Lovers and Newcomers

Amos sat back in his chair. He described how the new house would rise on a sloping plot of land hidden by a belt of trees to the south-west of the house. It was to be uncompromisingly modern with impeccable green credentials. The last adjustments to the plans, to meet the requirements of the local authority planning committee, were now in progress. Building work, Amos announced, would soon be starting. In the meantime, once the move up here was completed, he and Katherine were going to make a temporary home in the one-time holiday wing at the back of Mead.

‘We need to be right here. Keep an eye on the contractors,’ Amos said.

There was a collective shifting in seats, another change in the glittering currents of air as no one mentioned the real reason why Amos was leaving London and his chambers.

Katherine thoughtfully broke off a piece of oatcake and bit it in half. She was the only one who had changed before dinner, into an amethyst silk shift dress. Anything that plain and unadorned, Miranda reckoned, must have cost well into four figures.

‘We’re looking forward to it. Living in a holiday cottage will be like being on holiday,’ Katherine laughed.

Selwyn nodded. ‘Maybe it will.’

Miranda listened to his deep voice rather than the actual words. She knew what Selwyn’s plans were. From now on Polly and he would be living here too. They were going to do most of the work on the derelict wing themselves. She didn’t doubt Selwyn’s ability to tackle the job, or Polly’s willingness to assist him.

Selwyn had read medicine at university, but he had never completed his clinical practice. He had moved to Somerset instead, to a ramshackle cottage, where he set up a business buying, restoring and reselling antique furniture. Over the years, as the supply of undervalued old gems in need of a French polish seemed to dwindle, he had gone into buying timber and making furniture himself, and once Polly had given up academia and joined him they had run the business together. Polly wrote historical biographies in the short hours that were left to her between the furniture business and bringing up three children.

Miranda never knew precisely how successful or otherwise their enterprises had been, but it was no secret that they had never had any money to spare. The Somerset house and the workshops had finally been sold, and they had bought their piece of Mead from her.

Selwyn flexed his chisel-scarred fingers and grinned. ‘I’m busting to get started.’

That was obvious enough. The undischarged electricity that flickered in the room seemed to crackle about him, just as it had done when they were young.

Miranda looked across at Colin, inviting him to take his turn.

‘I’ll monitor progress and supply strong drink when required. When I’m not working I’ll stay if and when Miranda lets me.’

Colin was a theatre set designer. Mostly he worked in London, but sometimes a job took him to Italy or New York. Unlike the others he was not planning to move to Mead for good. Miranda leaned over and covered his hand with hers.

‘There are nine bedrooms in this house. Be here with us as much as you can,’ she implored.

Colin needed to be with somebody, after everything he had been through. They all thought that, not just Miranda. And if not with them, then whom?

‘Thanks, Miranda. Here I am.’

Selwyn had fidgeted and twitched through all the talking. Now he tipped back half a glass of red wine and jumped to his feet.

‘Sitting for hours makes my back ache. Where’s the music, Mirry?’

‘Next door.’

He bounded through a set of double doors, dragging the white loops of earphones and a black iPod out of his pocket. Ten seconds later music crashed out of the speakers.

‘C’mon, let’s dance,’ Selwyn hollered.

They groaned, but left their seats. It was ‘Baba O’Reilly’.

Selwyn kicked back a rug to expose dusty oak floorboards. They launched into the dance, laughing and kicking out their arms and legs and swinging their buttocks, without the embarrassed scorn of the Knight boys or Selwyn and Polly’s son and twin daughters to inhibit them. The Who were succeeded by Pink Floyd.

‘Haven’t you heard of the Arctic Monkeys, Selwyn?’ Amos shouted.

‘No, and neither have you.’

Katherine, flushed and beaming, was jiving with Colin. As always Amos missed every beat but made up for it with general enthusiasm.

Watching the dancing, her nervous anticipation melted into delight at the success of the first evening, Miranda noticed that there was no wine left on the table. She thought of the remaining bottles of Bollinger in the fridge in the pantry and slipped out into the hall to collect one or two of them. A narrow passage behind the stairs, lined with coats and cluttered with wellingtons, provided a short cut directly to the pantry. She didn’t need to switch on the lights, she knew every creak underfoot and every draught on her cheek, so she swore softly when her ankle connected sharply with a suitcase that Amos had brought in and left there. As she stopped to let the pain subside there was a rustle and a darker shape moved against the darkness.

It was Selwyn. She knew the scent of him before he reached for her, before his lips touched her ear.

‘You are beautiful, Barb. You’re so fucking gorgeous tonight, I don’t know where to put myself.’

‘And you’re pissed, Sel.’

‘No, I’m not.’

Even though it was pitch dark Miranda could see the lines of his profile. Through the muffle of waxed jackets and tweed caps she could hear pairs of feet thudding to the beat.

‘You didn’t always think I was gorgeous.’

There was a ripple of amusement in her voice.

‘Oceans of water have flowed under more bridges than there are in Venice, since those days,’ he protested.

He kissed her and she responded with a sharp intake of breath that seemed to catch in his throat.

‘Stop it,’ Miranda breathed, but they still hung together. He ran his fingers over her throat, down to the open buttons of her top.

She did move then, forcing herself to duck under his arm and skip away to the kitchen. He followed her, into the bright lights and the debris of cooking.

‘Take a couple of those bottles through for me?’

‘Amos has had quite enough already.’

‘So have you,’ she countered.

In the drawing room they were still dancing. Miranda was relieved that no one had missed them, even though all that had happened was a kiss exchanged by friends at the end of a long evening.

Everyone is asleep.

I could just hear the low rumble of Amos talking to Katherine as they undressed, but that stopped a while ago. Selwyn and Polly will be under the bedcovers, oblivious too. I imagine them spooned together, breathing in unison, Selwyn’s dark face crumpled up against her dimpled shoulder.

Amos will be wearing pyjamas, Katherine a nightie, but Polly and Sel will sleep naked. I remember what that felt like, the safety of interlocked bodies, the balm of skin against skin.

None of my business.

I hope Colin is sleeping too. He looks brittle with illness and exhaustion. Maybe Mead will soothe him, if he will allow it to.

These thoughts dance a gavotte around the other. How long since I was kissed, like Selwyn kissed me tonight?

A long, long time.

The lingering heat of that kiss makes me restless.

I cross the room, lean on the windowsill and gaze out. The moon has gone but over the crowns of oak and beech I can see stars. Tomorrow will be another warm day.

The house settles around me. No – around us.

As my mother encouraged me to do, I reckon up my blessings. This is what I have.

Mead, my husband’s house, now mine. I love it as if it were a living thing, even its dilapidation, multiplying outbreaks of decay, creeping damp and splintering bones.

Now friends have arrived bringing our cargo of history, jokes, secrets. Beyond price. A future will unfold here on these acres of Jake’s, shared by people he loved. We have different, complicated reasons, each of us, for investing ourselves and our hopes in Mead for this new beginning, but I believe the outcome will be shared happiness, and security, for all of us. Why not? Age at least brings the benefits of wisdom, mutual tolerance, which we did not possess when we were nineteen, for all our beauty and optimism.

But I’m getting sentimental.

That’s new, as is the realization that I can’t drink the way I used to.

The two things are, of course, quite closely connected.

My feet are as cold as ice.

I wish my bed were not empty.

TWO

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.