust on the cobbles to show where Selwyn has recently been at work, but I can’t hear anything except the rooks in the trees of the copse.
It’s beginning, I think. The New Mead Christmas, and God bless us every one.
In the cottage Katherine unpacked the dozen bags of shopping that Sam had carried in for her from the car. They had driven up from London together, and Toby would arrive later. Unwrapping packages and stowing them in the fridge and cupboards recalled the same sequences as performed at the o
ther holiday cottage with Chris. Then and now she had bought the same tea and the same wholemeal bread as she always did, thus staunchly maintaining brand loyalty in the process of betraying her husband. She felt miserably confused.
But you had left him, she reminded herself. It wasn’t a betrayal in the strictest sense.
She was back today by negotiation, out of loyalty to her family, because it was Christmas. The oddness of her situation made her wonder if her life was really just measured out by supermarket trips, and meals prepared for men and for sons and for friends of her sons, and therefore did it actually matter which men were involved just as long as the beef was rare and the pastry crisp?
‘Mum?’ Sam was standing by the fridge. He was looking at her as if he feared she might be slightly mad. She had laughed out loud, she realized.
‘It’s all right,’ she told him.
The sink was stained and the plughole clogged with some kind of greasy debris. The floor felt both sticky and gritty underfoot, and the table was covered with a mass of newspapers and coffee cups and empty glasses. Amos didn’t have much experience of cleaning up after himself, but she thought the state of chaos he had allowed their home to descend into was a deliberate underlining of her dereliction.
He came in now, bearing the linen that she had sent him upstairs to collect off the bed. One glance into their room had settled the uncertainty that had gnawed at her, all the way from London and for days before that.
She wasn’t going to share a bed, or even a room with him.
It seemed impossible, but in the eighteen days since she had left the cottage, apparently he hadn’t thought of changing the sheets. Out of such omissions, she realized, came finality.
Amos was a womanizer and he drank too much, he was overbearing and deficient in sensibility, but those faults were embedded in him, the man she knew, and because they were familiar to her she could perhaps have gone on trying to overlook them. Just as, in his turn, he probably tried to overlook her no doubt comparable failings. Yet although he had begged and begged her to come back to Mead, not to desert him and the boys at Christmas because they all loved and needed her, he hadn’t thought enough about her and about her known preferences to have welcomed her back to a clean house.
