Читать книгу Lovers and Newcomers - Rosie Thomas - Страница 8

Rain came sweeping across from the North Sea, borne on flat-bottomed bolsters of cloud that released a steady grey downpour as they slid over the land.

Miranda was down at the site with Amos, who was marching up and down in his wellingtons, waving his arms and chopping the air with his hands as he fumed about delays to his project.

The foundations of his house-to-be were now marked out across the churned-up meadow with pegs and tape, and as their boots slithered in the mud he reminded her of exactly where the terraces would be, where and how huge windows would slide up and down, and the ingenious way that doors would fold out onto the land.

She was as stirred and excited by the prospect as Amos himself. Almost anywhere on earth this building would be a thrilling expression of modernity, and she loved the idea of it being set right here against the old grey bones of Mead.

Amos never tired of telling anyone who would listen about his systems for storing heat and generating energy, the layers of insulation that would reduce thermal loss almost to zero, the waste water recycling technology, all the other innovations that he had planned with such glee, with a rich man’s confident relish for the latest and best. Dreamily, Miranda envisaged how the house would look, tethered here on its vantage point like a squared-off soap bubble, the planes of glass reflecting the leaves and the clouds.

The land fell away on three sides of the site, offering views for miles over the farmlands and copses, with a thin crescent of old deciduous woodland at the back of it in which the oak and horse chestnut leaves were just beginning to turn. The little wood offered protection from the winds off the sea that sometimes battered Mead itself.

The situation was perfect, as if the grand design had always been for people to build here, but its rightness had been overlooked until now. Miranda was proud of the potential, as though she had some hand in establishing it.

Amos swung to face her, oblivious to the rain, gouging up a little ruff of muddy earth with his heel.

‘Miranda, just tell me, why can’t we get going? The planning bureaucracy, the endless delays. It’s driving me insane. I want to see the trenches cut. I want to see my house rising out of this earth. I want it badly enough to get down on my knees right now and start digging at it with these.’

He waved his hands in front of her. She thought he might flop down in his corduroys and start burrowing at the flat grass like some immense sandy mole.

‘It’s not long now. Monday.’

‘That is long. One hundred and twelve hours…’ he glanced at his watch ‘…precisely.’

Miranda laughed. ‘It will be worth waiting for.’ Rain was dripping off the brim of her hat. ‘Let’s go back to the house. There’s nothing to be done out here.’

The Knights had now completed the move to Mead. Katherine had confided to Miranda that Amos had resigned from his chambers, and Miranda could see how restless he was without the demands of work to distract him. He didn’t want to go back to the sheltered confinement of Mead’s holiday wing and sit there looking out at the rain. He stuck his hands in his pockets instead and stared hungrily at the blue Portakabin that had been brought in the week before on a low-loader and lifted into place in a cradle of chains. There was a caravan waiting to one side with a yellow JCB parked next to it.

‘Come on, come on,’ he muttered and paced, as if the machinery might shudder into life under the force of his will.

‘Amos. I’m getting wet. I want a cup of coffee.’

He stopped. ‘What? Oh. Apologies in order. I’m being thoughtless.’ Then he sighed. ‘Standing here staring at some string and a digger’s not helping my blood pressure, in any case.’

They turned away on the caterpillar-tracked dirt road that would be the Knights’ driveway. It curved past the belt of trees and joined the main drive to the house a few yards from the gate.

Automatically, because none of them now used the front, Amos and Miranda headed for the back door into the house, crossing the wet glimmering cobbles of the yard. The holiday wing looked demurely occupied, with laundered curtains at the windows and even some pots of herbs placed by Katherine beside the doorstep. Across from this statement of domestic order sat the reverse of a mirror image – a picture of destruction.

Polly and Selwyn’s barn now had no windows, no door, no interior walls, and only a few gaunt beams for a roof. There came a series of thuds and the powdery splinter and crash of falling plaster and masonry. Amos raised his eyebrows at Miranda and a second later a figure appeared in the jagged hole that had once been a window. His hair, clothes and skin were thick with dust, and clods of ancient plaster clung to his shoulders. In this grey mask Selwyn’s mouth appeared shockingly red. Miranda caught the inside of her lip between her teeth and forced herself to look elsewhere. It was more difficult to have him so close, his physical presence always nudging into sight and from there marching into her private thoughts, than she had bargained for.

‘Hey, come and take a look,’ he yelled, brandishing his sledgehammer.

They ventured obediently to the doorway and peered through the hanging veil of dust. The floor was heaped with broken brick and laths and roughly swept-up piles of rubble. In the far corner, under the only remaining fragment of roof, a tarpaulin shelter had been rigged up, the corner looped back to reveal a camping mattress with folded sleeping bags and pillows all exposed to the dust. A primus burner on an improvised trestle table stood next to a tap that sagged away from the wall on a length of crusted pipe.

‘Just look at it,’ Amos muttered. The derision in his voice might have masked a tremor of reluctant awe.

Miranda stared at the tarp shelter. The whole scene was strongly reminiscent of the dwellings of primitive people, possibly hunter-gatherers huddled in caves, protected only by animal skins and a low fire. It was obvious that Selwyn adored descending to this level. Pitting himself against the weather, pulling his hut dwelling apart with his bare hands in order to rebuild something better for his woman and himself, he probably felt the very embodiment of primitive Man.

It was a joyous spectacle, as well as a sexy one. Miranda propped herself against a shaky wall to enjoy it.

‘Excuse me? What’s funny?’ Selwyn swung the sledgehammer in a small arc. He looked offended.

Amos coughed and slapped his hands together to shake off the dust and grit.

‘You see,’ Selwyn added, vaguely indicating a slice of rubbled floor, ‘this is where the snooker table will be.’

‘But you don’t play snooker,’ said Amos.

‘You always were a literal-minded person,’ Selwyn sighed.

Amos looked about. Small scraping and collapsing sounds came as the latest demolition area settled. ‘You’ve got quite a lot to do, haven’t you?’

‘It’ll be done before yours, mate. And anyway there’s no hurry. This place is fine as it is.’

‘Does Polly think so?’

Apart from the first, Selwyn had slept every night since their arrival at Mead under his own potential roof. Miranda guessed that he wanted to distance himself from the soft option, to demonstrate that he needed nothing from anybody, least of all creature comforts. Polly sometimes slept in their bedroom in the house, sometimes in the barn with him.

Miranda tried not to notice which, or when.

But she did notice. She couldn’t help it.

For the new residents at Mead the kitchen in the old house had become a kind of common room. It was where people congregated if they were not working or keeping to their own quarters, and it was big enough and already shabby enough to absorb the influx without looking much different. Today there was an earthenware jug of ragged crimson dahlias on the table, with a heap of magazines and envelopes drifting over an open laptop.

Miranda and Amos came in from the rain and tramped through to the passage beneath the stairs to leave their coats. Their boots left gritty prints on the tiles.

Colin was resting next to the Rayburn, in the Windsor armchair that had been favoured by Miranda’s late cat, and Polly was reading out to him the lonely hearts ads from a newspaper. Katherine had just arrived back from two days at her charity’s offices in London and her Burberry and briefcase were deposited on another chair. When Amos returned, padding in his socks and with what was left of his hair sticking up after he had rubbed it dry, he kissed her absently and patted her shoulder.

‘Meeting go off all right, darling?’

‘Yes. I…’

‘We’ve just been down to the site, Mirry and me. I’ll walk back down there with you, if you like.’

‘Has anything new happened?’

‘No.’

Katherine said, ‘Then I think I’ll go into the village with Polly and Colin. We were just talking about it. The rain is going to stop in a minute.’

He looked at her in surprise. ‘You’ve only just got back from town.’

Polly glanced up from her place at the table.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ Katherine agreed.

Amos hesitated, then nodded vaguely. ‘Right. Mirry, let’s have that coffee, then.’

Miranda straightened her back.

‘Yes, let’s. Black for me. Thanks.’

There was a small silence in the wake of her words. Amos seemed to become aware of four pairs of eyes on him.

‘What’s this? What are you all looking at?’

The reverberations of Selwyn’s sledgehammering made the cups on the dresser tinkle.

Polly murmured, ‘What do you mean, looking at?’

Amos puffed out his red cheeks but didn’t pursue the question. He lumbered about the kitchen collecting up the coffee pot and rummaging in the cupboards for coffee beans. Once he had located the jar he experienced a moment’s difficulty with fitting the lid on the grinder, then pressed the button as gingerly as if he expected the machine to detonate.

Polly read out over the clatter, ‘Erasmian fool, M 37, seeks warm-hearted man, London or Cambridge, to explore gravity and grace. Downhill skiing champion preferred.’ Colin shuddered. Amos stared briefly at them over his shoulder.

‘Is there any milk?’ he asked Miranda.

‘Have a look in the fridge.’

By the time he had produced two cups of coffee and set one down in front of Miranda, the other three had got up and were preparing to leave.

‘Might have a drink at the pub,’ Colin said, winding a scarf of Indian silk around his neck.

The kitchen was quiet after they had gone.

‘Why do I suddenly feel like the butt of some incomprehensible joke?’ Amos said abruptly into the silence.

Miranda thoughtfully drank some coffee, then replaced the cup in its saucer.

‘Do you?’

‘It reminds me of when we were students. It’s all coming back to me. I was forever arriving a crucial minute too late, after the decision had been made or the punch line delievered. Have I spent getting on for forty years demonstrating that I am not some egregious hanger-on, only to step back into a room with all of you in it to feel a callow nineteen all over again?’

The corners of Miranda’s mouth lifted. ‘I don’t know. But isn’t it rather good, in its way? Rather rejuvenating?’

He stared at her, trying to work out whether he was being teased.

‘No, I don’t think so.’

Miranda made herself be serious. ‘You’re not going to regret moving up here, Amos, are you?’ She didn’t want any of them to regret the decision, not even for a moment.

‘Katherine loves it.’ Amos’s expertise in deflecting questions was considerable. ‘Even in the car when we were driving up, I noticed how gleeful she was. She likes the life here better than living with me in London, that’s quite obvious. She seems happier now than at any time since the boys left home.’ He added, ‘Of course, I’m glad about that.’ His big hands, lightly clasped, rested on the table.

Miranda stood up and came to him. She put her arm over his shoulders and Amos flinched, just perceptibly, as if he feared what might happen next.

‘What about you?’ she murmured.

‘I want to get my house built.’

‘Yes. But what do you feel about being here at Mead, with the rest of us? We did all that talking about money and business and land and security and contracts, but I don’t think we – or you – did much more than mention the communal aspects.’

‘It’s a business arrangement, isn’t it?’ Amos said briskly. He ducked his head from beneath Miranda’s chin.

Miranda stood upright. Her expressive face showed the depth of her conviction. ‘But I want it to be more than that. For me, for Mead, for all of us. I want it to be about faith, and friendship, and the way that those values outlast, survive longer than marriage. Children grow up and go. Partners die, or leave, or whatever they do. What have you got left that means more than what we have here, the six of us?’

‘How about work? Call it achievement, if you prefer. Hindsight, that’s always a gift. Wealth, even, if you like. Quite a number of significant things, anyway.’

She slid her narrow hands into the back pockets of her trousers and paced away to the dresser.

‘I was thinking more emotionally.’

He widened his eyes in a show of amazement. ‘Really? You were, Mirry, of all people?’

‘Stop it, Amos. You said a minute ago that you felt unnerved by being with us again. That’s an emotional response. It’s an acknowledgement that we do have something significant here, between us all, old friends.’

Her eyes met his. The lids drooped and there were fans of wrinkles at the corners but otherwise her face was not much altered by the years. Miranda had always been a beauty. As far as Amos was concerned she was one of those women who ought to come stamped with a warning notice. Luckily, he might have added, she was not his cup of tea.

He said, ‘What we’ve got here is Selwyn going berserk, Polly being exaggeratedly patient with him, my wife suddenly as happy as Larry in spite of our various not insignificant problems, Colin who is clearly ill, you being your mystical self, and me, waiting for the bloody builders to come and start building my house.’

Miranda saw that Katherine had been right, the rain had stopped and a dilute sun now shone in on them.

Amos muttered, ‘But, even so, I’m moderately pleased to find myself here.’

Her smile reflected the sun. She skipped back to his side, kissed the top of his head and flattened his upstanding hair.

‘Oh, that’s good. Very good.’

‘I don’t know how it will turn out, though,’ he warned her. ‘I bought into a plot of rural land for development, at a good price, thank you, not into a new-age nest of nightmares.’

‘Sweet dreams,’ Miranda laughed.

Colin and Polly and Katherine took the footpath that skirted a series of fields on the way to Meddlett. The sky to the west was the blue of a bird’s egg, and the yellow leaves in the hedges hung luminous in the oblique light. Polly led the way, brushing through soaking long grass and tramping down the arms of brambles so that the others could pass. She walked briskly, and soon drew ahead. Katherine found that she was breathing hard, and looked back to see whether Colin wanted to overtake her. But he was strolling with his hands in his pockets, apparently studying the edge of the rain clouds where a bright rim of liquid gold shone against the grey.

The clean, damp air swelled her lungs. She liked the gleam of the wet leaves, and the iridescent trails of slugs glossing the stones.

Katherine was unused to country walking. She had grown up in Hampstead, and Sunday walks on the Heath with her parents had marked the limits of rural exploration. She had lived all her married life with Amos in London, and apart from occasional games of tennis and some gentle skiing there had been no call to exert herself. In his forties Amos had taken to going on trekking holidays, but always with male friends and colleagues. The idea of leaving the boys and accompanying him to Nepal had seemed so far-fetched to her in those days that it had never even been discussed. Nowadays Amos was too heavy for the mountains, and preferred a tropical beach.

Polly sat down on a stile and waited for her to catch up.

‘Am I going too fast?’ she asked.

‘Yes, but I like it. You know the way?’

‘Sel and I walked along here the other night.’

‘Did you? Going to the village?’

Polly shook her head. ‘Just having a walk together. He can’t work every minute of the day and night, but he gets so restless.’ She picked off a yellow leaf that was blotched with dark spots like skin growths, and twirled it in her fingers.

‘I noticed that,’ Katherine said.

‘I wish he’d relax more,’ Polly murmured.

‘Why does he drive himself so hard?’

Amos had driven himself too, especially in his early years at the Bar, but he always claimed that it was work undertaken ultimately to generate the time and money that would allow him to enjoy himself. A simple equation, Katherine reflected. And of course, as it was her habit to acknowledge, he had always been generous with the money.

Buying you off? A voice that she didn’t recognize startlingly murmured inside her head. She ignored it, and concentrated her attention on Polly.

‘Because he thinks he has fucked up,’ Polly answered in a level voice. ‘He thinks that he’s failed with everything else in his life, therefore he’s trying to compensate by building us a new home overnight, using his bare hands. We’re totally broke, you know. We had to sell the house, finally, to pay off the debts, and we’ve put just about everything that was left into the Mead barn.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘No one does, really. Don’t tell Amos, will you? He and Sel are so competitive.’

‘He’d probably try to give you some money.’

‘Exactly,’ Polly smiled, without much humour.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’ll have to get a job.’

‘In the furniture business again?’

‘No. I’m sick to death of wood and patina and British brown.’

‘Writing more books, then?’

‘I don’t think so, no. That’s the kind of work that you have to demonstrate some continuity in. I’m not sure if any publisher these days would be interested in me popping up with a proposal for a new life of Mary Seacole or someone. I mean a job job.’

‘I see,’ Katherine nodded.

‘Wish I did. But I’ll think of something.’

‘Of course you will.’

‘Do you need an assistant at the charity?’

‘No.’ Katherine was slightly in awe, even after so many years, of Polly’s academic and literary achievements. Polly would never make a belittling or even clever rejoinder if you made a mistake or revealed your ignorance in some way, she was far too gentle for that, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t if the circumstances were different. Katherine didn’t think that someone with opinions as definite as Polly’s would fit particularly easily into their quiet offices.

‘Oh, well.’ Polly sprang off the stile. Her bulk didn’t seem to impede her movements in the least. Polly raised her voice and called, ‘Colin, what are you looking at?’

‘I was just thinking that it’s a very painterly light.’

The answer came quickly enough, but it was obvious to both of them that this wasn’t at all what had been in his mind.

‘Shall we walk on?’ he smoothly suggested.

They followed the path for another half-mile until the fine tower of St Andrew’s, Meddlett came into view between the trees. The footpath joined the minor road into the village just at the sign displaying its name. With a black aerosol spray, someone had rather neatly deleted the ett of Meddlett and added -ing twatz.

‘Not everyone’s mad about village life,’ Colin observed.

The road led past the churchyard gate. There were quiet rows of gravestones. The church itself, Perpendicular with great arched windows, rose like a grey ship out of a smooth green sea.

In the distance, a man with a dog at his heels strolled on the other side of the road, raising his hand to a car as it crept by, and a woman in a green padded coat towed a wheeled shopper. The village street was otherwise deserted, yet they had the sense that they were being watched. The cottages enclosing the central green had low, deep-set windows. There was a pond in the centre of the green, and several ducks pottered on the bank under the willow branches. A bus stop, a post box and a red telephone kiosk stood in a line. The door of the combined general store and post office was open and there were bundles of kindling and logs stacked beside tilted boxes of tired-looking cauliflowers and onions.

Colin went inside to buy a newspaper, but came out without one.

‘You have to order the Guardian,’ he remarked.

Katherine was reminded of the village where she and Amos had stopped for tea on their drive up, and warily looked about her for the gang of teenagers. The fact that there was no one actually in sight under fifty meant that the three of them ought to have blended in perfectly. But they did not. She felt conspicuous, the precise opposite of being in London where the expected blanket of invisibility had indeed fallen around her at some point in her mid forties.

‘Let’s have this drink,’ Colin said.

He steered them past the pond and another row of flint cottages with tiny front gardens until they reached the Griffin. In the bar two silent couples were finishing their food but the table in the window, the one that had been occupied on Colin’s first visit by Jessie and Damon and the dog, was now empty. The same barman was in his place behind the pumps.

‘Afternoon,’ he said, after a pause.

‘Hello, again,’ Colin answered, with slight emphasis. ‘It’s pretty quiet this afternoon.’

‘That’s Meddlett for you,’ the man replied, slowly, as if they were foreign enough for him to be doubtful about their levels of English comprehension.

They chose glasses of wine from the options chalked up on a blackboard. Polly was already telling the barman that no, they were not passing through. They had come to live here. A flicker of interest animated his face.

‘Is that so? At Mead, is it? I’d heard about that. Planning issues, weren’t there, to do with building a new house?’

‘All sorted out now. Aren’t they, Katherine?’

‘It’s my husband’s house.’

Why not say it’s yours too? The discordant new voice niggled in her head.

Colouring slightly she added, ‘Work’s about to start. It’s very secluded. It’s not going to spoil anyone’s view or anything like that.’

‘No? Well. Live and let live, I say, in any case.’ Three glasses of wine were passed over the bar. ‘I’m Vin, by the way.’

They introduced themselves. Polly took the glasses of wine and put them on the window table.

‘We don’t see much of Mrs Meadowe,’ Vin remarked. ‘Her late husband used to come in, after I took this place on. He always said I’d made big improvements. It was a proper dump before that, the old Griffin.’ He was leaning on the bar now, settling in for a talk.

‘We are all old friends of Miranda’s and Jake’s,’ Polly said.

Katherine understood that unlike herself or Colin she was used to the rhythms of country pubs. She knew how much chat to exchange and when to make a cheery move aside. Polly steered them to their table now, closing a deft bracket on the conversation.

The window gave an oblique view of the green. Cars and passers-by in the middle distance now seemed to move very slowly, as in a film playing at the wrong speed.

Polly took a satisfied swallow of her wine.

‘Look at you,’ she said to Katherine.

‘What?’

‘You look beautiful.’

Katherine was startled. After their damp walk she knew exactly how her hair would be frizzing and her nose shining like a fog lamp. Instinctively she put up her hand to fluff out a chunk of hair over one ear.

‘She does,’ Colin agreed. ‘You do.’

Katherine heard a click, like the shutter of a camera. She wished that she might have a picture of this moment, if a camera could have captured the surge of warmth that ran through her blood and loosened her muscles, the unlooked-for buzz of pleasure at finding herself drinking wine in the afternoon with Polly and Colin for company, with a view through the window of amber and crimson leaves, and a word like beautiful in her ears. She couldn’t remember anyone having applied it to her, ever, not even Amos.

How disconnected have you been? the voice chimed in.

‘I don’t think so,’ she began to murmur, but Polly leaned forward and briefly covered Katherine’s hand with hers.

‘It’s all right, you know. You can be beautiful, it’s allowed. You don’t need Amos’s permission. Does she, Colin?’

‘No,’ he agreed.

Katherine thought for a moment. Her instinct was to deflect the compliment, but then, why? She sat forwards, smiling, her fingers lacing around her glass of pub merlot with the chain of purple bubbles at the meniscus.

Everything is going to change.

What did that mean? She was taken aback by the idea.

A burst of loud music suddenly poured through the pendant strings of brown plastic beads and bamboo tubules that separated the back of the bar from the kitchen. Thank you for the music, a woman’s voice warbled.

‘Oi, Jess,’ Vin called over the din. ‘Turn that down, customers can’t hear themselves think.’

There was quite a long interval, and then the volume diminished a little.

One of the pale couples was leaving. A girl appeared in the doorway, where Colin had previously glimpsed the man in chef’s clothing. She came in and gathered up the dirty plates from the vacated table.

‘Hi, I was wondering if you’d be back,’ she called to Colin.

‘Hello Jessie,’ he answered.

Polly and Katherine turned to him in surprise.

‘We met the other night. I came in for a quick drink, and Jessie and her boyfriend were sitting here. We got talking.’

Jessie grinned. ‘You and I did. That loser Damon had buggered off, remember, it was just me and Raff.’ Her eyes flicked from Polly to Katherine. ‘Your, ah, husband gave me a lift home…?’ She made it a pointed question.

‘These are my friends, Polly and Katherine. I’m not married,’ Colin explained.

Jessie glanced at the folds of Colin’s scarf, and his expensive soft jacket.

‘No. So you’re all from Mead, then?’

She shuffled the plates into a precarious pile, scraping leftovers on to the uppermost one. ‘Whoops.’

Cutlery threatened to slide out of the plate sandwich and she dipped her hips and shimmied to tilt the load the other way. She looked very young and cheerful.

‘All of us,’ Polly answered. ‘We’re old friends, we’ve known each other for years, and my husband and I and Katherine and hers have moved up here to be together and not to sink into a decline in our old age.’

‘That’s cool. So it’s like, what did you call it in those days, a commune?’

‘No,’ they said, absolutely in unison.

Miranda was passionate about her scheme and each of the rest of them would have differently defined what they hoped Mead would become, but they had always been unanimous in declaring that it wouldn’t be a commune. Amos had said that communes stood for vegetarianism and free love and bad plumbing, and he would not be interested in any of those separately, let alone in combination.

‘The jury’s out on number two,’ Selwyn had muttered out of the corner of his mouth to Polly at the time. The memory of this made her smile. When she was amused, Polly’s eyes narrowed under heavy lids and her cheeks rounded into smooth apples so that she looked like a thumbnail sketch of a Japanese lady on a packet of egg noodles.

‘It’s more a collaboration, I’d say,’ Polly offered.

‘What about you, then?’ Jessie asked Colin.

‘I come and go,’ he told her.

‘Can’t see my mum doing anything like that. She lives in a bungalow,’ Jessie remarked, as if this entirely defined her.

Vin leaned heavily on the bar. Jessie seemed to feel his glare on her back.

‘I got a job, as you see,’ she announced to Colin, rolling her eyes. She raised her voice slightly. ‘Helping out in the kitchen, bit of cooking, washing up and that. There’s plenty of work around here, not a problem. Are you going to have lunch? We’re supposed to stop at two. Chef’s off today, we’re just microwaving, but I could do you lasagne and chips, or a baked and toppings if you like.’

‘No, we’re fine. We’ll just have our wine. Thanks.’

Jessie nodded and hoisted her pile of plates. ‘Nice to have met you,’ she told Polly and Katherine. ‘Come back one evening. We’ve got live music Fridays and Saturdays, not completely crap, as it goes, then quiz night’s Tuesday.’

‘Amos and Selwyn would love a quiz,’ Katherine said.

‘But they don’t know anything about telly or sport or pop music,’ Colin pointed out.

Jessie turned on him in indignation. ‘Some of the questions are quite intellectual. You should come as well and meet Geza. He’s the chef.’

‘I see.’

‘Sure you won’t have some food?’

They assured her that they would not.

‘Bye, then,’ Jessie said, and danced her way back to the kitchen.

Polly gave her Japanese noodle lady smile. She leaned closer to Colin and lowered her voice. ‘You’ve got the chance of a nice gay chef, by the sound of it.’

‘I’ve already seen him. Not bad at all,’ Colin smiled.

She tapped her hand lightly on his knee.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not even to please you, Polly.’

‘Not yet, you mean. I know. It’s all right. Shall we have another glass of wine, do you think?’

The others pretended to be shocked.

‘Two glasses of wine?’

‘In the middle of a weekday afternoon?’

And then they agreed, why not?

Amos went back across the yard to his house, saying that he had calls to make to the architect and the contractors and a mass of paperwork to deal with.

Looking around the kitchen, Miranda saw that it was in need of some attention. She put the dirty coffee cups in the dishwasher and emptied the grounds from the pot into the compost bucket. Someone – probably Amos – had been treating the bucket as a waste bin, and as she stooped down to pick out a polythene wrapper she discovered some pieces of broken plate. It was the one with ivy tendrils wreathed around the rim that she and Jake had found years ago in a junk shop in Norwich. She was sad that it was broken.

After she had disposed of the fragments, too badly smashed to be worth repairing, she wiped the table and picked up a few shed dahlia petals. From this angle it was apparent that the dresser was dusty, so she cleared a clutter of bowls and papers and searched in a drawer for a cloth and a tin of polish. Wadding the cloth up in her fist she pressed the tip of it into the brown ooze of polish, then began to work it in smooth strokes into the grain of the wood. She extended her arm in wide arcs, rubbing hard, enjoying these ministrations to her house.

In the days and weeks after Jake died I used to wake in the night and howl, letting the sobs rip out of me because I couldn’t think how to stop, even though I was frightening myself. Nothing will ever be as bad as that, and I know that I have done enough crying. More than enough to last what remains of a lifetime.

I look up from my polishing, and remind myself again of what I have.

Here is Mead, this lovely place where I belong.

There are no more Meadowes, Jake was the last of the line and I am the last to bear his family name, but thanks to my friends there are voices and laughter again in these rooms. Sometimes when we sit around the table it is as though we are not six, but a dozen or more – here are the earlier versions of each of us, gathered behind the chairs, leaning over one another’s shoulders to interject or contradict, phantoms of teenagers and young parents and errant mid-lifers, all these faces vivid in memory’s snapshots with the attitudes and dreams of then, half or more of which are now forgotten.

With this much familiarity between us, when I single out our older faces from the crowd, I have come to imagine that I can read off the latest bargains we are striking with ourselves, with each other, and – with whom?

If I believed in God, I would say so.

With fate, then.

If we can stay alive a few years longer, be healthy, live just a little more, maybe experience something new that will make us feel that everything that is passionate, breathtaking, surprising is not already behind us. If we can be fractionally careless, and just frivolous enough, amongst our old friends. If we can be not lonely, and only sometimes afraid: that will be enough.

These are selfish desires, of course. We are a selfish generation, we post-war babies, for whom everything has been butter and orange juice and free speech and free love.

But even with all our privileges, we have made mistakes.

Whereas if I thought about personal fallibility at all when I was young, it was just one more thing to laugh at.

And now I look up, and see Selwyn coming across the yard to the back door. The latch rattles, and he tramples his feet on the doormat to shake some of the plaster dust off his boots.

‘Hi. There you are. Where’s everyone?’ he asks.

‘Gone for a walk.’ I bend deliberately over the polishing cloth, making long sweeps over the dresser top.

‘Barb?’ He comes across and stands much too close to me, just six inches away. I can smell dust and sweat. ‘What’s the matter? You’re crying, aren’t you?’

He doesn’t touch me, but he picks up the tin of polish instead as if this is the closest connection he dares to make. He screws the lid in place and I study his notched and grimy hands and the rinds of dirt clinging to the cuticles.

The polishing slows down, my reach diminishing, until it gradually stops altogether.

‘No. I was just thinking sombre thoughts.’

He does touch me now, the fingers of his right hand just coming lightly to rest on the point of my shoulder. We look into each other’s eyes.

‘About the other night…’ he begins.

‘It’s all right. Don’t. No need to. You were a bit drunk. Me too. Two glasses of wine, nowadays, and I’m…’

He stops me.

‘I wasn’t drunk, and I don’t believe you were either. I meant it. You are so beautiful, and necessary to me. I’m numb these days, I’m like a log of dead bloody wood, totally inert except for the termites of anxiety gnawing away, but when I look at you it’s like the log’s being doused in petrol and set alight. I can’t stop it. I don’t want to stop it, because it’s being alive.’

‘Don’t say these things, Selwyn. You shouldn’t, and I shouldn’t listen.’

‘I’m bursting into flames, look.’

His index finger moves to my bare neck, slides down to the hollow of my collarbone.

I step backwards, out of his reach, skirting the corner of the dresser.

‘Polly,’ I manage to say. ‘Polly, Polly, Polly, Polly. Partner. Mother of three children. Your partner. Your children.’

‘You are not telling me anything I don’t already know,’ Selwyn says reasonably.

It was Miranda who had very nearly become Selwyn’s wife.

After they left the university they had drifted to London where Miranda found herself an agent and spent her days going to auditions, hitching up her skirt in front of a series of directors and chain-smoking afterwards while she waited for the phone to ring.

Selwyn was in the first year of his clinical training, and finding that he hated the sadistic rituals of medical memory tests and group diagnostic humiliations. At the time Miranda had a room in a shared flat in Tufnell Park and more often than not Selwyn stayed there with her, huddling in her single bed or crouching in the armchair amongst discarded clothes, a textbook on his lap and the apparatus for fixing another joint spread on the arm.

He claimed later, with reason, that this was the lowest period of his life. He knew that he wasn’t going to qualify as a doctor, but had no idea what else he might do with himself. Startlingly, he was also discovering that he was no longer the centre of attention. Amos and Polly and Colin and all their other friends had set off in different directions. It seemed that Miranda, with her jittery determination to be an actress, was the only thing he had left to hold on to.

He held on hard.

One night, lying ribcage to ribcage in her bed and listening to the cats squalling in the dank garden backed by a railway line, he said, ‘Let’s get married.’

They could at least then get a flat on their own together. There would be regular cooking, laundry would somehow get done, life would be legitimized.

Miranda said, ‘Yes.’

They went to Portobello Road the next Saturday afternoon and chose a ring, a Victorian garnet band that Selwyn couldn’t afford. Plans were made for a registry office ceremony at Camden Town Hall, to be followed by a restaurant lunch for Miranda’s mother and Selwyn’s parents and brother. In the evening there was to be a catered party in a room over a pub, at which a revived Blue Peony would be the disco. Weddings in those days were deliberately stripped of all tradition. Miranda hooted with laughter at the idea of a church, or a bridal gown, and a honeymoon involving anything more than a few days in a borrowed cottage in Somerset was out of the question in any case.

One weekend Miranda’s mother came down from Wolverhampton. Selwyn was banished to his rented room near the hospital. Joyce Huggett was in her forties, a normally outspoken and opinionated woman who was uncomfortable in London, which she hardly knew. She was also a little uncertain of her own daughter these days, because Miranda had gone to an ancient university and had acquired sophisticated friends, and was – or was about to become – an actress.

‘Couldn’t you at least wear white, Barbara? It needn’t be anything bridal. Just a little dress and coat, maybe. I’m thinking of the photographs.’

In Joyce’s own wedding picture, dating from the same month as Princess Elizabeth’s, Joyce was wearing a dress made from a peculiarly unfluid length of cream satin, with her mother’s lace veil. By her side, Miranda’s handsome father smiled in a suit with noticeably uneven lapels. The marriage lasted nine years before he left his wife and daughter for a cinema projectionist.

‘I’m not a virgin, Mum,’ Miranda said.

Mrs Huggett frowned. ‘You’re a modern young woman, I’m well aware of that, thank you. But this will be your wedding day. Don’t you want to look special?’

‘I know what I want,’ Miranda said calmly.

They went together to Feathers boutique in Knightsbridge and chose an Ossie Clark maxi dress, a swirling print of burgundy and cream and russet and rose pink that fell in panels from a tight ribboned bodice. Joyce paid for it and Miranda hugged her in real, unforced, delighted gratitude.

‘It’s perfect,’ she said. She agreed with her mother’s plea for her at least to wear a hat, and they chose a floppy-brimmed felt in dusty pink, from Biba.

‘You look a picture. I hope you’ll be happy, love,’ Joyce murmured.

Selwyn was very quiet. He slept a lot, as if he were clinging to every possible moment of oblivion. Without telling Miranda, he stopped going to lectures and practicals, and he smoked even more dope. Instead of balancing his life out, as he had hoped it would, impending marriage was destabilizing it even further. As soon as she became a bride-to-be, Miranda seemed to slip out of his grasp and turn into someone less compliant, less adoring, much less in his thrall than she had ever been before. She was often irritable with him, and he felt so limp and so hopeless that he knew she could hardly be blamed for that. His only responsibility before the wedding, apart from taking his velvet suit to the cleaners, was to find a flat that they could afford to move into together. He did drag himself out to look at two or three places, but the sheer effort of the process exhausted him, and he was shocked to discover that he couldn’t imagine living in these rooms with Miranda as his wife. He never even suggested that they might visit one of the rickety attics or basements together.

One week before the wedding, he got up very early in the morning and left his fiancée sleeping. From Euston he caught a train to Wolverhampton and then took a taxi to Joyce’s.

When she opened the door to him Joyce thought he had come to tell her that Miranda was ill, or dead. She snatched at his wrists, shouting in panic.

‘Where is she? What’s happened to her?’

‘Let me in,’ he begged. ‘She’s all right, it’s me that’s wrong.’

In the narrow hallway, with bright wallpaper pressing in on him, Selwyn blurted out that he couldn’t marry Miranda after all. In her relief that her daughter wasn’t dead or dying, Joyce turned cold and glittery with anger.

‘Does she know?’

‘No. I’ve come to tell you first.’

‘My God. You cowardly, selfish, pathetic creature.’

‘Yes,’ Selwyn miserably agreed. He didn’t need Joyce to tell him what he was. ‘It isn’t right to marry her. I won’t make her happy.’

Joyce looked him up and down. ‘No. You would not. Right. Now you’ve told me, bugger off out of here. I don’t want to look at your face. And leave my daughter alone, do you hear? We’ll be all right, we always have been, Barbara and me. Just don’t mess up her life any more than you’ve done already.’

‘I won’t do that,’ Selwyn promised.

He was true to his word. He gave up his medical studies, left London, and went to stay with the friends in Somerset who had been going to lend the happy couple their cottage for the honeymoon. He started work with a local carpenter, discovered that he had a talent for woodworking, and in between fitting staircases and kitchen cupboards he began to buy, restore and sell furniture.

Miranda recovered, helped by a rebound affair with an actor.

Seven years later, when Amos Knight married the quiet, pretty girl called Katherine whom he had met at the house of one of the other young barristers in his chambers, Miranda wore to their wedding the Ossie Clark dress and the Biba hat. The outfit was by then grotesquely out of fashion, but Miranda carried it off. She was on the brink of making a small name for herself as an actress.

I can’t stop myself. Instead of walking out of the kitchen I lift my head, and our eyes meet. Selwyn’s eyelashes and hair are coated with grey dust, as if he’s made up to play an old man on some amateur stage. He doesn’t try to reach out for me again, and I’m sharply aware that this is disappointing. My heart’s banging against my ribs, surely loud enough for him to hear, and my mouth is so dry that I don’t think I can speak.

Why now? Why, after all these years, is this happening again?

The answer comes to me: it’s precisely because of now.

We’re not young any longer, there’s no network of pathways branching invitingly ahead of us. No personae to be tried on for size. We’re what, and who, we are.

But we’re not yet ready to be old.

We stand in the silent kitchen, speechless and gaping like adolescents, but both of us realizing that through decades of duty and habit we’ve somehow forgotten about the thrill of choice: oh God, the breathtaking drama of sexual choice. The cliché that swims into my head might have been made for this instant. I do feel weak at the knees. I’m not sure that my legs will hold me upright.

When I don’t say anything, Selwyn sighs. He brushes his hand through his hair and a shower of splinters and plaster particles fall like snow.

‘Would it be all right for me to have a bath?’ he asks.

‘You don’t have to ask permission. You live here.’ My voice comes out in a croak, sounding as if I’ve borrowed it from someone else.

‘Thank you,’ he says.

I listen to his steps as he goes upstairs, the familiar creak of the oak boards, the clink of the bathroom latch somewhere overhead.

Without giving myself time to think, I run after him.

From the linen cupboard opposite my bedroom door I snatch up an armful of fresh towels. I race along the landing and push at the bathroom door. Not locked. It swings inwards.

The taps are full on and the room is already cloudy with steam.

Selwyn’s barefoot. He’s taken off his filthy sweater and shirt and dropped them on the floor. As soon as he sees me he nudges the clothes gently aside with his bare foot, clearing a space. He holds out his arms.

What I feel is an extraordinary lightening, giddiness, swirling of blood; it’s like being very drunk but with all my senses cleansed and heightened.

‘I’ve brought you some clean towels.’

‘No, you haven’t.’

He snatches the towels and drops them on top of the clothes.

It’s me who takes the last step.

Our mouths meet. Immediately we begin to consume each other, as if we’re starving, with the steam billowing in clouds around us. Out of the corner of my eye, as Selwyn twists off my jersey, I see that the bath is almost overflowing.

Once we’re started, rediscovering the inches of skin and the declivities and shadows of a pair of bodies that were once familiar territory (only yesterday, as it now seems), it’s impossible to stop.

Selwyn fumbles to his knees, drawing me down with him, wrestling to extricate me from absurd layers of vest and straps. Towels coiled with clothes and grit mound beneath us. Water laps at the very rim of the bath.

I hear myself gasping with laughter. ‘There’s going to be a flood.’

‘Fuck it.’

He drags me with him as he strains to reach the taps and stem the tide.

In the quiet that follows, there’s the sound of voices.

‘Oh, sweet Jesus.’ Selwyn slumps back against the side of the bath.

I’m already on my feet, spitting building rubble out of my mouth and frantically raking fingers through my hair. I pull my clothes into a sort of order and plunge out of the bathroom.

Colin and Katherine and Polly are all in the hall below. They’re laughing and exclaiming and apparently having some difficulty in taking off their boots and coats.

Polly glances up and sees me on the landing.

‘Colin’s been getting the eye from a nice young chef,’ she calls.

‘I had to carry these two home, just about,’ Colin says drily.

The hall clock chimes. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon.

Luckily, they’re all too busy and happy to notice anything.

I run down the stairs, relief all but cancelling out guilt.