A Village Affair

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Saturday morning? Sorry to cut into gardening time, but it wouldn’t interfere with a working week and it’s the one morning I have the remotest chance of his undivided attention for three minutes at least—’

  Martin rose too.

  ‘Suits me fine.’

  They went out into the foyer which was now entirely empty except for an enormously fat woman wedged in an armchair and grasping a Curry’s carrier bag on what remained of her knees beyond her stomach. Outside in St John’s Street they turned instinctively to one another and shook hands.

  ‘Henry,’ Martin said, ‘I’m really awfully grateful.’

  ‘Fingers crossed. If it comes off, I’ll be the grateful one. See you Saturday.’

  And then they separated, two pairs of well-polished brown brogues going purposefully off down the Salisbury pavements among the dawdling shoppers and the pushchairs.

  Dutifully, Alice took the children down to Dummeridge for the day. Clodagh had wanted to come, but Alice had said no.

  ‘Please. Why not? It’s another pair of hands to help with Charlie—’

  ‘I can’t explain why not, I just know I couldn’t handle it. Clodagh, it’s duty I’m going for, not particular pleasure.’

  ‘What am I going to do all Thursday?’

  ‘Make us an amazing supper to come home to,’ Alice said jokingly, but knowing Clodagh would take her seriously.

  ‘OK then. But I’ll have my pound of flesh some other way.’

  Alice said happily, ‘I know you will.’

  At least the children had been pleased about going. Natasha had dressed herself with immense care in fancy white socks and a pink plastic jewellery set, including earrings, which Gwen had given her and which Alice knew would cause Cecily real grief. James had submitted to Alice’s desire to compensate for the pink earrings by substituting brown lace-ups for his prized trainers with silver flashes on the heels, and Charlie, promoted from his carrycot to an egg-shaped safety seat in the back of the car, dah-dah’d contentedly to himself while taking off his first shoes and socks and throwing them on the floor.

  It was a long drive, but all three were remarkably good. Alice talked to them a lot over her shoulder, because she felt nervous, and because the first thing she was going to have to say was that they couldn’t, after all, stay the night. She should have said that at the outset, but she hadn’t, and now Cecily would have made up beds and told Dorothy to set up the cot and altogether it was an awful prospect and all her own fault. And then, driving through Wareham, she had thought, with sudden indignation, that she had no idea why she should feel guilty about Martin’s mother. Martin never seemed to.

  Once this had occurred to her, her indignation grew. She was the one who made all the running with Dummeridge, and it was a running she had now made for over a decade. Just because she had been so conscientious, they all of course expected her to go on being conscientious, so that Martin would have been amazed to be told to remember Cecily’s birthday himself, or to bring the children down to see her at Dummeridge. The last mile to the house, the leafy, sun-flecked familiar mile that Alice used to drive with such a joyfully lifting heart, seemed to have lost its charm entirely. She rounded the last curve of the road, went over the little stone bridge that spanned the remains of an ancient moat and pulled up in front of the studded front door with a kind of dread.

  The children squealed for release like piglets and went racing into the house shouting for Cecily. Alice followed slowly with Charlie under one arm and his discarded shoes and socks in her free hand. Natasha and James and Cecily had collided on the stairs and were hugging and chattering, and, watching them, Alice felt small and cold. Charlie stretched out of her arm towards his grandmother, so Alice put him down on the flagged floor and let him stagger across on his soft bare feet, bleating for attention.

  ‘Darling,’ Cecily said at last, reaching Alice, ‘this is a highlight. I’ve been looking forward to it so much you can’t think. Richard’s coming home tonight specially, so you really are honoured. I saw him lurking about with champagne bottles and I’ve got a salmon trout—’

  ‘Where’m I sleeping?’ James said.

  ‘Jimmy James. Where d’you think? In your always bed—’

  James, recalled to his own babyhood language, dissolved with pleasure.

  ‘And I,’ said Natasha, turning her pink bracelet admiringly on her wrist, ‘am in the blue room. Where Mummy used to sleep. In the golden bed.’

  It was too late. Alice made a feeble last try.

  ‘D’you know, I’ve done such a dotty thing, I’ve forgotten all our night things—’

  Cecily, jiggling Charlie in her arms, began to laugh.

  ‘Oh darling, how funny! But it couldn’t matter less. We’ll just have to put Charlie in a hot-water-bottle cover for the night. Won’t we.’

  The children were visibly happy. Cecily had packed their lunch up in little baskets so that they could elude the tedium of a table and also so that she could have Alice to herself while Dorothy dotingly spooned mashed carrot and liver into Charlie in the kitchen. There were two places laid for lunch in the dining room, either side of a shallow copper bowl containing a brilliant cushion of yellow-green moss studded with scyllas. Cecily helped Alice to a fragrant stew of chicken and cashew nuts, poured her a slender glass of Chablis and said, in the businesslike tone she had promised herself she would use all day, ‘Now then. I want to know when you are going to start painting again. No excuses now. Your house is almost straight, the children are settled, the village clearly thinks you are wonderful, so what are you waiting for?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Alice said coolly. ‘I’ve started.’

  Cecily stared.

  ‘Darling!’

  ‘Two days ago.’

  Cecily raised her glass.

  ‘It’s wonderful! Here’s to you. Tell me all about it, exactly what happened.’

  Alice was in no hurry to finish her mouthful. She said deliberately, ‘Clodagh locked me into the studio. It was as simple as that. She got the children to help her and they all said I couldn’t come out until teatime. At five o’clock, they unlocked the door and stood there with a chocolate cake.’

  Her face was faintly glowing. It had all been so extraordinary, she had been taken completely by surprise. It had begun with Gwen coming in during the morning with a painting of a straw hat on a chair by an open french window and saying, ‘I hope I’m not speaking out of turn, but this was just lying about in the spare bathroom and I picked it up and thought it was ever so pretty and then I looked and saw—’

  Alice was sitting on the edge of the kitchen table sewing name-tapes on James’s summer school uniform.

  ‘Yes. I did it.’

  ‘Mrs Jordan—’

  Clodagh came over from the sink.

  ‘Let me see.’

  She turned the painting towards her and examined it.

  ‘Hell’s teeth, Alice—’

  ‘I can’t do it any more,’ Alice said. ‘I don’t know why, I just can’t. I tried and it was hopeless.’

  ‘It’s ever so clever,’ Gwen said. ‘Now my cousin—’

  ‘What d’you mean, hopeless?’

  ‘I mean that I couldn’t draw or paint and so I felt rather desperate.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘About four years ago—’

  ‘Four years? Now that’s odd, because my cousin—’

  ‘Shut up, Gwen,’ Clodagh said. She peered at Alice.

  ‘Four years is an age ago. Why don’t you try again?’

  ‘I’m afraid to.’

  ‘Just what my cousin—’

  ‘Afraid?’ Clodagh said. ‘You afraid? This is seriously good, you know, seriously.’

  And then she had given the painting back to Gwen and gone back to the sink, and when she spoke again it was about a Canadian novelist called Robertson Davies that she said Alice must read.

  It was after lunch that it happened. Clodagh and
Natasha and James had been giggling away about something and they lured Alice up to the room above the garage on the pretence of needing to find the croquet set, and simply locked her in.

  ‘You can come out,’ James had shouted, highly delighted with the whole game,’when you’ve painted a picture!’

  At first she thought frenziedly that she couldn’t, she hadn’t any water, or paint rugs, but Clodagh had thought of all that. So in a curious state of being at once both exhilarated and quite calm, she had set up her easel and painted a corner of the dusty window, on whose sill John had left a half-carved duck. A couple of fronds of ivy had pushed their way in and a spider had woven a truly copybook web between the duck’s head and the windowframe. She painted very fast and quite absorbedly. When they let her out she was so pleased with herself she was almost sorry they had come. She said now, with a small swagger, ‘I always said I’d be able to paint at The Grey House.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Cecily watched her. She was pleased for Alice but wished very much that it had not been Clodagh who waved the magic wand.

  ‘It all sounds a bit melodramatic to me.’

  ‘It was. But it worked.’

  Cecily pulled herself together.

  ‘I’m more pleased than I can say. Not least because it will get all those people off my back who think I can get them an Alice Jordan just by whistling.’

  Alice took a swallow of her wine.

  ‘I don’t think I want any commissions just yet—’

  ‘Darling, why on earth not? I thought that was the point—’

  ‘I don’t want,’ Alice said, spacing the words out in a soft, even voice, ‘to be beholden to anybody about anything just now. I want to be free to do what I need to do.’

  ‘I don’t think I quite understand.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Could you explain?’

  ‘No,’ Alice said. ‘No. I don’t think I could. I just feel it very strongly.’

  ‘Forgive me, darling,’ Cecily said sharply, getting up to put a dish of big gleaming South African grapes on the table, ‘but you sound like a spoiled adolescent to me.’

  ‘I expect,’ Alice said politely, ‘that that is because I am not behaving exactly as you would like me to.’

  Cecily sat down and pushed the grapes towards Alice.

  ‘I have never tried to influence you in any way.’

  Alice said nothing.

  ‘If I have ever given you any kind of guidance – reluctantly, mind you – it is because you asked me for it. When you came here, a gauche girl—’ She stopped.

  ‘Are you going,’ Alice said serenely, ‘to tell me how much I owe you? It reminds me of conversations long ago with my mother.’

  Cecily held her hands together tightly to prevent herself from reaching over and slapping Alice. She closed her eyes for a second and said, ‘Don’t let’s quarrel.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘No.’ She opened them again and gave a small smile. ‘Neither of us do.’

  Alice rose.

  ‘May I use the telephone? There’s something I forgot to tell Clodagh about Martin’s supper.’

  ‘What has Clodagh to do with Martin’s supper?’

  ‘She offered to get supper for him,’ said Alice as if it were the most natural thing in the world, ‘because I am here.’

  She went away to the kitchen telephone and rang The Grey House. There was no reply. She dialled the Park and Lady Unwin answered and was excessively friendly and said she would fetch Clodagh at once.

  ‘I’ve lost,’ Alice said. ‘I’ve got to stay. Outmanoeuvred.’

  ‘Alice,’ Clodagh said. ‘You’re pathetic. How old are you? And I was going to do my Upper East Side Swank Foodie’s Fish Curry.’

  ‘Could you do it for Martin?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Clodagh. I’m really sorry.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘I’d better go. I’m so grateful.’

  ‘What for? For feeding the family lawyer?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tee hee,’ Clodagh said. ‘Serve you right for staying away. See you tomorrow—’

  ‘What about the family lawyer?’

  ‘I couldn’t possibly,’ Clodagh said, ‘tell you a state secret over the telephone,’ and she put the receiver down.

  Alice went out into the garden where Cecily and the children were feeding the goldfish with special grains out of a little plastic cylinder.

  ‘I hate him,’ James was saying, peering into the water, ‘his face is all gobbly—’

  ‘Just like yours, my dear,’ Natasha said, tossing her head to feel her earrings swing.

  ‘All well?’ Cecily said to Alice.

  ‘Perfectly. She’s going to make him a fish curry.’

  ‘I’ll make you into a curry!’ James shouted excitedly at the pool. ‘That’s what I’ll do! I’ll make you into a curry!’

  Natasha put her hand in her grandmother’s.

  ‘Sometimes, I’m afraid, Charlie eats beetles.’

  ‘Does he, darling?’

  Natasha sighed.

  ‘Oh yes. He’s a great responsibility. Can we go to the sea?’

  It was a long, long afternoon. Alice could not believe the strength of her wishing to be at home. She looked at familiar, beloved Dummeridge in the glory of its spring garden, as if through the wrong end of a telescope, tiny, remote and impersonal. When Richard returned, she kissed him with unusual warmth and Cecily, noticing this, said before she could stop herself, ‘And what has he done to deserve all this?’

  ‘She thinks I’m going to open some champagne for her,’ Richard said. ‘And she’s right.’

  Dinner was better because Richard was determined, it seemed, to keep things impersonal. He talked about the Middle East, made Cecily talk about her last trip to America – ‘Potagers are now sweeping Georgetown like measles’ – and when the talk inevitably drifted round to the state of things at Pitcombe, he said, ‘Guess who rang today.’

  Cecily, fetching a wedge of perfect Brie from the side-board, said, ‘Who?’ without interest.

  ‘Anthony.’

  ‘Anthony!’

  ‘Coming home,’ Richard said. ‘Changing continents, changing jobs—’

  ‘Why didn’t he ring here? Why didn’t he ring me?’

  ‘I expect he will—’

  ‘How odd,’ Alice said. ‘I haven’t seen Anthony for almost ten years. Ten years in the Far East. Before the children—’

  ‘He sent you his love,’ Richard said to Alice.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Dangerous stuff, Anthony’s love—’

  Cecily said, ‘When is all this happening?’

  ‘Soon. A few weeks.’

  ‘I see. My eldest son chooses to come home after a decade at a fortnight’s notice and does not seem to think it necessary to inform me.’

  ‘He rang me with the facts,’ Richard said, pouring more wine. ‘I expect he will ring you for analysis and interpretation.’

  Cecily drew in her breath, but she said nothing more except, after a pause, ‘Darling Alice, tell Richard what’s happening to Martin tonight. Too amusing—’

  Richard looked at Alice. She took a leisuredly swallow of wine, returned his look and said, without any emphasis, ‘He’s being fed fish curry by the youngest child of Pitcombe Park.’

  Richard’s mouth twitched.

  ‘Is he now.’

  Alice nodded.

  ‘I promise you.’

  ‘Isn’t that,’ Richard said measuredly, ‘something.’

  But Alice couldn’t reply because she was suddenly seized with a helpless fit of giggles.

  On his way home from the office, Martin stopped at Pitcombe shop to buy seeds and brown garden twine. He was slightly irritated that Cecily had landed him with Stuart Mott who was the kind of gardener whose surface friendliness concealed a sneering contempt for any employer’s opinion. If it wasn’t for Stuart, Martin woul
d not now be buying carrot and cabbage seed, both of which he considered wasteful to grow and dull to eat. He had meant to start Stuart’s employment with the friendly firmness he had heard his father use to junior colleagues on the telephone, but Stuart’s faintly curled lip had thrown him off key from the outset. When Cecily had telephoned him the other night with some idiotic objection to Clodagh as a friend of the family, Martin had been so aggrieved with her over her interference about Stuart that he had been quite short with her and the call had ended very coolly on both sides. Of course, being Martin, he had repented of this and had rung back to say sorry and his mother had said she quite understood, they were all clearly rather on edge just now, and no wonder. When she said that, Martin’s regret quite evaporated and he wished he hadn’t bothered to apologize. Standing in the shop now, spinning a rickety wire rack of seed packets, he felt indignation bubbling comfortably up in him all over again. This was aggravated further by Mr Finch coming stealthily up to him – he knew Martin was no candidate for bursts of lyric poetry – and saying, ‘You’ve an exotic supper to look forward to tonight, Mr Jordan.’

  Martin said, without looking up from the printed merits of Nantes Express carrots, ‘Have I?’

  Lettice Deverel, who disapproved exceedingly of Mr Finch’s separate and obnoxious manner to his upperand working-class customers, and who was half-obscured by a plywood unit of paper plates and doilies, said firmly, ‘Mr Jordan’s supper is no concern of yours, Mr Finch.’

  Mr Finch tiptoed back to his counter and began to make an unnecessary pyramid of nougat bars.

  ‘Miss Clodagh was in this afternoon,’ he said in self-justifying tones, ‘buying nutmeg and cinnamon. She told me they were to put in Mr Jordan’s supper because Mrs Jordan is away taking the children to their grandmother.’

  Lettice Deverel emerged and put a packet of sunflower seeds for the parrot down in front of Mr Finch.

  ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right, Mr Finch.’

  ‘Seems to me,’ Martin said in a jocular voice, coming forward with his seeds, ‘that everyone round here knows all about my supper but me.’

  ‘Village life, Mr Jordan,’ Lettice Deverel said.

  Martin offered Mr Finch a five pound note.

  ‘Is Miss Clodagh getting supper for me, then?’