Lovers and Newcomers (26 page)

When the doors opened and the mass of people spilled on to the platform, Polly was carried off the Tube, struggling with her shoulder bag and overnight case, her scalp damp and itching. People jostled at her back and she heard their sighs and clicks of irritation at the impediment. She had experienced a moment of pure panic. She had become too slow, too heavy and altogether too weary to cope with this city.

All her life, Polly had been used to speed: to thinking quickly, moving faster than her children, and manoeuvring Selwyn without letting on that she was doing so. Yet now, having once been the fertile source of so much energy, her body seemed to be solidifying into a block of dimpled lard. The bones that had once been hard under layers of plump satiny skin now seemed to be melting away. All that was left was fat. Her breasts stuck out painfully and she hunched her shoulders to protect them.

At the barrier she was trapped again, the pressure building at her back as she searched her pockets for her ticket. Her overnight bag was kicked sideways by flying people diverting past her into the snapping jaws of adjacent gates. As she stooped to retrieve it she briefly entered a nightmarish subworld of legs and skidding feet, sodden newsprint, stabbing heels. Finally, the ticket located, she bundled her new bruises and her luggage through the barrier and out into the street. Damp softened the dazzle of shops and traffic, splintered reflections shone out of puddled gutters. The air out here was mercifully cold and Polly sucked it into her lungs. She rested against the window of a tobacconist’s shop.

She felt lost in the welter of traffic and careless passers-by. Apparently she couldn’t hold her own any longer in London, and at the same time she felt crowded out of Mead. Selwyn’s obsession with the building work, and Miranda’s passion for the place coupled with her grand scheme for their life there combined to diminish Polly’s own stake in it.

Miranda won’t mind
. Selwyn’s unthinking words about their children coming to visit chafed her even now. She wanted to feel at home at Mead: she had embraced the idea of the move, even encouraged Selwyn to see it as a solution to their money problems, but already the ideal of companionship and support was mutating into a much lonelier, less utopian reality.

In the old days she had been at the centre of a small world. She felt a spasm of extreme longing for her old house in Somerset, and with it sadness for the loss of her children’s youth.

All that’s
gone
, she told herself briskly. Moreover, the same thing happens to every mother. Maybe not the part about being broke and having to sell up, but moving from the centre to the margins of a family, that was a voyage more inevitable than any physical retreat from the shelter of four beloved walls.

We have to find a new way to live, and that’s exactly what Sel and I are in the process of doing, she continued. We have chosen Mead, and we will make it work.

A man came out of the shop, stripping the cellophane off a pack of cigarettes and glancing curiously at her as he did so. Polly immediately collected herself. She picked up her bags and began to walk slowly, against the gritty flow of traffic, towards Alpha’s.

Now she was here she perched on the squeaky leather sofa, drinking wine too quickly, resisting the urge to let her head fall back against the cushions. She would have given anything to close her eyes for a few minutes.

‘Mum?’

Alpha and Omega were staring at her.

Polly glanced down and noted splinters of wood trapped in the fuzzy fibres of her grey jumper. She picked at them, but they were embedded. This morning, rummaging in the halflight amongst her belongings, she had pulled out a pair of black boots that she had judged quite serviceable for two days in London. Now she saw that the leather was cracked and the uppers were rimmed in mud.

‘What?’

‘Mum, you look really tired.’

The entryphone gave its double chime.

‘Here’s Ben, at last,’ Alpha said.

Polly brushed aside their double concern. ‘I’m fine. The barn’s turning out to be a bigger job than I expected, that’s all.’

Ben came in, the picture of gloom, burdened with a bicycle wheel and two panniers. He shed a helmet and a pump and peeled off his anorak with reflector stripes. Polly heaved herself to her feet and Ben tramped across to her, the cleats of his cycle shoes rattling on Alpha’s wooden floor. He had stopped shaving and his face was fluffed with fronds of hair. He submitted to his mother’s embrace.

‘How are you, Benjy? Have you heard from Nic yet?’

‘Yeah. A text.’

‘Thank goodness. How is she?’

Ben held up his hand to his sisters. ‘Mum, it’s not that simple.’

Polly stared at him. As soon as the suspicion entered her mind it smouldered and then blazed into certainty.

‘She’s pregnant, isn’t she?’

Ben gave a gusty sigh and collapsed on the sofa. His jaw descended on to his chest.

‘She was. I don’t know if she still is or not. I don’t even know where she is, she won’t tell me. Mum, how am I supposed to cope with potentially being a dad if she won’t have anything to do with me?’

Over his head Polly glanced at Alpha and Omega. They gave her the old what-shall-we-do-with-Ben look, only now with less amusement and a sharper edge of adult concern.

A baby?

Polly admired what she had seen of Nicola. She seemed a calm, rather self-contained girl, necessarily independent because she was effectively motherless. She might well have decided to keep her baby, Polly guessed, and her disappearance seemed to accord with that. She could understand her wanting to remove herself from Ben’s orbit while she took stock of her situation.

A
baby…

It would be Ben’s child, as well as Nic’s. The dawning realization forced a change of perspective, from yearning for the past to looking into the future, and it braced Polly. Often enough she had imagined her twins becoming mothers, Omie with her reliable Tom, even Alph, for all her colourful love life about which Polly suspected she heard only a fraction. But not Ben, her own baby.

She reached for his hand and squeezed it.

‘I can understand why you’re worried. But you know, I think if Nic has decided to keep the baby, she’ll want to involve you in the end.’

He sighed again. ‘Will she? I mean, what will I have to
do
?’

‘I don’t know. That depends on Nic,’ she told him. ‘But one thing I do know, whatever it is we’ll deal with it.’

Ben looked a little more cheerful. ‘Thanks, Mum.’

‘Can I tell Dad about this?’

He twitched one shoulder. ‘S’pose so,’ he muttered.

Polly didn’t think that Selwyn would welcome the immediate prospect of becoming a grandfather. It would make him feel old.

‘I’m so glad I’ve told you,’ Ben added, brightening. ‘I made Alph and Omie promise not to breathe a word until I got the chance. I’ve been really bugged about what you might say.’

‘We told him you’d be totally understanding, Mum,’ Alpha put in.

‘And they were right, you’re as good as you always are. I do love you,’ Ben said sweetly. He wound an arm around Polly’s neck and kissed her, just like he used to do when he was a toddler.

Alph and Omie put the food on the table and they sat down to eat. Polly wished that Selwyn had come to London with her, so that he could have shared this family meal. She covered up for his absence by telling the three of them about his furious progress in the barn, making it comical, making them laugh.

As soon as they had eaten, Ben announced that he was going to have to dash. His editor had asked him to write up a gig for the review page of the magazine.

‘Do you really have to?’ Polly asked.

‘Yeah. It’s a nu-rave night,’ he added helpfully. ‘Two hundred words. That’s good, isn’t it?’

‘Well done,’ agreed Polly.

She walked with him to the doors of the lift. Longing to talk some more about Nic and the baby, she asked if he could perhaps meet her for lunch. Ben looked perplexed, but then agreed vaguely that yes, tomorrow, maybe that would be a good plan.

Polly helped the twins to clear the dinner plates. The bike wheel had left a black smudge on the white wall.

‘Are you really all right, Mum? You do look a bit sad,’ Omie said. ‘Is it because of Benj?’

Polly wondered how much to admit to. She didn’t want to burden them with her dim, pessimistic misgivings about Mead.

She smiled. ‘I’m fine. But it’s a bombshell, Ben’s news, isn’t it? Thinking about a baby makes me miss the days when you were little.’ This was an elision, but it contained a seam of truth.

Alpha clapped her hands. ‘I know, let’s look at the photos.’

‘What, now?’ Polly wasn’t sure whether she wanted to suffer the pain-pricks of a trip down memory lane. Omega seized on the idea, however.

‘Oh,
yes
. When we were little.’

The intimation of another generation affected them, too. They weren’t quite ready, yet, to say goodbye to their own childhood.

Alpha fetched her iBook. Characteristically she had digitalized the Davies photo archive so it was available at a click. Equally characteristically Omega kept her pictures pasted between the floral covers of a Cath Kidston album.

They settled at the screen, their heads close together. Their mingled scent was of sweet perfumes, hair products, a faint hint of smoke.

They looked at the pictures of sandy children shivering and grinning underneath towels and beside windbreaks. There were tents pitched in the field behind the old house, reminders of games of cricket, picnics, birthday parties, dogs and kittens, adults asleep on sofas on Christmas afternoons, gappy smiles followed by versions in which new teeth appeared too large for childish faces. There were teenagers with attitude in every line of their bodies and outfits, gap-year hobos, and graduation portraits. Mostly, the pictures could have belonged to any family of a certain type in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Polly noted that their lives as captured seemed to have been one long celebration.

Missing altogether were any of the darker moments, including the successive deaths of four grandparents. The appearances of the older generation simply grew less frequent and then one by one petered out altogether, as if they were still absent-mindedly loitering just out of shot instead of having made their final departure. The past was preserved as a hymn to conventional happiness and it was left to the observer to murmur the counterpoint.

For this reason one picture caught Polly’s attention.

She put her fingers on Alpha’s wrist, delaying the next click of the mouse.

Their first summer in the house, Selwyn hammered together a rough timber arbour in the garden and Polly planted a golden hop to scramble over it.

In this photograph, a wooden trestle table and benches were drawn up under the shady arbour. The table was covered with a blue checked cloth and a dozen wine bottles stood amongst a clutter of plates and glasses and the debris of a Sunday lunch.

Polly was sitting at the far end of the table, a straw hat tipped back from her face. Ben sat beside her in his highchair, a winsome mass of blond curls. Alpha and Omega loomed in the foreground, two peas mugging for the camera, all stretched mouths and stuck-out tongues.

‘I love this one. Don’t we look sweet?’

‘I think we look quite annoying.’

Katherine sat in profile, her hair casually drawn up in a way that revealed her long throat and delicate jaw. She had been beautiful, back then. She was listening with a serious face to something Jake was telling her. It was right at the beginning of Jake and Miranda, maybe even the first time she had introduced him to the group. Miranda herself was just visible, on the opposite side of the frame from the twins, a cloud of dark hair and a thin crescent of pale cheek like a new moon. Her gesticulating hand was a blur, as was the figure of little Toby Knight, caught in the act of squirming down to escape from the table. The back of Amos’s head, thatched with thick hair, was turned to the camera.

The central places were taken by Colin and Stephen. They looked freakishly well turned out, in pale linen jackets and expensive shirts, and there was a suggestion of detachment about both of them. Stephen’s fingers caressed the stem of his glass, Colin’s eyes seemed to be on him. Selwyn had taken the picture.

Polly was pregnant. No one knew except Selwyn. She had miscarried a few days later, at thirteen weeks. The dark memory ran counter to this sunny snapshot of lunch in the country.

She also worked out that this was most probably the occasion that had marked the beginning of the break-up of the old group.

Sam and Toby Knight were boisterous boys and they had spent the whole day fighting each other and the Davies children. The twins had whined and cried and demanded attention. Amos and Selwyn had both drunk too much. Polly remembered clearly that Stephen had been fastidiously polite for the whole weekend visit, but she hadn’t had a moment of Colin to herself, which was what she craved.

There was never a serious falling out, or even a real disagreement that she could remember. Selwyn and Amos had always sparred but they also colluded in the way that men did, taking each other’s declarations of success and satisfaction with life at face value, in exchange for the same courtesy. What actually happened was that Miranda and Jake gradually withdrew to Mead, and Colin and Stephen lived in a way that was increasingly unfathomable to married straight people. Children or childlessness came between the four couples.

It was left to the three women and Colin to keep in touch via Christmas cards and intermittent phone calls. Then Jake died, and Stephen was murdered. Amos’s fine career was abruptly halted, and Selwyn and she finally and irrevocably ran out of money. Now those who were left had come back together again, at Miranda’s eloquent suggestion, to pick up the old threads and weave a new pattern.

Omega checked the screen again to see what was holding her mother’s attention. ‘Ah, it’s the New Mead posse. Is that why you’re interested in this one, Mum?’

‘I suppose so. Look at us all.’

‘Colin was very gorgeous in those days.’