A Village Affair

CHAPTER TWELVE

Anthony rang Cecily and told her he was going to Majorca for two weeks; a friend had lent him a villa.

'Where are you ringing from?'

'London.'

'I thought you were at Pitcombe-'

'I was. I left on Saturday. You can have too much village life.'

'Anthony,' Cecily said. 'What have you done?'

'Nothing-'

'Then why are you going to Majorca?'

'Because I'm a natural sponger, as you know, and I'm being given a fortnight's shelter in return for repainting a loggia. Luxury shelter, mind you.'

'I don't doubt it. How was everyone at Pitcombe?'

'Fine,' Anthony said heartily.

There was a pause, and then Cecily said, 'Well, off you go. And mind you do paint the loggia.'

'Trust me,' Anthony said and put the receiver down.

Cecily went out into the garden. Her white border was looking spectacular; it had taken eight years to achieve. She had planned it, she remembered, to celebrate Natasha's arrival, her first grandchild. She went down the length of it, stooping and peering, whipping out the odd grass that had seeded itself among the lupin spires, but she wasn't really concentrating. She was thinking about Anthony. About Anthony and Alice and Anthony's going to Majorca. When she had left Vienna, she had thought she would never be caught up, heart and soul, in human things again. She had gone on feeling like that, all through the early years of her marriage, even through Anthony's and Martin's childhoods, and when gardening took her over, it seemed to her quite natural that it should, quite natural that something passionate but platonic should fill up the vacuum she had endured since she left Vienna. But ironically, the gardening had brought her back to a hunger for humanity; it seemed, quite simply, to have led that way. She told herself that it was far too late to reach Richard and that her sons were both, in their separate ways, alien to her - Anthony too unreliable and dangerous, Martin too conventional. And then came Alice, and because of Alice Cecily could make the connection, really make it, not just long to with Martin and Anthony - and she would have with Richard too, if he had allowed her anywhere near him. And now here she was, more than three times the age she had been when she left Vienna, as trapped in the intensity of family feeling as she had ever been in romantic and erotic love. Such feeling was, she discovered, pulling dead tufts off an artemesia, quite as intense and obsessive as her earlier passion had been. She could scarcely credit the number of wakeful nights and restless days that those very people she had resigned herself to being unsuited for - a natural accident, she would say - had caused her.

At the end of the white border there was a bower. It was made of golden hops trained around an arched trellis and it contained a stone seat with a back like an acanthus leaf. It had been photographed - twining goldgreen fronds, lichened stone, clumps of grey-leaved, white-flowered rock rose - for a dozen books on English gardens. Even now, on a grey day without the brilliance of blue sky behind the brilliance of the hop leaves, it was a satisfaction to look at. Cecily stood in front of it for some time, and considered how long it was since she had had a really creative idea. It was almost as if you could pour your creativity into people or into your work but seldom into both. There simply wasn't enough for both. Men knew that. Men didn't even try to cover both. She could weep, she thought, standing there in front of her acanthus seat, she could simply weep at the frustration of this division, this unwanted intrusion into the wholeness of herself ...

Telephone!'

She turned. Dorothy was standing at the far end of the border flapping a duster. She began to walk quickly back.

'So sorry!' Dorothy said, 'but it sounds urgent. The vicar from Pitcombe - he says-'

The vicar-'

'Yes. A Mr Morris-'

Cecily ran. In the hall, the telephone receiver lay beside a luminous white hydrangea in a Chinese bowl.

'Mr Morris?'

'Ah,' Peter said. 'I'm so glad to speak to you. Nobody's hurt. You must understand that. All your family are unhurt. But I think you should come. I think they need you. I think your son would like you to come.'

'What's happened?'

Peter Morris said carefully, There has been an emotional upset.'

'What sort? What do you mean?'

'Could you come? It would be easier to explain to you, if you came-'

It would not, really, and he knew it. It would never be easy to explain but it was always worse on the telephone, when one was unable to see the other person's face. He screwed his own face up at the reproduction on his study wall of Carpaccio's St Jerome at his desk with the little dog badgering him silently from the floor nearby, and said, 'Everybody is well and being cared for, but your family needs your support.'

'I'll come,' she said. 'I'll be two hours.'

'Come to the vicarage. Come to me first.'

'Yes,' she said. 'Yes.' And he could hear her voice falter.

He put the telephone down and looked at the chair where she would be sitting when he told her that her daughter-in-law and Clodagh Unwin had become lovers and appeared to have no intention of ceasing to be lovers. He would have to tell her how Alice had come to him the night before, in a very bad way indeed, and asserted that her husband had tried to rape her. Rape, she had said, over and over. 'He tried to force me. He's mad, he's mad-'

He had sat her down in the rectory kitchen and made tea. Alice told him how good Martin had been initially, how accepting, and then how he had suddenly changed and come bellowing at her, accusing Clodagh of trying to fob him off with being the Unwins' lawyer as compensation for taking Alice, and how he had flung her on the floor and wrenched at her clothes and his own and been uncontrollably violent and savage, shouting all the time and weeping, and how James had come in and that of course had stopped things. Then Martin had locked himself in the spare room and could be heard sobbing there, and Alice had rung Clodagh who came down from the Park to help her comfort James, and she had left them together and come here because they needed a doctor, she thought, and more than a doctor probably, she didn't know, she could hardly think . . . The mug of tea in her hand was jerking uncontrollably and tea was splashing down on to her skirt, great hot splashes she hardly seemed to notice, so Peter took away the mug and sat and watched her until he thought she might be able to tell him again, more slowly, what had happened.

'He kept roaring,' Alice said. 'He kept roaring at me, "You're a lesbian, do you hear me, you're a lesbian"-'

'But you are. If what you tell me of you and Clodagh is true, you are.'

'And is that so wrong?'

'Yes,' Peter Morris said. 'It is very wrong.'

She gazed at him. Her mass of hair was loose and wild.

'But it made everything better, happier-'

'No,' Peter said. That is an illusion. It was a selfish, short-term pleasure. There is nothing good in a pleasure which inevitably creates innocent victims.'

'And if I was a victim before?'

'Free will,' Peter said. 'Always a choice, all your life.'

'I'm not bad,' Alice said, weeping suddenly, 'I'm not a wicked woman.'

'I know that. Goodness, essential goodness, does not guarantee anyone against wrongdoing.'

'It isn't wrong! How can love be wrong?'

'In itself, it can't. It is what you do with it.'

He had then telephoned the doctor at King's Harcourt and had walked Alice home through the Sunday twilight to The Grey House where there was silence behind the spare room door and in the kitchen a subdued, uneasy quiet while Clodagh read to James, and Natasha at the table filled in the diagrams in a dot-to-dot book. James was on Clodagh's knee, but when Peter and Alice came in she set him on the floor and came across to Alice and put her arm round her. Peter could not look at them. He went over to the table and admired what Natasha was doing.

'They don't, of course, look real,' Natasha said, drawing on. 'Because of all the corners.'

James went across to Alice and Clodagh, his thumb in his mouth, and leaned against them. He was in his pyjamas. Alice stooped to lift him and he put his arms round her neck and stuck his bare foot sideways so that Clodagh could hold it.

'Dr Milligan is coming,' Alice said. 'He will give Daddy something to help him sleep.'

'When I had chicken pox,' Clodagh said, 'when I was little, Dr Milligan gave me a biro and told me to draw round every spot I could find. It took a whole day.'

James chuckled, his face in Alice's shoulder.

'I shall go upstairs,' Peter said. 'I shall go up and wait for the doctor.'

Alice carried James back to the Aga and sat down with him on her knee. Clodagh stayed where she was.

'Alice-'

'Yes?'

'You're not wavering? What did Peter say to you-'

'That what we have is wrong.'

Clodagh snorted.

'I hope you took no notice.'

'I must take notice. But it does not mean, if I take notice, that my mind is changed.'

Natasha looked up and watched Clodagh.

'And your heart?' Clodagh said. Her head was high. She was wearing a brief, pale grey dress and she stood upright in it, a narrow shaft under her cloud of hair.

'Of all people,' Alice said, 'you know about my heart.'

Clodagh came forward suddenly and leaned on the table. She said urgently to Alice, 'It's real you know. Real. It isn't just pour epater Je bourgeoisie.'

'I know.'

Clodagh put her hand on Natasha's.

'It isn't selfish. It's giving. It folds in other people. It's what's best in women-'

'Clodagh,' Alice said, 'I know.'

Tears were running down Clodagh's face. She took no notice of them and they dripped on to the table.

'You must know it,' Clodagh said. 'Everyone must. They must see that it is as strong and real as ordinary love. I never knew that before but now I do. Oh, Alice-'

They were all watching her. James had taken his thumb out. Alice stretched out a hand.

'Clodagh. Clodagh, why all this, why worry-'

'Because of the centre line,' Clodagh cried out, letting go Natasha's hand and covering her wet face with her own. 'Because of that. Because I'm afraid of it, because I'm afraid it will pull you back, it will, it wUl-'

Natasha got hurriedly off her chair and came to her mother. Alice took her hand. She sat upright in her chair, holding her children, and although her face was quite drained by fatigue, she said in a voice of great calm, 'You needn't be afraid.'

Clodagh took her hands away from her face and went over to the roll of kitchen paper on the dresser and tore off a strip and blew her nose ferociously.

'Alice. Oh my precious Alice. You are such an innocent-'

And then the doctor had come. He had gone upstairs with Peter Morris to Martin, who, bruised to his very depths by his own behaviour as well as by the bitter discoveries of the last twenty-four hours, had conducted himself with the passive courtesy of a well-brought-up schoolboy, and had been helped into pyjamas and into bed, and given an injection to help him to sleep. Outside on the landing, with a weary distaste, Peter Morris explained the circumstances to Dr Milligan and then the two men went down to the kitchen and found that Clodagh had gone and that Alice was sitting at the table playing hangman with her children.

Dr Milligan said he would call again tomorrow but he thought Martin should be taken away for a while.

'So that,' he said to Alice, 'you can put your house in order.'

Alice said nothing. She stared at the spot on the table where the hanging lamp made a neat circle of apricot light.

'It isn't "F",' Natasha said. 'Only four more wrong and I've hanged you.'

Alice felt the two men looking down at her, big, greyhaired men in a late Sunday comfortableness of clothes. She heard Clodagh in her mind, Clodagh saying to her, laughingly, 'Why should men despise you? Honestly, you're a walking stereotype. Do women despise gay men? Alice, Alice-'

She looked up with difficulty.

'I will ring your mother-in-law in the morning,' Peter Morris said.

'Oh-'

'Yes,' he said firmly.

Doctor Milligan moved away towards the door.

'I'd get those children to bed if I were you. And yourself.' He opened the stable door. 'Rain,' he said, and went out into it.

Peter Morris came round the table and laid a brief passing hand on each child's head.

'You can always ring me-'

'Yes.'

'Martin will sleep all night.'

'Yes.'

'Get to bed now.'

When he had gone, Natasha said, sighing, 'It was all Uncle Anthony, wasn't it?'

'Well, partly-'

'Will Daddy be better in the morning?'

'A bit better.'

'Who's doing the school run?'

Alice thought.

'MrsAlleyne.'

James's lip trembled.

'No-'

'It's her turn-'

'I wantClodagh-'

'Yes. Yes. I know.'

She stood up and took James's hand.

'Come on. Bed.'

He trailed after her, dragging on her hand. They went slowly up the stairs, past the eloquently closed spare room door, and along the passage to James's room where his bed awaited him under a fly-past of model aeroplanes. He looked very small and fragile in bed. The sight of the back of his neck filled Alice with panic. She kissed him quickly for fear she might cry before she was out of the room, and for once he did not beseech her to stay, but put his forbidden thumb in and turned docilely on his side.

In her room next door, Natasha was settling Princess Power into her pink plastic castle for the night. Without turning, she said, 'Should I say goodnight to Daddy?'

'I think he is fast asleep. Have you put out your ballet things, for tomorrow?'

Natasha nodded. Tomorrow, Alice thought. Monday, ballet class, community shop, Clodagh to see to the children at teatime, Martin awake again, Cecily coming, Gwen coming, everyone beginning to know. And before that, this night to get through. She went over to Natasha and kissed her.

‘The moment she's organized, Tashie, you hop in. I'll come in later, when I've had a bath.'

'I wish,' Natasha said, 'that I could have her Power Chariot too.'

'Perhaps, for your birthday-'

Natasha began to talk, softly and intimately, into the pinkly mirrored throne room. Alice went out and closed the door. Then she listened at all the other doors, even, after a struggle, at the spare room door, and then she went along to her own bedroom and took her shoes off and lay down on her bed. She did not turn the light on. She simply lay there in the pale darkness and stared up into it, and outside, in the summer night, the rain pattered down on to the hard, dry ground.

'What are you telling me?' Cecily said, but she didn't really mean it. She knew.

Peter Morris said nothing more. He got up and went over to the window and looked out at his damp garden.

'And the doctor?'

'He went to The Grey House this morning. He thinks you should take Martin home with you for a few days. He needs looking after.' He turned from the window. The results of shock, you see. What might, a century ago, have been called a brainstorm.'

Cecily had her eyes closed.

This whole business is grotesque.'

'But it is happening.'

She opened her eyes and spread her arms out to his study walls.

'But here-'

'InPitcombe?'

'Yes.'

'Humanity is no different. It's just that the setting is prettier than, say, Solihull. And no crowds to hide in.'

Cecily said with a kind of stiff shyness, 'It must seem absurd to you, but I have never encountered such - such a - a situation before.'

'Nor I,' Peter said. 'Men yes. But not women. It is quite different, with women.'

Cecily shut her eyes again.

'No doubt-'

Peter Morris crossed the room and laid his hand on her arm.

'We must go round to The Grey House.'

'The children-'

They are at school.'

'Not the baby.'

The baby is where he should be,' Peter said. 'With his mother.'

Cecily allowed herself to be helped from the chair and guided from the house. The village street was empty except for Stuart Mott trimming the two green moustaches of privet that separated Miss Pimm's harsh little front garden from the pavement. He looked up when he saw them coming and gave a tossing nod of his head to show that he couldn't possibly relinquish the handles of his shears to wave. He knew who Cecily was. It looked, from the way she was walking, as if she had some bad news to break at The Grey House. Perhaps Mr Jordan's father had died or something had happened to that brother. Miss Pimm, dusting her dead mother's bureau in the front first-floor room, saw them too, and remembered that she had seen Peter Morris walking Alice along like that, as if sheltering an invalid, only the night before. Miss Pimm picked up her mother's inflexible photograph. The night of her mother's fatal stroke, she had gone straight to the rectory, just run there, even before she telephoned the surgery. It was the only time in her life she had ever tasted brandy.

'Is - is it known,' Cecily said, 'in the village?'

'Not yet.'

'Must it be?'

'It can't be stopped-'

'Why should not Alice go,' Cecily said, suddenly angry and turning upon Peter. 'Why must it be poor Martin-'

The children.'

'Yes-'

'My feeling is that Martin and Alice must heal separately before they come together again to heal their marriage.'

Cecily snorted.

Their marriage! My dear Mr Morris, that is surely over-'

'Not at all.'

He gripped her arm to cross the street.

'Such a betrayal,' Cecily said, thinking not solely of Martin.

'No worse, I think, than conventional adultery. Both are sins. Neither need destroy a marriage, given sufficient support.'

In the lane leading to The Grey House they met first the milk float and then a pick-up truck bearing Martin's heavy-duty lawn mower away for repair. In the last cottage garden, a rubber sheet blew on the washing line beside several pairs of immense pyjamas. At the gateway, Peter Morris took Cecily's arm more firmly and led her across the front of the house and round to the stable door to the kitchen. The top half was open and inside, in jeans and a checked shirt, very pale and with extremely neat hair, Martin sat at the table with the newspaper before him.

He looked up when their figures darkened the doorway, and then stood up, and said, 'Hello, Mother,' and came over and opened the door and kissed her cheek. Then he said, 'Good morning, Peter,' and stood back, politely, as if there was nothing more he could do.

Cecily put her arms round him. He stood and allowed her to. Then he said, 'Would you like some coffee? I expect there is some.'

'Darling,' Cecily said. 'Darling.'

'Please,' Martin said. He put her arms away.

'I've come to take you home, darling. I've come to take you home with me for a while-'

'I should like that,' Martin said.

'My car is at the rectory-'

She looked round the room.

'Where is Alice?'

Martin said carefully, 'Alice is taking Charlie for a walk in his pushchair. She would be glad for me to be at Dummeridge.'

Cecily gave a savage little yelp.

'I am sure she would!'

Martin's face immediately creased with distress and Peter Morris came forward and took his arm.

'Of course she would. She wants to see you better. We all do.'

'Heaven knows what Milligan gave me last night,' Martin said. 'I feel as if I'd been hit with a sledgehammer.' He put his hand to his face. 'I tried to ring the office. Alice said-'

Cecily put her arm around him.

'Don't worry about those things. Don't worry about anything. We'll take care of them.'

'My bag,' Martin said. 'I packed my bag-'

Peter went upstairs to look for it. On the landing, he found Gwen, bundling sheets into a pillowcase for the laundry.

That's his mother come then?'

'Yes-'

Gwen believed clergymen had a threefold social duty to baptise, marry and bury and no business to step beyond it.

'I suppose you got her to come?'

'I am looking for Mr Jordan's bag-'

'If you'd wanted to be useful,' Gwen said, pushing in sheets patterned with Paddington Bear, 'you'd have sent Clodagh packing weeks ago.' She jerked her head towards an open door. 'You'll find Mr Jordan's bag in there.'

'Gwen. Gwen, I hope you'll stay. At least until Mr Jordan gets back-'

'Depends,' Gwen said, 'on what I'm asked to do. Doesn't it.'

Peter said with some asperity, 'I don't seem to remember you having any moral dif ficulties with Major MurrayFrench's girlfriends.'

Gwen gathered up the bursting pillowcase.

"That was different, wasn't it? That was normal.' She moved towards the stairs. 'If I stay, it'll be because of the kids. You can't despise the kids, can you?'

Alice, on the river path with Charlie, saw Cecily's car go down the village street, cross the bridge and climb easily up the opposite hill, southward. She could see two heads in it. When it had disappeared, she put Charlie into his pushchair with his drooping bunch of buttercups, and pushed him resolutely up the street, talking to him animatedly. Cathy Fanshawe, coming out of the shop, saw her and ran across to say breathlessly that the fete had made nine hundred and fifty-one pounds, would you believe it? Alice said how wonderful. Cathy thanked her profusely for her stall and ran back again to her car. Soon Cathy Fanshawe would know why Martin had been taken away by his mother.

In the kitchen at The Grey House, Clodagh was frying a sausage for Charlie's lunch. Gwen had pointedly gone home. Clodagh too had waited until Cecily's car had pulled away from the rectory. She had had nothing to do all morning but wait. She had meant to speak to her mother, but Margot had gone up to London early for a dental appointment and lunch at the Parrot Club. The speaking would have to happen that evening or else Margot would hear, distortedly, from the village, and Clodagh wished her to know that she, Clodagh, would be leaving quite soon, and taking Alice and the children with her, to Windover. She had said nothing of this to Alice. She was waiting until she and Alice were alone.

When Alice came in, she put Charlie into his highchair and then went over to Clodagh and held her. Neither of them said anything. Charlie, looking for something he could reach, found the telephone cable and pulled it, so that the receiver clattered off and Alice had to come to its rescue.

'Awful boy.'

Charlie beamed.

'I am a coward,' Alice said. 'I couldn't face Cecily.'

There are quite a lot of cowards around here,' Clodagh said, turning the sausage, 'and you ain't one.'

She put the sausage in Charlie's dish, with a choppedup tomato, took it over to him, and cut it up.

'Nah,' Charlie said.

'It's all you're getting.'

He blipped the pieces of sausage with his spoon. Clodagh put her hand on Alice's shoulder.

'Sandwich?'

'No thanks. Nothing. Not hungry.'

'Alice,' Clodagh said, 'this is no moment to have the vapours. We are just beginning to get somewhere.'

Alice smiled. She picked up Clodagh's hand and laid her cheek on it.

'It's not the vapours. It's lack of sleep and lots to think about. And anyway, I must go. Shop day.'

Clodagh opened the door.

"I'll be here when you get back. We all will. Waiting for you.'

They stood and looked at each other. Then Alice leaned forward and kissed her and went out into the garden towards the drive.

The Community Shop was standing as usual in the yard behind the post office. Also as usual, Mr Finch was standing on some aluminium steps washing the windscreen with a plastic bucket in one hand and a sponge in the other. The back doors of the van were open, and what was not usual was that Mrs Finch, in a frilled floral blouse, was inside stocking up the shelves. Mrs Finch prided herself on having no manual part in the business though she kept an eagle eye on the books, and if she was minding the shop when a customer wanted potatoes she would pull on rubber gloves before she touched them and make it very plain, with deprecating remarks and smiles, how unaccustomed she was to this aspect of what she called the commercial world. Alice went up the steps into the van.

'Hello, Mrs Finch. No Michelle?'

Mrs Finch paused, holding two bottles of vinegar.

'No, Mrs Jordan. No Michelle.'

'Is she ill? She was fine on Saturday-'

'She is quite well. She is serving in the shop.'

'I see,' said Alice, who didn't. 'Well, let me do that. I know you don't like it-'

'Mrs Jordan,' said Mrs Finch, clasping her bottles, 'I am not one to flinch.'

She took a breath. She had rehearsed this to herself several times, ever since Gwen's astonishing visit to the shop shortly after midday. She put the bottles in their allotted place and turned towards Alice with her hands folded against her sunray pleated skirt.

'Mrs Jordan, I am sure you will not misunderstand me. I am also sure you will understand why I must, out of delicacy, say this to you, rather than allow Mr Finch to. Michelle will not be on the van with you this afternoon because her mother has requested that she shall not be.'

Alice began to laugh.

'Don't be idiotic-'

Mrs Finch watched her.

'I've lived a bit, Mrs Jordan. There isn't much I haven't seen. I'm not one to judge. But I'll tell you that in not judging, I am very rare. Very rare indeed.'