A Village Affair

CHAPTER FOUR

'Now the county travelling library,' said Miss Pimm with the separating articulateness of Marghanita Laski, 'is a great blessing.'

'Tuesdays, did you say?' Alice said, obediently writing it down on her list.

'Tuesday afternoons. Three to three-thirty. The librarian is an excellent vegetable gardener and to be relied upon for brassicas.'

'Brassicas', wrote Alice.

James, leaning against Alice, thought, with wonder, that they were discussing underclothes. He had his finger up his nose. He pulled it out and offered it to Miss Pimm.

'Gucky,' he said.

She averted her gaze.

'Mrs Leigh-Brent runs the church deaning rota. And Miss Payne is in charge of the flowers. I know Mrs Macaulay would gratefully welcome help on Mondays with the community shop and of course Mr and Mrs Fanshawe will be happy to register you with the local Conservative branch.'

Alice wiped James's nose hard enough with a piece of paper kitchen towel to make him whimper.

'Don't be a disgusting little boy. I don't think I really am a Conservative, but my husband-'

'Not?' said Miss Pimm, swivelling her gaze back.

'No,' Alice said staunchly, remembering Sir Ralph, 'I believe the Park-'

That,' said Miss Pimm, 'is quite different.'

She looked round the kitchen. It looked rather Joud to her, though considerably cleaner than in Major MurrayFrench's day. But she did not like being entertained in kitchens, even the kitchens of people newly moved in who might perhaps be forgiven for having nowhere else. When Miss Pimm had brought her mother to Sycamore Cottage fifteen years before, the first thing she had done was to make the sitting room respectable for callers. She remembered standing on a chair hammering in nails for the 'Cries of London' above the fireplace, the position they had occupied in all the houses of her life.

Natasha came in through the door to the hall carrying a doll dressed like a teenage fairy, and wearing an expression of faint disgust.

'Charlie's crying and he's pooey,' she said.

Alice stood up.

'Would you forgive me, Miss Pimm?' she said, 'I must just see to the baby.'

Miss Pimm sat on. There was much information yet to impart. She inclined her head.

'I am in no hurry.'

Alice left the room. Natasha came up to the kitchen table and put her gauzy doll down. She looked at Miss Pimm who seemed to have nothing about her that Natasha could admire. The texture of her stockings reminded Natasha of drinking chocolate powder.

'Pretty doll,' said Miss Pimm with extra elaborate articulation, as if speaking to a half-wit.

'She's called Princess Power,' Natasha said. Her voice was proud. 'She's got net petticoats, pink ones.'

She turned the doll upside down to demonstrate and Miss Pimm looked hastily away.

'But,' said James slowly and earnestly, from across the table, 'she hasn't got a willy.'

Panic blotched Miss Pimm's neck with purple patches.

'Have you?' said James.

Natasha hissed at him.

'Shut up.'

'Charlie's,' said James with real sympathy, 'is only little. But it'll probably grow.'

'I'm afraid,' said Natasha to Miss Pimm, 'that in James's class at school they talk about willies all the time. But you must just ignore him. Like Mummy does.'

'School!' cried Miss Pimm on a high note of relief. 'And do you like your school?'

'No,' said James. 'I hate everything except being at home.'

'He cries every morning,' Natasha said. 'It's so embarrassing. My best friend is called Sophie and she has Princess Power too only her petticoats are yellow. I like pink best.'

'Yes!' cried Miss Pimm. 'Yes! Pink!'

Alice came back into the room holding a large baby. Miss Pimm was afraid of babies. Alice sat down and picked up her pencil again, wedging Charlie into the space between her and the table.

'So sorry about that,' Alice said. 'Now, what else was there?'

Miss Pimm wanted to say that a cup of tea was one of the things. It was five past four. She would have liked a cup of tea and a Marie biscuit. She cleared her throat with meaningful thirstiness and said, 'Well, there is our little Sunday group.'

Charlie seized Alice's pencil and drew a thick, wild line across her list. Instinctively Miss Pimm's hand shot out to prevent the desecration of neatness, but Alice didn't seem to notice.

'Group of what?'

'Why, children.' She looked at Natasha and stretched her mouth into an attempted smile. 'We meet in the church room for songs and stories about Jesus.'

'I know about him,' Natasha said. 'He gave some people a horrible picnic with bare bread and fish that wasn't cooked. And then he walked about all over a lake and made a girl who was dead be alive again. If you ask me,' Natasha said darkly, 'I don't believe that bit.'

Tashie-'

'We have eleven little members,' Miss Pimm said hastily. 'And I-' She paused and then said with quiet pride, 'I play the ukelele.'

They stared at her. To her misery Alice found she didn't even want to laugh. Miss Pimm took their silence as an awestruck tribute to her skills and opened her black notebook in a businesslike way to show she was quite used to such admiration.

'Now, may I tell Miss Payne you would be happy to join the flower rota? I believe Mrs JCendoJl lacks a partner. And what about Mondays? The community shop is such a boon to our old people-'

Go, Alice said to herself in sudden frenzy. Go, go, go. I hate you here, you mimsy old spinster, I hate you in my kitchen. Go.

'We have unfortunately to share our vicar with King's Harcourt and BarJeston which means mattins only once a month, but he is a wonderful man, and we must just be thankful-'

'C'n I have some crisps?' James said.

'No. Don't interrupt. I am sorry, Miss Pimm, but usually around now I give them-'

Miss Pimm slapped her notebook shut and stood up.

'Naturally. I am sorry to interrupt family routine.'

'Oh no,' Alice said, struggling to her feet clutching Charlie, and in a confusion of apology, 'I didn't mean that at all, I only meant-'

'I come,' Miss Pimm said, implying by her tone that at least some people were still in command of their manners, 'just to welcome you to Pitcombe. I make a point of it, with newcomers.'

'Yes,' Alice said faintly. 'It's very kind of you and I'm sure when I've sorted myself out a bit-'

'You should see upstairs,' Natasha said. 'It's the most utterest chaos.'

Miss Pimm walked to the stable door and lifted the latch. She turned stiffly and gave a little downward jerk of her head.

'Sycamore Cottage. Telephone 204.'

'Thank you-'

'Good afternoon.'

'Goodbye,' Alice said. 'Goodbye-'

The door clicked shut, one half after the other. Alice subsided into her chair.

'Don't cry,' James said anxiously.

'I'm not,' Alice said through a river of tears.

'You are, you are-'

Natasha picked up Princess Power.

'I expect you're tired.'

'Yes,' Alice said. 'Yes, I expect I am, I'm sure that's it-'

Charlie's face puckered. James came to lean on her again, his eyes filling with tears.

'Don't do it,' he said. His voice was pleading. 'Don't do it.'

But she couldn't stop.

The community shop, Alice discovered, was a large and battered van, owned and driven by Mr Finch, one-time boarding-house keeper and failed poet, who ran Pitcombe Post Office and Village Stores. Twice a week, the shop van trundled out of Pitcombe with its cargo of old age pensions, tins of marrowfat peas and packets of bourbon biscuits, to serve outlying cottages and the smaller satellite villages of Barleston and King's Harcourt. It made thirteen stops in three hours, either outside the cottages of the most infirm, or by the clumps of people standing with clutched purses and plastic carrier bags at designated places along the route.

Mr Finch was very excited to have Alice on board on Monday afternoons. Mrs Macaulay, who was the longstanding other helper on Mondays, despised his artistic sensibilities, believing, as she did, only in good sense and wire-haired dachshunds, which she bred with dedication. 'My girls', she called her bitches. Within the first half-hour of her first Monday, Alice discovered that Mr Finch was misunderstood by his wife who yearned still for their boarding house in Kidderminster which had catered for actors at the Theatre Royal, and that Mr Macaulay had been called to the great dog basket in the sky ten years previously, much lamented by his widow and her girls.

'He was a wonderful man,' Mrs Macaulay said to Alice, as they jolted out of the village, the tins jiggling on their barricaded shelves. 'He could do anything he liked with animals. He inspired perfect trust.'

At the frequent stops, Mr Finch came out of the driver's cab and sat in the doorway of the van at the seat of change. Every time he appeared holding not only his cash box and ledger but also a battered notebook bound in imitation leather which he left nonchalantly on the edge of his little counter, with many a casually pregnant glance thrown in Alice's direction.

'Take no notice,' Mrs Macaulay hissed at Alice, passing her a stack of All-Bran boxes. Those are his terrible jingles. Don't give him the chance to mention them.'

At every stop, the van filled rapidly with people, heaving each other up the steps into the interior like an eager crowd of hedgehogs. Alice was stared at.

'Who's 'er?' somebody said from close to the floor.

'Sh, you, Granny. That's the new lady-'

'Who's 'er?'

'Mrs Jordan,' Mrs Macaulay said with great clarity. 'She has just moved into the Major's house at Pitcombe.'

There was a sucking of teeth.

'She won't like that. Miserable 'ouse, that is.'

'But I do like it-'

'It's very good of Mrs Jordan to help us,' Mrs Macaulay said, 'because she has three little ones on her hands.'

'Where's me spaghetti hoops, then?'

'Hang on, Gran, they're coming,' and then, turning confidentially to Alice, 'she loves them. She don't need her teeth in to eat them, see.'

At the end of the third stop, Mr Finch laid his hand slowly on his book of poems and looked roguishly at Alice.

'Care for something to read before Barleston, Mrs Jordan?'

Mrs Macaulay was ready for him. 'Sorry, Mr Finch, I've got the cereal section to explain to Mrs Jordan before we get there.'

Mr Finch placed the book flat against his chest, holding it in both hands.

'Are you a reader, Mrs Jordan? I fancy you are.'

'Novels,' Alice said hastily. 'As much fiction as I can get. But you know, with the children-'

Mrs Macaulay tapped her watch.

Time, Mr Finch, time.'

By the end of the second hour, Alice could gladly have lain down on the lineoleum floor of the van and wept with fatigue. Spring it might be, but the day felt raw and cold, and the depressing contents of the shelves, the tins of butter beans and the packet puddings, only compounded the bleakness. Alice had asked Mr Finch, in his shop the previous week, for an avocado pear, and Mr Finch had made it elaborately plain to her that left to himself his shop would be a profusion of avocado pears, but that the brutish character of his non-poetry reading clientele demanded nothing more outre than cabbages.

'I should be only too happy,' Mr Finch said egregiously, hunting in his memory for scraps of Tennyson with which to flatter and impress this delightful newcomer, 'to bring you anything you require on my visits to the wholesaler in Salisbury.'

Thank you,' Alice said, 'but I'm in Salisbury most days on the school run. It's just that I'd rather use your shop, I mean, I feel I ought-' She stopped. She had no wish to sound patronizing. But Mr Finch had hardly heard her.

' "Why should we only toil," ' cried Mr Finch suddenly. '' The roof and crown of things?'' '

Alice looked startled. He leaned over the counter, laying his hand reverently upon a display box of foilwrapped chocolate biscuits.

' "The Lotus Eaters." '

'Yes,'Alice said.

' "We only toil," ' intoned Mr Finch, ' "who are the first of things, And make perpetual moan, Still from one sorrow to another thrown-" '

The shop door had opened then and in had come Miss Pimm, in quest of a small loaf and a tin of sardines. Alice had seized her chance to flee, and had bought her avocado in Salisbury, later in the day, while picking Natasha up from school.

Now, sitting precariously on her little stool as the van rumbled onwards, she thought again of the avocado.

'If we put - slightly more interesting things on the shelves, do you think we could persuade anyone to buy them?'

'Not a hope,' Mrs Macaulay said. 'Absolutely set in their ways. Same stuff every week, same quantities. See that jar of Mint Imperials? We get through one a fortnight, regular as clockwork. Same with cream crackers.' She glanced at Alice. 'You look tired, dear. I expect it's the move. It really is good of you to join in so quickly.'

Alice said, 'But I always meant to,' and tried not to think of Miss Pimm's visit.

'I mentioned it to her ladyship,' Mrs Macaulay said. 'I said now there's a young woman prepared to pull her weight. Has she called yet?'

'No,' Alice said in some panic, thinking of the disordered rooms she somehow seemed unable to find the energy to disentangle. 'No, she hasn't. Frankly, the house looks so awful-'

'She won't mind that,' Mrs Macaulay said approvingly. 'She isn't one to stand on ceremony. My girls always know when it's her ladyship's car. They give her such a welcome.'

When Alice got home, Gwen, who had consented to look after the children on Monday afternoons until Alice returned, was making them the kind of tea she thought they should have. James was gazing in misery at the thick slice of bread and jam on his plate. The jam was red and he was alarmed by red food. Charlie, on the other hand, was cramming sticky squares of bread into his already packed mouth with the flat of his hand. Natasha, who had decided she would simply wait until Alice's return, had declined to eat anything at all. She sat at the table, neat in her school uniform, and told Gwen about her dancing class where she had been praised for being the flutteriest butterfly.

Alice dropped into a chair.

'It's a killer, that shop,' Gwen said, with satisfaction, putting a mug of thick brown tea in front of Alice.

'Peanut butter,' James pleaded in a hoarse whisper.

'In a minute,' Alice said. 'Just give me a minute. Tashie, why aren't you eating?'

'I was slightly hoping,' Natasha said, with theatrical quietness, 'for Marmite toast.'

'I brought them the jam,' Gwen said proudly. 'My kids used to go mad for strawberry jam.'

'How sweet of you-'

'And look how old gorgeous loves it!'

Charlie's face resembled that of a character in the final scene of a Jacobean revenge tragedy. Sensing them all looking at him, he plunged his gory hands rapturously into his hair. Gwen said fondly, 'Isn't he a card?'

'Gwen,' Alice said, suddenly remembering, 'Mrs Macaulay said today that Lady Unwin might call. And there isn't a civilized corner, except in here, to take her-'

Gwen pursed her lips to indicate that even such a thought had already occurred to some people.

'She will, Mrs Jordan. No doubt about it.'

Alice looked up at her.

'Would you help me have a real blitz on the drawing room?'

She looked really, helplessly tired. Even Gwen, who didn't go in for pity, felt sorry for her. She looked what Gwen called pulled down.

'Course I'll help, dear. It'd be a sight easier to clean with all those boxes shifted, in any case. She's a shocker for just popping in, is her ladyship-'

'Peanut butter,' James begged.

'All right,' Alice said standing up and moving slowly to the relevant cupboard.

'Of course,' Gwen said, 'it's all excitement up at the Park with Miss Clodagh coming back.'

Alice began to spread James's bread with peanut butter.

Thinner, thinner.'

'Shut up. Miss Clodagh?'

'The youngest. She's been in America for three years. She always was her parents' favourite. She was a monkey of a child, I can tell you. How can you,' she said to James, 'eat that nasty stuff?'

James gazed at her, chewing, but said nothing.

'I'm being very patient,' Natasha pointed out.

'Heavens,' Alice said, 'I might get a whole deputation from the Park-'

The telephone rang. Going to the hall to answer it, Alice said, 'Gwen, could you possibly make some toast for Natasha? I don't like her to touch the grill-'

The telephone was Cecily. She had resolved only to telephone once a week, and then only in the early evening when the children were in bed, because she felt that Alice's state of mind was very fragile just now, and that even if they were all worried sick, they must not let Alice know it. But today Alice had been on her mind so constantly for some reason that she could not restrain herself from ringing up.

'Hello,' Alice said tiredly.

'Darling,' Cecily said, 'you sound absolutely whacked.'

Alice's voice grew warmer, but no more energetic.

'It's the village community shop. I got involved somehow and I've spent three hours in a very cold van selling jars of beetroot to people who told me that I'd hate living here.'

Cecily laughed.

'How funny.'

'It wasn't really,' Alice said. 'It ought to have been. But it wasn't.'

'Then I'm very glad I've rung. Darling, I'm going to be very firm. I insist you have some more help, a mother's help, even an au pair girl. You're worn out to start with, and here you are taking on extra things like the shop.'

'I've got help,' Alice said. 'It's sweet of you, but there's Gwen. I've never had so much help-'

She stopped. This was quite true. She had never had so much help and nor had she ever lived in such a muddle. A lump rose in her throat. Sometimes she felt quite paralysed in her inability to sort herself out. She had felt desperate after Martin and Cecily had persuaded her to go to the doctor recently and she had spent two days in the gynae bit of Salisbury hospital while they did tests, and then there had been absolutely nothing wrong with her. Martin had been so pleased. She had felt frantic. If there wasn't something wrong with her, then why did she feel like this?

'You need someone living in,' Cecily said. 'You need a younger Dorothy. I intend to find you one.'

'Please,' Alice said, pleading, 'please, no-'

'But, darling, why on earth not?'

'Because there is nothing the matter with me. You know that. Mr Hobbs said so. I've just got to pull myself together.'

'But why can't you be helped to do that?'

'Because,' Alice said on the verge of tears, 'I don't want to be. It's so nice of you, but I must get on myself. I'm fine, really I am. Gwen's going to help me with the drawing room and when that's straight I'll feel quite different. I know it.'

There was a pause, at the end of which Cecily sighed.

'Would you consider a compromise?'

Alice sounded wary.

'What-'

'You struggle on for one more month, and if you don't feel any better, will you then let me re-open the subject?'

'All right,' Alice said unwillingly.

'Look, my love, there is no shame in not being able to manage. You have so much on your plate-'

'I might feel shame,' Alice said.

'Your standards are too high. Is Martin being a help?'

'He's fine. He's awfully busy but he helps a lot at weekends.'

'He's so proud of you.'

Alice squirmed, involuntarily.

'He's doing really well-'

'How are the children?'

'Jammy at present. But fine.'

'I shall have them here in the holidays. I want you and Martin to go away together. I said so two months ago. Shall I ring Verity about your honeymoon house in Patmos?'

'No,' Alice said with too much emphasis.

'Darling-'

'One shouldn't ever try and repeat things-'

'Darling Alice,' Cecily said sadly from Dummeridge, 'how I long to help you and how difficult you make it.'

'Sorry,' Alice said in a whisper. 'Sorry.'

The drawing room was cleared, carpeted, but uncurtained when her ladyship's Volvo, with a brace of handsome springer spaniels penned in the back, drew up outside The Grey House. From her bedroom window, Alice watched Lady Unwin get out, smooth down her pleated skirt, stoop inside the car to bring out a huge hydrangea in a pot and then advance, looking about her, towards the front door. Gwen, who had been washing the stone-flagged hall floor, let her in with alacrity.

'Ah, Gwen. How nice to see you. What a lovely day. Is Mrs Jordan in?'

Gwen showed Lady Unwin into the drawing room.

'Hm,' Lady Unwin said interestedly, putting down the pot, and moving towards the mantelpiece along which Alice's collection of old jugs marched in stout procession. 'Charming.' She turned to smile at Gwen. 'Do tell her I'm here.'

Gwen was sorry that Alice was wearing jeans and an old shirt of Martin's because she was unpacking tea chests, and sorrier still that Alice didn't intend, apparently, to make any changes at all to her appearance. She simply pulled her pigtail over her shoulder and ran downstairs. Lady Unwin, immaculate in a pale grey skirt and soft jersey with handsome pearls, was examining a drawing hung beside the fireplace. She turned and held both hands out to Alice.

'My dear Mrs Jordan. I'm a monster not to come before. Will you forgive me?'

'Oh, of course. I'm afraid we're still in a terrible muddle-'

'Don't speak to me of muddles. My youngest is just back from New York with enough luggage to fill a liner and I am not exaggerating when I tell you that she has spread it over the entire house.'

Alice said, 'Would you like a cup of coffee?'

Thank you so much, but no. I am flying in, literally, on my way to a meeting in Shaftesbury. Look, I've brought this. I've always loved them. It's a lacecap.'

'Oh,' Alice said, 'how kind of you-'

'I suppose,' Lady Unwin said, 'you are no relation to Cecily Jordan?'

Alice said, smiling, 'She is my mother-in-law.'

Lady Unwin grasped Alice's hand with warm enthusiasm.

'My dear! What luck. Now look-' She dropped Alice's hand and opened a large, professional handbag from which she took a slim diary. 'Now then. When can you dine with us? Let me see. Saturday fortnight? The eleventh?'

'Lovely,' Alice said faintly. Thank you, how kind-'

'And if you are speaking to your mother-in-law, tell her I am a devoted fan. I wonder if she'd stoop to talk to our little flower people here? Or perhaps a gardeners' brains trust for the hospice? I must think. Goodbye, my dear-' She waved a ring-glittering hand around the room. 'Too pretty.'

People like that, Alice thought, watching her enviously as she climbed swiftly into her car and turned it competently in the drive, people like that don't feel pain. People like Lady Unwin don't get into muddles and feel that their lives are without point and that they don't see the way forward.

'I've got a crush on Lady Unwin,' she said to Juliet Dunne, later, on the telephone. 'I want to be like her when I grow up.'

'Margot?' Juliet said. 'Don't be an ass. Of course you don't. It's an awful life. Luckily she's an old bossy boots so she rather likes it.'

'But she looks as if she's beyond things being able to hurt her. She looks-'

' Allie,' Juliet said firmly, 'if you don't book a holiday for yourself and Martin sharpish, I shall come and do it for you. Oh Lordy, here's Henry, early, if you please - Don't,' she said, away from the telephone, 'those are for the children's tea. Allie, dins at the big house will be quite sparky, I promise, and you'll love Clodagh. She's been a frightful headache all her life and has been living with some lawyer in New York for years whom she utterly refused to let Margot and Ralph - What? Oh, Henry says he is a millionaire, the lawyer. Anyway, millionaire or not, she's left him and come home so Margot has gone into her ultra-clucking routine. But Clodagh's lovely fun. Allie, I've got to stop and beat Henry up. He's eating all the children's egg sandwiches. Honestly, Allie, Henry is my cross.'

'Am I your cross?' Alice said to Martin at supper.

He leaned across the table and patted her but he wasn't giving her his full attention.

'Of course not.'

'If I'm such a burden to myself, I must be a burden to you-'

'You're tired-'

'But that's the effect, not the cause.'

He had his mouth full. Through his fish pie he said, 'Don't agree.' He finished his mouthful and went on. 'You've taken on so much. The village think you're great. Has the rector been?'

'No-'

'He will, then. I saw him in the shop. Seemed nice.'

'He'll only want me to do things.'

Then say no.'

'But you see,' she said, leaning forward to give him the second helping he always had, 'one of the reasons for living here is to be involved.'

'Not in everything. Not so that you are so tired you can't see straight.'

She said, looking at him hard, 'But I don't think it's that.'

Visibly he flinched. She saw his mind tiptoe away from the turn the conversation was taking, a turn he could not bear. He waved his fork at her.

'Frightfully good, this,' he said.

Two days later, Alice was pushing Charlie in his buggy along the river path. It was a pretty, bright, chill day and there were catkins on the willows and clumps of primroses on the banks. She picked one and gave it to Charlie. He held it respectfully at stiff arm's length and she thought how he was learning because even a few weeks ago he would have tried to eat it.

A man came along the path towards them, a big man in a loose tweed overcoat whom she took to be John Murray-French, and was just raising her arm to wave when she saw he had on a dog collar. When he came nearer, he called, 'Lovely morning!'

'Yes!' she called back.

He said, when he was near enough merely to speak, 'I'm Peter Morris. And you are Mrs Jordan. And I owe you what is known as a pastoral call.'

He was about sixty, vigorous and upright with thick hair and a good colour. He stooped to Charlie who offered him the primrose.

Thank you, old chap.'

'I know you are awfully busy,' Alice said.

He straightened.

'It's a shocking time of year for dying. They totter on all whiter and then, just as it begins to get warmer and lighter, they give up the ghost. It's been one funeral after another. That's why I came out today, to see something starting for once.' He looked down at Charlie. 'You're starting, luckily. Is that your only one?' 'He's my third.'

'You don't look old enough. I was going to come and tell you not to let the old biddies bully the life out of you. They will if they can. They do a wonderful job in the village but they know no mercy. Hope you'll be happy here.'

'Oh, we will-'

'It's a nice place. And you've a lovely house. I used to go up and play poker with John Murray-French in your house. I expect we'll start again in his cottage when he's settled. Two old bachelors together.' He looked down at Charlie again. 'Never had any children. My wife died before we got round to it.'

'I'm so sorry-'

'So was I. I was a sailor. That is, before the old Admiral up there' - he looked up at the blue sky - 'summoned me aboard. You'll find I speak my mind. If I can't abide something, I say so. And that applies to a large number of bishops. Woolly lot. Why don't they just see what the BibJe says about things? You know where you are, with the Bible.'

Alice turned the buggy back towards the village.

'I've never really read it. Not since school.'

'Not surprised. People don't. But sixty-five million copies are sold every year, so someone reads it. You ought to try.'

'I wouldn't know where to begin.'

'No excuse,' Peter Morris said heartily. He took the handles of the buggy from her and began to push.

'I hear they've got you on the community shop.'

'And the flower rota. But I've jibbed at the Sunday Group.'

'Good for you.'

'But the belonging, I mean, doing things, is part of living here-'

'So is getting on with everyone. I always say to newcomers, don't think living in a village is easy. In a town you can pick and choose your friends but a village is like a ship - you have to get on with everyone. Not easy, but not impossible. Hold on old fellow, here come some bumps.'

They emerged on to the broader path below the pub, the Pitcombe Inn. Late daffodils were drooping in the window-boxes and through the partly opened groundfloor windows seeped a stale breath of beer and frying. Peter Morris went on pushing Charlie, past the pub and round the corner up the village street where people hailed him. Alice felt comforted, walking beside him while he pushed and replied briefly to those who greeted him. He stopped at the corner of the lane to The Grey House.

'I'll return the chariot to you.'

'Thank you,' she said. She rather wanted to ask him to come with her.

He said, 'I've a bereavement, a broken leg and a bad case of self-pity to see to before lunch, Mrs Jordan. It was nice to meet you.'

He held out his hand and grasped hers.

'Keep smiling,' he said, and put a finger on the end of Charlie's little nose. 'You too, old fellow.'