Meadowland

by Alison Giles

  Making conversation, I asked about her job.

  It had started off being very part-time, she told me. Just one school and a few private lessons. ‘But now I’m dashing around virtually full-time. Only during term, of course.’ She straightened up from slotting plates into the bottom rack and threw her arms wide. ‘Only another ten days and then I have two months off. Bliss.’

  ‘You don’t enjoy teaching, then?’

  ‘Oh, yes. But it’s nice to have time with the boys. I did toy with the idea of playing professionally – I’ve a friend with the Philharmonic – but it didn’t feel right to palm Tom and Justin off with au pairs. Particularly not when they’d already lost their father.’

  I stared at her, any joggings to my memory about thwarted career preferences blotted out before they’d even taken shape. ‘Lost their father?’

  ‘Jonty. He died. Didn’t you know? Some stupid pile-up on the autobahn. That’s why we came back to England.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I hadn’t realised.’ I made a mental adjustment: so Andrew was her second husband.

  ‘It’s OK. Years ago now. Well, about five actually’

  ‘But the boys are so like Andrew!’ It was out before I’d stopped to think.

  Ginny stared at me. ‘Well, that’s not really so surprising. Family genes …’ Then she threw back her head and laughed. ‘Oh, my God. Hasn’t anyone explained? I’m Andrew’s sister.’

  CHAPTER 12

  Back at Wood Edge, when Andrew had dropped us off, I rounded on Flora.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me they were brother and sister?’ I demanded.

  Flora was slipping her feet out of her shoes. She looked across at me. ‘I wondered whether you’d realised.’

  ‘Of course I hadn’t. How could I have done? I assumed … I mean, there was no reason to query it. A man and woman living together with two children. What else was I supposed to think?’ I could hear my voice rising. ‘Why didn’t you explain? I felt an absolute fool. Does one always have to check everything?’

  Flora bolted the back door. ‘Better than jumping to conclusions.’ She sounded weary. ‘Time for bed, I think.’

  I ignored the comment. ‘And is there anything else I ought to know? Like … Andrew’s gay, or something?’

  The suggestion raised a smile from Flora. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I think you can rest assured on that one. Come on,’ she moved towards the stairs, ‘let’s leave it till the morning. We can talk about it then if you want to.’

  I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. The rain pattered on the ivy under my window. The comfortableness – for me anyway – had gone out of the evening following Ginny’s disclosure. I don’t know what my face must have registered at the moment of it – a total mix of emotions, I suppose, and, yes embarrassment. Why, I don’t know. It was hardly my fault I’d been under the misapprehension.

  Ginny had been quick to pick up on this. ‘Don’t worry,’ she’d said. ‘It was stupid of them –’ Andrew and Flora presumably – ‘not to explain. Trouble is, everyone in the village knows. Dammit, we’ve all grown up here. I guess they just didn’t think. Come on.’ She picked up the coffee pot. ‘Let’s take this through.’

  I was tempted to ask her not to say anything, but I hesitated and the moment was lost as she pushed open the door with her shoulder and went ahead. In any case, what did it matter? It didn’t make any difference to me one way or the other. And indeed, without the explanation, what might Andrew already have read – and, more to the point, continue to read – into what had been, after all, only friendliness?

  I braced myself for Ginny to share the joke. But as she distributed coffee and the after-dinner mints I’d brought along as a contribution and still said nothing, I realised she wasn’t going to. Not publicly, anyway. No doubt she and Andrew had chuckled over it as they prepared for bed. Bed? I disengaged them. Separate rooms. It was a strange thought.

  I imagined them saying goodnight on the landing. ‘I thought she went a bit quiet,’ Andrew might have surmised. I knew I had done. I’d tried to join naturally in the conversation; but all the time I was conscious not only of avoiding addressing Andrew directly but of worrying whether Ginny was watching me, quietly monitoring. I didn’t want to give any of them the wrong idea.

  I’d busied myself unwrapping a mint when he’d mentioned a walk across to Chadham in the morning. Yes, I admitted, carefully folding the green foil, I had remembered to bring trainers with me. No point in appearing incompetent on top of everything else.

  Flora excused herself from any intended expedition. Ginny pleaded chores.

  ‘So it’s just you and me,’ Andrew had announced cheerfully. ‘Don’t you let me down. Anyway, do you good to get some fresh air into those London lungs of yours.’

  There was no escape. Desperation produced inspiration. ‘What about Tom and Justin? Maybe they’d enjoy it too?’

  There was some discussion as to whether they could be retrieved at a reasonable hour. But in the end it was agreed. ‘And I’ll drive over with Flora, and we’ll all meet at The Three Bells for a pub lunch,’ decided Ginny.

  I wasn’t looking forward to it. Maybe, I thought hopefully, it would still be raining in the morning. I turned on my side and curled into a ball. After a while, I resorted to resolutely counting sheep.

  Andrew turned up just before eleven. I’d decided, on coming down to breakfast, not to make any further issue of last night’s revelation, and Flora didn’t raise the matter. Instead she and I spent the first half of the morning – inevitably, given my hopes for an excuse to cancel the excursion, an irritatingly fine one – cleaning out the hen-house. There was, I discovered, a lot of satisfaction to be gained from shovelling out damp, dung-laden sawdust and wood chippings and replacing them from clean-smelling sacks. Memory jogged, I enquired after Arabella.

  Flora pointed. ‘There she is. Limping a bit still – but making the most of her injury’

  It wasn’t difficult to identify her among all the other uniformly brown Rhode Islands. As though realising she was the focus of our attention, she stopped and lifted her gammy leg, turning a beady eye pathetically towards us. I laughed. ‘I see what you mean.’

  We were returning to the house when the Metro pulled into the drive. ‘Saving our strength,’ explained Andrew, tipping forward the front seat to let the boys out.

  ‘Goodness, I didn’t know you were planning that strenuous a route,’ said Flora.

  Andrew acknowledged he wasn’t. He’d thought we’d take the bridle path as far as the piggery, cut across the hill and then follow the river. He grinned at Tom. ‘Only about ten miles.’

  ‘What?’ I was the one who reacted.

  ‘Just teasing. Probably more like four.’

  I blanked my face, resisting being drawn. I turned my attention to Tom and Justin. ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘How was the camping?’

  I pressed them to chat about it as we set off ten minutes later. Tom was determinedly cool about a leaking tent, Justin innocently wide-eyed about having woken up in the middle of the night to find himself lying in a puddle. They’d had to bang on the back door to be let in, and been wrapped in blankets and given cocoa and cake. ‘And then we all slept on a big mattress on the playroom floor!’

  Andrew had listened in amusement. ‘Which was much more exciting than merely dossing down under canvas,’ he commented to me over Justin’s head.

  Justin looked uncertain. ‘No,’ he decided at last. ‘Course it wasn’t.’ And he galloped ahead to join Tom who was poking around in the hedge inspecting, it turned out, the remains of a nest.

  We’d been walking back in the direction of the village. Halfway along the lane, Andrew steered us off the road and through a gate on to a broad track dividing two fields of swaying barley. The ground was soft and damp beneath our feet, the air freshly cleansed.

  The path led on between more fields, then meandered across a swathe of untended hillocky grass to a planked footbridge over a stream. As we wandered along, Andrew chatted
as naturally as ever – regaling me with village anecdotes, commenting on some item in the news, weighing up England’s chances at Headingley. Now and then he turned his attention to his nephews, confirming a species of bird or deliberating with them on the state of the grain waving alongside us.

  Gradually I relaxed. I was being totally paranoid in my self-consciousness, it dawned on me. If Andrew had always assumed I knew he was unattached, what was different now? What was different, I acknowledged – and had the grace to smile at myself – was my recognition that, even so, he treated me as no more than a pleasant companion. It was my perception of the situation that had been rocked, not his. If there was a frisson of disappointment in the realisation, I nudged it away; replaced it with tentative relief; almost regretted matters were not as I had believed. Far better to be certain of him as a friend than risk possible complications and tensions. I still wondered whether Ginny had told him of my misapprehension.

  Beyond the watermeadows, the path curved through trees. Now we reached a point where farmyard smells preceded the sight, round the next bend, of outbuildings. As we passed them, I tried not to wrinkle my nose too obviously. Justin had no such inhibitions, accompanying his snout face with snuffling grunts. I laughed. Andrew mimicked him. ‘Come on, Porky,’ he said, and led the way up a barely identifiable track through the trees opposite. We emerged into the rough grass and low gorse of a hillside rising gently above us. ‘Race you to the top,’ he challenged, and the three of them charged off, shorter bare legs searching for gaps between stubby bushes while long trousered ones ploughed indiscriminately through them.

  ‘Oh, oh, my ankle. I’ve twisted it.’ Andrew hopped to a halt and made play of rubbing his lower leg, allowing the boys to catch up. Tom, I sensed, recognised the ploy for what it was but pounded past anyway, giving no similar quarter to his younger brother. Andrew, hobbling ostentatiously, managed a close third. Flopped on a grassy knoll at the top, they watched me floundering up to join them.

  We sat there in a group for a while facing back the way we’d come. The midday sun shimmered warmly through a chiffon of high white cloud.

  ‘They’re great kids, aren’t they?’ I said when they’d wandered off on some exploration of their own.

  Andrew nodded, then grinned. ‘I gather you thought they were mine!’

  I waited for embarrassment to rise. But it didn’t: Andrew was so clearly sharing his amusement with me.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘No need.’ He looked over to where they were bent over something on the ground. ‘I’d not have any urge to disown them.’

  That wasn’t quite what I’d meant.

  He glanced back at me. ‘I assumed Flora would have explained. Mind you,’ he gave me a quizzical look as he rose to his feet in response to a summons from Tom, ‘I’d barely graduated when that one was born. I’m not sure I’d have welcomed fatherhood quite that soon!’

  I laughed an apology as he started to move away to investigate. ‘Maths was never my strong point,’ I excused myself. But even so – suddenly recalling our conversation in the meadow – what about those subsequent years of legal training; and hadn’t he mentioned doing some travelling …? I supposed I should at least have wondered.

  The three of them were investigating something the boys had uncovered. ‘Dead adder,’ Andrew reported on returning.

  I pulled a face.

  ‘Dead one,’ he stressed.

  I still made a note to watch where I put my feet.

  Later, walking along the wide, grassy river bank, I raised the subject of Ginny. ‘She only told me her husband had been … had died. In an accident.’

  Andrew nodded. ‘They were living out in Germany. Jonty was an engineer. He was returning from some site inspection – then …’ He gave a sympathetic shrug. ‘The flat they were in went with the job, so she just packed up her bags and brought the children home.’

  ‘And moved into the Dower House?’

  ‘Obvious thing to do. It had been standing empty for a while, so we all got down to it. You should have seen the grass –’ he laughed suddenly, dismissing the mood of a moment ago – ‘it was about a mile high. Philip directing operations as usual, of course.’

  ‘So you obviously weren’t living there then.’

  ‘I was still up at the farm. The old man had died about a year earlier, but Mother was still there. Keeping the peace!’

  ‘That bad?’ I took my light-hearted cue from him.

  ‘No, I’m joking.’ He grinned. ‘I think. Then, when she went … That was something of a shock. She’d had a bit of heart trouble for a while but none of us thought it was that serious.’ He picked up a stone and lobbed it absently into the water. ‘I think I’d have moved out anyway – after all, the farm was now Philip’s – but in any case we’d hardly buried her before he announced he and Julia were going to get married. I reckoned it would be a bit crowded.’

  The ripples created by the stone had now fanned out towards the bank and subsided. I turned to Andrew. ‘So you moved down with Ginny?’

  ‘It seemed logical at the time. We’d been left the house jointly. Don’t know what the old man thought we’d do about it. One of us buy the other out, I suppose. But he didn’t want to break up the farm, and that was his only other asset. Anyway, I didn’t fancy a flat in town, and Ginny seemed to approve of the idea. Has a thing about it being good for the boys to have a man about the place.’ He waved to Justin who was shouting information about his latest discovery.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but what Ginny needs is a proper man …’ My jaw dropped as I assessed the words dangling in the air between us.

  Andrew threw back his head in an outburst of mirth.

  ‘Oh …! I didn’t mean … the way it came out wasn’t …’ But his hilarity was infectious.

  ‘It’s OK. I understand exactly what you mean.’ He was still chuckling. Then his face straightened. ‘You’re right, of course. I’d assumed she’d have found herself someone else … have remarried … long ago – certainly by now; that our sharing the house was only a temporary arrangement.’ Uncharacteristically, he scuffed at the turf. ‘To be honest, though for heaven’s sake don’t repeat this, I feel a bit stuck. Because of Tom and Justin mainly. They’ve got used to having me around …’

  ‘Difficult.’

  ‘Not that Ginny hasn’t had some very presentable men taking an interest from time to time. One in particular. He was widowed too, with a small daughter. Met him at some teaching conference or other. Would have been ideal, I’d have thought. But I guess none of them, in her eyes, matches up to Jonty.’ He gave a shrug. ‘Problem, isn’t it?’

  I agreed it was.

  We strolled in silence for a while. The boys wandered back to join us, Justin demanding to know how much further it was. He was hungry.

  ‘Only about half a mile,’ Andrew reassured him.

  The river had broadened out and here, at its widest point, a couple of anglers were trying their luck. We all stepped back and waited as one of them prepared to cast. Fascinated, I watched the line loop forward and back and forward again as he directed it to some chosen spot.

  ‘Much luck?’ enquired Andrew as we passed.

  ‘Not a lot.’ The man smiled ruefully. ‘Can’t seem to discover what they’re taking today.’

  We nodded sympathy, and paused to listen politely as he listed the flies he’d already tried without success. The names triggered my memory.

  ‘He should be using a Golden Retriever,’ I said as we moved away.

  ‘Should he?’

  I laughed. ‘I’ve really no idea.’

  ‘What’s a Golden Retriever?’ demanded Tom.

  ‘It was a fly my father used. He did a lot of fishing when I was about your age.’

  ‘I remember him talking about it,’ said Andrew. ‘Years ago when he first knew Flora. But then, of course, he took up painting.’

  ‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘they’re not such dissimilar interests.’

&nbs
p; ‘Well, you need a canvas stool for both!’

  I decided not to be pedantic about the type of fishing. ‘I was thinking more of the colours and shapes.’

  Andrew, witticism over, looked thoughtful. ‘And the artistry.’ He turned and stared back at the fishermen. I followed his gaze.

  ‘Look at the way they’re brushing the lines across the water,’ he said.

  I nodded; there was something extraordinarily soothing about the steady gentle movement.

  ‘Come on.’ Tom was standing with his hands on his hips. ‘I’m starving.’

  We spotted the parked Volvo as we approached The Three Bells. Flora and Ginny had, we discovered, already established claim to a table at the bottom of the garden, close to the water’s edge. Just as well, as the pub, enjoying a prime trading position next to the bridge, was becoming more crowded by the minute.

  I accompanied Andrew to the bar to fetch drinks and to order. When we emerged into the sunlight, he weaved his way ahead of me, ushering me to sit between Ginny and Tom and positioning himself, I noticed, beside Flora rather than next to the boys. It was Ginny now who was giving them her attention, Andrew very much the indulgent uncle who’d done his stint. I felt a surge of sympathy for them. Tom in particular had reached an age where he must be beginning to be aware that Andrew could never fill the gap in their lives. It wasn’t just Ginny – remembering my gauche comment to Andrew – who needed a ‘proper’ man; the boys surely needed to see her in such a relationship. The thought echoed eerily in my head, and my mind flashed back to those good times before the emotional stand-off between my parents.

  Now it was Ginny I found myself observing. Was she as content as she appeared? Had she had the odd fling since Jonty died, I wondered. Or, like me since my break-up with Mark, had she kept men at a chaste distance? I crossed my legs, disconcerted by the stirrings my train of thought produced. I avoided too obviously looking at Andrew who was deep in conversation with Flora.

  I excused myself and went in search of the Ladies. There I took the opportunity to pull a comb through my hair, taking my time smoothing and ordering it. I renewed the light make-up I was wearing not – I convinced myself – out of vanity but as though the act of blotting on more foundation could somehow blank my feelings from my own consciousness as well as hide them from others.