Meadowland

by Alison Giles

  Andrew drew the curtains together and then, as I stood there uncertainly, began unbuttoning my dress. ‘You won’t want to sleep in this,’ he said. I slid it from my shoulders and eased it down, stepping out of it and dropping it on to a nearby chair. As I did so, he turned back the bed covers. ‘Come on. Hop in.’

  Still in my cream camisole and knickers I did so, shivering involuntarily at the coolness of the sheets and watching – there wasn’t really anywhere else to look – as he pulled his shirt over his head, then unzipped his trousers and kicked them off.

  ‘Move over.’ Casually he slid in beside me, twisting to switch off the bedside lamp before easing his length alongside mine. ‘Here.’

  Now he had his arms around me and instinctively our legs eased together. I lay there, nestling up to him, the pulse of our breathing seeking and finding matching rhythms.

  And then I realised he was asleep.

  Tentatively I reached up and touched his hair. It was fine-textured but thick and my fingers slid through it without brushing his scalp.

  After a while, I turned over and snuggled my back into his chest.

  I was awake before him too. Stretching out a hand, I pulled the curtain open seven or eight inches, allowing the light to stream in. It glinted on the mirror propped on the tallboy opposite. In the shadow, away from the main beam, my dress lay sprawled where I’d abandoned it, the sleeve of Andrew’s shirt caught against its skirt.

  In sleep, his face was fully relaxed. I longed to touch the hint of stubble around his chin, to experience the roughness of it. Instead, lightly, I allowed my hand to rest on the soft hair of his chest, feeling the rise and fall beneath it.

  “Morning.’

  I turned my head; his eyes were open. Raising himself casually on one elbow, he leaned forward and allowed his lips to rest on mine for a few seconds before: ‘Breakfast. Scrambled eggs do you?’

  I dressed and joined him in the kitchen. He’d thrown open the back door and the fresh morning air contrasted with the stale warmth of the house.

  ‘You can cook then,’ I observed as I stood watching him stir a pan.

  ‘Man of many talents, me.’ He dished up. The eggs steamed gently alongside buttered toast, and I discovered I had an appetite.

  When we’d finished and pushed our plates aside, he reached out and placed his hand over mine, pressing it against the hardness of the table. ‘You OK?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’ I returned his gaze.

  His remained steady. ‘What I’d like,’ he said, ‘is for us to go away somewhere together for a couple of days.’

  I’d have withdrawn my hand if I could.

  ‘Think about it. I know a great little place in Somerset.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Is next weekend too soon?’

  ‘Won’t Philip need you?’

  His mouth quirked. ‘Is that a “yes”?’

  I wished I knew.

  ‘Come here.’ His hand gripped mine even more firmly as he drew me to my feet and round the table towards him.

  This time he kissed me in a way that left no room for doubt as to what was in his mind.

  CHAPTER 16

  Why, mid-week, was I overcome by total panic?

  I had at first hesitated, on the Sunday, to tell Flora of our plans but since, predictably but nonetheless to my relief, she hadn’t turned a hair when Andrew drove me round at about ten, I risked it.

  Actually, what I said to her when Andrew had left – ‘Tractor duty calls,’ he’d grimaced – was that he’d suggested we spend a weekend in Somerset, the implication being, I hoped, that I hadn’t yet agreed.

  Which in a way was true. When does a failure to say no become a yes?

  Flora, down on her hands and knees adjusting the wire-netting at the edge of the chicken run, looked up. ‘And?’

  ‘I just thought I’d mention it.’

  Flora, task completed, heaved herself to her feet.

  ‘Well? What do you think?’ I prodded as we negotiated the path back between the vegetables. I waited while she inspected the runner beans.

  ‘I think,’ she said, having satisfied herself that they were coming along well, ‘that you’ll probably enjoy it.’

  When does lack of disapproval constitute approval? At least I’d been open with her; more to the point, it occurred to me, had been able to be upfront with her. Where Mark was concerned, I’d always been very circumspect in discussing our relationship with Mother. And I hadn’t been close enough to my father to test the water with him. I found myself looking up at the sky as though maybe he was up there somewhere, observing. No thunderstorm broke so I chose to believe he was smiling.

  But London’s leaden skies, as I hunched home through summer drizzle a few days later, undermined my confidence. ‘You’re being ridiculous,’ I tried telling myself as I shook the damp from my coat and hung it to dry from the shower rail. ‘It’s what you want, isn’t it?’

  Elspeth, over the phone half an hour later, made the same point.

  I had managed to get through to her at last. After the usual long-time-no-sees, how-are-yous, I’d poured out the story of events since her visit.

  ‘But I thought,’ she said, bemused, ‘that’s what you wanted.’

  ‘It is. I think.’

  ‘Then buy yourself some sexy underwear and go for it.’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  I heard her sigh at the other end of the line. ‘OK, so what’s the problem?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I wailed, all my insecurities reasserting themselves.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘The man’s drop-dead gorgeous, you’ve been after his body –’ I winced at her one-track focus – ‘for ages, and what’s more it now turns out he’s as free as the air.’

  ‘Maybe that’s the trouble,’ I heard myself say miserably.

  ‘What!’ I could practically hear her brain whizzing. Mine, meanwhile, seemed stuck in neutral.

  ‘You mean you’d be happier having an affair with him if he were still married?’

  ‘Not “still”. He never was.’

  She brushed the correction aside impatiently. ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘It’s beyond me …’ Her voice broke into my paralysis. ‘I thought it was moral scruples holding you back?’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘Carrie …’ Her exasperation was almost tangible.

  ‘Well I thought it was.’ Maybe it had just been an excuse; I remembered my assessment of Gavin.

  Elspeth assumed a calmly authoritative tone. ‘Just go. Have a ball –’ she giggled briefly – ‘in more ways than one. And stop making such a mountain out of it.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said.

  I rang Andrew and confirmed I could leave work early on Friday.

  As the mid-afternoon train to Taunton settled into its steady rhythm, a fatalistic calm overcame me – that sense of a journey begun from which there was no turning back. I looked for Andrew as I alighted around six. He waved as he disengaged himself from helping an elderly woman sort out the mechanics of the left-luggage lockers.

  ‘Don’t know why they always pick on me,’ he said, giving me a quick hug and taking my bag.

  We drove north out of the town, through the initially flat surrounds and up on to the Quantock hills. The cooler, fresher air blowing into the car streamed across the side of my face and hair. I wound the window up a little and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Andrew.

  He slowed and drew off the road, the sills of the Volvo scraping gently against the heather. The smell of it as we got out was sweet and earthy.

  We walked up a steepish track, the stone chippings rough beneath our feet. A handful of others, some strollers, some anoraked walkers with backpacks, dotted the hillside. But the paths were splayed out so that we only passed within speaking distance of one couple who returned, with a courteous nod of the head, Andrew’s ritual ‘Good evening’.

  At the top, we stopped and looked down a
cross the landscape stretching right around us. Andrew positioned himself behind me, his body against mine, his arms folded round me. ‘Isn’t it glorious?’ he said. Slowly he turned me through the panorama of the Bristol Channel – the coast of Wales blurred but discernible through the opaque light of early evening – across the smoothly curved hills of the Brendons and the Blackdowns, on over the gentle undulations of the Somerset-Avon borders, and back again to the far-off glint of dipping sun on water. We stood there for a while. Not speaking. Close. Then he let his arms drop and we wandered back to the car.

  ‘Now you can have a cigarette,’ he said.

  ‘I’m glad you took me up there straightaway,’ I said, an hour and a half or so later.

  We were having dinner in the panelled dining room of the renovated manor house which had turned itself into a small hotel. It was tucked against the hillside, back from one of those narrow roads running down to the vale, and we had arrived with just enough time to shower and change.

  Our table allowed a view through the mullioned windows across the stretch of fields to the ridge beyond, now grey in the almost faded light. ‘Tomorrow,’ said Andrew, pointing, ‘we’ll walk right across there.’ He outlined the route he planned, identifying it by names with which he was clearly familiar – something or other stone, the trig. point at …, drop down to the pub at wherever for lunch …

  ‘You love this area, don’t you?’ I said.

  ‘It’s my retreat. Always has been. Usually I just drive over for the day. Then I simply walk; imagine I’m Coleridge or Wordsworth …’

  ‘I didn’t know there was a poet in you.’

  He raised an eyebrow and smiled. ‘Call me an incurable romantic.’

  And one, it became clear to me over the next two days – as he headed confidently along the often narrow criss-crossing tracks, forking unerringly left or right – who knew every twist and turn of this particular stretch of countryside …

  Just as equally, I discovered that night, he knew his way around a woman’s body.

  Lying naked with him in the huge soft bed – why for crying out loud did I choose, at this moment, to let it remind me of Flora’s? – I responded to his touch. Yet even as his hands explored, I felt myself tightening. Knowing he couldn’t help but be aware of it only made it worse.

  ‘Don’t you dare tell me to relax,’ I said.

  I sensed him grinning beside me. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’

  Then he raised himself on one elbow, his expression – caught by the moonlight hovering between the drawn-back curtains – one of careful, amused neutrality. ‘I didn’t know I was dealing with a virgin.’

  ‘You’re not.’ Indignantly.

  ‘A reconstituted one, then.’

  ‘Sod you!’ But I was laughing too.

  And suddenly what we were doing was fun – pleasurable fun; but with an underlying tenderness on Andrew’s part which raised it above the merely playful.

  And if in the course of it he felt any sense of urgency, he disguised it; until the moment when he moved on top of me, and by then mine was as great as his.

  As my return train on Sunday evening pulled heavily out of the station and settled down to its steady throb, images – like a series of photographic slides projected on a screen – flashed in indiscriminate succession across my mind: Andrew striding ahead along some narrow path trodden around a hillside; strolling hand in hand with me between avenues of beeches; steadying me down steep slopes; lazing idyllically beside me amongst the heather. So still we’d lain on one occasion that a group of deer had ventured close. Alerted by a rustle, I detected at first only a pair of deep brown eyes and pricked ears peering over the rise. I sat up, slowly, uncertain what I was seeing.

  I shook Andrew gently. ‘Look.’

  Four or five of them, delicate, curious, were paused, regarding us. Then they cantered away, stopping once to look back before disappearing into the fold of the valley. We saw others at a distance, always in groups, leaping at speed. In contrast, the wild ponies showed no concern at our presence, cropping peacefully as we passed within feet of them.

  Civilisation intruded from time to time in the form of the occasional Land Rover lurching across the landscape or, even more incongruously, a noisy spluttering motorbike; but each was soon gone and the countryside returned to its unspoilt tranquillity.

  My personal slide show switched back to the hotel: that first morning, awakening to a blanket of mist extending an eerie dampness right up to the windows; Andrew teasing away my disappointment. ‘Good,’ he’d said. ‘No rush to go down to breakfast.’ And this time his love-making was intense and passionate.

  Memory lingered; then shifted to the dining room: tables being cleared of already departed guests’ crockery and crumbs; steaming coffee; Andrew tucking into fried bacon, eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms, while I settled for a boiled egg and toast. The sun had by now broken through and it caught on his hair as he lifted his cup and, holding it in both hands, stared unwaveringly across it at me.

  ‘Don’t,’ I’d begged, aware of the waitress discreetly gathering up tablecloths. ‘You’re making me self-conscious.’

  The Inter-City rocked across points and I smiled to myself, surreptitiously. The woman sitting opposite looked up from her book and checked her watch. ‘We must be approaching Reading,’ she suggested. I nodded agreement.

  Half an hour later we drew into Paddington. I hesitated only a moment before heading for the taxi rank. The weekend deserved to be finished in style.

  Strange, I thought, as I lounged back in the cab’s depths, aware yet not aware of the lights and buildings without, how the rest of the world can remain so unaffected by one’s own change of spirit. By rights, pedestrians should be dancing in the streets, horns trumpeting Gloriana rather than blaring warnings, street lamps flashing Technicolor.

  I hurried up the grey stairs between off-white walls to the flat. Scarcely had I switched on the lights before the phone rang.

  ‘Hi.’ Warmth.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Just checking you got back safely’

  ‘Of course. But yes, thanks, no problem.’

  ‘OK. Goodnight, then.’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  I replaced the receiver and stood staring at Father’s painting hanging on the wall in front of me. ‘Yes,’ I confirmed. ‘Yes.’

  Then I made coffee and went to bed.

  I tackled problems at work next day with renewed energy. And there were plenty of them as the backwash from this year’s operations combined with the flood tide of next year’s planning.

  I even had cheerfulness to spare when Mother rang to remind me I’d suggested lunch.

  ‘But not this week,’ I pleaded looking round at the paper littering my desk and figures flickering on the computer screen.

  We settled for the following Wednesday. ‘Things should be calmer by then.’

  ‘Unless of course,’ a plaintive note crept into my mother’s voice, ‘you feel like coming and spending the weekend at home?’

  ‘Mother, you’ll love a trip to the West End. It’ll be perfect timing: the crowds will have gone and you’ll be able to take first pick of the stores’ new winter stock.’

  Martin from Sales came in just as I replaced the receiver ‘You look happy,’ he observed, almost accusingly. ‘What’s your excuse?’ I laughed and offloaded a couple of files into his arms in return for those he dumped on me.

  Elspeth inevitably was agog when I finally got round to punching out her number. ‘Well?’

  ‘Great,’ I confirmed. ‘Thanks for giving me a shove.’

  ‘So he came up to expectations?’ As ever, she was unable to resist the sexual innuendo.

  I played along. ‘Yes. And how.’

  She mooned with me over the deer and the ponies – ‘how sweet’ – before reverting to practicalities. ‘So when are you seeing him again?’

  ‘This weekend of course. I’m going down to Cotterly.’

  ‘Ooh. Lots of lovely hay
to roll in.’

  ‘Now there’s a thought.’ Laughing.

  ‘My God, you’re a different woman. I approve of this man. When do I get to meet him?’

  Clare demanded an answer to much the same question when I spoke to her. ‘Don’t feel like coming sailing again, do you?’ she’d rung to suggest.

  ‘Can’t,’ I said thankfully, recalling my previous experience. ‘I’m off to the West Country again.’

  ‘You’ve got a man down there.’

  I admitted it contentedly.

  ‘You dark horse, you. How long has this been going on?’

  I gave her a thumb-nail resumé – though omitting any mention of Flora.

  ‘Well drag him up to London. I must,’ she said, referring implicitly to my lack of anything but the most fleeting male involvement over the last couple of years, ‘inspect this phenomenon.’

  I gave the required promise but afterwards sat tapping my fingers on the chair arm, reflecting on the complications of allowing my two worlds to merge. I almost rang Clare back to warn her not to mention Andrew to her mother lest – in some fantasy scenario in Sainsbury’s – word of his existence should get back to mine. But then Clare, if I did so, would probe for explanations … Better to let things ride lest I open up what could develop into a yawning chasm.

  Little did I know that, without any help from Clare, that particular ground was, in any case, about to start rumbling.

  CHAPTER 17

  Circumstances at Cotterly were not, Andrew and I both accepted, conducive to passionate activity. I stayed at Wood Edge, and he and I contented ourselves, for the most part, with goodnight embraces in the shadow of Flora’s buddleia – ‘Very third form,’ he commented, ‘but never mind’ – before he departed to his own bed at the Dower House.