A Village Affair Read online

  ‘I couldn’t,’ said Mr Finch in offended tones, taking the note between finger and thumb, ‘possibly say.’

  Lettice and Martin emerged into the street together.

  ‘He’s a dreadful fellow,’ Lettice said, jerking her head backwards, ‘but then, running a village shop is enough to addle the sanest wits.’

  Martin laughed.

  ‘He’s not so bad. Made me rather look forward to my evening.’ He bent to open his car door. ‘Can I give you a lift?’

  Lettice shook her head.

  ‘Thanks, but no. My conscience is burdened by the fruit cake I ate for tea and will only be quieted by a little vigorous exercise.’ She looked at Martin with sudden keenness. ‘The whole village will know you and Clodagh had dinner together by tomorrow. Take no notice. Tell Clodagh from me that it’s time she went off and got herself a proper job. A job where she is stretched.’

  Martin got into the car and started it and went slowly up the hill. As he passed Lettice, she brandished her thumb stick at him, and a bit further on he passed Stuart Mott talking to Sir Ralph’s tractor driver, both of whom gave a brief, unsmiling nod. When he turned into his own drive, the kitten raced across his path in its usual ritual kamikaze greeting, and there – his insides gave a brief and pleasurable lurch – was Clodagh, taking washing off the line in the orchard beyond. She was wearing jeans and a black jacket embroidered with big, rough, silver stars.

  He got out of the car and went to lean on the orchard fence. It was a soft pale early evening and some of the fat buds on the apple trees were beginning to split over the bursting pinkness within. The air, having smelled of cold or mud for months, smelled of damp earth. The hens were muttering about in the grass around Clodagh’s feet. Last weekend, she had shown Martin how to measure their progress in coming into their first lay by the number of fingers you could place between the pelvic bone and the breast bone. ‘Not yet,’ she had said, ‘it ought to be four fingers. But coming on.’ He bent over the fence to make clucking noises at the hens, of which they sensibly took no notice, and then he said to Clodagh’s galaxied back, ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Don’t sound so thrilled,’ Clodagh said, dropping the last garments into the basket at her feet. ‘Alice meant to get home but your mother had killed the fatted calf so she couldn’t. And you aren’t deemed capable of scrambling your own eggs.’

  ‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ Martin said, opening the gate for her, ‘if you’re the alternative.’

  ‘You have very bizarre fish instead.’

  ‘Wonderful.’

  He followed her into the house and the kitten joined them, mewing faintly in anticipation of supper. Clodagh stopped and scooped it up and dumped it on the laundry.

  ‘You pig, cat. You’ve known there was fish in the house, all day, haven’t you.’

  ‘The whole village is talking about us. Apparently, you told Mr Finch you were getting supper for me.’

  ‘Yippee,’ Clodagh said. ‘At least it’ll take their minds off Pa’s rent rises—’

  ‘Rent rises?’

  ‘I do believe he’s putting up cottage rents a whole three pounds a week.’ She put the basket down on the kitchen table and picked out the kitten, who began at once to purr like a generator. ‘Anyway, you’ll know all about that soon, won’t you. As our new family lawyer?’

  Martin frowned. Spontaneity was one thing, indiscretion quite another. He hadn’t even been up to the Park to see Sir Ralph.

  ‘What do you know about that—’

  ‘Quite a bit.’

  ‘I suppose your father talks to you?’

  ‘Yes, he does. But this is different. This was my idea.’

  ‘Your idea? But Henry—’

  ‘Henry suggested your firm. I suggested you. Simple as that.’

  Martin was not at all sure if he was pleased about this. Being beholden to Sir Ralph for a benevolent idea was one thing, but to feel you were simply the result of a chance and frivolous notion of Clodagh’s was another.

  ‘You’re frowning,’ Clodagh said.

  ‘You make the whole thing sound so – so off the cuff—’

  ‘It was, rather.’

  Martin said stiffly, ‘I don’t like that.’

  Clodagh watched him.

  ‘If it had been a man, my father or my brother, you wouldn’t mind. It’s only because a woman suggested it, you feel insulted.’

  ‘No.’

  Clodagh went off to the larder and came back carrying a covered plate and an onion. Martin was still standing rather woodenly by the kitchen table. She put down the plate and the onion and came up to him.

  ‘Just because I thought of you,’ she said, ‘doesn’t mean it’s a silly suggestion. Pa wouldn’t have taken it up if it were silly, even for me. He was really thrilled. I promise you. You’ll see, when you go and talk to him.’

  Martin looked at her warily. His gaze was defensive.

  ‘I don’t like favours.’

  ‘Martin—’

  ‘I like to earn my way—’

  ‘But you are! Why should anyone offer you this if they didn’t think you’d be good at it? And good for us?’

  And then Martin, in some confusion of feeling and propelled by an urgency he was suddenly quite unable to control, leaned forward and kissed her. He then put his arms round her and held her very hard against him and bent his head to kiss her again. She said, very quietly, ‘No.’

  He smiled at her. He thought he was in charge.

  ‘Why no? I want to, you want—’

  ‘Because,’ Clodagh said, bending her head away, ‘I love Alice. You see.’

  He dropped his arms at once and turned away. He could feel his face grow fiery with shame and humiliation. He had broken his own rules.

  He mumbled, ‘So do I.’

  ‘I know you do.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry. I don’t know what came—’

  ‘Shh,’ she said. She came over and took his hand. ‘Forget it.’

  He thrust his chin out and removed his hand from hers.

  ‘I think I will scramble my own eggs.’

  Clodagh sighed.

  ‘As you wish.’

  She picked up the plate and the onion and took them back to the larder and returned with a wicker basket of eggs.

  ‘I’ll just feed Balloon.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Martin said, desperate both for her to go and for a drink.

  ‘Martin,’ Clodagh said, and her voice was kind, ‘no big deal. It simply didn’t happen,’ and then she went out through the stable door and after a while he heard her car start up and drive away and then Balloon came and pleaded penetratingly for food.

  Later, when he had poured himself a drink and fed the kitten, he went into his study and sat in the spring dusk and was very miserable. He was bitterly ashamed of himself, both for abusing Alice’s absence and for choosing someone who, by her own admission, was capable of better loyalty to Alice than her own husband was. He tried to comfort himself by remembering how unresponsive Alice had been recently – it was literally weeks since they had made love – but it was thin comfort and he had no faith in it. He wondered if he was going to be able to face Sir Ralph on Saturday because he felt his folly might be written on his brow for all to see. Not only had he behaved badly, but he had been rebuffed and rebuked. Martin was not a flirtatious man because he didn’t have the confidence to be one. He knew he feared rejection and that that fear made him unadventurous, and because he disliked very much being both unconfident and unenterprising and saw no way to remedy either, he sat in the deepening gloom and let his shame stagnate into bitterness. He had far too much whisky while this happened, and then grew maudlin, and wandered about the empty house and forgot his eggs altogether. He went over and over the little incident, foolishly and pointlessly, and finally went to bed in a very bad way indeed, forgetting to lock up downstairs so that Balloon, finding the larder door unsecured, levered his way in and achieved his ambition of three-quarter
s of a pound of monkfish.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Morning sunshine, coming in through the tall east windows of Pitcombe Park, fell upon the breakfast table, upon a jar of marmalade made by Mrs Shadwell the previous January, upon folded copies of The Times and the Daily Mail and upon a large biscuit tin bearing a Dymo-stamped label reading ‘Her Ladyship’s Ryvita’. Her Ladyship was not eating Ryvita. She was drinking a cup of coffee very slowly and trying very hard to concentrate on doing that, rather than on quarrelling with her husband.

  The subject was Clodagh. The subject between them in the last six weeks had almost exclusively been Clodagh. At first they had been united in loving anxiety and relief at having her home, and then in approving pleasure over her friendship with The Grey House, but then Sir Ralph had begun to devise schemes to make it possible for Clodagh to remain at home, financial schemes, and what had been a mere crevice of difference between them had widened into a rift.

  Margot Unwin loved her youngest daughter with quite as much energy as her husband did, but with more levelness of head. Clodagh’s adolescence, a roller-coaster ride of scrapes and truancies and broken-hearted friends who always seemed more loving than loved, had made her mother aware that she needed, in riding parlance, a short rein. Clodagh’s elder brother and sister had both been quite safe on longer reins, being more orthodox, less volatile and much duller, and Sir Ralph had always persisted in believing that Clodagh, left to herself, would emerge as tractable and conventional as young Ralph and Georgina had done. Attempt to coerce Clodagh into anything, he had always maintained, and it’s like throwing a lighted match into a barrel of gun-powder; give her all the space she needs and she will come, in her own time, as good as anyone could wish.

  ‘Don’t,’ Margot Unwin said, ‘say gunpowder to me again.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Sir Ralph said, faintly huffy. He had grown fond of the image, over the years. ‘I am only trying to illustrate what I believe.’

  ‘I know what you believe.’

  Sir Ralph began to butter toast vigorously.

  ‘And I’m right. Her coming home from America proves I’m right. She couldn’t, she found, be as bohemian as she thought she could, so she came home, very sensibly.’

  ‘I don’t think,’ Margot said, putting down her coffee cup, ‘you could call being half-engaged to an immensely successful American lawyer very bohemian. I suppose you mean it was bohemian of them to live together. And it wasn’t sense that brought Clodagh home, it was the need of refuge—’

  There was a knock and the door opened. Shadwell and two liver and white springer spaniels looked in.

  ‘Mr Dunne’s here, sir. And Mr Jordan. I’ve put them in the library. Mr Dunne said not to hurry as he knows he’s early.’

  ‘Thank you, Shadwell.’

  The door closed. Sir Ralph rose and shook out his huge napkin like a sail cracking in the wind.

  ‘We’ll talk about this later, Margot.’

  She did not move, but she said in her most commanding-committee voice, ‘You must know, Ralph, that I absolutely disapprove of what you are about to suggest to Henry. It is quite wrong. It is unfair to young Ralph and to Georgina and it will be disastrous for Clodagh. I may not be physically present at the meeting, but my astral self will be.’ She paused, and then added, ‘Very forcibly.’

  And then she picked up the Daily Mail, shook it flat and, with the skill of long practice, opened it at Nigel Dempster.

  ‘Who are all those?’

  Henry Dunne squinted up at the marble busts along the top of the library bookshelves.

  ‘Roman emperors, I think.’

  ‘Heavens,’ Martin said. ‘Real?’

  ‘Oh yes, Grand Tour stuff. This room was done about seventeen-eighty.’

  ‘It’s amazing—’

  ‘It’s lovely,’ Henry said, with the carelessness of one quite familiar with amazingness, ‘isn’t it?’

  It was a long room, with three floor-length windows at one end, lined entirely with books. Over the books at one end was pinned a huge map of the estate. By the windows a vast partner’s desk was heaped with papers, and parallel to the fireplace an amiable elderly red leather sofa faced a handsome portrait of the Unwin who had made the room and furnished its corners with a marble goddess, a Roman senator and a bronze, after Flaxman, of St Michael slaying Satan. The rest of the room was comfortingly filled with map cases and loaded tables and dog baskets. Here and there enormous hippeastrums reared out of Oriental urns, and turned their majestic striped trumpets to the light. The air of the room smelt of man and dog and polished leather and history. Martin sniffed. This, he thought in the phrase he had once used to himself about Alice, this is something.

  Sir Ralph and two spaniels came in on a benevolent tide of greeting. He was carrying a file of papers and was followed by Shadwell with a tray of coffee. They sat down round the fire after shaking hands, and the third baronet looked down on them from his place on the over-mantel panelling as he had looked down for two hundred years already. Sir Ralph waved an introductory hand towards him.

  ‘Sir John. His elder brother, Ralph, died when only a child. He’s the only John Unwin in an unbroken line of Ralphs, back to James I. So you see,’ handing Martin a cup, ‘you’ll be taking on, if you agree, over three hundred of us.’

  ‘Henry did say—’

  ‘Did he? Good. Excellent. I wanted to see you at once but Henry is frightfully cautious. Aren’t you, Henry? Insisted on seeing you first. What do you say?’

  Martin was afraid that his eagerness was written on his face.

  ‘Well, of course, Sir Ralph, if the idea meets with the approval of my senior partners, I’d be more than happy—’

  ‘I’ll make sure they’re happy. My dear fellow, of course they’ll jump at it. Can’t tell you what a difference it will make, having you a stone’s throw away.’

  Henry, recollecting how he and Juliet were constantly at the mercy of midnight telephone calls about estate business, busied himself with his coffee cup. Martin could discover the job’s little hazards for himself.

  ‘The first thing I want to discuss, you see – and this is urgent – is my provision for Clodagh. I know,’ Sir Ralph said, waving a dismissive hand at Martin’s rising objection of professional inability even to hear the legal problem of someone who was not yet his client, ‘you can’t tell me anything yet. But I want to tell you. Because it’s the first thing I’ll want you to deal with.’

  He got up and went off for the coffee pot. Behind his back, Henry signalled Martin to smiling acquiescence about anything Sir Ralph might say, however bizarre. He came back and refilled their cups with alarming swoops of his tweed-clad arm.

  ‘Of course, this house and estate go to young Ralph. Goes without saying and I’m only thankful he wants it and doesn’t feel he ought to be running a soup kitchen in Stepney or some pop group thing. As to the girls, I’ve got a couple of farms in trust for them, Georgina’s in Wales, Clodagh’s not far from here, near Wimborne. They aren’t supposed to have them until my death but I want Clodagh to have hers now. I think she needs the income. What do you think? Am I going to have a problem unscrambling the trust? To be honest, Martin, I don’t like problems.’

  Martin swallowed.

  ‘It’s a bit difficult, not knowing anything about—’

  ‘But you must,’ Sir Ralph said with energetic friendliness, ‘know about trusts. You are a lawyer.’

  ‘There are a lot of complications,’ Henry said, coming to the rescue. ‘And until Martin has seen all the documents—’

  ‘It’s an express trust,’ Sir Ralph said to Martin.

  Martin shifted and put down his coffee cup.

  ‘Usually, if all the beneficiaries of a trust are of age and in agreement, they can put an end to a trust—’

  ‘Excellent!’

  ‘But of course, that may not apply in this case because of other factors I don’t know about.’

  ‘What I want, you see,’ Sir Ralph said, turning the fu
ll charm of his smile upon Martin, ‘is to be able to provide Clodagh with enough to live on, without her feeling under pressure to take the wrong kind of job. You have seen enough of Clodagh to agree with me that that must not happen.’

  Henry, seeing on Martin’s face the as yet unspoken question of what was the right kind of job for Clodagh, cleared his throat loudly and frowned.

  ‘Yes,’ Martin said lamely, to Sir Ralph.

  Sir Ralph went over to the windows.

  ‘Come here and have a look.’

  Martin followed.

  ‘See all the new planting? Every tree indigenous. I hate to tell you how many elms we lost and now Henry tells me there’s honey rot in the beech hanger. Well, what d’you say?’

  He turned and faced Martin.

  ‘My trees, my tenants, my daughter. You and Henry between you, hm? Keep us all in order. Ring Henry later in the week when you have told your partners, and he’ll put you in the picture.’ He held out his hand and shook Martin’s warmly. ‘I’m so pleased, so very pleased. Give my love to your pretty wife.’

  On the days when Clodagh did the school run, for Alice, Alice painted. She began to paint much bigger, more abstract things, and to think, much more than she ever had before, about colour and light, as well as shapes. When she wasn’t painting, or doing things for the children or the house, Clodagh took her round the village, to introduce her to all the cottagers. Clodagh knew everyone. As a child she had made a point of it, partly out of social curiosity and partly out of an appetite for oddness. The village had grown perfectly used to her, so used that she got slapped and shouted at along with their own children. In the village she learned obscene words for parts of the body which she took back to the Park to alarm Georgina with, and scrumped for apples (this was pure affectation for the Park glasshouses yielded white peaches and Black Hamburg grapes) and joined the Bonfire Night gangs that put jumping jacks in village dustbins. Watching the dustbins dance, clattering their lids, had been, she told Alice, one of the purest joys of her life.

  In return, the village preferred her to any other Unwin, even though, inconsistently, they would have been shocked to see Sir Ralph or Lady Unwin being as impudently approachable as Clodagh. She had entrée everywhere. Alice, a little self-conscious and anxious not to intrude or patronize, went in her wake in and out of a series of sitting rooms, where the television blethered on unwatched in corners and where old beams and fireplaces had been boxed in with plywood to modernize their old-fashioned shortcomings. She drank a good deal of dark tea, listened to endless monologues about health, and helped to wash up in kitchens where potato chips and motorbike parts bubbled companionably away side by side in their pans of oil. In the newer cottages picture windows let in blank blocks of light and fireplace surrounds rose in pyramidal steps dotted with brass animals and ornamental china thimbles. There weren’t enough children, Alice noticed, not enough prams in back gardens and tricycles blocking hallways.