A Village Affair

by Joanna Trollope

  After twenty minutes or so, Alice came and stood in the kitchen doorway.

  ‘Martin’s gone for a walk. It’s so kind of you to have him.’

  Juliet had her back to Alice, stirring her soup.

  ‘You know I’m not kind.’

  ‘And it was kind to have us both here—’

  ‘Shut up,’ Juliet said. ‘Stop mouthing crappy platitudes at me.’ She turned round. ‘Did you get anywhere?’

  ‘No.’ Alice paused and then she said, ‘He wants me to apologize, I think. He wants it to be all my fault.’

  Juliet said nothing. She took the soup off the cooker and peered at it.

  ‘Henry’ll never eat this. Looks like pond slime.’

  Alice said, ‘I’ll go home now. But thank you.’

  Juliet banged her saucepan down.

  ‘What the hell do you expect from him? What has he done, poor brute, except be the boring old Englishman he’s always been – the one you married?’

  ‘It isn’t as simple as that—’

  ‘Simple? You bet your life it isn’t simple.’ She came across the kitchen, holding the wooden soup spoon. ‘Allie. Allie, how could you?’

  Alice looked at her.

  ‘How could you treat Martin like this? How could you be so absolutely normal all these years and then suddenly – God, Allie, have you fallen off your trolley?’

  ‘In order to even begin to understand,’ Alice said, ‘you have to want to.’

  ‘And what about you trying to understand Martin?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Understanding unfortunately doesn’t mean I can wave a wand and put everything right, but it does mean that I’m trying to take everyone into account.’

  Juliet marched back to the cooker.

  ‘Too good of you.’

  Alice left. As she went out of the Dunnes’ house, she could see Juliet’s little boys on a climbing frame across the lawn. She got into her car. On the floor there were bits of Lego, and a cassette tape of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and a bangle of Clodagh’s, purple and gold, that Natasha had borrowed to take to school and awe Sophie with. There were also rather a lot of sweet papers.

  ‘I want you to be more slutty,’ Clodagh had said to her. ‘My beautiful, sexy, slutty Alice. I want you to let your elastic go. Life to the senses, death to sense.’

  Alice started the car, and drove slowly down the drive to the lane. The heavy August green of the countryside weighted the land right down. Some days, when it was still, you felt the fields could not breathe. Gross weeds lined the lanes, tangling on the verges. Alice thought she felt like it looked, exhausted, weighed down, ripe for harvest. She put her hand up for her pigtail, and held it as she drove, one hand on it, the other on the steering wheel.

  As she came into The Grey House the telephone was ringing. An immense happy certainty seized her. It would be Clodagh. Clodagh had been away a week and it would be so like her to ring now, in the early evening, so that Alice didn’t have another whole night to get through, wondering where she was. She took her time, confidently, getting to the telephone, and when she picked up the receiver, she was smiling.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Alice,’ Richard said.

  ‘Richard—’

  ‘I won’t ask how you are because you can’t be other than awful.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’d like to see you.’

  She closed her eyes. Tearless for so long now, she could feel the floodgates weakening.

  ‘Alice?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’m here—’

  ‘I’d like to see you. Would you like to see me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Come to London. I’d come to Pitcombe except that I don’t want to be curtain-twitching fodder. Come before the children get back. Have you heard from them?’

  ‘Postcards—’

  ‘I’ll see you on Tuesday,’ Richard said. ‘Come to the flat. We’ll have lunch.’

  ‘Yes,’ Alice said, crying.

  ‘Come on, love. Come on—’

  ‘Don’t be kind to me, it’s hopeless—’

  He laughed.

  ‘I’ll see you on Tuesday,’ he said.

  It was mattins on Sunday morning. The sun was out, and the clumps of hollyhocks by the lych gate were jubilant with their papery trumpets. Mattins was preferred by the Protestant habitués of Pitcombe because the hour was civilized and there was no delicate dilemma as to whether one should eat, or not, before communion, and if not, in Miss Payne’s case, risk the humiliation of breakfastless internal rumblings in all the quietest and most holy moments. Once she had been compelled to go out of the church entirely and suffer an agony of blushes by a table tomb in the churchyard.

  August was usually a poor month for congregations because of holidays, but this particular Sunday seemed to fall between the end of Europe and the beginning of Scotland in the Pitcombe holiday calendar. The narrow nave, decorated with immense white phlox sent down from Pitcombe Park, intermingled with royal blue artificial delphiniums provided by Cathy Fanshawe – ‘Good God,’ Henry Dunne said, hunting for hassocks, ‘is it Lifeboat week?’ – filled satisfactorily with people, red-faced from harvest and Cornwall, brown-faced from Umbria and Tenerife. Miss Pimm, in a brown print, with tremulous bare arms, sat at the organ. The choir, a mixed bag of Motts and Crudwells and the reluctant Barton child who was required, by his parents, to participate, sat below her, picking their noses and whispering.

  Rosie and Gerry Barton sat in the front pews on the right, opposite the Unwin pew. The Bartons were smiling, the Unwins were attempting to. Behind the Unwins, the Dunnes formed a loyal cohort, Henry in a blazer with his old regimental buttons, Juliet in a blue flowered frock, their boys – whom Henry intended to hold in half-nelsons for most of the service – in identical T-shirts and shorts. Buntie Payne sat across the aisle from them and smiled at the children, which emboldened them to make grisly faces. Down the rest of the aisle, scattered in twos and threes, sat the Fanshawes, a local farmer, John Murray-French with his cricket-watching panama on the pew beside him, several visitors, Michelle and her friend Carol, a new family who had modestly chosen a back pew, and old Fred Mott, in his wheelchair, wheeled up by Mr Finch who believed him to be an absolute test case for the promise of universal redemption. He sat wheezing a little, fingering his trousers and loudly sucking on Fishermen’s Friends.

  Peter Morris came out of the vestry in the green stole of Trinity and looked pleasedly at the church. He went down the aisle greeting people, and then up to the choir to say a few admonishing words. He often thought he would have forgiven them a great deal if they had been able to sing at all. Then he went back into the vestry for a few private moments, moments in which he was always surprised at how easily and earnestly prayer came, and went back into the church and saw Alice Jordan, sitting alone and very upright two pews behind the Dunnes. She was staring straight ahead. Instead of embarking upon the bidding prayer, Peter went down the aisle to her and said, in the resounding silence, ‘How nice to see you, Alice,’ to which she said thank you. He then went back to the chancel step, opened his arms wide and began.

  Alice, kneeling, sitting, rising, told herself she must get through it. She said the Lord’s Prayer, but she did not say the General Confession or join in the hymns which everyone else seemed to sing with a kind of exaggerated gusto. It occurred to her that the atmosphere was like the one she imagined prevailing in doomed aircraft, tremendous stoicism tussling silently with incipient hysteria. Sir Ralph, as churchwarden and sidesman, came round with the collection bag during ‘Lead me, Heavenly Father, lead me’ and Alice dropped in her coins without looking at him. During the sermon, the little Dunne boys, who had known her all their lives, twisted round to beam broadly at her, and were cuffed back into place by their father. It was only at the end that her courage faltered, and in the last hymn she slipped quickly out of her pew so that Buntie Payne, who had been planning to kiss her in fron
t of everyone, turned eagerly to do so after the Peace and cried in a voice loud with disappointment ‘Oh, it’s too bad! Really it is! She’s gone!’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ‘I was going to take you out,’ Richard said, ‘but then I thought that the moment either of us managed to say something we really wanted to say there’d be a waiter asking if we wanted pepper on our salads. So I went to Selfridges Food Hall and got this.’

  Alice looked down at the coffee table in the little sitting room of Richard’s flat. On it was a bottle of wine, a plastic envelope of smoked salmon, brown bread and a lemon.

  She said, ‘Are you going to grill me?’

  ‘Heavens no. Why should I do that?’

  ‘Because you are Martin’s father.’

  He picked up the bottle of wine and went to find a corkscrew.

  ‘I’m a human being too. I’d have to be a pretty unpleasant one to drag you all the way to London just to tick you off.’

  He disappeared for a moment into the tiny kitchen, reappearing with wine glasses.

  ‘You mustn’t be defensive.’

  Alice threw her head up.

  ‘I don’t want to be. But I keep feeling driven into it.’

  It had been so lovely in the train, coming up, being nobody. And the Tube had been even better, jammed in with people, all strangers.

  ‘London’s a luxury,’ Alice said, accepting a glass of wine, ‘after Pitcombe.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, it would be.’

  He put a hand on her arm and steered her into an armchair.

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  ‘Not terribly.’

  ‘Drink up then. We’ve got all day.’

  ‘But the office—’

  ‘It can wait.’

  ‘Martin said you had built a wall together—’

  ‘You saw him?’

  ‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘At Juliet’s. It didn’t really work.’

  ‘No,’ Richard said. ‘It wouldn’t have. Poor boy.’

  Alice said nothing.

  ‘Poor boy,’ Richard said again. ‘Poor boy. He’s been misinformed, somehow, all his life. He wouldn’t begin to understand. He’s in a rage of not understanding.’

  ‘I don’t blame him,’ Alice said. ‘I wouldn’t have understood either. Before Clodagh.’

  ‘Talk to me,’ Richard said. He leaned forward and poured more wine into Alice’s glass. ‘Talk to me.’

  ‘No—’

  ‘Yes. I may be one of the few people who can help. I love Martin.’ He paused. ‘I love you. I think I understand Martin. I would like to understand you.’

  ‘I don’t want this,’ Alice said. ‘I don’t want my marriage kindly mended.’

  ‘I don’t want to mend it.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘No,’ Richard said. ‘But I want a resolution. For him, for you, for my grandchildren.’ He looked at Alice. ‘Talk to me, about Clodagh.’

  ‘I can’t—’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you’re a man.’

  ‘Alice,’ Richard said, ‘I don’t think you know very much about men, or you wouldn’t say such a thing. Do you trust me?’

  She thought.

  ‘I don’t know—’

  ‘Pay me the compliment of knowing that I will believe you and probably understand what you tell me.’

  Alice got up. She walked round the little room fiddling with things, an ashtray on a sideboard, a marble egg on a wooden stand, a foolish adult toy made of a heap of magnetic paper clips on a black glass base. Then she came back to her chair and sat down.

  ‘What makes it so difficult is that the love between women has always been belittled. Hasn’t it? Down the ages. Treated as something at best foolish, like – like a kind of silly harmless hobby.’

  She put her wine glass down and picked up the lemon, rolling it in her hands and sniffing it.

  ‘But what I feel – and I may never fall in love again – is that what Clodagh has given me has enriched me. It hasn’t impoverished anything about me, hasn’t taken anything from me, if you see what I mean. It’s grown me up. It’s enabled me to love everyone else in my life properly, and as far as I can see only another woman would do for that instructive kind of love because only another woman could see I needed it and could understand about the children and self and the permanent balancing act of motherhood and self. Only another woman,’ Alice said firmly, ‘could understand and – and supply.’

  Richard slid off his chair on to his knees beside the coffee table and began to make competent sandwiches.

  ‘If you want to know,’ Alice said, rolling the lemon, ‘bed isn’t the most significant thing. At least, after the beginning it wasn’t. I think sex is more important for Clodagh than for me. If I’m honest. But what I love, what I’m terrified of doing without again, is the life force. A kind of elixir. Do you see?’

  He nodded, peeling salmon off cellophane strips.

  ‘You can’t imagine how much fun we have. You can’t conceive of how differently I see myself, because of her. It’s a kind of revelation.’

  Richard took the lemon away from her, cut it and began to squeeze the juice on to his sandwiches.

  ‘I was so lonely,’ Alice said. ‘I don’t blame Martin. He didn’t know what to do about me, and I didn’t know what to do about me either. But Clodagh did. I woke up. When I looked back at getting married and honeymooning and then being married, I think I was simply asleep. I must have been. Twelve years, dawdling about in a kind of half-life.’

  Richard put two sandwiches on a plate and balanced it on her knee.

  ‘Eat up.’

  Alice looked at the plate, then at him.

  ‘Do I make sense to you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you imagine what I mean?’

  ‘Of course. I’ve felt something like it. But in my case it was for the opposite sex, rather than my own.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Cecily, of course,’ Richard said.

  ‘Cecily!’

  ‘Yes.’

  Alice took an unenthusiastic bite of sandwich.

  ‘You talk,’ she said. ‘You talk now.’

  There was a little pause, then Richard said, with great carefulness, ‘If you had had a confident, loving man make love to you, this would never have happened. You’ll think that’s just common or garden male arrogance. It isn’t. There’s a world of difference between making love and having sex. I was never able to make love to Cecily as I wished to because her mind was quite closed to me. The summit of her emotional life was Vienna and she would never allow anything to approach it in case it proved only an illusion and the giant, secret romance of her life crumbled to dust.’

  He stopped, and rose to fill Alice’s glass. She waited, watching him.

  ‘But I could have loved her, if she’d let me. At the risk of sounding incestuous, I could have loved you, because, like Clodagh, I know what you are like and what you like.’

  He looked at Alice.

  ‘I’m not jealous of Clodagh. I’m only sorry that you should be put through this hoop for her, socially. I understand exactly what you say about loneliness. I’ve had a mistress for years – fifteen to be exact – because I’m a tender man and a passionate man and Cecily can’t let herself allow me to be either. It doesn’t suit her to acknowledge that I like women.’

  ‘Martin—’ Alice said.

  ‘Cecily never brought the boys up to like women. She didn’t try. They are both afraid of women. I didn’t try either. I didn’t see until too late. In that respect, I am quite as much to blame as she is.’

  Alice reached over to take Richard’s hand.

  ‘So sad,’ Alice said. ‘So sad. You are actually exactly the right man for her.’

  He smiled.

  ‘Oh, I know that. I’ve known that for forty years.’

  Alice bent her head.

  ‘Forty years! The things people live with—’

  ‘Sometimes
you have to. If you don’t at heart want anything else.’

  ‘But a mistress—’

  ‘Would a string of call girls be better?’

  Alice looked up.

  ‘You mean—?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Alice said, with Clodagh’s intonation.

  ‘I haven’t been allowed to make love to Cecily for almost twenty years.’

  ‘But you still—’

  ‘Yes, I still.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to have stopped? Loving her, I mean—’

  ‘Only very theoretically. And occasionally. Perhaps I’m just immensely pigheaded and won’t admit to failure. Perhaps it’s love.’

  Alice flung herself back in her chair.

  ‘Love,’ she said.

  Later, when he was driving her to Paddington, Richard said quite casually that he would like to buy her a little flat or house in Salisbury, to be near the children’s school. He said it would be a secret between the two of them. He said it would have no strings. She could have it for a month or a year or however long she wanted it for. She felt quite bewildered by the offer and said, looking away from him ‘But why?’ and he said for the children first and for her and Martin second.

  ‘Martin?’

  ‘If you have some independence, he won’t feel so threatened or resentful. It will make the next step easier. He cannot bear the thought that the law will require him to give money to a woman he believes has betrayed him. If you don’t need so much from him, that’s one less battle. One less battle is good for the children.’

  ‘But you can’t, why should you—’

  ‘Mind your own business,’ Richard said. ‘Just let me know when you know.’

  In the train, tiredness fell upon Alice like a hammer blow. She put her head back on the orange tweed headrest with which British Rail sought to cosset its passengers, and closed her eyes. Through her mind a procession of people moved, Clodagh and her children and Martin, her parents, her parents-in-law, Clodagh’s parents, all spinning slowly by, their faces seeming to wheel up out of a soft darkness and then melt away again into it. I am the link, Alice thought. All these people, through me, have their future. It’s a horrible power, but it’s real. And it’s mine. Even if I don’t want it, it’s mine. Things aren’t going to happen to me now because I have to make the next things happen. I have to choose. I am far beyond any point I ever was before and there’s nothing to shield me now. I am in a high, bare, painful place . . .