Lovers and Newcomers
From the bestselling author of Iris and Ruby comes a novel of a group of friends. They were wild in the 60s; but now they face turning sixty themselves.Miranda Meadowe decides a lonely widowhood in her crumbling country house is not for her. Reviving a university dream, she invites five of her oldest friends to come and join her to live, and to stave off the prospect of old age. All have their own reasons for accepting.To begin with, omens are good. They laugh, dance, drink and behave badly, as they cling to the heritage they thought was theirs for ever: power, health, stability. They are the baby boomers; the world is theirs to change. But as old attractions resurface alongside new tensions, they discover that the clock can’t be put back.When building work reveals an Iron Age burial site of a tribal queen, the outside world descends on their idyllic retreat, and the isolation of the group is breached. Now the past is revealed; and the future that beckons is very different from the one they imagined.
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Lovers and Newcomers
Rosie Thomas
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2010
Copyright © Rosie Thomas 2010
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016 Jacket photographs © Shutterstock.com
Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007285945
Ebook Edition © April 2016 ISBN: 9780007321513
Version: 2016-04-20
To Theo
The old house has been cold and empty for so long, but now it’s stirring. A joint of the oak stair treads releases a sudden sharp snap, a window left open for air rattles in a gust of wind, and the scent of baking rises from the kitchen.
The place is coming back to life around me.
I am making cakes for tea, and already I have looked into each of the guest rooms at least three times in order to enjoy the sight of folded towels and the little jugs of flowers placed on chests of drawers. Meadow flowers from Mead fields; oxeye daisies, and cow parsley, which has shed a faint dust of grey pollen on the waxed wood. I reach out to sweep away the powder with my little finger, before deciding that it looks pretty as it is.
Not that my old friends will be guests, of course.
They will belong here, they do belong here, that’s why they are coming. I’m excited at the prospect, the pleasure of anticipation tautened with nerves, like a child before a birthday. This thought makes me laugh as I close the bedroom door. Childhood is a very long way off, for all of us. That’s part of the story.
It’s already four o’clock. A hot afternoon, for September. Only the angle of the sun, which has altered from full day to the first suggestion of evening just while I have been lingering in a doorway, suggests that autumn stalks not far off.
They’ll be here soon.
As I walk down the stairs the longcase clock that stands in the hall chimes the hour, echoed today by the faint, damped note of the village church bell. You can only hear the church bell ringing when the wind blows from the south-west, Jake told me that when he first brought me here.
My late husband would be pleased with what’s happening at Mead. I’m sure he would. I whisper to him in my head, as I sometimes do, in the way people who have become used to living alone conduct imaginary dialogues.
We lived our time here just the two of us, Jake, and came neither to want or need any other company. But without you there is too much time and silence. The house withers, and so do I.
From today there will be a new order, and different voices in the old rooms and outside under the heavy trees. The novelty, though, will have a retrospective glimmer that suits Mead, feeding it like wax polish on old wood. Selwyn and Amos and the others are your old friends as well as mine. Although this plan of mine will throw us all into new alignments, we have years of history between us.
In the kitchen I lift the tins out of the oven and turn out my cakes to cool on wire racks near the open window. A huge bumble bee flusters against the glass so I find a muslin-covered frame to place over them. But I find myself standing, lost in thought, my fingers still gripping the harmless frame as the bee escapes into the breeze.
I want this experiment to succeed. I want it so much.
From three different directions, three vehicles were converging on the old house in its cradle of fields and trees.
Selwyn Davies cursed as he ground the gears of the borrowed van yet again.
‘This thing is a heap of shit. It’s knackered. It’s about as old as me, and just as useless.’
His partner didn’t look up from the newspaper she held in two hands, braced at chest level. Partner is a gruesome bloody word, Polly would say, but what are you supposed to call the person you never married but have lived with for thirty years and have three kids by?
