Lovers and Newcomers (54 page)

When she looked up she saw how intently Miranda was watching her.

‘I love this place,’ Polly said.

Miranda’s face softened, and then broke into a brilliant smile.

‘Do you? Do you really?’ She was deeply pleased by this.

‘I do. Shall we go outside? It’s such a beautiful afternoon.’

The two women went through the kitchen and out into the courtyard. Grass and weed seedlings were sprouting between the cobbles and Miranda stooped to uproot a few tufts. The warmth of spring sunshine lingered between the old walls.

Amos had recently moved out of the cottage.

Almost as soon as he had finally decided not to go ahead with his building project at Mead, a house in Meddlett had come up for sale. It was a compact Georgian house that stood back from the green, separated from the road by a low wall but with a good view of the duck pond and the willows and the front of the Griffin, and he had bought it and moved in within what seemed a matter of days. Amos had always been decisive, and in practical matters whatever he chose to focus on usually came about. He was now busy with the campaign for the Meddlett Princess, and the beginnings of involvement in village politics.

‘He’ll be on the parish council next,’ Miranda joked as she and Polly passed the door of the cottage. Katherine’s pots of herbs were putting out tiny furls of leaf.

‘He told me he was thinking of standing.’

‘Hah.’

The prospect seemed less ludicrous than it would have done six months ago. They agreed that Amos would probably make quite a useful councillor.

‘When’s Katherine coming?’ Polly asked.

‘Tomorrow. She’s collecting the last of her things.’

Amos had envisaged that his withdrawal from the cottage would give Katherine the freedom to come and go comfortably at Mead, but it was turning out that she came up less and less often.

‘I have to keep up with my job, now I’m a single woman,’ she told Polly and Miranda, only half-joking. She had begun looking for a flat of her own to buy in London, somewhere near where her boys lived. Most of the rest of her time was spent with Chris, in his house near the city ring road.

Colin said that he might take over the cottage from Amos and Katherine, if Miranda would let him.

They passed out of the gate, damp long grass swishing around their ankles as they followed the line of the building. Polly studied the flint walls, bowed in places, the soft orangey-red brick, the chimney stacks outlined against the fading sky. A line of crows headed for the trees. What she had told Miranda was true. With Gwen Meadowe and her predecessors for company as well as Miranda herself, Mead felt like a home of Polly’s own, a home for the person she would have to become in the next passage of her life.

The front of the house glowed with the last of the sun. A bench stood against one wall and they sat down together.

‘You and me, Colin, and Joyce,’ Polly counted. ‘It’s not what you planned for your new Mead, is it?’

Miranda’s head tipped back. She studied the old guttering, and the protruding mess of what looked like a bird’s nest lodged in the hopper.

‘Plans have a way of turning out to be useless,’ she said at last. ‘But I still believe in planning.’

They sat contemplating the view for another minute before Miranda asked, ‘You are going to stay, aren’t you? I know the way a death can affect the way you feel about a place. When Jake died, I found I loved Mead even more. I can see him everywhere I look. But maybe that’s painful for you in the barn. Selwyn worked too hard at it, didn’t he? There was so much of him, an excess of the person. It overflowed into what he did. Maybe you’re lonely…’ Her voice trailed off and she looked away, across the flowerbed towards the curve of the drive.

Polly told her firmly, ‘I’m not so very lonely. I’m not going to leave, either. The barn is my home.’

Miranda was still watching the bird’s nest. In a light voice she said, ‘That’s good.’

‘Did you know your mother-in-law, Mirry?’

‘Gwen? Not well. She was already very old and in a nursing home when I married Jake.’

‘I’ve found her wartime diary. It’s about her garden here, and growing vegetables. It’s not full of personal detail, but she shines out of it. I’m thinking of using her as the starting point for the book, if that’s all right with you?’

As always when she talked about her work, Polly was aware of the gulf between the flatness of the described outline and the excitement within her. The anticipation of writing was like keeping a big secret, one that it would be damaging to spill however much she might be tempted.

Miranda was a voracious reader but she had never written a book. She would have no idea of this creative tension.

‘Of course it’s all right with me. It sounds interesting. Are you ready to start?’

The air was rapidly cooling as the sun set. Polly wrapped her multi-coloured Christmas cardigan more tightly around her.

‘I’ll write two or three chapters and an outline. Then I’ll try it on my agent. I’ve got to make some money, I can’t do it just for love. There’s Leo to think of, apart from anything else.’

Polly had come alive again. She was leaning forward with anticipation, her eyes wide open, looking into next week.

It wasn’t just the book project that had revivified her.

She regularly saw Nic and Leo, and the baby was often left in her care at the barn while Nic did a massage or pedicure. Her own three children were recovering from the shock of losing their father. Alph’s boyfriend, the South American doctor, had at last been introduced and was turning out to be everything Alph needed. Omie was illustrating a new series of children’s books about a cat contortionist. Even Ben was beginning to accept that he and Nic were not destined to live happily ever after. He showed a decent level of interest in his baby son, but paternity wasn’t the full three-act drama he might have been expected to make of it.

Polly put one arm around Miranda’s thin shoulders.

‘I am so glad to be here. Thank you for sharing Mead with me.’

‘I am glad too,’ Miranda answered.

It was growing cold now.

‘I should go in and see if Joyce is all right,’ Miranda said.

They went in through the front door. The radio was playing, extremely loudly, the only way Joyce could listen to it.

‘Is it really all right to borrow your car again?’ Nic wondered.

Polly took the baby from her. She put her mouth to the tiny ear and whispered baby-nonsense into it.

Nic sighed, ‘He was a demon last night. He was awake from ten past two until half past four.’

‘Maybe he was hungry?’

‘He can’t
always
be hungry. But in case he is while I’m away, there’s a full bottle in the bag. I should go, Polly. It’s a new client, and she sounds minted. I could do with a recommendation to some of her smart friends, those ones with houses up on the coast that are worth half a million.’

Polly handed her the car keys. ‘Go on, then. Don’t be late for Madam Minted.’

Nic returned a weary smile. She hadn’t anticipated quite how hard it was going to be, looking after Leo on her own whilst trying to please her first couple of clients and sell herself to new ones, even though Polly was so good to her and Leo was easy compared with some of the babies she saw at the clinic. Kieran kept offering to help out too, but she was afraid that if she just let him, all the props of survival determination that held her up would collapse and she and Leo would be submerged in dependency. She was prickly towards Kieran as a result, but he refused to be discouraged and so she was coming to count on his constancy anyway.

There was no way out of this, she had to acknowledge.

‘Why do you need a way out of everything?’ Jessie frowned. ‘It’s not difficult, is it? He fancies you, inexplicably you fancy him back. You’re both free. Straightforward, or what?’

That might have been the way, before Leo, but not now. She had to be careful for both of them. Of course Jessie had nothing to do but put in her shifts at the Griffin, and the rest of her time she could spend sleeping or smoking dope or pretending to talk about philosophy with Amos Knight.

Kierkegaard
, that was what she was reading now.

Nic sighed for the lazy days of pre-motherhood, gone for ever, and then worked up a warm but professional smile as she drove to the client’s house.

Polly took Leo out for a walk in the turbo pram. Her hip didn’t hurt too much today.

When she leaned over to look at him she saw that his dark blue eyes were wide open, fixed on the branches and clouds as they slid overhead. It was hard to separate now from then, a generation ago, when she had walked the twins down country lanes in Somerset. It felt as though the only difference apart from her ageing bones was Leo’s tranquil nature, whereas the twins had operated a 24-hour rota. If one was asleep, she remembered, the other was awake and screaming.

How Selwyn would have loved this new baby, once he had held him in his arms.

Damn
you
, Selwyn. Why did you have to go, and miss everything?

She was walking back down the driveway to Mead when she heard a car. She stood aside as Katherine lowered the window and beamed out.

‘Hello, Granny,’ she called.

‘Come over to the barn right now,’ Polly ordered.

Katherine and Miranda passed the baby between them. He reclined on one lap and then the other, enjoying the attention.

Katherine said, ‘It must be wonderful being that age, don’t you think? All you ever see is huge melon smiles, looming over you.’

‘I’m not so sure Nic’s always smiling,’ Polly said. ‘I’d forgotten all about how relentless living with a baby can be.’

Katherine couldn’t help glancing at Miranda, and Miranda returned her look.

‘Yes, I do wish I’d had a child,’ she said with simple candour. ‘Do you think all childless women imagine their might-have-been children, waiting in the wings somewhere but never hearing the cue to take the stage? I’d give anything for a grandchild now, to see him growing up at Mead the way Jake did. But all the same, I’m trying not to be jealous of you two. You’ll have to share yours. I should think there will be plenty to go around, in a few years’ time.’

It was the only time either of them had ever heard her say even this much about having no children of her own. Miranda leaned down and pressed her nose against the baby’s boneless button one, and the short wings of grey hair swung forward to hide her face. There was less hectic rush and sparkle to Miranda these days, and she took more time over what she said.

‘There won’t always only be just
you
to admire, Leo Selwyn,’ she whispered.

Polly made tea, and then they agreed that it wasn’t too early for a glass of wine. She warmed the bottle of milk for Leo, and Katherine fed him. He fell asleep after taking half of it, a bubble of milky drool swelling between his lips.

The new angle of the sinking sun threw different shafts of light across the room, probing the corners where floorboards didn’t meet the wall and the angles under the stairs where leftover planks were propped against bare plaster, already gathering their own layers of dust. The barn was just as Selwyn had left it, and whilst it had looked good enough in the candlelight at Christmas, the citric glare of a spring day showed up all the rough edges. Polly had made no changes since the day he died. Some day she might, she told herself, but in the meantime she was settling into the fabric of the place just as it stood, laying down her own tender nacre in the abrasive new shell. In a way, Polly thought, she and Miranda might be domestic opposites but they both lived like molluscs within the pre-existing confines of their houses.

Katherine felt the difference between herself and her two friends particularly sharply today.

Coming back here to Mead was a reminder of how a predictable life could change in a mere six months. The shell she had occupied back in September had smashed, leaving her exposed to the tides. She was in no doubt that she was in love with Chris Carr, but loving a divorced man with two daughters was a series of questions, not an answer. The days and nights that they spent together made them both happy, but these were hours that had to be set aside from two lives based in two different cities, revolving around two different jobs, and partly forfeit to four children and two ex-spouses. Every week was different. Every day, even. She was surprised to realize what a creature of routine she had once been, and how much store she had set upon order in her life with Amos. Nowadays even the simplest processes, like getting dressed or cooking a proper dinner, had become fraught with difficulty. The shoes or belt vital to complete an outfit were always in London or still at Mead, and however hard she looked in the cupboards of whichever kitchen she was in, there were no vanilla pods or fenugreek.

‘This is how life is,’ Chris murmured to her.

They stood in each other’s arms, and he rocked her on the hearth rug beside their joined reflection in the mantelpiece mirror. He was a sanguine, optimistic, organized person compared with her. Sometimes she felt frightened by her own rampaging disorder. Who
was
she, nowadays, who had once been Katherine Knight?

She had tried to make friends with his two girls. She was surprised by her own surprise at discovering that they had pierced ears, and wore pale pink hooded tops and big white trainers with grey marl leggings. They hadn’t responded to her friendly overtures with any enthusiasm, and she knew within the first half-hour that she had struck the wrong note with them.

‘I’m afraid they haven’t taken to me,’ she said to Chris.

‘Yes, they have. You’ve got to remember they’re loyal to their mum, and as far as they’re concerned you take up my attention, which should rightfully be theirs.’

‘I understand that. But they don’t like me.’

‘Yes, they do. They think you’re a bit posh, that’s all.’

She stared at him, swallowing a hiccup of dismay. ‘Is that better than too old for you, do you think?’

Chris laughed. ‘Neither objection, if that’s what they are, matters in the least. They’ll come around. We have the right to our own lives, Kath.’