were driving through a village, its main street set with small grey stone terraced houses that broke up in places to reveal vistas of new bungalows set behind them. A group of resentful teenagers stared out from a glass and steel bus shelter like ruminants from a pen at the zoo. Amos patted the palms of his hands on the wheel, then brightened.
‘Are you hungry?’ he asked, which meant that he was.
On a corner of the long street he had spotted a teashop. He braked and the Jaguar slid in to the kerb.
‘We said we’d be there for tea,’ Katherine remarked. Amos got out of the car, came around and held open the door for her.
‘There’s no hurry. We’ve got a lifetime at Mead ahead of us.’
For a moment, she imagined he had said life sentence.
The teashop was cool, with a stone-flagged floor and a cluster of mismatched chairs and tables. Amos sat down at the table in the window and Katherine took her place opposite him. He chose scones and cream for both of them, and wedges of Victoria sponge and fruit cake, chatting with the waitress as she took the order. He had always had a big appetite, and lately he seemed even hungrier for food.
‘We don’t have to eat it all,’ he laughed at her protest, ‘but you know I love cake.’
Katherine acquiesced. It was restful sitting in the window of what must once have been the village shop, with the traffic trickling by outside. The country was a slower place, they would both have to learn that. Gripped by affection as well as happy anticipation, she leaned across and put her hands over Amos’s.
‘We’re at the beginning, aren’t we?’ she said. ‘A new place, a different way to live, but still with the benefit of everything we have learned. That’s all right, isn’t it?’ Then, knowing that what they both knew really couldn’t be construed as all right, she added hastily, ‘Remember what we were like, all of us, when we met?’
‘Only vaguely, thank God.’
He withdrew one hand, then the other, and as soon as the waitress put the plate in front of them he started work on the scones. He began to talk about their rather famous architect. The woman had promised to send a revised set of drawings for part of their magnificent new house, to be built at Mead on a plot of land purchased from Miranda, but had failed to do so before they left for this inaugural weekend.
The teenagers had broken out of the corral of the bus shelter. Now they lurched up the street in a mob, arms and legs shooting out of the central mass. They enveloped Amos’s glimmering silver Jaguar and one of them tweaked the nearside wing mirror, which instantly lent the car a comical lop-eared appearance. Amos was concentrating on loading jam onto the second half of scone and didn’t see what was happening, but Katherine watched. Without feeling much concern for the car, she hoped that they would move on before her husband noticed the assault on his property and caused a scene.
One of the bigger boys glanced up and caught her eye. He bounded across the pavement and pressed himself up against the café window. He had a broad red face, hummocked with pimples, which he brought up against the glass, misting it with his breath. His mouth opened wider and suckered itself to the glass, lips paling as his tongue licked a trail through the dust in a lingering smooch. Katherine gazed with interest at this spectacle as Amos bit into his scone. Behind the window boy, the rest of the group were pulling the wipers of the car to the vertical, rocking on the rear bumper and trying to prise open the doors.
She coughed slightly as the boy doing the kissing formed a tube with the fingers and thumb of his right hand and waggled it at her.
Amos did look around now. The boy immediately detached himself and ran, leaving a wet smear on the window like the trail of a giant mollusc.
‘Bloody feral kids, same everywhere,’ Amos growled, through crumbs and jam. The other boys dashed after their leader, hooting as they went.
‘Christ, look what they’ve done,’ Amos roared, suddenly noticing.
Katherine tucked away a smile as she looked at the car, wing mirrors drooping and wipers standing erect.
‘More tea?’ she asked.
Selwyn negotiated a lane lined with trees that looked leaned-upon by the wind. He swung the wheel sharply and steered the van through a pair of lichenous gateposts topped with stone balls twice the size of a man’s head.
The drive curved under more trees, then straightened, and Mead revealed itself against its ancient green backdrop. At its heart was an old flint building with bigger Georgian windows than the original farmhouse construction had featured, which gave it a slightly startled aspect. A modest porte cochère, also a later addition to the fabric, framed the double front door. The plaster was falling in chunks from the bases of the fluted pillars. On either side of the original house, short, unmatching wings had been added at later dates, partly in reddish-orange brick and partly in flint. The overall effect was harmonious but not at all grand, as if the house had quietly expanded according to requirements over several hundred years without any particular design having been set or followed.
The van coasted over the gravel and came to rest at a tangent to the circular flowerbed that formed the centrepiece of the front courtyard. The scent of lavender flooded the cab.
Polly looked through the insect-spotted windscreen at the russet and grey façade of the house. There was moss growing beneath broken sections of lead guttering, and the paintwork of the front door was faded, but the size of it and the almost magical seclusion of the setting never failed to impress her. Mead was a beautiful place to end up, she reflected. If ending up was actually what was happening.
In the front doorway, framed by the pillars, Miranda Meadowe appeared. 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,’