A Village Affair Read online

  Clodagh said, ‘The Americans I knew ate in restaurants all the time,’ and then she went up to Susie Somerville and said, ‘Come on, Sooze. I want a horror story from your latest trip.’

  ‘Braced for it?’ Susie Somerville said delightedly, going up the great staircase beside Clodagh. ‘Well, you simply won’t believe it, but I had an eighty-five-year-old junkie who chose Samarkand as the spot to trip out—’

  Margot Unwin took Alice’s arm.

  ‘My dear, I do hope they looked after you at your end of the table.’

  ‘Beautifully, thank you—’

  ‘Let’s find you a loo, my dear, the geography of this house is a nightmare for strangers.’

  They went up the stairs together behind Susie and Clodagh, Margot talking all the time, and across an immense landing peopled with giant Chinese jars to one of several panelled doors. Margot thrust it open with her free hand and pushed Alice into the pink warmth beyond.

  ‘Take your time, my dear.’

  Alice was suddenly desperately tired. Shut into this baronial bathroom done up in a style Cecily would describe as Pont Street 1955, she could at last look at her watch. It was only ten past ten. There would have to be half an hour without the men, and then half an hour with them, before she could even begin to signal home to Martin across the room. She looked in the mirror. To herself she looked badly put together and amateurish. Perhaps it was time to cut off her pigtail.

  Outside the bathroom, Sarah Alleyne was waiting for her. Sarah was fair and expensive looking, and Juliet Dunne had said that she was brilliant on both horses and skis.

  ‘I wondered,’ she said now, languidly, to Alice, ‘I wondered if we could talk about sharing a school run. My wretched nanny’s pregnant and I’m quite stuck, just for now—’

  In the drawing room the ladies were gathered, holding cups of black coffee and feigning indifference to a silver dish of chocolates. Neither Clodagh nor Susie Somerville was there. Lady Unwin sat Alice beside her on a little French sofa, and talked about the village. She went through a kind of vivacious inventory of inhabitants, from old Fred Mott who was nearly a hundred through Miss Pimm and Miss Payne to some old thing called Lettice Deverel who played the harp. After twenty minutes, Alice realized that she had not been asked a single question. After twenty-five minutes, the men came in, and after thirty, Susie and Clodagh returned still absorbed in some conversation. Martin was holding both brandy and a cigar, neither of which he normally touched, and he sat down beside the gaunt Mrs Pitt with every show of enthusiasm. Alice realized, with amazement, that he was really enjoying himself.

  She could not drag him away until almost midnight, and only then because other people were beginning to look round for Shadwell and their coats and to say, ‘Come on, old thing, eight o’clock church tomorrow, don’t forget.’ Both Unwins kissed Alice goodnight but Clodagh, talking to the Harleyford man whom Alice wondered if Lady Unwin intended to be the next boyfriend, just waved from across the room and called, ‘Look at the beams!’ to Martin.

  ‘What did she mean?’ Alice said in the car.

  ‘She and her brother carved swear words into the beams in the room above our garage, for a dare, when they were little. She couldn’t remember what the words were, though.’

  He began to laugh.

  ‘Was she nice?’ Alice said.

  ‘Good fun,’ he said, still laughing. ‘Good fun.’

  At home they found James asleep in their bed, clutching Alice’s nightie. Gwen said she was sorry about it, but he’d been a proper handful. Martin carried him to his own bed, and then drove Gwen home while Alice sat on the floor of James’s room and waited for him to sink down into deep oblivion again. She sat with her arms round her knees and her head bent and thought, without enthusiasm, of the dinner party. When Martin came back, she crept out of James’s room and went to their bedroom where Martin was chucking his clothes over the back of a chair.

  ‘Did you enjoy it? Did you like tonight?’

  He was down to his socks and boxer shorts. He pulled one sock off and dropped it.

  ‘It was terrific,’ he said. He pulled off the other sock. ‘Wasn’t it?’

  She went past him to the cupboard where she kept her clothes.

  ‘I think you did rather better than me at dinner.’

  ‘Oh-ho,’ he said sounding pleased. He seldom flirted, but he liked to be flirted with. ‘D’you think so?’

  ‘I thought she was jolly rude,’ Alice said, from half inside the cupboard.

  He began to hum. Clodagh had been far from rude to him.

  ‘Give her time—’

  ‘If I can be bothered—’

  ‘Allie,’ he said, suddenly serious, ‘we can’t fall out with the Unwins.’

  ‘Can’t?’

  ‘No. You just can’t be bolshy.’

  He went off to brush his teeth. When he came back, Alice was in her yellow dressing gown, fiercely brushing her hair. When they were first married, he used to love watching her do it; now he got into bed, hardly looking, and punched the pillows into the shape he liked.

  ‘You looked great tonight,’ he said absently.

  ‘I felt a mess—’

  ‘Rubbish.’ His voice was thickly sleepy.

  She went over to the window and parted the curtains to look out. There was a bright hard white moon, and the shadow of the fence lay in a black grid on the silver grass. I would so like to be free, Alice thought involuntarily. I am so tired of myself and the muddle of everything. I wish . . . She stopped.

  ‘Come to bed,’ Martin said.

  She dropped the curtain and crossed the room to climb in beside him. He turned to roll himself behind her, cupping her breast in his hand. She stiffened, very slightly.

  ‘OK, OK,’ he said. He rolled away. ‘Night.’

  She reached to turn out her bedside lamp. A silver slice fell through a gap in the curtains.

  ‘Martin. Sorry—’

  He grunted.

  She turned on her side and lay there, staring into the dim room. Outside an owl called, from across the valley, and after a while another owl answered it from the beeches high above the Park. Then, from down the corridor, but coming nearer at every step, came the sound of James, crying.

  ‘What do you want to go to church for?’ Martin said.

  They were both slightly hung-over, Martin because he had had quite a lot of brandy, and Alice because she couldn’t drink much of anything, anyway.

  ‘I feel I’d like to. That’s all. It’s only an hour and Charlie will be resting. If you could just put the lamb in at half past eleven—’

  ‘I wanted to be in the garden.’

  ‘Then be in it. The children can come outside with you.’

  ‘But the lamb—’

  ‘You come inside to do that. It will take you all of two minutes.’

  ‘I don’t see why you want to go. You never go to ordinary church.’

  ‘But I see,’ Alice said, suddenly cross, ‘why you don’t want me to go. It won’t do you any harm to have the children for an hour. I want to be somewhere quiet. I want to think.’

  ‘Suppose I want to think?’

  ‘Then you can go to evensong.’

  He went out into the garden then, banging both halves of the stable door which failed to latch and bounced open again. Alice had a bad quarter of an hour putting Charlie down for his rest and finding a roasting tin for the lamb and Natasha’s other gumboot and persuading James out of his pyjamas and into clothes, so that she had to run to church, which was uphill, and arrived very much out of breath and ill-prepared for calm.

  The church was simple and strong and medieval. It had only a nave and a chancel and there was no stained glass in the windows, so that whatever natural light there was came in, uninterrupted. At the west end was a famous Norman font, carved with scenes from the life of John the Baptist ending with his lolling head on a charger, a scene that Miss Payne, who was in charge of the church flowers, liked to screen with a brass jug o
f golden rod or Michaelmas daisies or delphiniums. Mr Finch, of the shop, was sidesman in charge of books. He pressed Hymns A & M into Alice’s hands most meaningfully.

  She chose a pew at the back. The hassocks had been embroidered by the villagers to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee, each one representing animal or plant or bird life along the Pitt river. Alice knelt carefully on a bunch of kingcups. Ahead of her was a dozen or so backs, of which she recognized a few, and beyond them, Peter Morris in cassock and surplice. Idly she wondered who laundered its snowy folds. The organ began, a little breathlessly, played by Miss Pimm in her Windsmoor Sunday suit. The congregation rose stiffly to its feet.

  Holding her prayerbook, Alice thought how much her father admired Cranmer’s English. She remembered him giving a sudden impromptu lecture at supper one night on the iniquity of the banal and bloodless language of the modern service book. Pitcombe clearly had turned its thumbs down to the alternative services – what she held, she discovered, was in the still sonorous English of 1928. In the front of her prayerbook was stamped ‘The Church of St Peter, Pitcombe’ and underneath, in neat elderly script, ‘Given in memory of Hilda Bryce, by her loving family’. Did anyone, she wondered, commemorate people that way any more?

  She did not really notice what they said or sang, nor did she hear properly what Peter Morris said comfortably for ten minutes, from his pulpit, about St Paul’s exhortations to the Romans, on being delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. She had said she wanted to think, but she didn’t think. She simply sat, and looked at the whitewashed walls and the little monuments in stone and brass lamenting matchless husbands and beloved mothers and sons and observed how the pale sunlight came in and lit up the brass ends of the churchwardens’ staffs like tiny flames. And then she knelt with everyone else and read aloud with them the prayer of St Chrysostom.

  ‘Fulfil now, O Lord, the desires and petitions of thy servants, as may be most expedient for them.’

  What, she wondered, were her desires and petitions, except that she wished to be rid of this preoccupation with the fluctuating graph of her unhappiness? She got up and followed everyone out, and Mrs Macaulay said how nice it was to see her in church, and Mr Finch smirked as he took her books, and Peter Morris clasped her hand warmly and told her to remember him to Charlie.

  When she got home, they were all sitting round the kitchen table with mugs and the biscuit tin, and Clodagh Unwin was there too. She looked pale, and nothing like as self-possessed as the night before, and she was wearing butter yellow tights, and an enormous grey jersey that came half-way down her thighs, and grey suede boots. The moment Alice came in, Clodagh got up and went across to her, put her hands on Alice’s arms and said, ‘I came to say sorry. Because I was so horrible last night.’

  Alice, startled, said, ‘Oh, you weren’t—’

  ‘I was,’ Clodagh said. ‘I was awful. Ma said would I be particularly nice to you, but I was in a temper with her for something that’s too boring to mention so I was particularly horrible instead.’

  Alice moved away slightly.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘You were very nice to Martin.’

  He gave a pleased guffaw from the table.

  ‘Oh, please,’ Clodagh said. Alice gave her a quick glance and saw her eyes were full of tears.

  ‘Don’t make so much of it. It doesn’t matter. I didn’t notice.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Clodagh said, with the beginning of a smile, ‘if that doesn’t make me feel worse.’

  ‘Come on, Allie,’ Martin said. ‘Come on. Have some coffee.’

  Alice threw her coat over the chair back and reached for an apron on the hook behind the door to the hall.

  ‘I’ve got to do the potatoes for lunch—’

  ‘I’ll do them,’ Clodagh said, taking the apron. ‘I’m a whizz at potatoes.’

  James, who had decided Clodagh was delicious, pulled a chair up to the sink, giggling, so that he could splash about while she peeled. Natasha, who felt a keen desire for Clodagh’s boots, stayed by the table to devise a scheme by which she might try them on even if they were going to be too big, which they were, she knew, but all the same . . . Alice, not won over, went to fetch the potatoes from the larder and the peeler from a drawer and a saucepan. She dumped the potatoes in the sink and Clodagh seized her wrist.

  ‘Please forgive me,’ she said. Her voice was an urgent hiss and her curious grey-gold eyes were bright with intensity.

  ‘You made me feel a fool last night,’ Alice said, ‘and you’re doing it again now. I don’t like it. That’s all.’

  Clodagh dropped her wrist. In a voice so low only Alice could hear it, she said, ‘You were the only person last night who didn’t look a fool.’

  Alice went away to find carrots and a bag of frozen peas. When she came back, Martin had gone out again, James and Clodagh were singing and splashing at the sink and Natasha, without being asked, was laying the table, back to front.

  ‘Clodagh’s staying,’ Natasha said. ‘Daddy asked her.’

  Clodagh turned round.

  ‘But I won’t if you don’t want me to.’

  ‘Of course stay. It’s very ordinary lunch—’

  ‘You’re really kind.’

  Natasha stretched up to her mother’s ear.

  ‘Oh I so want her boots—’

  ‘Aren’t they smart.’

  Without turning round, Clodagh kicked her boots off backwards.

  ‘Try them.’

  Natasha gave a little squeal. James put his arms around Clodagh’s waist in case the boots should create a bond between her and Natasha. She dropped a kiss on his head and he looked up at her with passion.

  ‘You’ve no idea,’ Clodagh said, ‘how unutterable American children are. We had one that used to come to the apartment loaded with toys and if you admired the smallest thing, he’d say. “Don’t touch. OK?” at the top of his voice.’

  James thought this was brilliantly funny.

  ‘Don’t touch, OK, don’t touch, OK, don’t touch, OK—’

  ‘Look—’ Natasha breathed, bending over to admire her feet.

  ‘You look like Puss in Boots.’

  ‘I love them.’ She looked up at Clodagh. ‘Are they American?’

  ‘Sure thing, baby,’ Clodagh said with an American accent, ‘Henry Bendel, no less.’

  Martin came back with a bottle of wine. He was humming. He kissed Alice’s cheek on his way to fetch a corkscrew and then again on his way to fetch the glasses. At the second kiss, she laughed.

  ‘Feeling better?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, surprised.

  ‘I expect church made you feel better,’ Natasha said, stroking the boots, ‘I think it’s supposed to.’

  When everyone laughed she looked tremendously pleased and said, in Gwen’s phrase, ‘Well, this really is my day and no mistake.’

  Martin poured wine for himself and Clodagh and Alice. Clodagh finished the potatoes and put them on to boil and scooped the peelings out of the sink into the rubbish bin. Alice stared at her.

  ‘Isn’t that right?’ Clodagh said. She had pushed up the sleeves of her jersey and stood there, shoeless, like a grey and yellow bird.

  ‘It’s absolutely right. I just don’t associate New York flat dwellers with—’

  ‘Oh,’ Clodagh said quickly, smiling at her, ‘I always did things like that. I used to scrub floors and stuff as therapy when the whole scene got a bit heavy.’

  She came round the table to where Alice was peeling carrots and looked at her intently.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  Alice took a quick swallow of her wine.

  ‘Is this another kind of game? Like last night?’

  ‘No,’ Clodagh said. ‘I could kill myself for last night.’

  Alice’s hands were shaking. She put down her wine glass not at all steadily.

  ‘You haven’t met my baby.’

  ‘He’s so sweet,’ Nata
sha said, still mooning over her feet. ‘He’s the nicest baby in my class.’

  Clodagh dropped her gaze and let Alice go.

  ‘Can we go and find him?’

  The children rushed to seize her hands, Natasha shuffling but determined in her boots. They went out of the room and Alice could hear them beginning to clatter, chattering up the uncarpeted stairs. Singing softly, without meaning to, Alice fetched a pan and put her carrots in it, beside the pan of Clodagh’s potatoes.

  CHAPTER SIX

  It was not in the least lost upon Peter Morris that Alice hadn’t attended to a word of his sermon; indeed, that she had hardly come to church for any orthodox spiritual purpose at all. This was hardly uncommon. The reasons that brought his congregations to church seemed to him quite as various and tenuous and peculiar as those that kept them away. Folding his stole carefully after the service, Peter decided that Alice had probably come because an hour in church meant you could step off life for a space, stop time. That at least was how she had looked. And no doubt while she sat there, drifting, that decent young husband of hers – good midshipman material – was gardening and minding the children. Peter sighed. The Jordans seemed to him a thoroughly late twentieth-century combination of emotion and imagination on the one hand and Anglo-Saxon aversion to intensity on the other. A polite and lonely alliance.

  The village, needless to say, had minutely observed the outward things. Even old Fred Mott, day in day out at his cottage window next door to the post office, had sufficient sight left to say approvingly on Peter Morris’s weekly visits, ‘That’s a fancy piece. That’ll make ’em all sit up.’

  ‘Who?’ Peter said. ‘Who’ll sit up—’

  ‘All of them old dumps round ’ere. All them old bags.’

  His little wet mouth widened into a grin.

  ‘You’re an old scoundrel, Fred.’

  ‘Not ’alf what I was when I was young. Not ’alf.’

  It was all very well, of course, to observe that something was troubling Alice, but how to help was inevitably much trickier. When he asked people around the village, the general view was that she was extravagantly blessed among mortals – lovely house, nice husband, dear little children, more than enough money – so that even if she was being helpful in the matter of the shop and the flower rota, that really was no more than her duty, living where she did and having what she had. Rosie Barton, who ran a very successful little computer business in Salisbury with her husband, Gerry, and who had very decided views on the sort of village Pitcombe should be, said, with the seeming deep sympathy that was her stock in trade, that Alice simply had to learn about a village community. Peter had pointed out that Wilton had hardly been an inner city situation to come from, and Rosie said indeed no, but the measure of involvement in the village was unique. Peter had said no more. The Barton child, an anxious four-year-old in the care of a succession of au pair girls, seemed never to require from his parents the involvement their business or village life did. And they came to church.