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
