‘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.
After a moment Colin asked deliberately, ‘What stage are the plans at now? Fill me in.’
Amos sat back in his chair. He described how the new house would rise on a sloping plot of land hidden by a belt of trees to the south-west of the house. It was to be uncompromisingly modern with impeccable green credentials. The last adjustments to the plans, to meet the requirements of the local authority planning committee, were now in progress. Building work, Amos announced, would soon be starting. In the meantime, once the move up here was completed, he and Katherine were going to make a temporary home in the one-time holiday wing at the back of Mead.
‘We need to be right here. Keep an eye on the contractors,’ Amos said.
There was a collective shifting in seats, another change in the glittering currents of air as no one mentioned the real reason why Amos was leaving London and his chambers.
Katherine thoughtfully broke off a piece of oatcake and bit it in half. She was the only one who had changed before dinner, into an amethyst silk shift dress. Anything that plain and unadorned, Miranda reckoned, must have cost well into four figures.
‘We’re looking forward to it. Living in a holiday cottage will be like being on holiday,’ Katherine laughed.
Selwyn nodded. ‘Maybe it will.’
Miranda listened to his deep voice rather than the actual words. She knew what Selwyn’s plans were. From now on Polly and he would be living here too. They were going to do most of the work on the derelict wing themselves. She didn’t doubt Selwyn’s ability to tackle the job, or Polly’s willingness to assist him.
Selwyn had read medicine at university, but he had never completed his clinical practice. He had moved to Somerset instead, to a ramshackle cottage, where he set up a business buying, restoring and reselling antique furniture. Over the years, as the supply of undervalued old gems in need of a French polish seemed to dwindle, he had gone into buying timber and making furniture himself, and once Polly had given up academia and joined him they had run the business together. Polly wrote historical biographies in the short hours that were left to her between the furniture business and bringing up three children.
Miranda never knew precisely how successful or otherwise their enterprises had been, but it was no secret that they had never had any money to spare. The Somerset house and the workshops had finally been sold, and they had bought their piece of Mead from her.
Selwyn flexed his chisel-scarred fingers and grinned. ‘I’m busting to get started.’
That was obvious enough. The undischarged electricity that flickered in the room seemed to