me because I couldn’t think how to stop, even though I was frightening myself. Nothing will ever be as bad as that, and I know that I have done enough crying. More than enough to last what remains of a lifetime.
I look up from my polishing, and remind myself again of what I have.
Here is Mead, this lovely place where I belong.
There are no more Meadowes, Jake was the last of the line and I am the last to bear his family name, but thanks to my friends there are voices and laughter again in these rooms. Sometimes when we sit around the table it is as though we are not six, but a dozen or more – here are the earlier versions of each of us, gathered behind the chairs, leaning over one another’s shoulders to interject or contradict, phantoms of teenagers and young parents and errant mid-lifers, all these faces vivid in memory’s snapshots with the attitudes and dreams of then, half or more of which are now forgotten.
With this much familiarity between us, when I single out our older faces from the crowd, I have come to imagine that I can read off the latest bargains we are striking with ourselves, with each other, and – with whom?
If I believed in God, I would say so.
With fate, then.
If we can stay alive a few years longer, be healthy, live just a little more, maybe experience something new that will make us feel that everything that is passionate, breathtaking, surprising is not already behind us. If we can be fractionally careless, and just frivolous enough, amongst our old friends. If we can be not lonely, and only sometimes afraid: that will be enough.
These are selfish desires, of course. We are a selfish generation, we post-war babies, for whom everything has been butter and orange juice and free speech and free love.
But even with all our privileges, we have made mistakes.
Whereas if I thought about personal fallibility at all when I was young, it was just one more thing to laugh at.
And now I look up, and see Selwyn coming across the yard to the back door. The latch rattles, and he tramples his feet on the doormat to shake some of the plaster dust off his boots.
‘Hi. There you are. Where’s everyone?’ he asks.
‘Gone for a walk.’ I bend deliberately over the polishing cloth, making long sweeps over the dresser top.
‘Barb?’ He comes across and stands much too close to me, just six inches away. I can smell dust and sweat. ‘What’s the matter? You’re crying, aren’t you?’
He doesn’t touch me, but he picks up the tin of polish instead as if this is the closest connection he dares to make. He screws the lid in place and I study his notched and grimy hands and the rinds of dirt clinging to the cuticles.
The polishing slows down, my reach diminishing, until it gradually stops altogether.
‘No. I was just thinking sombre thoughts.’
He does touch me now, the fingers of his right hand just coming lightly to rest on the point of my shoulder. We look into each other’s eyes.
‘About the other night…’ he begins.
‘It’s all right. Don’t. No need to. You were a bit drunk. Me too. Two glasses of wine, nowadays, and I’m…’
He stops me.
‘I wasn’t drunk, and I don’t believe you were either. I meant it. You are so beautiful, and necessary to me. I’m numb these days, I’m like a log of dead bloody wood, totally inert except for the termites of anxiety gnawing away, but when I look at you it’s like the log’s being doused in petrol and set alight. I can’t stop it. I don’t want to stop it, because it’s being alive.’
‘Don’t say these things, Selwyn. You shouldn’t, and I shouldn’t listen.’
‘I’m bursting into flames, look.’
His index finger moves to my bare neck, slides down to the hollow of my collarbone.
I step backwards, out of his reach, skirting the corner of the dresser.
‘Polly,’ I manage to say. ‘Polly, Polly, Polly, Polly. Partner. Mother of three children. Your partner. Your children.’
‘You are not telling me anything I don’t already know,’ Selwyn says reasonably.
It was Miranda who had very nearly become Selwyn’s wife.
After they left the university they had drifted to London where Miranda found herself an agent and spent her days going to auditions, hitching up her skirt in front of a series of directors and chain-smoking afterwards while she waited for the phone to ring.
Selwyn was in the first year of his clinical training, and finding that he hated the sadistic rituals of medical memory tests and group diagnostic humiliations. At the time Miranda had a room in a shared flat in Tufnell Park and more often than not Selwyn stayed there with her, huddling in her single bed or crouching in the armchair amongst discarded clothes, a textbook on his lap and the apparatus for fixing another joint spread on the arm.
He claimed later, with reason, that this was the lowest period of his life. He knew that he wasn’t going to qualify as a doctor, but had no idea what else he might do with himself. Startlingly, he was also discovering that he was no longer the centre of attention. Amos and Polly and Colin and all their other friends had set off in different directions. It seemed that Miranda, with her jittery determination to be an actress, was the only thing he had left to hold on to.
He held on hard.
One night, lying ribcage to ribcage in her bed and listening to the cats squalling in the dank garden backed by a railway line, he said, ‘Let’s get married.’
They could at least then get a flat on their own together. There would be regular cooking, laundry would somehow get done, life would be legitimized.
Miranda said, ‘Yes.’
They went to Portobello Road the next Saturday afternoon and chose a ring, a Victorian garnet band that Selwyn couldn’t afford. Plans were made for a registry office ceremony at Camden Town Hall, to be followed by a restaurant lunch for Miranda’s mother and Selwyn’s parents and brother. In the evening there was to be a catered party in a room over a pub, at which a revived Blue Peony would be the disco. Weddings in those days were deliberately stripped of all tradition. Miranda hooted with laughter at the idea of a church, or a bridal gown, and a honeymoon involving anything more than a few days in a borrowed cottage in Somerset was out of the question in any case.
One weekend Miranda’s mother came down from Wolverhampton. Selwyn was banished to his rented room near the hospital. Joyce Huggett was in her forties, a normally outspoken and opinionated woman who was uncomfortable in London, which she hardly knew. She was also a little uncertain of her own daughter these days, because Miranda had gone to an ancient university and had acquired sophisticated friends, and was – or was about to become – an actress.
‘Couldn’t you at least wear white, Barbara? It needn’t be anything bridal. Just a little dress and coat, maybe. I’m thinking of the photographs.’
In Joyce’s own wedding picture, dating from the same month as Princess Elizabeth’s, Joyce was wearing a dress made from a peculiarly unfluid length of cream satin, with her mother’s lace veil. By her side, Miranda’s handsome father smiled in a suit with noticeably uneven lapels. The marriage lasted nine years before he left his wife and daughter for a cinema projectionist.
‘I’m not a virgin, Mum,’ Miranda said.
Mrs Huggett frowned. ‘You’re a modern young woman, I’m well aware of that, thank you. But this will be your wedding day. Don’t you want to look special?’
‘I know what I want,’ Miranda said calmly.
They went together to Feathers boutique in Knightsbridge and chose an Ossie Clark maxi dress,