A Village Affair

CHAPTER THREE

They were married, in 1977, by unanimous agreement, at Dummeridge. Alice's mother, quite overwhelmed by Cecily, allowed all decisions to be made for her, including a shopping trip to Bournemouth for her wedding clothes. She returned, saying a little fretfully that she had never cared for green, but she was clearly elated, and refused to describe the trip in order to show her husband and her daughter that she too could have her lovely secrets. Alice didn't care. She went down to Dummeridge every weekend without fail, and made plans - where Martin should look for a job, what kind of house they should seek, where they should go for their honeymoon, what her dress should be made of, what she ought to put on her wedding present list.

'You mean I can actually ask outright for six cream bath sheets and a Spode blue Italian souffle dish and a dozen wine glasses and a tin-opener?'

'I most certainly do. People expect it.'

'Wowee! Now,' Alice said. 'Let's think what else-'

Martin was offered a job in Salisbury which he took with alacrity, and not long afterwards Alice and Cecily found a cottage on the edge of Wilton, with three bedrooms and a charming elevated fireplace made from an old bread oven, and an apple tree in the garden. It was May and the tree was luscious with blossom. In June, Alice left the art school, packed up her bedroom in Reading and moved down to Dorset. Her mother, truly wounded now, did not even try to stop her because it was so glaringly evident to everyone why she was doing it. Her father, however, did try.

'Are you sure,' he said to her, propping his attractive bulk against the kitchen cupboards and cradling a glass of whisky against his chest, 'that your head hasn't been turned?'

Alice said waspishly, 'Well, that's certainly something you would know about.'

He laughed. He had always been exasperatingly impossible to annoy.

'Come on, Al. You've only two months more to stick out here. It's a bit rough on us to be so publicly cast aside for the glamorous prosperity of the Jordans even before you're married. You look spoiled. We look inadequate.'

'I don't mind how I look,' Alice said, 'and I can't help how you look. The boys have both gone, I've had three years here on my own. At Dummeridge there isn't a permanent atmosphere and I can paint.' A tiny, proud pause. 'I have three more commissions.'

'You might perhaps,' Sam Meadows said unwisely, suddenly struck by the vision of opening the Lynf ord Road front door to find nobody but his wife inside, 'think of me.'

Alice snorted.

'I see. You'd like me to stay so that there's some sort of buffer state here between you and Mum. Well, bad luck. That's one of the reasons I'm going now.'

Sam took a gulp of his drink.

'Frankly, Al, I don't think I could take it on my own.'

Then you should understand exactly how I feel. Don't whine,' Alice said crossly. 'And don't try and make me feel guilty. I'm going, and that's that.'

Her father levered himself upright and came round the kitchen table to put his arm around her and plant a competent, whisky-scented kiss on her head.

'I don't blame you,' he said, 'and you shouldn't blame me for having a go at making you stay.'

'Blame,' Alice said, leaning against him and resentfully acknowledging how good he was at touching women. 'Don't talk about blame. It's a word never used at Dummeridge, and nor is guilt or loyalty or betrayal or any other of the awful emotional claptrap words you and Mum use all the time.'

Her father had gone out then, and she had returned to her room to finish packing, and when she came down, her mother was sitting on the brown repp-covered, foam-filled sofa in the sitting room staring into space with her hands gripping one another in her lap. Alice squatted beside her.

'Martin's coming for me at five.'

'I know,' her mother said.

'There's not much difference,' Alice said with difficulty, 'between going now and going when I'm married. Honestly, there isn't.'

Silence.

'It isn't - it isn't because I don't - well, it's not that I'm - I'm not fond of you and Dad, it's just the atmosphere here.'

'I see.'

'Nobody asks me to take sides there,' Alice said, pleading. 'I haven't got to think who I'm going to upset every time I open my mouth.'

Elizabeth Meadows continued to stare at nothing.

'I see.' A little pause. 'And is the Jordans' marriage a happy one?'

Alice was rather startled. She had never stopped to consider such a thing, and now that she did it came to her that perhaps it wasn't particularly companionable as a marriage but it was perfectly all right, and anyway, they both had their own lives, that was the difference.

They don't want it to be everything in life to them, like you do,' Alice said, making everything worse. 'Cecily has her own career, Richard's very successful-'

'How perfect,' her mother said, as if spitting out broken glass.

Alice sighed. She got up and went over to the french windows that opened into a sad little strip of garden that her mother tended with ferocious tidiness, filling the parallel beds with salvias and African marigolds in regimented rows.

'Look,' she said, 'whatever I do, I can't get it right. Either you're upset or Dad is. So I'm going only a little bit before marriage decently allows me to, where I get it right all the time without even trying.'

Elizabeth said, 'You protest too much. I am not attempting to prevent you,' and then, blessedly, the doorbell rang and it was Martin.

Alice never slept at Lynford Road again. The two months at Dummeridge passed like a happy dream. Richard was away almost all the time, and Cecily was in America for three weeks, and as Martin, taking his final exams, could not be there except weekends, Alice had the house to herself, looked after by Dorothy and as free as air. She slept in a hammock in the garden at midday, and at night wandered about in the pale summer darkness and made herself voluptuous sandwiches filled with cream cheese and dried apricots and chopped walnuts which she sometimes ate sitting quite naked on the moonlit lawn or in the unlit drawing room. She went down to the sea at midnight, with the surprised but politely acquiescent dogs, and swam in the glittering black water, and then walked home barefoot and sat on the Aga, wrapped in a blanket feeling her salty hair dry into long whispering snakes down her back. She meant to paint, but she didn't. She knew she would have to, when Cecily, came back, so she spun out her time alone greedily, luxuriously, drifting through the hot hayfields beyond the house, leaning her cheek against walls and trees, lying on her stomach on the lawn with her arm plunged into the goldfish pool watching the light darting in the water and the bubbles of air pour upwards from the hairs on her arm.

She saw Martin off to London on Sunday nights without a pang; indeed, when the sound of the Mini's busy little engine had quite faded away she felt a bubbling up of her spirits, as if she were really free again. This made her go straight to the kitchen and sit down at the huge scrubbed table and write to him very lovingly, telling lum how much she looked forward to Friday, and how carefully he must drive. She wrote these letters in all sincerity. When she had written them, she would go down to the sea and swim and swim and swim. Dorothy, finding wet towels on the Aga rail so many early mornings, wondered whether she should say something about the lack of sense in swimming alone in the sea in the middle of the night and decided, looking at Alice, not to. The moment she was married, that freedom would vanish, you never got it again, so even if it was risky, it was worth it, and after all, everything worth having was a risk, one way or another.

Alice had only two visitors besides Martin, while Cecily was away. One was Anthony who arrived unannounced for the night, drank copiously at dinner and tried, in a very practised way, to kiss her afterwards. She said, standing quite rigid in his arms. 'But I don't fancy you at all. I don't find you in the least attractive.'

'Try me,' he said, bending his head.

She bent away.

'In any case,' she said, 'you are only having a go to score off Martin.'

So Anthony dropped his arms and went to bed, and was gone when she woke in the morning.

The other visitor was her future father-in-law, at home for two nights, between journeys. He telephoned her to say he was coming. She said, wanting to be dutiful, 'Is there anything I ought to do? I mean, anything you'd like or usually have-'

No, he said, nothing. She was to take no notice of him; Dorothy could do what had to be done. He would be there for dinner. So she went for a long, aimless, happy walk, spending a great deal of time in an unexpected stream building a dam, and came back about teatime to hear the sound of someone playing the piano. It could only be Cecily. Full of a sudden rush of pleased excitement, she burst into the drawing room crying, 'Oh, I wasn't expecting-' and found that it was Richard.

He stopped and turned round.

'But,' Alice said, 'you don't play the piano!'

He smiled.

'I do.'

'But Cecily-'

'I always have. I'm competent but uninspired, as you may imagine. I never play if I think there is anyone in the house.'

She crossed the room slowly, and stood beside him. He had been playing Schubert, too.

'I've really thrown you,' he said, 'haven't I.'

She felt her face grow hot.

'Yes. I thought-' she paused.

'I know,' he said. 'People do.' He got up from the piano and brushed his hands briskly together as if he were shaking off the disconcerting unfamiliarity. He looked down at her and she wondered if he were very slightly laughing at her, but all he said was, 'You look well. What have you been doing?'

And she said, looking back, 'Absolutely nothing.'

He had liked that. He wanted, later, to hear what absolutely nothing involved. She could tell him parts of it, though clearly to tell a man who is about to become your father-in-law that you had lain naked on his drawing room sofa eating sandwiches in the middle of the night was hardly on. She was, to her surprise, sorry when he went away, bound for Heathrow and then the Gulf of Mexico. He hadn't seemed, while he was at Dummeridge, either to take the house away from her and after all, it was his - or to encroach upon her freedom. On the contrary, he seemed to have his own private freedom which tantalized her a little, made her want to know more about him. When he was gone, she found to her intense annoyance that she was just a little lonely, so that when Cecily returned three days later she had the same kind of thankful, over-excited welcome from Alice as from her dogs.

'I shouldn't have left you so long, but this wretched tour was fixed up almost a year ago. Never, never do I wish to have to explain again that it is not possible to make an English spring garden in Selma, Alabama.'

Everything pulled itself together once Cecily had returned. Days and nights went back to their conventional roles, lists were made, letters were written, Alice's wedding dress - ivory chiffon over peachcoloured silk - was finally fitted. Presents arrived by every post, presents from complete strangers and from shops that had never been in Alice's orbit - the General Trading Company in Sloane Street, Harrods, Peter Jones, Thomas Goode, the White House. The dining room at Dummeridge slowly filled up with sheets and china and saucepans and Chinese lamps, things that she, Alice, had chosen and asked for and was now being given. As the piles grew, she discovered that she did not like it, even though she liked the things. It was not that she felt that she was being spoiled, but rather that these bales of towels and pairs of garden shears and boxes of brandy balloons were somehow buying her. She tried to say something of this to Cecily, and Cecily, believing her feeling to be the result of the material modesty of her upbringing, said she must simply lie back and lap it up.

'I promise you, people want to do this. They would think it most odd if you hadn't a list, and goodness knows you haven't been greedy.'

So Alice wrote her letters obediently and tried to decide constructively about flowers and asparagus rolls and the colour of lining for the marquee which was to be very grand and have f rench windows in case the day was cool. At night, instead of lying languorously in her linen sheets, Alice lay and worried, worried about details and little things and felt that from somewhere a pressure had arisen that was now sitting on her chest and her brow and making it difficult for her to see or breathe.

When her wedding day came, she was in no mood for it. It happened, of course, the great machine being inexorably in motion, and she went up the aisle most decoratively on her father's manifestly pleased arm, but she felt lonely, all day, and by the end of it she was tearful and exhausted from the effort of seeming as she wished she were feeling.

'She's tired,' Cecily said to Martin privately, tucking them into the car to go away while the guests, unnaturally jolly after champagne drunk unsuitably mid-afternoon, stood on the gravel and cheered. 'Look after her.'

He did his best. She slept most of the way to Athens next day and he was very solicitous and tucked blankets round her and motioned the air hostesses not to bother her with lunch and drinks and duty-free watches. A friend of Cecily's had lent them a villa on Patmos, and they were alone there except for the couple who were caretakers and who were so assiduous in both house and garden that they were quite difficult to elude. They swam and slept and lay in the sun, and Alice drew a bit, and at night Martin made love to her which she didn't mind but didn't seem able to look forward to much, either. What he felt about it she didn't know because they didn't talk about it. They were perfectly companionable and years later, when both of them, separately, tried to remember their honeymoon, neither could, in any detail.

'I think,' Alice was to say to her father-in-law, trying to be truthful and fair, 'I think I was simply asleep.'

When they returned, wearing the tan and the faint, pleased air of achievement expected of honeymooners, Alice's parents took the final step of obliterating Lynford Road from her life. They had hardly been home two weeks, and Alice was still in the state of early nesting, where to find the perfect place to hang a washing line gives the keenest pleasure, when her father arrived, quite unannounced. He looked absolutely normal; it was Alice who was astonished. She took him proudly into her little sitting room, sat him down in the only proper armchair they possessed and pointed out various aspects of the room he might admire while she went to make coffee. He said he would rather have a brandy.

'Brandy?' Alice said.

'Yes, brandy.'

'We haven't got any brandy.'

Sam Meadows closed his eyes.

'What have you got?'

'A wine box.'

'Then a glass of wine box, please.'

Alice went out to her kitchen and took one of her new glasses out of her newly painted cupboards and filled it from the wine box. The wine, she noticed irrelevantly, appeared to be being sold by a mustard company. She took the glass back into the sitting room and Sam said, before he even had it in his hand, 'You see, I've come to tell you that I have left your mother.'

Alice, distanced by Apple Tree Cottage and Greece and Dummeridge from her parents' ancient torments, said only, 'For whom?'

'For nobody,' Sam Meadows said. 'For my sanity.'

Alice put the glass of wine in his hand. She said, 'Did you plan this?'

'Oh yes. I'd been planning it for years. I knew I couldn't stay once you were all gone, but on the other hand if I had gone before you might never have been able to leave yourself.' He took a swallow. 'I left the night of your wedding day.'

'You what-'

'We drove home from Dummeridge in complete silence. I think the only word either of us uttered was when she said "Mind" passing a bicycle somewhere near Andover. When we got home, she began. Nothing new, just all the usual things, over and over. So I went upstairs and packed a bag - silly really, just like some melodramatic telly thing - and I drove to a university residence where I knew there was an empty room destined for an American postgraduate who had never turned up. I'm still there.'

'But I've spoken to you,' Alice said. 'And to Mum. And neither of you ever said-'

'She thinks I'll go back. She thinks thirty years of marriage makes it inevitable.'

Alice looked at her pretty fireplace which she had filled with flowers and leaves.

'You've been an awful husband.'

'I haven't been a faithful husband.'

That's awful. I couldn't stand it.'

Sam finished the wine.

'I wasn't unfaithful in order to hurt your mother.'

'I know that. It's just that she has nothing else.'

'It was that I nearly died of.'

Alice looked at him. She felt both a faint disgust and a mild affection for him, but mostly she felt that none of it had much to do with her.

'What will happen to Mum?'

'I don't know. Of course, I'll give her half of everything. But at the moment she won't discuss anything because she thinks I must return. So-' He looked across at Alice.

'So you want me to go and tell her that you are not coming back and she must think what she wants to do.'

'Yes.'

'All right,' Alice said.

Her father stood up.

'You don't sound much concerned. One way or the other.'

Alice said, with sudden temper, 'You always want such an emotioned reaction. Well, I haven't one to give you. Or if I have, I mightn't want to show it. Maybe I think you are right to leave and maybe at the same time I think Mum's future looks terrible, but I'm not going to talk to you about it. I'm not going to wallow.'

Sam came over to her and put his hands on her upper arms.

'One day,' he said, 'one day when you wake up to real feeling and real pain, one day when you can't have something you long for or you see too late that you have closed the door on something you need, then you will understand about communication and communicating is, after all, the only end of life that makes any sense.'

Alice said indignantly 'What d'you mean, when I wake up to real feeling?'

Sam dropped his hands.

'Just that.'

When he had gone, Alice went into her kitchen to wash up his wine glass and cried a bit, out of confusion. It seemed a long time until Martin might be home and she was tempted to telephone him but restrained herself, just, and so wasted an afternoon in profitless fidgets around the cottage. When he did arrive, she told him at once, in a clumsy rush, and he came over to her and put his arm round her and said, 'Oh, Allie, I'm so sorry, how awful for you, but really it was inevitable wasn't it?' And she felt suddenly and wonderfully better. Of course it was inevitable! What else could anyone have expected of that hopelessly ill-assorted pair manacled to one another by law and a perfect graveyard of impossible expectation and broken promises? She leaned against Martin. He said into her hair, 'You've got a new life now, anyway. I mean, they'll just have to get on with it, won't they. You see, you're mine now, aren't you.'

And it seemed then, standing there together, that he was both the answer and the refuge, and so she clung to him and was full of grateful love.

She did, of course, go to see her mother. They sat either side of the kitchen table with their elbows on the worn formica, and Elizabeth said at once, 'I know he won't come back. I have to face having dedicated myself to a man who is quite able simply to remove himself and leave me with the ashes of our life together. My life was his. Now I don't have one.'

'Perhaps,' Alice said, 'he didn't want all that dedication.'

She felt sorry for her mother. Her eyes were quite dead, like pebbles, and she was painfully thin.

'There was no way to please him. There was no way to hold him. It was all I wanted, ever, and it was the one thing I couldn't have.' She began to cry, silently. 'I don't want to live any more.'

Alice put her hand out and held her mother's wrist.

'Stop it.'

Elizabeth said, 'You haven't the first idea what I am talking about. You have never felt passionately about anyone in your life. You are so immature.'

Alice took her hand back again. With an immense effort she said, 'I'd like to help. If you'll tell me how.'

'You can't,' her mother said. 'It's nice of you to want to, but you can't. Nobody can except one person and he has finally refused.'

Alice got up and leaned her hands on the table so that she could thrust her face at her mother.

'All right, then. Drown in self-pity if you want to. Refuse help. Keep your stupid melodrama. But just don't forget I offered and you turned me down.'

Elizabeth turned her face away.

'Why should you care?' she said, in the low, bitter voice she had used since Alice arrived. 'There you are, safely married to money and status before you are twenty-one. You're spoiled. The Jordans have seduced you but you'll regret it because nobody, nobody, has life that easy.'

Alice left the house then, and went for a long and angry walk around the streets where her brothers had done their long-ago paper rounds, and when she returned her mother had made tea and announced, with no preliminary, that she was going to Colchester anyway, to live with her sister.

'So all that scene just now,' Alice said, incredulous and on the verge of tears, 'was for nothing? You knew all along, you were going to live with Aunt Ann?'

'I have nowhere else to go,' her mother said. 'Who would want me?'

'Who indeed,' Alice said to Martin later, dolloping sour cream into baked potatoes for their supper. 'I don't know what to make of her. She's certainly a sensational mother, that's for certain.' Martin made soothing noises. In his book, parents were not for objective criticism; they should be exempt, somehow, from personal discussion. He hardly knew his mother-in-law and the unmanageable neurotic bits of her he simply closed his mind to. She had been to university and read law, and that he could encompass quite comfortably, but the rest - best for everyone's sake not to dwell on it. And however much cause she had, he didn't like Allie sounding sarcastic about her. He cut into his potato and cold ham with energy and told Alice about a colleague of his who had a flat in Verbier which he let to friends at reduced rates, and which he had offered to them, in February.

Two weeks later, Elizabeth Meadows left for Colchester and the neat villa of her widowed sister. She took almost nothing with her but her clothes, and left her wedding and engagement rings in a saucer on the kitchen table. Lynford Road was sold, and Sam bought a flat near the university where he could live the kind of life that his greedy, kindly temperament was best suited to. He came to Apple Tree Cottage several times a year, where his benevolent bohemianism made him a great favourite among Alice's new friends who treated him with the same indulgence they might have shown an elderly and affectionate labrador who had suddenly learned to speak. Elizabeth never came. Once a year Alice, with a sinking heart, went to Colchester for a night with the two sisters, and sat miserably in their precisely tidy sitting room while their joint grievance at losing their men occupied the fourth chintz armchair with the strength of a palpable being.

The next three years were - happy. Martin was entirely so, not just in the possession of Alice, but also because he knew - and the knowledge pleased him enormously his life's major decisions were taken. He had not only taken them, he liked them. His job, which would finally make him a partner, was exactly what he had unambitiously expected, he had a pretty cottage and enough money, and he had Alice. The having of Alice was an incalculable asset, both for what she gave him and for the way in which people saw him, having her. She had taken to plaiting her long hair high on her head on honeymoon, to keep it from tangling like weed in the sea, and now she wore it like that all the time, and people looked at her a good deal. She wore boots and shawls and clothes from India and Peru, while the wives of Martin's colleagues wore navy blue loafers and striped shirts and pearl earrings. She painted borders round the rooms of the cottage, and pictures on the cupboard doors, and gradually people began to want her to paint their cupboards and walls and to do watercolours of corners of their houses that they felt best expressed their personalities, which they then gave to one another for Christmas and anniversaries.

She made curtains for the cottage, great dramatic billowing things that she hung from poles, while her friends turned their own cottages into sprigged milkmaid boxes, and felt, returning to them after supper with Alice and Martin, that they were altogether too timid. Alice learned to cook too, and to garden, and brought to both the eye and the confidence that it is no good wishing for if you are born without. Alice, it was generally agreed, in the rural circles around Salisbury, Alice Jordan had style.

And when having style exhausted her, Alice went off, of course, to Dummeridge. For those first three years of her marriage she went two or three times a month, driving down the comfortable southern roads through Cranborne and Wimborne and Wareham to spend a night with Cecily. They were usually alone, but if Richard happened to be there, he made little difference to their aloneness, and Anthony had taken his demanding and difficult personality off to Japan, with an investment company. Cecily was writing a new book on kitchen gardens which was an attempt to revive the ancient potager. A prototype was being laid out at Dummeridge, as complex and orderly as a knot garden, and Alice drew the plan, painting in each red-leaved lettuce, each gooseberry bush trained to grow like a lollipop, each radiating brick path, with the charming stiff precision of a sampler. Cecily had shown her the foreword to the book.

This book owes so much to other people besides myself. Some of them are dead, like those vegetable heroes of the past, Richard Gardiner and William Lawson. Some are very much alive, and foremost among those is my daughter-in-law, Alice Jordan, whose exquisite plan for my own potager here at Dummeridge you will find as a frontispiece.

'I would take you to America with me, next time,' Cecily said, 'but I don't think it would be quite fair on Martin.'

However, to both of them, a trip to Venice seemed perfectly fair. Martin did not, after all, want to go.

'Honestly,' he said, 'I'm not brilliant at endless churches and pictures of saints. You know me.'

Alice was torn. She felt quite easy at going without him, but at the same time a small disquiet that he didn't want to come. This was somehow compounded by the fact that he was so manifestly satisfied at the prospect of his wife and his mother going off to be cultural together. He said this so often and so complacently to people that in the end Alice lost her temper with him and dispensed with her compunction. They had been married almost two years.

Venice filled her with a quite violent excitement. Long after she and Cecily got back - and they were only there for five days - Alice fed herself voluptuous fantasies of living there. She saw herself in a rooftop flat watching the sun sail round behind the belltowers and the domes, a flat with a balcony filled with pots of basil and a warm parapet on which to lean and gaze down into the still, olive-oily green waters of a canal. She saw herself going shopping with a basket, buying aubergines and long, sweet tomatoes from the vegetable boat by the San Barnaba bridge, and fantastic alien fish from the market, and pasta and parmesan cheese from the tiny crammed shops in the lanes of San Polo. In the background of these dreams, she could not disguise from herself, lurked a man. He was shadowy, but extremely satisfactory, and he was not Martin.

Then she became pregnant. She liked it. She was full of energy and aroused everyone's admiration. In their large circle of young couples, some had babies - almost all had dogs - and their mutual stage of marriedness was this possession of a first baby. Alice made no fuss about anything and bore Natasha with ease. Both mother and baby seemed instinctively to know how to handle one another, and Martin, who was not required by Alice to help with nappy-changing or midnight feeds, was deeply envied by colleagues whose wives had pointed out to them that the baby, with all its attendant troublesomeness, was half theirs.

Of course, with Natasha, she could not go so freely and frequently to Dummeridge. So she telephoned, every few days, and once a month Cecily came up to Wilton with armfuls of bounty from the garden and stayed in the third tiny bedroom, and was pleased with everything and enchanted by her granddaughter. She even sang to Natasha sometimes, and Alice and Martin exchanged slightly conspiratorial smiles of accomplishment and pleasure. Alice's friends adored her. They would all pour in for coffee or for lunch round the kitchen table, clutching their babies and their toddlers, if they knew Cecily was there. At Christmas, they gave their mothers copies of Cecily's book which they brought proudly for her to autograph.

It was then that Alice met Alex Murray-French. Alex's father John lived at The Grey House in Pitcombe, a much admired village where all Alice's friends aspired, without much hope, to live. Alex's parents had divorced when he was eight, but The Grey House had been his childhood home, and he chose to return to it a good deal rather than go out to Australia with his mother and stepfather. On one of his visits to his father, he saw a painting of Alice's, a painting she had done for a mutual friend, of a flight of stone steps leading up to an archway and a tangle of creeper. He thought he would like such a painting to send to his mother in Australia, and so he drove to Apple Tree Cottage one afternoon, on the off-chance, and found Alice on the doorstep stripping currants with her baby asleep in a basket beside her under a patchwork quilt.

Alex fell in love as suddenly as Martin had done four years before. Alice did not fall back, but she felt she would very much have liked to. He was eager and sympathetic and cultivated. He came constantly, all that autumn, on the pretext of his mother's painting, and Alice basked in his longing and admiration like a cat in the sun. She never flirted with him and he never even tried to kiss her. He told her most eloquently of his feelings, and although she liked to hear him he did not strike an answering chord in her. In the end Martin grew suspicious and angry and Alex took his picture and himself away and left Alice with a real emptiness, a bigger one than she felt was in the least fair.

Martin watched her for a long time after this.

'There was nothing in it,' Alice would say. 'He had a crush on me and I didn't have one back. I liked talking to him, that's all.'

Martin knew that, but he still felt sulky about it. He believed her and yet he felt at the same time that that part of her, that differentness in her, that had made him want her so much, was becoming elusive, that he couldn't catch it any more. Instead of feeling that life with her was a lovely chase, he began to feel that she was keeping something back. But because he could not, by temperament, speak of it, he watched her instead, and this made her cross.

Her second pregnancy was quite unlike the first. She felt sick, she was sick, and many days she was so tired that from the moment she dragged herself out of bed in the morning, she was obsessed, all day, with the prospect of getting back into it. James was born with difficulty and didn't seem to like life outside Alice when confronted with it. Cecily dispatched a New Zealand girl, from a London agency, to help Alice, and Apple Tree Cottage strained at the seams under the impact of her capable outdoorsy personality. She certainly worked, and Alice could rest in the afternoons and send Natasha off to nursery school every morning in clean dungarees not laundered by herself, but the privacy of their lives was quite gone. Jennie was only with them for four months, but when she left, in a gale of good will, for a family in Pelham Crescent, she left behind her the constraint between Alice and Martin that they had adapted to encompass her in their lives. Friendly and goodmannered towards one another, they moved through the rituals of Martin's job and Natasha's school runs and James's demands, and supper parties (small), and children's tea parties (large), without somehow either coming together or moving forward.

Alice pretended not to notice that she didn't want to paint. Her friend, Juliet Dunne, whose husband Henry was agent at Pitcombe Park and who was blessed with a sharp tongue and keen percipience, made no bones about pointing this out.

'It's no good hiding, Allie. This awful baby business doesn't last long, and if you aren't careful you'll end up like my mother saying why is it every day takes a week. It doesn't matter if you don't want to paint. You just have to.'

'I do want to-'

'No you don't. You just want to want to. You won't get real wanting back unless you kick yourself into doing something. Look at our useless husbands. They'll never get anywhere much because they couldn't move themselves if you paid them.'

'Why did you marry Henry?'

'Oh,' Juliet said, scraping apricot pudding off her newest baby's chin, 'he was so suitable and so keen and everyone else in my flat was getting married. I quite like him, though.'

'You mean love him.'

'Yuk,' said Juliet.

Alice did try to paint after that, and it bored her so much she was quite alarmed. She took out some things she had done before James was born and they looked to her the desirable achievements of a total stranger, so she put them away again, hurriedly, before they should demoralize her. She had, she told herself, plenty to do in any case and she did it all - a touch of pride here without any help at all. None of her friends managed their houses and families with no help at all. Cecily was always offering her some, but she said the cottage was too small, and in any case she liked her privacy.

Small things happened. Martin was made a junior partner, Natasha started at a little private school in Salisbury - the children wore checked smocks and had to shake hands, smiling, with their teacher each morning

- they built on a playroom and another bedroom at the cottage. In the late winter, Alice and Martin went skiing (Alice discovered, rather to her satisfaction, that she liked frightening herself), and in the summer Cecily rented a cottage for them on the north Cornish coast where the children could play on the calm sands of the Camel estuary. Alice began to read, hungrily, novel after novel, carrying lists of them around in her bag along with the purse and cheque books and cash cards and paper handkerchiefs and tubes of Smarties and clean knickers and sticking plasters that formed her daily battle gear. Titles like And Quiet Flows the Don stuck in her mind like burrs. She chanted them to herself in the car, while in the back the members of the school run bullied the most tearful, sucked their thumbs and surreptitiously took their knickers off in order to amaze the others with their wicked daring.

When she discovered she was pregnant with Charlie, her first reaction was relief. She felt a great gratitude towards this unexpected baby for mapping out her life for her again and threatening her with its needs. Martin seemed extremely pleased except for taking out, with immense ostentation, an insurance policy against school fees which he appeared to regard, Alice felt, as something he was nobly doing for her.

'Ignore him,' Juliet said, 'just fade him out. It's the only way to survive living with a man.'

'But the baby isn't just mine!'

'You try telling any father that. Henry will acknowledge William and Simon when they are captaining the first eleven, and strictly not before. If you wanted anything else, you shouldn't have married an Englishman.'

'No one else offered.'

'Allie,' Juliet said, 'just get on with this baby, would you? You'll make a much better job of it than Martin in any case. I despair of myself but I think I envy you.'

Charlie was born, suddenly, a month early, and Alice went into a deep, deep decline. Sunk in the fogs of a profound depression, she was carried off to Dummeridge with the baby where she remained for a month, struggling inch by inch out of the depths into which she had tumbled. Pills, frequent small meals, sleep, confiding conversation and gentle exercise were prescribed as her regime. Martin, thankful to surrender this dismal conundrum to his mother, telephoned nightly for bulletins and was spoiled tenderly by Alice's friends who pitied his male dilemma in the kitchen.

She came home pale and thin and slightly sad, but she was better. Martin was very sweet to her but at the same time anxious she should know that he had suffered too, alone at night with the two elder children and responsible for the morning whirlwind of rejected eggs and lost gumboots. The week Alice returned, Cecily wrote privately to Martin, to the office in Salisbury, and said she thought Alice needed both a change and more support. She suggested a house move and offered to pay for help and for a holiday, a holiday without any of the children, the moment Charlie was weaned. And then the gods produced The Grey House, out of casual conversation at a dinner party, and presented it to the Jordans on a plate. It was not just the house they offered, but village life, the chance and the need to be part of a proper community, where you couldn't even go to buy stamps, Alice thought excitedly, without meeting several people you knew. There would be a church fete, and a flower rota, and a list for driving old people into Salisbury, or to the hospital, and men from the Park would bring loads of logs in winter, and a Christmas tree, and in the summer she would pityingly watch the neat tourists emerge from the parked Toyotas and peer hopefully - but fruitlessly - down the pretty, sloping street for a tea shop. She would, she knew it, envy no one, long for nothing. In Pitcombe she would feel again what she had felt at Dummeridge ten years ago when she was twenty-one - she would feel she had come home.