A Village Affair

CHAPTER ONE

On the day that contracts were exchanged on the house, Alice Jordan put all three children into the car and went to visit it. Natasha made her usual seven-year-old fuss about her seat-belt, and James was crying because he had lost the toy man who rode his toy stunt motorbike, but the baby lay peaceably in his carrycot and was pleased to be joggling gently along while a fascinating pattern of bare branches flickered through the slanting back window of the car on to his round upturned face. Natasha sang Ten Green Bottles' to drown James and James amplified his crying to yelling. Alice switched on the car radio and a steady female voice from Woman's Hour explained calmly to her how to examine herself for any sinister lumps. Mud flew up from the winter lanes and made a gritty veil across the windscreen. James stopped yelling abruptly and put his thumb in his mouth.

'You are an utter baby,' his sister said to him disdainfully. He began to cry again, messily, round his thumb.

Alice could see his smeary wet red face reflected in the driving mirror. The voice on the wireless said that if you disliked touching yourself, you should get someone else to feel for you. The interviewer said - perfectly reasonably, Alice thought - how would anyone else be able to feel what you could feel, not being, as it were, on the inside of yourself?

'Crying like that,' Natasha said to James, 'makes people think you are a girly.'

James let out a wild squeal and flung his motorbike-clutching fist out sideways at his sister, just able to reach her cheek. Eyes wide with outrage and turned at once upon her mother, Natasha began to cry. In the very back, conscious of an atmosphere he didn't like, Charlie's soft round face gathered itself up in distress. He opened his mouth and screwed his eyes up tight. Alice stopped the car.

The lymph nodes-' said the Woman's Hour woman into the racket.

Alice turned her off. She undid her seat-belt and twisted herself around.

'Be quiet!' she shouted. 'You beastly, beastly children. I won't have this. You are not to quarrel in the car. How can I drive? Do you want me to drive you into a wall? Because that's what will happen.'

Natasha stopped crying and looked out of the window for walls. There were none, only a hedge and a hilly field and some black and white cows.

She said, There aren't any walls.'

Alice ignored her.

'Where did I say we were going?'

'In the car,' James said unsteadily.

His sister looked at him witheringly.

To our new house.'

'Yes. Don't you want to see it?'

'Yes,' Natasha said.

James said nothing. At that moment he didn't want anything except to put his thumb back in, which he dared not do.

Then,' Alice said, 'nobody will say one single word until we get there. Otherwise you will have to stay in the car while I get out and look at everything. Is that clear?'

She buckled herself in again and started the car. Natasha watched her. She was the only mother Natasha knew who had a pigtail. It was very long. It started high up, almost on top of her head, and ended up half-way down her back. It was fat, too. Usually, she pulled it over one shoulder. Natasha wanted one like it, so did her friend Sophie. Sophie's mother had sort of ordinary hair you couldn't really remember, like mothers usually had.

Looking at her mother's pigtail made Natasha suddenly feel affectionate, out of pride.

'I'm sorry,' she said, in a minute voice, because of the ban.

Alice beamed at her quickly, flashing the smile over her shoulder.

'Nearly there.'

Alice had always wanted to live in Pitcombe; everybody did, from miles around, and if a house there was photographed for sale, in Country Life, the caption always read, 'In much sought-after village'. It was the kind of village long-term expatriates might fantasise about, a stone village set on the side of a gentle hill, with the church at the top and the pub at the bottom, by a little river, and the big house - baroque - looking down on it all with feudal benevolence. Sir Ralph Unwin, who owned the big house, three thousand acres and two dozen cottages still, was tall and grey-haired and an admirable shot. He drove a Range Rover through the village and waved regally from the elevated driving seat. He allowed Pitcombe Park to be used constantly for functions to raise money for hospices and arthritis research and the church roof, though he drew the line at the local Conservatives. 'I'm a natural cross-bencher,' he would say, knowing he would be admiringly quoted. Alice had only met him once, introduced by John Murray-French from whom they were going to buy the house, and he had said, 'You are more than welcome to Pitcombe, Mrs Jordan, particularly if you have children.' She had wondered if he was well aware of how charming he was. Lady Unwin was charming too, in that capable, administrative way that women acquire after long practice on councils and committees. Lady Unwin chaired the county's St John's Ambulance Brigade and the local hospice committee and saw it as her duty to attend PCC meetings and NADFAS outings and the village over-sixties jaunts. She had grasped Alice's hand in her own large and flexible one with its pink painted nails and peerless Georgian rings and said, 'Oh my dear, hooray. Just what we need, some new young blood to liven us all up.'

And Sir Ralph, taking his wife by the arm in one of those public displays of proud affection for which he was liked as much as for the independence of his politics, said with a warm smile, 'Don't trust her an inch, Mrs Jordan. She'll have you on every rota and committee in sight, within minutes.'

Everyone round them had laughed. Alice had laughed too. She had liked it. She had felt welcomed and included, almost part of the life that she was quite certain she wanted to live in Pitcombe for. When they had heard, at a dinner party, that John Murray-French was selling up, privately, she and Martin had hardly slept for excitement. His was not just a house in Pitcombe, but one of the houses in Pitcombe, half-way down the hill, with the beeches of the Park above it and the river three fields below it, at the end of a little cul-de-sac which ran from the main street between pretty, low, haphazard rows of cottages. There was an orchard beyond it, and a paddock where the children could have a pony and, on top of the garage, a wonderful high beamed room with north light where John Murray-French carved the ornamental decoy ducks for which he had become mildly famous and which Alice could use as a studio. She hadn't painted since James was born, more than four years ago. But she would be able to now, she knew it.

She swung the car in off the main street and drove carefully down between the cottages. It was early afternoon and the lane was quite empty except for a crumpled old face at a ground-floor window between a spider plant and a begging china dog in a large green hat. Alice waved and smiled. The face took no notice at all. A black cat on a garden wall didn't even stop washing to watch them go by. At the end of the lane were the two slender weathered stone pillars that announced the entrance to The Grey House. They had stone bobbles on top, smeared with ochre and greenish grey lichen. Beyond them, two clipped deep green rows of hornbeam marched towards the house. Alice stopped the car, suddenly exultant. Everything was going to be all right, it was, it was.

'Help yourselves,' John Murray-French had said on the telephone that morning. 'I'll be out but Gwen will be around somewhere supposedly packing books but probably swilling my gin in the broom cupboard. She knows you're coming.' He paused. He was very fond of Alice. So had his son been, but too late, when she was already married. 'I'm so pleased it's you,' he said.

'Oh, John-'

'I've lived here for thirty-five years. Can't believe it. I'd hate it to go to a stranger.'

'I promise we'll love it. I mean, we already do. In fact, I think it's the answer-'

'The answer? To what?'

There had been a tiny pause.

'Oh,' she said, in a more matter of fact voice, 'three children, more space, studio for me. You know.'

She let the car creep between the hornbeams. The children, sensing the drama, began to give little squeals of excitement in the back. Natasha had already written, in all her books, partly from pride, partly to prevent James ever claiming them:

This book belongs to:

Natasha Jordan

The Grey House

Pitcombe

Wiltshire

And there it was. Long, low, grey, with its pretty sashed eighteenth-century windows reaching almost to the floors, its heavy panelled door with pediment and lion's-head knocker, its three brick chimneys, its terrace over the valley, sitting so beautifully in its pleasing sweeps of golden gravel and green grass. Sinuous grey arms of wisteria twined up over the pediment and along the facade, and either side of the front door a bay tree grew glossily in a Versailles tub. It was perfect.

Alice climbed out of the car and released the children. They raced down the lawn at once, still squealing, to climb the iron park railing that separated the lawn from the paddock below. Alice opened the back and picked up Charlie. He was very pleased and beat about in the air with his hands and crowed. She went up to the front door and rang the bell. John had said not to bother but she didn't want to alienate Gwen in any way, hoping she would stay and clean the house for her, as she had done for John for a decade.

Gwen opened the door after a very long time, clearly meaning to upstage Alice, but was undone in an instant by the sight of Charlie in his blue padded snowsuit.

'Ah. Bless him. Isn't he lovely? Come in, Mrs Jordan. The Major said you'd be over.'

Alice turned to shout for the children. They were still on the railings.

'I'd leave them,' Gwen said. 'Can't come to no harm. Who's a lovely boy, then?'

Charlie regarded her impassively.

'He's very good,' Alice said, anxious to be friendly. 'The best of the three, really. But he weighs a ton.'

'Would he come to Gwen, then?'

She held out her arms. Charlie allowed himself to be transferred without protest. He examined Gwen's face solemnly for a while and then her pink blouse and her maroon cardigan. Finally, after long scrutiny, he put a single shrimp-like finger on her crystal beads.

'Aren't you gorgeous?' Gwen said to him, quite melted. 'Aren't you and Gwen going to have a nice time, then?'

Alice felt a rush of gratitude towards Charlie.

'Actually, I was going to ask you-'

Gwen turned a beaming face on her.

'I thought you might be. Course I'll help.' She turned her face back to Charlie. 'Gwen's not going to turn down an old heart-throb like you, now, is she. I'll take him into the study, Mrs Jordan, and you just poke about. The Major said to. I'll keep an eye out for the children. Now then,' she said to Charlie, 'I wonder if we could find a biccy?'

Alice said faintly, 'He's only got two teeth. He's only eight months. Perhaps-'

'Who's a big boy?' Gwen said moving off rapidly. 'Who'd have thought it? Eight months-'

The drawing room ran for twenty-five feet along the front of the house to the right of the door; the dining room rather less to the left. Behind them were a study for Martin, a room for a playroom, and a kitchen which opened with a stable door on to a wide brick path and then grass and then the eastward view. The stable door had seized upon Alice's imagination when she had first seen it; she had visualized a summer morning, with the sun streaming in through the opened top half, and herself up a ladder, surging while she stencilled designs her head was full of round the tops of the walls. She could feel how happy she would be. The kitchen was rather grim now because John was only concerned with it as a place to open tins in, but she had known the moment she saw it how lovely it could be. Looking at it now, darkly cream painted, shabby linoleum floored, with its scrubbed centre table cluttered with half-empty marmalade jars, and corkscrews and newspapers and ripped-open brown envelopes, she suddenly had a tiny twinge.

It was very tiny, but it was there. It was like a sudden, faint, malicious little draught of cold air on a golden summer day, or a wrong note in a melody, very transient in itself but leaving something unnerving behind it. Alice shook herself, took hold of the comforting end of her plait, and looked sternly at the kitchen. Pale yellow walls, she had settled on that, white woodwork, strip, sand and polish the floor, scented geraniums along the windowsills, dried hops along the ceiling beams, jars of pulses and spices on the dresser, a rocking chair, patchwork cushions, a cat . . . She began, without warning, to cry. It was horrifying. Why was she crying? Huge sobs, like retching, were surging up brokenly inside her and these vast tears were spilling over and she couldn't see. She fumbled frantically for a handkerchief, scrabbling in the pockets of her coat and her skirt, up her sleeves, in her bag. She found a crumpled tissue and blew her nose violently. She never cried. Strong Alice who hadn't cried since after Charlie which was obviously post-natal. She sat down in one of John's scuffed kitchen chairs and bent her head. She was frightening herself.

Probably she was tired. It had been quite a strain wondering if they really would get The Grey House, and Martin wasn't good at this kind of thing and fussed a lot about money and surveys and things like that. She had said to him, trying to encourage him, 'But the right things are right, aren't they? I mean, the house feels right so I can paint again and make a bit of money at last, and perhaps we could have a pony. It never matters with money in the long run, does it? We always manage. We will now.'

He said crossly, 'I manage you mean.'

She tried not to feel furious. She tried not to remember that Martin had a private income, even if it wasn't huge, so that money never was a proper problem to them, as it was to other people. They weren't rich, but they weren't uncomfortable either. Martin hated her to talk about his private money; he was very secretive about it. She thought that his pride suffered from knowing he did not earn very much as a country solicitor and probably never would. She told herself he had to pretend he earned all their income, for his own self-esteem. So she waited, looking at his rough, fair head bent over the newspaper, and after a bit she said, 'You see, I think we'll be so happy at The Grey House. That's the element I think is so important.'

They had many such conversations. Sometimes Martin said, 'Aren't you happy here, then?' and sometimes he said, 'Oh I know, I know, I'm just being an ass, you know how I hate thinking about money,' and once he said, 'Thanks a bloody million,' and stamped out. She began to follow him but stopped, and they went to bed that night hardly speaking. That kind of thing was, of course, terribly tiring, far more tiring than digging a whole cabbage patch or painting a ceiling or spending an entire day in London Christmas shopping in the rain. Alice blew her nose again now and stood up. She would go into the drawing room. Nobody could ever want to cry in the drawing room.

But she did. She stood by the fireplace in the lovely long low room with its bookcases, and windows to the terrace, and imagined decorating the Christmas tree in that corner, and doing a vast arrangement of dried flowers in that, and hanging up those marvellous miles of ivory moire curtain that Martin's mother had given her, at all the windows, and she felt worse than she had in the kitchen. She felt despair. At least, she thought it was despair, but she did not think she had ever had a feeling like this in her life with which to compare it. She fled from the drawing room to the dining room, confronted images of herself smiling down the candlelit length of the table across dishes of perfect food, and fled again, upstairs and into the first bedroom she came to.

It was John's. It would be hers and Martin's. It was the room she had dreamed of most, of lying in bed with the view of the valley surging in through those near floorlength windows. She knew where she would put her dressing table, and the little sofa her mother-in-law had given her, and where she would hang her collection of drawings of seated women, a collection she had begun when she was fourteen. She looked at the room now in panic. There was no malevolence in it, nothing in it but its usual graceful, placid charm. The panic was in her. She put her hands to her face. It was burning hot.

In the bathroom John's old pug was curled up in a basket in the bottom of the airing cupboard. The door was open so that he shouldn't feel claustrophobic. He grunted when Alice came in but didn't stir. It was a huge bathroom, with an armchair and a bookcase, ancient club scales, lots of magazines in ragged stacks, a lovely view and several friendly, doggy old dressing gowns hung in a mound on the back of the door. Alice shut the door behind her and locked it. She ran a basin of cool water and splashed her face, then she dried it on John's towel, which smelt attractively male, and sat down in the armchair. Deep breaths, one after the other. Close eyes. Idiotic Alice, mad Alice, lucky Alice. She was still holding John's towel. She buried her face in it. How good male things were when they were impersonal to you: the sound of a strange man's confident stride across a wooden floor, a man behind you at a newspaper kiosk rattling the change in his pocket, the contrast of wrist skin and shirt cuff and jacket sleeve on your neighbour at a dinner party, John's bald old bath towel. She felt better and stood up.

'Never a word of this to anyone,' she said to the pug and went downstairs.

In what would be Martin's study, and was now a fuggy and welcoming burrow where John spent winter evenings, Alice found Charlie sitting on Gwen's knee with her beads round his neck, and Henry Dunne. Henry was Sir Ralph's agent, and although John Murray-French had bought The Grey House from the estate long before Henry's day, it was still regarded as being in the fold. Henry and John's son had been at Eton together and Henry often came in on his way here and there across the estate, to tell him this and that and to describe the hunting days which were his passion and which John, leisuredly french-polishing his ducks, didn't seem to mind hearing about, over and over. John's patience meant that when Henry got home he didn't feel the urge to tell Juliet, his wife, all about hunting, which was just as well because it made her scream, literally, with boredom.

Henry thought Alice was wonderful. He thought her beautiful too, with her long dark blue eyes and her astonishing high-plaited hair, but he was rather afraid she might be quite clever. Last New Year's Eve he had hoped she thought him wonderful too because he had boldly kissed her, quite separately from all that lunatic midnight kissing which was always such chaos you might well end up kissing the furniture, and she had seemed to like it. He said, 'Goodnight, my lovely,' to her in a whisper when the party broke up at last and she gave him a long look. But when he saw her next it was in Salisbury, by chance, and she was pushing her baby in a little pram thing and although she smiled at him, she was absolutely composed and even said, 'Wasn't that a lovely party, at the New Year?'

He said, 'You made it lovely. For me.'

And she smiled at him and shook her head.

'Do you mean, Alice, that you didn't-'

'I mean that-'

She stopped. He said, 'What? What? Tell me.'

She looked at him again. There was a flicker of fear in her face, he could see it, even a dope like him whom Juliet was always saying had the perceptiveness of a myopic buffalo.

'Please not,' Alice said, and then she had kissed his cheek quickly and pushed her baby into Marks and Spencer.

She seemed only delighted to see him now. She kissed him, said, 'How's Juliet?' and 'Oh, you old ponce,' to Charlie, and sat down beside Gwen.

'The house looks so nice,' she said to Gwen, untruthfully, since she had hardly noticed.

'I do my best. Bit of a business, what with the Major's pipes and the carving and the dogs. But we struggle on, don't we gorgeous?'

Charlie made mewing noises in Alice's direction. She lifted him off Gwen's knee and returned the beads.

'Gwen says she's staying on,' Henry said.

'I know. Isn't it marvellous of her?'

'Four mornings I'll do here. And a day to muck out the Major when he's in his cottage. You should see the place now, walls running with damp-'

Alice stood up, holding Charlie against her shoulder.

‘Thank you so much for your kindness, Gwen. It's such a weight off my mind, knowing you'll help me. I ought to go and round up the children now.'

'I'll come with you,' Henry said. 'I only came to leave John the surveyor's report on his cottage.'

Gwen opened the front door for them both. Alice put a hand on it. Her front door. She took her hand away quickly and put it back under Charlie's solidly padded bottom.

'Bye now,' Gwen said. 'Mind how you go. Bye-bye, you lovely boy.'

When the door had shut, Alice said, 'Is she going to drive me mad?'

Henry looked mildly shocked.

'I don't think you'll find anyone else very easily. Everyone is crying out for help and I know for certain Elizabeth Pitt has her eye on Gwen, and so does Sarah Alleyne, except nobody can bear to work for her for more than a month.'

He opened the car boot so that Alice could stow Charlie away in his carrycot.

'We're all thrilled you have got this house, you know. It'll make such a difference to the village.'

Alice straightened up.

'We're so lucky.'

'I'll say. The hordes John has had to beat away don't bear thinking of. He said a chap appeared out of the blue driving a black BMW and offered him four hundred thousand.'

'What has a BMW got to do with it?'

Henry said, faintly nettled, 'He must have come down from the City. That sort of money.'

Alice said nothing. She stood quite still and looked at the house. The light was beginning to fade and Gwen had switched on a lamp here and there, coral-coloured rectangles in the soft grey facade. It looked idyllic.

'I'm sick with envy,' Henry said, watching her. 'Me and half Wiltshire.'

Alice turned slowly to face him. She reached out and touched his hand for a second.

‘The thing is,' she said, quite calmly, 'that now that I have it, I don't in the least want it.' And then she burst into tears.

'I don't know what it is,' Martin said into the telephone, keeping his voice down even though Alice was upstairs in the bath. 'She doesn't seem able to tell me. She thinks The Grey House is lovely, she doesn't want to stay here, but she says she is terrified of moving.'

His mother, fifty miles away in Dorset, said, 'Is it the moving itself?'

'Can't be,' Martin said. 'She never minds anything like that. I've never seen her like this.'

'She was very upset for a while after Charlie-'

That's all over,' Martin said. 'Pronounced A-one four months ago.'

'Have you,' Martin's mother said, 'been quarrelling?'

Too loudly Martin said, 'No.' Then he said, more ordinarily, The odd bicker, I suppose, over what we ought to offer for The Grey House, but not quarrelling.'

'Can I speak to her?'

'She's in the bath. She doesn't know I'm ringing you.'

Martin's mother, who loved her daughter-in-law dearly, said with some indignation, 'Behind her back, as if she was unfit to hear? No wonder she cries.'

Martin drooped. It was as it ever was. He couldn't remember a time when he hadn't longed to please his mother, to feel confidential with her, and then to know every time that he had failed. He knew she loved him but he wasn't ever sure she liked him. It was rather the same with his elder brother Anthony, except that Anthony was tougher and ruder, so that they sparred together. He remembered with customary bewilderment his mother saying to Alice ten years ago, 'I'm glad it's Martin you're marrying, not Anthony. I love Anthony but I know he is really a horrible boy.'

And she meant it. It wasn't a doting mother's joke. Martin wondered uneasily what his mother had said to Alice about him; there was so much she had said to Alice that he would never know.

'Of course talk to her,' he said now, stiffly, 'if you think it'll do any good.'

'Get her to ring me,' Cecily Jordan said, 'when she's out of the bath.'

He sighed and put the receiver down. He was frightfully tired. He had got back from a long day, and everything looked entirely as usual, children in bed, supper ready, Alice in the low slipper chair by the fire in their tiny sitting room, stitching at some tapestry thing until she turned her face up for his greeting kiss and he saw she had been crying. She then cried on and off all through supper. She said, between crying and mouthfuls, that she had an awful feeling of foreboding that it just wasn't going to work. He had said, 'The Grey House, you mean?'

'No - no - not the house exactly, just living there, us living there-'

'But it's the thing you have always wanted!'

'I know,' she said, pushing her plate away half-full. 'I know. That's why I am so afraid.'

He tried to jolly her.

'You're not afraid of anything! You never have been. You terrify me, skiing.'

'Oh,' Alice said dismissively, 'physical things. Easy. This is something much more alarming, a sort of utterly lost feeling, as if I'd staked everything on something that wasn't there at all.'

Martin began to finish the lasagne she had left.

'I don't understand you,' he said.

He still didn't. Perhaps his mother was right and it was the remains of post-Charlie blues. He felt sorry for her, but at the same time faintly aggrieved that she couldn't behave normally about something she had said she desperately wanted and that he had really had to battle to achieve. He'd had to sell a lot of shares, a lot, for The Grey House. He looked round the room, tiny but full of fascinating things and bold stuffs and extraordinary paintings which he wouldn't have chosen himself in a million years but which he found he really liked, now he saw them. Very Alice. He looked into the fire. He felt she was failing him.

When she came down, in a yellow dressing gown with her plait pinned up on top with a comb, he said, trying not to sound surly, 'Ma says would you ring her.'

A kind of light came into Alice's eyes, a look of relief and hope.

'Oh yes,' she said. 'Did she ring?'

'I rang her.'

'Martin, I'm not being deliberately neurotic. I detest feeling like this. If I could stop, I would.'

He got out of his chair and went to kick a log in the fireplace. He thought of his mother's tone to him, on the telephone. He said to Alice, 'Is it me? Is it something to do with me? Are you sick of me?'

Alice gave a little gasp.

'Oh no!'

He grunted.

'Just wondered.'

The wrong note in the melody sang out again, tiny and harsh, in her mind. She went across the room and put her arms round him from behind, laying her cheek against his back.

'You know it isn't that. Haven't I kept telling you that I want The Grey House because I know we'll be happy there?'

'But that doesn't fit in with all this panic.'

'Exactly. It's probably some hormone imbalance. That's what I've been thinking about in the bath.'

He turned round and held her. He thought how much more often he needed to make love to her than she wanted to have it made to her. He took a deep breath.

'Go and ring Ma,' he said.