Rosie Thomas - Lovers and Newcomers

‘Not yet, you mean. I know. It’s all right. Shall we have another glass of wine, do you think?’

The others pretended to be shocked.

‘ Two glasses of wine?’

‘In the middle of a weekday afternoon?’

And then they agreed, why not?

Amos went back across the yard to his house, saying that he had calls to make to the architect and the contractors and a mass of paperwork to deal with.

Looking around the kitchen, Miranda saw that it was in need of some attention. She put the dirty coffee cups in the dishwasher and emptied the grounds from the pot into the compost bucket. Someone – probably Amos – had been treating the bucket as a waste bin, and as she stooped down to pick out a polythene wrapper she discovered some pieces of broken plate. It was the one with ivy tendrils wreathed around the rim that she and Jake had found years ago in a junk shop in Norwich. She was sad that it was broken.

After she had disposed of the fragments, too badly smashed to be worth repairing, she wiped the table and picked up a few shed dahlia petals. From this angle it was apparent that the dresser was dusty, so she cleared a clutter of bowls and papers and searched in a drawer for a cloth and a tin of polish. Wadding the cloth up in her fist she pressed the tip of it into the brown ooze of polish, then began to work it in smooth strokes into the grain of the wood. She extended her arm in wide arcs, rubbing hard, enjoying these ministrations to her house.

In the days and weeks after Jake died I used to wake in the night and howl, letting the sobs rip out of me because I couldn’t think how to stop, even though I was frightening myself. Nothing will ever be as bad as that, and I know that I have done enough crying. More than enough to last what remains of a lifetime.

I look up from my polishing, and remind myself again of what I have.

Here is Mead, this lovely place where I belong.

There are no more Meadowes, Jake was the last of the line and I am the last to bear his family name, but thanks to my friends there are voices and laughter again in these rooms. Sometimes when we sit around the table it is as though we are not six, but a dozen or more – here are the earlier versions of each of us, gathered behind the chairs, leaning over one another’s shoulders to interject or contradict, phantoms of teenagers and young parents and errant mid-lifers, all these faces vivid in memory’s snapshots with the attitudes and dreams of then , half or more of which are now forgotten.

With this much familiarity between us, when I single out our older faces from the crowd, I have come to imagine that I can read off the latest bargains we are striking with ourselves, with each other, and – with whom?

If I believed in God, I would say so.

With fate, then.

If we can stay alive a few years longer, be healthy, live just a little more, maybe experience something new that will make us feel that everything that is passionate, breathtaking, surprising is not already behind us. If we can be fractionally careless, and just frivolous enough, amongst our old friends. If we can be not lonely, and only sometimes afraid: that will be enough.

These are selfish desires, of course. We are a selfish generation, we post-war babies, for whom everything has been butter and orange juice and free speech and free love.

But even with all our privileges, we have made mistakes.

Whereas if I thought about personal fallibility at all when I was young, it was just one more thing to laugh at.

And now I look up, and see Selwyn coming across the yard to the back door. The latch rattles, and he tramples his feet on the doormat to shake some of the plaster dust off his boots.

‘Hi. There you are. Where’s everyone?’ he asks.

‘Gone for a walk.’ I bend deliberately over the polishing cloth, making long sweeps over the dresser top.

‘Barb?’ He comes across and stands much too close to me, just six inches away. I can smell dust and sweat. ‘What’s the matter? You’re crying, aren’t you?’

He doesn’t touch me, but he picks up the tin of polish instead as if this is the closest connection he dares to make. He screws the lid in place and I study his notched and grimy hands and the rinds of dirt clinging to the cuticles.

The polishing slows down, my reach diminishing, until it gradually stops altogether.

‘No. I was just thinking sombre thoughts.’

He does touch me now, the fingers of his right hand just coming lightly to rest on the point of my shoulder. We look into each other’s eyes.

‘About the other night…’ he begins.

‘It’s all right. Don’t. No need to. You were a bit drunk. Me too. Two glasses of wine, nowadays, and I’m…’

He stops me.

‘I wasn’t drunk, and I don’t believe you were either. I meant it. You are so beautiful, and necessary to me. I’m numb these days, I’m like a log of dead bloody wood, totally inert except for the termites of anxiety gnawing away, but when I look at you it’s like the log’s being doused in petrol and set alight. I can’t stop it. I don’t want to stop it, because it’s being alive.’

‘Don’t say these things, Selwyn. You shouldn’t, and I shouldn’t listen.’

‘I’m bursting into flames, look.’

His index finger moves to my bare neck, slides down to the hollow of my collarbone.

I step backwards, out of his reach, skirting the corner of the dresser.

‘Polly,’ I manage to say. ‘Polly, Polly, Polly, Polly . Partner. Mother of three children. Your partner. Your children.’

‘You are not telling me anything I don’t already know,’ Selwyn says reasonably.

It was Miranda who had very nearly become Selwyn’s wife.

After they left the university they had drifted to London where Miranda found herself an agent and spent her days going to auditions, hitching up her skirt in front of a series of directors and chain-smoking afterwards while she waited for the phone to ring.

Selwyn was in the first year of his clinical training, and finding that he hated the sadistic rituals of medical memory tests and group diagnostic humiliations. At the time Miranda had a room in a shared flat in Tufnell Park and more often than not Selwyn stayed there with her, huddling in her single bed or crouching in the armchair amongst discarded clothes, a textbook on his lap and the apparatus for fixing another joint spread on the arm.

He claimed later, with reason, that this was the lowest period of his life. He knew that he wasn’t going to qualify as a doctor, but had no idea what else he might do with himself. Startlingly, he was also discovering that he was no longer the centre of attention. Amos and Polly and Colin and all their other friends had set off in different directions. It seemed that Miranda, with her jittery determination to be an actress, was the only thing he had left to hold on to.

He held on hard.

One night, lying ribcage to ribcage in her bed and listening to the cats squalling in the dank garden backed by a railway line, he said, ‘Let’s get married.’

They could at least then get a flat on their own together. There would be regular cooking, laundry would somehow get done, life would be legitimized.

Miranda said, ‘Yes.’

They went to Portobello Road the next Saturday afternoon and chose a ring, a Victorian garnet band that Selwyn couldn’t afford. Plans were made for a registry office ceremony at Camden Town Hall, to be followed by a restaurant lunch for Miranda’s mother and Selwyn’s parents and brother. In the evening there was to be a catered party in a room over a pub, at which a revived Blue Peony would be the disco. Weddings in those days were deliberately stripped of all tradition. Miranda hooted with laughter at the idea of a church, or a bridal gown, and a honeymoon involving anything more than a few days in a borrowed cottage in Somerset was out of the question in any case.