OUTSIDE THE CHAPEL THEY STOOD, CHATTING awkwardly. It was always a little awkward for the first few minutes. But it was cold and quite dark so they quickly moved into the house. Annie asked Rick and Phil to help her carry the food from her van into the kitchen. Afterwards she stood there, unpacking the hampers, stocking the fridge, glimpsing her friends at a distance through the open door in the hall, which led into the common room. The fire was already lit. She couldn’t see them all, but did catch Rick parading in, with a bottle of wine in each hand. He set them on the table, then pulled a corkscrew from his jacket pocket, like a conjuror performing some amazing trick, playing as always as if to an audience. The light in the room was dim, and Annie thought his silhouette was strange, almost demonic, with the flames dancing behind him.
The others started on the booze then, but that was traditional too. They’d always drunk far too much on Friday nights, even when they’d had kids with them. There’d been times, she thought, when social services could legitimately have expressed concern about the children’s safety, though they’d had two teachers in their number, and really, they should have known better. Annie had stumbled to bed on a couple of occasions in the early hours, aware of children running through the corridors, whooping and laughing in some game of their own.
As they’d all grown older, she’d come across pale-faced teenagers sitting on the floor in corners, with tears rolling down their cheeks. It had only occurred to her later that they’d probably been drinking too, or taken some form of drug. Her child had never been old enough to be troublesome and she’d been naive about such things. She knew Rick and Philip had smoked cannabis when they’d been younger, but in spite of her hippy clothes, the flowers in her hair and the bare feet, she’d always been wary. Not worried about any potential danger to her health, but about making a fool of herself.
She went back outside to the van to fetch a last tray of baking, and the air smelled not of weed, but of woodsmoke and ice. She hadn’t bothered putting on a coat and the sudden cold chilled her bones. There was a frost forecast, the first of the year. There would be a dark sky full of stars, when the light eventually seeped away, a sliver of moon. She shut the van again and stepped back into the house.
The door to the common room was still propped open and Annie could look in without being seen. They’d switched on the lights and she had a better view of them. Her first full view after the candlelight in the chapel and the clumsy greeting in the dusk. They’d offered to help when they’d all come inside, but that had been routine politeness. Annie always prepared the Friday night meal and they knew she’d catch up with them once supper was under way. She stood for a moment observing them.
Her first response was shock that they’d aged so much in the past five years. Perhaps it was Ken, sitting with Lou, attentive by his side, and Skip his dog at his feet, that prompted the thought. Ken looked misty-eyed, seemingly struggling to appear aware of what was going on, and horribly frail. Lou had phoned them all in advance to warn them.
I’ve been worried about him for a while, but we only got a diagnosis a few months ago. Alzheimer’s.
‘But he’s so young!’ Annie had said. Meaning: He’s the same age as me.
‘He’s sixty-six,’ Lou had said. ‘Not so young.’ Had there been an edge of smugness in her voice? Because Lou was three years younger than the rest of them. She’d been a fourth year when the rest of them had been in the lower sixth, that year they’d first come here, and stayed up all night, intense, talking until the first rays of the sun had caught the room’s mess of discarded crisp packets and overflowing ashtrays. Lou hadn’t been here. Perhaps that had always made her something of an outsider. Not quite part of the group.
Ken had very much been seen as a baby-snatcher then, and Annie had resented the arrival of Lou into the mix, her presence at parties, the shows of affection, even in school. Annie had rather fancied the solid, reliable Ken herself. They’d kissed a few times. After lock-ins in the Stanhope Arms, the pub they’d adopted in Kimmerston Front Street. Drunken fumbles when they were walking home. Because they’d lived in the same village a couple of miles out of town. Their dads had both worked in the pit.
Then Ken had shyly announced that Lou had agreed to go out with him. Annie remembered the moment. The start of double French one spring morning. Daffodils in the school garden on the edge of the tennis courts. And of course, she shouldn’t have been surprised. She’d had no claim on Ken, and, after all, she’d snogged most of the lads in the group at one time or another. Certainly Rick. Nothing Rick liked more than a commitment-free grope. And more, given the chance.
When #MeToo had been all over the news Annie had felt a moment of guilt. Sometimes Rick’s approaches had been so bloody forceful that it had felt almost like assault. Not that he’d raped her, nothing like that, but he’d come pretty close. Made her uncomfortable. And she’d gone along with it, hadn’t she? Now, she thought she should have been more confident, told him to stop. Then he would have got the message earlier that he couldn’t behave like that. He wouldn’t have tried it on with his young colleagues. He might still have his show on the BBC.
Now, in the fading light of the Pilgrims’ House common room, Louisa was still attractive, but even she was showing her age. The hair was beautifully cut and dyed, but there were lines around her eyes, and horizontal wrinkles between her nose and her mouth.
We’re all old! Of course we are. What was I expecting? That by meeting up with my old school friends, I’d magically become the girl that I was when we first came together? We’re lucky that we’ve all survived. All, except Isobel.
Annie switched on the oven and put the pie she’d made inside. She put plates to warm and laid the big kitchen table, with the mismatched cutlery from the dresser drawer. Then she went back to the hall, watching again from the shadows, plucking up courage to interrupt Rick, who was in full flow, when Philip stood up.
‘Annie Laidler, what are you waiting for?’ The voice loud and rich, and honed in the pulpits of large draughty churches. ‘You need some wine, of course you do. You’re the one who’s been slaving over a hot stove, while we indulge ourselves.’ He laughed as he poured a giant glass of red and wrapped his arms around her in a hug. Suddenly all the nervousness disappeared. She was here with her best friends in the world and it would be a fabulous weekend.
And so, the evening rolled on, much as the reunions always did. Friday night supper supplied by Annie, salad brought by the others. Philip always made and brought the puddings. The others made a fuss of his creations, though in Annie’s opinion, they never tasted quite as good as they looked. Jax would very definitely have turned up her nose. Later though, when Philip was at the sink in the kitchen, an apron tied round his ample waist, doing the washing-up, Annie felt a moment of overwhelming affection for him. How kind he was! And how much he’d changed since she’d first got to know him.
That first weekend, Philip had been angry, argumentative, arrogant. He’d mellowed a little as Only Connect had progressed, but to the end he’d chafed at the restrictions, the silence of evening chapel. He’d been a swearer in the group sessions and he’d led a break-away group to the pub on one of the evenings. Annie still couldn’t quite understand how Philip, the rule-breaker, the non-conformist, the awkward sod, had become an Anglican priest.
Perhaps he was still all those things. Certainly, he stood out in this company of liberal, lefty, angst-ridden individuals. As the rest of them aged and raged against the good night to come, he faced it with equanimity, even with amusement. Death, he said, was the last big adventure. He didn’t know with any certainty what lay beyond the grave, but he was curious to find out.
Inevitably, after the meal, they carried on drinking, even Louisa, who was usually the most sober of them all. Annie had to survive the photos of a new grandchild, the stories of hip and kitchen replacements, of holiday plans and care home choices for very elderly relatives. Things changed in five years. So, Annie brought out the photo she’d found while she’d been sorting through a few boxes at home. The photo of them on that first weekend, standing in front of the Pilgrims’ House. All flared jeans and cheesecloth. Her and Dan, Isobel and Philip, Rick and Charlotte. It must have been taken on the first evening because Charlotte was still there. Ken was standing to one side, looking in at them. Judy Marshall standing in the middle, a bit aloof. A bit uncomfortable. Trying to pretend that, as the teacher, she was entirely in control.
As the evening wore on, they regressed back to the age they’d been in that photograph. Back in the common room, when the meal was over, and the plates washed and cleared away, they played sixties music. They danced. How embarrassing it would be if someone walked past and saw them through the uncurtained window! The old anecdotes were dragged out and, as always, there were new revelations, memories that only one of them held deep in their unconscious, and which had never previously been shared. The pile of logs in the basket on the grate shrank and the bottles emptied, and they became less rowdy and more reflective. A silence fell and even a set of footsteps in the lane – probably some islander on his way home from the Seahorse – startled them.
This year, the previously untold story came from Rick. He was sitting on the floor close to the fire, still wearing the leather jacket he always turned up in. Annie thought he must be sweating. But then he’d moved south straight after school, so perhaps he’d become soft.
He turned away from the fire and grinned a wolfish smile.
‘Did I ever tell you that I had sex with Miss Marshall?’
The first few words held no surprise. Many of his stories began with: Did I ever tell you I had sex with …
But Miss Marshall had been a teacher. Young, just out of college. Short skirts and tight, wet-look boots. Straight black hair and a fringe almost into her heavily made-up eyes. She’d taught them English and drama and had been passionate about Dylan Thomas. And Dylan. Serious, intense and rather unworldly. Only Connect had been her idea and she’d been here with them on that first occasion.
Annie still saw Judith around in Kimmerston. Her name wasn’t Marshall anymore – she’d married. Annie couldn’t remember what she was called these days. Her husband had died. Jax knew her because she did charitable work for the church and the deli donated any stuff approaching its best before date to the food bank there. So, she was someone else who’d changed dramatically if Rick’s story was to be believed.
Annie remembered Judy Marshall greeting them at the door of the Pilgrims’ House that first time. The pupils had arrived together in one of the school minibuses, but Miss Marshall had driven up herself. She had a little Citroën. Bright yellow. She must have heard the bus on the lane, because she’d been there in the doorway as they’d climbed out of the vehicle. They’d been stretching and groaning because it hadn’t been the most comfortable ride.
Back in the present, Rick was telling the story of how he’d screwed Judy Marshall at the post-school play party, but Annie was lost in a different past. She remembered the teacher’s words as she’d welcomed them inside.
‘Come along,’ she’d said. ‘You’re in for a great adventure.’ Which were almost exactly the same words Philip used now when he was speaking of death.
Annie thought it a little strange that she found this coincidence more interesting than yet another of Rick’s tales about his conquests.