Read Lovers and Newcomers for Free Online

kiss exchanged by friends at the end of a long evening.
    Everyone is asleep.
    I could just hear the low rumble of Amos talking to Katherine as they undressed, but that stopped a while ago. Selwyn and Polly will be under the bedcovers, oblivious too. I imagine them spooned together, breathing in unison, Selwyn’s dark face crumpled up against her dimpled shoulder.
    Amos will be wearing pyjamas, Katherine a nightie, but Polly and Sel will sleep naked. I remember what that felt like, the safety of interlocked bodies, the balm of skin against skin.
    None of my business.
    I hope Colin is sleeping too. He looks brittle with illness and exhaustion. Maybe Mead will soothe him, if he will allow it to.
    These thoughts dance a gavotte around the other. How long since I was kissed, like Selwyn kissed me tonight?
    A long, long time.
    The lingering heat of that kiss makes me restless.
    I cross the room, lean on the windowsill and gaze out. The moon has gone but over the crowns of oak and beech I can see stars. Tomorrow will be another warm day.
    The house settles around me. No – around us .
    As my mother encouraged me to do, I reckon up my blessings. This is what I have.
    Mead, my husband’s house, now mine. I love it as if it were a living thing, even its dilapidation, multiplying outbreaks of decay, creeping damp and splintering bones.
    Now friends have arrived bringing our cargo of history, jokes, secrets. Beyond price. A future will unfold here on these acres of Jake’s, shared by people he loved. We have different, complicated reasons, each of us, for investing ourselves and our hopes in Mead for this new beginning, but I believe the outcome will be shared happiness, and security, for all of us. Why not? Age at least brings the benefits of wisdom, mutual tolerance, which we did not possess when we were nineteen, for all our beauty and optimism.
    But I’m getting sentimental.
    That’s new, as is the realization that I can’t drink the way I used to.
    The two things are, of course, quite closely connected.
    My feet are as cold as ice.
    I wish my bed were not empty.

TWO
    Rain came sweeping across from the North Sea, borne on flat-bottomed bolsters of cloud that released a steady grey downpour as they slid over the land.
    Miranda was down at the site with Amos, who was marching up and down in his wellingtons, waving his arms and chopping the air with his hands as he fumed about delays to his project.
    The foundations of his house-to-be were now marked out across the churned-up meadow with pegs and tape, and as their boots slithered in the mud he reminded her of exactly where the terraces would be, where and how huge windows would slide up and down, and the ingenious way that doors would fold out onto the land.
    She was as stirred and excited by the prospect as Amos himself. Almost anywhere on earth this building would be a thrilling expression of modernity, and she loved the idea of it being set right here against the old grey bones of Mead.
    Amos never tired of telling anyone who would listen about his systems for storing heat and generating energy, the layers of insulation that would reduce thermal loss almost to zero, the waste water recycling technology, all the other innovations that he had planned with such glee, with a rich man’s confident relish for the latest and best. Dreamily, Miranda envisaged how the house would look, tethered here on its vantage point like a squared-off soap bubble, the 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.