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
