A Village Affair

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

'I was going to take you out,' Richard said, 'but then I thought that the moment either of us managed to say something we really wanted to say there'd be a waiter asking if we wanted pepper on our salads. So I went to Self ridges Food Hall and got this.'

Alice looked down at the coffee table in the little sitting room of Richard's flat. On it was a bottle of wine, a plastic envelope of smoked salmon, brown bread and a lemon.

She said, 'Are you going to grill me?'

'Heavens no. Why should I do that?'

'Because you are Martin's father.'

He picked up the bottle of wine and went to find a corkscrew.

'I'm a human being too. I'd have to be a pretty unpleasant one to drag you all the way to London just to tick you off.'

He disappeared for a moment into the tiny kitchen, reappearing with wine glasses.

'You mustn't be defensive.'

Alice threw her head up.

'I don't want to be. But I keep feeling driven into it.'

It had been so lovely in the train, coming up, being nobody. And the Tube had been even better, jammed in with people, all strangers.

'London's a luxury,' Alice said, accepting a glass of wine, 'after Pitcombe.'

'Yes,' he said. 'Yes, it would be.'

He put a hand on her arm and steered her into an armchair.

'Are you hungry?'

'Not terribly.'

'Drink up then. We've got all day.'

'But the office-'

'It can wait.'

'Martin said you had built a wall together-'

'You saw him?'

'Yes,' Alice said. 'At Juliet's. It didn't really work.'

'No,' Richard said. 'It wouldn't have. Poor boy.'

Alice said nothing.

'Poor boy,' Richard said again. 'Poor boy. He's been misinformed, somehow, all his life. He wouldn't begin to understand. He's in a rage of not understanding.'

'I don't blame him,' Alice said. 'I wouldn't have understood either. Before Clodagh.'

'Talk to me,' Richard said. He leaned forward and poured more wine into Alice's glass. Talk to me.'

'No-'

'Yes. I may be one of the few people who can help. I love Martin.' He paused. 'I love you. I think I understand Martin. I would like to understand you.'

'I don't want this,' Alice said. 'I don't want my marriage kindly mended.'

'I don't want to mend it.'

'You don't?'

'No,' Richard said. 'But I want a resolution. For him, for you, for my grandchildren.' He looked at Alice. Talk to me, about Clodagh.'

'I can't-'

'Why not?'

'Because you're a man.'

'Alice,' Richard said, 'I don't think you know very much about men, or you wouldn't say such a thing. Do you trust me?'

She thought.

'I don't know-'

'Pay me the compliment of knowing that I will believe you and probably understand what you tell me.'

Alice got up. She walked round the little room fiddling with things, an ashtray on a sideboard, a marble egg on a wooden stand, a foolish adult toy made of a heap of magnetic paper clips on a black glass base. Then she came back to her chair and sat down.

'What makes it so difficult is that the love between women has always been belittled. Hasn't it? Down the ages. Treated as something at best foolish, like - like a kind of silly harmless hobby.'

She put her wine glass down and picked up the lemon, rolling it in her hands and sniffing it.

'But what I feel - and I may never fall in love again - is that what Clodagh has given me has enriched me. It hasn't impoverished anything about me, hasn't taken anything from me, if you see what I mean. It's grown me up. It's enabled me to love everyone else in my life properly, and as far as I can see only another woman would do for that instructive kind of love because only another woman could see I needed it and could understand about the children and self and the permanent balancing act of motherhood and self. Only another woman,' Alice said firmly, 'could understand and - and supply.'

Richard slid off his chair on to his knees beside the coffee table and began to make competent sandwiches.

'If you want to know,' Alice said, rolling the lemon, 'bed isn't the most significant thing. At least, after the beginning it wasn't. I think sex is more important for Clodagh than for me. If I'm honest. But what I love, what I'm terrified of doing without again, is the life force. A kind of elixir. Do you see?'

He nodded, peeling salmon off cellophane strips.

'You can't imagine how much fun we have. You can't conceive of how differently I see myself, because of her. It's a kind of revelation.'

Richard took the lemon away from her, cut it and began to squeeze the juice on to his sandwiches.

'I was so lonely,' Alice said. 'I don't blame Martin. He didn't know what to do about me, and I didn't know what to do about me either. But Clodagh did. I woke up. When I looked back at getting married and honeymooning and then being married, I think I was simply asleep. I must have been. Twelve years, dawdling about in a kind of half-life.'

Richard put two sandwiches on a plate and balanced it on her knee.

'Eat up.'

Alice looked at the plate, then at him.

'Do I make sense to you?'

'Yes.'

'Can you imagine what I mean?'

'Of course. I've felt something like it. But in my case it was for the opposite sex, rather than my own.'

'Who was it?'

'Cecily, of course,' Richard said.

'Cecily!'

'Yes.'

Alice took an unenthusiastic bite of sandwich.

'You talk,' she said. 'You talk now.'

There was a little pause, then Richard said, with great carefulness, 'If you had had a confident, loving man make love to you, this would never have happened. You'll think that's just common or garden male arrogance. It isn't. There's a world of difference between making love and having sex. I was never able to make love to Cecily as I wished to because her mind was quite closed to me. The summit of her emotional life was Vienna and she would never allow anything to approach it in case it proved only an illusion and the giant, secret romance of her life crumbled to dust.'

He stopped, and rose to fill Alice's glass. She waited, watching him.

'But I could have loved her, if she'd let me. At the risk of sounding incestuous, I could have loved you, because, like Clodagh, I know what you are like and what you like.'

He looked at Alice.

'I'm not jealous of Clodagh. I'm only sorry that you should be put through this hoop for her, socially. I understand exactly what you say about loneliness. I've had a mistress for years - fifteen to be exact - because I'm a tender man and a passionate man and Cecily can't let herself allow me to be either. It doesn't suit her to acknowledge that I like women.'

'Martin-' Alice said.

'Cecily never brought the boys up to like women. She didn't try. They are both afraid of women. I didn't try either. I didn't see until too late. In that respect, I am quite as much to blame as she is.'

Alice reached over to take Richard's hand.

'So sad,' Alice said. 'So sad. You are actually exactly the right man for her.'

He smiled.

'Oh, I know that. I've known that for forty years.'

Alice bent her head.

'Forty years! The things people live with-'

'Sometimes you have to. If you don't at heart want anything else.'

'But a mistress-'

'Would a string of call girls be better?'

Alice looked up.

'You mean-?'

'Yes.'

'Jesus,' Alice said, with Clodagh's intonation.

'I haven't been allowed to make love to Cecily for almost twenty years.'

'But you still-'

'Yes, I still.'

'Wouldn't you like to have stopped? Loving her, I mean-'

'Only very theoretically. And occasionally. Perhaps I'm just immensely pigheaded and won't admit to failure. Perhaps it's love.'

Alice flung herself back in her chair.

'Love,' she said.

Later, when he was driving her to Paddington, Richard said quite casually that he would like to buy her a little flat or house in Salisbury, to be near the children's school. He said it would be a secret between the two of them. He said it would have no strings. She could have it for a month or a year or however long she wanted it for. She felt quite bewildered by the offer and said, looking away from him 'But why?' and he said for the children first and for her and Martin second.

'Martin?'

'If you have some independence, he won't feel so threatened or resentful. It will make the next step easier. He cannot bear the thought that the law will require him to give money to a woman he believes has betrayed him. If you don't need so much from him, that's one less battle. One less battle is good for the children.'

'But you can't, why should you-'

'Mind your own business,' Richard said. 'Just let me know when you know.'

In the train, tiredness fell upon Alice like a hammer blow. She put her head back on the orange tweed headrest with which British Rail sought to cosset its passengers, and closed her eyes. Through her mind a procession of people moved, Clodagh and her children and Martin, her parents, her parents-in-law, Clodagh's parents, all spinning slowly by, their faces seeming to wheel up out of a soft darkness and then melt away again into it. I am the link, Alice thought. All these people, through me, have their future. It's a horrible power, but it's real. And it's mine. Even if I don't want it, it's mine. Things aren't going to happen to me now because I have to make the next things happen. I have to choose. I am far beyond any point I ever was before and there's nothing to shield me now. I am in a high, bare, painful place ...

'Excuse me,' a voice said next to her, 'but am I on the right train to make a connection for Didcot Parkway?'

Elizabeth Meadows opened the door of her sister's house in Colchester and found Richard Jordan there.

She was so astonished that she almost shut the door again in fright. He said, smiling, 'I wondered if you would have forgotten what I looked like.'

'Yes,' she said, 'No-'

From the through sitting room where she was polishing the brass fire-irons, Elizabeth's sister Ann called, 'Who is it? I wish you'd shut the door.'

'Come in,' Elizabeth said.

He followed her into the cream painted hall where a Swiss cheese-plant sat exactly in the centre of an otherwise empty table, and then into the sitting room. Ann Barlow was wearing cotton gloves to protect her hands from the brass cleaning wadding and a flowered pinafore with a big front pocket on which 'Breakages!' was embroidered in royal blue stranded cotton. She scrambled to her feet, frowning. If there was one thing she hated more than an unexpected caller, it was an unexpected man caller.

'You remember Richard Jordan. Alice's father-in-law-'

In Ann Barlow's mind, the Jordans were entangled with the breakdown of her sister's marriage. She pulled off a glove and held out an indifferent hand, making ritual noises about coffee which Richard said untruthfully that he would love. He was directed towards a flowered armchair from which he could see a regimented garden and a white painted seat and a line of washing hung up in strict order of size. Elizabeth did not know what to do with him. She resented him fiercely both for coming and for looking so at ease now he was here. She sat opposite him and stared at his well-shod feet and resolved that she would not help him conversationally.

He did not seem to mind her unfriendliness. He told her that James had learned to swim in Cornwall, which she remained inflexible about since Alice hadn't seen fit to tell her they were going to Cornwall in the first place. He admired the delphiniums and said Cecily was opposed heart and soul to the notion of the new pink ones. He remarked on the beastliness of the A12, to which Elizabeth managed to reply that she didn't drive any more, and then Ann came in with a tray of coffee and, there was the usual fuss - Elizabeth despised Ann's houseproudness as deeply suburban - with little tables and spoons and plates to catch biscuit crumbs. When the fuss had subsided, Richard began to talk very differently. He said he was here without Alice's knowledge or permission but she had enough to cope with just now and he had made a unilateral decision to come that he would probably be punished for. He then said, with a calm Elizabeth found horrible, that Alice and Martin had separated because Alice had had a love affair with a woman, and that Alice was at the moment trying to determine her future and Martin was trying to recover from a breakdown. He then said, unwisely, that he hoped they would not be too harsh on anyone. At this point, Ann Barlow put down her coffee cup and left the room.

'I hope,' Richard said, 'that I have not shocked your sister.'

'Of course you have.'

'And you? Have I shocked you?'

'Nothing,' Elizabeth said angrily, 'nothing really shocks me.' She gave Richard the first proper look she had awarded him 'You are a meddler,' she said. 'And I doubt your motives.'

He shrugged.

'I hoped to smooth Alice and Martin's path-'

She snorted.

'I'm not a fool. Prurient is the word that springs to mind. Prurient is how I should describe your action in coming here.'

He lowered his head. She thought his colour was darkening.

'Heaven knows,' Elizabeth said, 'heaven knows what your motives are, what they have ever been.'

He kept his head down.

'Could they not be,' he said into his chest, 'could they not be altruistic?'

'Impersonally, of course they could be. In your case, I doubt it. I resent your coming. I resent your crude translation of my daughter to me. I resent your possessive attitude to grandchildren who are as much mine as yours. I resent your patronage. I resent the divisions you have, as a family, made in mine.'

He got up, abruptly, clumsily.

'I had better go.'

She said nothing. He was beside himself with rage.

'I shall tell Alice of this-'

'You are wrong to suppose she will have any sympathy for you. Much less gratitude.'

He wanted to shout at her that he saw exactly why Sam Meadows had left her, why Alice had seen in Cecily the mother Elizabeth had declined to be. He began, but she went past him to open the sitting room door and then the front door and he found himself outside, beside a bed of stout begonias, bellowing to himself in the quiet residential road, almost before he had said a quarter of it. There was nothing for it but to drive back to London.

Two days later, Alice received two letters at The Grey House. One was from her mother.

'I had a call from your father-in-law,' Elizabeth wrote, 'in the course of which I learned a great deal more about him than about you. Perhaps you will write. Perhaps you will even come and see me. Do not be afraid of coming, because I would not try to counsel you.'

It was signed, 'With love from your mother, Elizabeth.' The other letter was no more than a postcard. It was undated and unsigned, and it simply said, in Clodagh's wild black writing, 'Women need men like fish need bicycles.'

That was all. The next day the children came home and Alice realized, holding them with great relief and love, that in the fortnight they had been away she had come to no decision at all.

'What are you doing?' James said. He was holding a plastic ray gun and half a biscuit.

'Writing to Grandpa.'

'Can I too?'

'Yes, but not on this paper. On your own bit of paper.'

James put the ray gun down on Alice's letter. He did that all the time now, putting his spoon on her plate, his book across her newspaper, his toothbrush into her mouth.

'Jamie-'

He put his hand on the gun. Silently he dared her to move it away.

'I can't write-'

He raised his other hand and pushed the bitten biscuit at her mouth.

'Darling. Don't-'

'Eat it!'

'No, Jamie, no, it's all licky-'

He jabbed it against her lower lip and it broke.

'You broke my biscuit.'

'You broke it. Being silly. Move your gun so I can write.'

He kept his hand on the gun and screwed his foot round on the piece of biscuit that had fallen on to the floor until it was a brown powder.

There.'

Alice took no notice. He threw another bit down and did the same thing. Alice gripped the table edge and her pen and glared at what she had written.

'After thinking it over and over, I know I must decline your offer. The price - the price of having to rely on you - is too high. I can't do it. You are too protective, somehow, too administering. I couldn't breathe. I don't really know if I trust you.'

She thought, I should be saying this, not writing it, but if I say it he will argue with me and try to persuade me otherwise. And I may say, like last time, all kinds of things that I should not have said.

'Gun,' said James loudly. 'Gun, gun, gun.'

He pushed it roughly into her pen-holding hand and hurt her. She held the hurt hand in the other, tense with pain and fury, and he watched her.

'Gun,' he said again, but with less confidence.

'Go away,' Alice said. 'Go away until I have written my letter. Go and play with Tashie.'

He shook his head, but he was chastened by the red mark on her hand. He crept under the table and lay down and put his cheek on Alice's foot, and after a while she could feel tears running into her sandal. She moved her toes, so that he could feel them, and with an immense effort picked up her pen again.

'I can't,' she wrote to Richard, 'be the cure-all for your frustrations. I don't want that ever again, the prison of gratefulness. I am grateful, but I'd rather be it from a distance, on equal terms.'

She felt James's hand on her other foot.

'Jamie? You're a bit tickly-'

He giggled, faintly.

'You trapped me,' Alice wrote, 'didn't you. You trapped me into talking. I'd rather not think why you wanted to do that and I'd rather not think why you want to help me. But what has happened to me has moved me out of the objective case into the subjective case so that I am not available for anyone else's plans just now.'

She signed the letter, 'With love from Alice'. When it was licked up and stamped, by James, they put Charlie into his pushchair and found Natasha, who was arranging her Cornish shells into an interminable exhibition all around the upstairs windowsills, and went down to the post. On the way they met Lettice Deverel who was very kind and ordinary and invited them to tea to meet the parrot. When they got home, Alice made cheese sandwiches for lunch and they ate them in the garden while the children talked about all the things they would do when Daddy and Clodagh came home again.

'Have you seen her?' Clodagh demanded.

Lettice held the telephone at a little distance from her ear.

'Yes. Yes, I have.'

'And? And?'

'We didn't speak of you, if that's what you mean.'

'How did she look?'

'A little tired. That's all.'

'Lettice,' Clodagh shouted. 'Lettice. How can you be so awful to me?'

There was a little silence. The parrot, across the kitchen, clucked approvingly at a grape it held.

'I used to think,' Lettice said, 'I used to think that you had promise and originality. And courage. Now I don't know. I'm more depressed by this episode than I can tell you. You seem to me like some kind of Hedda Gabler, all style and shallow selfishness.'

In London, sitting on her fortunate friends' sofa, Clodagh began to cry.

'Except you have a heart,' Lettice went on. 'I know that because I can see it's been touched. Oh, Clodagh dear, I do beg you to moke something of your life.'

'No!' said the parrot. 'No. No. No. Not pretty.'

It threw the grape stalk out of its cage.

'I can't give this up,' Clodagh said. 'I can't. I'll die.'

'On the contrary, you will live much better.'

'Is she missing me? Does she look as if she's missing me?'

'Don't ask me idiotic questions. Ask me how your poor parents are.'

'Well?'

'Much in need of hearing from you. You should have rung them, not me.'

'I couldn't ask them about Alice.'

'You shouldn't be asking anyone.'

'What about the children then? Did they mention me?'

'No. We only spoke of the parrot.'

'Oh, parrot,' said the parrot. 'Dear parrot. Dear me.'

Clodagh's voice grew small.

'I Jong to come down.'

'I dare say-'

'But I'm not crawling to anyone-'

'If you don't get off your bottom, Clodagh Unwin,' Lettice said, 'and make an independent decision, you'll find that Alice will probably have made them all for you.'

'What d'you mean? What's going on? What did

Alice-' 'I mean nothing, except that Alice has three children and no money of her own and can't fiddle-faddle around

like you can.'

'Has Martin been around?'

'No. He's living with a friend in Salisbury.'

'I'm coming down, damn what everyone thinks-'

'Think!' Lettice cried. Think! You try a little thinking.'

The parrot hooked its beak into the wires of its cage and began to haul itself up to the top. When it got there, it hung upside down for a bit and then it said, with great calm, 'Damn and blast.' Lettice began to laugh.

Delighted, it joined in, and Clodagh, hearing what appeared to be a roomful of merriment in Pitcombe, put the telephone down, in despair.

Martin was just waiting. He had stopped talking to anyone about Alice, particularly to Cecily. He had a very comfortable room in a friend's house on the edge of the Close in Salisbury, and he was working hard, and seeing his children once a week when Alice left them for him at The Grey House and went out, and he was making sure he played tennis a good deal and golf a bit, and he had accepted an invitation to stalk in Sutherland in October. He was making quiet plans to sell The Grey House. Whatever happened next, they couldn't possibly stay there.

Cornwall had restored him in some measure, certainly as to how he stood with his children. He liked being with them but was amazed at how much they needed done for them, how insatiable and helpless they were. Except for the brief time over Charlie's birth, he had never been responsible for them, a thing he didn't like but was perfectly prepared to do, if he had to. He felt perfectly prepared for a lot of things. That was the trouble, really, feeling like that. Nothing seemed violently upsetting any more or impossible to face or to be worth very much angst of any kind. When he tried to think what really mattered now, he couldn't. So he thought he would just get on with each day, as unremarkably and pleasantly as he could, and wait. In any case, if he waited, in the end it would be Alice who had to do something. And that would be only just. Wouldn't it?