Lovers and Newcomers (40 page)
‘Whereabouts, exactly?’ Amos wonders.
‘Well…I suppose, I imagine, somewhere close to the original grave site. I know of course that your house will be built over the grave itself…’
‘I’ve heard mention of the idea,’ Amos continues. Probably in the Griffin, I think. Apparently Amos has taken to going there in the evenings. He has joked about integration and how one or two of the friendliest patrons no longer actually turn their backs on him. Then he adds abruptly, ‘The fact is, I don’t know if the house will even be built.’
Selwyn and I turn to stare at him. This is the first we have heard of it. There is a silence, prickly with embarrassment.
‘Who is this?’ Joyce suddenly wants to know. The vicar was introduced to her fifteen minutes ago, but she has had one of her forgetful moments. He reminds her, and they shake hands all over again.
‘Never a one for church, my daughter,’ Joyce puts in.
The vicar turns back to Amos. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve put my foot in it by asking. If there’s anything I can do to help, either in pastoral or spiritual matters, you can always find me at the vicarage.’
‘Thank you. I’ll remember that.’
After he’s gone, Joyce dozes off again. Selwyn has been too generous with the Baileys.
‘I didn’t know you’d decided not to go ahead,’ I venture to Amos.
He jumps up, scattering newspapers and sending his book flying.
‘I don’t want the bloody house if I can’t have Katherine there with me. What am I supposed to do with the place?’
He swings away from us and blunders out into the darkness. We see the lights in the cottage flick on. Selwyn doesn’t say anything, let alone try to make a joke of it. Joyce sleeps soundly through all of this.
I wash up the teacups, dry the teapot and put it back on the dresser shelf, then store the remaining mince pies in an airtight box in the larder. These won’t last long with the Knight boys and all the Davieses and Ben’s girlfriend here. I’ll make another batch tomorrow, I decide. These small decisions help to keep at bay a rising tide of dismay. There will be no glass and steel house on the violated site. The community is breaking up, piece by piece, before it has even properly established itself.
I don’t know even what the next days will bring, let alone another year.
Selwyn has taken to following me through the house. I tell him not to do it, intending never to be alone with him, even for one minute. But how are you supposed to make convincing an order that is the opposite of what you really want?
After I have helped Joyce up to bed, I’m sitting in Jake’s old study. Selwyn told me as soon as I came home that he had shown the old letters and estate records to Polly. I expressed mild surprise and he said defensively, ‘Why not? Are they so private? I thought it would interest her, and I was quite right.’
She must have spent hours in here. Some of the books and papers are set out in orderly rows, under notes and dates in her familiar handwriting. The room is cold without a fire lit, and I pull my layers of cardigans tighter. Now, precisely on cue, Selwyn appears in the doorway. He closes it behind him and then leans against it. He looks tired.
‘I want to talk to you,’ he says.
‘Go on.’
‘I want to leave her.’
I am appalled by his flat certainty. Genuinely, to the core of my being. I manage to stammer, ‘No. Not because of me, or to be with me. I won’t have that, or you.’
He marches at me, grasps me by the elbows, kisses me as if that will work in a way that words don’t. He is so warm, vital, and as our bodies fuse together I feel rather than think the words,
I saw you first, you were mine first and Polly has had you all these years, don’t we deserve our time together now?
But I have known his intention, haven’t I, ever since that snatched afternoon? Maybe, even, the possibility has been in the back of my mind from the beginning, when the great plan for the new Mead was first conceived? Where Selwyn is concerned my capacity for self-delusion, deception and denial is apparently limitless. I shrivel within myself in shame and confusion.
‘I’m going to do it anyway. After Christmas. I can’t stand living like this.’
I shout at him now, ‘Can’t you see what’s in front of your eyes?’
I gesture through the thick wall, towards Amos’s cottage. ‘The misery these things cause?’
He comes to me again, takes me in his arms, rests his face against mine. ‘There are levels of misery, Barb. Trust me, won’t you?’
We’re standing there, locked together, when the door suddenly opens. We jump apart like criminals and I see Joyce standing there in her dressing gown.
She has only been in bed for an hour, but probably isn’t aware of that.
She says plaintively, ‘Barbara, have you seen my book? I want to read. I can’t find my book anywhere.’
There’s no doubt she has seen us. I can’t attempt an explanation, or an excuse, and now none of us will know when or how a reference to this little scene will spill out of her. I go to her and take her arm, leading her out of the room.
‘Let’s see if we can find it,’ I say.
Meddlett church and its land are familiar in all seasons, but I love this stark midwinter version. In the very depths of the year, the world seems spun out of threads of black and white. The massive yew by the churchyard gate is a black shape snipped out of a pearl-white sky, the tower stands like a flint bulwark against the wind, and the ranks of gravestones are set in steely grass that holds only the vaguest memory of green. There are flowers on some of the graves, but cold has nipped the glow out of the petals.
My breath smokes ahead of me as I cross the path leading from the south door and head for the Meadowe plot. I have made a little wreath of ivy and holly from the Mead woods, as I do each year, and I place it against the simple headstone that marks Jake’s grave. Then I rest my hand on the shoulder of stone, rubbing the coating of loose grit and lichen with my fingertips as if to coax it into life. I’m telling Jake in a wordless rush of a confession that time has looped and doubled on itself, that I love Selwyn but I can’t allow him to turn his back on his marriage, and I’m not sure how at our age we can resist the turbulence that threatens us all.
A temporary peace descends, at least.
Christmas is nearly here. It’s not taking shape in quite the way I had planned and imagined, because no one seems to know quite who will be coming, and if they do appear what frame of mind they will be in or how they will all respond to each other. It’s probably a good thing that I can’t influence any of this, because in my eagerness to have it turn out well I might try to over-choreograph everything. The uncertainty is novel, after all the Christmases that Jake and I spent here together when our routine never varied. He liked to dip into the new books that were all the presents he ever wanted, to open up one of his bottles of good claret so that it had plenty of time to breathe, and then drink it quietly with our dinner.
This year I’m enchanted by the way that all the previously empty rooms of the house are warm and lamplit, and that when I look into them I don’t know if I am going to come across Joyce and Amos watching television and grumbling at cross-purposes about declining standards in broadcasting, or Nic watching
YouTube
on Colin’s laptop while he tapes swathes of fir branches to a mantelpiece. In Jake’s study I will almost certainly find Polly poring over old letters with her bifocals pushed down her nose and a scarf wound around her throat for warmth. If she is there I back out, nodding generalized approval and smiling vaguely. It’s not easy to behave normally in Polly’s company, what with the broad undertow of guilt about my behaviour and specific anxiety about what Joyce saw the other evening. My mother hasn’t come out with any mention of it yet, but I can’t be sure she won’t.
Since she came back from London with Colin, bringing the pregnant girl, Nic, with them, Polly has seemed her usual generous self. She is touchingly solicitous over Nic, and she was admiring of the results of Selwyn’s last huge efforts to finish off the barn. But I know that she is watching him, and me. I can feel her eyes on my back, observing and assessing.
Back in the kitchen I might find Selwyn himself, paging restlessly through my newspaper and thawing out after a bout of sawing in the yard. The floors of reclaimed wood have been laid throughout the barn and so Polly has decreed that from now on the messiest work has to be done outside. I think she is surprised by the way he meekly complies with her orders. His eyes follow me over the top of the paper as I move between the larder and the oven. We are all watching one another.
My ungloved fingers have gone numb. I clap them to get the blood flowing and as I turn from the grave I see Nic threading her way between the headstones. She asked if she could come with me in the car to the village, and tactfully she went in to take a look at the church while I came across to Jake. She’s wearing a bright red short coat, blue woolly tights and a plum-coloured knitted hat, and the brilliance of this get-up bleeds into the surrounding air so that she seems enveloped by a sort of fuzzy electrical field. She stops beside me, head on one side and a hand resting on her bump as she studies the inscription on the headstone. It gives just his name and dates.
‘You must have been lonely after he died.’
‘I was, a little,’ I admit.
And so the plan was conceived to bring my old friends up here to Mead. It’s only since they arrived that I have been able to assess how cut off Jake and I had become, and now they are here I so much want them to stay. I think again with a twist of apprehension that this Christmas celebration will be an interval of peace before whatever seismic upheavals the new year must bring. Knowing this makes the prospect seem even more precious to me.
‘Didn’t you want to have kids?’ she wonders.
She’s an unusual girl, this Nic. Her bluntness seems almost deliberate, as if she has made a decision not to be the tactful type, but she can also be outstandingly kind. She’ll sit for an hour and more and massage my mother’s swollen feet and ankles, and the other day she gave her a pedicure complete with a startling fluorescent polish that Joyce is inordinately pleased with.
‘Have a look at my feet,’ she keeps calling out to the milkman or the window cleaner or whoever else drops in to wish us the compliments of the season. Their wheels used barely to stop turning on the gravel before they were off again, but lately the household has become much more interesting to them and, like the vicar, they tend to linger in the hope of a chat and, no doubt, some gossip to circulate in the village.
Nic adoringly tracks Colin around the house. Luckily Selwyn has stopped doing it with me, now Polly is back from London, or we would look like the participants in some complicated game. She spent hours with him while they sprayed winter foliage with silver paint to twist into decorations, asking him endless questions about New York and which celebrities he has met. They exchange names I’ve never heard of. But she’s sensitive enough to leave him alone when she guesses he might be getting tired of her, or just tired.
‘Children didn’t happen,’ I tell her.
‘Hm,’ she says, rubbing her belly.
Nic has already said that she never really considered a termination because, as she put it, her own mother had kept her in the days when she had much less going for her. Mind you, she hadn’t done a lot for her since that time, she sniffed, but the gift of life and all that, you can’t deny it.
‘You have to admire our Nic,’ Colin said in private to me, and I rather do.
She wanders a couple of steps to the next headstones, which belong to Jake’s father and mother, and his grandparents lie next to them. The Meadowes were not a prolific clan in the last century; Jake and his father were both only children. Nic reads all the names, and then tilts her head to take in the other burial plots and the fine tower of the church. She rocks on her heels and coughs a cloud into the icy air.
‘All your family, all in one place,’ she says in wonderment. ‘I mean, roots like this, must make you feel special.’
‘It’s my husband’s family. Joyce is all there is of mine,’ I remind her.
‘Your mum’s great. She’s not like a real old person. I know what you mean, though. I used to feel dead envious of Ben because he had his sisters and a mum and dad and they were all really close, and into looking after each other. Polly’s so kind and sort of reliable without being judgemental, isn’t she? She’s the kind of mum you’d go for if you could buy a pattern and knit yourself one. Maybe that’s why Ben’s pretty hopeless, though. He’s never had to sort things out for himself, has he?’
‘I don’t know about that,’ I say, diplomatically.
Nic sighs. ‘I’d quite like my kid to have a family.’
‘But it will do, won’t it? Its grandmother could hardly be more eager for it.’
‘Yeah. But, you know. You can’t rely too much on other people. I’ve basically got to do it myself. At the end of the day Ben is Polly’s son, and me and Ben – that’s never going to happen, trust me. I’m dreading him getting here, to be honest. It’s been so peaceful and lovely the last couple of days, just hanging out with you and Colin and Polly, and as soon as he arrives there’s going to be all the drama.’ She’s shivering now, and glumly chewing her lower lip as she stares at Jake’s grandparents’ grave.
‘It might not be so bad. You’re in the house with me and Colin, Ben’s in the barn with his family. We’ll make it all right, between us.’ I take her arm. ‘Come on, you’re getting cold. Did you see the memorial in the church?’
‘No.’
‘It’s a good one. Let’s go and look.’
The dim interior is scented with dusty hassocks, spilled wax from the children’s Christingle service, and a large Christmas tree. The same nativity scene is put out every year, a circle of carved wooden animals surrounding a plaster Mary and Joseph and a swaddled plaster Christ child in a straw manger. The memorial tablet is on the south wall, so Nic and I pass behind the pews and down the side aisle to reach it.