‘Mmm,’ acknowledged Peg. ‘The empty nest. I know all about that.’ Peg snipped at a sprig of holly. ‘Although, having two children, that happened more gradually with us. Phoebe went first, ahead of her elder sister by almost two years. Maybe that gave us longer to think about what life would be like after they’d gone, I don’t know. All Idoknow is that I didn’t have nearly enough time with Julian.’
Henry held her look, hoping his was warm and sympathetic. It was horrible to think of someone like Peg, so vibrant and alive, living with death at such an early age. ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘That doesn’t seem at all fair. I wish Linda and I had made the most of the time we had together but…we didn’t.’ And it struck Henry that perhaps hehadbeen complacent after Adam left home. Had he mistaken happiness for what was actually stagnation? Or hadhe known it all the while, yet chosen to convince himself he was happy because it was easier than doing something to remedy the situation?
‘I think Adam blames me for what happened with his mum,’ he said. ‘And maybe he’s right.’
‘Maybeyou shouldn’t be so hard on yourself,’ suggested Peg. ‘You didn’t have sole responsibility for your marriage, after all.’ She looked at the boughs of greenery in her hand. ‘That ought to do it,’ she added. ‘We’d better get back.’
The peeling of potatoes turned into carrots as well, and parsnips. Then there were Brussels sprouts to clean up and score, and leeks from the garden to wash and slice, and by the time Henry had done that, Peg had made some stuffing using sausage meat and Bramley apples which she’d picked straight from the tree. Her kitchen was warm, and fragrant with herbs and spices and, despite the mince pie he’d eaten earlier, Henry realised he was ravenous. Not only that, but it was a meal he was actually looking forward to eating.
They had barely spoken for the last hour or so, apart from comments about what to prepare and in what quantities, but the silence had been an easy one, interspersed with Peg humming ‘Deck the Halls’ at odd intervals. In fact, as he’d surreptitiously watched her from across the room, there were times when she seemed almost as if she were dancing, swaying to some rhythm only she could hear.
‘Did you enjoy the carol service?’ she asked.
‘I did, although…’ Henry pulled a face. ‘I spent far too many occasions in that church as a small boy wishing I was anywhere else but there. So there was this oddly nostalgic feeling, too, only not in a good way.’
‘Oh dear…Do you remember much about the village?’
Henry shook his head. ‘Hardly anything. We didn’t live here for that long – from when I was about seven for three years orso. I’m the youngest of four, born to very busy parents, both GPs. I think they were relieved to have a child who was so quiet, so I was pretty much left to my own devices and that usually meant head in a book.’
‘Hence the love of English…?’
‘Mmm, and I didn’t venture out much. I remember the green, although I don’t think there was a pond on it back then, and I remember the post office because it had a vending machine on the outside wall where you could buy some weird cinnamon-flavoured chewing gum. I can’t remember the name of it now, but I loved that stuff.’
‘So you were a very quiet and studious child, were you?’
Henry looked at Peg in surprise. ‘I guess I was, yes. A quiet, studious child who turned into a quiet, studious adult…I’m an English lecturer so I still have my head in a book most days…’ He took in Peg’s amused expression. ‘Which is possibly not a surprise.’
‘I didn’t say that,’ replied Peg. ‘But now that you mention it…’ She grinned. ‘We talked about stereotypes when we were stuck in the traffic jam, didn’t we? Me being a widow and you a divorcee…And I think we both refuted the clichés, but I’m not at all surprised to learn you’re a lecturer.’
‘Aren’t you? What gave me away?’
‘Well, perhaps the fact that when we first met you were wearing odd socks and had your jumper on back to front.’
‘Was I?’ Henry scratched his head, before peering down at his feet. He wriggled his toes. ‘I didn’t even notice.’
‘It probably shouldn’t, but it conjured up a vision of a forgetful academic, concerned with far more important things than the triviality of dress.’
‘Guilty as charged. And I guess that does make me seem disorganised, but funnily enough, I’m the opposite when itcomes to my work. With my students I have everything just so. It’s the rest of my life which runs away from me.’
‘So you enjoy your job?’
‘Oh yes, I think it’s the one thing I’m good at.’
‘Then you’re lucky enough to have discovered what brings you alive – what gives your life meaning.’ She pursed her lips as if pondering what she’d just said. ‘Everything else is just noise, isn’t it?’
Henry stared at her. There was something in what she’d said. Some distinction maybe between the way in which he lived his life and the way Adam did. Could that be why he and his son didn’t understand one another? A thought was trying to make itself understood, but Henry couldn’t quite catch hold of it for long enough to make any sense.
He looked around at Peg’s kitchen, at the clutter which…no, that wasn’t the right word. It wasn’t clutter in the sense of being untidy, more that there were simply lots of things in the room. It should feel oppressive, but somehow it didn’t. In fact, the opposite was true. Henry found it comfortable, comforting…
‘Is everything okay?’ asked Peg. ‘You seem to be looking for something.’
Henry frowned. ‘I was just thinking…When I look at my son’s house compared with yours, it isn’t just the style which is different, there’s something else as well – like nothing there fits properly. Here, everything blends. It doesn’t jar your eyes to look at it, it doesn’t jar your thoughts either. Does that sound crazy? I’m not sure I can explain it properly.’
‘No, I understand,’ said Peg. ‘When we first moved here the bathroom was downstairs – through the door to the right of the fireplace. Getting to it from upstairs was a bit of a convoluted journey – through the dining room, across the lounge, round the side of the sofa and then…’ She paused to look at him. ‘Do you see where I’m going with this? We didn’t give it a hugeamount of thought to start with – it was where the bathroom was and that was the end of it. But after a couple of months, things in the house began to niggle at me. The living room didn’t look quite right. Neither did the dining room. The colours were wrong, or a piece of furniture was in the wrong place, and we spent months fiddling with things, but never seeming to fix the problem. And it was sad because this was our dream house in every other respect. We’d so looked forward to moving here and yet…something wasn’t working.
‘The solution came about quite by chance when we decided to make some alterations to the kitchen and the builder asked if we’d ever thought of moving the bathroom upstairs. Because if we were, with all the changes that would need to be made to the plumbing, that would be the time to do it. It was as if someone had turned a light on. And from the moment the alteration was made, the house righted itself. It flowed, you see…and we were movingwiththe flow instead of against it. I think the same is true with our lives.
‘Sometimes, when we think we’re unhappy with a particular thing, or want to change it, it’s only because we haven’t worked out that it’s actually something else causing the problems. Does that make sense? And because we don’t know what that something is, we go about changing all manner of stuff in the hope that it will make everything feel better, not even realising that we’re going about it all wrong.’
