Lovers and Newcomers (30 page)

She placed her hands on the table. The rings briefly caught her attention. Engagement, wedding, and eternity, from their twenty-fifth anniversary. Eternity was a long time.

‘Not this house. The new one. I don’t want to build it. I don’t want to live in it. I’m sorry. I couldn’t not tell you so, once I was sure of it myself.’

Now he brought his elbow up to rest on the table, one finger curled against his lips, watching her and weighing up this disclosure.

‘I see,’ he said deliberately. ‘Once you were sure, you say? It’s a radical change of mind, isn’t it? May I ask what has prompted it?’

The measured nature of this response absolutely enraged her. They were discussing what would have been their future home, and she was his
wife
, not a witness making a deposition.

To stop herself from intemperately shouting at him she tried to recapture the certainty that she didn’t want to build or occupy the house, as well as the deep relief at not having to, that had come to her as she sat drinking Chris’s mug of tea in the bedroom of the flat in Bloomsbury.

Amos listened in attentive silence as she stumbled through a summary of her misgivings. It wasn’t easy to convey to him how the very thought of the house-to-be brought on claustrophobia, or how the architectural spaces waiting to be filled with
things
only fired up her longing to own fewer, not more, items of serious sculpture and considered furniture. Most of all she didn’t want to see all this spoil, the trophies of Amos’s success, heaped up on what had been the long resting place of the Iron-Age princess.

In any case Amos’s career in the law hadn’t been crowned with glory. She didn’t actually say this. It wouldn’t have helped. But it had always been in the back of her mind that a cottage somewhere, a little grey house with quiet square rooms, would have been more appropriate in the circumstances than this blinging construction of glass and turbines and eco-vanity.

Katherine finished by saying that what she really wanted was for the wind and the rain to go on playing over that acre of ground, and for the sun to be allowed to warm the grass.

‘If we did build this house, you know, I’m afraid it would only bring us bad luck,’ she murmured.

Even though it had turned into quite a long and impassioned speech, Katherine felt inarticulate in the face of her husband’s meticulous consideration. As she too often did. Amos sat still, reversing the Mont Blanc pen between his fingers.

‘Well?’ she prompted.

He frowned. ‘Bad luck.
Bad luck?
That’s the kind of dippy nonsense Miranda would believe in. It must be catching.’

‘This is nothing to do with Miranda. It’s to do with
me
, and what I want.’

The glimmer of surprise in his face was more eloquent than words. It came to her that he was totally unused to hearing her express what she wanted. And she knew that she probably had herself to blame for not having been more insistent.

‘So where
do
you want to live?’

‘What’s wrong with here?’

Amos didn’t actually look around the kitchen, or out to the view through the window. He didn’t need to.

‘Look. There’s a bloody great delay anyway. I’ve spoken to Rona and to McDade.’ These two were their architect and the main contractor. ‘He’s got our team on another job, the slippery little rat. I’m going to have to look at the clauses in the contract, see how to bring him back into line. There’ll be plenty of time for you and me to talk about this.’

He wasn’t attaching any significance to what she had said. He had dismissed her misgivings outright, assuming that she would change her mind in time.

He was wrong, though.

Katherine stood up.

‘I’m going out for a while. I need a long walk.’

There was a grove of pines leading from the road northwards in the direction of the distant beach. Katherine parked her car next to a National Trust kiosk and wound down the window. Salty air flooded in and she leaned her head back and briefly closed her eyes. Seagulls screamed overhead and an occasional raindrop pinged on the roof.

A gentle tap on the car door made her jump. She opened her eyes to see Chris.

She got out and they turned to walk down the sandy track, heading for the great bowl of space beyond the trees. Their boots crunched in sugary wet sand laced with grass. Katherine sucked in lungfuls of the clean wind, enjoying the rhythm of their steps and the way that Chris didn’t fire questions at her, or find it essential to speak at all.

‘Thanks for meeting me,’ she said after a while.

‘I’m skiving. I’m supposed to be at a site assessment in Breckland, but I sent one of the assistants instead. It feels rather good. I think I’ll do it more often.’

They negotiated a narrow path through the trees, scrambled up a steep incline where the exposed tree roots were polished by passing feet, and ran down to the point where a view opened up across an immense flat beach. In the distance, grey-white breakers raced towards the shoreline. An onshore wind blew straight into their faces and they hung briefly on the balls of their feet, clothes ballooning, leaning their bodies into its resistance. Katherine reached for the anchor of Chris’s hand and he reas-suringly took it, rubbing his thumb in the web of skin between her thumb and forefinger.

‘My girls used to love this beach when they were small. We brought them up here every summer for picnics and swimming,’ he said as they began to walk.

The coarse sand was the colour of dried clay, studded with all kinds of shells. Katherine noticed the elongated blue-black envelopes of razor clams. In the distance were the stick-figures of other walkers, and their dogs scudding through tidal drainage channels. She felt a strange, thrilling release of adrenalin that made her want to run too.

He swung their linked hands, smiling at her.

‘I was pleased to hear from you, Katherine, and I can’t think of a better way to spend a morning, but you didn’t call me just because you wanted to go for a walk, did you?’

She shook her head. ‘Have you seen the plans for our house at Mead?’ she began.

‘I glanced at them when the archaeology brief came in for tender from the planning department, and again when we embarked on the watching brief. It looks very magnificent.’

‘It’s much too magnificent. It’s self-important. It feels to me like a tomb lid, pressing down on us. On me. I told Amos this morning that I don’t want to live there. I don’t think we should be going ahead with the building.’

Chris reflected on this.

‘I’m sorry if the excavation is the reason for that?’

‘It’s not, or not directly. I don’t want to think of our house or anyone else’s towering over the princess’s grave, but the reasons are more complicated than the archaeology. It’s not a whim, or a capricious changing of mind. It’s to do with me and Amos and our life up until now, and the way I should live in the future.’

‘What did your husband say when you told him?’

Katherine smiled a little grimly. ‘Nothing. That’s partly it. He assumes that I will get over it, change my mind again, if he even thinks that hard. The real truth is that my opinion doesn’t matter much to him.’

‘I see,’ Chris said quietly. ‘Can you tell me any more?’

‘Not right now. I will some day. For now, I’ll just say that I made a decision while I was driving here. I’m going to leave him.’

He kept her hand clasped in his but he was looking ahead, at the wide curve of the beach and the low outlines of sand dunes in the far distance.

‘Go on,’ he said.

‘I shall move out of the cottage. I’ll probably go to London and live in the flat for the time being, until I find somewhere permanent.’

She was making this up as she went along and he would be able to tell this from the way the words haphazardly fell out of her.

But the more the certainty unfurled, the more certain of its rightness she became.

She recalled the elation that she had felt back in September as she and Amos drove up here in the Jaguar, the upsurge of happiness at finding herself drinking wine in the afternoon with Polly and Colin in the Griffin, and other recent moments of joy, not only in Chris’s company. They were all to do with change, green tendrils of independence emerging from bare soil, nothing to do with Amos or the building work.

I am not anyone’s good or chattel, she repeated. Of course not. She was still Sam and Toby’s mother, and what she was contemplating would shock them as well as hurt them, but they were grown men now. If she had achieved anything, she thought, it was to have brought up sons who had never had cause to question whether they were loved, or put first. The boys would thrive, whether or not she continued to live under the same roof as their father.

The strange euphoria that had eddied around her ever since coming to Mead now found an anchor. The optimism born of it was crystallizing, taking definition in the briny wind. She felt drunk and at the same time never more sober or sure of herself. She glanced back over her shoulder at their footprints, and then forwards over a vast shining expanse of untracked sand to the sea.

‘I think you’ve made up your mind,’ Chris observed.

They stopped in the middle of the beach. Blown sand whipped around them, stinging their cheeks, forcing them to turn their backs to the waves.

‘Yes, I have.’

She needed to reassure him, and she took a moment to choose her words. The simplest would also be the most honest.

‘I’m so happy we met. But I want you to know that nothing that has happened between you and me has affected the decision I’ve made. I’d be coming to the same conclusion if I didn’t know you at all.’

She half-turned into the wind, in order to look into his face.

‘You don’t have to worry that I might pursue you. You’re not going to be involved in what will happen between Amos and me. I don’t expect you to do, or even say, anything about it. Well…except maybe as a friend. If you want to be. If you did decide to be that, I’d welcome it with all my heart.’

He was going to speak but she stopped him. ‘I loved the other night, I felt like a young girl again and that’s the best present you could have given me, but it’s not what convinced me I need to leave my husband. That’s all I wanted to say. More than enough, probably.’

She smiled, a wide smile of complete frankness that he found touching. He wound his finger around a strand of her hair that had blown across her face and caught at the corner of her mouth. He studied it for a second before tucking it inside the collar of her coat.

‘Can I speak now?’

She smiled even more broadly. There were some grains of fine sand caught in her brows and eyelashes. ‘Yes, you can,’ she said.

‘Are you saying that you want me to be your friend and no more?’

She hesitated. Physically she was longing for a different relationship with Christopher Carr, and to want someone’s body was such an exciting rebirth of sensation that it was hard to ignore. She did her best, though.

‘I don’t know yet. There is a lot of ground that I have to cover first, and I have to do it on my own. It wouldn’t be fair to Amos otherwise. After that, I don’t know what will happen. I’m not even sure quite who I’ll be, if I’m not Mrs Amos Knight any longer. That’s the truth, Chris.’

‘I understand,’ he said.

He cupped her face in his hands and briefly kissed her. Then they walked on.

He added, ‘I’m not afraid that you might pursue me. I don’t have any experience of women doing that in any case, but it doesn’t strike me as your style at all. I can’t make any judgement about your marriage. How could I presume to do that? But I will tell you this. I’ve only just met you, but I want to go on talking to you. I want to tell you what I know and what I believe in and hope for, and I want to hear you telling me the same things. I want to look at your face while I’m listening to you. Maybe I haven’t led a very varied or exciting life, but this is the first time I’ve ever felt anything of the kind. If it’s falling in love, if
that’s
what this is, I can understand why all the world makes such a song and dance about it.’

Katherine’s eyes were stinging, not just from the wind. The only other times she had heard such eloquence from Chris were when he talked about archaeology. His candour left her tongue-tied now.

He promised her, ‘Whatever does happen, though, you can count on me as a friend.’

They reached the shelter of the belt of pines. They had walked a huge arc, almost to the breaking waves and then veering away again. Now they followed a path to a distant village across salt marshes dotted with sheep. Chris led the way to a little café looking over the maze of tidal creeks towards the sea defences, and when they reached it they sat on a bench at an outside table, leaning comfortably against the splintered silver-grey wood of the hut wall. They ate thick crab sandwiches and drank rapidly cooling tea while predatory gulls eyed them from their perches on tarry mooring posts. The two of them must have looked, Katherine thought, like the most companionable of settled couples, the kind who keep a National Trust handbook and a guide to local walks tucked in the glove compartment of their car.

When she had set out the other evening for her restaurant date with Chris, she had been both shocked and pleased to consider herself on the brink of adultery. The evening had maintained its double-edged promise by being serious but also skittish, flirtatious, a
date
date complete with candles and complicit waiters, and ending up with going back for a nightcap. If Toby hadn’t called when he did, it was likely that she and Chris would have gone to bed together.

Today, though, the tenor between them had altered. They were sitting on their bench with the fibres of shared experience already beginning to knot them together, not yet knowing whether the final balance would favour love or friendship, but certain that it was going to be one or the other. They had moved into one another’s lives and it wasn’t the kind of stake that you gave up on.

It was late in life to make such a discovery. These were the kind of connections that everyone made quickly and thoughtlessly in their teens or twenties, and which were then woven into the fabric of life. Marriages or old friendships of the kind that were entrenched at Mead were almost all begun early in life. This new coming-together was so unexpected and so unlooked-for that it seemed doubly precious. There was something solid here, weighty with promise, yet also wide and free-ranging.