by Rosie Thomas
He swung their linked hands, smiling at her.
‘I was pleased to hear from you, Katherine, and I can’t think of a better way to spend a morning, but you didn’t call me just because you wanted to go for a walk, did you?’
She shook her head. ‘Have you seen the plans for our house at Mead?’ she began.
‘I glanced at them when the archaeology brief came in for tender from the planning department, and again when we embarked on the watching brief. It looks very magnificent.’
‘It’s much too magnificent. It’s self-important. It feels to me like a tomb lid, pressing down on us. On me. I told Amos this morning that I don’t want to live there. I don’t think we should be going ahead with the building.’
Chris reflected on this.
‘I’m sorry if the excavation is the reason for that?’
‘It’s not, or not directly. I don’t want to think of our house or anyone else’s towering over the princess’s grave, but the reasons are more complicated than the archaeology. It’s not a whim, or a capricious changing of mind. It’s to do with me and Amos and our life up until now, and the way I should live in the future.’
‘What did your husband say when you told him?’
Katherine smiled a little grimly. ‘Nothing. That’s partly it. He assumes that I will get over it, change my mind again, if he even thinks that hard. The real truth is that my opinion doesn’t matter much to him.’
‘I see,’ Chris said quietly. ‘Can you tell me any more?’
‘Not right now. I will some day. For now, I’ll just say that I made a decision while I was driving here. I’m going to leave him.’
He kept her hand clasped in his but he was looking ahead, at the wide curve of the beach and the low outlines of sand dunes in the far distance.
‘Go on,’ he said.
‘I shall move out of the cottage. I’ll probably go to London and live in the flat for the time being, until I find somewhere permanent.’
She was making this up as she went along and he would be able to tell this from the way the words haphazardly fell out of her.
But the more the certainty unfurled, the more certain of its rightness she became.
She recalled the elation that she had felt back in September as she and Amos drove up here in the Jaguar, the upsurge of happiness at finding herself drinking wine in the afternoon with Polly and Colin in the Griffin, and other recent moments of joy, not only in Chris’s company. They were all to do with change, green tendrils of independence emerging from bare soil, nothing to do with Amos or the building work.
I am not anyone’s good or chattel, she repeated. Of course not. She was still Sam and Toby’s mother, and what she was contemplating would shock them as well as hurt them, but they were grown men now. If she had achieved anything, she thought, it was to have brought up sons who had never had cause to question whether they were loved, or put first. The boys would thrive, whether or not she continued to live under the same roof as their father.
The strange euphoria that had eddied around her ever since coming to Mead now found an anchor. The optimism born of it was crystallizing, taking definition in the briny wind. She felt drunk and at the same time never more sober or sure of herself. She glanced back over her shoulder at their footprints, and then forwards over a vast shining expanse of untracked sand to the sea.
‘I think you’ve made up your mind,’ Chris observed.
They stopped in the middle of the beach. Blown sand whipped around them, stinging their cheeks, forcing them to turn their backs to the waves.
‘Yes, I have.’
She needed to reassure him, and she took a moment to choose her words. The simplest would also be the most honest.
‘I’m so happy we met. But I want you to know that nothing that has happened between you and me has affected the decision I’ve made. I’d be coming to the same conclusion if I didn’t know you at all.’
She half-turned into the wind, in order to look into his face.
‘You don’t have to worry that I might pursue you. You’re not going to be involved in what will happen between Amos and me. I don’t expect you to do, or even say, anything about it. Well…except maybe as a friend. If you want to be. If you did decide to be that, I’d welcome it with all my heart.’
He was going to speak but she stopped him. ‘I loved the other night, I felt like a young girl again and that’s the best present you could have given me, but it’s not what convinced me I need to leave my husband. That’s all I wanted to say. More than enough, probably.’
She smiled, a wide smile of complete frankness that he found touching. He wound his finger around a strand of her hair that had blown across her face and caught at the corner of her mouth. He studied it for a second before tucking it inside the collar of her coat.
‘Can I speak now?’
She smiled even more broadly. There were some grains of fine sand caught in her brows and eyelashes. ‘Yes, you can,’ she said.
‘Are you saying that you want me to be your friend and no more?’
She hesitated. Physically she was longing for a different relationship with Christopher Carr, and to want someone’s body was such an exciting rebirth of sensation that it was hard to ignore. She did her best, though.
‘I don’t know yet. There is a lot of ground that I have to cover first, and I have to do it on my own. It wouldn’t be fair to Amos otherwise. After that, I don’t know what will happen. I’m not even sure quite who I’ll be, if I’m not Mrs Amos Knight any longer. That’s the truth, Chris.’
‘I understand,’ he said.
He cupped her face in his hands and briefly kissed her. Then they walked on.
He added, ‘I’m not afraid that you might pursue me. I don’t have any experience of women doing that in any case, but it doesn’t strike me as your style at all. I can’t make any judgement about your marriage. How could I presume to do that? But I will tell you this. I’ve only just met you, but I want to go on talking to you. I want to tell you what I know and what I believe in and hope for, and I want to hear you telling me the same things. I want to look at your face while I’m listening to you. Maybe I haven’t led a very varied or exciting life, but this is the first time I’ve ever felt anything of the kind. If it’s falling in love, if that’s what this is, I can understand why all the world makes such a song and dance about it.’
Katherine’s eyes were stinging, not just from the wind. The only other times she had heard such eloquence from Chris were when he talked about archaeology. His candour left her tongue-tied now.
He promised her, ‘Whatever does happen, though, you can count on me as a friend.’
They reached the shelter of the belt of pines. They had walked a huge arc, almost to the breaking waves and then veering away again. Now they followed a path to a distant village across salt marshes dotted with sheep. Chris led the way to a little café looking over the maze of tidal creeks towards the sea defences, and when they reached it they sat on a bench at an outside table, leaning comfortably against the splintered silver-grey wood of the hut wall. They ate thick crab sandwiches and drank rapidly cooling tea while predatory gulls eyed them from their perches on tarry mooring posts. The two of them must have looked, Katherine thought, like the most companionable of settled couples, the kind who keep a National Trust handbook and a guide to local walks tucked in the glove compartment of their car.
When she had set out the other evening for her restaurant date with Chris, she had been both shocked and pleased to consider herself on the brink of adultery. The evening had maintained its double-edged promise by being serious but also skittish, flirtatious, a date date complete with candles and complicit waiters, and ending up with going back for a nightcap. If Toby hadn’t called when he did, it was likely that she and Chris would have gone to bed together.
Today, though, the tenor between them had altered. They were sitting on their bench with the fibres of shared experience already beginning to knot them together, not yet
knowing whether the final balance would favour love or friendship, but certain that it was going to be one or the other. They had moved into one another’s lives and it wasn’t the kind of stake that you gave up on.
It was late in life to make such a discovery. These were the kind of connections that everyone made quickly and thoughtlessly in their teens or twenties, and which were then woven into the fabric of life. Marriages or old friendships of the kind that were entrenched at Mead were almost all begun early in life. This new coming-together was so unexpected and so unlooked-for that it seemed doubly precious. There was something solid here, weighty with promise, yet also wide and free-ranging.
As they sat with their hands linked, silently watching the swirl of seawater filling the creeks, the broad skies and silent empty marshes stretching around them seemed their own country.
Miranda waited by her mother’s hospital bed until Joyce finally fell asleep.
The GP, when she came, had been concerned about her breathing and the rising fever. An ambulance was called, and in the A & E department a diagnosis of pneumonia had been followed by a long wait for an in-patient bed to become free. When they finally reached it it was in a mixed ward full of mute, waxen old people and the sound of despairing coughing. Joyce held on to Miranda’s hand, saying very little.
The medical staff reported that she was weak, but not in immediate danger. A mask was fixed over her face and drips were connected to her blue arms.
Once she was definitely asleep Miranda slipped away, saying to the nurses that she would collect some of her mother’s belongings from home and bring them in for her. Back at the flat she took a tartan zipped suitcase down from the top of the wardrobe and blew a layer of dust off the lid. Guessing, she opened cupboards and found two nighties, underwear, a cracked washbag that she filled with toiletries from the bathroom. In the bottom drawer of the chest lay the cashmere cardigan jacket that Miranda had given her for her last birthday, still folded in the shop’s tissue paper. She packed the fleece dressing gown that hung behind the bedroom door and collected a pair of trodden-down slippers from the rug beside the bed. She stood for a moment with these in her hands, studying the imprint of her mother’s bare feet. The dark impression of heel and toes in beige fur-fabric was too intimate to be handled comfortably, just as it felt intrusive to be searching and selecting from amongst these predictable belongings. It was like going through the private possessions of a stranger who happened also to be her mother.
She put in the paperback novel – a historical romance – that was lying on the bedside table and zipped up the suitcase with a sense of relief. Everything in the flat was tidy and fairly clean, but the clothes and furniture and the few other items, from china knick-knacks to pot-bound house plants and a small row of paperbacks, all had the air of being perfunctorily assembled, as if their owner had lost interest in them as well as in the wider world. The flimsiness of this place of her mother’s, a temporary perch only a few wingbeats from the end of a long flight, made Miranda feel deeply sad. Not for the first time, she vowed to overcome Joyce’s blank refusals and make her come to live with her at Mead. In the cottage now occupied by Katherine and Amos, perhaps, if she refused to surrender her independence altogether.
There was nothing else here, as far as she could see, that Joyce might need for a short stay in hospital. Miranda carried the case out into the hall and made a quick check of doors and windows. She would be coming back later, to spend the night. This was where she would stay until Joyce was discharged. The houseman who admitted her had said antibiotics should bring the pneumonia under control, and if she could stay free of hospital infections she would recover quite quickly. As she glanced into the kitchen, her mobile rang. It was six o’clock. Through the lit window of the flat opposite, Miranda could see a very old woman, tottering in minute steps across the bright backdrop of her kitchen.
Glancing at the display she said, ‘Katherine? Hello?’
‘Yes, it’s me. Where are you, Mirry?’
‘At my mother’s.’
She explained what had happened and why she would be away from Mead for a few days. Katherine’s voice was warm with sympathy.
‘No,’ Miranda answered, ‘thanks. Nothing you can do. Everything should be all right in the house, and Colin’s back in a few days. Wait, though – you could just mention to Polly and Selwyn what’s happened?’
‘I’ll do that. Go on. Off you go back to the hospital.’
Miranda almost rang off, but she remembered just in time to ask if Katherine had called for any reason. There was a second’s silence before her reply. No, she said. Nothing important. Just hi.
They said goodbye. Miranda took the tartan suitcase out to her car.
Katherine sat in the bedroom at the cottage. What had seemed straightforward and inevitable this morning on the beach had now become dark and convoluted. She had been going to confide in Miranda, had even worked out the exact words she would use. The notion had been to confirm the reality of what she was doing by telling another person, but this was the way things happened. You got so immersed in your own concerns that you started thinking of other people almost as cardboard cut-outs to be moved about in the unfolding drama but then – chasteningly – you were reminded that they were busy on their own stage. Katherine was fond of Joyce, and hoped that she would soon be better. She was also concerned for Miranda herself, whom she knew to be troubled by the awkwardness of her relationship with her mother. Katherine’s own gentle, conventional mother had died of breast cancer ten years ago.
In any case, she decided now, her decision to speak to Miranda had probably only been a delaying tactic. Perhaps she had been hoping that her friend would dissuade her, tell her that she mustn’t do anything of the kind – was that it?
One thing she did know: she wasn’t going to approach Polly in the same way. Because there was something wrong between Polly and Selwyn, too. He was brittle and irritable with everyone, and cutting to Polly herself, whereas Polly had developed a kind of mute, imploring meekness around him that she was too clever to wear comfortably.
It isn’t until you come to live in each other’s pockets like this that you start to see all the cracks, Katherine thought. Miranda with her love and vivacity had convinced them that Mead would be the place where they could start to grow old, and Amos had taken the proposal and decorated it with his grand designs. She had gone along with his notions, because that was what she did, and to her surprise she had been the one who had been woken up by the change.
But it didn’t look now as if they would be seeing out as much as a season of the great Mead plan together. Katherine was sorry that out of all of them she was going to be the one who began the retreat.
When she came into the cottage, having said goodbye to Chris next to their parked cars on the beach road, Amos was sitting in an armchair with the whisky decanter at his elbow. She passed by him without speaking, and he had ignored her. Separately, in the hours that she had been out, they had been moving towards the crisis. Amos was no fool. He was intuitive, in his own bull-headed way, and he’d know that today had a different dimension from any of their previous crises, serious though some of them had been. Now she could hear him moving about downstairs, banging against furniture and shouldering through doorways.
If she didn’t go and confront him soon he would bring the fight upstairs to her.
She found him in the kitchen. He had shaken fresh ice out of the ice tray and there were cubes melting on the floor. His face was dark red.
‘Why do you have to drink so much?’ she asked in exasperation.
Amos had never been a drunk. But since he had been asked either to leave his chambers or face a harassment charge – the pearl-handled revolver no-option option, as he bitterly called it – he had been starting earlier and earlier in the day.
‘Because I’m fucking miserable, and it helps,’ he snarled.
His pain was so obvious that she put her hand out to him, exactly as if he were one of the bo
ys come home from school with a problem that she could solve. For all these years her role had been to soothe and comfort these three men, and now she was going to be the cause of their suffering.
Amos shook it off. ‘Don’t minister to me. Don’t do your bloody concerned thing. I’ll just get on with it, thanks.’
‘All right.’ She took a cloth and mopped up the melted ice. He stumbled past her into the living room and flopped into his chair. She followed, and stood in front of him. She felt slightly ill with apprehension, and self-disgust. It would have been so much easier to go upstairs to the second bedroom and climb into bed. In the morning Amos would be sober, and they could pretend that what was wrong was not significant, and nothing much would change, and so she would hold on to the life she knew instead of reaching for the one she wanted.
It was remembering the brave, determined picture of herself that she had painted for Chris that made her hold her resolve.
There is a lot of ground I have to cover. I have to do it on my own.
Oh, please. Who did she think she was? Joan of Arc?
But she had said it.
‘Amos, I’m going to London tonight.’
‘What the hell for?’
He looked at her from under thickened eyelids. He knew what was coming, but he was going to make her say it.
‘I’m leaving you.’
He swirled his glass and threw down another inch of whisky. Then he laughed.
‘Why? Haven’t I earned enough money to keep you happy?’
She did him the favour of ignoring the question. ‘Amos, you say you’re miserable. Hasn’t it ever crossed your mind that I might be too?’
He laughed again, with desolation cracking his face. ‘If you are, we’ve got more in common than I thought. You seem to me as happy as a cow in clover.’