A Village Affair Read online

  Alice, Peter Morris knew, would have been amazed to find how much she was watched and how much the village knew about her. It had amazed Peter himself, at his first country living in Suffolk, to realize that not a line of washing could go up nor an order of groceries be placed without every item being noticed, and conclusions drawn. When he heard someone in the Pitcombe shop say, ‘She keeps the children nice,’ he knew that meant that the frequency of lines of socks and knickers blowing in The Grey House orchard had not gone unremarked.

  Even with the great Admiral aloft to talk and pray to, Peter Morris was very conscious of his solitariness. He had not really meant to remain a widower so long – his marriage had only managed two years before his wife’s cancer had killed her, in four months, start to finish – but he had never found another woman to whom he could talk as comfortably as he had to Mary. He had come very close to it in Suffolk, with a woman who, in the end, decided she could not be a parson’s wife, and then, oddly enough, he had found quite recently an excellent friend in Lettice Deverel of Pitcombe. She was over seventy, scholarly, sharp and a Shavian socialist. She kept a harp in her muddled sitting room, and a green Amazon parrot in the kitchen and she had not a minute in the world for airs and graces. In the last three years, Peter Morris had taken to going up the lane from his sturdy early Victorian rectory to her Regency villa at the top of the village when he had a human knot to untie. Even if she said, as she often did, that she knew nothing about backward babies or neurotic spinsters or the male menopause or whatever the current problem was, she was a good sounding board, and simply went on making bread or potting up pelargoniums while he talked himself to some kind of conclusion.

  Rose Villa contained an accumulation of a lifetime’s energetic curiosity and culture. As a young woman Lettice Deverel had taught in an international school in Switzerland and had learned to ski in brown leather boots – there was a matching brown photograph to prove it. She had then come home to teach with the Workers’ Education Authority, and gone on to be librarian of a famous collection on the history of women in England. All her life she had painted, cooked, gardened, written, read, travelled and kept animals and a diary. She played both the piano and the harp. She had always lived alone and had collected a wide and enthusiastic circle of friends. When Peter Morris added himself to the circle, she told him that she was agnostic and that she had never known a priest well before. He said in that case, she was about to learn. She said, meaning it, ‘But I won’t stand for God being dragged in all the time,’ and he had replied, ‘Well, He won’t mind that as there’s nothing He dislikes so much as no reaction at all.’

  It had been a good start. Three years later, among a welter of weekly minutiae, they had together been through Clodagh Unwin’s defection to America, the death of Miss Pimm’s tyrannical but worshipped old mother, a crippling motorbike accident to the brightest boy in the village, cot deaths, Down’s Syndrome babies, broken marriages, drunkenness, unemployment, fire, flood and pestilence. Alice Jordan seemed to Lettice Deverel a very minor problem indeed. She went on thumping her dough while she said, ‘Of course, you wouldn’t trouble yourself about her if she wasn’t good-looking.’

  ‘Good morning,’ the parrot said from his cage. ‘And who’s a pretty parrot then?’

  ‘I might,’ said Peter Morris, who never minded being found out, ‘not trouble myself quite so much—’

  ‘She may be a very spoiled young woman, for all we know. And of course spoiled people inevitably become discontented in time.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s spoiled. I think she may be unhappy, but I don’t think it’s discontent. It might be disappointment, of course. In her marriage, maybe.’

  Lettice Deverel had encountered Martin several times in the village; once, outside the shop, she had dropped a bag of flour and he had helped her, most assiduously, to scoop it into the gutter. She gave a faint snort.

  ‘The English public school system—’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘—renders most men incapable of recognizing or acknowledging their own states of mind. Makes them emotionally inarticulate.’ She poked a floury finger at Peter. ‘Makes most of them afraid of women. Drives any of them who go to Winchester quite round the bend.’

  ‘I think Martin Jordan went to Rugby.’

  ‘Stands out a mile off.’

  She dumped fat sausages of dough into loaf tins and set them at the back of her ancient Rayburn to rise.

  ‘If you’re trying to make me say I think you should go and talk to her, you’re out of luck. You leave well alone.’

  ‘Laugh like parrots at a bagpiper,’ said the parrot. ‘Good morning. Merchant of Venice. Pretty parrot.’

  ‘She’s rather a good painter, you see,’ Peter said, ‘and she won’t paint. Or can’t paint.’

  ‘Creativity isn’t like carpentry.’

  Peter Morris stood up.

  ‘Why have you taken against Alice Jordan?’

  ‘I’ve done no such thing. I’ve admired her about the village and I’ve noticed what you have noticed. But I haven’t woven sentimental fantasies about her. You leave her be. She’s got pride. Now come outside and have a look at the camellia I thought the frost had done for. You never saw such leaders—’

  The last week of the spring school holidays was soft and warm, with the sun shining bright and hard through the still bare branches of trees. Pitcombe began to break the winter seal on its doors and windows and pot plants were put out on doorsteps, like invalids, to take a little reviving air. Lettice Deverel washed the blankets on her bed as a gesture to spring cleaning, and started to go for walks again, declining to do so in winter because she said there was no point in walking when you had to keep your eyes on your feet rather than the view. In rubber-soled brogues and grasping a thumb stick, she set off most afternoons at a determined pace and the village, noticing her departures, said to one another, grinning, that spring must have come if Miss D. was off again. Fred Mott’s grandson, Stuart, who was unemployed and a competition gardener, took advantage of these walks to take a wheelbarrow up to Rose Villa by the field path where he would be less observed, and to help himself to some excellent and well-rotted compost.

  Sometimes Lettice went up the hill and round the edge of the Park. Sometimes she went either way along the river path, or across fields by bridleways to King’s Harcourt and Barleston. Her favourite walk, however, was to skirt the higher boundary of The Grey House garden and strike east along the hillside, with the river below her and a widening valley view opening out ahead. She noticed, with approval, that the window frames of The Grey House were being painted and that someone had begun to thin out the depressing hedge of mahonias that John Murray-French had simply ignored. There was a new sandpit on the lawn outside the kitchen door, and a tricycle and a pleasingly full washing line. Lettice had never wanted to marry but she was a staunch supporter of family life.

  Two fields beyond The Grey House, she could hear children. She dropped down the slope a little so that she could see the river, and there some way below her in the grass sat Alice Jordan and Clodagh Unwin with a basket and a baby, while a girl and a boy were jumping about over the trunk of a fallen willow near-by. It was a very pretty scene. It might have been, Lettice thought, the subject of one of those Victorian narrative paintings on which her artistic teeth had been cut. Alice wore blue and Clodagh was wrapped in a strange cloak of yellow and black. Lettice, who had known Clodagh from a child and believed her to be thoroughly spoiled and the only original child of the Unwin family, considered going down the slope to join them, and to meet Alice Jordan properly. But they looked so complete in themselves that she decided against it, and tramped on above them with her stick in her right hand and her face set determinedly to the eastward view.

  ‘Don’t you have any curiosity about me?’ Clodagh was saying.

  She had been wearing a long string of yellow amber beads under her cloak, and she had taken them off and given them to Charlie who was collapsing them, up and
down, up and down, on his knees.

  ‘I’m dying of it,’ Alice said, ‘but I thought it was generally accepted that no one must ask.’

  ‘Ask what—’

  ‘About New York.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Clodagh said, ‘what about New York?’

  Alice leaned on one elbow, turning herself towards Charlie and Clodagh.

  ‘Well. I may have got it all wrong, but I understood that a love affair that might have ended in marriage went wrong and you have come home with a broken heart.’

  ‘Broken heart?’ Clodagh said. ‘Hah! Marriage. Honestly.’

  Alice waited. Charlie swung the beads from side to side and talked excitedly to them.

  ‘I see,’ Clodagh said. ‘I’m the poor little jilted fiancée, am I?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Alice said, ‘I don’t know anything. And if you want to be mysterious, I never shall.’

  There was a pause. Then Clodagh said, ‘I don’t want to be mysterious. Not to you.’

  Alice lay down in the grass and waited. It was ten days since the dinner party at Pitcombe Park, and she had seen Clodagh on eight of them. Clodagh had come down to The Grey House constantly on some pretext or other, bringing with her a tabby kitten and a significant change of atmosphere. It was she who suggested this picnic, just as she had suggested a number of other things – getting the drawing room curtains up, learning songs to her guitar, making fudge, choosing old roses to climb through apple trees – that had made them all feel that life was markedly improved.

  ‘There was a love affair,’ Clodagh said, ‘and it did end. But I ended it.’

  Alice turned her head sideways. She could see the backs of Charlie’s and Clodagh’s heads against the sky.

  ‘Then even if you’re sad, you aren’t as sad as you would have been if you had been thrown over.’

  Clodagh didn’t turn around.

  ‘I’m not sad at all. I’m thankful to be out of it. I was nearly stifled with possessiveness. Couldn’t go out without saying where, couldn’t telephone without saying who, couldn’t buy so much as new socks without being asked who they were meant to impress. And as I was being virtually kept, after I gave up my job, I wasn’t in much of a position to object.’

  ‘So he wanted to marry you?’

  Clodagh turned round suddenly and lay on her front so that her face was close to Alice’s.

  ‘There wasn’t any question of marriage.’

  ‘Oh Lord,’ Alice said. ‘Was he married already?’

  Clodagh raised her eyes so that she was looking straight at Alice, only a foot away.

  ‘Alice,’ she said, ‘he was a woman. That’s why.’

  Alice thought she had stopped breathing.

  ‘My lover was a woman,’ Clodagh said.

  Alice sat up.

  ‘So all this millionaire lawyer stuff was just a smokescreen—’

  ‘She was a millionaire. Is, I mean. And she is a lawyer. And she’d have married me like a shot. As it was, she did everything but eat me. So I had to leave.’

  ‘Clodagh—’

  Clodagh sat up and put an arm across Alice’s shoulders, above Charlie’s head.

  ‘Have I shocked you?’

  ‘No,’ Alice said. ‘Yes. I don’t know—’ She turned to look at Clodagh. ‘Do you hate men?’

  Clodagh began to laugh.

  ‘Oh, Alice—’

  ‘Shut up,’ Alice said angrily, twitching her shoulders free.

  ‘Listen,’ Clodagh said, ‘I like men a lot. I don’t sleep with women because I have to. I do it because I choose to. We all have a choice, you, me, everyone—’

  Charlie tipped himself sideways and began to crawl energetically down the grassy slope towards his brother and sister. Alice made as if to follow, but Clodagh held her.

  ‘He’s fine. We’ll go after him if we need to. We haven’t finished.’

  ‘I don’t know what to think—’

  ‘Don’t try then.’

  ‘Tell me—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, Clodagh, I don’t know, I don’t – just, tell me – tell me what happened, what’s happened to you—’

  ‘Nothing’s happened. Before I was twenty I slept with boys and girls – girls first of course because of boarding school – and I liked girls better. Nothing happened to me unless you can call the discovery of preferring girls a happening. I’ve had two proper affairs, one with a writer in London and then this one, with an American lawyer whom I met through my first lover and some libel action over a book of hers. The first affair was really better because we were more equal and I don’t like being dominated. If I did, I’d probably like sex with men more. I got stuck in the New York business. I was very bowled over by all the glamour and Concorde and skiing in Aspen and stuff, and by the time that had worn off I was up to my neck, New York job, amazing apartment and this besotted woman. All her friends said she’d kill herself if I left, so I stayed. And then I realized that if I didn’t leave, I’d kill myself, so I went. And she did try to kill herself but they got her to hospital in time and pumped her stomach and the lover who’d preceded me in her life and always wanted her back anyway has taken her to Florida.’

  Natasha came stumbling up the field to say that James had got river inside his Wellingtons.

  ‘Tell him to take them off and play in bare feet.’ Alice was astonished her voice should sound so ordinary.

  ‘And Charlie’s eating all kinds of things. We thought we saw him eat a ladybird—’

  Clodagh laughed.

  ‘Did he spit it out?’

  ‘No. He sort of crunched it—’ Alice began to get up.

  ‘Perhaps we should go back—’

  ‘No,’ Natasha pleaded. ‘Please not yet. We’re on a voyage. Please.’

  She went dancing back to the fallen tree. Alice followed her with her eyes, devouringly.

  ‘Did you love her?’

  ‘Of course,’ Clodagh said. ‘At the beginning. Or at least, I was in love.’ She looked at Alice, smiling. ‘Are you suggesting I’m only in it for the sex?’

  ‘Of course not—’

  ‘Alice,’ Clodagh said, and her voice was warmly affectionate, ‘you don’t know a thing about a thing, do you?’

  Alice said nothing.

  ‘A husband, three children but you aren’t even awake. You haven’t one clue about how wonderful you are, nor how to live—’

  Alice’s voice was choked with angry tears.

  ‘Don’t be cheap. Living isn’t your jet-setting, sexually indulgent merry-go-round. Living is getting on with things, bearing things, making things work—’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Clodagh said. She put her hands over her face. After a while she took them away again and said, in the gentlest voice, ‘My poor little Alice.’

  ‘I’m not poor. And don’t patronize me.’

  ‘Believe me,’ Clodagh said, ‘that’s the last thing I want to do.’

  Alice began to rip up single grasses, like tearing hairs out of a head.

  ‘It’s you who don’t know what life is for. You don’t live, you just pass the time. You only want to enjoy yourself—’

  ‘Ah,’ said Clodagh, quite unperturbed, ‘the puritan ethic yet again, I see.’ She stretched across and very gently but firmly took hold of Alice’s agitated hand. ‘Alice. If I’m so wrong and you are so right, why are you so cross and unhappy?’

  ‘I’m not—’

  ‘Alice.’

  Alice took her hand away and wound her arms round her knees and put her head down on them. She said, muffled, ‘I’ve tried so hard—’

  ‘Too hard, perhaps.’

  ‘You couldn’t call my children not living properly—’

  ‘I don’t. But you won’t have them for ever and you’ll always have you.’

  ‘Sounds to me like the usual live-for-yourself pseudo-psychological American claptrap—’

  Clodagh let a little pause fall and then she stood up so that her voice should come down to Alice fr
om a distance.

  ‘If you aren’t happy with yourself, you aren’t any use to anyone else. And I should think that should satisfy even your masochistic puritanism.’

  And then she went down the slope to the children, who were delighted to see her and let her come on board their ship and sail over the grassy sea. Above them, in a perfect turmoil of fury and relief and misery and excitement, Alice sat where Clodagh had left her and cried copiously into her folded arms.

  When they returned to the house at teatime, Clodagh carrying Charlie and Alice the picnic basket, they found Cecily in the drive, in her car, reading a magazine. Natasha and James were entranced at this and rushed forward with pleased screams but Alice felt, for the disconcerting first time, less pleased than she expected to. She said, ‘My mother-in-law,’ to Clodagh and went forward behind the children.

  Cecily got out of the car all smiles and hugs. She took no notice of Alice’s wariness and hugged her too, with her usual warmth, and kissed Charlie and said hello to Clodagh. She had never done this before, never arrived on impulse without warning – it was one of her rules – but then she had never felt so out of touch, so – so excluded from Alice’s life as she had recently. Even given Alice’s precarious state of mind, the telephone had been abnormally silent and when she had, after intense self-examination, tried to ring, there was either no one there or only Gwen who answered the telephone with an affectation that set Cecily’s teeth on edge – ‘Mrs Jordan’s residence’ – and was then elaborately, unnecessarily, discreet about Alice’s whereabouts.