A Village Affair

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Most days one of the children asked when Martin would be better enough to come home. Usually Alice said, soon. Once a week Juliet came over and picked them up and took them home with her so that they could see Martin, and the night after these visits James usually wet his bed. It was the school holidays and the days yawned for occupation. Alice devised a list of duties, and Natasha's was to go down to the shop. She liked this because all down the street people stopped and talked to her and asked her how she was and Mrs Finch would come out of the back part of the shop and give her sweets and sometimes a kiss pungent with Coty's 'L'Aimant'. The rest of the day she did not like so much. The feeling in the house was peculiar, without her father, and she missed school, and Sophie, who had been taken to Corfu by her family. She spent a lot of time in her bedroom, drawing a wardrobe for Princess Power, and she wrote a huge notice saying 'Private - Keep out' which she stuck on her door, four feet from the floor so that James could not possibly avoid seeing it. Behind the closed door, besides drawing, she spent a good deal of time painting her toenails with Clodagh's scarlet polish.

When Cecily telephoned to suggest that she and Martin and Dorothy take the children to Cornwall - as usual, she said with emphasis - Natasha thought it quite extraordinary that Alice wasn't coming. James, in floods of tears, said he wouldn't go without Alice. Natasha said why couldn't they all go, Alice and Martin and Clodagh and everybody, and Alice said it was difficult to explain but she was desperately tired in the complicated way that happened to grown-ups sometimes and she had to be by herself for a bit.

'So Clodagh can come,' said Natasha.

'Well-'

'Clodagh isn't tired.'

'Clodagh can't come. Clodagh has got something else to do that she can't not do.'

'I'll ask her to come,' Natasha said. 'We can show her the witches'rock.'

James's eyes bulged at the memory of it.

'I can't come,' Clodagh said. 'I'd love to. But I can't. I've got to plan my future, you see. I've got to find a job.'

Natasha said then at least a holiday would make Daddy completely better and he could come home afterwards. Then she burst into tears. Alice, trying to hold her, said, 'I do promise you that when you come back, everything will be sorted out.'

But Natasha would not be held and shouted, 'I hate you!' and rushed out into the garden and picked up Charlie's sandpit spade and hurled it so that it sailed up into the air, far further and harder than she had meant, and came down through the greenhouse roof. Then she stood and screamed with panic at what she had done. James, standing in the kitchen doorway and watching her, began to pee helplessly into his shorts.

Cecily came to collect the children herself. She thought Alice looked awful, but she would have been even angrier if Alice had not looked awful. Indeed, she looked so awful that Cecily would almost have liked to say or do something affectionate but Alice, though perfectly polite, made such a gesture quite impossible. Together, they put the children's bags into the boot of the car, and then strapped in Charlie's car seat, and Charlie into his car seat, and urged Natasha and James to get in beside him. Nobody was quite crying but everybody almost was.

'Bring me some shells,' Alice said through the car window.

'Mummy-' James mouthed at her, not daring to speak for fear of letting out his sobs.

'You might find a starfish-'

Cecily put the car into gear.

'I'm sure we will. And James is old enough for the smallest surfboard now-'

'James! Isn't that lovely?'

The car slid forward. Three faces turned her way, crumpling, and Cecily's free hand waved from the driver's window. Alice made herself stand there and wave back until the car was gone between the hornbeams and then she turned and went back into the empty house.

'If we were city women,' Alice said slowly, 'we'd have a completely different life. It's being country women that makes it so difficult-'

She stopped. City or country made no difference to Clodagh. Clodagh was Clodagh wherever she was.

'Difficult for me, I mean. Even if I moved to a city, I'd still be a country woman now. I'd still feel visible.'

'You're visible because you're you.'

Tm too visible just now-'

There had been a nasty little moment in the shop that morning, a moment when Cathy Fanshawe had ignored Alice's greeting and turned effusively to speak to Stuart Mott who was buying cigarettes and staring at Alice with a look of such repulsive interest that she had felt quite sick. When she came out of the shop, Michelle had darted up to her, out of the shop yard, and had clutched her convulsively and wordlessly, but it wasn't enough to undo the silent insults of Cathy Fanshawe and Stuart Mott. Going up the street, slowly, with her head as high as she could get it, she thought that even the cottage facades looked as if they had taken stands, were holding their breath until she was past.

'You must get away,' Clodagh said.

They were lying in the orchard under the old Russet Egremont where Clodagh had suggested they plant a Paul's Himalayan Musk which would spread through the gnarled branches like a cascade of late blossom ...

'No,' Alice said slowly.

'Yes. Yes!'

Clodagh rolled on her side and propped her head on her hand. She put out her free hand and ran a forefinger down Alice's profile.

'Come with me. We'll go down to Windover. We'll start a new life there together, you and me and the children. I'll get a job. You'll paint. Alice-'

Alice turned her head to look at Clodagh.

'Windover will be just the same as here.'

'No. No. Here everyone knew you as a married woman. There we'll arrive as two women, you and me, no past. We can do it. We can do anything we want.' She pushed her face close to Alice's. 'You don't need money. I've got that. You don't need anything, you just need to come. I love you. Do you hear me? I love you.'

Alice just went on looking. After a long time, it seemed to Clodagh, she said, 'And I love you. More than I think I have ever loved anyone.'

'Then come, then come-'

Alice turned back to look at the sky. She pulled a long grass from its sheath beside her and put the juicy end between her teeth.

'Loving you makes all decisions much more difficult. Loving anybody does-'

Clodagh snorted.

'You sound like Lettice-'

Lettice had stopped Clodagh the other day, coming down from the Park, and had taken her by the shoulders and said, very fiercely indeed, 'If you love Alice Jordan, my girl, you have to let her go.' Clodagh had been amazed. She still was. She liked Lettice a lot but some of her opinions had got stuck in some kind of timewarp. Throw away the best thing that had ever happened to her? Deliberately? Causing heartbreak all round? Honestly.

Alice was frowning.

'Alice,' Clodagh said softly, to win back her attention.

'Mm?'

'Look at me-'

Alice turned.

'I'm looking-'

Tell me why you love me.'

Alice smiled, a slow, lazy smile.

'I love your gaiety. And your freedom of spirit. And your arrogance and strength and mad courage. And I love your love for me.'

After some time, Clodagh said, 'We don't have to go to Windover. I can sell it. It's worth millions, I should think. We'll go abroad. We can go anywhere. What about the South of France?'

'Lovely,' Alice said, but her mind had slipped into neutral once more.

'You have to come with me, you know. You'd only be half a person without me. Like I'd be, without you.'

'I know.'

Then when shall we go?'

Alice sat up and pulled her plait over her shoulder and began to pick grass seeds out of it.

'You must go.'

'Shut up!' Clodagh shouted in panic, springing up.

'Calm down,' Alice said. 'I just mean for a bit. I must be absolutely alone, for a bit-'

Clodagh stooped to seize her shoulders.

'You won't go and see Martin, promise-'

'Martin is in Cornwall.'

'Or Juliet. Or my mother. Or-'

'Clodagh-'

'Promise!' Clodagh screamed.

Alice slapped her.

'Shut up!'

'Sorry,' Clodagh said, crying. 'Oh God, Alice. Oh my God!'

She fell on her knees beside Alice.

'I'll kill myself if you leave me.'

Alice put her hands over her face.

'Think what we've shared,' Clodagh said. Think what we do together. No one else can do that for you, no one. Only me. We'll go to France. We'll have a house in the sun, we'll all go naked in the sun. We'll have a garden with lavender and thyme and a terrace over a valley. We'll never have to be apart, nights and days together, days and nights. The children will be bilingual, brown as nuts and bilingual. We'll make love when we want to, quite free, in sunlight and moonlight, and you'll come so alive you'll wonder you ever called it life before-'

Alice's hands were shaking. From behind them she said, 'Be fair.'

'Fair?'

Alice put her hands in her lap and held them tightly.

'I expect you think I am deeply bourgeois but I can't come to paradise dishonestly-'

'Dishonest? What the hell's dishonest about us? It's being so bloody honest that's half-killing you!'

'Glodagh,' Alice said. 'Clodagh. I can't think while you're here.'

'I'm terrified of your thinking-'

'What would you do,' Alice said, 'if you had three children?' She looked at Clodagh squarely. 'And a husband.'

'It's excuses,' Clodagh said at once. 'All excuses-'

'Call it whatever names you like. Nothing changes what is, what I have in my path that you don't have in yours.'

Clodagh grew excited again.

'I see, I see. You're going to be the sacrificial lamb, nobly giving up the best happiness you'll ever be offered-'

'I didn't say anything about giving up anything. I have thought about sacrifice and I'll think some more. You could think about it too. You could think about a good deal, and stop shouting at me.'

'Alice,' Clodagh said, 'I'm scared as hell.'

Alice put out a hand and took Clodagh's.

'I remember the day you told me your lover in New York was a woman. We were down in the river meadow and the children had made a boat out of a log and you were wearing your wizard's cloak. I shan't ever forget that conversation. I shan't ever forget that I suddenly could see the powers and freedoms that might be mine. "We all have a choice," you told me. "You, me, everyone." Well, you had chosen, and then I did. Nobody made us, we chose. And now here we are with the results of our choice and we have to choose again-'

'I can't believe what I'm hearing!'

'Yes you can. You know it's true. "If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen," you said to me.'

Clodagh snatched her hand away.

'But you won't stay in the kitchen with me!'

'I didn't say that. I haven't decided anything. But we must be apart for a bit. I don't want it but I can't think at all while there are emotional demands all over me, yours, the children's, anyone's. It isn't just the now, you see, it's the future too. Things never stand still, do they.' She looked at Clodagh. 'You ought to think about your own future too. For your own sake.'

Clodagh stood up. She was wearing a peculiar patchwork skirt with long handkerchief points to the hem, which brushed against Alice's bare arm. Alice looked with love at the triangle of red and yellow cotton lying against her skin.

'Just a week,' Alice said.

'I'll go to London.'

'Yes.'

'Who knows' - defiantly - 'who I may meet?'

Alice said nothing. Clodagh moved away to lean on the apple tree trunk.

'Wouldn't you care?'

'Of course-'

'Would it make you angry?'

'No.'

'Sad?'

'Very.'

'Alice - Alice, why don't you resent anyone for anything, damn and blast you?'

'I do.'

'You don't-'

'I do. I just can't resent anyone for something I've done-'

'Go to hell!' Clodagh shouted. She swirled from the tree in her gypsy rags. 'Priggish, conventional, bloody bourgeois! I'm going, I'm going and you'll never know where!'

And then she ran from the orchard and across the lawn by the sandpit and Alice heard her car start up and roar furiously round the house and down the drive. Then Balloon came, dancing through the long grass, to remind Alice that, crisis or no crisis, a cat would like his supper.

When the Unwins heard that Clodagh was going to London, they both tried desperately to stop her.

'But you wanted me to go. In fact you ordered me-'

'Not to London.'

'Why not to London, for God's sake?'

They could not answer her. They could not utter what they had newly learned about London. Clodagh watched them struggle for a while and then she said, 'You mean that you think I'm going to London to cruise.'

Even she was sorry. She looked at the utter misery on their faces, their self-confident, prosperous, genial faces, and was sorry.

'I'm not,' she said, and her voice was softer. 'I'm not interested. It's one of the things you don't understand. But I must get away from here, I must be somewhere anonymous. I might,' she said, trying to make small amends, 'I might see about a job.'

Margot drove her to Salisbury station and they listened to the car radio on the way, to an adaptation of an Arnold Bennett novel, and there was a scene between an overbearing mother and a defiant daughter longing for independence, and neither Margot nor Clodagh could turn it off for fear of tacitly admitting that it had any particular significance to either of them. It was market day in Salisbury and it was trying to rain, warm, thin, summer rain that made the roads feel greasy. The spire of the cathedral rose imperturbably into the grey clouds and tourists carrying National Trust carrier bags spilled off the narrow pavements in search of lavatories and Marks and Spencer and Mompesson House. Margot gazed at their apparent ordinariness with passionate envy and Clodagh with energetic scorn. At the station, Clodagh bought a single ticket.

'Oh darling, not a return?'

'No,' Clodagh said. 'Not because I'm not coming back. But because in my present mood I just wouldn't like the feeling.'

They were ten minutes early for the train.

'Don't wait-'

'I want to.'

'Ma,' Clodagh said, 'please don't wait.'

'I can't bear to see you so unhappy,' Margot said, her own face ravaged by wretchedness.

'It's pretty hateful-'

'Oh, Clodagh-'

'No,' Clodagh said. 'Don't start. If it makes it easier, just pretend I'm in love with a man.'

A flash of anger braced Margot.

'I will certainly not stay, to be spoken to like that.'

Clodagh watched her go, upright in a summer dress of cream linen, watched her stop to speak to an elderly porter who had helped with Unwin school trunks for fifteen years, watched her smile goodbye to him and go out past the folded iron gates to the station yard, back to her car, back to Pitcombe, where Alice was.

When she got to London, she took a taxi to Highgate, to the flat of the woman writer who had been her first real lover. The writer had a new lover, another writer, and they made Clodagh extremely welcome and were most sympathetic about her pain and her fears. It was comforting to be in their flat, to be in a room where the atmosphere was full of acceptance and understanding. She talked far too much and they were very patient.

During supper, one of them said, very gently, that she didn't think promiscuity would be the answer, and Clodagh said probably not and that was almost the worst part of it, not being able to affect Alice just now.

'I feel,' she said, 'that I'm the one that's given her the confidence to behave like this. So can you see why I feel so frantic?'

They could. They made her camomile tea and put her to bed in a little, comfortable back bedroom with a copy of Sinister Wisdom that one of them had brought back recently from America. Then they told her to try and sleep, and went out, and Clodagh could hear them moving about, clearing up, talking companionably to one another, and she looked at the room with its blue and white cotton curtains and its brass lamp and the rough white Greek rug on the floor, and she was so consumed with longing and envy that she turned her face into her pillow and cried and cried as if her heart would break.

In her kitchen, Juliet Dunne pretended to make watercress soup. She chopped shallots and made stock from a cube and hummed a bit but it wasn't any use. She'd only started because she'd met this very tired bunch of watercress lurking in the fridge behind the walnut oil and the Mister Men yoghurts, and she'd thought she'd just do something with it as a distraction from thinking of Martin and Alice sitting eight feet apart on her terrace supposedly having a talk. She had always happily regarded the roles of wife and mother as the absolute pits, but they were knocked into a cocked hat by the role of mediating friend. It was awful. Offer the participants a drink and they both say no, thank you, just Perrier, ask them where they'd like to sit and they say anywhere, it doesn't matter; say, trying to make a joke, look, I'll come and break it up in ten minutes and they look mortally offended. So you shove them out on to the terrace and say do look at my Whisky Mac rose, don't you think it's almost as disgusting as the drink, and they ignore you and sit down, sighing, a long way from one another as if they suspected a contagion. So you hop about a bit, being inane, and then you say oh my God something in the oven, and rush into the kitchen for another bloody cry and then you think, must do something, can't just sit here and wait, so you find some practically fossilized watercress and think, aha, I'll make soup. But all you really want to do is go on bawling, in between tiptoeing to the window and looking out at their unhappy, separate backs. I hate being fond of people, Juliet thought, stirring her dissolving stock cube with a knife handle, I simply hate it. I'd much rather loathe them, like I loathe Clodagh. At least you know where you are, with loathing.

After twenty minutes or so, Alice came and stood in the kitchen doorway.

'Martin's gone for a walk. It's so kind of you to have him.'

Juliet had her back to Alice, stirring her soup.

'You know I'm not kind.'

'And it was kind to have us both here-'

'Shut up,' Juliet said. 'Stop mouthing crappy platitudes at me.' She turned round. 'Did you get anywhere?'

'No.' Alice paused and then she said, 'He wants me to apologize, I think. He wants it to be all my fault.'

Juliet said nothing. She took the soup off the cooker and peered at it.

'Henry'll never eat this. Looks like pond slime.'

Alice said, 'I'll go home now. But thank you.'

Juliet banged her saucepan down.

'What the hell do you expect from him? What has he done, poor brute, except be the boring old Englishman he's always been - the one you married?'

'It isn't as simple as that-'

'Simple? You bet your life it isn't simple.' She came across the kitchen, holding the wooden soup spoon. 'Allie. Allie, how could you?'

Alice looked at her.

'How could you treat Martin like this? How could you be so absolutely normal all these years and then suddenly

- God, Allie, have you fallen off your trolley?'

'In order to even begin to understand,' Alice said, 'you have to want to.'

'And what about you trying to understand Martin?'

'I do.'

'You do?'

'Understanding unfortunately doesn't mean I can wave a wand and put everything right, but it does mean that I'm trying to take everyone into account.'

Juliet marched back to the cooker.

'Too good of you.'

Alice left. As she went out of the Dunnes' house, she could see Juliet's little boys on a climbing frame across the lawn. She got into her car. On the floor there were bits of Lego, and a cassette tape of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and a bangle of Clodagh's, purple and gold, that Natasha had borrowed to take to school and awe Sophie with. There were also rather a lot of sweet papers.

'I want you to be more slutty,' Clodagh had said to her. 'My beautiful, sexy, slutty Alice. I want you to let your elastic go. Life to the senses, death to sense.'

Alice started the car, and drove slowly down the drive to the lane. The heavy August green of the countryside weighted the land right down. Some days, when it was still, you felt the fields could not breathe. Gross weeds lined the lanes, tangling on the verges. Alice thought she felt like it looked, exhausted, weighed down, ripe for harvest. She put her hand up for her pigtail, and held it as she drove, one hand on it, the other on the steering wheel.

As she came into The Grey House the telephone was ringing. An immense happy certainty seized her. It would be Glodagh. Clodagh had been away a week and it would be so like her to ring now, in the early evening, so that Alice didn't have another whole night to get through, wondering where she was. She took her time, confidently, getting to the telephone, and when she picked up the receiver, she was smiling.

'Hello?'

'Alice,' Richard said.

'Richard-'

'I won't ask how you are because you can't be other than awful.'

'Yes.'

'I'd like to see you.'

She closed her eyes. Tearless for so long now, she could feel the floodgates weakening.

'Alice?'

'Yes. Yes, I'm here-'

'I'd like to see you. Would you like to see me?'

'Yes.'

'Come to London. I'd come to Pitcombe except that I don't want to be curtain-twitching fodder. Come before the children get back. Have you heard from them?'

"Postcards-'

'Ill see you on Tuesday,' Richard said. 'Come to the flat. We'll have lunch.'

'Yes,' Alice said, crying.

'Come on, love. Come on-'

'Don't be kind to me, it's hopeless-'

He laughed.

'I'll see you on Tuesday,' he said.

It was mattins on Sunday morning. The sun was out, and the clumps of hollyhocks by the lych gate were jubilant with their papery trumpets. Mattins was preferred by the Protestant habitues of Pitcombe because the hour was civilized and there was no delicate dilemma as to whether one should eat, or not, before communion, and if not, in Miss Payne's case, risk the humiliation of breakfastless internal rumblings in all the quietest and most holy moments. Once she had been compelled to go out of the church entirely and suffer an agony of blushes by a table tomb in the churchyard.

August was usually a poor month for congregations because of holidays, but this particular Sunday seemed to fall between the end of Europe and the beginning of Scotland in the Pitcombe holiday calendar. The narrow nave, decorated with immense white phlox sent down from Pitcombe Park, intermingled with royal blue artificial delphiniums provided by Cathy Fanshawe - 'Good God,' Henry Dunne said, hunting for hassocks, 'is it Lifeboat week?' - filled satisfactorily with people, redfaced from harvest and Cornwall, brown-faced from Umbria and Tenerife. Miss Pimm, in a brown print, with tremulous bare arms, sat at the organ. The choir, a mixed bag of Motts and Crudwells and the reluctant Barton child who was required, by his parents, to participate, sat below her, picking their noses and whispering.

Rosie and Gerry Barton sat in the front pews on the right, opposite the Unwin pew. The Bartons were smiling, the Unwins were attempting to. Behind the Unwins, the Dunnes formed a loyal cohort, Henry in a blazer with his old regimental buttons, Juliet in a blue flowered frock, their boys - whom Henry intended to hold in halfnelsons for most of the service - in identical T-shirts and shorts. Buntie Payne sat across the aisle from them and smiled at the children, which emboldened them to make grisly faces. Down the rest of the aisle, scattered in twos and threes, sat the Fanshawes, a local farmer, John Murray-French with his cricket-watching panama on the pew beside him, several visitors, Michelle and her friend Carol, a new family who had modestly chosen a back pew, and old Fred Mott, in his wheelchair, wheeled up by Mr Finch who believed him to be an absolute test case for the promise of universal redemption. He sat wheezing a little, fingering his trousers and loudly sucking on Fishermen's Friends.

Peter Morris came out of the vestry in the green stole of Trinity and looked pleasedly at the church. He went down the aisle greeting people, and then up to the choir to say a few admonishing words. He often thought he would have forgiven them a great deal if they had been able to sing at all. Then he went back into the vestry for a few private moments, moments in which he was always surprised at how easily and earnestly prayer came, and went back into the church and saw Alice Jordan, sitting alone and very upright two pews behind the Dunnes. She was staring straight ahead. Instead of embarking upon the bidding prayer, Peter went down the aisle to her and said, in the resounding silence, 'How nice to see you, Alice,' to which she said thank you. He then went back to the chancel step, opened his arms wide and began.

Alice, kneeling, sitting, rising, told herself she must get through it. She said the Lord's Prayer, but she did not say the General Confession or join in the hymns which everyone else seemed to sing with a land of exaggerated gusto. It occurred to her that the atmosphere was like the one she imagined prevailing in doomed aircraft, tremendous stoicism tussling silently with incipient hysteria. Sir Ralph, as churchwarden and sidesman, came round with the collection bag during 'Lead me, Heavenly Father, lead me' and Alice dropped in her coins without looking at him. During the sermon, the little Dunne boys, who had known her all their lives, twisted round to beam broadly at her, and were cuffed back into place by their father. It was only at the end that her courage faltered, and in the last hymn she slipped quickly out of her pew so that Buntie Payne, who had been planning to kiss her in front of everyone, turned eagerly to do so after the Peace and cried in a voice loud with disappointment 'Oh, it's too bad! Really it is! She's gone!'