Lovers and Newcomers

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘You dropped something,’ the skater called. He stooped down, reached between his splayed boots and picked up the pebble. The man took the time to examine it thoroughly before handing it over.

  ‘Keepsake, huh?’ he asked.

  The stone was a chunk of quartz that he and Stephen had picked up when they were walking together on Brighton beach, way back at the beginning of their time together. Colin had remarked on the stone’s very rough heart-shape, and Stephen had taken it to a gemstone cutter who had cut and polished it. Stephen had later presented the cloudy heart to him, with a little speech about not having a heart of stone.

  After Stephen was murdered, Colin almost always carried it with him. It wasn’t a talisman, exactly. But he liked to keep it at hand.

  ‘Yes.’ He took the heart and dropped it into his pocket. ‘Thanks.’

  The first rollerblader had vanished. This one wore tight lycra leggings, a black Puffa and a knitted beanie. He seemed supernaturally tall, perched on top of his skates. He studied Colin from a height.

  ‘Pretty cold today,’ he said.

  Colin agreed.

  ‘Which way you heading?’

  ‘I’m just taking a walk.’

  The man was young, somewhere in his early twenties. He had a wide mouth, the upper lip as full as the lower, with prominently defined margins to both that made Colin think of a piece of primitive sculpture. His large nose sloped to his forehead with no indentation at the bridge. It wasn’t easy to place his accent.

  ‘I’ll roll along with you,’ he said in a companionable way. Colin began walking, and the man swooped ahead, executed a turn and sped back to his side. He was a graceful mover.

  ‘You British?’

  ‘Yes. Where are you from?’

  It was a long time since Colin had made one of these connections. He took a certain amount of care to avoid the possibility, even. But he had not forgotten how they went, and the old flare of anticipation ran through him all over again. How optimistic the spirit is, he thought, even though the body is otherwise.

  The skater said, ‘I am from Brazil. My family is in Rio. My name is Carlos.’

  They moved on, the man slicing ahead, making a leg change, curving backwards to Colin’s side again. Colin fell into this rhythm until they passed a line of benches, all of them empty.

  ‘Is it too cold to sit for a few minutes?’ Carlos asked.

  They turned aside from the path.

  They were talking about Carlos’s unrewarding job as a barista and his forthcoming audition for a modern dance company, when Colin’s BlackBerry alerted him to a message. He apologized for the interruption and checked the screen.

  Nic’s baby boy born 6.07 p.m., named Leo Selwyn. All well xxxxx granny

  Colin crowed aloud, threw the phone up and snatched it out of the air again.

  He stared at the picture Polly had sent. It showed a tiny tomato-faced infant swaddled in a white blanket and held tightly in a pair of young arms.

  How important this baby was. He had no real link with Nic beyond his liking for her and her somewhat surprising attachment to him, but he felt a sudden surge of protective love for Selwyn’s newborn namesake that was almost as strong as for a child of his own unrealized child.

  ‘Good news?’ Carlos asked.

  ‘My dearest friend has a new grandson.’

  Carlos peered at the photograph. His thigh briefly touched Colin’s as he leaned inwards. ‘Hey. That calls for a celebration.’

  Colin thumbed a reply to Polly.

  Best granny in the world. Kiss to Nic and the baby. Back very soon, Cx

  He hesitated for a second and then moved the cursor over to back. He deleted the word and replaced it with home. He realized that he was smiling.

  ‘Do you want to uh, go somewhere?’ Carlos asked when Colin slipped the phone back into his overcoat pocket and heard it clink against the stone. Carlos ran his blades experimentally forwards and backwards and then rocked his boots so the wheels spun free.

  ‘I can’t do anything,’ Colin said.

  The words were a denial, though. He could do things.

  He was thinking of the windows of FAO Schwarz, the drive from London up to Mead, Leo Selwyn asleep in his hospital crib. He saw Polly’s round face and heard Miranda’s hoot of laughter. He wanted to see them all, but before that, right now, he wanted a glass of champagne – several glasses – and some company, maybe a bar, a place and scenery that he understood, and the touch and taste of another person’s skin. It was as if the lowering sky had split clean open, and a bright shaft of strong sunlight struck through.

  Carlos lazily smiled back at him.

  ‘There are ways and means, man.’

  SPRING

  SIXTEEN

  March came and then April, the last week of April bringing a green bloom to the countryside as Polly absorbed herself in sheaves of letters and creaking account books.

  The more she read, the more deeply she was drawn out of her own life and into another world. Far from being a confined space, Jake’s study now became the entrance to a colonnade of years, each one marked off by summer in the fields, harvest, the Fifth procession, then Advent and Christmas, Lent and Easter, and the recorded dates of ploughing and sowing and rabbit shooting and occasional hunting. Polly noted the bills for the twice-yearly visits of the piano tuner, the chimney sweep and the knife-grinder. A horse-drawn mower was used to cut what had then been wide lawns, the horse’s hooves wrapped in sacking so they would not mark the green velvet grass. In one Victorian account book, neatly itemized, she found the total expenditure for a grand dinner for county neighbours at which Lord Lockington and his lady had been entertained just after their marriage.

  These were Mead’s glory days. After this the account books and farm records grew scrappy, as the head of the family turned to gambling to meet his debts. There were no more bouts of ambitious entertaining recorded.

  These estate records had been kept by successive generations of Meadowe men, farmers and lately gentry. Their wives and daughters were glimpsed only through mentions of glazing to ‘Mary’s glass house’ or the purchase of a pony, ‘Amelia’s tenth birthday’. For generation after generation these women had kept house, given birth to children and brought up families, playing their part on the estate as it grew and then declined again, but the last chatelaine before Miranda, Jake’s mother, Gwen, was the only one to have left anything like a first-person account of herself. Dating from the Second World War, it was no more than a worn notebook filled with irregular scribbled jottings.

  Jake’s father had been away in the services, like most of the men in the county. So far Polly had found only two or three letters from him, interleaved between the pages of the notebook. They were written from London and mentioned ‘this outfit’ and ‘liaison work’, but they were rather formal, unlike his late uncle’s loving missives from the trenches in France. It was Gwen’s garden diary that Polly found totally absorbing. She had evidently been a plantswoman. There were lists of plants, Helleborus n., Ilex argentea, M. grandiflora, references to pruning roses and dividing clumps of bergenia, and to planting 250 narcissi bulbs in a single afternoon. ‘My dear bit of garden,’ she wrote in the spring of 1940. But the country was at war, and food had to be grown in place of flowers. Without confiding even a line of complaint to her diary, Gwen Meadowe grubbed up her perennials and scented shrubs and planted potatoes and onions in their place, helped by one old man from Meddlett and a series of land girls who were billeted with her. Gwen wrote pithily about these various Doras and Eileens, describing one Molly as ‘a very troublesome girl. But a merry, likeable nuisance’.

  Polly looked up after she read this, and thoughtfully stretched the cramps out of her neck. She felt a distinct and growing kinship with Gwen in her solitary pursuits, and this historical Mead with its desecrated gardens grew more real than the version that actually sheltered her.

  Satisfaction, even a muted version of happiness, was transforming Polly. To be abs
orbed in work like this, to realize that a whole afternoon had passed without numbering the hours, was a pleasure she hadn’t known for a long time. Selwyn was gone and the pain of losing him shifted inside her like a cumbersome load, but today the weight of it didn’t quite crush the breath out of her.

  Outside, the rose branches that framed the window were covered with tender green and bronze leaves, and sprays of unopened buds nodded in the wind. Perhaps this very climber was one of those tended by Gwen Meadowe, who had been quietly relieved to note in her garden diary that there was no food crop that could usefully be grown in its place.

  Polly knew how she was going to start her book. It would begin in 1945, with the estate and village VE Day celebrations held in the barn where she now lived, and it would work backwards from Gwen to her mother-in-law, who had been chauffeured through the narrow lanes in the Silver Ghost that had once been garaged in the same barn. Perhaps that Mrs Meadowe of the Great War would have written letters to her son at the Front in what was now Miranda’s drawing room, and in the same room her husband’s grandmother might have worked out the dinner menu to impress Lord and Lady Lockington and the rest of the county grandees.

  Polly would trace the history of the house by telling its story backwards, through the decades of two or three centuries, as far as these records and whatever others she could unearth would allow her to go. The perspective was a long one. She puffed out her cheeks in awe just in contemplating it, but at the same time a distinct thrill ran through her.

  There was a patch of blue sky visible above the trees.

  She stood up, easing her painful hip. She wanted to talk to Miranda.

  She picked her way through the ordered avenues of her research documents and walked through the quiet house. The drawing-room door stood slightly ajar.

  ‘That you, Poll?’ Miranda called out.

  Joyce was asleep on the Knole sofa, her back and head propped on a pile of cushions. Her jaw had dropped open and she snored lightly. She had grown very frail lately, and increasingly forgetful. Sometimes in a lucid moment she announced that she must get back to her own place because she had had quite enough of being in Miranda’s house, draughty old pile. But she soon forgot the intention. Nobody had any real expectation that she would be able to live on her own again.

  Miranda was reading, curled up in an armchair. She looked smaller, a quieter and more watchful version of the bright spirit she had been. The room was scented with cold wood smoke and white lilac in a huge vase that stood on a side table.

  I have been attending very thoroughly to my own grief, Polly realized, but I haven’t given much consideration to Miranda, who loved him too.

  Affection and sympathy for her friend touched her heart.

  ‘Have you been working all this time?’ Miranda wondered.

  Polly nodded. She went over to the grand piano in the corner of the room and lifted the lid. She played a few notes, very softly. They keys were yellow and split and the instrument was badly out of tune.

  When she looked up she saw how intently Miranda was watching her.

  ‘I love this place,’ Polly said.

  Miranda’s face softened, and then broke into a brilliant smile.

  ‘Do you? Do you really?’ She was deeply pleased by this.

  ‘I do. Shall we go outside? It’s such a beautiful afternoon.’

  The two women went through the kitchen and out into the courtyard. Grass and weed seedlings were sprouting between the cobbles and Miranda stooped to uproot a few tufts. The warmth of spring sunshine lingered between the old walls.

  Amos had recently moved out of the cottage.

  Almost as soon as he had finally decided not to go ahead with his building project at Mead, a house in Meddlett had come up for sale. It was a compact Georgian house that stood back from the green, separated from the road by a low wall but with a good view of the duck pond and the willows and the front of the Griffin, and he had bought it and moved in within what seemed a matter of days. Amos had always been decisive, and in practical matters whatever he chose to focus on usually came about. He was now busy with the campaign for the Meddlett Princess, and the beginnings of involvement in village politics.

  ‘He’ll be on the parish council next,’ Miranda joked as she and Polly passed the door of the cottage. Katherine’s pots of herbs were putting out tiny furls of leaf.

  ‘He told me he was thinking of standing.’

  ‘Hah.’

  The prospect seemed less ludicrous than it would have done six months ago. They agreed that Amos would probably make quite a useful councillor.

  ‘When’s Katherine coming?’ Polly asked.

  ‘Tomorrow. She’s collecting the last of her things.’

  Amos had envisaged that his withdrawal from the cottage would give Katherine the freedom to come and go comfortably at Mead, but it was turning out that she came up less and less often.

  ‘I have to keep up with my job, now I’m a single woman,’ she told Polly and Miranda, only half-joking. She had begun looking for a flat of her own to buy in London, somewhere near where her boys lived. Most of the rest of her time was spent with Chris, in his house near the city ring road.

  Colin said that he might take over the cottage from Amos and Katherine, if Miranda would let him.

  They passed out of the gate, damp long grass swishing around their ankles as they followed the line of the building. Polly studied the flint walls, bowed in places, the soft orangey-red brick, the chimney stacks outlined against the fading sky. A line of crows headed for the trees. What she had told Miranda was true. With Gwen Meadowe and her predecessors for company as well as Miranda herself, Mead felt like a home of Polly’s own, a home for the person she would have to become in the next passage of her life.

  The front of the house glowed with the last of the sun. A bench stood against one wall and they sat down together.

  ‘You and me, Colin, and Joyce,’ Polly counted. ‘It’s not what you planned for your new Mead, is it?’

  Miranda’s head tipped back. She studied the old guttering, and the protruding mess of what looked like a bird’s nest lodged in the hopper.

  ‘Plans have a way of turning out to be useless,’ she said at last. ‘But I still believe in planning.’

  They sat contemplating the view for another minute before Miranda asked, ‘You are going to stay, aren’t you? I know the way a death can affect the way you feel about a place. When Jake died, I found I loved Mead even more. I can see him everywhere I look. But maybe that’s painful for you in the barn. Selwyn worked too hard at it, didn’t he? There was so much of him, an excess of the person. It overflowed into what he did. Maybe you’re lonely…’ Her voice trailed off and she looked away, across the flowerbed towards the curve of the drive.

  Polly told her firmly, ‘I’m not so very lonely. I’m not going to leave, either. The barn is my home.’

  Miranda was still watching the bird’s nest. In a light voice she said, ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Did you know your mother-in-law, Mirry?’

  ‘Gwen? Not well. She was already very old and in a nursing home when I married Jake.’

  ‘I’ve found her wartime diary. It’s about her garden here, and growing vegetables. It’s not full of personal detail, but she shines out of it. I’m thinking of using her as the starting point for the book, if that’s all right with you?’

  As always when she talked about her work, Polly was aware of the gulf between the flatness of the described outline and the excitement within her. The anticipation of writing was like keeping a big secret, one that it would be damaging to spill however much she might be tempted.

  Miranda was a voracious reader but she had never written a book. She would have no idea of this creative tension.

  ‘Of course it’s all right with me. It sounds interesting. Are you ready to start?’

  The air was rapidly cooling as the sun set. Polly wrapped her multi-coloured Christmas cardigan more tightly around her.

 
‘I’ll write two or three chapters and an outline. Then I’ll try it on my agent. I’ve got to make some money, I can’t do it just for love. There’s Leo to think of, apart from anything else.’

  Polly had come alive again. She was leaning forward with anticipation, her eyes wide open, looking into next week.

  It wasn’t just the book project that had revivified her.

  She regularly saw Nic and Leo, and the baby was often left in her care at the barn while Nic did a massage or pedicure. Her own three children were recovering from the shock of losing their father. Alph’s boyfriend, the South American doctor, had at last been introduced and was turning out to be everything Alph needed. Omie was illustrating a new series of children’s books about a cat contortionist. Even Ben was beginning to accept that he and Nic were not destined to live happily ever after. He showed a decent level of interest in his baby son, but paternity wasn’t the full three-act drama he might have been expected to make of it.

  Polly put one arm around Miranda’s thin shoulders.

  ‘I am so glad to be here. Thank you for sharing Mead with me.’

  ‘I am glad too,’ Miranda answered.

  It was growing cold now.

  ‘I should go in and see if Joyce is all right,’ Miranda said.

  They went in through the front door. The radio was playing, extremely loudly, the only way Joyce could listen to it.

  ‘Is it really all right to borrow your car again?’ Nic wondered.

  Polly took the baby from her. She put her mouth to the tiny ear and whispered baby-nonsense into it.

  Nic sighed, ‘He was a demon last night. He was awake from ten past two until half past four.’

  ‘Maybe he was hungry?’

  ‘He can’t always be hungry. But in case he is while I’m away, there’s a full bottle in the bag. I should go, Polly. It’s a new client, and she sounds minted. I could do with a recommendation to some of her smart friends, those ones with houses up on the coast that are worth half a million.’

  Polly handed her the car keys. ‘Go on, then. Don’t be late for Madam Minted.’