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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.