A Village Affair

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘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 emotional 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?’

  ‘W
ho 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 su
ddenly 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 good-mannered 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.