Lovers and Newcomers
Rosie Thomas

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2010

Copyright © Rosie Thomas 2010

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016 Jacket photographs © Shutterstock.com

Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007285945

Ebook Edition © April 2016 ISBN: 9780007321513

Version: 2016-04-20

Dedication

To Theo

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

September

One

Two

October

Three

Four

Five

Six

November

Seven

Eight

Nine

December

Ten

Eleven

Christmas

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

February

Fifteen

Spring

Sixteen

June

Miranda

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading: Daughter of the House

About the Author

Also by Rosie Thomas

About the Publisher

SEPTEMBER

ONE

The old house has been cold and empty for so long, but now it’s stirring. A joint of the oak stair treads releases a sudden sharp snap, a window left open for air rattles in a gust of wind, and the scent of baking rises from the kitchen.

The place is coming back to life around me.

I am making cakes for tea, and already I have looked into each of the guest rooms at least three times in order to enjoy the sight of folded towels and the little jugs of flowers placed on chests of drawers. Meadow flowers from Mead fields; oxeye daisies, and cow parsley, which has shed a faint dust of grey pollen on the waxed wood. I reach out to sweep away the powder with my little finger, before deciding that it looks pretty as it is.

Not that my old friends will be guests, of course.

They will belong here, they do belong here, that’s why they are coming. I’m excited at the prospect, the pleasure of anticipation tautened with nerves, like a child before a birthday. This thought makes me laugh as I close the bedroom door. Childhood is a very long way off, for all of us. That’s part of the story.

It’s already four o’clock. A hot afternoon, for September. Only the angle of the sun, which has altered from full day to the first suggestion of evening just while I have been lingering in a doorway, suggests that autumn stalks not far off.

They’ll be here soon.

As I walk down the stairs the longcase clock that stands in the hall chimes the hour, echoed today by the faint, damped note of the village church bell. You can only hear the church bell ringing when the wind blows from the south-west, Jake told me that when he first brought me here.

My late husband would be pleased with what’s happening at Mead. I’m sure he would. I whisper to him in my head, as I sometimes do, in the way people who have become used to living alone conduct imaginary dialogues.

We lived our time here just the two of us, Jake, and came neither to want or need any other company. But without you there is too much time and silence. The house withers, and so do I.

From today there will be a new order, and different voices in the old rooms and outside under the heavy trees. The novelty, though, will have a retrospective glimmer that suits Mead, feeding it like wax polish on old wood. Selwyn and Amos and the others are your old friends as well as mine. Although this plan of mine will throw us all into new alignments, we have years of history between us.

In the kitchen I lift the tins out of the oven and turn out my cakes to cool on wire racks near the open window. A huge bumble bee flusters against the glass so I find a muslin-covered frame to place over them. But I find myself standing, lost in thought, my fingers still gripping the harmless frame as the bee escapes into the breeze.

I want this experiment to succeed. I want it so much.

From three different directions, three vehicles were converging on the old house in its cradle of fields and trees.

Selwyn Davies cursed as he ground the gears of the borrowed van yet again.

‘This thing is a heap of shit. It’s knackered. It’s about as old as me, and just as useless.’

His partner didn’t look up from the newspaper she held in two hands, braced at chest level. Partner is a gruesome bloody word, Polly would say, but what are you supposed to call the person you never married but have lived with for thirty years and have three kids by?

‘You’re not old, or useless. Stop saying you are.’

‘Is there any more tea in the flask, Poll?’

She sighed. ‘Do you want to stop?’

‘No. I just want some tea.’

‘You’re driving.’

‘Am I? Oh, right. Thanks. Might have overlooked that if you hadn’t reminded me.’

Polly smiled. ‘It’s not far now. I’d offer to drive, if I thought you’d agree to change over.’

‘This gearbox. You wouldn’t want to tangle with it, my love, believe me.’

Polly roughly folded her newspaper and rummaged in the Tesco bag at her feet. She brought out a dented Thermos flask, wedged it between her knees to remove the cup lid and unscrew the cap beneath, then poured the last dregs of beige tea. She nestled the cup in Selwyn’s outstretched hand.

‘Ta.’ He drained the tea at a gulp, gave the cup back without looking at her. He shifted from buttock to buttock and stretched his neck in a futile attempt to ease the perennial ache in his back, then wound down the window and rested his elbow on the sill. Draught tore through the cab of the van, harrying Polly’s newspaper and blowing his hair into a demented-looking crest. They reached the crown of a low hill and gathered speed. Selwyn tapped the dial and crowed, ‘Look at that. Fifty mph.’

‘Downhill, with a following wind,’ they both added.

They often said the same things at the same time. Studying Selwyn as he drove, his teeth bared in a grimace and his fists locked on the wheel, Polly thought he looked like a pirate. She still found him attractive, even after thirty years. He made her laugh, and at other times the stab of love for him made her catch her breath.

‘You know,’ he said as they slowed to a crawl up the next hill, ‘I never thought I’d end up going to live with her.’

‘You live with me, Sel. Having her next door is a domestic technicality, not a contract in the biblical sense.’

He seemed to turn this over in his mind.

‘It’s her place. She’s milady of the manor, isn’t she?’

‘It’s our place. We’re making it ours, from now on. That’s the whole idea.’

‘We’ll see how it turns out. Anyway,’ he added with a flash of a grin, ‘it’s too late now, eh?’

Selwyn loved the whiff of burning boats, and the wild leap for freedom out of the snapping jaws of disaster. It made him a tiring companion, but an interesting one.

‘Yup.’ Polly disentangled her newspaper, and seemed to concentrate on the arts pages.

In one of the two cars that were heading towards Mead, a silver Jaguar driven very confidently by her husband at unnecessarily high speed, Katherine Knight imagined how an eye in the sky might see them all. Three specks of metal, flashing an occasional point of light when chrome caught the sun, moving through a chequerboard of pasture and crops. Where they were going there was only farmland, and a scatter of villages, and then the white-laced edge of the land where it broke off into the sea. Katherine let out a small gasp, as if she were thinking so hard about what was to come that she had actually forgotten to breathe. Amos Knight glanced at her. He was wearing a blue shirt, crisply ironed, the cuffs folded back.

‘Are you happy?’

It was an unusual question, for Amos. She said at once, ‘Yes. Excited, too. What about you?’

He changed down with a dextrous flick and accelerated past a muck-spreader that was leaving a trail of brown clods on the crown of the road. He raised a hand, flat-palmed, in a magisterial salute as the other driver dwindled to a speck in the rear-view mirror.

‘Good, good. That’s what I like to hear.’

He concentrated on her answer and ignored the question. It had always been a trick of his to act as if he bestowed everything upon her, as if her life itself somehow flowed from its source in him and its abundance was his generous gift.

Katherine let her head fall back against the leather of the seat headrest.

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.

Colin carried his drink to a table facing the dartboard. He centred the straight glass on a circular beer mat, drew out a chair and sat down. He was very tired, not just because of the drive to Meddlett. He resisted the urge to tip his head back against the dado rail and close his eyes on the saloon bar. Instead he took a mouthful of beer. A man in checkered trousers, white jacket and neckerchief looked in through the door. He was dark, eastern European, perhaps Turkish, Colin guessed. The chef briefly met his eye, then withdrew.

There was a laminated menu slotted into a small wooden block on the table in front of him. Colin studied it.

‘Why not try our delicious smoked haddock hotpot?’ it queried. ‘Served with chips and salad.’

He wondered, if he were going to eat here, whether he would choose the hotpot over the Moroccan-style lamb tagine or the hot and spicy Thai noodles. There wasn’t much hope of getting away from the chips. He wondered how life would be if he didn’t move forwards or backwards but took a room right here at the Griffin, eavesdropping on the conversations of strangers and submerging himself in a lake of Adnam’s.

Miranda and Polly and the others would come looking for him. However he tried to evade them they would search him out and take him by the arm, kindly but unstoppably, and lead him to Mead. In his present directionless state this thought was vaguely comforting. He didn’t want not to be at Mead any more strongly than he wanted not to be anywhere else. He would occupy one of Miranda’s several spare bedrooms, listen to the conversations of his old friends, and his external inertia would secretly mirror the other lack of function that he had yet to come to terms with.

Miranda had been a bright, unsteady flame when he first knew her.

He could see her as she had been, as vividly as if that early version of her had just danced into the room. She wore her black hair in thick ropes, pinned up anyhow, and the tangled, reckless volume of it made her thin arms and legs and narrow waist seem all the more elegantly fragile. She had appeared like some newborn quadruped, all unsteady limbs and wet eyelashes, but with a healthy young animal’s instinctive hold on life. Miranda had been at all the parties, all the Hunger Lunches and demos and concerts and poetry readings, dressed in her tiny skirts and suede jerkins and velvet cloaks and dippy hats. He didn’t think she had been to all that many lectures, but that wouldn’t have mattered because Miranda was going to be an actress. She had scaled the university’s various social ladders, hand over hand, and perched near the top rung of all of them. She had been, decidedly, a success.

Colin was almost sure that he could remember the actual party where they had all joked about their commune-to-be.

There had been a small room, probably somewhere up Divinity Road, every wall and hard surface painted purple, filled with mattresses and candles and joss sticks, the reek of joints and half-cured Afghan coats.

Amos had definitely been there. Amos was a somewhat marginal figure in those days. He had been to a public school, while the rest of them took pride in the fact that they had not. He played rugby and would disappear slightly shame-facedly on weekday afternoons to train at the university sports ground, often vanishing on Saturdays as well to play in college matches. Like the rest of them he wore loons and tie-dyed vests, but his hair never seemed to grow quite long enough to eradicate the school prefect’s neat side-parting and razor-clipped neck. Amos was loudly a member of the University Communist Club. When he got drunk he liked to link arms with his friends and zigzag home chanting ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’.

Selwyn had been there too, laughing and skinning up, all red mouth and lean, flat belly. Selwyn’s little jumpers and shrunken vests tended to ride up and away from the tops of his velvet pants to expose disconcerting, lickable expanses of his smooth skin. It was Selwyn who would have been responsible for the music, most probably at that time precisely on the groovy cusp between the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin. Colin acknowledged to himself that he had no real idea; even in those days he had preferred Verdi. But Selwyn would have known. Selwyn ran a mobile disco called Blue Peony out of his Dormobile van. He often played at student balls and big parties, standing at the decks in headphones, dappled by the bloom of strobe lights and enclosed within a three-deep ring of girls.

Polly had been there too, talking hard and gesticulating and prodding the air to make a point. Not Katherine, though. Katherine came along later.

And Miranda of course. Wherever Selwyn was, in those days, Miranda went. Miranda had got up to dance between the tangle of legs. She made vine-tendril twisting motions with her small white hands, swaying with her eyes closed, hair falling down her back in a thick dark river. Colin watched Selwyn who watched Miranda who was wandering happily in her own universe.

‘It’s not going to happen,’ Polly said. ‘Not to us. Never. We’ve got the Pill now, they’ll have developed a magic medicine bullet by the time we’re fifty. We’ll all take it, we’re going to stay young and beautiful.’

‘If you want to be loved,’ Colin hummed, but nobody heard him.

‘That’s rubbish,’ Amos scoffed. ‘Medical and technological advances haven’t quite got to the point where they can stop you hitting fifty, Polly, and then sixty and seventy, and then you’ll die. But we’re young now, that’s what counts. We’re going to start making a difference as soon as we can.’

‘What difference?’ someone yawned.

‘We’ll bring down the old order, establish the new. Attack the morbid old institutions, the BBC, the party political system, the monarchy…’

This was not a previously unheard speech of Amos’s.

‘The class system, the public schools…’ Polly patiently and amusedly listed for him.

Colin stirred himself. He had smoked enough of Amos’s hash to realize that he knew secrets and understood mysteries, and should concentrate on those insights instead of dissipating precious energy on worrying about his clothes and the exams.

‘Listen, man. Before long, Americans will be standing on the moon. Think of that. Why can’t there be a cure for old age?’

‘There is. It’s called death,’ Amos snapped.

Miranda had gyrated to the window. She leaned her hot forehead against the cool glass and then gave a little cry.

‘Look. Oh, look. Everyone.’

Heads turned. The moon was a pale, perfect disc sailing through streamers of cloud.

Miranda breathed, ‘Imagine it. Men on the moon. How…beautiful. Their footprints will be up there in the dust, you know, for ever and ever. I’m envious. I’d like that to be my epitaph.’

‘If Polly and Colin are right, you won’t be needing an epitaph. You’ll still be here, cluttering the place up.’

‘Oh, I don’t think I want that at all. What I’d like when the time comes is to be a magnificent old lady. With a brilliant, scandalous history. Frail of course, rather grand, greatly loved. Deeply mourned, when I go.’ She lifted her arm, the trumpet sleeve of her velvet dress falling back to leave her wrist bare. ‘You know what? I’ve got the most amazing idea. When we are all old, if it has to happen, we should live together in a fabulous, outrageous commune. We should all come back together again, at the other end of our lives, when we’ve achieved everything we want to, and just refuse to do what old people do.’

‘Old people being like my gran, you mean?’ a boy interrupted. ‘She sits in a chair all day waiting to be taken to the toilet, and begs for her cup of tea because she can’t remember she had it five minutes ago?’

Miranda looked on him with pity. ‘It won’t be like that. Not for us,’ she said. ‘Polly’s talking about it all being different by then, not about actual immortality.’

‘Christ,’ Amos said. ‘What is all this? There’s so much to be done now. Why are we talking about what’s going to happen to us in a hundred years time?’

‘I like my idea,’ Miranda insisted.

Selwyn stirred himself. He reached up to grasp Miranda’s wrist, and drew her back into the circle. She had stuck sequins along her cheekbones and they flashed in the candlelight.

‘Then you shall have what you want,’ he told her. Most of them laughed. Selwyn was joking, but the joke was in part a reference to his acknowledged supremacy and power in the group. What Selwyn decided usually came to pass.

Silence had fallen after that. In their different ways they were all thinking about the conversation and peering, into the chinks between the phrases, at the remote and chilly landscape of their old age. It had seemed no less distant than the moon.

Or perhaps it was just me who was contemplating it, Colin thought now.

Maybe the others were all far too preoccupied with the constant murmur of sex. Or the roar of sedition, in Amos’s case.

‘He’s mine, for fuck’s sake. You’re not having him, whatever you say.’

The sudden shout made Colin jump. The young couple who had been sitting in the window were now on their feet and measuring up to each other as if they were about to trade blows. The dog jumped off the bench and whimpered and the boy grabbed at the lead clipped to its collar. The girl reached to snatch at the lead too. In doing so she lost her footing and overbalanced against Colin’s table. It tilted sharply and his glass slid off and smashed on the floor. Beer and shards splashed over his shoe and sock.

‘Shit, Jessie,’ the boy hissed.

The girl turned to look at what she had done, but she didn’t miss the opportunity to grab the lead out of the boy’s hand first.

‘Bugger off,’ she told him.

The boy was scarlet in the face and everyone in the room was looking at him. Beer dripped off the leg of Colin’s trousers.

‘You’re a cow,’ the boy told the girl. He banged past the table and marched out of the bar. The dog whined again, and then consoled itself by lapping at the puddle of spilled beer.

‘Mind the glass, Raff,’ the girl screeched. She jerked on the lead to haul the animal out of danger, and anchored him to the leg of a heavier table. She and Colin stooped together and began to gather up the shards of broken glass.

‘I’m really, really sorry,’ the girl muttered. ‘He wanted to take my dog, you know?’

‘Watch out,’ the barman said, arriving with a cloth and a dustpan. The girl mopped up the puddle as he swept the debris away. Colin ruefully examined his wet ankle, shaking off the tinkly remnants of broken glass.

‘Shall I, like, mop you up as well?’ She made some flapping movements with the dingy cloth. Colin took a folded white handkerchief out of his pocket and did the job for himself.

‘It’s all right. No permanent damage,’ he said, sounding pompous in his own ears.

‘Really? You’d better let me buy you another drink, though, since the last one went in your shoe.’

Colin sat upright and looked at her. She was no more than eighteen, with a pretty, monkeyish face. Her open top showed the upper tendrils of a tattoo extending above her right breast. She smiled suddenly at him, and Colin smiled back.

‘Just a half,’ he said.

‘Right. What was it?’

‘That one,’ he pointed. The dog watched with its ears pricked as she bought two halves and carried them back to the table.

‘There you go. Can I join you? Just split with my bloke, haven’t I? Mind you, that’s no great loss. He’s a disaster. This is Rafferty, by the way.’ The dog’s tongue fell out of its mouth. ‘And I’m Jessie.’

‘Colin,’ Colin said. ‘Sorry about the boyfriend.’

‘Uh, well. There’s not a lot of choice round here, that’s the thing. It’s make the best of what there is or DIY, if you get me.’

Colin laughed.

‘So, you on holiday?’

‘Not exactly,’ Colin said.

Jessie took a packet of Golden Virginia and some Rizlas out of her pocket and began to construct a roll-up. ‘It’s all right,’ she pre-empted the barman’s protest. ‘There’s no law against making a fag, is there? I’m not going to smoke it in here.’

She turned her attention back to Colin. ‘So?’

‘I have a friend, some friends, who live near here. I’m just visiting. For a few days, maybe longer.’

‘Where’s that, then?’

‘Mead House. Do you know it?’

Jessie turned down the corners of her expressive mouth and wagged her head from side to side.

‘La-di-dah.’

‘Is it?’

‘Yeah, it’s posh for this part of the world.’ She gave a quick cough of laughter, and at the same time checked out Colin’s shoes and watch. ‘Dead posh. You should see the places that aren’t. Open your eyes a bit, that would.’

‘Do you live in, uh, Meddlett?’

‘Yup. Born and bred. And Damon.’

‘Damon?’

‘Him.’ She jerked her head to the door.

‘Why was he trying to take your dog?’

‘He did belong to both of us. Me and Damon’re living together, right? Rented a place off this bloke who was going abroad, and we got the dog as well, the same time, from a dogs’ home. Made us seem like a family. But the bottom line is he’s mine. Raff knows it, Damon knows it. He was trying it on, just now, that’s all.’

Jessie raised her chin, but Colin could see that she was on the verge of tears. Rafferty pulled himself forward almost to throttling point in order to rest his jaw on the corner of her knee. He rolled his eyes upwards and Jessie stroked his head.

‘Can’t stay with us, Raff, can he? He’ll have to find himself somewhere else to live. Fucking loser,’ she muttered.

‘What do you do, Jessie? Have you got a job?’

She sniffed. ‘Yeah. Course. I’m not one of those scroungers. I’ve been on the casual all summer, since I left sixth-form college. Cleaning. You know, holiday lets and that. End of the season, now, though. I could go on the agricultural, but that’s mostly for the foreigners. Have to think about uni, won’t I, next year? Now me and Damon are finished.’

‘That sounds to me like a good idea.’

He was becoming quite the embodiment of pomposity, Colin thought. He glanced at his watch. Somehow it was now twenty minutes to nine. They had finished their drinks while they were talking.

‘Yeah, I gotta go too,’ Jessie said at once. She stood up abruptly and detached Rafferty’s lead. ‘Night all,’ she called loudly to the other customers. Four pairs of eyes watched them as they filed out.

In the car park, Colin took a deep breath and gave thanks for the fact that he hadn’t tried to buy them both another drink. It was a long time since he had consumed even two pints of beer.

‘Nice talking to you,’ Jessie muttered.

He noticed that there was a full moon behind the tall trees that lined the car park wall, a pale disc floating behind branches and stirring up memories.

‘Can I give you a lift anywhere?’

Jessie was grinning as she considered him. ‘We-ell. Don’t suppose you’re going to jump on me, are you?’

‘No.’ Not you, or anyone else.

‘All right. It’s the same way you’re going, anyway.’

Jessie sat beside him with the dog pressed between her knees. They drove in silence, down an empty road turned pewter by the moonlight.

‘Just in here,’ she said abruptly, after a mile. The car nosed into a break in the hedgerow barred by a lopsided gate.

‘Know your way from here, do you? It’s another mile, then stone gateposts on the right.’

‘Yes. I’ve been there before.’

‘See you around, Col.’

The dog bounded out, followed by the girl. Jessie vaulted the gate, the dog squeezed between the lower bars, and they both vanished into the darkness.

When he turned the corner in the drive, Mead was a blazing patchwork of light that dimmed the moon. Colin sat for a few minutes and stared at the yellow windows, watching as figures passed back and forth inside. It had turned cold under the crackling stars and he shivered.

Miranda was standing outside the dining-room door as he slipped into the house. She wore her hair in a neat silvery bob but now there were strands sticking out all over her head, and she had the look of just having recovered from laughing very hard.

‘Here you are at last,’ she exclaimed to him. ‘Thank goodness. Why’s your phone turned off? We were about to send out a search party.’

‘I guessed you might,’ Colin said.

She kissed him, her mouth rubbing against his, her hands cupping his face.

‘Darling, you’re freezing. Come on, come and get warm. Have you eaten? Amos wanted us all to play Sardines. For a moment it looked as though we might have to, but things have moved on.’

‘I was held up, sorry I’m late. What’s going on?’

‘Fun.’ Miranda tilted her head back so that she could look squarely at him. Her eyes were brilliant. ‘It is, you know. Remember? I didn’t expect getting together to be quite so lively.’

‘Good,’ he said simply. ‘That’s a really good start.’

She took his hand, lacing her fingers through his, and drew him into the dining room.

‘He’s finally arrived.’

Four faces turned at once. Colin had the momentary, disconcerting sense of having slipped back into another time.

These people were not the same age as he felt; they were not medically ravaged or disappointed in love or grown cynical in the wake of too much compromise. They were students, sprawled and giggly and careless. He blinked. The difference was that the empty bottles on the table had held champagne, the crumbs scattered between the place settings were Stilton and oatcakes and the smoke was from Amos’s cigar. But there was a glitter in the air that was even more startling, a mineral sparkle that was nothing to do with the candlelight or Katherine’s earrings. Dust was not settling; currents of anticipation set the motes whirling. The room felt charged, as if a single spark might ignite a blaze.

Selwyn leaped up and spread his arms out wide.

‘Never trust anyone over seventy, Col.’

Polly left her seat and came to Colin’s side, wrapping an arm around him and dropping her head on his shoulder.

‘Don’t listen to him. We were just talking about the old days. How are you feeling? Are you well?’

Polly always emanated warmth and ease, not just because of her rounded haunches and broad, well-fleshed back, or her apparent happy security within the solid defences of her body. Unusually, and unlike Amos, her cleverness didn’t make her impatient. She listened and remembered and so her sympathy could be depended on, but she was also clear-sighted and wasn’t afraid to be brisk, or even truthful. She was the member of the group with whom Colin felt most comfortable. If he loved anyone, in the objective and unspoken and theoretical manner that was all that was left to him nowadays, it was Polly Ettridge.

‘I feel fine.’

Looking from Polly down the length of the table, to the faces and the backdrop of old furniture and folded dim curtains, he realized that he really did feel fine. Now that he had actually arrived at Mead.

He found his way to a place at the table end. Miranda placed a dish of blackberry tart with ivory clots of thick cream in front of him, with a wineglass of champagne. Colin had a sweet tooth. He attacked the pudding and then took a swig of champagne. He brandished the glass.

‘Here’s to the big Mead adventure.’

‘Jake would have enjoyed this, wouldn’t he?’ Miranda said.

In their different ways, in the small pool of silence that followed, each of them acknowledged his absence. The scale of it, the absolute way that Jake had left them, had gone and died, was made harder to contemplate because they were so alive tonight.

After a moment Colin asked deliberately, ‘What stage are the plans at now? Fill me in.’

Amos sat back in his chair. He described how the new house would rise on a sloping plot of land hidden by a belt of trees to the south-west of the house. It was to be uncompromisingly modern with impeccable green credentials. The last adjustments to the plans, to meet the requirements of the local authority planning committee, were now in progress. Building work, Amos announced, would soon be starting. In the meantime, once the move up here was completed, he and Katherine were going to make a temporary home in the one-time holiday wing at the back of Mead.

‘We need to be right here. Keep an eye on the contractors,’ Amos said.

There was a collective shifting in seats, another change in the glittering currents of air as no one mentioned the real reason why Amos was leaving London and his chambers.

Katherine thoughtfully broke off a piece of oatcake and bit it in half. She was the only one who had changed before dinner, into an amethyst silk shift dress. Anything that plain and unadorned, Miranda reckoned, must have cost well into four figures.

‘We’re looking forward to it. Living in a holiday cottage will be like being on holiday,’ Katherine laughed.

Selwyn nodded. ‘Maybe it will.’

Miranda listened to his deep voice rather than the actual words. She knew what Selwyn’s plans were. From now on Polly and he would be living here too. They were going to do most of the work on the derelict wing themselves. She didn’t doubt Selwyn’s ability to tackle the job, or Polly’s willingness to assist him.

Selwyn had read medicine at university, but he had never completed his clinical practice. He had moved to Somerset instead, to a ramshackle cottage, where he set up a business buying, restoring and reselling antique furniture. Over the years, as the supply of undervalued old gems in need of a French polish seemed to dwindle, he had gone into buying timber and making furniture himself, and once Polly had given up academia and joined him they had run the business together. Polly wrote historical biographies in the short hours that were left to her between the furniture business and bringing up three children.

Miranda never knew precisely how successful or otherwise their enterprises had been, but it was no secret that they had never had any money to spare. The Somerset house and the workshops had finally been sold, and they had bought their piece of Mead from her.

Selwyn flexed his chisel-scarred fingers and grinned. ‘I’m busting to get started.’

That was obvious enough. The undischarged electricity that flickered in the room seemed to crackle about him, just as it had done when they were young.

Miranda looked across at Colin, inviting him to take his turn.

‘I’ll monitor progress and supply strong drink when required. When I’m not working I’ll stay if and when Miranda lets me.’

Colin was a theatre set designer. Mostly he worked in London, but sometimes a job took him to Italy or New York. Unlike the others he was not planning to move to Mead for good. Miranda leaned over and covered his hand with hers.

‘There are nine bedrooms in this house. Be here with us as much as you can,’ she implored.

Colin needed to be with somebody, after everything he had been through. They all thought that, not just Miranda. And if not with them, then whom?

‘Thanks, Miranda. Here I am.’

Selwyn had fidgeted and twitched through all the talking. Now he tipped back half a glass of red wine and jumped to his feet.

‘Sitting for hours makes my back ache. Where’s the music, Mirry?’

‘Next door.’

He bounded through a set of double doors, dragging the white loops of earphones and a black iPod out of his pocket. Ten seconds later music crashed out of the speakers.

‘C’mon, let’s dance,’ Selwyn hollered.

They groaned, but left their seats. It was ‘Baba O’Reilly’.

Selwyn kicked back a rug to expose dusty oak floorboards. They launched into the dance, laughing and kicking out their arms and legs and swinging their buttocks, without the embarrassed scorn of the Knight boys or Selwyn and Polly’s son and twin daughters to inhibit them. The Who were succeeded by Pink Floyd.

‘Haven’t you heard of the Arctic Monkeys, Selwyn?’ Amos shouted.

‘No, and neither have you.’

Katherine, flushed and beaming, was jiving with Colin. As always Amos missed every beat but made up for it with general enthusiasm.

Watching the dancing, her nervous anticipation melted into delight at the success of the first evening, Miranda noticed that there was no wine left on the table. She thought of the remaining bottles of Bollinger in the fridge in the pantry and slipped out into the hall to collect one or two of them. A narrow passage behind the stairs, lined with coats and cluttered with wellingtons, provided a short cut directly to the pantry. She didn’t need to switch on the lights, she knew every creak underfoot and every draught on her cheek, so she swore softly when her ankle connected sharply with a suitcase that Amos had brought in and left there. As she stopped to let the pain subside there was a rustle and a darker shape moved against the darkness.

It was Selwyn. She knew the scent of him before he reached for her, before his lips touched her ear.

‘You are beautiful, Barb. You’re so fucking gorgeous tonight, I don’t know where to put myself.’

‘And you’re pissed, Sel.’

‘No, I’m not.’

Even though it was pitch dark Miranda could see the lines of his profile. Through the muffle of waxed jackets and tweed caps she could hear pairs of feet thudding to the beat.

‘You didn’t always think I was gorgeous.’

There was a ripple of amusement in her voice.

‘Oceans of water have flowed under more bridges than there are in Venice, since those days,’ he protested.

He kissed her and she responded with a sharp intake of breath that seemed to catch in his throat.

‘Stop it,’ Miranda breathed, but they still hung together. He ran his fingers over her throat, down to the open buttons of her top.

She did move then, forcing herself to duck under his arm and skip away to the kitchen. He followed her, into the bright lights and the debris of cooking.

‘Take a couple of those bottles through for me?’

‘Amos has had quite enough already.’

‘So have you,’ she countered.

In the drawing room they were still dancing. Miranda was relieved that no one had missed them, even though all that had happened was a kiss exchanged by friends at the end of a long evening.

Everyone is asleep.

I could just hear the low rumble of Amos talking to Katherine as they undressed, but that stopped a while ago. Selwyn and Polly will be under the bedcovers, oblivious too. I imagine them spooned together, breathing in unison, Selwyn’s dark face crumpled up against her dimpled shoulder.

Amos will be wearing pyjamas, Katherine a nightie, but Polly and Sel will sleep naked. I remember what that felt like, the safety of interlocked bodies, the balm of skin against skin.

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.

TWO

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.

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.’

Miranda saw that Katherine had been right, the rain had stopped and a dilute sun now shone in on them.

Amos muttered, ‘But, even so, I’m moderately pleased to find myself here.’

Her smile reflected the sun. She skipped back to his side, kissed the top of his head and flattened his upstanding hair.

‘Oh, that’s good. Very good.’

‘I don’t know how it will turn out, though,’ he warned her. ‘I bought into a plot of rural land for development, at a good price, thank you, not into a new-age nest of nightmares.’

‘Sweet dreams,’ Miranda laughed.

Colin and Polly and Katherine took the footpath that skirted a series of fields on the way to Meddlett. The sky to the west was the blue of a bird’s egg, and the yellow leaves in the hedges hung luminous in the oblique light. Polly led the way, brushing through soaking long grass and tramping down the arms of brambles so that the others could pass. She walked briskly, and soon drew ahead. Katherine found that she was breathing hard, and looked back to see whether Colin wanted to overtake her. But he was strolling with his hands in his pockets, apparently studying the edge of the rain clouds where a bright rim of liquid gold shone against the grey.

The clean, damp air swelled her lungs. She liked the gleam of the wet leaves, and the iridescent trails of slugs glossing the stones.

Katherine was unused to country walking. She had grown up in Hampstead, and Sunday walks on the Heath with her parents had marked the limits of rural exploration. She had lived all her married life with Amos in London, and apart from occasional games of tennis and some gentle skiing there had been no call to exert herself. In his forties Amos had taken to going on trekking holidays, but always with male friends and colleagues. The idea of leaving the boys and accompanying him to Nepal had seemed so far-fetched to her in those days that it had never even been discussed. Nowadays Amos was too heavy for the mountains, and preferred a tropical beach.

Polly sat down on a stile and waited for her to catch up.

‘Am I going too fast?’ she asked.

‘Yes, but I like it. You know the way?’

‘Sel and I walked along here the other night.’

‘Did you? Going to the village?’

Polly shook her head. ‘Just having a walk together. He can’t work every minute of the day and night, but he gets so restless.’ She picked off a yellow leaf that was blotched with dark spots like skin growths, and twirled it in her fingers.

‘I noticed that,’ Katherine said.

‘I wish he’d relax more,’ Polly murmured.

‘Why does he drive himself so hard?’

Amos had driven himself too, especially in his early years at the Bar, but he always claimed that it was work undertaken ultimately to generate the time and money that would allow him to enjoy himself. A simple equation, Katherine reflected. And of course, as it was her habit to acknowledge, he had always been generous with the money.

Buying you off? A voice that she didn’t recognize startlingly murmured inside her head. She ignored it, and concentrated her attention on Polly.

‘Because he thinks he has fucked up,’ Polly answered in a level voice. ‘He thinks that he’s failed with everything else in his life, therefore he’s trying to compensate by building us a new home overnight, using his bare hands. We’re totally broke, you know. We had to sell the house, finally, to pay off the debts, and we’ve put just about everything that was left into the Mead barn.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘No one does, really. Don’t tell Amos, will you? He and Sel are so competitive.’

‘He’d probably try to give you some money.’

‘Exactly,’ Polly smiled, without much humour.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’ll have to get a job.’

‘In the furniture business again?’

‘No. I’m sick to death of wood and patina and British brown.’

‘Writing more books, then?’

‘I don’t think so, no. That’s the kind of work that you have to demonstrate some continuity in. I’m not sure if any publisher these days would be interested in me popping up with a proposal for a new life of Mary Seacole or someone. I mean a job job.’

‘I see,’ Katherine nodded.

‘Wish I did. But I’ll think of something.’

‘Of course you will.’

‘Do you need an assistant at the charity?’

‘No.’ Katherine was slightly in awe, even after so many years, of Polly’s academic and literary achievements. Polly would never make a belittling or even clever rejoinder if you made a mistake or revealed your ignorance in some way, she was far too gentle for that, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t if the circumstances were different. Katherine didn’t think that someone with opinions as definite as Polly’s would fit particularly easily into their quiet offices.

‘Oh, well.’ Polly sprang off the stile. Her bulk didn’t seem to impede her movements in the least. Polly raised her voice and called, ‘Colin, what are you looking at?’

‘I was just thinking that it’s a very painterly light.’

The answer came quickly enough, but it was obvious to both of them that this wasn’t at all what had been in his mind.

‘Shall we walk on?’ he smoothly suggested.

They followed the path for another half-mile until the fine tower of St Andrew’s, Meddlett came into view between the trees. The footpath joined the minor road into the village just at the sign displaying its name. With a black aerosol spray, someone had rather neatly deleted the ett of Meddlett and added -ing twatz.

‘Not everyone’s mad about village life,’ Colin observed.

The road led past the churchyard gate. There were quiet rows of gravestones. The church itself, Perpendicular with great arched windows, rose like a grey ship out of a smooth green sea.

In the distance, a man with a dog at his heels strolled on the other side of the road, raising his hand to a car as it crept by, and a woman in a green padded coat towed a wheeled shopper. The village street was otherwise deserted, yet they had the sense that they were being watched. The cottages enclosing the central green had low, deep-set windows. There was a pond in the centre of the green, and several ducks pottered on the bank under the willow branches. A bus stop, a post box and a red telephone kiosk stood in a line. The door of the combined general store and post office was open and there were bundles of kindling and logs stacked beside tilted boxes of tired-looking cauliflowers and onions.

Colin went inside to buy a newspaper, but came out without one.

‘You have to order the Guardian,’ he remarked.

Katherine was reminded of the village where she and Amos had stopped for tea on their drive up, and warily looked about her for the gang of teenagers. The fact that there was no one actually in sight under fifty meant that the three of them ought to have blended in perfectly. But they did not. She felt conspicuous, the precise opposite of being in London where the expected blanket of invisibility had indeed fallen around her at some point in her mid forties.

‘Let’s have this drink,’ Colin said.

He steered them past the pond and another row of flint cottages with tiny front gardens until they reached the Griffin. In the bar two silent couples were finishing their food but the table in the window, the one that had been occupied on Colin’s first visit by Jessie and Damon and the dog, was now empty. The same barman was in his place behind the pumps.

‘Afternoon,’ he said, after a pause.

‘Hello, again,’ Colin answered, with slight emphasis. ‘It’s pretty quiet this afternoon.’

‘That’s Meddlett for you,’ the man replied, slowly, as if they were foreign enough for him to be doubtful about their levels of English comprehension.

They chose glasses of wine from the options chalked up on a blackboard. Polly was already telling the barman that no, they were not passing through. They had come to live here. A flicker of interest animated his face.

‘Is that so? At Mead, is it? I’d heard about that. Planning issues, weren’t there, to do with building a new house?’

‘All sorted out now. Aren’t they, Katherine?’

‘It’s my husband’s house.’

Why not say it’s yours too? The discordant new voice niggled in her head.

Colouring slightly she added, ‘Work’s about to start. It’s very secluded. It’s not going to spoil anyone’s view or anything like that.’

‘No? Well. Live and let live, I say, in any case.’ Three glasses of wine were passed over the bar. ‘I’m Vin, by the way.’

They introduced themselves. Polly took the glasses of wine and put them on the window table.

‘We don’t see much of Mrs Meadowe,’ Vin remarked. ‘Her late husband used to come in, after I took this place on. He always said I’d made big improvements. It was a proper dump before that, the old Griffin.’ He was leaning on the bar now, settling in for a talk.

‘We are all old friends of Miranda’s and Jake’s,’ Polly said.

Katherine understood that unlike herself or Colin she was used to the rhythms of country pubs. She knew how much chat to exchange and when to make a cheery move aside. Polly steered them to their table now, closing a deft bracket on the conversation.

The window gave an oblique view of the green. Cars and passers-by in the middle distance now seemed to move very slowly, as in a film playing at the wrong speed.

Polly took a satisfied swallow of her wine.

‘Look at you,’ she said to Katherine.

‘What?’

‘You look beautiful.’

Katherine was startled. After their damp walk she knew exactly how her hair would be frizzing and her nose shining like a fog lamp. Instinctively she put up her hand to fluff out a chunk of hair over one ear.

‘She does,’ Colin agreed. ‘You do.’

Katherine heard a click, like the shutter of a camera. She wished that she might have a picture of this moment, if a camera could have captured the surge of warmth that ran through her blood and loosened her muscles, the unlooked-for buzz of pleasure at finding herself drinking wine in the afternoon with Polly and Colin for company, with a view through the window of amber and crimson leaves, and a word like beautiful in her ears. She couldn’t remember anyone having applied it to her, ever, not even Amos.

How disconnected have you been? the voice chimed in.

‘I don’t think so,’ she began to murmur, but Polly leaned forward and briefly covered Katherine’s hand with hers.

‘It’s all right, you know. You can be beautiful, it’s allowed. You don’t need Amos’s permission. Does she, Colin?’

‘No,’ he agreed.

Katherine thought for a moment. Her instinct was to deflect the compliment, but then, why? She sat forwards, smiling, her fingers lacing around her glass of pub merlot with the chain of purple bubbles at the meniscus.

Everything is going to change.

What did that mean? She was taken aback by the idea.

A burst of loud music suddenly poured through the pendant strings of brown plastic beads and bamboo tubules that separated the back of the bar from the kitchen. Thank you for the music, a woman’s voice warbled.

‘Oi, Jess,’ Vin called over the din. ‘Turn that down, customers can’t hear themselves think.’

There was quite a long interval, and then the volume diminished a little.

One of the pale couples was leaving. A girl appeared in the doorway, where Colin had previously glimpsed the man in chef’s clothing. She came in and gathered up the dirty plates from the vacated table.

‘Hi, I was wondering if you’d be back,’ she called to Colin.

‘Hello Jessie,’ he answered.

Polly and Katherine turned to him in surprise.

‘We met the other night. I came in for a quick drink, and Jessie and her boyfriend were sitting here. We got talking.’

Jessie grinned. ‘You and I did. That loser Damon had buggered off, remember, it was just me and Raff.’ Her eyes flicked from Polly to Katherine. ‘Your, ah, husband gave me a lift home…?’ She made it a pointed question.

‘These are my friends, Polly and Katherine. I’m not married,’ Colin explained.

Jessie glanced at the folds of Colin’s scarf, and his expensive soft jacket.

‘No. So you’re all from Mead, then?’

She shuffled the plates into a precarious pile, scraping leftovers on to the uppermost one. ‘Whoops.’

Cutlery threatened to slide out of the plate sandwich and she dipped her hips and shimmied to tilt the load the other way. She looked very young and cheerful.

‘All of us,’ Polly answered. ‘We’re old friends, we’ve known each other for years, and my husband and I and Katherine and hers have moved up here to be together and not to sink into a decline in our old age.’

‘That’s cool. So it’s like, what did you call it in those days, a commune?’

‘No,’ they said, absolutely in unison.

Miranda was passionate about her scheme and each of the rest of them would have differently defined what they hoped Mead would become, but they had always been unanimous in declaring that it wouldn’t be a commune. Amos had said that communes stood for vegetarianism and free love and bad plumbing, and he would not be interested in any of those separately, let alone in combination.

‘The jury’s out on number two,’ Selwyn had muttered out of the corner of his mouth to Polly at the time. The memory of this made her smile. When she was amused, Polly’s eyes narrowed under heavy lids and her cheeks rounded into smooth apples so that she looked like a thumbnail sketch of a Japanese lady on a packet of egg noodles.

‘It’s more a collaboration, I’d say,’ Polly offered.

‘What about you, then?’ Jessie asked Colin.

‘I come and go,’ he told her.

‘Can’t see my mum doing anything like that. She lives in a bungalow,’ Jessie remarked, as if this entirely defined her.

Vin leaned heavily on the bar. Jessie seemed to feel his glare on her back.

‘I got a job, as you see,’ she announced to Colin, rolling her eyes. She raised her voice slightly. ‘Helping out in the kitchen, bit of cooking, washing up and that. There’s plenty of work around here, not a problem. Are you going to have lunch? We’re supposed to stop at two. Chef’s off today, we’re just microwaving, but I could do you lasagne and chips, or a baked and toppings if you like.’

‘No, we’re fine. We’ll just have our wine. Thanks.’

Jessie nodded and hoisted her pile of plates. ‘Nice to have met you,’ she told Polly and Katherine. ‘Come back one evening. We’ve got live music Fridays and Saturdays, not completely crap, as it goes, then quiz night’s Tuesday.’

‘Amos and Selwyn would love a quiz,’ Katherine said.

‘But they don’t know anything about telly or sport or pop music,’ Colin pointed out.

Jessie turned on him in indignation. ‘Some of the questions are quite intellectual. You should come as well and meet Geza. He’s the chef.’

‘I see.’

‘Sure you won’t have some food?’

They assured her that they would not.

‘Bye, then,’ Jessie said, and danced her way back to the kitchen.

Polly gave her Japanese noodle lady smile. She leaned closer to Colin and lowered her voice. ‘You’ve got the chance of a nice gay chef, by the sound of it.’

‘I’ve already seen him. Not bad at all,’ Colin smiled.

She tapped her hand lightly on his knee.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not even to please you, Polly.’

‘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.

One weekend Miranda’s mother came down from Wolverhampton. Selwyn was banished to his rented room near the hospital. Joyce Huggett was in her forties, a normally outspoken and opinionated woman who was uncomfortable in London, which she hardly knew. She was also a little uncertain of her own daughter these days, because Miranda had gone to an ancient university and had acquired sophisticated friends, and was – or was about to become – an actress.

‘Couldn’t you at least wear white, Barbara? It needn’t be anything bridal. Just a little dress and coat, maybe. I’m thinking of the photographs.’

In Joyce’s own wedding picture, dating from the same month as Princess Elizabeth’s, Joyce was wearing a dress made from a peculiarly unfluid length of cream satin, with her mother’s lace veil. By her side, Miranda’s handsome father smiled in a suit with noticeably uneven lapels. The marriage lasted nine years before he left his wife and daughter for a cinema projectionist.

‘I’m not a virgin, Mum,’ Miranda said.

Mrs Huggett frowned. ‘You’re a modern young woman, I’m well aware of that, thank you. But this will be your wedding day. Don’t you want to look special?’

‘I know what I want,’ Miranda said calmly.

They went together to Feathers boutique in Knightsbridge and chose an Ossie Clark maxi dress, a swirling print of burgundy and cream and russet and rose pink that fell in panels from a tight ribboned bodice. Joyce paid for it and Miranda hugged her in real, unforced, delighted gratitude.

‘It’s perfect,’ she said. She agreed with her mother’s plea for her at least to wear a hat, and they chose a floppy-brimmed felt in dusty pink, from Biba.

‘You look a picture. I hope you’ll be happy, love,’ Joyce murmured.

Selwyn was very quiet. He slept a lot, as if he were clinging to every possible moment of oblivion. Without telling Miranda, he stopped going to lectures and practicals, and he smoked even more dope. Instead of balancing his life out, as he had hoped it would, impending marriage was destabilizing it even further. As soon as she became a bride-to-be, Miranda seemed to slip out of his grasp and turn into someone less compliant, less adoring, much less in his thrall than she had ever been before. She was often irritable with him, and he felt so limp and so hopeless that he knew she could hardly be blamed for that. His only responsibility before the wedding, apart from taking his velvet suit to the cleaners, was to find a flat that they could afford to move into together. He did drag himself out to look at two or three places, but the sheer effort of the process exhausted him, and he was shocked to discover that he couldn’t imagine living in these rooms with Miranda as his wife. He never even suggested that they might visit one of the rickety attics or basements together.

One week before the wedding, he got up very early in the morning and left his fiancée sleeping. From Euston he caught a train to Wolverhampton and then took a taxi to Joyce’s.

When she opened the door to him Joyce thought he had come to tell her that Miranda was ill, or dead. She snatched at his wrists, shouting in panic.

‘Where is she? What’s happened to her?’

‘Let me in,’ he begged. ‘She’s all right, it’s me that’s wrong.’

In the narrow hallway, with bright wallpaper pressing in on him, Selwyn blurted out that he couldn’t marry Miranda after all. In her relief that her daughter wasn’t dead or dying, Joyce turned cold and glittery with anger.

‘Does she know?’

‘No. I’ve come to tell you first.’

‘My God. You cowardly, selfish, pathetic creature.’

‘Yes,’ Selwyn miserably agreed. He didn’t need Joyce to tell him what he was. ‘It isn’t right to marry her. I won’t make her happy.’

Joyce looked him up and down. ‘No. You would not. Right. Now you’ve told me, bugger off out of here. I don’t want to look at your face. And leave my daughter alone, do you hear? We’ll be all right, we always have been, Barbara and me. Just don’t mess up her life any more than you’ve done already.’

‘I won’t do that,’ Selwyn promised.

He was true to his word. He gave up his medical studies, left London, and went to stay with the friends in Somerset who had been going to lend the happy couple their cottage for the honeymoon. He started work with a local carpenter, discovered that he had a talent for woodworking, and in between fitting staircases and kitchen cupboards he began to buy, restore and sell furniture.

Miranda recovered, helped by a rebound affair with an actor.

Seven years later, when Amos Knight married the quiet, pretty girl called Katherine whom he had met at the house of one of the other young barristers in his chambers, Miranda wore to their wedding the Ossie Clark dress and the Biba hat. The outfit was by then grotesquely out of fashion, but Miranda carried it off. She was on the brink of making a small name for herself as an actress.

I can’t stop myself. Instead of walking out of the kitchen I lift my head, and our eyes meet. Selwyn’s eyelashes and hair are coated with grey dust, as if he’s made up to play an old man on some amateur stage. He doesn’t try to reach out for me again, and I’m sharply aware that this is disappointing. My heart’s banging against my ribs, surely loud enough for him to hear, and my mouth is so dry that I don’t think I can speak.

Why now? Why, after all these years, is this happening again?

The answer comes to me: it’s precisely because of now.

We’re not young any longer, there’s no network of pathways branching invitingly ahead of us. No personae to be tried on for size. We’re what, and who, we are.

But we’re not yet ready to be old.

We stand in the silent kitchen, speechless and gaping like adolescents, but both of us realizing that through decades of duty and habit we’ve somehow forgotten about the thrill of choice: oh God, the breathtaking drama of sexual choice. The cliché that swims into my head might have been made for this instant. I do feel weak at the knees. I’m not sure that my legs will hold me upright.

When I don’t say anything, Selwyn sighs. He brushes his hand through his hair and a shower of splinters and plaster particles fall like snow.

‘Would it be all right for me to have a bath?’ he asks.

‘You don’t have to ask permission. You live here.’ My voice comes out in a croak, sounding as if I’ve borrowed it from someone else.

‘Thank you,’ he says.

I listen to his steps as he goes upstairs, the familiar creak of the oak boards, the clink of the bathroom latch somewhere overhead.

Without giving myself time to think, I run after him.

From the linen cupboard opposite my bedroom door I snatch up an armful of fresh towels. I race along the landing and push at the bathroom door. Not locked. It swings inwards.

The taps are full on and the room is already cloudy with steam.

Selwyn’s barefoot. He’s taken off his filthy sweater and shirt and dropped them on the floor. As soon as he sees me he nudges the clothes gently aside with his bare foot, clearing a space. He holds out his arms.

What I feel is an extraordinary lightening, giddiness, swirling of blood; it’s like being very drunk but with all my senses cleansed and heightened.

‘I’ve brought you some clean towels.’

‘No, you haven’t.’

He snatches the towels and drops them on top of the clothes.

It’s me who takes the last step.

Our mouths meet. Immediately we begin to consume each other, as if we’re starving, with the steam billowing in clouds around us. Out of the corner of my eye, as Selwyn twists off my jersey, I see that the bath is almost overflowing.

Once we’re started, rediscovering the inches of skin and the declivities and shadows of a pair of bodies that were once familiar territory (only yesterday, as it now seems), it’s impossible to stop.

Selwyn fumbles to his knees, drawing me down with him, wrestling to extricate me from absurd layers of vest and straps. Towels coiled with clothes and grit mound beneath us. Water laps at the very rim of the bath.

I hear myself gasping with laughter. ‘There’s going to be a flood.’

‘Fuck it.’

He drags me with him as he strains to reach the taps and stem the tide.

In the quiet that follows, there’s the sound of voices.

‘Oh, sweet Jesus.’ Selwyn slumps back against the side of the bath.

I’m already on my feet, spitting building rubble out of my mouth and frantically raking fingers through my hair. I pull my clothes into a sort of order and plunge out of the bathroom.

Colin and Katherine and Polly are all in the hall below. They’re laughing and exclaiming and apparently having some difficulty in taking off their boots and coats.

Polly glances up and sees me on the landing.

‘Colin’s been getting the eye from a nice young chef,’ she calls.

‘I had to carry these two home, just about,’ Colin says drily.

The hall clock chimes. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon.

Luckily, they’re all too busy and happy to notice anything.

I run down the stairs, relief all but cancelling out guilt.

Ben and Nicola

The boy climbed the flight of stairs that led straight up from the street door. With the usual smell of warm grease from the café following him, he leaned briefly against the thin ply of the flat door and juggled a bunch of flowers, a brown takeaway bag and a carton of milk. He twisted a key in the Yale and the door sighed open. He nudged it further with his hip and wriggled into the dark, confined space beyond.

‘Nic? ’S me.’

No answer came but he shouldered his way cheerfully onwards past the coat pegs and the parked Hoover and a stack of cardboard boxes. The light in the main body of the flat was slightly brighter. There was only one room, L-shaped, with a kitchenette and a partitioned bathroom that would not have passed a health and safety inspection with flying colours. To excuse this Nicola’s Greek landlord told her that he was not making formal rental, no, more like place for his own family, and cheap for now while he wait for his cousin to come and fix up.

Nicola was sitting in the armchair at the end of the room farthest from the unmade bed, next to a window overlooking a row of lock-ups and the fading leaves of a plane tree. Her knees were drawn up to her chest. Ben saw that she was wearing her grey holey jersey and leggings, for about the fourth day running, but she had pulled a little skirt on over the leggings and her hair was freshly washed.

‘Hi, babe, you OK? Look, I got you these.’ He held out the flowers, yellow and white daisies that he had chosen from a green enamel bucket outside the grocer’s at the end of the road. ‘And some soup as well, properly healthy, bean and something. It might have got a bit cold but I can heat it up again, easy. Or would you rather have a cup of tea? There’s milk.’

Nicola gazed up at him, her wide eyes expressionless. He was uneasily conscious of wanting to placate her, although he didn’t know why she should need this treatment. She had been a bit off, lately. He kept looking up and finding that she was staring at him. When he responded with his wide, frank smile she’d blink, and quickly look away again.

‘Not bad out,’ he went on. He put down the takeaway bag, and the milk and flowers.

Nic stirred, unwinding her legs and biting off a yawn. ‘How was work?’

‘Yeah. It was good. You know, average.’

‘Did you speak to him?’

‘He’ was the editor and manager of the local listings and events magazine where Ben worked part time. Ben wanted to be a writer, like his mother had once been, and even though what he mostly did was go out to the post office or ring venues to check the times of the week’s gigs, he insisted that this was the perfect pathway to literary success. Ben had been saying for a couple of weeks now that he only had to ask and he’d get a proper slot, like a column of his own or something.

‘No. Didn’t get a chance. It was mental there today.’

‘Right.’

Nic stood up. Her shoulders dropped and she reached out an arm and hooked it around him.

‘Thanks for the flowers.’

‘OK. I wish…’ Ben hesitated, lost as he often was for words to express his desire for all to be well, for there to be a safe enclosure for himself and Nic within the only slightly enticing chaos and mystery that the adult world seemed to present. Best of all would have been a house in the country, with a wilderness garden, the sort of place where he and his sisters had been lucky enough to grow up. ‘Well, you know.’

They stood close together, with Ben’s chin resting on Nicola’s head.

‘Are you hungry?’ he asked gently.

‘No. What time have you got to go out?’

Ben earned some extra money from working in the set-up and take-down crew of a smart party organizer. The hours were awkward, but the pay was better than bar work.

‘’Bout four?’

She moved away from him and twisted the daisies out of their paper. There wasn’t a vase, so she splayed them out in a plastic jug and put them on the table.

‘Gina wants me to babysit later.’

Nic worked three days and occasional evenings as nanny to the two small children of a GP, and the other two days she went to college to train in alternative beauty therapies. Their various different commitments meant that Ben and Nic sometimes only saw each other for a few hours a week.

‘D’you want to go out for a walk?’

‘I don’t know. No, not really.’

Ben followed her from the table to the armchair, his movements unconsciously mirroring hers. He was two years younger, but it could seem like much more. Nic sighed.

‘Maybe we could just go to bed for an hour.’

He grinned at that. ‘Maybe. Or, I dunno, perhaps we should do the washing up instead?’

Nic’s fugitive smile flashed at him, making her look like the girl he had first caught sight of at an unlikely party. ‘Hey. Watch it.’

She padded across to the bed as he unlaced his Converse and took off his jeans. Nic lay down just as she was, balling up her small fists inside the sleeves of her jumper. Ben stretched out half on top of her, his hands sliding up her ribcage, but she turned her face away to avoid his mouth.

‘No, Ben, wait a minute, can’t you? Let’s just have a cuddle.’

‘After,’ he muttered, trying to press his knee between hers. His mobile began to ring in the pocket of his jeans. ‘Shit. Better get that.’

He reached a long arm for the phone and studied the display. Then he turned it off. ‘My sister,’ he yawned. He rolled back against Nic but she was lying on her back now, her chin lifted and her eyes fixed on the ceiling.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she said.

Shadows of the plane tree branches moved on the ceiling.

‘What?’

‘Pregnant. In the club. Up the duff. Expecting. Bun in the…’

‘Shit,’ he said again. And then, on a long breath, ‘No.’

Ben shook his head, trying somehow to dislodge this enormous notion before it could settle on him. ‘How?’

‘Oh God, Ben, don’t make this so hard. Can’t you ever meet me halfway? How do you think?’

‘But we always use…well, I know, not every time, but…’

‘There you are,’ Nic said coldly.

‘How do you know? Are you sure?’

‘I got a tester thing. I did it two days ago, and again this morning. You pee on a stick.’

‘And?’

‘It’s positive.’ She spaced out the words, speaking as if to a child.

Ben fell back now and they lay side by side. Then he reached out and found her hand. He laced his fingers with hers, trying to radiate reassurance.

‘It’s all right, baby.’

Nic writhed away from him. ‘Don’t call me that. Just don’t, do you hear?’

There was a choke in her voice that he had never heard before.

‘I’m sorry. Listen. We’ll sort it out. You know, you can get a…’

‘An abortion,’ Nic said. ‘That’s what it’s called.’

‘Yeah, that’s right. I know what it’s called. You could maybe ask Gina what we should do.’

‘No way. She’s so fucking brisk and tidy and sorted, she’s the last person I’d ask.’

‘OK, OK. But there are people. Agencies, and clinics and things. There’s my mum, as well, if it comes to that.’

‘Your mum?’

Nic suddenly began to cry, quite noisily, with her mouth open and tears sliding out of the corners of her eyes. Unable to bear this, Ben hoisted himself on to his knees and knelt over her, gripping her arms.

‘Nic, don’t cry. Please don’t cry. We’ll fix it, we’ll do it together. I’m here, look.’

She looked into his eyes. ‘Will we?’

‘Yes. Of course we will. It happens.’

‘Promise?’

‘Yes. Cross my heart.’

‘I feel so bad. Like it’s a bad thing, a really black wicked thing we’ve done, and we shouldn’t have and everything will be wrong now…’

‘Hush. It won’t. It’s going to be all right, Nic. I promise.’

Ben leaned down and kissed her, tasting the salt on her cold mouth, and it was long seconds before she yielded and wound her arms around his neck.

‘I promise,’ he repeated.

Alpha and Omega

Alexandra Davies rummaged in her bag to retrieve her mobile phone, wedged it precariously between her left ear and her shoulder, and with her right index finger jabbed the button of the stop request at the traffic lights.

‘Yeah, Omie? Hi?’

‘God, what’s that racket? Listen, have you heard from Mum?’

‘No,’ Alexandra told her sister. A bendy bus swished by and then a high-sided truck that rocked her with a blast of turbulence.

Olivia’s voice rose slightly.

‘Alph? Are you there?’

‘Yeah. It’s traffic. I’m out.’

‘What d’you think they’re doing?’

The lights refused to change but the stream of vehicles briefly slowed and Alexandra took the opportunity to dash across the first three lanes. It was coming on to rain, and she had no hood or umbrella with her.

‘Who?’

‘Our parents.’

‘Omie, you know as well as I do what they’re up to. They have moved further out to the sticks, they’re doing up some wreck of a house on Miranda Meadowe’s estate, Dad’s full of wild schemes, Mum’s going along with it. What’s new?’

Olivia sighed, and her sister could hear her settling herself for a long talk. ‘Nothing, I suppose, when you put it like that. I’m worried about them, though. They don’t call, do they? And when I call them, they’re always busy. Ben says the same, you know.’

‘I don’t think it’s a cause for worry, is it? They’ve got a life. We’ve got a life. Even Ben has. We’re a success story, the Davies family.’

From the safety of the central island Alexandra weighed up her chances of survival if she darted onwards against the lights.

Olivia said, ‘Is that what you call it? Growing up felt more like a car crash, most of the time.’

‘Success against the odds. Have you talked to Sam or Toby about it? It must be the same for them.’

‘No, it isn’t. The Knights were at boarding school and always moving anyway. Hampstead, Islington, Richmond, one of those places. But I so miss our old house, you know? Don’t you? I have these dreams about it, all the time. It’s where we grew up. It’s got all our history locked in it.’

‘I know, I feel the same. But at the end of the day it’s only bricks and mortar, isn’t it? The house had to go, they needed the money, that’s that, and what matters is we’ve all got each other. Even Mum and Dad are still around for us, you know, even though they’re not right here.’

‘You’re right, Alph, ’course you are. I just feel a bit, what, lost? Abandoned. Is that totally weird at our age?’

‘You mean, Parents Leave Girl Twins, Twenty-five, All Alone in World. Social Services Intervene?’

They made the humming noise that was their shorthand for laughter. ‘OK, so I’m a freak.’

‘No, you’re not. Mum’s always been right beside us. So has Dad, even, in his own way. Now they’ve sold our house and gone to live somewhere we don’t know at all with what might seem to be a random new family made up of friends of theirs from a hundred years ago, and they’re suddenly quite busy with stuff that doesn’t seem to concern us. It’s bound to be strange, isn’t it? But isn’t this what happens to all families, in the end? We were never going to be at home in the kitchen with Mum for ever and ever with Ben in his highchair and us two making jam tarts. At least they’re not divorced, like most people’s p’s.’

Alexandra ran, and successfully completed the crossing. Fat raindrops landed on the pavement, the same size as the blobs of discarded gum already speckling it. She transferred her mobile to the other ear, wedged it in place again and fished in her bag for her purse. She calculated that there was just time to run into Pret and pick up a coffee before going back to work.

‘Yeah. It is what happens. Anyway.’ Olivia sighed. The conversation had followed a familiar pattern, with her own anxieties temporarily allayed by Alexandra’s reassurances. ‘I forget what you’re doing tonight?’

‘Meeting Cam and Laure. Might go out after. You?’

‘Film, something foreign, can’t remember what it’s called. Tom wants to see it.’

‘Speak later, then?’

‘Yeah. Thanks, Alph.’

‘Love you. I’ve got to go now. Bye, sis.’

‘Me too. Bye. Wait – I’ll give Ben a call, shall I? I don’t know what he and Nic are doing. I haven’t seen them, either.’

‘Do that. Bye.’

Alexandra crammed her phone into the pocket of her black jeans and slid through the queue at the coffee counter. She had seven minutes of her lunch hour left. She would talk to Olivia at least once more, perhaps twice, before bedtime.

The Davies girls were monozygotic, or identical, twins.

At their birth their father had exclaimed in rapture, holding the squalling crimson scraps against his heart, ‘These two are my world, from this day onwards. They are my Alpha and my Omega.’

The family story went that Selwyn had tried to insist that the babies should be christened accordingly, but Polly firmly opted for what she called nice, normal names.

Polly’s mother had agreed. ‘Lovely. Not letters, or Zebedee or Dusk or Cowslip, or whatever poor little children seem to get landed with nowadays.’

It made no difference though. To their family, their baby brother Ben, and most of their friends, the twins for ever bracketed the Greek alphabet between them. To each other and to the rest of the world apart from employers, airlines and the DVLC, they were Alph and Omie. Two halves of a whole, one another’s best and closest ally.

Not that they were all that much alike, at twenty-five, even to look at. From their Facebook profiles, it would have been difficult to deduce a relationship. Alexandra worked in retail marketing, and lived alone in a rented glass and steel studio flat near Bethnal Green. She wore monochrome clothes with a decidedly Japanese influence, and intended to set up her own company within five years. Olivia lived with her boyfriend in his chaotic flat off Shepherd’s Bush Road. She was a freelance illustrator, working from home, and was usually dressed in a picturesque scramble of rainbow knits and tie-dye.

Because they lived at opposite ends of town, the two girls didn’t see each other all that often, not more than twice or even once a week. The principal link between them, as vital as their umbilical cord had once been, was their pair of mobile phones. They always had exactly the same make and model. It was really weird, Omie said, but she had lost hers one night because it had fallen out of her pocket and dropped down the toilet when she was at a club, and she had been way too grossed out to reach down and fish it out again. But then less than twelve hours later, Alph had had her bag with her phone inside it stolen from beneath her desk by a sneak thief who had slipped into her office while she was down the corridor talking to her boss and everyone else was out at lunch.

The twins consulted each other, and then agreed on the new model.

They talked or texted each other all the time, the little chirrup of a ringtone or bleep of an arriving message so familiar that they presented no barrier to the seamless dialogue between them.

OCTOBER

THREE

The digger driver reversed smartly away from the trench. A flock of gulls rose from the raw earth and banked over the ochre tree tops, wheeling back as the machine trundled off to dump its hopper-load of soil and flints on a swelling mound. It was a soft, windless morning. The grinding of the digger and the cries of the gulls carried a long way in the still air.

Two workmen towed a heavy roll of polythene sheeting from the back of a truck whilst the site manager in a fluorescent jacket and hard hat talked on his mobile at the door of the Portakabin office. On the lip of the trench a young man in a helmet was standing alone with his hands in his pockets. He studied the loads of earth as they were sliced and scooped away, from time to time glancing over at the contractor or his client. He was the first person at the site to notice two women and a tall, thin man strolling towards them from the direction of the main house. He sighed to himself. They were entitled to be here, of course, but in his experience visitors at an excavation meant nothing but delays and questions. He didn’t know Mrs Meadowe personally, but he came from Meddlett where she had the reputation of being unfriendly. He stuck his hands deeper in his pockets and concentrated on the digging.

Amos was also watching the work. He was in an excellent humour. Something that was ingenious, fitting and intricately designed was going to be created here out of nothing, on the rim of a field in an attentive landscape. Satisfaction that construction was at last under way spilled all through him. His sense of happy anticipation even increased when the digger momentarily halted and he caught the sound of laughter and raised voices close at hand. As soon as he saw Katherine he raised his arm and waved, beckoning the visitors across. Miranda and Colin followed her, picking their way past the contractors.

‘We thought we’d come and see what’s happening,’ Miranda called to him.

‘Progress,’ he shouted back.

The three of them scuttled towards him, bundling out of the path of the digger and gathering to inspect the work.

Amos put a proprietorial arm around his wife’s shoulders.

In the course of their married life Katherine and he had lived in a dozen houses, from the first cramped terrace to the latest sprawling mansion in half an acre of suburban garden. He thought of all the different property viewings, the potential homes with actual merits to be decoded from the hyperbole of various estate agents, the subsequent measurings and deliberations, and the final compromises that had to be made in order to fit a family within a set of walls, like a crab into a pre-existing shell, with the boys arguing over who was to have the bigger room and Katherine saying that really she was going to miss the old house. Now for the first time his family would have a home designed around it, not the other way around. Not that they were any longer precisely a family, of course; Sam and Toby had their own places, he had seen to that. But they would still come. Children took a long time to detach themselves nowadays, he had noticed, if they ever really did so.

Now his wife turned her head and remarked to Colin and Miranda that she couldn’t imagine what their home was going to be like when it was finally built.

‘There’s so much space, and air and sunshine. It’s hard to picture what a house will look like plonked down here.’

Amos frowned. Her vagueness as well as her choice of words irritated him.

‘Darling, you’ve seen all the plans a thousand times. Drawings, computer simulations, every single stage of the process.’

She only shook her head, and laughed.

‘I know. Weird, isn’t it?’

Miranda had brought a basket. ‘I thought we should have a celebration,’ she announced, to cover the momentary awkwardness. She led the way to a vantage point under the trees and unpacked a bottle of champagne and a carton of orange juice. Amos waved to the workmen and followed the others.

Miranda had found a reason for a celebration almost every other day at Mead. It was as if she were the entertainments secretary and they were freshmen newly arrived at university, needing scheduled social events and copious supplies of drink to kick-start their friendships. Four days ago Selwyn had announced that a major phase of his demolition work was complete, and they had gathered between the ceiling props and barrows of rubble to admire the open space and to drink wine poured into the plastic mugs that were all Polly had been able to muster. It was two in the morning before they finally dispersed to bed. Amos had joked that he wasn’t sure he could stand the pace and Selwyn countered that he couldn’t see why not, since they had little else that was significant to occupy them these days. At that point Polly took his arm and guided him off to bed in the tarp shelter.

Miranda threw herself into all these events, carrying the others on the tide of her high spirits. She was already screwing the plastic feet into a set of picnic wineglasses as they sat down in a row on the dry turf. Colin leaned back against a tree trunk. He was tired, but he raised his glass when Miranda handed it to him.

‘Here’s to the perfect house. May you live like a king, Amos. A solar-heated, green-spirited monarch.’

‘What about me?’ Katherine demanded. They all turned to look at her.

‘And a queen, K, of course,’ Colin added.

They sipped champagne and watched the digger as it rolled to and fro like a sturdy toy. The sun rose higher above the trees, but the outlines of the copses and field crests in the distance were blurred by mist, suggesting a cold night to come. The digger came up with another hopper full of earth, and they heard the note of the engine change as the driver backed up a short distance.

He jumped from the cab and walked across to look down into the trench. At the same time, the young man who had been watching slid his hands out of his pockets and walked briskly to the edge.

Amos was leaning on one elbow. He propped himself a little higher to see what was going on.

The digger driver returned to his seat and Amos nodded his approval, but then the man turned off the engine, dismounted once more and hurried away towards the site office. The other workmen stopped what they were doing.

‘What now?’ Amos groaned.

‘Maybe he’s found some buried treasure,’ Miranda teased, but she sat up straighter too. ‘After I’ve gone and sold the land to you, as well.’

‘It’s some bloody annoying thing. I just know it.’

The site manager left the Portakabin. There was now a cluster of hi-vis jackets and helmets gathered about the raw slit in the ground. Amos launched himself to his feet. He charged off with his head down and his elbows jutting at an angle. His trousers rippled over his broad shanks. Rather uncertainly, Katherine got up and followed him.

‘Better take a look?’ Colin murmured to Miranda. She was already on her feet.

A line of gulls settled on the roof of the stationary digger. They rotated their heads as if they were waiting for a curtain to go up. A sharp smell of sour earth and torn roots hung in the air.

A few inches below the surface the cut edges of turf, roots and a few inches of topsoil gave way to dense earth, packed with stones. Protruding from the bottom of the trench, where a band of earth seemed to be darker than elsewhere, Miranda saw what appeared to be a long piece of flint. It was grey, clogged with dirt, and splintered where the sharp edge of the digger blade had smashed into it. The young man ignored her, and everyone else. He knelt to examine the find.

‘Just caught my eye, didn’t it?’ the digger driver was saying to the other workmen. He was big with a red face, his yellow helmet perched above it looking much too small for his head.

‘Right you are, Alan. Let’s take a look,’ the site boss said. He vaulted into the trench, but the young man snatched at the collar of his jacket and pulled him back.

‘Wait there,’ he snapped, with surprising authority. ‘Everyone, just stand where you are.’

Silence fell over the little group. Even Amos hesitated.

The young man slid down into the trench. With his right thumb he rubbed the earth from the protruding flint, stroking it as if it were a baby’s fist. Then he took out a tiny trowel, and with infinite care began to scoop the debris from around it.

‘Who is he?’ Colin murmured.

‘The archaeologist,’ Amos said curtly.

‘The what?’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. It’s the planning regulations. One of the hoops you have to jump through to get anything done. The county bloody archaeologist assessed the site, told me and the architect that there was a minimal chance of there actually being any old bits of Roman pottery or anything else buried here, but he was sending someone in on a watching brief just in case. Someone I end up paying for, naturally. That’s him.’

It was obvious to Miranda now that what was protruding from the ground was not a flint but a broken bone. She watched intently, only half hearing Amos’s tirade.

The archaeologist gently worked the bone free. He placed it in a bag, carefully labelled the exterior, and laid it on the lip of the trench.

‘Right, then. Let’s get going again,’ Amos called.

The men shuffled, and the archaeologist continued to ignore them all. He was kneeling again and scraping at the earth. A moment later he came up with a smaller bone. He cupped it in his palm and brushed away the dirt.

Amos trampled forwards. Miranda wanted to restrain him, and when she caught Katherine’s eye she knew she felt the same.

Amos called, ‘Look. I know you’ve got a job to do. But I can’t allow the remains of some animal to hold up the work of an entire site crew for half a morning.’

The second bone went into a separate bag.

Amos raised his voice. ‘It’s a dead…’ there was a second’s hesitation while he searched his mind for a farm animal, any animal ‘…cow.’

The archaeologist did look up now. Beneath the plastic peak of his helmet his face looked startlingly young, almost unformed. To Colin, standing beside Miranda at the end of the trench, his features seemed vaguely familiar. Until recently he would have searched his memory for where and when, and what they might have done together.

‘These are human remains,’ the young man said.

A deeper pool of silence collected. Bowing his head, one of the workmen took off his helmet and held it awkwardly across his chest. Shocked, Miranda gazed down into the freshly sliced earth at the bottom of the trench, and then at the labelled bags. Who was it, buried here in this peaceful place? Who, and when?

Amos broke in again, ‘This is my land. We have all the necessary permissions in place to build a house right here, and that’s what you are delaying.’

Katherine put her hand on his arm. ‘Amos, please.’ But he shook it off. He marched to Alan’s side and tried to nudge him backwards towards the digger. The two of them performed a tiny dance with their chests puffed out. The gulls rose in unison from their perch, their wingbeats loud in the stillness. Alan scratched the back of his head under his hard hat and retreated a couple of reluctant steps, followed by the site manager making pacifying gestures. Miranda reached for Colin’s hand and held it, but her eyes were still fixed on the disturbed ground. Amos measured up to the contractor and Alan, as if he were going to manhandle them back to work. His face was red and he was puffing slightly. Amos was not used to having his orders ignored. For a moment it looked as if he might win, as Alan placed his boot on the step of the machine and prepared to climb up.

The archaeologist put down his trowel. He stood in front of the digger with his hand raised.

‘Work at this site is temporarily suspended,’ he said, ‘pending further investigation.’

‘On whose authority?’ Amos demanded.

‘On my own, for the time being,’ the young man answered. ‘I am just going to notify the police, and the coroner’s office.’

‘The police? The police?’ Amos came to a standstill, his arms flopping to his sides.

Katherine looked at her husband, then turned away from him.

‘What is it? Who was it?’ Miranda murmured.

The workmen were already filing cheerfully in the direction of their caravan, pulling off their helmets as they went.

‘I’m sorry,’ the young archaeologist said to Miranda and Amos and the others. He had a stud in his nose, and ropes of hair pulled back and buried under the loose collar of his plaid flannel shirt. His hands, heavy with dirt, hung loose at his sides. Colin tried to recall where he had seen him before.

‘I can’t say for certain, not immediately, but I’m fairly sure, based on what I can see, that this is not a recent interment. But I’ve got to act by the book.’

Miranda lifted her head. Her face was white. ‘Recent? What does that mean? I’ve lived here for more than twenty years. It’s my home. This was my husband’s land, he grew up here. Who would be buried in a spot like this?’

‘Are you sure these are human bones?’ Colin asked.

‘Yes, I am. There is part of a femur, and a patella.’ He tried to sound authoritative but a flush coloured his face, showing up the scattered pocks of healed acne. He was probably in his early twenties. Hardly a match for Amos, Colin thought, the poor kid.

The archaeologist continued, speaking directly and gently to Miranda because of the shock in her eyes. ‘The way the thigh and the knee were uncovered makes me think that the corpse may have been buried in a semi-crouching position. The remainder of the skeleton will be there, almost definitely.’ He raised his hand and pointed to the wall of the trench. Grass roots and a few bruised daisies overhung it.

‘How long ago?’ Miranda asked.

‘I’ll really have to check with my field supervisor. I’m not all that experienced.’ His colour deepened. ‘There are tests, of course. But he’s probably prehistoric. That would be my guess. Bronze Age, or Iron Age. Something like two thousand years old.’

‘Two thousand?’ Amos muttered, in spite of himself.

They looked out over the plateau of grass and the sweep of farmland and dappled country beyond it.

The regular perspective tilted, and swung out of alignment. Miranda steadied herself against Colin’s arm. She and the others had been thinking about their present concerns, she realized, and speculating only about the new house and next month and next year, but now their attention was forcibly dragged back through the centuries. Under the thin skin of earth, hardly more than two spade-depths below the grass, lay history. Silently she wondered what this landscape had looked like so long ago, and who it was who had come out of the opaque past to be uncovered in front of them.

Miranda found that she was shivering.

Amos recovered himself first. ‘The local CID are going to be most helpful with that, then.’

‘It’s a formality, sir. But this is a human body.’

‘How long is all this going to take? As a formality, of course?’

The archaeologist met his eye. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘Let’s find out, shall we?’

Amos went to the site manager’s Portakabin and Miranda could see him vigorously making his points while the builder shook his head and fended him off with raised hands. Then Amos took out his mobile phone. Colin walked away and stood at a little distance, apparently contemplating the view. Katherine and Miranda were left at the side of the trench.

Seeing Miranda’s pallor Katherine asked, ‘Are you all right?’

Almost to herself Miranda said, ‘I can’t say I’ve ever thought about it before, but bones are so intimate when you’d really expect them to be quite dry and inanimate, wouldn’t you? It’s so apparent that once there was flesh and sinews and smooth skin. We were looking at a person’s leg, part of the body of a real person who lived and breathed, and then you have to take in the fact that they’ve been lying there in the ground for thousands of years. Jake and I used to come here sometimes and have a picnic, looking out over this view. It rather changes the picture, doesn’t it?’

Katherine touched her arm. ‘Do you want to go back to the house?’

Miranda was grateful for her concern. Realizing that she was still holding her picnic glass, she tipped the residue of her drink into the grass. The plastic was smeared and there was a scum of orange pulp sticking to the sides.

‘No, I want to see what’s going to happen. Champagne seems suddenly a bit off key, though, doesn’t it? Shall we go back and just sit down for a bit?’

They could hear Amos still shouting on the telephone. The archaeologist had made some calls too, and now he took out a camera and started snapping the open trench from various angles. The workmen were gathered around the caravan with their sandwiches and copies of the Sun.

The two women went back to their vantage point and sat down. Miranda dropped the empty champagne bottle into her basket and unscrewed the foot of her glass. It was becoming clear that they were going to have to wait some time for any developments. Miranda rested her chin on her knees. She had been thinking about Jake, and the quiet graveyard of Meddlett church where he was buried. Then her thoughts switched to Colin as she watched him strolling down to the distant fence marking the boundary of what had once been Miranda’s land and was now Amos’s.

She asked suddenly, ‘K? Do you think Colin is any happier living here with us, or is he just going through the motions?’

‘Of living, or trying to be happy?’

‘Doing one, while feeling obliged to attempt the other. There’s a glass wall around him, don’t you think? Ever since Stephen was killed. It’s as if he’s here because of not knowing where else to be? Although, come to think of it, maybe he’s not alone in that. Do you remember the times when we all used to live our lives, not just inhabit a corner of them?’

Katherine turned to look at Miranda’s face. After a moment she answered, ‘I don’t know what it must be like for Colin. Polly may know more, with her and Colin being so close, but probably none of us can do more than imagine. But, yes. He has put up barriers. Do you remember how exuberant he used to be?’

‘I do. The Ibiza trip?’

Laughter chased the sadness out of Miranda’s eyes as they acknowledged the memory.

In the mid-1970s, when Amos was insisting to Katherine that he was going to marry her so she had better get to know and like his friends, he had rented a holiday villa near San Antonio and invited a dozen people for a summer holiday. In the party were Miranda and the actor she was at that time considering as a potential husband, and Colin and the man with whom he had recently fallen in love.

Stephen was five years older than Colin. He was a compact, rather unsmiling businessman who didn’t try very hard to integrate himself into the group. He didn’t particularly enjoy the island nightlife, he didn’t take any drugs or even drink very much, and it was obvious that he had only come on the holiday because he wanted to be with beautiful and extrovert Colin, whatever that might take.

It was a big enough group to absorb his differences without them seeming particularly noticeable, Miranda recalled, and in any case it was the time when Amos was remodelling himself as a traditionalist barrister and upholder of family values, which was much more remarkable and amusing to them all.

One day, when most of them were too sunburned and hungover to do anything but lie in the shade beyond the pool, Colin and Stephen whiled away the siesta hour by dressing up.

Miranda remembered waking up from a nap. Done up as Carmen Miranda, ‘As a tribute to you, of course,’ he had told her, Colin was kneeling precariously on a lilo in the middle of the pool. He was wearing a flamenco skirt, a bra top, gold hoop earrings, full make-up and a hat made out of a laden fruit bowl topped with a crest of bananas. He wobbled to his feet and began to strum a guitar. He managed a passable samba rhythm and a warble of ‘Bananas is My Business.’ But even with this apparition in front of them, it was Stephen they were all gaping at. He was arranged on a second lilo, two legs crammed into one leg of a pair of lime green trousers and two feet into a single swimming flipper. He was slowly combing the strands of a very old and matted long blonde wig to tumble over his hairy chest and looking at Colin with a parody of adoration that very clearly had real devotion embedded in it.

That was the first inkling that Miranda or any of Colin’s friends had of the extreme contradictions in Stephen’s nature. There were, they understood, all kinds of warring elements concealed under the solid exterior. It suddenly became much less surprising that Colin found him so interesting.

It was only a few seconds before Carmen Miranda very slowly and with great dignity tilted sideways into the water. Stephen neatly caught the guitar as it fell past him. Miranda’s actor cine-filmed the whole sequence.

‘I wish I had that film,’ Miranda sighed. ‘I’d give anything to see it again.’

‘Do you ever see whatshisname? The actor?’ Katherine wondered.

‘No. What was his name? Although in fact, I did see him about three years ago. In an episode of Holby City.’

‘Any good?’

Miranda laughed delightedly. ‘As a psychopathic father on the run while his teenaged daughter haemorrhaged in casualty? Absolutely excellent. I’ve probably got some photographs of the Carmen Miranda event in a box somewhere.’

‘We should get the old pictures out.’

‘Maybe.’

Katherine said, ‘It’s good to have these shared memories. It’s historic glue.’

Miranda considered for a moment, and then asked, ‘Do you ever feel that you’re only inhabiting your life, K?’

Katherine studied the patch of turf framed by her knees. There were ants busy between the blades of grass. Then she lifted her head. The archaeologist had descended into the trench once again.

‘I did. Sometimes. I think being here has changed that.’

‘Has it?’ Miranda was pleased. ‘Has it really?’ She seized on any confirmation that the Mead collaboration was working as she hoped.

Katherine said quickly, ‘Of course, I had Amos and the boys, and work, and people coming to dinner, all those things, so I wasn’t exactly lonely, but I did feel that I was sort of watching from the sidelines rather than pitching into the scrum myself. And I would use a bloody rugby metaphor, wouldn’t I, as if even the language for framing my own experiences has to be borrowed from my menfolk?’

She attempted a laugh at this, while Miranda only raised her eyebrows.

‘But I feel different here, being with you and Colin and Selwyn and Polly. It’s old ground, yet new at the same time. There’s a sense of anticipation, definitely hopeful anticipation. It’s not all to do with the glass house, although of course that’s exciting.’ She made this dutiful nod out of habit, and consideration to Amos and Miranda herself. ‘It’s almost a rebirth, isn’t it? A completely different way of living, and that leads to general crazy optimism, which is rather at odds with the reality as far as Amos and I are concerned.’

There was a pause. This was quite a long speech, for Katherine.

‘Any news about that?’ Miranda asked, treading carefully.

The reason for Amos’s departure from London and the law wasn’t discussed at Mead, although everyone knew that everyone else knew about it. She was relieved when Katherine answered matter-of-factly.

‘About whether the young woman is finally going to press charges? The most recent notion is that she won’t. I think she may be on dangerous ground because she almost certainly reciprocated some of Amos’s attentions, at least to begin with. Then she probably withdrew, and he naturally refused to accept her withdrawal, and then he would have crossed the line between pursuit and harassment somewhere along the way. I imagine that would all be rather delicate to prove in court, don’t you? Particularly against an adversary like Amos.’

Katherine picked a blade of grass and thoughtfully chewed on it.

‘Now he’s left the chambers that may be enough to satisfy her. I don’t know if he’ll go back to the Bar some day. If he’ll need to, that is. I don’t mean for the money, God knows he’s got enough of that piled up, but just to stay the Amos he is, in his own estimation. That’s why this new house, seeing it take shape here, is so important. It gives him a reason for being. He’s not the kind of man who retires to the golf course, particularly against his will. He’s been bored, lately, and it makes him more difficult.’

There were opposing notes of sympathy and of dismissal in her words, chiming together, that took both women a little by surprise.

‘Yes, I can see that,’ Miranda agreed.

Colin turned back from the boundary fence. He walked slowly, on a wide arc, but he was drawn steadily back to the trench. The young archaeologist was still on all fours, gently scraping with his trowel. He was so absorbed in what he was doing that he didn’t hear Colin’s approach, and it was the shadow falling across his work that made him jump. He jerked upright on his knees but his expression relaxed as soon as he saw that it wasn’t Amos.

‘Sorry,’ he muttered.

‘Why? You’re doing your job.’

The boy wasn’t looking at him. His gaze was fixed on the earth.

‘There’s something here.’ He knew he should keep the discovery to himself, maintain a professional detachment, but he couldn’t help blurting it out. His fist closed tightly on the handle of his trowel and it was all he could do to stop himself in his eagerness from lunging back at the find and gouging at the remains.

Colin heard how his voice shook.

‘What? What is it?’

The boy glanced quickly past him. Miranda and Katherine sat a way off, talking. Amos was still telephoning, the site crew lounged in the sunshine.

‘Look.’ He pointed downwards.

Out of the earth close to the edge of the trench, the rim of something smooth and curved now protruded. Crusted with dirt, it might have been taken for a large piece of broken glass or pottery, but the archaeologist had already rubbed an inch of it clean. The sun struck a dull gleam out of precious metal.

‘Good God,’ Colin said.

‘Yeah. And a bit,’ the boy agreed.

‘What happens now?’

‘Well, it doesn’t happen every day, does it? It’s killing me but I’ve got to wait for my field supervisor to show up. I don’t know much, but I’m pretty sure this is big.’

In the middle distance, a car drew up at the point where Amos’s driveway would one day meet the curving route to the main house. A uniformed policeman got out and opened the gate, then the patrol car bumped slowly over the builders’ track to the site.

‘Christ, now here’s the cops. I hoped the boss would get here first,’ the boy sighed.

‘You can handle it,’ Colin told him. The boy’s resemblance to someone he knew was no longer troubling. It came to him that this wasn’t actually Jessie’s boyfriend from the first evening in the pub, the one she had squabbled with about ownership of the dog, but the two of them were certainly sufficiently alike to be mistaken for one another.

A second solid policeman emerged from the car. Amos made straight for the pair of them, with the site manager bobbing at his side.

‘Here we go then,’ said the archaeologist as he climbed reluctantly out of the trench.

Across the field, alerted by the sighting of police in the driveway of the house, Selwyn was hurrying towards them with Polly moving more slowly in his wake.

‘Has there been a murder?’ Selwyn asked.

‘Not recently, by the look of it,’ Colin told him. ‘Although I think Amos would prefer it to be a straightforward drug-related shooting. History may take longer to unravel.’

Amos said, surveying his site later that afternoon: ‘So, the monkeys have taken over the zoo.’

A van arrived, with ‘Anglian Archaeological Services’ painted on the sides. Several archaeologists of various degrees of seniority climbed out, donned helmets and fluorescent jackets with AAS printed on the back, fanned out and began measuring, pegging lines and scribbling on clipboards. The field supervisor, a lean bearded man in his forties, made a series of urgent calls. A frame tent was brought out and quickly erected over the trench, and the white nylon fabric sucked and billowed in a rising wind. The policemen conferred with the supervisor, the intermittent crackle of voices from their radios carrying across to where Selwyn stood joking about how English Heritage and the county archaeologist would never let Amos dig the channels in the earth for his futuristic ground exchange heating now that there was known to be treasure beneath.

‘Buried gold,’ Selwyn murmured. ‘Who knows, Amos, you might just have got even richer.’

‘Probably not, under the 1996 Treasure Act,’ Amos retorted. But that they should be even discussing this sharpened the sense that an unwelcome change was coming to Mead.

Another car wound its way towards them and yet another archaeologist emerged, bearing a licence from the Ministry of Justice to allow the human remains to be excavated. A copy of it was formally pinned to the door of the Portakabin. Amos read the licence and gave a curt, unwilling nod to acknowledge that, for now at least, he would have to agree to a suspension of work. It was clear that there would be no more progress on the site for the time being, so the builders packed up and went home. The police lingered long enough for the osteologist who had arrived in the van to assure them personally that the uncovered bones were hundreds of years old, then they folded their double bulk back into their patrol car and drove away.

The bearded field supervisor introduced himself as Christopher Carr. He promised that as soon as his team had had a chance to make a first assessment of the finds, Mr Knight would be informed. In the meantime, it was important that the excavation be conducted methodically in order that no vital information or clues were lost in the process, and they would understand that, wouldn’t they? His young assistant, Kieran, had acted correctly in calling a temporary halt to the site work. He thanked Amos for his cooperation.

‘When can we have a look?’ Katherine asked him, then glanced away, as if she suspected it had been in some way wrong of her to ask.

‘As soon as there is anything interesting to see,’ Christopher told her. ‘But I would be grateful if for the time being you wouldn’t mention the find to anyone at all outside this group. Sightseers and the press are never helpful on the scene until we are ready for them.’

Amos struck his forehead quite hard with the heel of his hand.

Katherine and Polly left the site to go back to the house and make sandwiches, but Miranda found that she couldn’t leave the site while so much of Mead’s unimagined history was being uncovered. The archaeologists moved in and out of their tent, watched by Miranda and the others from their picnic place. They could hear the metallic clink of trowels. Bags and buckets filled with spoil were brought out, and a young woman with dreadlocks longer than Kieran’s knelt to sift the loose earth through a sieve.

Amos ate smoked salmon sandwiches and loudly fumed about the delay, until Miranda snapped at him.

‘It’s my land too. My home for twenty years, Jake was born here. Can’t you acknowledge that whatever is lying in that trench might have at least a comparable importance to your house?’

At once Amos put his big hand on hers. ‘Of course, Mirry. I do apologize. How thrilling for Mead if this does turn out to be a major discovery. But I don’t think you’ve quite got the hang of what a disruption it may turn out to be.’

‘Let’s wait and see, shall we?’ Miranda said quietly. Colin lay back and seemed to fall asleep.

At the end of the afternoon, Kieran came out of the tent and crossed to where they still waited. His face was flushed under the faint pockmarks.

‘Would you like to come and take a look?’

They got to their feet and followed him.

Within the white tent, sheltered from the wind that had got up, it was warmer and surprisingly still. The fabric rippled and snapped with small popping sounds. The pleasantly diffused light coupled with the strong scent of trampled grass was reminiscent of a garden fête or agricultural show. The archaeologists were lined up beside their trench, mostly with their hands folded, looking downwards like proud but modest exhibitors. A photographer’s tripod and camera stood in place at one end of the tent.

Miranda looked down and caught her breath.

The earth had been cleared partially to expose the skeleton. It was dark, discoloured and broken, but still shockingly human. It lay on its left side, the legs bent up towards the chest and the forearms extended. Earth filled the collapsed ribcage and crusted the pelvic bowl. The skull was tilted at an angle, the eye sockets blinded with dirt and the jaw with a rim of teeth seeming to grin into infinity.

Two feet away from it lay a second skull, much smaller, and the ribs of a young child.

Only when she had taken this in did she see that resting between the jaw of the larger skeleton and the framework of its ribcage lay a band that once would have circled the neck. To the side of the body, the curved edge of metal that Colin had glimpsed had been further exposed. It looked like the edge of a large plate. A raised pattern that might have been part of a scroll or leaf design was just visible.

Stillness spread outwards and seemed to press against the nylon walls and roof of the tent, where the wind chafed.

At Miranda’s side, Colin remembered Stephen’s funeral in the village on the edge of the Yorkshire moorland, and the priest and the mourners gathered at the edge of the open grave as handfuls of earth thudded on to the coffin lid. He raised his head now in an attempt to blot out the memory, searching along the line of silent people as if he hoped to see a priest amongst them.

He was not a religious man, but he would have liked to hear some words of blessing or a simple prayer spoken over these bones.

The first person to break the silence was Christopher Carr. His voice was low and they had to listen to catch his words.

‘This is an important discovery,’ he said. ‘Perhaps very important. We have a rich burial here, probably dating from the later Iron Age. We may be looking at a prince, a tribal leader at least, who was buried with his symbols of rank and power and provisions for the afterlife.’

‘What about the child?’ Katherine asked. This time she looked directly at Chris. He nodded sympathy at her.

‘We can’t tell yet. Perhaps it was an attendant, maybe even a human sacrifice as part of the funeral ritual. Our osteologist, that’s David over there, may well be able to establish the cause of death.’

David was a small man with glasses. He smiled and then suppressed it, all the time looking as if he couldn’t wait to start handling the bones. The atmosphere was slowly lightening. The archaeologists began quietly to stack their tools. Kieran ducked out of the entrance with one more yellow plastic bucketful of loose earth.

One by one, the Mead people turned away from the trench and its contents. As the shock of staring death in the face subsided, they became aware that these relics were from a time so distant that they could hardly connect with it.

Chris said, ‘There’s one more thing. We’ll be leaving a security guard here overnight. The site will have to be protected until the artefacts have been removed to a safe place.’

Miranda demanded ‘Why? This is a private estate. No one comes here.’

‘Forgive me, Mrs Meadowe. We don’t know yet what these grave goods are, or what else we might find. If they should turn out to be alloys of precious metals, or even solid gold, imagine what the material alone might be worth, without adding up the historical value.’

Amos began to say something, then stopped himself.

‘I see,’ Miranda said, although she was only just beginning to. This discovery was going to change the delicate balance of life at Mead, the life she had wanted for them all, that much was already clear.

Chris continued, ‘With your help, we’ll keep this discovery quiet for as long as possible. But in my experience news inevitably leaks out sooner or later, and you’d be surprised at the nighthawks who will turn up looking for a piece of treasure to keep for themselves.’

Outside the tent it had grown chilly and the sky was overcast. Another van had arrived, this one marked ‘Lockyer Security’. A very large shaven-headed man sat in the driver’s seat, frowning over a print-out.

Amos stood in front of Chris. ‘Can you give me any idea of how long?’ he asked yet again.

‘How much time my team will be granted to complete the excavation is the decision of the county archaeologist, and that depends on how important he judges the findings to be, in terms of local and national history.’

Amos’s lower jaw was protruding now, a dangerous sign. ‘And so?’

The archaeologist sighed. ‘If I have to put a frame on it I’d say something more than a few days, but not as long as several months. We’ll do the job as quickly as we can.’

‘Thank you,’ Amos said, as if he were dismissing the most unreliable of witnesses.

Chris turned to Katherine, who stood a yard behind her husband. ‘I’m sorry,’ he told her.

Katherine’s smile was transforming. Miranda saw it, and so did Polly, although Amos wasn’t looking at her. ‘Please don’t be,’ she said. ‘There’s no need.’

As he passed Kieran, Colin asked him, ‘Did I meet your brother, at the Griffin in Meddlett, with a girl called Jessie and a dog?’

‘Yeah, that’ll be him. Damon.’

‘I thought so. You’re very alike.’

‘Not really,’ Kieran frowned.

The security guard lumbered out of the shelter of his van, and Amos made his comment about monkeys and the zoo.

They sat in the kitchen, over the remains of dinner. Selwyn had taken the blue chair next to the range and he balanced it on two legs and drank whisky as he surveyed the room. They had been talking all evening about the day’s discovery. Amos insisted that he was no expert on the exact terms of the Treasure law, whilst leaving no doubt at all that he knew far more than the rest of them. He explained that if they fell within the definition of treasure, the finds would belong to the Crown. If they turned out to be spectacular, or historically significant, they would probably be bought by a museum. There might be a reward for the landowner.

‘The best reward I can think of would be to get my house built,’ he growled.

The others sighed. They had heard this enough times already. Miranda cupped her chin in her hands and looked at Amos.

‘Jake would have loved the Warrior Prince of Mead.’

‘The Warrior Prince?’ Selwyn tried out the sound of it, dangerously tipping his chair and steadying himself with one hand burrowed amongst the tea towels and laundry hanging from the bar at the front of the range. ‘This could make us as famous as Sutton Hoo. English Heritage will come and put up a tearoom. There will be boxed fudge, and a coach park.’

‘No, there will not,’ Miranda said sharply.

‘Amos might decide otherwise. He owns the land, I believe.’ Whisky made Selwyn malicious.

‘Shut up, Sel,’ Polly advised.

Amos got up from his chair and crossed to Miranda’s side of the table. He hovered behind her chair, not quite able to do what he wanted, which was to hug her.

‘Mirry, let’s promise each other this minute in front of witnesses that whatever happens, this land business and prince business and the skulls and archaeology drama will not compromise our friendship. I solemnly promise there will be no tearoom, and certainly no fudge. Can you forgive me for happening to own the little acreage under which the bones have turned up?’

Miranda had never been immune to the force of his deliberate charm.

She answered solemnly, ‘I promise, too. And there’s nothing to forgive. The prince belongs to Mead itself, regardless of whose bit of turf he’s lying beneath. That’s what Jake would say.’

‘I wish he were here, too,’ Amos said. He sketched a sort of kiss in her direction and went back to his seat. Smiling dangerously over the rim of his glass, Selwyn studied him.

Polly’s mobile rang. She took it out and inspected the display.

‘Omie, hello darling. Are you all right?’

‘Doesn’t anyone else want another drink?’ Selwyn called out.

‘Yes, that’s Dad.’ Polly glanced up. ‘Sorry, all. No, Omie, that’s not what I meant. Of course I’m not apologizing to anyone for you ringing me. What’s the matter? Wait a minute.’ She got up and went out into the hall. They could hear her talking, and then she moved further away. Selwyn let his chair crash forward on to all four legs.

Katherine carried dishes to the sink, then leaned to look out into the yard. It was raining hard, and puddles glimmered in the porch light from their wing. Polly and Selwyn’s side was a darker slab of darkness.

‘Pretty bleak for the guard,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t like to be out there with only the dead for company, would you?’

‘They’re not going to come back,’ Colin said.

Miranda broke in, ‘No. Except, in a way they have, haven’t they? We’re thinking about them, peering down the centuries, dressing them in our minds in their necklaces and attaching stories to their lives and deaths. I can’t get that child’s skull and ribs out of my head.’

Amos took Katherine’s arm. ‘Come on, old girl. History’s all bones. We’re going to bed now.’

The Knights went out into the yard. Colin collected up his book and laptop, and said goodnight. Selwyn and Miranda were left alone.

‘Barb,’ Selwyn began softly, in the voice that he used only for her.

‘No.’

His mouth curled, making him look dangerous again. ‘Is that no generally, as a blanket edict, or in relation to something specific?’

Since the bathroom day, Miranda had avoided being alone with him. Now the possibility that Polly might step back into the room at any moment held her in a bubble of tension. Each of her senses was amplified. Miranda could imagine so vividly what it would be like if he left his chair, took her in his arms and put his mouth to the hollow formed by her collarbone, that it was as if he had actually done it. She swallowed, her mouth dry.

‘Just no,’ she whispered.

‘I want to touch you.’

‘I know.’

They listened to the rain.

‘What shall we do?’ he asked, as much of himself as to her.

‘We’ll live here at Mead, value our friendships, and get old together.’

There was a shocking crash as Selwyn’s glass hit the red tiles at his feet and smashed into fragments. Neither of them could have said for certain whether he had thrown it or accidentally let it fall.

‘I don’t want to get old.’

There was so much vehemence and bitterness in his voice that it frightened her. ‘I don’t want to hear any more about death. Jake’s dead, Stephen’s dead. There are skeletons at the bottom of the fucking garden. What happened to the fairies, then? I want to live now, Mirry. I want you.’

‘I know,’ she whispered again.

If Polly hadn’t come in at that moment, she would have gone to him.

‘That was Omie,’ Polly said. She flipped her phone shut.

‘Was it?’ Selwyn sounded dazed.

‘I just said it was. There’s broken glass all over the floor.’

He sighed. ‘I dropped my drink.’

‘Probably just as well.’ Polly had already gone for the dustpan. He took it from her and roughly swept up the broken pieces. Miranda stood up, very stiffly, as if all her joints hurt.

‘It’s been an interesting day, hasn’t it? I’m going to bed. Sleep well, you two,’ she said.

Polly and Selwyn lay on their bed under the tarpaulin. Water dripped steadily above their heads and ran off into an enamel bowl. The various drips into various receptacles around the room sounded like an elaborate piano exercise.

‘Are you ready?’ Selwyn asked.

‘Yes.’

He leaned up on one elbow, his shadow looming grotesquely on the opposite wall. He fiddled for a moment with the knob and then turned out the gas lamp. The mantle glowed red for two seconds and then they were in darkness.

‘Were you and Miranda arguing?’ Polly asked.

‘No.’

She waited, but he didn’t add anything.

She was intensely conscious of her heavy thigh and the six inches that separated their two bodies. If Selwyn and Miranda hadn’t been arguing there was something else going on, and that possibility worried her much more than routine squabbling. History meant that there was always a buried connection between the two of them, but Polly was beginning to realize that she had underestimated the pull of it. Living here as closely as they did, seeing each other constantly, was disinterring the ancient foundations.

The dripping seemed to grow louder, as if the drops were hitting her skull.

‘I’m concerned about Omie,’ she said at length, casting her fears in a less threatening mould.

Selwyn gave an impatient twitch. ‘That’s nothing very new. What is it this time?’

‘She’s angry with us. We’ve sold their home, moved up here. She says it’s as if we’ve abandoned them.’

There were five drips, then six. Three of them came very close together, almost as one.

‘Poll, our children are all adults. We’ve brought them to this point, healthy and educated and relatively normal. Or you have, mostly, I’m not claiming any particular glory for it. But we’ve got to let them live their own lives, now, and in the future. You can’t be their guardian and safety net for ever. Even you can’t do that.’

‘I could. Isn’t that what parents are meant to do?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Omie says she thinks there’s something up with Ben. Alph does, as well.’

Despite her anxiety, Polly felt drowsiness beginning to smother her. She was always tired, these days. She knew that her voice had taken on a meandering quality.

As if from a long way off she heard Selwyn say, in an impatient mutter, ‘If there’s something up with Ben, as Omie says, then we’ll hear about it.’

‘Yes,’ Polly finally agreed. She turned on to her side, away from him.

Selwyn lay on his back, unmoving.

FOUR

Gardening makes me think of Jake.

He’s here in all the stones and shadows of Mead – or rather his absence is, because rational recall often fails me and I look up expecting to see him, only to experience all over again a miniaturized spasm of shock and loss – but it is the garden that contains the most vivid memories.

The first time he brought me here, when we were newly in love and I could still hardly believe that there were no obstacles to our being together for ever, we sat against the wall of the house, over there on the wrought-iron bench where my discarded jacket and gardening apron now lie. It was the end of May, and the bricks were warm with the day’s sunshine. There were sprays of thick cream roses arching off the walls, and wood pigeons noisy in the trees.

‘Could you live here?’ Jake asked me.

It was like being asked if I thought I could endure Paradise.

‘You’re an urban woman,’ he said, when I asked why he doubted it. ‘You might get bored here with me. You might feel isolated from London, from acting and all the people you know and the life you’re used to.’

I told him that I loved him, and the only life I wanted was with him, and that was the truth.

I was turning forty and Jake was already sixty. I had had a modest success as a stage actress, but I knew that I was never going to be as good as a dozen of my contemporaries. Hollywood casting directors were never going to come calling. I had had numerous boyfriends and lovers after my first and only fiancé, Selwyn, but this sense of rightness with a man, of there being nothing to qualify or redeem in our relationship, was absolutely new to me.

Jake had been briefly married in his thirties but there had been no children, and his wife seemed to have made little impression on the house or indeed on him. After that, I assumed, there would have been girlfriends; after all I had met Jake at that most unpromising of romantic opportunities for a single woman, a dinner party given by a couple I had met on holiday. He had singled me out, and the next evening we went out to dinner on our own. It was hardly likely that I was the first to receive this sort of attention from him, but I believed him when he promised me that I would be the last.

Although he didn’t bring me here immediately I learned very quickly, just from the way he talked about it, that Jake was inseparable from Mead. And as soon as he did invite me and I began to know the place, I understood why.

He was offering me himself, and he didn’t do it lightly.

We sat on the wrought-iron bench and listened to the birds. The sun slowly sank, the bricks glowed as if they radiated their own light, and Jake turned to me.

‘Could you be a country wife, do you think?’

Yes, I told him.

It was not an isolated existence, in any case. My old friends and their children came to visit us. Even my mother came from time to time. She liked staying at Mead, and she and Jake got on well together even though she tended to make barbed remarks on the lines of some people not knowing they were born, and how iniquitous it was that ninety per cent of the land in this country belonged to less than ten per cent of the people.

Jake was more than equal to her. ‘Quite agree with you, Joyce,’ he used to nod. ‘It’s a lousy system. Getting rid of land, that’s what the Meadowes have been about for the last hundred and fifty years.’

She would laugh, impatient but disarmed.

I didn’t exactly choose not to involve myself in village affairs, but that was what happened. As Jake’s wife and the chatelaine of Mead I was in any case outside the circle of Meddlett women who gossiped about local events at a level of detail I couldn’t be bothered to absorb. Inevitably there were the sly hints and whispers about Jake, too, and his local affairs before we met. I didn’t want to hear any of these.

The women probably thought I was standoffish; it was true that I found the coffee mornings and book groups tedious and repetitive. There were a few county couples with whom we had dinner, but I didn’t play tennis or ride horses and so those women soon overlooked me. Jake also had his own circle of friends, mostly men of his own age who enjoyed fishing and bird-watching and were interested in land management and country politics, and he continued to involve himself with the parish council and the village church.

I found that I was happy and entirely fulfilled in the peaceful world Jake and I inhabited together. If I wanted a change of scenery I went to London, to the theatre or shopping, or just to gossip with Katherine or Colin or any one of a dozen other friends. Sometimes I even felt resentful when local commitments took up too much of Jake’s time. He did say he wished I would participate more, and so for several years we hosted Meddlett’s November the Fifth party until the annual bacchanalia finally got out of hand.

While I reflect on all this I have been wielding the shears in snapping bursts, within a thicket of honeysuckle growth that is blocking the light into the dining-room window.

I lean back to judge the effect and out of the corner of my eye see a figure coming towards me. Once again memory plays its trick of elision and I think it is Jake in his old tweed coat. A companionable greeting, nothing as formal as a word, takes shape in my head, and then the nudge of reality makes me blink and duck.

‘Let me go up the ladder and do the top bit for you,’ Colin says.

An ache has developed between my shoulder blades so I hand him the shears in silence and wipe my forehead with the back of my gardening glove.

Colin works more methodically, disentangling the excess growth before clipping it back. I hold the stepladder with one hand, and listen to the rooks in the trees along the drive. Very quickly the top of the shrub looks disciplined while the sides that I have butchered bristle with snapped twigs and dying tendrils. He dismounts and touches my shoulder.

‘Don’t you have anyone to come in and do this for you?’

‘Am I so bad at it?’ I smile.

‘It’s a lot of work.’

I glance about trying to see the house and its setting through his eyes.

The roses and lavender need attention, it’s true, and there are weeds sprouting between broken stone slabs. Jake was a knowledgeable gardener, whereas I am only trying to keep the place looking cared for. I don’t employ a regular handyman, even for a few hours a week. This is partly because of the money, but mostly because I don’t want anyone else working amongst Jake’s flowers. Gardeners have strong ideas of their own. I might come out one evening and find the old roses replaced with those variegated evergreens, the kind that look like shiny oilcloth splashed with bleach.

There are days when Mead is too much, even though looking after it is my only job. Sometimes I count up and there are half a dozen light bulbs waiting to be replaced in three different rooms. Blocked gutters are sending rainwater chutes down the old walls, and doors have warped in the winter’s damp so they no longer close properly.

Sell up, demon voices immediately whisper in my ear. Move to a modern apartment, somewhere with underfloor heating and windows that don’t rattle.

I shan’t do that, of course.

At other times, much more consistently, I know that I can – and will – do anything to keep it going.

The idea of having Colin and the others to live here with me is part of that process of preservation. They choose to see it as a more emotional matter, Mirry gathering everyone together in her old hippy way, and it has that element of course. Who else can we look to, now that we have reached this time of our lives?

But I am more practical than my old friends give me credit for.

Colin leans the stepladder against the wall of the house. The exertion has brought some colour to his face, but I notice how thin he is. We all know that he has, or has had, prostate cancer, but I don’t think even Polly knows much more than that bald fact. Colin talks so little about himself.

‘Shall we go in and have a sandwich?’ I suggest.

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.’

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