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It was rather impressive, in a way, that he felt he could still do this to her. Of course, she acknowledged scrupulously, in the economic sense he did provide. Amos was a barrister specializing in tax matters, whereas she was the administrator of a small medical charity. He earned per year – or rather had earned, she wasn’t quite sure what would be happening in the future – rather more than twenty times her annual salary. That was a lot of money. He paid for their handsome house, deposits on flats for their two boys, holidays in the Caribbean or the Maldives, the various bouts of their joint entertaining, most of her clothes.
But, she had taken to telling herself, his money and recent professional status didn’t mean that he owned her, nor that she had no existence apart from him. Not now, not any longer. Katherine now knew that as a person, as a good human being with solid worth, if she were somehow to be placed in the opposite pan to him on a pair of moral scales, her metal might not shine as brightly as his but she would still outweigh him.
Yes, she would.
Out of the corner of her eye Katherine looked at the chino-clad bolster of his thigh and wondered why it was that her attempts at self-affirmation never quite succeeded, even in her own estimation.
Amos was Amos, and she tended to get washed up on the granite cliffs of him like a small boat driven in a gale on to the Chilean shore.
They were driving through a village, its main street set with small grey stone terraced houses that broke up in places to reveal vistas of new bungalows set behind them. A group of resentful teenagers stared out from a glass and steel bus shelter like ruminants from a pen at the zoo. Amos patted the palms of his hands on the wheel, then brightened.
‘Are you hungry?’ he asked, which meant that he was.
On a corner of the long street he had spotted a teashop. He braked and the Jaguar slid in to the kerb.
‘We said we’d be there for tea,’ Katherine remarked. Amos got out of the car, came around and held open the door for her.
‘There’s no hurry. We’ve got a lifetime at Mead ahead of us.’
For a moment, she imagined he had said life sentence.
The teashop was cool, with a stone-flagged floor and a cluster of mismatched chairs and tables. Amos sat down at the table in the window and Katherine took her place opposite him. He chose scones and cream for both of them, and wedges of Victoria sponge and fruit cake, chatting with the waitress as she took the order. He had always had a big appetite, and lately he seemed even hungrier for food.
‘We don’t have to eat it all,’ he laughed at her protest, ‘but you know I love cake.’
Katherine acquiesced. It was restful sitting in the window of what must once have been the village shop, with the traffic trickling by outside. The country was a slower place, they would both have to learn that. Gripped by affection as well as happy anticipation, she leaned across and put her hands over Amos’s.
‘We’re at the beginning, aren’t we?’ she said. ‘A new place, a different way to live, but still with the benefit of everything we have learned. That’s all right, isn’t it?’ Then, knowing that what they both knew really couldn’t be construed as all right, she added hastily, ‘Remember what we were like, all of us, when we met?’
‘Only vaguely, thank God.’
He withdrew one hand, then the other, and as soon as the waitress put the plate in front of them he started work on the scones. He began to talk about their rather famous architect. The woman had promised to send a revised set of drawings for part of their magnificent new house, to be built at Mead on a plot of land purchased from Miranda, but had failed to do so before they left for this inaugural weekend.
The teenagers had broken out of the corral of the bus shelter. Now they lurched up the street in a mob, arms and legs shooting out of the central mass. They enveloped Amos’s glimmering silver Jaguar and one of them tweaked the nearside wing mirror, which instantly lent the car a comical lop-eared appearance. Amos was concentrating on loading jam onto the second half of scone and didn’t see what was happening, but Katherine watched. Without feeling much concern for the car, she hoped that they would move on before her husband noticed the assault on his property and caused a scene.
One of the bigger boys glanced up and caught her eye. He bounded across the pavement and pressed himself up against the café window. He had a broad red face, hummocked with pimples, which he brought up against the glass, misting it with his breath. His mouth opened wider and suckered itself to the glass, lips paling as his tongue licked a trail through the dust in a lingering smooch. Katherine gazed with interest at this spectacle as Amos bit into his scone. Behind the window boy, the rest of the group were pulling the wipers of the car to the vertical, rocking on the rear bumper and trying to prise open the doors.
She coughed slightly as the boy doing the kissing formed a tube with the fingers and thumb of his right hand and waggled it at her.
Amos did look around now. The boy immediately detached himself and ran, leaving a wet smear on the window like the trail of a giant mollusc.
‘Bloody feral kids, same everywhere,’ Amos growled, through crumbs and jam. The other boys dashed after their leader, hooting as they went.
‘Christ, look what they’ve done,’ Amos roared, suddenly noticing.
Katherine tucked away a smile as she looked at the car, wing mirrors drooping and wipers standing erect.
‘More tea?’ she asked.
Selwyn negotiated a lane lined with trees that looked leaned-upon by the wind. He swung the wheel sharply and steered the van through a pair of lichenous gateposts topped with stone balls twice the size of a man’s head.
The drive curved under more trees, then straightened, and Mead revealed itself against its ancient green backdrop. At its heart was an old flint building with bigger Georgian windows than the original farmhouse construction had featured, which gave it a slightly startled aspect. A modest porte cochère, also a later addition to the fabric, framed the double front door. The plaster was falling in chunks from the bases of the fluted pillars. On either side of the original house, short, unmatching wings had been added at later dates, partly in reddish-orange brick and partly in flint. The overall effect was harmonious but not at all grand, as if the house had quietly expanded according to requirements over several hundred years without any particular design having been set or followed.
The van coasted over the gravel and came to rest at a tangent to the circular flowerbed that formed the centrepiece of the front courtyard. The scent of lavender flooded the cab.
Polly looked through the insect-spotted windscreen at the russet and grey façade of the house. There was moss growing beneath broken sections of lead guttering, and the paintwork of the front door was faded, but the size of it and the almost magical seclusion of the setting never failed to impress her. Mead was a beautiful place to end up, she reflected. If ending up was actually what was happening.
In the front doorway, framed by the pillars, Miranda Meadowe appeared. She held open her arms.
Selwyn vaulted out of the van and trampled through lavender and leggy roses. He wrapped his arms around Miranda’s narrow torso and swung her off her feet, laughing and kissing her neck.
‘Babs, darling Barb, we thought we’d never get here.’ He took in a great breath of air, ‘Ah, smell that countryside, will you? It’s ripe with pure cow. Or is it sheep? Now we are here we’re never going to leave. Are we, Poll? So you’d better get used to it. I hope it isn’t all a mistake, is it, Barb? You haven’t changed your mind?’
Polly followed behind him, skirting the flowerbed. Her hips and buttocks and breasts made a series of globes, tending towards one circular impression as she moved.
‘Put me down, Sel,’ Miranda protested. ‘No, of course I haven’t changed my mind. Hello, Polly, love. Welcome to Mead. Welcome home.’
The two women kissed each other, hands patting each other’s upper arms where the flesh was soft.
‘Thanks, Miranda,’ Polly murmured. ‘Here we are. I’m very glad.’
Selwyn called Miranda Barbara mainly because he could. They had known each other since their first term at university, the almost prehistoric time when Miranda had still been Barbara Huggett, fresh from her divorced mother’s semi in Wolverhampton. When Barbara took the part of Miranda in the University Players’ production of The Tempest, in which Selwyn played Trinculo, she decided that as a name for a black-haired siren with a future in theatre, Miranda had a lot more going for it than Barbara ever would.
It was a considerable number of years after that that she finally met and married Jacob Meadowe, farmer and landowner.
‘Come on in,’ Miranda beamed.
She danced her way through the house, past the handsome staircase and the doors opening to the drawing room, and a shuttered dining room where the table was already laid with six places for dinner.
‘When are the others getting here?’ Selwyn called, peering in at the glimmer of silver candlesticks.
The final establishment of the new households would take some more time, but with her developed sense of theatre Miranda had decreed that there should be a weekend gathering to mark the beginning of their new association.
‘Now,’ Miranda said, with her wide smile. It was nearly five o’clock.
This was the weekend.
The kitchen was warm, with one of the solid fuel ranges that Polly thought a country living cliché and quite impossible to cook on, and which Miranda claimed to love like a dear friend. The floor was red quarry tiles, starred and pocked with a history of dropped saucepans and tracked with the passage of generations. There was a built-in dresser running the length of one wall, its shelves crowded with mismatched china, and a scrubbed table in the centre. Polly lowered herself into a Windsor chair painted some shade of English Heritage blue to match the legs of the table.
‘Tea coming up,’ Miranda said happily. She brought the kettle back to the boil, poured and stirred, and then began to slice sponge cake.
‘Just a small bit for me,’ Polly murmured.
‘Oh, come on. I made it.’
Selwyn had bounded straight to the back door. He unlatched it and stood on the threshold, rocking gently on the balls of his feet and staring out into the cobbled back courtyard. Chickweed sprouted between the stones and clumps of nettles grew against the flint walls. There were two short wings projecting from the rear of the main house as well as from the front, giving it the profile of a broad but stumpy and irregular H. These two wings were smaller and more dilapidated than the forward-facing pair, having been used in the past partly as barns for the farming that no longer happened at Mead, and partly as garaging for long-vanished cars. The right-hand wing had been converted years before for holiday lettings, but now stood empty and waiting. The left-hand one was much more tumbledown. A section of the roof stood open to the rafters, the panes in some of the windows were broken and patched with cardboard, and a barn-sized door hung open and let in the weather.
It was this most sorry portion of the old house that Selwyn and Polly had recently bought from Miranda, using quite a large slice of the capital that remained from selling their own house and paying off accumulated debts. Despite her unworldly air, Miranda – or her financial advisors – had driven a hard bargain.
‘We should get some of our stuff unloaded,’ Selwyn said. ‘Set up camp. Polly?’
He vibrated with so much eagerness and seemingly innocent energy that the natural response would have been to go along with whatever he suggested. The two women knew him better, and gazed back at him.
‘We’ve only been here ten minutes,’ Polly observed.
‘Camp? What do you mean? You can’t be thinking of sleeping across there tonight?’ Miranda wailed. ‘Have a rest first.’
Selwyn rubbed his hands. They were big, broad, and scarred.
‘Rest? Rest from what? There’s a lot to do out there. We want to get started, Poll, don’t we?’
Polly looked from one to the other.
‘Tomorrow,’ she said.
The Jaguar purred between the gateposts, accelerated past the bend in the driveway and came to a halt beside the abandoned white van.
Amos nodded at it. ‘That’ll be Selwyn’s.’
He and Katherine sat in the quiet and looked across at the front of the house.
‘I always forget. It’s lovely,’ Katherine breathed.
‘It’s falling down.’
‘That, too.’
‘Come on. Let’s go inside and at least get ourselves a drink before the place collapses.’
Amos sprang out and immediately buried his head in the Jaguar’s limited boot space, then emerged with a box in his arms. The evening air was rich with the scent of lavender and agriculture. Miranda appeared once more in the doorway, framed by the pillars. Burdened with his case of champagne Amos could only boom a greeting at her, but Miranda and Katherine embraced.
‘You look well,’ Miranda murmured in Katherine’s ear, as if she had been expecting otherwise.
‘I am well. You know.’
‘We’ll talk. Amos, give me a kiss.’
He leaned over the box and kissed the cheek that she turned to him.
It was Amos who led the way inside. Katherine pulled down the ribbing of her heather-coloured cardigan and followed, carefully placing her feet on the uneven paving. Miranda came behind, light on her feet in her worn ballet flats.
The kitchen boiled with noisy greetings.
‘Bollinger? Amos, you’re still a flash fucker.’
‘Right, you’ll be sticking to tea, then,’ Amos grinned as he dropped a weighty arm on Selwyn’s shoulder. ‘Mirry, glasses for the rest of us. We’ll drink a toast to the new order.’
‘Ah, Katherine, come here. Your husband’s a prat, but you are gorgeous. And you smell divine.’
‘Do I? It’s Jo Malone. I thought it might be a bit young for me…’
‘Now, listen. I don’t want to hear the y word, not from any of us, now or for the rest of our years at Mead. Or the o word, either. Definitely not that one.’
‘Shouldn’t we wait for Colin?’
Everyone was talking at once. Miranda moved happily between them.
Colin was the sixth member of their group. ‘He’ll be here in a minute, I’m sure.’
‘Polly, my darling. How do you bear living with this man?’
‘How do I? You’re going to find out, aren’t you?’
‘Christ. Yes. What have we all let ourselves in for?’
‘I don’t seem to have any champagne glasses. Or not matching ones. Not much call for them lately.’
‘It doesn’t matter about matching. Any glasses will do. Just don’t give Amos the biggest one. Here, let’s use these.’
Selwyn applied strong thumbs and the first cork popped. Miranda swooped a glass and caught the plume of silver froth. The five of them stood in a smiling circle, between the dresser and the scrubbed table with its litter of mugs and cake crumbs.
‘A toast,’ Amos proposed. ‘Here’s to Mead, and to Miranda, and the future.’
‘Here’s to all of us,’ Miranda answered. ‘Long life and…’ she searched for the appropriate word, then it floated into her head, ‘harmony.’
‘Harmony. To all of us,’ they echoed.
The words came easily enough. They had known each other for the best part of forty years. For some of those decades the friendships had seemed consigned to the past, but now there was this late and intriguing regrowth.
Polly put down her empty champagne glass. ‘Where is Colin?’ she asked.
The third vehicle, a small German-made saloon, had reached Meddlett village. It passed the church and the general store-cum-post office on the corner, and skirted the village green. It had passed the pub too, where the lights were coming on as the daylight faded, but then the driver braked quite sharply. A car following behind hooted and accelerated past with another angry blast on the horn. The first car reversed a few yards, then made a dart into the pub car park.
The bar was yellow-lit. It had been slightly modernized, which meant that the horse brasses, patterned carpet and tankards had been removed and replaced by stripped wood. Various jovially phrased notices warned against hiking boots, work clothing and requests for credit. A list of darts fixtures was pinned to the wall next to a cratered dartboard. The window table was occupied by a young couple with a dog seated on the bench between them. They each had an arm wrapped around the dog, and over its smooth black head they were talking heatedly in low voices. An old man in corduroy trousers sat on a stool at the bar, and two younger men stood next to him with pints in their hands. Their conversation halted as their heads turned towards the door. Colin ducked to miss the low beams and made his way to the bar. The barman put down a cloth and rested his weight on his knuckles.
‘Evening,’ he said.
Colin smiled. He felt about as at home in this place as he would have done in the scrum of a rugby international, and wondered why only a minute ago it had seemed like such an excellent idea to call in for a solitary, sharpening drink before turning up at Mead.
‘Evening. I’ll have…’ A cranberry martini? A pink champagne cocktail? He ran his eye along the labelled pumps. ‘…ah, a pint of Adnam’s.’
‘Coming up,’ the barman nodded. The conversation to Colin’s left resumed, being something to do with reality television.
‘If they will pick monkeys, they’ll get gibberish, won’t they?’ the older man observed.
‘Do better yourself, Ken, could you?’ one of the others laughed.
‘I could,’ Ken said flatly. He drank, then stuck out his lower lip and removed a margin of beer froth from the underside of his moustache.
