A Village Affair

by Joanna Trollope

  Alice said, ‘Why must you insist that I am your enemy?’

  ‘You are. You humiliated me the worst way a woman could humiliate a man. It’s your doing.’

  ‘Would you have preferred me to have slept with another man, thereby showing you up as an inadequate lover?’

  ‘Yes,’ Martin said. ‘No,’ and put his head in his hands.

  ‘Stop thinking about sex. It isn’t really about sex. At least, sex is only a part.’

  ‘I can’t—’

  ‘I don’t want a divorce so that I can live with Clodagh. I want a divorce because I’m not going to live with anyone. If you think you’ll feel better by making it all difficult, I can’t stop you. You have heaps of people on your side. But I’m not going to help make it a battle. I’d rather be your friend than your enemy. I’d rather be – Clodagh’s friend than her enemy. But I won’t for all that pretend I regret what has happened because it wouldn’t be true.’

  ‘You must be mad.’

  ‘I expect it’s easier to think that.’

  ‘Easier!’

  ‘If you tell everyone I’m mad then you don’t have to consider what I am or what I’ve done seriously. You don’t have to acknowledge that I’m part of the human pattern. You don’t even have to begin to look for anything good.’

  She stood up.

  ‘I must go. I’m lecturing. I seem to have an awful tendency to lecture at the moment.’

  He gazed at her. He didn’t want her to go and did not know how to make her stay.

  ‘I’ll see the children on Saturday—’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘How much do they know?’

  ‘What you would expect,’ Alice said, ‘at their age. They just want everything to be normal again.’

  ‘And whose fault is that?’ Martin cried out, unable to stop himself. ‘Whose fault is that, that it isn’t?’

  When Alice had gone, he went to his bathroom at the back of the flat and watched her walk across what had been the old kitchen yard of the house, to her car. Well, his car really; he’d bought it, after all. She was wearing a huge, fell, long denim skirt and a red shirt and a suede waistcoat and her plait fell down her back as straight as an arrow. He leaned his forehead on the glass. She opened the car door and climbed in, folding her skirt in after her, and shut the door. Martin closed his eyes. A sense of loss, a terrifying, savage sense of no longer having something that had been his alone, engulfed him in a black flood of bereavement.

  Sam, sitting in the garden of The Grey House with a copy of the Times Literary Supplement, was half-supervising his grandchildren. This occupation struck him as being rather like invigilating public examinations, except that the children did not fix him with the anguished, reproachful stares of candidates immobilised by exam nerves or inadequate revision. Instead they seemed absorbed in some extraordinary ritual under a car rug hung between kitchen chairs and only came out intermittently to make him solemn offerings of daisy heads on a tiny plate which Charlie seemed eager to eat. Sam let him. The Elizabethan kitchen, after all, had made excellent use of violets and marigolds.

  His presence in the house for the last few days had given it a solidity. Rituals had formed at once around him, as grandfather and as man, little tendrils of the instinct for security reaching out to cling to him. He liked it. He thought he liked it a great deal more than he remembered liking fatherhood, which had come at a time in his life when he wasn’t ready for it. His grandchildren interested him a lot; he was struck by the dignity of Charlie’s babyhood. He was sorry to think that his children had not interested him very much, a sign, he thought now, of his immaturity then. He saw the realistic female certainties in Natasha and the romantic male agonies in James and he now saw in his daughter, Alice, a mixture of both, as he supposed they ought to exist, in adults who were adults. He also saw, to his delight, that he had a role. The family came to him. They came, Alice had said – and she had said this sadly – in a way they had not come to Martin.

  ‘He is too young,’ Sam had said. ‘Just as I was. He is still too full of self.’

  She had been determined to go and see Martin. Sam had said it would achieve nothing and she replied that it wouldn’t now, but that it might make some little difference, later. When she came back, Sam had a plan to put to her. They would all live together. With whatever her share of the proceeds of The Grey House came to and whatever he could get for his flat, they would put together and buy a house near Reading, for the five of them. He envisaged a ménage of security and individual freedom. If, when the dust had settled, Clodagh wanted to visit them, well, he wasn’t going to object. And Martin could of course come and go as he wished.

  Charlie came crawling over the grass and hauled himself upright on Sam’s trouser leg.

  ‘Hello, old man.’

  Charlie beamed. Sam thought of his journeys to Sainsbury’s and how in future he would put Charlie in the child seat of the trolley. He lifted Charlie on to his knee.

  ‘How about living with your grandfather then?’

  Charlie examined a shirt button intently.

  ‘We could have a dog.’

  From the drive came the sound of Alice’s horn, announcing her arrival home. Holding Charlie, Sam stood up and, calling the children to him, led them all round to the garage to greet her.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The cottage was undeniably ugly. It was built of yellowish brick under a blue slate roof and stood in a long garden that ran down to the lane, a tangled garden with aggressive great clumps of delphinium and hollyhock and ornamental sea kale. There was also an apple tree groaning with fruit; it was clearly in the habit of being so prolific because one long, low, laden branch was propped up on a stout wooden stake driven into the ground.

  The cottage was uncompromising as well as ugly. It had four rooms upstairs and two downstairs, and in a narrow wing running out at the back, a bathroom above a depressing kitchen. The previous owners had believed very much in hardboard. It was nailed over fireplaces and panelled doors and bannisters and beams, and had then been painted in either mauve or apricot emulsion to blend in with the surrounding walls. In the sitting room there was a fireplace of faintly iridescent tiles and below every tap in the house stains spread in green and brown tongues.

  Two miles further up the valley there had been a pretty cottage for sale. It was built of stone and the interior was beamed and friendly. There had been great pressure on Alice to choose it because even if many of those exerting pressure didn’t much, at the moment, care where she lived, they wanted the children to live somewhere attractive. But Alice had been adamant. She had been adamant about a lot of things and choosing East Cottage rather than the pretty stone one was one of them. The others were that she would live alone and that she would not, because of the children and their schools, leave the Salisbury area. She would move to the other side of the city, but she and Martin would have to risk meeting by mistake now and then. She was also adamant that he and the children should see a great deal of each other.

  Natasha was disgusted with East Cottage. Her bedroom was the size of a cupboard and smelled of mushrooms. The walls were papered with fawn bobbly stuff and there was a grey bit on the ceiling that looked squashy. Alice said the room would be absolutely transformed, just you wait, but Natasha didn’t want to wait, any more than she had wanted to leave Pitcombe. She told Alice quite often that she hated her and was confused and miserable to find that she felt no better after saying it, so she said it again, louder, to see if that worked. Even school didn’t seem the same, with no Grey House to go home to, and Sophie wouldn’t be friends this term, so Natasha turned to Charlotte Chambers who was slow and charmless but who had a swimming pool at home and a huge drawing room with a white carpet. The sitting room at East Cottage had no carpet at all, just a piece of rush matting. Alice said that room was going to be wonderful too, just you wait, so Natasha had gone to stay for a whole weekend with Charlotte Chambers, to punish Alice. But the punishment had gone wrong
because Natasha had been so homesick. She came home on Monday night, after school, and she shouted, ‘I hate this house!’ and then she cried and cried and clung to Alice. Alice said to her, ‘I know it’s hard to feel it, but every day we are going forward.’

  ‘But I want to go back.’

  ‘That’s the saddest thing to do. Nothing is ever as good as you thought it was. Because you change. You see the old things with changed eyes and they aren’t the same.’

  Lettice Deverel came to tea. She came bumping up their stony drive in her old car with the parrot in its cage on the back seat. It was not a good passenger and had screamed most of the way but was pleased to be stationary and accepted a slice of apple with goodish grace. Lettice said that it would probably live for about sixty years more than she would, and that she must find a very kind, interesting person who would look after it when she was dead. James, mesmerized by the parrot’s self-possession and humour and little grey blue claw holding the apple, went into a fantasy of being considered sufficiently kind and interesting. He gazed ardently at Lettice, to make her notice.

  ‘Margot Unwin would like to see you,’ Lettice said to Alice.

  ‘Lord—’

  ‘She needs to. It’s very pathetic to see someone so capable so sad and confused. And of course she cannot talk to Ralph because she wants to understand and he cannot bring himself to.’

  ‘Do you mean she wants me to explain—’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Lord,’ Alice said again.

  ‘She wants you to go to the Park.’ Lettice looked at Alice. ‘I’m afraid Clodagh is going back to America.’

  Alice said in a low voice, ‘I thought she would.’

  ‘I hope it’s just a passing impulse.’

  ‘To be made a fuss of, do you mean, to be comforted?’

  ‘She has never been hurt before, you see.’

  Alice looked at her children.

  ‘I think it’s worse to leave being first hurt until you are grown up.’

  ‘You never know,’ Lettice said. ‘You never know in life, which is good experience and which is damage. Do you?’

  After tea, they went out of the cottage to the long shed where Alice was making a studio. Her easel was already set up and there was a trestle table with a workmanlike array of paints and bottles and jam jars of brushes.

  ‘I shall keep myself,’ Alice said. ‘Martin is keeping the children, but I shall keep myself. And about time too, I can’t help thinking.’ She picked up a drawing. ‘Peter Morris has commissioned a painting of Pitcombe Church. The interior. So I’ll have to sneak back to do that.’

  ‘Don’t you sneak anywhere,’ Lettice said. She took the sketch and looked at it. ‘What is this horrible cottage for? A hair shirt?’

  ‘It isn’t horrible. It’s real. You wait until I’ve finished with it. You see – oddly enough – it’s easier to bear things here. It feels mine. Partly because it isn’t what’s expected of me, I suppose. That isn’t defiance, just the best way to go forward—’

  She stopped. Lettice eyed her.

  ‘Will you be lonely?’

  ‘No,’ Alice said. She took the sketch from Lettice and propped it on the easel. ‘Are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you see—’

  ‘Yes,’ Lettice said, thinking of the sufficiency she had made for herself. ‘Yes. Of course I see.’

  Sam came most weekends. He was an enormous asset, not only emotionally, but also because he proved to be very capable with tools. He was delighted with himself, over this.

  ‘If you’d told me, ten years ago, to re-hang a door, I’d have gone straight to the pub. But look at this. Go on, push it. See? Smooth as silk. Come on, Jamie, pick up my hammer. What use is an apprentice if he won’t even carry my clobber?’

  He was entirely unresentful that Alice had declined to set up house with him, and as the weeks wore on he came to think that she had been quite right and that he very much liked his new double life, single in Reading, family at East Cottage. He began, too, to feel first pity and then affection for Clodagh. Without Clodagh, he would not have had these enriching and complementing roles. He made a list of winter projects for East Cottage – ‘Replace gutters where necessary – Clear wilderness behind shed – Start log pile – Replace all lavatory glass with plain, etc. etc.’ – which he tacked up in the kitchen so that Elizabeth, who came, astonishingly, for two nights, was drawn back and back to it, to read it over and over as if she couldn’t believe her eyes.

  The children thought her peculiar, but peaceful, because she did not attempt to be affectionate. She seemed to like East Cottage and professed herself quite prepared to paint window frames, which she then did patiently for forty-eight hours. She declined, to Alice’s relief, to have any kind of conversation even approaching a heart-to-heart, and only said, while they were washing up once and the kitchen was noisy with the children, ‘Well, you’ve taken a very long time to work yourself through all that nonsense, and you chose a very strange way out, but you’ve done it. And that’s a great deal.’

  When she left, she said she was going to work for the Citizens’ Advice Bureau and had taken a flat in central Colchester.

  ‘I should have done it ten years ago. Ann is a very enervating companion. But I’m doing it now, just in time. Don’t come and see me, it’s a dreadful journey. I shall come and see you.’

  When she had gone, James said, ‘Was that really a granny?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I thought she was a school lady.’

  From Cecily and Richard, Alice heard nothing. Cecily saw the children when they were with Martin, and they would return to East Cottage with new jerseys and bars of chocolate and books. This enraged Alice.

  ‘It shouldn’t,’ Sam said. ‘They are just the sad symbols of frustrated power.’

  ‘I loved her so much,’ Alice said. ‘And now I can hardly bear to think of her. She wanted to eat me up.’

  ‘Didn’t Clodagh?’

  Alice looked deeply distressed.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Don’t—’

  Sam was sorry.

  ‘I didn’t mean they were the same. In any way. Oh, Allie—’

  But she wouldn’t speak of it any more and after a while Sam heard her, in her bedroom, crying.

  ‘Why is Mummy crying?’ Natasha said.

  ‘Because she is missing Clodagh.’

  Natasha nodded.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘that makes me cry, too.’

  East Cottage was half a mile out of a village. It was an odd village, without a shop or a pub, and the church only had a service every three weeks. The priest, a young, cadaverous, scowling man, who was deeply frustrated to find himself with five rural churches instead of the inner city parish he had wanted, came to see Alice and sat drinking mug after mug of tea while he told her how useless he felt. He’d had some sort of breakdown – he would not, mysteriously, be precise – and this living was supposed to be his stepping stone back to his real calling. He was called Mark Murphy. Alice liked him. On his second visit – he came for supper and ate as voraciously as he had drunk tea – she told him, as a kind of test, about Clodagh, and he said, ‘Love’s terrifyingly hard to come by, isn’t it? You have to grab it when you get the chance.’

  His vicarage was a small, unappealing modern house in a neighbouring village which he said had the soul of a shoebox. He took to coming on Saturdays sometimes, to help Sam with clearing the garden, and when Sam asked him if he shouldn’t be at home with his family, he said there wasn’t one to be at home with because his wife had left him two years ago and had gone home to Newcastle with their baby.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Sam said.

  ‘Yes,’ Mark Murphy said, and sighed. ‘So am I. She said she had no idea that the other woman in a priest’s life might turn out to be God.’

  Sometimes, in the lane going down to the main road to Salisbury, Alice passed a fair girl driving a dented Citroën with the back full
of children. They had passed each other indifferently several times and then, by mutual consent, began to smile and wave. The girl left a note in the wooden mail box at Alice’s gate.

  ‘I’m Priscilla Mayne,’ the note said. ‘I live half a mile the other side of the village in the Victorian ruin that looks like a squat. No telephone yet. Come and see me when you feel like it.’

  Alice thought she would feel like it very soon. When a postcard came from Anthony – she put it in the Rayburn at once – and one from John Murray-French which said, ‘The new Grey House people are decent and dull. Don’t lose touch,’ she felt in some peculiar way that the possibilities in the as yet unknown Priscilla Mayne had somehow much more reality than her past, known though it was. Sam told her that this was the stuff of freedom, and that she must learn to drink whisky.

  ‘Why?’ she said laughing.

  ‘Robert Burns. “Freedom and whisky gang together.” Actually, freedom is headier than whisky but why not celebrate one with the other?’

  It was almost Christmas before Juliet came to East Cottage. She came on a wet day when the cottage, still in a state of raw upheaval, presented its most lowering aspect, and Alice came upon her standing by her car and staring at the mountainous, sodden bonfire of Sam’s clearance schemes.

  ‘Allie—’

  Alice seized her arm.

  ‘Come in. Come in out of the rain. I’ve just made some unsuccessful bread.’

  In the kitchen, Juliet burst into tears.

  ‘Allie, it’s all so awful—’

  ‘No. No, it isn’t. I like it here.’

  ‘I don’t mean here. I mean life in Pitcombe.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. We can’t have left that big a hole—’

  Juliet said, sniffing, ‘You’ve left heaps of holes. Great black ones. People are falling in all over the place. I’ve been in one for months. That’s why I didn’t come.’

  ‘Isn’t everyone making rather a meal of it?’

  ‘Of course they are. Villages just do. Martin’s seeing someone called Sophie. I cannot tell you how suitable she is. She drives a Mini and has a King Charles spaniel. Allie, I really hate you.’