Lovers and Newcomers (34 page)

‘If the developer doesn’t go bust first, that is,’ Chris said.

She watched him while he took measurements and soil samples. They were undemonstrative with each other in the presence of an architect and an engineer, but once, when no one was looking, Chris caught her hand and lightly ran his thumb over the bones of her wrist. This tiny gesture seemed to touch her as intimately as anything that had taken place between them the night before. He was a good talker, but she was learning that he was more eloquent with the unspoken. The opposite of Amos.

A thin shawl of rain came at them off the Wash.

‘Are you warm enough?’ he asked. He wanted her to sit in the car with the heater on but she preferred it out here, with him. It felt companionable, although – like homely – that was an odd word to come to mind.

Wasn’t that what she already had, a home and a companion, and had done for the last thirty years?

On the drive back to the cottage they stopped at a café in the middle of a village. There was another long featureless street, but this place didn’t seem to have the teenage population of the place where she and Amos had had tea back in September. Or maybe on a day like this everyone between thirteen and twenty was indoors, smoking and listening to their MP3s. This café wasn’t organic with Victorian embellishments, like the other one. It was bleary with condensation and smelled of frying.

Katherine and Chris were eating soup. It was both salty and tasteless, with the powdery packet residue at the centre of occasional lumps.

‘Don’t say I don’t show you the world,’ Chris laughed, but he was apologizing at the same time, fearing that she might be critical of his choice although they had passed no other alternatives apart from a Chinese takeaway. Much of his life must consist of days like this, Katherine realized. Long drives to remote sites, and hasty meals taken en route. They still didn’t know much about each other, even though he was now officially her lover. She was faintly oppressed by the prospect of how much separate history lay behind them, and how much they still had to discover. It was like being given a text to study in a language not her mother tongue.

Outside, a young woman in a parka came by with her child. The child was dressed in a bright red all-in-one with the hood pulled up over a knitted hat, making it impossible to guess what sex it was. It was riding a tiny tricycle, pedalling furiously but still making such slow progress that the mother kept stopping to let it get ahead by a yard before two steps brought them parallel again. They were both intent on this journey, their cold-pinched features showing a strong resemblance. Sam had owned just such a trike when he was a toddler, and the snail’s-pace of days with a tiny child came vividly back to Katherine. A glance at Chris revealed that he was watching the pair too, with an expression she didn’t want to fathom. Neither of them spoke until the tricycle had passed out of the frame of the café window.

With a younger woman, Chris could have a new family. He had claimed once that he didn’t want to start again, but she had no way of telling whether this was the truth.

It was raining harder now, and there was still a distance to drive back to the cottage.

‘Shall we go?’ he asked gently.

Katherine nodded, gathering up her bag and damp raincoat.

The next morning she woke reluctantly from a sleep that seemed deeper than usual, and it took several seconds to remember where she was. Then unwillingness for the impending separation from Chris flooded through her. She pressed closer against him and he held her in his arms.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Sadness.’

His mouth moved against her ear. ‘That’s always going to be with us. It’s the accumulation of experience, building up like scale inside a kettle. The more you learn, the harder it is to be thoughtlessly optimistic. We can learn to live with it, though.’

‘Do we have to? Isn’t there some product we can use just to fizz it away?’

‘I can think of something we might try.’ His hands slid over her. And for half an hour at least, it worked.

In the end, they couldn’t put off getting up any longer. Katherine knew before switching on her mobile that there would be several messages from Amos, and probably from the boys as well. Chris walked naked to the window and opened the curtains to the view of grey sky. She studied the set of his shoulders and the collar of flesh at his middle. His legs were furred with dark hair.

‘I have to go home. For Christmas, at least,’ she told him.

Without turning around he said, ‘I know you do.’

They ate breakfast together at the pine kitchen table. Afterwards they emptied the small residue of food into a bin liner and carried it out to the wheelie bin at the side of the house. Katherine’s car was where she had parked it two nights ago, with the wheels tracked sideways. Salt air had already touched the crumpled front wheel arch with rust. He put her small bag in the boot and held open the door for her. When she slid down the driver’s window he leaned in and kissed her.

‘After Christmas,’ she promised, although she didn’t know
what
.

He stood back and watched, with his hand raised, as she drove away.

The days crept by and Christmas came closer.

Katherine stayed in London, going to work and coming home each night to the Bloomsbury flat. She reorganized the charity’s main donor index and devised a major appeal to be launched in the New Year, impressing her colleagues with her flood of energy. In her spare time she went Christmas shopping, not quite able to resist the guilty impulse to buy more presents than usual for her sons. Toby and Sam came to see her again, separately as well as together, and she did her best to convince them that she was all right and so would they and Amos be, given time. She knew that they were disappointed in her, although they tried hard not to be.

She spoke to Chris every day, but even so when she was not immersed in her own work she was startlingly lonely. She hadn’t taken into account how the background reassurance of a long partnership fills all the waking hours.

She also talked to both Polly and Miranda, and she was pleased when they suggested coming to London to take her out.

‘Yes please, let’s do that,’ she agreed. Being away from Mead and separated from Amos made her understand how much her affection for both her friends had deepened.

Miranda was still with Joyce. Katherine asked Polly for news about Amos, and Polly told her all she knew, which was very little. She said that he seemed to spend most of his time watching television and drinking.

One night over a bottle of wine Amos confided to Selwyn that his sons were shocked and incredulous that their parents’ long marriage could shatter like this.

‘What am I supposed to say to them?’ Amos was at a loss for words, for possibly only the second or third time in his life.

‘Maybe it hasn’t shattered,’ Selwyn attempted. ‘Perhaps when you’ve both had a chance to think it over, you’ll be able to patch things up.’

Amos surveyed his surroundings. The cottage was no longer polished and pin-neat. There was a strong smell, partly relating to the overflowing bin in the kitchen but more to do with unopened windows and despair.

Selwyn added, ‘You should allow Katherine a bit of leeway. She’ll probably come around. She’s given you plenty of slack over the years, hasn’t she?’

‘For Christ’s sake. There’s a difference between taking a couple of minor diversions along the route and blowing up the whole fucking road. I always came home. I don’t know about you, but I have never suggested or considered that my marriage was for anything less than life.
From this day forth
, you know. But you and Polly never actually got married, did you?’

Selwyn rested his head in his hands. It was late, he was always tired, and there were knots here that were too serious for him to risk even the gentlest attempt at unpicking. Across the yard Miranda’s windows were still in darkness. He was unnerved to realize how deeply her absence was affecting him.

‘No. We never said those words. What difference does it make, after three decades of sharing a life?’

‘None, so it seems.’ Amos shook his head and refilled his glass. He had physically shrunk. His unironed shirt collar revealed the sad folds of his neck.

Back in the barn, Selwyn related this exchange to Polly. With Miranda and Colin both away, they had become unofficial caretakers of Amos.

‘You don’t think he’ll do anything stupid, do you?’ Selwyn wondered. He tightened the jaws of a bench vice and ran his fingers over a length of planking before taking up a plane.

‘If you mean shoot or poison himself, no, I don’t. He might drink himself to death, but that will take a while.’

Polly had come back from the house, where she had used the washing machine in the utility room off Miranda’s kitchen. Selwyn watched her place the plastic holdall that functioned as their laundry basket in a relatively undusty spot at the other end of their trestle table. She took out clean pairs of jeans and T-shirts, shook them with a sharp snap and refolded them in the air since there was nowhere clean enough to put them down. He couldn’t read her expression.

‘Poll?’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know. Here.’

He stretched out a hand towards her and she hesitated for several seconds before reaching out for it. Her attention focused on the shirt hanging from her other hand.

Polly could have taken this brief connection of fingertips as an opportunity to talk, but she found herself unable to say even a word. The spectacle of Amos and Katherine loomed over her, as colossal and with as much rude impact as a film on an iMax screen. The projection was so close that the margins of the picture seemed to flicker over her own face, making her blink and want to screw up her eyes. She was afraid that if she spoke, the conversation might skid into a discussion about their own possible separation. Maybe, she thought, Selwyn was searching through the barriers for a way of introducing the subject.

After a moment he withdrew his hand. He returned to the bench and bent his shoulder to the plane. Ringlets of crisp woodshavings coiled to the floor.

By five minutes after closing time, the bar at the Griffin was almost empty. Earlier it had been crowded for the weekly quiz night, but now only the hard core of customers remained. Vin Clarke flapped a towel over the pumps and told the last half-dozen drinkers to get a move on because he had a bed to go to, even if the rest of them didn’t.

Amos had been sitting alone at a small table for two hours. Having summoned up the startling amount of energy and determination necessary to get himself out of the cottage, drive to Meddlett and enter the pub, knowing that if he sat at home any longer he would go mad, he had been greeted by a couple of curt nods and a muttered, ‘Evening. What’ll it be?’ from Vin himself. He passed the time by eavesdropping on the quiz.

The teams took it very seriously, huddling around the tables, shielding their papers with bent arms and energetically sledging their competitors. A small flame of competitiveness rekindled in Amos and he toyed with the idea of making a single-handed late entry. Once Vin began reading out the questions, he was relieved that he had not, because he couldn’t answer any of them. He wasn’t at all clear on who Angelina was, let alone the names of her twins, and the five original members of Liberty X were also completely unknown to him.

The night’s prize (twenty pounds and a round on the house) was eventually scooped by the youngest and noisiest team, a gang of shaven-headed boys and their girlfriends.

Now the last pair of men heaved themselves off their bar stools and lumbered to the door. Vin gave Amos a meaningful look.

‘Everything all right up at the house, is it?’ he asked.

Amos nodded. The evening had left him feeling like the last living representative of an about-to-be extinct species. Now he came to think about it, the entire severed, twitching, unfamiliar rump of his once-familiar life was giving off the same impression.

‘Shame about that robbery. Must have left you pretty gutted,’ Vin observed, with immeasurable satisfaction. ‘No sign of them catching anyone, is there?’

Amos was surprised to remember that he had been so exercised about the excavation and the delay to his building project. Now the events were diminished and remote, as if he were observing them through the wrong end of a telescope. He hadn’t been to the site, or even thought much about it. Why had it never occurred to him that he would derive no satisfaction from any of his plans or projects if he had to see them through alone?

Hadn’t he ever considered that he might miss Katherine so much?

Even to see Selwyn and Polly together, fielding the tail ends of each other’s sentences and skirting through the tricky choreography of domestic life in their barn, made him squirm with jealousy and weary outrage.

How
had this happened? When exactly had his wife hatched into the cool, detached and seemingly implacable creature who barely deigned to speak to him on the telephone?

Vin shrugged. There was no useful information to be gleaned here. He turned his back and began flicking switches. The bar was plunged into semi-darkness and Amos took this as the signal to leave. In the doorway he almost collided with Jessie, who was carrying a pile of glass ashtrays.

‘Hi?’ she said, looking behind him.

‘I’m on my own,’ he told her.

‘Thought you might have brought the guys from the commune to quiz night,’ she grinned.

‘It’s not a commune,’ he said automatically.

She dealt out the ashtrays and took off her apron.

‘Got your car here?’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘Give me a lift home? It’s bloody cold walking in this weather and
he
won’t drive me, even though I’m staff. Of course, if you hadn’t knocked me off my bike and squashed it flat I’d be able to ride home.’

‘I didn’t knock you off your…’ he began. Jessie let out a hoot of laughter.

‘We’ve done this routine already, haven’t we?’

Her face was bright with mockery and as his gaze slid southwards from her smile he noticed the tendrils of the intriguing tattoo.