A Village Affair

by Joanna Trollope

  Alice pretended not to notice that she didn’t want to paint. Her friend, Juliet Dunne, whose husband Henry was agent at Pitcombe Park and who was blessed with a sharp tongue and keen percipience, made no bones about pointing this out.

  ‘It’s no good hiding, Allie. This awful baby business doesn’t last long, and if you aren’t careful you’ll end up like my mother saying why is it every day takes a week. It doesn’t matter if you don’t want to paint. You just have to.’

  ‘I do want to—’

  ‘No you don’t. You just want to want to. You won’t get real wanting back unless you kick yourself into doing something. Look at our useless husbands. They’ll never get anywhere much because they couldn’t make themselves if you paid them.’

  ‘Why did you marry Henry?’

  ‘Oh,’ Juliet said, scraping apricot pudding off her newest baby’s chin, ‘he was so suitable and so keen and everyone else in my flat was getting married. I quite like him, though.’

  ‘You mean love him.’

  ‘Yuk,’ said Juliet.

  Alice did try to paint after that, and it bored her so much she was quite alarmed. She took out some things she had done before James was born and they looked to her the desirable achievements of a total stranger, so she put them away again, hurriedly, before they should demoralize her. She had, she told herself, plenty to do in any case and she did it all – a touch of pride here – without any help at all. None of her friends managed their houses and families with no help at all. Cecily was always offering her some, but she said the cottage was too small, and in any case she liked her privacy.

  Small things happened. Martin was made a junior partner, Natasha started at a little private school in Salisbury – the children wore checked smocks and had to shake hands, smiling, with their teacher each morning – they built on a playroom and another bedroom at the cottage. In the late winter, Alice and Martin went skiing (Alice discovered, rather to her satisfaction, that she liked frightening herself), and in the summer Cecily rented a cottage for them on the north Cornish coast where the children could play on the calm sands of the Camel estuary. Alice began to read, hungrily, novel after novel, carrying lists of them around in her bag along with the purse and cheque books and cash cards and paper handkerchiefs and tubes of Smarties and clean knickers and sticking plasters that formed her daily battle gear. Titles like And Quiet Flows the Don stuck in her mind like burrs. She chanted them to herself in the car, while in the back the members of the school run bullied the most tearful, sucked their thumbs and surreptitiously took their knickers off in order to amaze the others with their wicked daring.

  When she discovered she was pregnant with Charlie, her first reaction was relief. She felt a great gratitude towards this unexpected baby for mapping out her life for her again and threatening her with its needs. Martin seemed extremely pleased except for taking out, with immense ostentation, an insurance policy against school fees which he appeared to regard, Alice felt, as something he was nobly doing for her.

  ‘Ignore him,’ Juliet said, ‘just fade him out. It’s the only way to survive living with a man.’

  ‘But the baby isn’t just mine!’

  ‘You try telling any father that. Henry will acknowledge William and Simon when they are captaining the first eleven, and strictly not before. If you wanted anything else, you shouldn’t have married an Englishman.’

  ‘No one else offered.’

  ‘Allie,’ Juliet said, ‘just get on with this baby, would you? You’ll make a much better job of it than Martin in any case. I despair of myself but I think I envy you.’

  Charlie was born, suddenly, a month early, and Alice went into a deep, deep decline. Sunk in the fogs of a profound depression, she was carried off to Dummeridge with the baby where she remained for a month, struggling inch by inch out of the depths into which she had tumbled. Pills, frequent small meals, sleep, confiding conversation and gentle exercise were prescribed as her regime. Martin, thankful to surrender this dismal conundrum to his mother, telephoned nightly for bulletins and was spoiled tenderly by Alice’s friends who pitied his male dilemma in the kitchen.

  She came home pale and thin and slightly sad, but she was better. Martin was very sweet to her but at the same time anxious she should know that he had suffered too, alone at night with the two elder children and responsible for the morning whirlwind of rejected eggs and lost gumboots. The week Alice returned, Cecily wrote privately to Martin, to the office in Salisbury, and said she thought Alice needed both a change and more support. She suggested a house move and offered to pay for help and for a holiday, a holiday without any of the children, the moment Charlie was weaned.

  And then the gods produced The Grey House, out of casual conversation at a dinner party, and presented it to the Jordans on a plate. It was not just the house they offered, but village life, the chance and the need to be part of a proper community, where you couldn’t even go to buy stamps, Alice thought excitedly, without meeting several people you knew. There would be a church fête, and a flower rota, and a list for driving old people into Salisbury, or to the hospital, and men from the Park would bring loads of logs in winter, and a Christmas tree, and in the summer she would pityingly watch the neat tourists emerge from the parked Toyotas and peer hopefully – but fruitlessly – down the pretty, sloping street for a tea shop. She would, she knew it, envy no one, long for nothing. In Pitcombe she would feel again what she had felt at Dummeridge ten years ago when she was twenty-one – she would feel she had come home.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘Now the county travelling library,’ said Miss Pimm with the separating articulateness of Marghanita Laski, ‘is a great blessing.’

  ‘Tuesdays, did you say?’ Alice said, obediently writing it down on her list.

  ‘Tuesday afternoons. Three to three-thirty. The librarian is an excellent vegetable gardener and to be relied upon for brassicas.’

  ‘Brassicas’, wrote Alice.

  James, leaning against Alice, thought, with wonder, that they were discussing underclothes. He had his finger up his nose. He pulled it out and offered it to Miss Pimm.

  ‘Gucky,’ he said.

  She averted her gaze.

  ‘Mrs Leigh-Brent runs the church cleaning rota. And Miss Payne is in charge of the flowers. I know Mrs Macaulay would gratefully welcome help on Mondays with the community shop and of course Mr and Mrs Fanshawe will be happy to register you with the local Conservative branch.’

  Alice wiped James’s nose hard enough with a piece of paper kitchen towel to make him whimper.

  ‘Don’t be a disgusting little boy. I don’t think I really am a Conservative, but my husband—’

  ‘Not?’ said Miss Pimm, swivelling her gaze back.

  ‘No,’ Alice said staunchly, remembering Sir Ralph, ‘I believe the Park—’

  ‘That,’ said Miss Pimm, ‘is quite different.’

  She looked round the kitchen. It looked rather loud to her, though considerably cleaner than in Major Murray-French’s day. But she did not like being entertained in kitchens, even the kitchens of people newly moved in who might perhaps be forgiven for having nowhere else. When Miss Pimm had brought her mother to Sycamore Cottage fifteen years before, the first thing she had done was to make the sitting room respectable for callers. She remembered standing on a chair hammering in nails for the ‘Cries of London’ above the fireplace, the position they had occupied in all the houses of her life.

  Natasha came in through the door to the hall carrying a doll dressed like a teenage fairy, and wearing an expression of faint disgust.

  ‘Charlie’s crying and he’s pooey,’ she said.

  Alice stood up.

  ‘Would you forgive me, Miss Pimm?’ she said, ‘I must just see to the baby.’

  Miss Pimm sat on. There was much information yet to impart. She inclined her head.

  ‘I am in no hurry.’

  Alice left the room. Natasha came up to the kitchen table and put her gauzy doll down.
She looked at Miss Pimm who seemed to have nothing about her that Natasha could admire. The texture of her stockings reminded Natasha of drinking chocolate powder.

  ‘Pretty doll,’ said Miss Pimm with extra elaborate articulation, as if speaking to a half-wit.

  ‘She’s called Princess Power,’ Natasha said. Her voice was proud. ‘She’s got net petticoats, pink ones.’

  She turned the doll upside down to demonstrate and Miss Pimm looked hastily away.

  ‘But,’ said James slowly and earnestly, from across the table, ‘she hasn’t got a willy.’

  Panic blotched Miss Pimm’s neck with purple patches.

  ‘Have you?’ said James.

  Natasha hissed at him.

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Charlie’s,’ said James with real sympathy, ‘is only little. But it’ll probably grow.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ said Natasha to Miss Pimm, ‘that in James’s class at school they talk about willies all the time. But you must just ignore him. Like Mummy does.’

  ‘School!’ cried Miss Pimm on a high note of relief. ‘And do you like your school?’

  ‘No,’ said James. ‘I hate everything except being at home.’

  ‘He cries every morning,’ Natasha said. ‘It’s so embarrassing. My best friend is called Sophie and she has Princess Power too only her petticoats are yellow. I like pink best.’

  ‘Yes!’ cried Miss Pimm. ‘Yes! Pink!’

  Alice came back into the room holding a large baby. Miss Pimm was afraid of babies. Alice sat down and picked up her pencil again, wedging Charlie into the space between her and the table.

  ‘So sorry about that,’ Alice said. ‘Now, what else was there?’

  Miss Pimm wanted to say that a cup of tea was one of the things. It was five past four. She would have liked a cup of tea and a Marie biscuit. She cleared her throat with meaningful thirstiness and said, ‘Well, there is our little Sunday group.’

  Charlie seized Alice’s pencil and drew a thick, wild line across her list. Instinctively Miss Pimm’s hand shot out to prevent the desecration of neatness, but Alice didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Group of what?’

  ‘Why, children.’ She looked at Natasha and stretched her mouth into an attempted smile. ‘We meet in the church room for songs and stories about Jesus.’

  ‘I know about him,’ Natasha said. ‘He gave some people a horrible picnic with bare bread and fish that wasn’t cooked. And then he walked about all over a lake and made a girl who was dead be alive again. If you ask me,’ Natasha said darkly, ‘I don’t believe that bit.’

  ‘Tashie—’

  ‘We have eleven little members,’ Miss Pimm said hastily. ‘And I—’ She paused and then said with quiet pride, ‘I play the ukelele.’

  They stared at her. To her misery Alice found she didn’t even want to laugh. Miss Pimm took their silence as an awestruck tribute to her skills and opened her black notebook in a businesslike way to show she was quite used to such admiration.

  ‘Now, may I tell Miss Payne you would be happy to join the flower rota? I believe Mrs Kendall lacks a partner. And what about Mondays? The community shop is such a boon to our old people—’

  Go, Alice said to herself in sudden frenzy. Go, go, go. I hate you here, you mimsy old spinster, I hate you in my kitchen. Go.

  ‘We have unfortunately to share our vicar with King’s Harcourt and Barleston which means mattins only once a month, but he is a wonderful man, and we must just be thankful—’

  ‘C’n I have some crisps?’ James said.

  ‘No. Don’t interrupt. I am sorry, Miss Pimm, but usually around now I give them—’

  Miss Pimm slapped her notebook shut and stood up.

  ‘Naturally. I am sorry to interrupt family routine.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Alice said, struggling to her feet clutching Charlie, and in a confusion of apology, ‘I didn’t mean that at all, I only meant—’

  ‘I came,’ Miss Pimm said, implying by her tone that at least some people were still in command of their manners, ‘just to welcome you to Pitcombe. I make a point of it, with newcomers.’

  ‘Yes,’ Alice said faintly. ‘It’s very kind of you and I’m sure when I’ve sorted myself out a bit—’

  ‘You should see upstairs,’ Natasha said. ‘It’s the most utterest chaos.’

  Miss Pimm walked to the stable door and lifted the latch. She turned stiffly and gave a little downward jerk of her head.

  ‘Sycamore Cottage. Telephone 204.’

  ‘Thank you—’

  ‘Good afternoon.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ Alice said. ‘Goodbye—’

  The door clicked shut, one half after the other. Alice subsided into her chair.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ James said anxiously.

  ‘I’m not,’ Alice said through a river of tears.

  ‘You are, you are—’

  Natasha picked up Princess Power.

  ‘I expect you’re tired.’

  ‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘Yes, I expect I am, I’m sure that’s it—’

  Charlie’s face puckered. James came to lean on her again, his eyes filling with tears.

  ‘Don’t do it,’ he said. His voice was pleading. ‘Don’t do it.’

  But she couldn’t stop.

  The community shop, Alice discovered, was a large and battered van, owned and driven by Mr Finch, one-time boarding-house keeper and failed poet, who ran Pitcombe Post Office and Village Stores. Twice a week, the shop van trundled out of Pitcombe with its cargo of old age pensions, tins of marrowfat peas and packets of bourbon biscuits, to serve outlying cottages and the smaller satellite villages of Barleston and King’s Harcourt. It made thirteen stops in three hours, either outside the cottages of the most infirm, or by the clumps of people standing with clutched purses and plastic carrier bags at designated places along the route.

  Mr Finch was very excited to have Alice on board on Monday afternoons. Mrs Macaulay, who was the longstanding other helper on Mondays, despised his artistic sensibilities, believing, as she did, only in good sense and wire-haired dachshunds, which she bred with dedication. ‘My girls’, she called her bitches. Within the first half-hour of her first Monday, Alice discovered that Mr Finch was misunderstood by his wife who yearned still for their boarding house in Kidderminster which had catered for actors at the Theatre Royal, and that Mr Macaulay had been called to the great dog basket in the sky ten years previously, much lamented by his widow and her girls.

  ‘He was a wonderful man,’ Mrs Macaulay said to Alice, as they jolted out of the village, the tins jiggling on their barricaded shelves. ‘He could do anything he liked with animals. He inspired perfect trust.’

  At the frequent stops, Mr Finch came out of the driver’s cab and sat in the doorway of the van at the seat of change. Every time he appeared holding not only his cash box and ledger but also a battered notebook bound in imitation leather which he left nonchalantly on the edge of his little counter, with many a casually pregnant glance thrown in Alice’s direction.

  ‘Take no notice,’ Mrs Macaulay hissed at Alice, passing her a stack of All-Bran boxes. ‘Those are his terrible jingles. Don’t give him the chance to mention them.’

  At every stop, the van filled rapidly with people, heaving each other up the steps into the interior like an eager crowd of hedgehogs. Alice was stared at.

  ‘Who’s ’er?’ somebody said from close to the floor.

  ‘Sh, you, Granny. That’s the new lady—’

  ‘Who’s ’er?’

  ‘Mrs Jordan,’ Mrs Macaulay said with great clarity. ‘She has just moved into the Major’s house at Pitcombe.’

  There was a sucking of teeth.

  ‘She won’t like that. Miserable ’ouse, that is.’

  ‘But I do like it—’

  ‘It’s very good of Mrs Jordan to help us,’ Mrs Macaulay said, ‘because she has three little ones on her hands.’

  ‘Where’s me spaghetti hoops, then?’

  ‘Hang
on, Gran, they’re coming,’ and then, turning confidentially to Alice, ‘she loves them. She don’t need her teeth in to eat them, see.’

  At the end of the third stop, Mr Finch laid his hand slowly on his book of poems and looked roguishly at Alice.

  ‘Care for something to read before Barleston, Mrs Jordan?’

  Mrs Macaulay was ready for him.

  ‘Sorry, Mr Finch, I’ve got the cereal section to explain to Mrs Jordan before we get there.’

  Mr Finch placed the book flat against his chest, holding it in both hands.

  ‘Are you a reader, Mrs Jordan? I fancy you are.’

  ‘Novels,’ Alice said hastily. ‘As much fiction as I can get. But you know, with the children—’

  Mrs Macaulay tapped her watch.

  ‘Time, Mr Finch, time.’

  By the end of the second hour, Alice could gladly have lain down on the lineoleum floor of the van and wept with fatigue. Spring it might be, but the day felt raw and cold, and the depressing contents of the shelves, the tins of butter beans and the packet puddings, only compounded the bleakness. Alice had asked Mr Finch, in his shop the previous week, for an avocado pear, and Mr Finch had made it elaborately plain to her that left to himself his shop would be a profusion of avocado pears, but that the brutish character of his non-poetry reading clientele demanded nothing more outré than cabbages.

  ‘I should be only too happy,’ Mr Finch said egregiously, hunting in his memory for scraps of Tennyson with which to flatter and impress this delightful newcomer, ‘to bring you anything you require on my visits to the wholesaler in Salisbury.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Alice said, ‘but I’m in Salisbury most days on the school run. It’s just that I’d rather use your shop, I mean, I feel I ought—’ She stopped. She had no wish to sound patronizing. But Mr Finch had hardly heard her.