A Village Affair Read online

  He said crossly, ‘I manage you mean.’

  She tried not to feel furious. She tried not to remember that Martin had a private income, even if it wasn’t huge, so that money never was a proper problem to them, as it was to other people. They weren’t rich, but they weren’t uncomfortable either. Martin hated her to talk about his private money; he was very secretive about it. She thought that his pride suffered from knowing he did not earn very much as a country solicitor and probably never would. She told herself he had to pretend he earned all their income, for his own self-esteem. So she waited, looking at his rough, fair head bent over the newspaper, and after a bit she said, ‘You see, I think we’ll be so happy at The Grey House. That’s the element I think is so important.’

  They had many such conversations. Sometimes Martin said, ‘Aren’t you happy here, then?’ and sometimes he said, ‘Oh I know, I know, I’m just being an ass, you know how I hate thinking about money,’ and once he said, ‘Thanks a bloody million,’ and stamped out. She began to follow him but stopped, and they went to bed that night hardly speaking. That kind of thing was, of course, terribly tiring, far more tiring than digging a whole cabbage patch or painting a ceiling or spending an entire day in London Christmas shopping in the rain. Alice blew her nose again now and stood up. She would go into the drawing room. Nobody could ever want to cry in the drawing room.

  But she did. She stood by the fireplace in the lovely long low room with its bookcases, and windows to the terrace, and imagined decorating the Christmas tree in that corner, and doing a vast arrangement of dried flowers in that, and hanging up those marvellous miles of ivory moire curtain that Martin’s mother had given her, at all the windows, and she felt worse than she had in the kitchen. She felt despair. At least, she thought it was despair, but she did not think she had ever had a feeling like this in her life with which to compare it. She fled from the drawing room to the dining room, confronted images of herself smiling down the candlelit length of the table across dishes of perfect food, and fled again, upstairs and into the first bedroom she came to.

  It was John’s. It would be hers and Martin’s. It was the room she had dreamed of most, of lying in bed with the view of the valley surging in through those near floor-length windows. She knew where she would put her dressing table, and the little sofa her mother-in-law had given her, and where she would hang her collection of drawings of seated women, a collection she had begun when she was fourteen. She looked at the room now in panic. There was no malevolence in it, nothing in it but its usual graceful, placid charm. The panic was in her. She put her hands to her face. It was burning hot.

  In the bathroom John’s old pug was curled up in a basket in the bottom of the airing cupboard. The door was open so that he shouldn’t feel claustrophobic. He grunted when Alice came in but didn’t stir. It was a huge bathroom, with an armchair and a bookcase, ancient club scales, lots of magazines in ragged stacks, a lovely view and several friendly, doggy old dressing gowns hung in a mound on the back of the door. Alice shut the door behind her and locked it. She ran a basin of cool water and splashed her face, then she dried it on John’s towel, which smelt attractively male, and sat down in the armchair. Deep breaths, one after the other. Close eyes. Idiotic Alice, mad Alice, lucky Alice. She was still holding John’s towel. She buried her face in it. How good male things were when they were impersonal to you: the sound of a strange man’s confident stride across a wooden floor, a man behind you at a newspaper kiosk rattling the change in his pocket, the contrast of wrist skin and shirt cuff and jacket sleeve on your neighbour at a dinner party, John’s bald old bath towel. She felt better and stood up.

  ‘Never a word of this to anyone,’ she said to the pug and went downstairs.

  In what would be Martin’s study, and was now a fuggy and welcoming burrow where John spent winter evenings, Alice found Charlie sitting on Gwen’s knee with her beads round his neck, and Henry Dunne. Henry was Sir Ralph’s agent, and although John Murray-French had bought The Grey House from the estate long before Henry’s day, it was still regarded as being in the fold. Henry and John’s son had been at Eton together and Henry often came in on his way here and there across the estate, to tell him this and that and to describe the hunting days which were his passion and which John, leisuredly french-polishing his ducks, didn’t seem to mind hearing about, over and over. John’s patience meant that when Henry got home he didn’t feel the urge to tell Juliet, his wife, all about hunting, which was just as well because it made her scream, literally, with boredom.

  Henry thought Alice was wonderful. He thought her beautiful too, with her long dark blue eyes and her astonishing high-plaited hair, but he was rather afraid she might be quite clever. Last New Year’s Eve he had hoped she thought him wonderful too because he had boldly kissed her, quite separately from all that lunatic midnight kissing which was always such chaos you might well end up kissing the furniture, and she had seemed to like it. He said, ‘Goodnight, my lovely,’ to her in a whisper when the party broke up at last and she gave him a long look. But when he saw her next it was in Salisbury, by chance, and she was pushing her baby in a little pram thing and although she smiled at him, she was absolutely composed and even said, ‘Wasn’t that a lovely party, at the New Year?’

  He said, ‘You made it lovely. For me.’

  And she smiled at him and shook her head.

  ‘Do you mean, Alice, that you didn’t—’

  ‘I mean that—’

  She stopped. He said, ‘What? What? Tell me.’

  She looked at him again. There was a flicker of fear in her face, he could see it, even a dope like him whom Juliet was always saying had the perceptiveness of a myopic buffalo.

  ‘Please not,’ Alice said, and then she had kissed his cheek quickly and pushed her baby into Marks and Spencer.

  She seemed only delighted to see him now. She kissed him, said, ‘How’s Juliet?’ and ‘Oh, you old ponce,’ to Charlie, and sat down beside Gwen.

  ‘The house looks so nice,’ she said to Gwen, untruthfully, since she had hardly noticed.

  ‘I do my best. Bit of a business, what with the Major’s pipes and the carving and the dogs. But we struggle on, don’t we gorgeous?’

  Charlie made mewing noises in Alice’s direction. She lifted him off Gwen’s knee and returned the beads.

  ‘Gwen says she’s staying on,’ Henry said.

  ‘I know. Isn’t it marvellous of her?’

  ‘Four mornings I’ll do here. And a day to muck out the Major when he’s in his cottage. You should see the place now, walls running with damp—’

  Alice stood up, holding Charlie against her shoulder.

  ‘Thank you so much for your kindness, Gwen. It’s such a weight off my mind, knowing you’ll help me. I ought to go and round up the children now.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Henry said. ‘I only came to leave John the surveyor’s report on his cottage.’

  Gwen opened the front door for them both. Alice put a hand on it. Her front door. She took her hand away quickly and put it back under Charlie’s solidly padded bottom.

  ‘Bye now,’ Gwen said. ‘Mind how you go. Bye-bye, you lovely boy.’

  When the door had shut, Alice said, ‘Is she going to drive me mad?’

  Henry looked mildly shocked.

  ‘I don’t think you’ll find anyone else very easily. Everyone is crying out for help and I know for certain Elizabeth Pitt has her eye on Gwen, and so does Sarah Alleyne, except nobody can bear to work for her for more than a month.’

  He opened the car boot so that Alice could stow Charlie away in his carrycot.

  ‘We’re all thrilled you have got this house, you know. It’ll make such a difference to the village.’

  Alice straightened up.

  ‘We’re so lucky.’

  ‘I’ll say. The hordes John has had to beat away don’t bear thinking of. He said a chap appeared out of the blue driving a black BMW and offered him four hundred thousand.’
/>   ‘What has a BMW got to do with it?’

  Henry said, faintly nettled, ‘He must have come down from the City. That sort of money.’

  Alice said nothing. She stood quite still and looked at the house. The light was beginning to fade and Gwen had switched on a lamp here and there, coral-coloured rectangles in the soft grey façade. It looked idyllic.

  ‘I’m sick with envy,’ Henry said, watching her. ‘Me and half Wiltshire.’

  Alice turned slowly to face him. She reached out and touched his hand for a second.

  ‘The thing is,’ she said, quite calmly, ‘that now that I have it, I don’t in the least want it.’

  And then she burst into tears.

  ‘I don’t know what it is,’ Martin said into the telephone, keeping his voice down even though Alice was upstairs in the bath. ‘She doesn’t seem able to tell me. She thinks The Grey House is lovely, she doesn’t want to stay here, but she says she is terrified of moving.’

  His mother, fifty miles away in Dorset, said, ‘Is it the moving itself?’

  ‘Can’t be,’ Martin said. ‘She never minds anything like that. I’ve never seen her like this.’

  ‘She was very upset for a while after Charlie—’

  ‘That’s all over,’ Martin said. ‘Pronounced A-one four months ago.’

  ‘Have you,’ Martin’s mother said, ‘been quarrelling?’

  Too loudly Martin said, ‘No.’ Then he said, more ordinarily, ‘The odd bicker, I suppose, over what we ought to offer for The Grey House, but not quarrelling.’

  ‘Can I speak to her?’

  ‘She’s in the bath. She doesn’t know I’m ringing you.’

  Martin’s mother, who loved her daughter-in-law dearly, said with some indignation, ‘Behind her back, as if she was unfit to hear? No wonder she cries.’

  Martin drooped. It was as it ever was. He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t longed to please his mother, to feel confidential with her, and then to know every time that he had failed. He knew she loved him – but he wasn’t ever sure she liked him. It was rather the same with his elder brother Anthony, except that Anthony was tougher and ruder, so that they sparred together. He remembered with customary bewilderment his mother saying to Alice ten years ago, ‘I’m glad it’s Martin you’re marrying, not Anthony. I love Anthony but I know he is really a horrible boy.’

  And she meant it. It wasn’t a doting mother’s joke. Martin wondered uneasily what his mother had said to Alice about him; there was so much she had said to Alice that he would never know.

  ‘Of course talk to her,’ he said now, stiffly, ‘if you think it’ll do any good.’

  ‘Get her to ring me,’ Cecily Jordan said, ‘when she’s out of the bath.’

  He sighed and put the receiver down. He was frightfully tired. He had got back from a long day, and everything looked entirely as usual, children in bed, supper ready, Alice in the low slipper chair by the fire in their tiny sitting room, stitching at some tapestry thing until she turned her face up for his greeting kiss and he saw she had been crying. She then cried on and off all through supper. She said, between crying and mouthfuls, that she had an awful feeling of foreboding that it just wasn’t going to work. He had said, ‘The Grey House, you mean?’

  ‘No – no – not the house exactly, just living there, us living there—’

  ‘But it’s the thing you have always wanted!’

  ‘I know,’ she said, pushing her plate away half-full. ‘I know. That’s why I am so afraid.’

  He tried to jolly her.

  ‘You’re not afraid of anything! You never have been. You terrify me, skiing.’

  ‘Oh,’ Alice said dismissively, ‘physical things. Easy. This is something much more alarming, a sort of utterly lost feeling, as if I’d staked everything on something that wasn’t there at all.’

  Martin began to finish the lasagne she had left.

  ‘I don’t understand you,’ he said.

  He still didn’t. Perhaps his mother was right and it was the remains of post-Charlie blues. He felt sorry for her, but at the same time faintly aggrieved that she couldn’t behave normally about something she had said she desperately wanted and that he had really had to battle to achieve. He’d had to sell a lot of shares, a lot, for The Grey House. He looked round the room, tiny but full of fascinating things and bold stuffs and extraordinary paintings which he wouldn’t have chosen himself in a million years but which he found he really liked, now he saw them. Very Alice. He looked into the fire. He felt she was failing him.

  When she came down, in a yellow dressing gown with her plait pinned up on top with a comb, he said, trying not to sound surly, ‘Ma says would you ring her.’

  A kind of light came into Alice’s eyes, a look of relief and hope.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Did she ring?’

  ‘I rang her.’

  ‘Martin, I’m not being deliberately neurotic. I detest feeling like this. If I could stop, I would.’

  He got out of his chair and went to kick a log in the fireplace. He thought of his mother’s tone to him, on the telephone. He said to Alice, ‘Is it me? Is it something to do with me? Are you sick of me?’

  Alice gave a little gasp.

  ‘Oh no!’

  He grunted.

  ‘Just wondered.’

  The wrong note in the melody sang out again, tiny and harsh, in her mind. She went across the room and put her arms round him from behind, laying her cheek against his back.

  ‘You know it isn’t that. Haven’t I kept telling you that I want The Grey House because I know we’ll be happy there?’

  ‘But that doesn’t fit in with all this panic.’

  ‘Exactly. It’s probably some hormone imbalance. That’s what I’ve been thinking about in the bath.’

  He turned round and held her. He thought how much more often he needed to make love to her than she wanted to have it made to her. He took a deep breath.

  ‘Go and ring Ma,’ he said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Before Cecily Jordan had married, she had been, briefly, a Lieder singer. She had gone to Vienna, to train, in 1937, in the teeth of her parents’ opposition, and had, at eighteen, fallen wildly in love with music, with Vienna, and with a young Jewish composer and political activist. It was he who introduced her to the pure and lovely solo songs of Schubert and who taught her to vary her performance from lyrical to intensely dramatic, as the Lied required. This he did partly by technical instruction, and partly by taking her to bed and awakening her to a consciousness of her own powers which she found quite natural to express in song.

  In the winter of 1938 he made her promise, by threatening never to see her again if she wouldn’t comply, to go home at once to England if anything should befall him. He made her write the promise down and sign it. In June 1939, he was arrested while crossing the Ringstrasse, in midday sunlight, and a note from him, containing the written promise, was brought to her while she stood in her sunny, dusty, cluttered room out by the Prater Park, doing her voice exercises.

  ‘To break your promise will make everything infinitely worse for both of us and I should despise, not admire you for it,’ her lover wrote. ‘The best thing you can do for us now is to take that lovely voice we have made together back to England, and use it as a light in a dark world.’

  He did not write that he loved her. Sitting in a series of hideous trains crawling home across Europe, Cecily reflected that he had never said it either. She hadn’t noticed, so busy had she been doing the loving for both of them. She arrived in battened-down England in August, numb and almost speechless, and went out to Suffolk to her parents’ house, where her mother was relishing the prospect of the privations of wartime, had already sold all her childhood books for salvage and had painted a red line round the bath, four inches from the bottom, as a peculiarly irritating kind of Plimsoll line.

  Cecily tried to sing, but she couldn’t. War was declared in September but it seemed to her that the news ca
me from very far away and had no direct relevance to her. She slept badly and spent a greater part of each night lying awake reliving Vienna. By day she went for punishing walks and talked a good deal about joining up, which she did not do. Then suddenly, out of the blue, she announced she was going to Canada, to Toronto, to teach singing in a large girls’ school. She went for six years. Her parents thought she might marry a Canadian, but she married no one. She returned to England in the grisly winter of 1946 and the following June she married Richard Jordan, whom she had met on the train that she had taken from Southampton after leaving her transatlantic ship.

  Richard Jordan was an engineer. He had been in Southampton looking at a bombed site as a possible place for a factory to make drills for wells. He prospered. He and Cecily had two sons in five years and bought a manor house in a wooded valley a mile from the sea beyond Corfe in Dorset. Cecily, who found in due course that she could not naturally enjoy the company of any of the three men in her life, discovered some kind of recompense in the manor’s garden. She became a gardener of imagination and then distinction. She wrote books on gardens and was invited to lecture all over England in the sixties and, as her fame spread, all over Eastern America in the seventies.

  And then, in 1976, her younger son, Martin, brought Alice home. It was a September day of ripe perfection, the gardens at Dummeridge replete in the late warmth, bursting fallen plums lying stickily in the long grasses, fat things humming and buzzing in the borders. Cecily had been out by the eighteenth-century summerhouse she had discovered derelict in Essex and had transported to Dorset, tying up a heavy double white clematis that obligingly bloomed twice a year, when someone behind her said, quite easily, ‘You must be Martin’s mother.’