by Rosie Thomas
Nic stayed on at Mead until everyone returned from the funeral in Somerset, but then she told Polly and Miranda separately how grateful she was for their hospitality and announced that she was moving on.
Polly didn’t even know how to take this news.
‘I need you to tell me exactly where you’ll be living in London,’ she attempted.
Nic sat close beside her.
‘I’m not going back to London.’
‘Please, Nic. Don’t run off again,’ Polly begged. Nic’s heart twisted at the sight of her exhausted face and the purple pouches under her eyes.
‘I’m not going to run anywhere. Jessie needs a lodger, she asked me if I wanted the room. I’m moving in with her until after the baby’s born.’
Polly was too extinguished even to be surprised by this. All she could think of were obstacles.
‘What about your course? You need to finish it off, you need to be able to support yourself and…’
‘I can do the course work at a college up here. There’s sure to be somewhere nearby. In the meantime I’ll work for myself. You know, waxes and pedicures and that, locally. Card in the shop window, cash in hand. I’m good at what I do, and word will get around in a place like this. I’ll make enough money. I don’t need much.’
Polly thought about it. In the desolate landscape, a tiny light winked and began to glimmer.
‘You’ll be here? You and the baby? In Meddlett?’
‘That’s the general idea. I know I shouldn’t be asking this right now, but maybe you could help me with looking after the baby sometimes, while I’m working?’
Polly’s eyes narrowed to horizontal slits, her cheeks rounded into apples and her lips curved to show her teeth. For the first time in long days, she was smiling.
‘Oh Nic, of course I will. I’ll be here. We’ll make it all right for him.’
‘Him?’
‘Oh yes, it’s a boy. I’m certain of it.’
By the time February came, Polly was on her own in the barn. The beams creaked and the roof shivered in the gales. She took a bitter, comradely pleasure in the harshness of the weather. Sometimes she shook her fist at the dark grey whirling skies. Do what you want. Do your worst, she cried.
The telephone rang a good deal. When she didn’t feel like speaking to anyone she let the machine pick up and listened to the disembodied voice of one or other of her children or friends leaving a loving message. She was grateful for the net that proved able to hold her, but she was also detached from the outside world. She let the waves of anger and loss and fear wash over her, and she sluiced backwards and forwards with them like seaweed in the tide.
Katherine called her every day. Polly could hear the gulps in her voice as she tried to soften the high note of her own pure, humming happiness and offer instead the murmur of concerned sympathy.
‘I’m all right,’ Polly claimed. When a different admission forced its way out Katherine soothed her as best she could.
Every evening she gazed out at the yellow squares of lighted windows in the cottage across the yard, and in the main house. They usually blinked off early, leaving an outline of deeper blackness. It occurred to her that she and Amos and Miranda were like castaways on three adjacent islands, separated by a tidal race. But she also knew that this impression was distorted. In fact the other two regularly made the short crossing to her island, bringing supplies, news from the distant world, and the possibility of a condition other than solitude.
Amos came over to roost in Selwyn’s chair beside the oversized hearth. Firewood burned away to powdery ash with frightening speed, and then Polly would have to make yet another trip out to replenish the log basket. Amos propped his socked feet on a stool and drank the whisky he invariably brought with him. He was looking less well scrubbed and tailored these days. His shirts were left unironed and his trousers could have stood a visit to the drycleaners. He was usually disappointed to find that there was no more chance of a wifely hot supper in the barn than there was in the cottage. Polly had no appetite at all, and subsisted on cheese sandwiches and occasional boiled eggs. The waistbands of her skirts grew noticeably looser.
‘It’s the death diet,’ she said mordantly to Katherine.
Amos talked about the past. He reminisced about university, and his own attempts in the intervening years to jump out from Selwyn’s long shadow. ‘I never did manage it, did I? Now he’s gone, I’m more aware than ever of the difference in our relative stature.’
Polly listened with a dulled ear. Her own memories marched with her, most vividly in the endless insomniac nights.
‘Selwyn didn’t think of you as being in his shadow. You’re the one who was a success in life,’ she said.
Amos described how he was becoming quite an accepted face in the village. He regularly ate dinner at the Griffin, and was making the transition from eavesdropper to contributor in the bar conversations.
‘That Slovakian chef they’ve got there, Geza, he’s not that bad. Food’s quite decent.’
‘Is it?’ she murmured. The flames leaped as another log hissed and settled. Talk was more of an effort than she felt capable of making, and Amos knew it. He rambled on, seamless in whisky.
‘This notion about locals not welcoming incomers, you know, it’s partly true, and why should people be overjoyed at strangers buying up the houses and cutting them out of their own community?’
It was interesting to hear Amos, of all people, using a word like community. Polly angled her head towards him.
‘But it’s not that difficult to break through. It’s been harder for me than it would be for most, just because I happen to own the land where the princess was dug up, although Jessie’s probably put a word in for me.’
Polly raised her eyebrows by a hair’s-breadth. Amos laughed, slightly abashed. ‘It’s not what you think. I’m not making a play for her. But I do think she is interesting.’
‘Yes,’ Polly agreed. She was listening with more than half an ear now. Amos waved his whisky glass.
‘I’d like to help her out. Maybe you and I could, you know, think of a way. An appropriate way. As I was saying, I’ve been talking to people. Vin Clarke, the local builder, the guy who farms next door to Mead, one or two others. Their roots are right here, even more than Miranda’s. The princess belongs to this land, bones and her cup and torc and coins and all. It’s not just the soap-dodgers, those placard people, who think so. Most people in Meddlett do.’
Amos was lonely, and disconcerted, and he was spending more time in the pub. He picked up ideas, and endearingly latched on to them as though they were brand new. Shaken out of herself in spite of everything, Polly looked at him with affection.
‘So what do you want to do?’
His shoulders sagged. ‘Christ. I’ve no real idea. Get the bones and the treasure and the land reunited in some way.’ Words suddenly burst out. ‘I don’t know what I want to do. I feel so clapped out and pointless, Poll. I’ve no reason to, I’m not ill. Colin’s got bloody prostate cancer, Jake and Stephen and dear, inspiring, unique Selwyn have all gone and died on us, whereas I’m all right. I should be grateful, shouldn’t I? But for the first time in my life I can’t work out what I’m doing or where I want to be.’
The neck of the bottle rattled against the tumbler. He caught himself.
‘I’m sorry. Shouldn’t be visiting this on you, of all people.’
‘Go ahead. In a way it’s helpful.’
Amos was on his feet now, two fingers of Glenmorangie slopping in the glass.
‘We’re all old.’
Their eyes fell, simultaneously, on the fines box. It stood amongst books and CD cases on a set of makeshift shelves that Selwyn had constructed from planks and blocks of wood. Stuck to the side was a label on which Miranda had printed DON’T MENTION THE O WORD. Amos picked it up and turned it over. The lid fell off and five- and ten-pound notes fluttered out and drifted to the floor. He knelt down, grimacing at the twinges in his knees as he counted the m
oney.
‘Two hundred and twenty quid in used fives and tens, and an extra fiver. Where did that come from? Did someone half-mention feeling as old as bloody Methuselah? Or did they say they only felt half his age?’
Suddenly, Polly was laughing. She felt lighter than she had done for weeks.
‘I think that was Joyce. The rest of us agreed that she was more entitled to complain about feeling ancient than us Boomers, so Mirry stuck in a fiver for her.’
Amos stuffed the money back in the box and replaced the lid.
‘It’s good to see you laugh again. We’re never going snowboarding in St Anton, are we? What shall we do with the cash?’
Polly thought about it.
‘Why don’t we give it to Nic, to buy a pram?’
He sat back on his heels. ‘Ah, that’s a good idea. One of those pneumatic all-terrain beauties you see these days. A futuristic vehicle for the new generation.’
Amos wasn’t inclined to sit down any longer. He paced the length of the room and back again. Then he stopped in front of her, hands in pockets, forehead corrugated.
‘I have made one decision. I’m definitely not going to build the house.’
She thought of the solar panels and thermal insulating glass and ground source heat pump, and all the proud technology he had described in such loving detail to whoever would listen.
‘Oh, Amos. All those plans.’
‘Yes. Plans are just that.’
‘Where will you live?’
He shrugged. ‘Somewhere here, near you and Mirry, if you’ll let me. It occurs to me – late in the day, I know, as Katherine would no doubt agree – that bricks and mortar, glass and steel, whatever, don’t matter at all. The only value on earth is in your friends and the people you care about.’
‘Oh, Amos,’ she said again. Coming from him, this statement of the obvious had the impact of pure revelation.
He said, ‘I am going to give the site back to the princess, so that she can come home to rest.’
Polly closed her eyes for a second. The sensation of lightness stayed with her.
The next evening Miranda came across to the barn, having telephoned first to check if this would be all right. She never arrived unannounced, and Polly appreciated her tact. She brought a shopping basket with her, and unpacked a pot of home-made soup, a fresh loaf, some cheese and an apple pie. She didn’t ask what needed to be done, just went ahead and did it. Polly sat by the fire, drinking the glass of red wine that Miranda put in her hand.
The microwave pinged.
‘Eat this,’ Miranda ordered.
The hot soup tasted good. Polly dipped a chunk of warm bread into her bowl.
‘May I talk to you?’ Miranda asked, after a few mouthfuls.
Polly hesitated.
‘That depends. No confessions. Don’t say anything that either of us might wish unsaid.’
Miranda reddened slightly. Polly’s voice was gentle, as ever, but there was an underlying note of warning.
‘I won’t.’
‘Thank you. We’ve been friends for so many years, and we’ll go on being friends, won’t we?’
Polly stretched her hand across the table, touched her fingers to Miranda’s. After a second, in which they both listened to the wind howling off the sea and battering the chimneys, Miranda looked up.
‘Because Sel is dead,’ Polly said sadly.
‘I know.’ Miranda let the ambiguity of the flat acknowledgement shield them both. Her face was pinched with misery and her eyes heavy from lack of sleep.
Polly tapped her hand and smiled encouragement, the touch of steel melting away. ‘Go on, then.’
‘All right. You asked me if you could work on Jake’s family papers, and I said I’d think about it. Now I have thought, and I want you to go ahead. Whatever you’d like to do with the material, it’s yours. If there’s a book to be written about the history of Mead, I couldn’t imagine a better person to tackle it.’
Polly spooned up the last mouthful of soup, then wiped the bowl clean with a twist of brown bread. For weeks she had hardly thought about the boxes of folded letters, the ledgers and account books and farm records, and the hours that she had already spent perched on a rickety chair in Jake’s old study.
Her face changed.
‘Thank you. No, wait…that sounds inadequate. I don’t think you can imagine how much of a difference it will make, to have that work to do.’
Nic was living only a mile away, waiting for the baby to be born. Now, after all, here was a book to be pieced together out of the Meadowe papers. Suddenly it seemed that all over the plain of darkness there were tiny lights glimmering.
They clinked their glasses, still wary of each other, but fired up by shared optimism. Miranda chopped herself a wedge of cheese and pushed the plate across to Polly.
‘So Amos is not going to build the wonder house after all,’ Miranda remarked. He had told her that he planned to give the site to Meddlett, and wanted to find a way between them to hammer out the rights of access. She had reminded him that as far as legal matters went he was the lawyer, not her.
‘Can it be done?’ Polly asked.
‘I don’t see why not,’ she said.
‘Wouldn’t you mind?’
Miranda had thought hard about it, remembering the home-made placards and posters. Amos was right, she decided. If people wanted to come to visit the burial site, if they wanted to connect to the princess and her history by stepping on the same ground and looking out at the same sweep of pasture, then what reason could she put forward for denying them?
‘No. I wanted people at Mead. It’s one way of doing it, isn’t it?’
She didn’t try to explain to Polly – not tonight, but maybe she would in time – that this act of propitiation was one way of making peace with herself.
‘Will there be a Visitors’ Centre?’
Miranda saw that Polly was gently teasing her. It was heartening that her old friend was able to forget herself to this extent.
‘Possibly. And a tearoom and a toilet block. Who knows what Amos will be able to pull off?’
‘Who knows,’ Polly echoed.
The following day, Polly went to work. She put on her thickest skirt and leggings, a fleece and a pair of fingerless mittens, and crossed the yard to the main house. She felt weak, as if she had been ill for a long time, and there was a pain in her hip that was becoming familiar, but the icy air flooding into her lungs delivered an invigorating kick. Joyce was reading the newspaper in her chair beside the kitchen range. She peered over her spectacles at Polly.
‘Could you come back at some other time?’ she asked.
From deep in the house came the sound of hoovering. It was Miranda’s way to bring her feelings under control by throwing herself into diversionary activities, and housework was the current favourite. The kitchen looked unusually tidy, and the old red tiles had been washed and waxed.
‘It’s Polly, Joyce. How are you today?’
Joyce studied her. ‘What happened to you?’
‘I survived.’ It was a thin, low-voltage smile that accompanied the acknowledgement, but it was still a smile.
She went on through the house and ensconced herself in Jake’s old study. On the table beneath the window she set up her lined notebooks and pencils, her vintage laptop computer and an index card box. The window panes were silvered with condensation, and the frame of bare, tangled twigs contained a misty landscape distorted by water droplets. She stared out for a few moments, then drew a bundle of papers towards her. She began rereading the letters that Jake Meadowe’s great-uncle had written home from the Front.
The Griffin was busy.
Part of Amos’s plan for the evening related to this being Jessie’s night off. He was sitting at the table in the window where Colin had first seen her arguing with Damon, and he was engaged in a debate with Stan the builder and a shifting cast of other people who all had views on what should happen to the Meddlett Princess and her regalia. Gez
a’s sweating visage occasionally appeared between the strands of kitchen curtain. Vin Clarke’s second waitress shuffled in with two plates of lamb pilaff and dispensed them to waiting customers. Amos had already eaten his pork with prunes.
‘You own all that gold now, don’t you?’ an oblong man in biker’s leathers said.
Patiently Amos explained the law yet again. The inquest at the court of the coroner for the district had recently declared that the find did indeed qualify as treasure, but there was still a long way to go. He embarked on his practised account of how the cup and the torc and the rest would now have to go before a treasure valuation committee, after the archaeologists and scientists had completed their reports and valuations, and only then would their value in monetary terms begin to emerge. The local and national museums would look to their budgets and bid to acquire the objects, whilst the exhibition and collections experts would want all the items to be displayed together in order to tell a coherent story. Somewhere down the line, a reward would be paid out.
The crowd listened to all this with moderate good humour, only Vin muttering about how much the lawyer liked the sound of his own voice, same as all his kind. Big, bald Roy sat massively in his special corner beside the bar, nodding in agreement.
‘The normal procedure is for the money to be split between the landowner and the finder,’ Amos said, as he had done several dozen times before. ‘It’ll be a decent sum, but not a fortune.’
‘Depends how you define fortune, doesn’t it?’ someone muttered. ‘Strikes me it wouldn’t be the same amount for me as it would be for you, not at all.’
There was a shuffle and some elbowing at the bar. A figure emerged from the throng, nudged forwards by the other drinkers. Amos looked across and saw that it was Kieran. He waved to him, and asked, ‘Why did you leave me to do all the explaining? You know much more than I do.’
‘Doesn’t sound like it,’ Kieran countered.
Someone else said to him, ‘You were the finder, mate, weren’t you? So you’ll be getting the other half of the cash, eh?’
Kieran’s sensitive skin flared. ‘The company will, not me. I’ll get a bit of a bonus, maybe, if I’m a good boy.’
