Lovers and Newcomers

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I want to feed him up, to mother him, but the idea of Colin, the most self-contained of men, welcoming any maternal attention from me is comical enough to make me smile.

He looks up at the sky. It’s pale and luminous. Two days of rain and wind following the discovery of the burial site have now given way to a warm, damp stillness. The air smells of ploughed earth and leaf mould, and it’s hard to believe that the bracing sea is only six miles away.

‘I think I’d rather go for a walk. Indoors is a bit claustrophobic on a day like this.’

I put away the ladder and the tools. Nowadays before we can set off on even a short impromptu walk we have to change our shoes and put on different jackets and Colin finds a flat tweed cap to cover his thinning hair. I note these signs of elderly caution only in passing, because I am getting used to them. We all display them, except for Selwyn. Selwyn, I think, would still set out for Tibet at an hour’s notice without a backwards glance, and in the clothes he stood up in.

Colin and I head down the drive together, tacitly steering away from the track that leads to the site. Earlier today Amos got in his Jaguar and raced off to protest the delay to his project at a meeting with the contractors, his architect, and the various senior representatives of the county authorities. He asked me if I would like to join them, but I assured him that I’d be quite happy to hear everything from him. The idea of sitting through a meeting with Amos on the boil and a row of local authority archaeological experts was not enticing.

He’s not back yet.

Katherine is in London, at the charity, and Polly and Selwyn are working on their house. There’s a cement mixer parked in the yard.

Colin takes my arm. He has long legs, but he shortens his stride to match mine.

‘Where are we going?’

I don’t want to walk into Meddlett. If we did we’d bump into people I know and for now I want Colin to myself.

‘Along the footpath and up the hill. We can look back at the house and the digging.’

‘Why don’t you tell me some more of the history of this place?’ he says as we negotiate the path.

I’m used to thinking of Mead’s story as Jake told it to me in our early days together. Now, unsettlingly but intriguingly, it has acquired an Iron-Age dimension. The past five hundred years once seemed time and depth enough, yet now they are foreshortened. I wonder if this is a diminishment, but what has been disinterred can’t be buried and forgotten all over again. I begin the story anyway, with the part I know.

Jake’s ancestors were farmers in this part of the county, in a small way, from the time when records began. At the beginning of the fifteenth century we know there was a house on the site of this present one, probably no more than a huddle of stone walls and a couple of barns, because parish records detail the modest holding of land and the number of individuals who lived and worked there. A hundred years later, a record from the county assizes showed that one of the sons of the family had been imprisoned for thieving from travellers passing along the highway to Norwich.

Jake was always greatly pleased with this detail of his ancestry.

‘I am descended from highwayman’s stock,’ he boasted.

The upturn in the family fortunes came a hundred years later, when the wife and children of a wealthy London silk importer moved out of the city to escape the plague, arriving to stay with a sister who had married into a local landowning family. The silk merchant had no sons, and the current heir to Mead wooed and married the eldest daughter, a Miss Howe. With Miss Howe’s fortune, Jake’s ancestor bought hundreds of acres of adjoining land and began the informal enlargement of his farmhouse. The family name became Mead Howe, and eventually Meadowe.

Over the next hundred years there was a slow ascent into the ranks of the gentry. The family acquired indoor servants, a coach was kept, and the horses stabled where Selwyn is now busy mixing concrete. Then came a pair of Victorian gamblers, father and son, who accelerated the decline of the family fortunes as much of the land was lost or sold to settle debts. By the time Jake’s amusing, cynical and profoundly lazy father died, there was nothing left but the house itself, the outbuildings and a modest acreage.

Jake was the last of the Meadowes, and I inherited the estate from him. The remaining acres of land, apart from the portion I sold to Amos, are rented to a local farmer.

Seeing the house and its setting, the more unworldly of my theatrical friends who came to stay assumed that I had married money, but that really was not the case. Jake made a modest income from farming and writing on country topics for rural interest magazines. I contributed a small amount from converting a couple of barns to make the holiday cottages where Amos and Katherine are now staying, and we were deeply content together. What I did marry was a much more primitive connection to the land and to a place that became unexpectedly important to me.

Jake’s uncomplicated theory was that it was that much more important to me partly because I had so determinedly sidestepped the connection to my own history – if you can use the term to relate to a Midlands semi that my mother unsentimentally got rid of when I was in my early twenties. I was always welcome in her various flats after that, but none of them had any pretensions to being home, the way Mead became almost from the moment I set eyes on it.

Jake wasn’t implying that I was an arriviste (although in Meddlett terms I most certainly am); he was just pleased and interested that I fell so much in love with his life and background, as well as with him. I didn’t have the outward appearance of a country wife and I don’t think he had been expecting anything of the kind.

Colin walks with his shoulders slightly hunched, his hands in his pockets, listening.

‘Roulette, or cards? Or the horses?’ he asks when I come to the bit about the gamblers.

‘I’m not sure. All three, perhaps.’

He says wonderingly, ‘You know, I never really asked Jake about his family history. He wouldn’t have volunteered it, would he? It’s a major trajectory, over six centuries. That’s a long time to be able to trace your forebears.’

‘Jake took it for granted. It’s the likes of you and me who find it so remarkable.’

‘Two generations, that’s how far back my family acquaintanceship goes.’

Colin’s parents were Yorkshire schoolteachers, very proud and slightly respectful of their talented son. I remember them coming to see Colin receive his degree, and him posing afterwards in his gown and mortarboard, flanked by his smiling mother and father. I took the photograph with the camera his father handed to me.

They acknowledged but never fully accepted that Colin was gay, and they died within a year of each other when he was still in his thirties.

‘Mine too,’ I say.

I never saw my father after he left home.

‘That useless bugger? Don’t waste your wishing on him, love. He doesn’t deserve it,’ was my mother’s usual response to my questions.

In the end, since he never tried to contact her or me, I took her advice.

I knew her parents, my Nanny and Gamps, as tidy old people who sometimes looked after me for weekends, or whole weeks of the school holidays, in their miniature and sepulchrally quiet house in a village in Warwickshire. They liked Sunday Night at the London Palladium, and sitting in deckchairs in their back garden on fine afternoons. I loved them, in the undemonstrative way they favoured (they didn’t hold with kissing and hugging. That was for other folk, the sort who liked to make a show of things), but staying with them was boring.

At home with my working mother I got fish fingers and tinned spaghetti on toast, which was what I liked to eat, but at Nanny and Gamps’s there was bright yellow haddock disgustingly cooked in milk, complete with skin and brackish foam, and mystifying lemon curd tart instead of Wagon Wheels or mini swiss rolls in red and silver foil.

At my grandparents’ I coiled myself up and concentrated even harder on growing up as quickly as possible, in order to make my escape into a more glamorous world. I never doubted that I would do it. I must have been an unrewarding grandchild for them.

Colin says, ‘We find Jake’s pedigree remarkable now. We didn’t back then, did we? Who cared about Amos’s background except as a good joke, or anything about that etiolated guy who lived on his staircase who was the grandson of a duke? None of us was interested in what had been or what had made us, except maybe in working out how to overthrow it. What was important was what we were going to make happen. That was the gift of our generation. The absolute conviction that we could change the world.’

‘Yes. It’s only since we failed to do that and then discovered that we were going to get old as well that we’ve started to be hungry for history.’

‘And that’ll be a tenner in the box, please,’ Colin says.

‘Damn.’

What started out as a joke between Selwyn and Amos has gathered momentum at the New Mead (spoken within the same quotation marks that we now employ for New Labour).

Whenever any of us remarks that we are old, or mentions something that we did when we were young but can no longer enjoy or endorse, a fine is levied. It started at a pound, but that turned out not to be a sufficiently serious deterrent. There are plans to use the accumulated fund for the most unlikely group outing any of us can come up with. The current front-runner is a weekend’s extreme snowboarding in St Anton.

‘Jake never had any illusions about changing the world. He believed in micro initiatives like selling the estate cottages, so the people who lived in them and worked on the land could own their homes. He never went on a demo in his life. He poked fun at me about my agitprop days.’

‘Jake wasn’t a Boomer, he belonged to the previous generation. I bet he’d have gone on the countryside march, though.’

I smile. ‘Yeah, he would. I went on it for him.’

We cross the Meddlett road and climb a low hill crowned with a line of crooked oak trees. They are still holding on to their dun and yellow leaves, but through the thinning screen I can see the dense nodes of mistletoe. From the windows of Mead these trees are familiar sentries on the skyline.

We turn to look back the way we have come. Colin is out of breath.

‘Look,’ I say unnecessarily.

The land dips to the road, then unrolls all the way in front of us. There is the small natural plateau and vantage point that now belongs to Amos, and the fence that marks his boundary and mine. I have always known that it was a commanding spot. It seems obvious, now, that ancient people would have chosen it for the same reason.

In the shelter of the trees Colin sits down to rest on the step of a stile.

We can see the white tent, and people processing in and out of it. Without binoculars I can’t be sure but I assume the two figures who seem to be kneeling in prayer are in fact still patiently sieving earth from the grave. There are a couple of parked vans and a car, but no sign of any of Amos’s contractors.

‘And now six hundred years seems relatively modern. A mere interlude,’ Colin murmurs.

This chimes precisely with my own thoughts.

‘All that time, while the land was being settled and farmed, then bought and sold, plague coming and going, the crops growing, cattle grazing, Jake’s highwayman ancestor sticking his pistols in his belt and galloping off on his black stallion, those two were lying there. Ancient, invisible.’

‘Even though we’ve dug them up again they are still inscrutable,’ he says.

‘I expect the osteologist and the Iron-Age man from Oxford will soon be able to tell us everything about them,’ I sigh.

Colin glances at me.

‘Do you mind that?’

‘Not exactly. It’s more on their behalf that I regret the disturbance. Two thousand years of unbroken peace, then along comes Amos with his ground source heating system.’

‘From my own completely detached and therefore selfish point of view,’ Colin offers, ‘I rather appreciate the contrast of scale. Looking back a couple of millennia does put one’s personal, short-term problems into perspective.’

I turn my head to look at him. Polly and Katherine and I, now that we are living so closely together, have taken to describing versions of our problems to one another. But it’s unusual for Colin to touch even this lightly on his feelings.

I say, ‘Talking your problems over with your friends might achieve the same result, without the archaeological intervention.’

Unfortunately this comes out sounding like a criticism, which I didn’t intend at all.

‘Mirry, you’re a sympathetic ear, I know that. But I’m not much good at soul-baring. What can you really say to anyone, even your closest friends, about personal loss? Or about the individual slow decline, or sudden end, that’s lying in wait for us all?’

I blurt out, ‘Because that is part of the human condition. And to share the grief and the fear, those things we’ve all known by the time we get to our age, as well as the picnics and birthdays, isn’t that what we’re put here for? At the very least, to ease each other’s loneliness?’

He says very gently, ‘I’ve no idea why we’re put here. To me there seems less of a reason for our existence than there probably did to the Warrior Prince and his cup-bearer over there.’

Across the fields and floating tree tops we watch a sudden flurry of activity on the site. A large open crate is borne out of the tent and laid on the grass, and every one of the distant figures lays down their tools and crowds around to look. Colin stands up, brushing leaves and moss from his coat.

‘What’s happening, I wonder?’

I can’t help reflecting aloud, ‘Wouldn’t Jake have been fascinated?’

‘He would.’ Colin puts his arms around me and holds me close against him. He has always found non-sexual touching easy and natural, unlike a straight man.

Jake died after only a short illness, here at Mead, with me beside him. He was twenty years older than me; I can’t even say that he was snatched away before his time. Not like Colin’s Stephen, who was murdered. Almost casually, for money for a fix, by a boy he had taken up with after he and Colin broke up. Without it ever having been discussed, I know that Colin blames himself. If he and Stephen had still been together there would have been no casual sex with dangerous young men.

I’m trying to find a way to acknowledge that my loss is painful to a lesser degree than his, but it’s too clumsy a sentiment to put into words. Colin probably reads my mind in any case. I ask abruptly, ‘Tell me, how are you? What about the illness?’

To my surprise he laughs. ‘Polly wants me to get off with the luscious chef at the Griffin.’

‘Well, why not?’

It’s nice being held by Colin. I’m not cold, but the warmth our bodies hatches between us is welcome. Not for the first time I reflect what a shame it is that he’s not interested in women.

‘Dearest. I don’t need a chef in my life.’

‘I wouldn’t mind one.’

‘You could cope with it, Mirry. More than cope. Look at you.’

He strokes my hair back from my face. ‘Listen. I had the radiation therapy. I chose that rather than surgery, and it works in quite a high percentage of cases, but not in mine. It’s testosterone that fuels the cancer growth, did you know that? Mine’s an aggressive one. Mucho macho. When I first met my specialist I thought he was a patronizing little fart, excuse me, but I’ve warmed to him lately. He tells it straight. The radiation treatment didn’t do the trick. I can still opt for surgical removal of the tumour, but it’s in a ticklish spot. There is the risk of a little slip with the blade, can you imagine? Whoops, I’m suddenly incontinent. Rubber knickers, absorbent pads, worrying about how strongly I might smell of piss when I’m sitting in the theatre.’

‘No. Don’t do that.’

‘Exactly. So instead of going under the knife, my friend the specialist gives me injections of female hormone. It works, but there’s a payoff. It makes me completely impotent. However much I might want to, these days I couldn’t get it up for a whole chorus line of chefs. Not even individually basted in virgin olive oil and served with side dishes of oysters and rhino horn.’