Curiosity calls them to Wyld Farm. The track to the farmhouse is still full of potholes. The cars bounce and squeak over the bumps. Green shoots dot the ploughed fields. The soil, the colour of bruised meat, is heavy with rain. The farmhouse appears through skeletal trees. A lighted window and smoke curling up from a chimney. A wooden gate now blocks the entrance to the yard. As David opens it, dogs race out to mill around his legs like spinning tops.
They park the vehicles. Over a bramble hedge stands the cottage of the same name. It’s a bizarre feeling to be back.
‘We lived in Bramble Cottage when we got married,’ Julian says. ‘But when Seymour got ill, we moved into the house, Miriam and Peter, our four-year-old son and me. Seymour couldn’t be on his own. You’ll get wet. Go inside and have a wander. It’s not locked.’
The hall is cramped. There’s a smell of cold and of wood-smoke. The sitting room where Amy spent so much time, high and happy, is gloomier than she recalled. The windows admit little light and even the few pieces of furniture make it feel cluttered. Signs of a family are evident: newspapers stacked under a table, children’s books, a toy train; they might just have left.
Up the narrow stairway is the bedroom Amy once shared with David. Did she paint the wall this soft green? The marble-topped washstand seems familiar. Is there evidence on these creaking floorboards that her bare toes trod here? Exposure of memory to reality reveals discrepancies but she cannot place where the errors lie.
Over the past years she has often thought about Wyld Farm. Sometimes she judges she had been thwarted by powerlessness. That’s too simple, she decides. There was hurt but there was healing too. A face she isn’t expecting to see stares back at her from the mirror. Cross-hatched lines furrow the skin around her eyes and her hair, once ash-blond is dull brown. Things are better out of focus, she decides folding away her glasses. She heads for the stairs.
Maggie is in the room she sometimes shared with Simon, the man with the affable manner who is stammering to her brother downstairs. What was it about him, the man in deck shoes and chinos that once had made her spirits sparkle? She had not always been happy here, that’s for sure, but at least she’d had choices. Unlike her life now. Her interest in pummelling English into the heads of students is dead.
‘I could do with a smoke.’ David says to Simon. ‘I suppose it’s being in this cottage, I associate it with good times. Join me?’
Simon is resisting the temptation to touch the crumbling plaster by the cooker. ‘Not p-p-part of my lifestyle now, thanks. I’m a management consultant, did I say? I suppose for you musicians it’s p-p-par for the course. Amy says you’re in a b-b-band? Anyway, we have to h-h-head homeward shortly; recalcitrant teenage girl to k-k-keep track of this evening.’
David does not mention he works as a designer for a packaging company that pays the bills and the child support. The band is his hobby. ‘Alright, next time we’re down here at our country cottage. What an incredible piece of luck, eh? Good old Seymour. This will be a perfect place to bring my son, get away from the city. He loves to kick a ball and there’s not much space where he lives with his mum. Amy, you want some of this?’
‘Thanks, I will,’ she giggles. She remembers how David used to make her stomach flip, especially when he played the guitar. Used to remind her of Jim Morrison.
His wife has not laughed like this for ages. Simon watches her reach into the cupboard, her dress pulling tight across her bottom. He feels a frisson of desire.
Triumphantly she shakes a cup at him. ‘When we lived here, do you remember, darling? I used to think it was glamorous to drink from cracked crockery. I suppose we should be getting back home soon. David, can we give you and Maggie a lift back to the station?’
Miriam cannot go and see the cottage full of its new owners. Julian’s so-called friends, the people who were scarce for so many years when he needed their support. To witness them in her home, judging her possessions, tainting her things with their glances, she can’t bear it. Instead she does what makes her feel better when she’s anxious. She potters. Habits that restore order restore equanimity. There was never time to tackle the chaos of Seymour’s house when he was ill. Even though the hospice nurses came in twice a day, by the time Miriam was home from work and made supper, put Peter to bed and pushed the buttons on the washing machine, she was too exhausted. In the last weeks of life as Seymour slipped in and out of consciousness, she’d taken compassionate leave from work and sat, day and night by his bedside, keeping him as comfortable as possible. Pandemonium mounted.
Today she’ll make a start. Miriam switches on the larder light. The one tiny window is covered in dense mesh; the air is still. Jars of pickled vegetables line the shelves like specimens in a museum. It’s impossible to read the faint writing on the pot labels. It’s probably stuff leftover from those halcyon days when the group tried to be
