planes of glass reflecting the leaves and the clouds.
The land fell away on three sides of the site, offering views for miles over the farmlands and copses, with a thin crescent of old deciduous woodland at the back of it in which the oak and horse chestnut leaves were just beginning to turn. The little wood offered protection from the winds off the sea that sometimes battered Mead itself.
The situation was perfect, as if the grand design had always been for people to build here, but its rightness had been overlooked until now. Miranda was proud of the potential, as though she had some hand in establishing it.
Amos swung to face her, oblivious to the rain, gouging up a little ruff of muddy earth with his heel.
‘Miranda, just tell me, why can’t we get going? The planning bureaucracy, the endless delays. It’s driving me insane. I want to see the trenches cut. I want to see my house rising out of this earth. I want it badly enough to get down on my knees right now and start digging at it with these.’
He waved his hands in front of her. She thought he might flop down in his corduroys and start burrowing at the flat grass like some immense sandy mole.
‘It’s not long now. Monday.’
‘That is long. One hundred and twelve hours…’ he glanced at his watch ‘…precisely.’
Miranda laughed. ‘It will be worth waiting for.’ Rain was dripping off the brim of her hat. ‘Let’s go back to the house. There’s nothing to be done out here.’
The Knights had now completed the move to Mead. Katherine had confided to Miranda that Amos had resigned from his chambers, and Miranda could see how restless he was without the demands of work to distract him. He didn’t want to go back to the sheltered confinement of Mead’s holiday wing and sit there looking out at the rain. He stuck his hands in his pockets instead and stared hungrily at the blue Portakabin that had been brought in the week before on a low-loader and lifted into place in a cradle of chains. There was a caravan waiting to one side with a yellow JCB parked next to it.
‘Come on, come on,’ he muttered and paced, as if the machinery might shudder into life under the force of his will.
‘Amos. I’m getting wet. I want a cup of coffee.’
He stopped. ‘What? Oh. Apologies in order. I’m being thoughtless.’ Then he sighed. ‘Standing here staring at some string and a digger’s not helping my blood pressure, in any case.’
They turned away on the caterpillar-tracked dirt road that would be the Knights’ driveway. It curved past the belt of trees and joined the main drive to the house a few yards from the gate.
Automatically, because none of them now used the front, Amos and Miranda headed for the back door into the house, crossing the wet glimmering cobbles of the yard. The holiday wing looked demurely occupied, with laundered curtains at the windows and even some pots of herbs placed by Katherine beside the doorstep. Across from this statement of domestic order sat the reverse of a mirror image – a picture of destruction.
Polly and Selwyn’s barn now had no windows, no door, no interior walls, and only a few gaunt beams for a roof. There came a series of thuds and the powdery splinter and crash of falling plaster and masonry. Amos raised his eyebrows at Miranda and a second later a figure appeared in the jagged hole that had once been a window. His hair, clothes and skin were thick with dust, and clods of ancient plaster clung to his shoulders. In this grey mask Selwyn’s mouth appeared shockingly red. Miranda caught the inside of her lip between her teeth and forced herself to look elsewhere. It was more difficult to have him so close, his physical presence always nudging into sight and from there marching into her private thoughts, than she had bargained for.
‘Hey, come and take a look,’ he yelled, brandishing his sledgehammer.
They ventured obediently to the doorway and peered through the hanging veil of dust. The floor was heaped with broken brick and laths and roughly swept-up piles of rubble. In the far corner, under the only remaining fragment of roof, a tarpaulin shelter had been rigged up, the corner looped back to reveal a camping mattress with folded sleeping bags and pillows all exposed to the dust. A primus burner on an improvised trestle table stood next to a tap that sagged away from the wall on a length of crusted pipe.
‘Just look at it,’ Amos muttered. The derision in his voice might have masked a tremor of reluctant awe.
Miranda stared at the tarp shelter. The whole scene was strongly reminiscent of the dwellings of primitive people, possibly hunter-gatherers huddled in caves, protected only by animal skins and a low fire. It was obvious that Selwyn adored descending to this level. Pitting himself against the weather, pulling his hut dwelling apart with his bare hands in order to rebuild something better for his woman and himself, he probably felt the very embodiment of primitive Man.
It was a joyous spectacle, as well as a sexy one. Miranda propped herself against a shaky wall to enjoy it.
‘Excuse me? What’s funny?’ Selwyn swung the sledgehammer in a small arc. He looked offended.
Amos coughed and slapped his hands together to shake off the dust and grit.
‘You see,’ Selwyn added, vaguely indicating a slice of rubbled floor, ‘this is where the snooker table will be.’
‘But you don’t play snooker,’ said Amos.
‘You always were a literal-minded person,’ Selwyn sighed.
Amos looked about. Small scraping and collapsing sounds came as the latest demolition area settled. ‘You’ve got quite a lot to do, haven’t you?’
‘It’ll be done before yours, mate. And anyway there’s no hurry. This place is fine as it is.’
‘Does Polly think so?’
Apart from the first, Selwyn had slept every night since their arrival at Mead under his own potential roof. Miranda guessed that he wanted to distance himself from the soft option, to demonstrate that he needed nothing from anybody, least of all creature comforts. Polly sometimes slept in their bedroom in the house, sometimes in the barn with him.
Miranda tried not to notice which, or when.
But she did notice. She couldn’t help it.
For the new residents at Mead the kitchen in the old house had become a kind of common room. It was where people congregated if they were not working or keeping to their own quarters, and it was big enough and already shabby enough to absorb the influx without looking much different. Today there was an earthenware jug of ragged crimson dahlias on the table, with a heap of magazines and envelopes drifting over an open laptop.
Miranda and Amos came in from the rain and tramped through to the passage beneath the stairs to leave their coats. Their boots left gritty prints on the tiles.
Colin was resting next to the Rayburn, in the Windsor armchair that had been favoured by Miranda’s late cat, and Polly was reading out to him the lonely hearts ads from a newspaper. Katherine had just arrived back from two days at her charity’s offices in London and her Burberry and briefcase were deposited on another chair. When Amos returned, padding in his socks and with what was left of his hair sticking up after he had rubbed it dry, he kissed her absently and patted her shoulder.
‘Meeting go off all right, darling?’
‘Yes. I…’
‘We’ve just been down to the site, Mirry and me. I’ll walk back down there with you, if you like.’
‘Has anything new happened?’
‘No.’
Katherine said, ‘Then I think I’ll go into the village with Polly and Colin. We were just talking about it. The rain is going to stop in a minute.’
He looked at her in surprise. ‘You’ve only just got back from town.’
Polly glanced up from her