Rambles on the Edge. Wendy Maitland

be me, I thought peevishly, not my six-year-old daughter. Several days followed in a carefree state of unstructured time as clocks and watches were ignored and mealtimes occurred randomly. A great many bottles of wine were emptied as we sat around the enormous kitchen table, chatting and idling until tugged by the children to go and look at something they had built or knocked over during mad games. Too soon David had to leave, to go and visit his mother in Somerset, and we returned to Forest Lodge knowing time was short before tickets back home had to be booked.

      Muz was scandalised at the state of the children’s clothes waiting for her twin-tub when we returned. ‘Whatever can you have been doing to accumulate so much dirt, and all these grass stains? Your friend must have let the children run riot by the look of them,’ she grumbled, while allowing the precious machine to be wheeled out on a day that wasn’t washday. We were sorting through the grubby pile of clothes when the phone rang and Muz went to answer it. ‘It’s for you,’ she called from the hall where the phone lived on a small table next to the front door. ‘It’s a man. He didn’t say who he was.’ That will be David, I thought. But it wasn’t. Incredibly it was Lanner, his voice unmistakable as he said, ‘I heard you were over here, visiting your mother.’

      ‘Yes,’ I managed to reply after a moment of stunned hesitation.

      ‘I’m on leave, staying with my parents, not too far from where you are. I thought of driving over one day,’ he suggested casually. My voice seemed to have dried up with the shock of hearing him instead of David, and I needed to collect myself. ‘What about your wife?’ I asked after a pause.

      ‘She’s not here. I came on my own with the children.’

      There was silence as I took this in. What was he saying? Had he and his wife split up? Why did he want to see me?

      ‘Are you still there?’ He sounded surprised.

      ‘Yes. But you can’t come over, I’m just about to leave. I’m living in Rhodesia now,’ I added lamely as if whole continents stretched between us instead of a few miles of English countryside.

      ‘It would be a pity to miss a chance to meet again since last time was so awkward and offered no opportunity for any meaningful conversation. Especially with no shortage of subjects for discussion,’ he added enigmatically.

      ‘It’s just not a good time,’ I answered quickly, feeling trapped, and annoyed with Lanner for thinking he could walk back into my life so abruptly after the years of anguish he had caused me.

      ‘I would like to see you again,’ he persisted.

      ‘Why?’

      ‘In case there have been past misunderstandings.’

      ‘We are both in different places now, looking ahead, not looking back.’ ‘Sometimes looking back offers perspective, and can be a good thing, helping to understand the past.’

      ‘Looking back is what people do when they’re lost,’ I said, directing the remark at him, and noticing a slight sadness in his voice as he replied. ‘I can see you will not be persuaded, but I hope, one day, fate will look upon us more kindly and provide another opportunity for speaking.’

      ‘Yes, possibly,’ I said, feeling relieved that we could end on good terms. ‘It does seem as if fate conspires to engineer some strange encounters for us.’ He laughed in the chuckling way which was familiar and dangerously engaging, so that I had to hold onto myself to say goodbye and put the phone down. I was shaking as I did so, but glad to have avoided the complications that any meeting inevitably would have caused.

      Muz wanted to know who it was, and when I told her and how the conversation had ended, she was irritated. ‘You could easily have let him come here. It would not have been disloyal to Adam. In any case I would have liked to see Lanner again. He was in love with you, you know.’

      ‘No, he wasn’t,’ I said fiercely. ‘He cut me off with no explanation or the slightest twinge of conscience, just like Tom did with Elaine.’

      ‘Elaine is still friendly with Tom. She doesn’t hold it against him, even though he married someone else. It’s the Christian thing to do.’

      ‘Not all of us in this family are very good at doing the Christian thing,’ I reminded her, thinking of Fa, but not saying so.

      Muz switched the subject to Ros. ‘I hope Ros is going to be all right with her new friend, sharing a flat with him and that other couple at Earl’s Court.’ I knew what she was thinking: that she hoped they all had their own bedrooms and there was nothing improper going on. When Ros had been on a caravan holiday with a previous boyfriend, Muz had fretted about the lack of privacy in such cramped quarters. ‘Where will Ros get dressed?’ she fussed. ‘There isn’t even a normal bathroom in the caravan for her to get changed, or put on her nightdress at night.’ I thought it best to avoid enlightening her that Ros was unlikely to be wearing a nightdress while she and her boyfriend occupied the one and only caravan bed each night.

      Ros was still working at Bart’s Hospital in the medical art department where they were developing a teaching aid for medical students which was innovative at the time. It offered desks with video screens displaying a menu of clinical subjects, accompanied by illustrations and films of surgical and other procedures. Her ‘new friend’, as Muz called him, was Gary Pritchard, a Fine Arts graduate like herself. He was Welsh, from a mining family in the valleys, an only child, talented and ambitious. He had won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London and from there joined BBC Television as a set designer and was a good foil for Ros, scooping her out of the dark corners of Craddock muddle with a hearty attitude that he applied to all aspects of life. He was a generous and flamboyant character who exhibited quantities of Welsh charm along with a lilting Welsh accent, so that even Muz allowed herself to be teased and complimented when Gary was visiting. But for Andy he had nothing but scorn. ‘A total waster,’ was Gary’s comment on the hapless Andy.

      David phoned or wrote from his mother’s house, and if Muz answered the phone he smoothed her suspicions with a Sandhurst drawl put on to disarm her. ‘Your army friend is a perfect gentleman,’ she commented after one call. ‘He has lovely manners. He didn’t ask straight away to talk to you, but asked me about myself and we chatted for quite a long time. What a nice man. Why don’t you ask him over?’

      ‘He’s too far away, and there isn’t time,’ I told her. But I missed him and so did the children. They had become attached from an early age when happy hours were spent with him and his children in Kenya while his wife was often away. He was an inspired inventor of games for them, such as constructing mini-assault courses with water features and rope bridges, combining energetic activity with mad frolics and dogs joining in. But he was just as happy to sit down with the rest of us for a few hands of cards, a glass always within reach.

      I had to acknowledge the intense affinity that had grown up between us, emphasised by this latest encounter, while also acknowledging that it could be no more than a momentary distraction from our own entirely separate commitments. His wife wanted to stay in Nairobi where the gracious life of expats suited her, while David was determined that his son and daughter should join him in England and have an English education. His focus was on them and his career path in the British Army, intentionally putting aside other considerations while not wanting to put me aside altogether, but I had my own focus and it remained far from England. Such a rare type of person is hard to let go, I thought, and Louise echoed these thoughts when she said: ‘I wish David could come to Rhodesia with us. He’s my friend as well as yours, you know.’

      The aunts were insistent on a last visit to Howleigh and I was glad afterwards that there would be no more complicated train journeys with luggage and small children after the latest experience, when we had to change trains several times to reach Taunton. On one of these legs the train was packed tight like the Delhi Express as I squeezed in, carrying Peter, pushchair, suitcase and bags, with Louise and Simon clinging to my coat, terrified that they might get swept away in the crush. Once safely on board I thrust Peter onto the lap of a surprised woman sitting in a crowded carriage while I went to search for spare seats. She looked greatly relieved when I returned to retrieve