Rosie Thomas - Lovers and Newcomers

None of my business.

I hope Colin is sleeping too. He looks brittle with illness and exhaustion. Maybe Mead will soothe him, if he will allow it to.

These thoughts dance a gavotte around the other. How long since I was kissed, like Selwyn kissed me tonight?

A long, long time.

The lingering heat of that kiss makes me restless.

I cross the room, lean on the windowsill and gaze out. The moon has gone but over the crowns of oak and beech I can see stars. Tomorrow will be another warm day.

The house settles around me. No – around us .

As my mother encouraged me to do, I reckon up my blessings. This is what I have.

Mead, my husband’s house, now mine. I love it as if it were a living thing, even its dilapidation, multiplying outbreaks of decay, creeping damp and splintering bones.

Now friends have arrived bringing our cargo of history, jokes, secrets. Beyond price. A future will unfold here on these acres of Jake’s, shared by people he loved. We have different, complicated reasons, each of us, for investing ourselves and our hopes in Mead for this new beginning, but I believe the outcome will be shared happiness, and security, for all of us. Why not? Age at least brings the benefits of wisdom, mutual tolerance, which we did not possess when we were nineteen, for all our beauty and optimism.

But I’m getting sentimental.

That’s new, as is the realization that I can’t drink the way I used to.

The two things are, of course, quite closely connected.

My feet are as cold as ice.

I wish my bed were not empty.

Rain came sweeping across from the North Sea, borne on flat-bottomed bolsters of cloud that released a steady grey downpour as they slid over the land.

Miranda was down at the site with Amos, who was marching up and down in his wellingtons, waving his arms and chopping the air with his hands as he fumed about delays to his project.

The foundations of his house-to-be were now marked out across the churned-up meadow with pegs and tape, and as their boots slithered in the mud he reminded her of exactly where the terraces would be, where and how huge windows would slide up and down, and the ingenious way that doors would fold out onto the land.

She was as stirred and excited by the prospect as Amos himself. Almost anywhere on earth this building would be a thrilling expression of modernity, and she loved the idea of it being set right here against the old grey bones of Mead.

Amos never tired of telling anyone who would listen about his systems for storing heat and generating energy, the layers of insulation that would reduce thermal loss almost to zero, the waste water recycling technology, all the other innovations that he had planned with such glee, with a rich man’s confident relish for the latest and best. Dreamily, Miranda envisaged how the house would look, tethered here on its vantage point like a squared-off soap bubble, the planes of glass reflecting the leaves and the clouds.

The land fell away on three sides of the site, offering views for miles over the farmlands and copses, with a thin crescent of old deciduous woodland at the back of it in which the oak and horse chestnut leaves were just beginning to turn. The little wood offered protection from the winds off the sea that sometimes battered Mead itself.

The situation was perfect, as if the grand design had always been for people to build here, but its rightness had been overlooked until now. Miranda was proud of the potential, as though she had some hand in establishing it.

Amos swung to face her, oblivious to the rain, gouging up a little ruff of muddy earth with his heel.

‘Miranda, just tell me, why can’t we get going? The planning bureaucracy, the endless delays. It’s driving me insane. I want to see the trenches cut. I want to see my house rising out of this earth. I want it badly enough to get down on my knees right now and start digging at it with these.’

He waved his hands in front of her. She thought he might flop down in his corduroys and start burrowing at the flat grass like some immense sandy mole.

‘It’s not long now. Monday.’

‘That is long. One hundred and twelve hours…’ he glanced at his watch ‘…precisely.’

Miranda laughed. ‘It will be worth waiting for.’ Rain was dripping off the brim of her hat. ‘Let’s go back to the house. There’s nothing to be done out here.’

The Knights had now completed the move to Mead. Katherine had confided to Miranda that Amos had resigned from his chambers, and Miranda could see how restless he was without the demands of work to distract him. He didn’t want to go back to the sheltered confinement of Mead’s holiday wing and sit there looking out at the rain. He stuck his hands in his pockets instead and stared hungrily at the blue Portakabin that had been brought in the week before on a low-loader and lifted into place in a cradle of chains. There was a caravan waiting to one side with a yellow JCB parked next to it.

‘Come on, come on,’ he muttered and paced, as if the machinery might shudder into life under the force of his will.

‘Amos. I’m getting wet. I want a cup of coffee.’

He stopped. ‘What? Oh. Apologies in order. I’m being thoughtless.’ Then he sighed. ‘Standing here staring at some string and a digger’s not helping my blood pressure, in any case.’

They turned away on the caterpillar-tracked dirt road that would be the Knights’ driveway. It curved past the belt of trees and joined the main drive to the house a few yards from the gate.

Automatically, because none of them now used the front, Amos and Miranda headed for the back door into the house, crossing the wet glimmering cobbles of the yard. The holiday wing looked demurely occupied, with laundered curtains at the windows and even some pots of herbs placed by Katherine beside the doorstep. Across from this statement of domestic order sat the reverse of a mirror image – a picture of destruction.

Polly and Selwyn’s barn now had no windows, no door, no interior walls, and only a few gaunt beams for a roof. There came a series of thuds and the powdery splinter and crash of falling plaster and masonry. Amos raised his eyebrows at Miranda and a second later a figure appeared in the jagged hole that had once been a window. His hair, clothes and skin were thick with dust, and clods of ancient plaster clung to his shoulders. In this grey mask Selwyn’s mouth appeared shockingly red. Miranda caught the inside of her lip between her teeth and forced herself to look elsewhere. It was more difficult to have him so close, his physical presence always nudging into sight and from there marching into her private thoughts, than she had bargained for.

‘Hey, come and take a look,’ he yelled, brandishing his sledgehammer.

They ventured obediently to the doorway and peered through the hanging veil of dust. The floor was heaped with broken brick and laths and roughly swept-up piles of rubble. In the far corner, under the only remaining fragment of roof, a tarpaulin shelter had been rigged up, the corner looped back to reveal a camping mattress with folded sleeping bags and pillows all exposed to the dust. A primus burner on an improvised trestle table stood next to a tap that sagged away from the wall on a length of crusted pipe.

‘Just look at it,’ Amos muttered. The derision in his voice might have masked a tremor of reluctant awe.

Miranda stared at the tarp shelter. The whole scene was strongly reminiscent of the dwellings of primitive people, possibly hunter-gatherers huddled in caves, protected only by animal skins and a low fire. It was obvious that Selwyn adored descending to this level. Pitting himself against the weather, pulling his hut dwelling apart with his bare hands in order to rebuild something better for his woman and himself, he probably felt the very embodiment of primitive Man.