Lovers and Newcomers

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.