A Village Affair

CHAPTER TWO

Before Cecily Jordan had married, she had been, briefly, a Lieder singer. She had gone to Vienna, to train, in 1937, in the teeth of her parents' opposition, and had, at eighteen, fallen wildly in love with music, with Vienna, and with a young Jewish composer and political activist. It was he who introduced her to the pure and lovely solo songs of Schubert and who taught her to vary her performance from lyrical to intensely dramatic, as the Lied required. This he did partly by technical instruction, and partly by taking her to bed and awakening her to a consciousness of her own powers which she found quite natural to express in song.

In the winter of 1938 he made her promise, by threatening never to see her again if she wouldn't comply, to go home at once to England if anything should befall him. He made her write the promise down and sign it. In June 1939, he was arrested while crossing the Ringstrasse, in midday sunlight, and a note from him, containing the written promise, was brought to her while she stood in her sunny, dusty, cluttered room out by the Prater Park, doing her voice exercises.

To break your promise will make everything infinitely worse for both of us and I should despise, not admire you for it,' her lover wrote. The best thing you can do for us now is to take that lovely voice we have made together back to England, and use it as a light in a dark world.'

He did not write that he loved her. Sitting in a series of hideous trains crawling home across Europe, Cecily reflected that he had never said it either. She hadn't noticed, so busy had she been doing the loving for both of them. She arrived in battened-down England in August, numb and almost speechless, and went out to Suffolk to her parents' house, where her mother was relishing the prospect of the privations of wartime, had already sold all her childhood books for salvage and had painted a red line round the bath, four inches from the bottom, as a peculiarly irritating kind of Plimsoll line.

Cecily tried to sing, but she couldn't. War was declared in September but it seemed to her that the news came from very far away and had no direct relevance to her. She slept badly and spent a greater part of each night lying awake reliving Vienna. By day she went for punishing walks and talked a good deal about joining up, which she did not do. Then suddenly, out of the blue, she announced she was going to Canada, to Toronto, to teach singing in a large girls' school. She went for six years. Her parents thought she might marry a Canadian, but she married no one. She returned to England in the grisly winter of 1946 and the following June she married Richard Jordan, whom she had met on the train that she had taken from Southampton after leaving her transatlantic ship.

Richard Jordan was an engineer. He had been in Southampton looking at a bombed site as a possible place for a factory to make drills for wells. He prospered. He and Cecily had two sons in five years and bought a manor house in a wooded valley a mile from the sea beyond Corfe in Dorset. Cecily, who found in due course that she could not naturally enjoy the company of any of the three men in her life, discovered some kind of recompense in the manor's garden. She became a gardener of imagination and then distinction. She wrote books on gardens and was invited to lecture all over England in the sixties and, as her fame spread, all over Eastern America in the seventies.

And then, in 1976, her younger son, Martin, brought Alice home. It was a September day of ripe perfection, the gardens at Dummeridge replete in the late warmth, bursting fallen plums lying stickily in the long grasses, fat things humming and buzzing in the borders. Cecily had been out by the eighteenth-century summerhouse she had discovered derelict in Essex and had transported to Dorset, tying up a heavy double white clematis that obligingly bloomed twice a year, when someone behind her said, quite easily, 'You must be Martin's mother.'

She turned. There was a tall girl standing six feet away. She wore jeans and a blue shirt and her abundant brown hair was tied up behind her head with an Indian scarf.

'I'm Alice Meadows,' the girl said. 'Martin wanted to catch up with the cricket but I said I couldn't bear not to come out here. I hope you don't mind.'

'Mind,' Cecily said, 'I should think not.'

She took off her gardening glove and held her hand out to Alice.

'More than welcome, Alice Meadows,' she said.

She had put Alice to sleep in the little south bedroom that she privately thought she would use for herself when Richard was dead. It had a brass bedstead, polished floorboards with rough cream Greek rugs, blue and white toile de Jouy curtains, deep windowsills, and, in a corner, a huge china jardiniere out of which a violently healthy plumbago cascaded in a riot of starry pale blue flowers.

'Do you like it?' Cecily said, unnecessarily.

'In everyway.'

'It's my favourite room. It has a very nice personality.' She glanced at Alice. 'Are you and Martin serious?'

Alice returned her look, entirely unperturbed. The house and the room and this fascinating, strong-looking woman with her drill gardening shirt and trousers, her beautifully coiffed hair and her ropes of pearls, made her feel that there was nothing to fear or to be decided it would all be done for her.

'No,' Alice said. 'We have known each other for two weeks. Martin met my brother, playing squash, and my brother brought him home. We have been to the cinema twice and to the pub a bit. You know. And then he asked me here.'

She ran her hand round the fat brass knob on the bed end.

'Do you think,' she said to Cecily, 'that I was wrong to come if I don't mean to be serious?'

'No. Whatever you end up being, you were right to come.'

They went down into the garden again together and Cecily left Alice under a willow at the edge of the lawn while she went to make tea. Alice lay back in an old cane chair whose arms were unravelling in spiny strands, and looked up at the strong blue sky through the fading blond-green fronds of willow and felt - she hunted about in her mind for a word. Happy? Too thin. Content? Too sluggish. Gorgeous? Too self-regarding. But all were right in their way, and so was replete and sleek and blissful, and so was-

Would she, Alice wondered abruptly across her own thoughts, tell Martin's mother about her family? Would she say that to come to this ancient and lovely house, to drowse in this romantic and sensual garden, was an answer to a prayer, the antidote to her own home where the unlovely walls echoed, day in, day out, with her mother's steady complaining? I am ripe for this, Alice told herself, pushing off her shoes with her toes and stretching her bare feet in the sun. I am an absolute sucker for this paradise, I was a pushover even before Martin's mother opened her mouth. She shut her eyes and let the willow dapple its shadow softly across her eyelids. At home now, at Lynford Road, Reading, her mother would be drinking Indian tea out of an ugly mug given away by a garage, while not listening to Kaleidoscope or the end of Afternoon Theatre on Radio , but instead storing up in her mind all the day's grievances which were, indeed, a lifetime's grievances, against her friendly, amiable philandering husband, Alice's father, who was probably, even now, taking a seminar on the Metaphysical Poets at the university and thinking about sex.

She wouldn't leave him. It was one of her complaints to Alice that she wouldn't because she loved him and look how she was treated, how her loyalty was abused. Alice had come to see that it was closer to tyranny than loyalty, even though her father's carryings-on disgusted her. She felt, as she got older, that even her friends weren't safe from him; they all thought him dishy and flirted with him when they came to collect Alice for the cinema or a disco. Alice's mother wanted her to take sides, to defend her, but Alice wouldn't. She thought they were both wrong, and she knew that the moment she had finished art school, she would leave Reading and the hideous house with its charmless contents and her mother's bitter laments and her father's selfindulgence and she would go, like her brothers had, and not come back.

One of her brothers had gone right away, to Los Angeles, where he was a tremendously successful taxi driver. The other had only gone to London, to live happily in a huge disordered flat with six others off Lavender Hill, and do his Law Society exams. It was he who had brought Martin Jordan home - well, not home exactly because passing through was all he could take - on their way to play squash in some tournament in Oxford, and because Alice had been upstairs painting in an absolute fury after the newest student conquest had telephoned quite openly to ask to speak to Professor Meadows, they had taken her to Oxford too. She wouldn't watch them play squash, but went to the Ashmolean instead and looked at the Caernavon marbles, and came away much soothed. Martin Jordan had come down from London four times in two weeks to take Alice out - the last time he had brought flowers for her mother which nobody had done, Alice thought, in twenty years - and then he had telephoned and said he was coming through Reading, on his way to Dummeridge, and that he would collect her. If she'd like to go.

Alice said Reading wasn't on the way to Dorset from London.

'It is,' Martin said, 'if I'm coming to collect you.'

So he had, and they had driven away from Lynford Road and Alice would not look back to wave at her mother because she knew herself to be the cause of a new complaint for daring to go off to enjoy herself while her mother was forced to stay behind and suffer. And here she now was, as long and supple and warm as a stretched-out cat, lying under a willow in a place like heaven, while someone wonderful brought tea which would be, Alice knew, China, in pretty cups, with slices of lemon to float in it and perhaps almond biscuits.

'There,' Cecily said, 'what a contented looking girl.' She put down the tray. 'I hope you like China tea. And Dorothy, who helps me, has made some shortbread.'

Alice said laughing, 'I said almond biscuits in my mind.'

'And China tea?'

'Oh yes-'

Cecily smiled broadly and sat down in a cane chair.

'Martin is still glued to the box.'

'I don't mind. As long as he doesn't want me to be glued too.'

'He says you paint.'

'Yes.'

'Things you see, or things you imagine?'

'Things I see coloured by things I imagine.'

'Lemon?'

'Oh, please-' She swung herself upright and put her bare feet down on the brisk, warm, late summer grass.

'You don't know,' she said to Cecily with some energy, 'how heavenly this is.'

'I do, you know. Don't forget that I have virtually made it, so I like to take all the credit.'

She held out a shallow eggshelly cup painted with birds of paradise.

'Where I live,' Alice said, taking it reverently, 'everything is as ugly as possible. I think it's my mother's revenge on life for not making her happy.'

'Almost nobody is happy,' Cecily said. 'It's rather that one must devise ways of cheating or eluding unhappiness. And of course, some people love unhappiness with a passion.'

'My mother just loves it with a grim determination,' said Alice and let out a burst of sudden laughter, 'Oh, oh, I'm mean, mean-'

'Yes,' Cecily said, looking at her with great liking, 'you are. Now, you had better tell me all about her and your clever father. I fear you have come into a gravely illiterate household. I believe my husband reads nothing but newspapers and engineering periodicals, Martin reads nothing but colour supplements and his brother Anthony reads nothing at all. What about you?'

Alice put her cup down carefully and lay back again in the cane chair.

'Love stories. I'm mad on love. Do you think it's the answer?'

'Now that,' Cecily said, thinking of her son Martin, 'is something you will have to find out for yourself.'

Even as a baby, a brand new baby, Martin had looked faintly anxious. He was a pretty baby and then a dear little boy and then an attractive bigger boy and finally he emerged as a sturdy, fair, good-looking man. But he still looked anxious. If you were in a good mood, Cecily always thought, you wanted to comfort that anxiety away, but if you were not, his expression resembled the silent reproachful pleading of a dog who has nothing to do all day but beseech you for a walk you haven't time to give it. She loved Martin very much but she didn't want him with her a great deal; she never had. He was undeniably rather dull, but she wouldn't have minded that. It was his want of boldness she found so discouraging, his unadventurousness, his lack of curiosity. Bringing this uncommon girl down was the most enterprising thing he had done in twenty-four years of life. Not only had he brought her down, but he was handling her beautifully. Cecily would have expected him to be too eager, too slavish, but he wasn't. He was quite challenging in fact, and even though Cecily suspected him of being besotted, he gave little hint of it. Alice had the same bold, free manner with him; there were no longing glances or furtive looks. When Anthony came home, later, for dinner the first evening, Alice took almost no notice of him at all even though he was dramatically rude in order to attract her attention. He was so rude that his father, roused from his inner world at the far end of the table, said suddenly, 'Leave the room.'

'Father-'

'Leave the room.'

Anthony turned to his mother.

'Go on,' she said.

'This is barbaric-'

'Leave the room,' Richard Jordan said, and suddenly there was a bull-like threatening look on his face. Anthony got up.

'What will Alice-' He stopped. They were all watching him. He left.

Cecily seemed quite unmoved.

'I believe a Frenchwoman has written a book describing how she finally got rid of her five sons. I must buy a copy.'

Martin did not try to come to Alice's room that night. She had thought he might and had rather hoped he wouldn't. She had been to bed twice with men before, once when she was seventeen to see what it was like and get the first time over with, and once six months before, driven by a simple physical longing to be made love to. She had, somewhat inevitably, preferred the second time, but neither had been what she was hoping for, which she put down to not being in love with either man. She was quite clear that she wasn't in love with Martin either, and so didn't want sex with him to become some litmus paper test. But she thought, lying there in linen sheets in her charming room while a disgracefully theatrical copper harvest moon hung outside, that she would very much like some good sex. She would like to be taken over by some huge physical force inside herself and feel every atom of her body as a body. One of the lecturers at the art school - rather a creep, in fact - had said that good sex made you a better painter. Alice had thought about this and finally had dismissed it as a very sixties view. What about Toulouse Lautrec and Van Gogh for starters? What Alice really wanted to know, she decided, her hands flat on her cotton nightie-clad belly, was what an orgasm really felt like, what it did to you. Then she could stop wondering.

She turned on her side, and slid both hands between her thighs. This was the most wonderful place she had ever been to. If Martin asked her to marry him tomorrow, standing perhaps in the creeper-clad stableyard while the white pigeons flew erratically about in the blue air above them, she would say yes. Then she could always come here and, best of all, Cecily would be her mother-in-law. She began to giggle, helplessly, out of happiness and excitement, and Martin, standing in the dark passage outside her door, was very nearly, but not quite, brave enough to come in and ask her what she was up to.

He knew he wanted to marry her. He knew it the moment her brother Josh had pushed open the back bedroom door in that grim house in Reading, and there was Alice in black and red striped tights and a vast blue smock smeared all over with paint and her hair screwed up on top with a paintbrush thrust through it, painting away in a terrible temper. He didn't even look at what she was painting, he was so busy looking at her. He had never seen anyone who looked so - so vital. She flung herself at Josh, who seemed equally pleased to see her. And then they had carried her off to Oxford and Martin had felt that his little Mini was absolutely pulsing with interest and life even though Alice didn't say much. She just sat in the back and existed, and occasionally he glanced in the driving mirror at her and felt his guts melt. This was something.

He found she gave him courage. He could dare with her, conversation with her was a kind of game. He realized, leaving a pub with her ten days later, that he didn't even feel dull or conventional, he felt brilliant. He grew afraid that if he didn't make her his, for ever, that brilliance would go, he would go back to being the dear, ordinary old Martin who fussed about train times and driving conditions and made his mother - however she strove to conceal it - visibly sigh. Asking Alice down to Dummeridge was a brainwave, an absolute corker of an idea, and now here was Alice adoring the house and getting on with his mother like a house on fire. And even his father... Anthony had once said, in a rage, that living with their father was like living in a house where the biggest and best room was always locked, and though Martin, by nature both conventional and loyal, was distressed by the image, he recognized the truth of it. His father wasn't exactly dull, he was just ruthlessly private, but he was watching Alice, Martin could see that, and what was more, he liked her. Being Alice - Martin felt himself dissolve at the thought - she didn't appear to notice that Richard was withdrawn. She talked to him, and so he talked back. He smiled at her. The only person she ignored was Anthony and that was Anthony's own stupid fault, all that capering and showing off to attract her attention, trying to impress her by bitching the parents. It was the first time, the first glorious time in Martin's life, that he had scored over Anthony, that he had something Anthony wanted that he couldn't have, that he had found something of real stupendous quality that his father and his mother applauded him for. He was ten feet tall. He was a new, a different man. If he could keep Alice, everything would fall into place from now on, there would be a goal, a future, he would work for her.

With stupendous self-control, and guided by a subtlety of instinct he had never experienced before but which he entirely trusted to, he did not propose to Alice for three months. They saw each other every week, and two weekends a month he arrived in Reading with russet or mauve chrysanthemums for Mrs Meadows ('Only get her hideous flowers,' Alice said. 'She despises pretty ones.') and drove Alice down to Dummeridge. He had a half-gun in a local shoot, and sometimes Alice went with him, to beat, and sometimes she stayed at Dummeridge and painted and talked to Cecily. Cecily admired her paintings a good deal and persuaded her into both watercolours and painting pictures of corners of the house. Alice painted a cobwebby window at a turn of the cellar stairs, and a scattering of hens on the old stone mounting block and a corner of the drawing room where a battered little alabaster bust stood on a table shrouded in an Indian shawl against a faded, striped wall covered in miniatures.

At lunchtime they ate eggs and salad and home-made brown bread by the Aga, and Cecily always gave Alice wine - at home there was beer and whisky for her father and sherry for her mother which of course she wouldn't touch for fear of feeling better, but never wine - and they talked as Alice had never talked before. Cecily even and it was thirty years since she had mentioned it to anyone - talked about Vienna. The story fired Alice with a yearning passion, not just the love story but the foreignness, and the powerful romance of the voice that blossomed and was then locked away in a box for ever when all the circumstances that had awakened it were wrenched away. Alice had never travelled, except on a school trip to Paris which was chiefly distinguished by interminable and sick-making hours shut up in a bus. The Jordans had all travelled; they took it as a matter of course. Richard travelled constantly, on business; the boys went skiing and both had been on safari in Kenya; Cecily went on her lecture tours and on her own to France and to Italy to look at things, she said, and to eat and drink both literally and metaphorically.

'You should go,' she said to Alice. 'It's criminal that you haven't been to Italy.'

Alice began to think that indeed it was. As the autumn wore on, she became privately very angry when Sunday night came and she had to leave Dummeridge, glimmering away in the firelight in its wealth of old stuffs and books. Lynford Road looked worse on each return, the scuffed carpet tiles in the hall, the uncompromising, harshly shaded ceiling lights, the black and green tiles in the bathroom, the mean proportions that confronted her everywhere, too high, too narrow. She began to long for Martin's Monday call, regular as clockwork, telling her when he was coming down to take her out. His arrivals, invariably punctual, became events of real excitement. Every time she found him standing on the tiled doorstep in Lynford Road, in a tweed jacket she had last seen him wear in the drawing room at Dummeridge and the brogues she could still hear striking the stone flags of the kitchen passage, her feeling of being rescued grew greater and more glamorous.

In the first week of December he arrived to take her out to supper in Marlow. He was wearing a suit and Alice, convinced he would say something to her, put on the black dress she had made from a length of jersey from the market, piled her hair high on her head and added some enormous copper earrings a friend at art school had made for an Egyptian exhibition. The restaurant in Marlow had pink napkins and red-shaded lights. Martin made a face.

'Sorry,' he said to Alice.

She wasn't entirely sure why he was apologizing; it looked to her just as she would expect a restaurant to look. In any case, she was far too full of anticipation to care if the panelling was phoney or Mantovani was being played whisperingly over the loudspeaker system. Martin ordered everything competently, told her about his week - she hardly listened to him - and then said he had something to tell her and something to ask her. She forced herself to look at him quite, quite straight.

'Tell first,' she said.

'My mother has two commissions for you. Two friends of hers have seen the paintings you have done of Dummeridge, and they want you to paint in their houses. Ma said she has asked a hundred and fifty for you. Each.'

'Each!' Alice said, and went scarlet.

'Well?' He was smiling hugely.

Alice clutched herself.

'It's - it's wonderful. So's she. Heavens. money-'

There was a sudden small hard lump in her throat. She supposed it to be amazement and delight.

'I rang her last night. She really wanted to tell you herself at Christmas, but I made her let me. That's the other thing. The thing I wanted to ask you.'

Alice couldn't look straight this time; she didn't seem able to look anywhere. She looked down instead into her melon and parma ham and Martin said to her bent head, 'Would you come for Christmas? To Dummeridge?'

There was a pause. Oh, Martin thought, you cool, cool customer, don't keep me dangling, don't, don't. Say yes, say yes, say...

'Love to,' Alice said. Her voice was warm but not in the least eager. It betrayed nothing of what she was feeling, nothing of the sudden fury that had seized her, a fury against Martin. Ask me, she had screamed at him silently, ask me, ask me. And he had said, come for Christmas.

That's great,' he said. They'll all be thrilled, I know it. What about-'

'My parents?'

'Yes-'

'I've spent twenty Christmases with them,' Alice said with a fierceness for which Lynford Road could not be blamed, 'and I think I deserve one off. Granny's coming, anyway.'

They arrived at Dummeridge on Christmas Eve to a house garlanded in green, with pyramids of polished apples and candles and the smoky scent of burning wood.

'So lovely!' Cecily said. To have a woman to do it all for.'

From the moment she and Martin got to Dummeridge, Alice was the star of Christmas. She could feel the atmosphere lifting as she entered rooms and knew that everything was being done for her, with an eye on her. She had a fire in her bedroom, and a Christmas stocking of scarlet felt, and wherever she went the eyes of the household were upon her and the hearts of the household were hers. Even Anthony, she noticed, was striving to please. She felt, moving through the lovely rooms, taking the dogs out for windy walks high above the grey winter sea, that this was what she was meant for, that she had somehow come home.

So confident was she, so queenly, that when Martin did propose she felt no elation, no sudden lurch of delight and relief, just a warm acknowledgement of the inevitable. It was Boxing Day and they were racing along Seacombe Cliff, shouting into the wind, when he seized her suddenly, breathless and laughing, and said, 'You will marry me, won't you?'

And she said, laughing back, 'Certainly not!' and ran away from him, and he knew she didn't mean it and chased her and pulled her to the ground and pinned her there, on the cold exciting turf under the racing wild clouds, and made her promise. Then he carried her home to Dummeridge and his father opened champagne and whenever she looked across at Cecily, Alice knew she could have made no other choice. She was loved here.

That night, relaxed and warm and full of power and confidence, she had an orgasm in Martin's arms. He had one rather later. She was a bit confused - the champagne perhaps - as to why she had had one and how much it had to do with what he was doing to her, which wasn't, actually, much at the time, but she felt great triumph that her body had taken her over, as she had been so anxious for it to do. It did occur to her that the release that had happened to her body didn't seem to have overwhelmed her mind at the same time, but she pushed that thought aside, as clearly, if she had had an orgasm with Martin she must be more in love than she thought, which meant in turn that it would, as a feeling, grow. She slept gratefully in Martin's arms until five, when he gently disentangled himself and went discreetly back to his own room. They met at breakfast in a mood of mutual, and visible, triumph, and Cecily, noting this with inexpressible relief, felt that thirty years of negative life had at last turned a corner.