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
