Rosie Thomas - Lovers and Newcomers

It was a joyous spectacle, as well as a sexy one. Miranda propped herself against a shaky wall to enjoy it.

‘Excuse me? What’s funny?’ Selwyn swung the sledgehammer in a small arc. He looked offended.

Amos coughed and slapped his hands together to shake off the dust and grit.

‘You see,’ Selwyn added, vaguely indicating a slice of rubbled floor, ‘this is where the snooker table will be.’

‘But you don’t play snooker,’ said Amos.

‘You always were a literal-minded person,’ Selwyn sighed.

Amos looked about. Small scraping and collapsing sounds came as the latest demolition area settled. ‘You’ve got quite a lot to do, haven’t you?’

‘It’ll be done before yours, mate. And anyway there’s no hurry. This place is fine as it is.’

‘Does Polly think so?’

Apart from the first, Selwyn had slept every night since their arrival at Mead under his own potential roof. Miranda guessed that he wanted to distance himself from the soft option, to demonstrate that he needed nothing from anybody, least of all creature comforts. Polly sometimes slept in their bedroom in the house, sometimes in the barn with him.

Miranda tried not to notice which, or when.

But she did notice. She couldn’t help it.

For the new residents at Mead the kitchen in the old house had become a kind of common room. It was where people congregated if they were not working or keeping to their own quarters, and it was big enough and already shabby enough to absorb the influx without looking much different. Today there was an earthenware jug of ragged crimson dahlias on the table, with a heap of magazines and envelopes drifting over an open laptop.

Miranda and Amos came in from the rain and tramped through to the passage beneath the stairs to leave their coats. Their boots left gritty prints on the tiles.

Colin was resting next to the Rayburn, in the Windsor armchair that had been favoured by Miranda’s late cat, and Polly was reading out to him the lonely hearts ads from a newspaper. Katherine had just arrived back from two days at her charity’s offices in London and her Burberry and briefcase were deposited on another chair. When Amos returned, padding in his socks and with what was left of his hair sticking up after he had rubbed it dry, he kissed her absently and patted her shoulder.

‘Meeting go off all right, darling?’

‘Yes. I…’

‘We’ve just been down to the site, Mirry and me. I’ll walk back down there with you, if you like.’

‘Has anything new happened?’

‘No.’

Katherine said, ‘Then I think I’ll go into the village with Polly and Colin. We were just talking about it. The rain is going to stop in a minute.’

He looked at her in surprise. ‘You’ve only just got back from town.’

Polly glanced up from her place at the table.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ Katherine agreed.

Amos hesitated, then nodded vaguely. ‘Right. Mirry, let’s have that coffee, then.’

Miranda straightened her back.

‘Yes, let’s. Black for me. Thanks.’

There was a small silence in the wake of her words. Amos seemed to become aware of four pairs of eyes on him.

‘What’s this? What are you all looking at?’

The reverberations of Selwyn’s sledgehammering made the cups on the dresser tinkle.

Polly murmured, ‘What do you mean, looking at?’

Amos puffed out his red cheeks but didn’t pursue the question. He lumbered about the kitchen collecting up the coffee pot and rummaging in the cupboards for coffee beans. Once he had located the jar he experienced a moment’s difficulty with fitting the lid on the grinder, then pressed the button as gingerly as if he expected the machine to detonate.

Polly read out over the clatter, ‘Erasmian fool, M 37, seeks warm-hearted man, London or Cambridge, to explore gravity and grace. Downhill skiing champion preferred.’ Colin shuddered. Amos stared briefly at them over his shoulder.

‘Is there any milk?’ he asked Miranda.

‘Have a look in the fridge.’

By the time he had produced two cups of coffee and set one down in front of Miranda, the other three had got up and were preparing to leave.

‘Might have a drink at the pub,’ Colin said, winding a scarf of Indian silk around his neck.

The kitchen was quiet after they had gone.

‘Why do I suddenly feel like the butt of some incomprehensible joke?’ Amos said abruptly into the silence.

Miranda thoughtfully drank some coffee, then replaced the cup in its saucer.

‘Do you?’

‘It reminds me of when we were students. It’s all coming back to me. I was forever arriving a crucial minute too late, after the decision had been made or the punch line delievered. Have I spent getting on for forty years demonstrating that I am not some egregious hanger-on, only to step back into a room with all of you in it to feel a callow nineteen all over again?’

The corners of Miranda’s mouth lifted. ‘I don’t know. But isn’t it rather good, in its way? Rather rejuvenating?’

He stared at her, trying to work out whether he was being teased.

‘No, I don’t think so.’

Miranda made herself be serious. ‘You’re not going to regret moving up here, Amos, are you?’ She didn’t want any of them to regret the decision, not even for a moment.

‘Katherine loves it.’ Amos’s expertise in deflecting questions was considerable. ‘Even in the car when we were driving up, I noticed how gleeful she was. She likes the life here better than living with me in London, that’s quite obvious. She seems happier now than at any time since the boys left home.’ He added, ‘Of course, I’m glad about that.’ His big hands, lightly clasped, rested on the table.

Miranda stood up and came to him. She put her arm over his shoulders and Amos flinched, just perceptibly, as if he feared what might happen next.

‘What about you ?’ she murmured.

‘I want to get my house built.’

‘Yes. But what do you feel about being here at Mead, with the rest of us? We did all that talking about money and business and land and security and contracts, but I don’t think we – or you – did much more than mention the communal aspects.’

‘It’s a business arrangement, isn’t it?’ Amos said briskly. He ducked his head from beneath Miranda’s chin.

Miranda stood upright. Her expressive face showed the depth of her conviction. ‘But I want it to be more than that. For me, for Mead, for all of us. I want it to be about faith, and friendship, and the way that those values outlast, survive longer than marriage. Children grow up and go. Partners die, or leave, or whatever they do. What have you got left that means more than what we have here, the six of us?’

‘How about work? Call it achievement, if you prefer. Hindsight, that’s always a gift. Wealth, even, if you like. Quite a number of significant things, anyway.’

She slid her narrow hands into the back pockets of her trousers and paced away to the dresser.

‘I was thinking more emotionally.’

He widened his eyes in a show of amazement. ‘Really? You were, Mirry, of all people?’

‘Stop it, Amos. You said a minute ago that you felt unnerved by being with us again. That’s an emotional response. It’s an acknowledgement that we do have something significant here, between us all, old friends.’

Her eyes met his. The lids drooped and there were fans of wrinkles at the corners but otherwise her face was not much altered by the years. Miranda had always been a beauty. As far as Amos was concerned she was one of those women who ought to come stamped with a warning notice. Luckily, he might have added, she was not his cup of tea.

He said, ‘What we’ve got here is Selwyn going berserk, Polly being exaggeratedly patient with him, my wife suddenly as happy as Larry in spite of our various not insignificant problems, Colin who is clearly ill, you being your mystical self, and me, waiting for the bloody builders to come and start building my house .’