A Village Affair Read online

  ‘Tell first,’ she said.

  ‘My mother has two commissions for you. Two friends of hers have seen the paintings you have done of Dummeridge, and they want you to paint in their houses. Ma said she has asked a hundred and fifty for you. Each.’

  ‘Each!’ Alice said, and went scarlet.

  ‘Well?’ He was smiling hugely.

  Alice clutched herself.

  ‘It’s – it’s wonderful. So’s she. Heavens. Real money—’

  There was a sudden small hard lump in her throat. She supposed it to be amazement and delight.

  ‘I rang her last night. She really wanted to tell you herself at Christmas, but I made her let me. That’s the other thing. The thing I wanted to ask you.’

  Alice couldn’t look straight this time; she didn’t seem able to look anywhere. She looked down instead into her melon and parma ham and Martin said to her bent head, ‘Would you come for Christmas? To Dummeridge?’

  There was a pause. Oh, Martin thought, you cool, cool customer, don’t keep me dangling, don’t, don’t. Say yes, say yes, say . . .

  ‘Love to,’ Alice said. Her voice was warm but not in the least eager. It betrayed nothing of what she was feeling, nothing of the sudden fury that had seized her, a fury against Martin. Ask me, she had screamed at him silently, ask me, ask me. And he had said, come for Christmas.

  ‘That’s great,’ he said. ‘They’ll all be thrilled, I know it. What about—’

  ‘My parents?’

  ‘Yes—’

  ‘I’ve spent twenty Christmases with them,’ Alice said with a fierceness for which Lynford Road could not be blamed, ‘and I think I deserve one off. Granny’s coming, anyway.’

  They arrived at Dummeridge on Christmas Eve to a house garlanded in green, with pyramids of polished apples and candles and the smoky scent of burning wood.

  ‘So lovely!’ Cecily said. ‘To have a woman to do it all for.’

  From the moment she and Martin got to Dummeridge, Alice was the star of Christmas. She could feel the atmosphere lifting as she entered rooms and knew that everything was being done for her, with an eye on her. She had a fire in her bedroom, and a Christmas stocking of scarlet felt, and wherever she went the eyes of the household were upon her and the hearts of the household were hers. Even Anthony, she noticed, was striving to please. She felt, moving through the lovely rooms, taking the dogs out for windy walks high above the grey winter sea, that this was what she was meant for, that she had somehow come home.

  So confident was she, so queenly, that when Martin did propose she felt no elation, no sudden lurch of delight and relief, just a warm acknowledgement of the inevitable. It was Boxing Day and they were racing along Seacombe Cliff, shouting into the wind, when he seized her suddenly, breathless and laughing, and said, ‘You will marry me, won’t you?’

  And she said, laughing back, ‘Certainly not!’ and ran away from him, and he knew she didn’t mean it and chased her and pulled her to the ground and pinned her there, on the cold exciting turf under the racing wild clouds, and made her promise. Then he carried her home to Dummeridge and his father opened champagne and whenever she looked across at Cecily, Alice knew she could have made no other choice. She was loved here.

  That night, relaxed and warm and full of power and confidence, she had an orgasm in Martin’s arms. He had one rather later. She was a bit confused – the champagne perhaps – as to why she had had one and how much it had to do with what he was doing to her, which wasn’t, actually, much at the time, but she felt great triumph that her body had taken her over, as she had been so anxious for it to do. It did occur to her that the release that had happened to her body didn’t seem to have overwhelmed her mind at the same time, but she pushed that thought aside, as clearly, if she had had an orgasm with Martin she must be more in love than she thought, which meant in turn that it would, as a feeling, grow. She slept gratefully in Martin’s arms until five, when he gently disentangled himself and went discreetly back to his own room. They met at breakfast in a mood of mutual, and visible, triumph, and Cecily, noting this with inexpressible relief, felt that thirty years of negative life had at last turned a corner.

  CHAPTER THREE

  They were married, in 1977, by unanimous agreement, at Dummeridge. Alice’s mother, quite overwhelmed by Cecily, allowed all decisions to be made for her, including a shopping trip to Bournemouth for her wedding clothes. She returned, saying a little fretfully that she had never cared for green, but she was clearly elated, and refused to describe the trip in order to show her husband and her daughter that she too could have her lovely secrets. Alice didn’t care. She went down to Dummeridge every weekend without fail, and made plans – where Martin should look for a job, what kind of house they should seek, where they should go for their honeymoon, what her dress should be made of, what she ought to put on her wedding present list.

  ‘You mean I can actually ask outright for six cream bath sheets and a Spode blue Italian soufflé dish and a dozen wine glasses and a tin-opener?’

  ‘I most certainly do. People expect it.’

  ‘Wowee! Now,’ Alice said. ‘Let’s think what else—’

  Martin was offered a job in Salisbury which he took with alacrity, and not long afterwards Alice and Cecily found a cottage on the edge of Wilton, with three bedrooms and a charming elevated fireplace made from an old bread oven, and an apple tree in the garden. It was May and the tree was luscious with blossom. In June, Alice left the art school, packed up her bedroom in Reading and moved down to Dorset. Her mother, truly wounded now, did not even try to stop her because it was so glaringly evident to everyone why she was doing it. Her father, however, did try.

  ‘Are you sure,’ he said to her, propping his attractive bulk against the kitchen cupboards and cradling a glass of whisky against his chest, ‘that your head hasn’t been turned?’

  Alice said waspishly, ‘Well, that’s certainly something you would know about.’

  He laughed. He had always been exasperatingly impossible to annoy.

  ‘Come on, Al. You’ve only two months more to stick out here. It’s a bit rough on us to be so publicly cast aside for the glamorous prosperity of the Jordans even before you’re married. You look spoiled. We look inadequate.’

  ‘I don’t mind how I look,’ Alice said, ‘and I can’t help how you look. The boys have both gone, I’ve had three years here on my own. At Dummeridge there isn’t a permanent atmosphere and I can paint.’ A tiny, proud pause. ‘I have three more commissions.’

  ‘You might perhaps,’ Sam Meadows said unwisely, suddenly struck by the vision of opening the Lynford Road front door to find nobody but his wife inside, ‘think of me.’

  Alice snorted.

  ‘I see. You’d like me to stay so that there’s some sort of buffer state here between you and Mum. Well, bad luck. That’s one of the reasons I’m going now.’

  Sam took a gulp of his drink.

  ‘Frankly, Al, I don’t think I could take it on my own.’

  ‘Then you should understand exactly how I feel. Don’t whine,’ Alice said crossly. ‘And don’t try and make me feel guilty. I’m going, and that’s that.’

  Her father levered himself upright and came round the kitchen table to put his arm around her and plant a competent, whisky-scented kiss on her head.

  ‘I don’t blame you,’ he said, ‘and you shouldn’t blame me for having a go at making you stay.’

  ‘Blame,’ Alice said, leaning against him and resentfully acknowledging how good he was at touching women. ‘Don’t talk about blame. It’s a word never used at Dummeridge, and nor is guilt or loyalty or betrayal or any other of the awful emotional claptrap words you and Mum use all the time.’

  Her father had gone out then, and she had returned to her room to finish packing, and when she came down, her mother was sitting on the brown repp-covered, foam-filled sofa in the sitting room staring into space with her hands gripping one another in her lap. Alice squatted beside her.

>   ‘Martin’s coming for me at five.’

  ‘I know,’ her mother said.

  ‘There’s not much difference,’ Alice said with difficulty, ‘between going now and going when I’m married. Honestly, there isn’t.’

  Silence.

  ‘It isn’t – it isn’t because I don’t – well, it’s not that I’m – I’m not fond of you and Dad, it’s just the atmosphere here.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Nobody asks me to take sides there,’ Alice said, pleading. ‘I haven’t got to think who I’m going to upset every time I open my mouth.’

  Elizabeth Meadows continued to stare at nothing.

  ‘I see.’ A little pause. ‘And is the Jordans’ marriage a happy one?’

  Alice was rather startled. She had never stopped to consider such a thing, and now that she did it came to her that perhaps it wasn’t particularly companionable as a marriage but it was perfectly all right, and anyway, they both had their own lives, that was the difference.

  ‘They don’t want it to be everything in life to them, like you do,’ Alice said, making everything worse. ‘Cecily has her own career, Richard’s very successful—’

  ‘How perfect,’ her mother said, as if spitting out broken glass.

  Alice sighed. She got up and went over to the french windows that opened into a sad little strip of garden that her mother tended with ferocious tidiness, filling the parallel beds with salvias and African marigolds in regimented rows.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘whatever I do, I can’t get it right. Either you’re upset or Dad is. So I’m going only a little bit before marriage decently allows me to, where I get it right all the time without even trying.’

  Elizabeth said, ‘You protest too much. I am not attempting to prevent you,’ and then, blessedly, the doorbell rang and it was Martin.

  Alice never slept at Lynford Road again. The two months at Dummeridge passed like a happy dream. Richard was away almost all the time, and Cecily was in America for three weeks, and as Martin, taking his final exams, could not be there except weekends, Alice had the house to herself, looked after by Dorothy and as free as air. She slept in a hammock in the garden at midday, and at night wandered about in the pale summer darkness and made herself voluptuous sandwiches filled with cream cheese and dried apricots and chopped walnuts which she sometimes ate sitting quite naked on the moonlit lawn or in the unlit drawing room. She went down to the sea at midnight, with the surprised but politely acquiescent dogs, and swam in the glittering black water, and then walked home barefoot and sat on the Aga, wrapped in a blanket feeling her salty hair dry into long whispering snakes down her back. She meant to paint, but she didn’t. She knew she would have to, when Cecily came back, so she spun out her time alone greedily, luxuriously, drifting through the hot hayfields beyond the house, leaning her cheek against walls and trees, lying on her stomach on the lawn with her arm plunged into the goldfish pool watching the light darting in the water and the bubbles of air pour upwards from the hairs on her arm.

  She saw Martin off to London on Sunday nights without a pang; indeed, when the sound of the Mini’s busy little engine had quite faded away she felt a bubbling up of her spirits, as if she were really free again. This made her go straight to the kitchen and sit down at the huge scrubbed table and write to him very lovingly, telling him how much she looked forward to Friday, and how carefully he must drive. She wrote these letters in all sincerity. When she had written them, she would go down to the sea and swim and swim and swim. Dorothy, finding wet towels on the Aga rail so many early mornings, wondered whether she should say something about the lack of sense in swimming alone in the sea in the middle of the night and decided, looking at Alice, not to. The moment she was married, that freedom would vanish, you never got it again, so even if it was risky, it was worth it, and after all, everything worth having was a risk, one way or another.

  Alice had only two visitors besides Martin, while Cecily was away. One was Anthony who arrived unannounced for the night, drank copiously at dinner and tried, in a very practised way, to kiss her afterwards. She said, standing quite rigid in his arms. ‘But I don’t fancy you at all. I don’t find you in the least attractive.’

  ‘Try me,’ he said, bending his head.

  She bent away.

  ‘In any case,’ she said, ‘you are only having a go to score off Martin.’

  So Anthony dropped his arms and went to bed, and was gone when she woke in the morning.

  The other visitor was her future father-in-law, at home for two nights, between journeys. He telephoned her to say he was coming. She said, wanting to be dutiful, ‘Is there anything I ought to do? I mean, anything you’d like or usually have—’

  No, he said, nothing. She was to take no notice of him; Dorothy could do what had to be done. He would be there for dinner. So she went for a long, aimless, happy walk, spending a great deal of time in an unexpected stream building a dam, and came back about teatime to hear the sound of someone playing the piano. It could only be Cecily. Full of a sudden rush of pleased excitement, she burst into the drawing room crying, ‘Oh, I wasn’t expecting—’ and found that it was Richard.

  He stopped and turned round.

  ‘But,’ Alice said, ‘you don’t play the piano!’

  He smiled.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘But Cecily—’

  ‘I always have. I’m competent but uninspired, as you may imagine. I never play if I think there is anyone in the house.’

  She crossed the room slowly, and stood beside him. He had been playing Schubert, too.

  ‘I’ve really thrown you,’ he said, ‘haven’t I.’

  She felt her face grow hot.

  ‘Yes. I thought—’ she paused.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘People do.’ He got up from the piano and brushed his hands briskly together as if he were shaking off the disconcerting unfamiliarity. He looked down at her and she wondered if he were very slightly laughing at her, but all he said was, ‘You look well. What have you been doing?’

  And she said, looking back, ‘Absolutely nothing.’

  He had liked that. He wanted, later, to hear what absolutely nothing involved. She could tell him parts of it, though clearly to tell a man who is about to become your father-in-law that you had lain naked on his drawing room sofa eating sandwiches in the middle of the night was hardly on. She was, to her surprise, sorry when he went away, bound for Heathrow and then the Gulf of Mexico. He hadn’t seemed, while he was at Dummeridge, either to take the house away from her – and after all, it was his – or to encroach upon her freedom. On the contrary, he seemed to have his own private freedom which tantalized her a little, made her want to know more about him. When he was gone, she found to her intense annoyance that she was just a little lonely, so that when Cecily returned three days later she had the same kind of thankful, over-excited welcome from Alice as from her dogs.

  ‘I shouldn’t have left you so long, but this wretched tour was fixed up almost a year ago. Never, never do I wish to have to explain again that it is not possible to make an English spring garden in Selma, Alabama.’

  Everything pulled itself together once Cecily had returned. Days and nights went back to their conventional roles, lists were made, letters were written, Alice’s wedding dress – ivory chiffon over peach-coloured silk – was finally fitted. Presents arrived by every post, presents from complete strangers and from shops that had never been in Alice’s orbit – the General Trading Company in Sloane Street, Harrods, Peter Jones, Thomas Goode, the White House. The dining room at Dummeridge slowly filled up with sheets and china and saucepans and Chinese lamps, things that she, Alice, had chosen and asked for and was now being given. As the piles grew, she discovered that she did not like it, even though she liked the things. It was not that she felt that she was being spoiled, but rather that these bales of towels and pairs of garden shears and boxes of brandy balloons were somehow buying her. She tried to say something of this to Cecily, and Ceci
ly, believing her feeling to be the result of the material modesty of her upbringing, said she must simply lie back and lap it up.

  ‘I promise you, people want to do this. They would think it most odd if you hadn’t a list, and goodness knows you haven’t been greedy.’

  So Alice wrote her letters obediently and tried to decide constructively about flowers and asparagus rolls and the colour of lining for the marquee which was to be very grand and have french windows in case the day was cool. At night, instead of lying languorously in her linen sheets, Alice lay and worried, worried about details and little things and felt that from somewhere a pressure had arisen that was now sitting on her chest and her brow and making it difficult for her to see or breathe.

  When her wedding day came, she was in no mood for it. It happened, of course, the great machine being inexorably in motion, and she went up the aisle most decoratively on her father’s manifestly pleased arm, but she felt lonely, all day, and by the end of it she was tearful and exhausted from the effort of seeming as she wished she were feeling.

  ‘She’s tired,’ Cecily said to Martin privately, tucking them into the car to go away while the guests, unnaturally jolly after champagne drunk unsuitably mid-afternoon, stood on the gravel and cheered. ‘Look after her.’

  He did his best. She slept most of the way to Athens next day and he was very solicitous and tucked blankets round her and motioned the air hostesses not to bother her with lunch and drinks and duty-free watches. A friend of Cecily’s had lent them a villa on Patmos, and they were alone there except for the couple who were caretakers and who were so assiduous in both house and garden that they were quite difficult to elude. They swam and slept and lay in the sun, and Alice drew a bit, and at night Martin made love to her which she didn’t mind but didn’t seem able to look forward to much, either. What he felt about it she didn’t know because they didn’t talk about it. They were perfectly companionable and years later, when both of them, separately, tried to remember their honeymoon, neither could, in any detail.