Lovers and Newcomers. Rosie Thomas

      Katherine heard a click, like the shutter of a camera. She wished that she might have a picture of this moment, if a camera could have captured the surge of warmth that ran through her blood and loosened her muscles, the unlooked-for buzz of pleasure at finding herself drinking wine in the afternoon with Polly and Colin for company, with a view through the window of amber and crimson leaves, and a word like beautiful in her ears. She couldn’t remember anyone having applied it to her, ever, not even Amos.

      How disconnected have you been? the voice chimed in.

      ‘I don’t think so,’ she began to murmur, but Polly leaned forward and briefly covered Katherine’s hand with hers.

      ‘It’s all right, you know. You can be beautiful, it’s allowed. You don’t need Amos’s permission. Does she, Colin?’

      ‘No,’ he agreed.

      Katherine thought for a moment. Her instinct was to deflect the compliment, but then, why? She sat forwards, smiling, her fingers lacing around her glass of pub merlot with the chain of purple bubbles at the meniscus.

       Everything is going to change.

      What did that mean? She was taken aback by the idea.

      A burst of loud music suddenly poured through the pendant strings of brown plastic beads and bamboo tubules that separated the back of the bar from the kitchen. Thank you for the music, a woman’s voice warbled.

      ‘Oi, Jess,’ Vin called over the din. ‘Turn that down, customers can’t hear themselves think.’

      There was quite a long interval, and then the volume diminished a little.

      One of the pale couples was leaving. A girl appeared in the doorway, where Colin had previously glimpsed the man in chef’s clothing. She came in and gathered up the dirty plates from the vacated table.

      ‘Hi, I was wondering if you’d be back,’ she called to Colin.

      ‘Hello Jessie,’ he answered.

      Polly and Katherine turned to him in surprise.

      ‘We met the other night. I came in for a quick drink, and Jessie and her boyfriend were sitting here. We got talking.’

      Jessie grinned. ‘You and I did. That loser Damon had buggered off, remember, it was just me and Raff.’ Her eyes flicked from Polly to Katherine. ‘Your, ah, husband gave me a lift home…?’ She made it a pointed question.

      ‘These are my friends, Polly and Katherine. I’m not married,’ Colin explained.

      Jessie glanced at the folds of Colin’s scarf, and his expensive soft jacket.

      ‘No. So you’re all from Mead, then?’

      She shuffled the plates into a precarious pile, scraping leftovers on to the uppermost one. ‘Whoops.’

      Cutlery threatened to slide out of the plate sandwich and she dipped her hips and shimmied to tilt the load the other way. She looked very young and cheerful.

      ‘All of us,’ Polly answered. ‘We’re old friends, we’ve known each other for years, and my husband and I and Katherine and hers have moved up here to be together and not to sink into a decline in our old age.’

      ‘That’s cool. So it’s like, what did you call it in those days, a commune?’

      ‘No,’ they said, absolutely in unison.

      Miranda was passionate about her scheme and each of the rest of them would have differently defined what they hoped Mead would become, but they had always been unanimous in declaring that it wouldn’t be a commune. Amos had said that communes stood for vegetarianism and free love and bad plumbing, and he would not be interested in any of those separately, let alone in combination.

      ‘The jury’s out on number two,’ Selwyn had muttered out of the corner of his mouth to Polly at the time. The memory of this made her smile. When she was amused, Polly’s eyes narrowed under heavy lids and her cheeks rounded into smooth apples so that she looked like a thumbnail sketch of a Japanese lady on a packet of egg noodles.

      ‘It’s more a collaboration, I’d say,’ Polly offered.

      ‘What about you, then?’ Jessie asked Colin.

      ‘I come and go,’ he told her.

      ‘Can’t see my mum doing anything like that. She lives in a bungalow,’ Jessie remarked, as if this entirely defined her.

      Vin leaned heavily on the bar. Jessie seemed to feel his glare on her back.

      ‘I got a job, as you see,’ she announced to Colin, rolling her eyes. She raised her voice slightly. ‘Helping out in the kitchen, bit of cooking, washing up and that. There’s plenty of work around here, not a problem. Are you going to have lunch? We’re supposed to stop at two. Chef’s off today, we’re just microwaving, but I could do you lasagne and chips, or a baked and toppings if you like.’

      ‘No, we’re fine. We’ll just have our wine. Thanks.’

      Jessie nodded and hoisted her pile of plates. ‘Nice to have met you,’ she told Polly and Katherine. ‘Come back one evening. We’ve got live music Fridays and Saturdays, not completely crap, as it goes, then quiz night’s Tuesday.’

      ‘Amos and Selwyn would love a quiz,’ Katherine said.

      ‘But they don’t know anything about telly or sport or pop music,’ Colin pointed out.

      Jessie turned on him in indignation. ‘Some of the questions are quite intellectual. You should come as well and meet Geza. He’s the chef.’

      ‘I see.’

      ‘Sure you won’t have some food?’

      They assured her that they would not.

      ‘Bye, then,’ Jessie said, and danced her way back to the kitchen.

      Polly gave her Japanese noodle lady smile. She leaned closer to Colin and lowered her voice. ‘You’ve got the chance of a nice gay chef, by the sound of it.’

      ‘I’ve already seen him. Not bad at all,’ Colin smiled.

      She tapped her hand lightly on his knee.

      ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not even to please you, Polly.’

      ‘Not yet, you mean. I know. It’s all right. Shall we have another glass of wine, do you think?’

      The others pretended to be shocked.

      ‘Two glasses of wine?’

      ‘In the middle of a weekday afternoon?’

      And then they agreed, why not?

      Amos went back across the yard to his house, saying that he had calls to make to the architect and the contractors and a mass of paperwork to deal with.

      Looking around the kitchen, Miranda saw that it was in need of some attention. She put the dirty coffee cups in the dishwasher and emptied the grounds from the pot into the compost bucket. Someone – probably Amos – had been treating the bucket as a waste bin, and as she stooped down to pick out a polythene wrapper she discovered some pieces of broken plate. It was the one with ivy tendrils wreathed around the rim that she and Jake had found years ago in a junk shop in Norwich. She was sad that it was broken.

      After she had disposed of the fragments, too badly smashed to be worth repairing, she wiped the table and picked up a few shed dahlia petals. From this angle it was apparent that the dresser was dusty, so she cleared a clutter of bowls and papers and searched in a drawer for a cloth and a tin of polish. Wadding the cloth up in her fist she pressed the tip of it into the brown ooze of polish, then began to work it in smooth strokes into the grain of the wood. She extended her arm in wide arcs, rubbing hard, enjoying these ministrations