A Village Affair

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘I have never,’ Lettice said staunchly, ‘prayed in my life.’ She stood up and drained her glass. ‘But if I did,’ she said reflectively, ‘I’d save it for Clodagh, not the weather.’

  ‘In the old days,’ Stuart Mott said, leaning against the shop counter and eyeing Michelle, ‘the shop’d always give something for the fête. Dad said.’

  Mr Finch disliked Stuart Mott. He disliked all the Motts. He thought them shiftless and dishonest. They were also a plain family. At least the Crudwells, who proliferated in Pitcombe as the Motts did, had some Romany blood and were picturesque to look at, even if their girls were without morals and were constantly being caught up at the army camp at Larkhill. Mr Finch had come to abhor human sexuality. He supposed that his abhorrence was the result of thirty-three years of Mrs Finch. He leaned on the other side of the counter and said to Stuart, ‘The old days were different. The village shop got used properly then because nobody had cars to take them into Salisbury. I can’t afford to give away so much as a packet of cabbage seeds.’

  ‘Don’t need cabbage seeds,’ Stuart said, still looking at Michelle. ‘Got more’n enough cabbage plants. We’d like a nice box of chocolates for the tombola, though.’

  Michelle was friends with Stuart’s daughter Carol and she thought Stuart was dirty to keep staring at her like that. She wasn’t going to open her mouth and give him the chance to speak to her, though, so she turned round with her back to him and began to rearrange hairslides on a blue card hanging against the shelves where Mr Finch kept what Mrs Finch called toiletries. Along the shelf where the soap and talcum powder stood, Mrs Finch had tacked a swathe of mauve net and an imitation orchid.

  ‘I’ll give you a box half-price,’ Mr Finch said, ‘and bang goes my profit and then some.’

  Michelle was going to help Alice and Clodagh on the white elephant stall. They’d asked her themselves. And Martin had made a sort of speed game with pegs on a wooden board which you had to cover with plastic cups, as many as you could in thirty seconds, because Lady Unwin had asked him to. Gwen was doing teas with Sally Mott and Miss Pimm was taking the money for them. Mrs Fanshawe was in charge of the cake stall and at this moment, to judge by the smell, Mrs Finch was in her kitchen in a ruffled nylon apron making her contribution of iced fancies. ‘My specials,’ she called them. Even Michelle, who could eat four Twix bars at a sitting, wanted to throw up at the sight of all that pink and yellow fondant icing. While she baked, Mrs Finch was working her way through the score of The Merry Widow. She had reached the waltz. Stuart Mott pointed to the largest box of chocolates.

  ‘I’ll give you two quid for that one.’

  Mr Finch lifted down a small box of fudge which said it had been made of clotted cream in a cottage.

  ‘This is my best offer. Sixty pence is all I’m asking.’

  With elaborate reluctance, Stuart Mott counted out sixty pence in very small change.

  ‘You helping Mrs Jordan, then,’ he said to Michelle’s back.

  She shrugged.

  ‘Might be.’

  ‘She’s taken a fancy to you, hasn’t she. I know all about that. Nothing goes on up there that I don’t see.’

  He picked up the box of fudge. Michelle hadn’t turned round and Mr Finch, priggishly mindful of Lettice Deverel’s opinion of gossip, turned aside to wipe his bacon slicer.

  ‘That brother’s staying on,’ Stuart said. ‘He’s a funny bloke. Nice car. You seeing our Carol later?’

  ‘Dunno—’

  Stuart walked over to the door.

  ‘See you Saturday.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ Mr Finch said, wiping vigorously.

  Michelle said nothing. The one thing her eleven years of schooling had taught her was that you could be infinitely ruder if you kept your mouth shut.

  ‘If I wasn’t here,’ Anthony said to Martin, surveying Pitcombe Park just before the fête opened, ‘I wouldn’t believe this sort of thing still went on.’

  Martin was trying to wedge a card table sufficiently steady to hold his game.

  ‘It goes on all over England. Every summer. Thousands and thousands of village fêtes. Can you find me a flat stone?’

  They had been allotted a corner of the great grass terrace below the house, under a laburnum tree. To their left Lettice Deverel, in a blue hessian apron with a sort of kangaroo pocket in front for money, was pricing geranium cuttings and courgette plants rooted in old cream cartons at ten pence each. Miss Payne, her helpmeet at the plant stall, was surreptitiously marking most of these down to five pence before arranging them invitingly on a trestle table draped in green dustsheets that had been dyed expressly for this purpose ten years before and which spent three hundred and sixty-four days of the year folded up in Miss Payne’s box room.

  Beyond the plant stall, an old kitchen table by a magnificent yellow peony bore a depressed collection of second-hand books, mostly paperbacks, the throwouts of the village’s collective holiday reading. Mrs Macaulay, who never read anything except Good Housekeeping and dachshund breeding handbooks, arranged her stall according to the width of books, so that War and Peace and old medical dictionaries lay between hefty doses of improbable espionage and pornography. Mrs Macaulay was, of long experience, realistic about her afternoon and had brought her knitting. She would sell any historical romance she had to Mrs Finch, anything with thighs and breasts on the cover to Stuart Mott and have a terrible time finding anything for the Unwins or the vicar who were all obliged, by tradition, to make a purchase from every stall. Beyond that, she would have plenty of time in her folding chair beside the peony to negotiate the shawl collar of her cardigan jacket.

  As close to the house itself as they could get – and laughingly insisting that that was where they had been put – Gerry and Rosie Barton set up what they called their community stall. This had involved both of them visiting every cottage in the village for a contribution, explaining, with unfading smiles, that they wanted every person in Pitcombe to feel just a little bit involved. Granny Crudwell, interrupted in a Saturday afternoon’s wrestling on television, had told them to bugger off. Other people had produced scraps from their gardens and jars from their larders and, in Miss Pimm’s case, two mustard cotton crocheted dressing table mats, so that the community stall under its banner ‘Your Village Stall!’ resembled the kind of nameless detritus people are thankful to leave behind when they move house. Rosie and Gerry were not attending to their stall; they had left their fat and despairing German au pair girl, whose sole aim in life appeared to be the meticulous correctness of her lifeless English, in charge. They themselves were flitting from stall to stall, smiling and encouraging the stallholders and indulging in the little jokes which inferred, no more, that we, the village, were somehow in cahoots, and superior cahoots at that, against the Big House, and all that it stood for. Sally Mott and Gwen admired Rosie Barton. At least she didn’t give herself airs. There were some people round here, Sally said to Gwen as they filled the Mothers’ Union tea urn, who needed to be reminded we were living in the twentieth century. When Rosie had started her Village Wives’ group, Sally Mott had been the first to sign up. As she said, living with Stuart and old Fred made you desperate for some area of your life where you could be sure you’d never meet a man.

  The tea stall was flanked on one side by Stuart Mott and his tombola, and on the other by the white elephant stall which Alice and Clodagh had taken real trouble over. Every bit of rubbish they had collected had been mended and washed and polished and Alice had made a huge banner to pin on poles above the stall on which a line of elephants, trunk to tail, was dancing. It had been an immense amount of work organizing the stall, and Alice had been grateful for it because it had given her something to do with Anthony. Anthony had been staying for over a week now, and he was beginning to get her down. He watched her, all the time, and spoke to her in words that were very affectionate, but neither his look nor his tone matched his words. Clodagh had stayed up at the Park far more while Anthony was around and when
she did come to The Grey House, to help with things for the stall, she was sharp and aloof. Alice had tried to corner her to talk about what was happening, and twice she had tried to telephone secretly, but Clodagh had simply said, ‘Wait till he’s gone, Alice, wait.’ But for Alice, who had at last woken up and who was full of appetite and gratitude, this was almost impossible. She resolved she would ask Martin to move Anthony out; after all, Martin didn’t want him there, hadn’t wanted him at all in the first place, it was she, with her overflowing heart, who had said come, do come, I’ll be nice to you, I’m nice to everyone just now. But he’d brought something nasty with him and he had added to it since he came. Arranging a row of little cut-glass bottles on a piece of white cotton lace, Alice thought she would ask Martin tonight to ask Anthony to go. And at the idea her heart simply lifted and she turned to give Clodagh a smile of pure love.

  Clodagh put a cardboard box of fivepenny and tenpenny pieces into Michelle’s hands.

  ‘Run over to Martin with these, would you? It’s his float. Twenty-five pence a go or five for a pound.’

  Michelle went off across the lawn in her new white stilettos.

  ‘What a bloody week,’ Clodagh said. ‘I’ve missed you. I’ve never missed anyone so much. When is that bastard going?’

  Alice looked quickly at Natasha who was piling their float money into neat categories.

  ‘As soon as possible. I’ll ask Martin—’

  ‘He knows. Anthony knows. He knew at once.’

  ‘Knows?’

  Mrs Fanshawe was approaching with a paper plate of cupcakes.

  ‘I don’t care,’ Alice said. ‘I don’t care if the whole world knows.’

  ‘I’ve brought these,’ Mrs Fanshawe said, ‘because you stall ladies always get left out at teatime.’

  She put the plate down.

  ‘Thank you,’ Alice said. A vast relief was bubbling up in her.

  Mrs Fanshawe looked quickly over the white elephants.

  ‘Do you know, my grandmother had exactly that vase? I remember it distinctly. You helping Mummy with the change, dear? That’s never your baby! He’s grown so . . . Must fly, you know how they all fall up on the cake stall the moment they’re let in. Must be at my post! Granny Crudwell’s made one of her fruit cakes and to tell the truth you can almost smell the brandy from here . . .’

  She backed away. Clodagh made her nervous. Alice said softly, ‘I’d like to tell her. I’d like to tell everyone.’

  Over by the pair of Union Jacks wedged in painted oil drums that marked the entrance, Shadwell blew on a whistle. At once a surge of thirty or forty people hurried into the circle of stalls and made purposefully for their particular objects. As the first two possible competitors, a couple of boys of about twelve, approached the game under the laburnum tree, Anthony said casually to Martin, apropos of nothing they had been saying before, ‘Of course, Clodagh Unwin is a lesbian.’

  Martin said, ‘What do you mean?’ and then the bolder boy held out fifty pence and, when Martin began to explain the rules, said, ‘I know. I played it before.’

  Martin handed him a stack of plastic cups and set his stopwatch.

  ‘Ready? Rubbish, Anthony. Anyway, how do you know—’

  Anthony said nothing. He waited for the boy to score, and then for his shyer friend to score two higher and for their scores to be entered in a notebook, and then he said, ‘I know because she is having an affair with Alice.’

  There was a silence, and then Martin said with great distinctness, ‘Alice is my wife.’

  ‘Alice, your wife, and Clodagh Unwin are having an affair.’

  A small girl was being helped up towards Martin by her granny. She was holding twenty-five pence. Martin explained the game, very carefully, and between them the granny and the small girl slowly put six cups on the pegs in thirty seconds and then the stopwatch rang and the child began to cry. Her granny, promising treats, took her away with an accusing look at Martin.

  He said to Anthony, ‘Don’t talk such utter, bloody rubbish.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘It’s a lie. It’s a barefaced bloody lie. You’ve made it up because you’re jealous.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Anthony said. ‘You only have to watch and you’ll see.’

  Sir Ralph, jovial in a Prince of Wales checked suit and a yellow rose in his buttonhole, came up and said he’d better make a fool of himself like everyone else. Martin said that it was jolly good of him, sir. He made a great thing of not understanding the rules and then attracted quite an audience when he actually played, with immense skill and swiftness, topping all three previous scores. He straightened up and clapped Martin on the shoulder.

  ‘I like to outwit a legal brain when I can.’

  There was a ripple of polite laughter. Sir Ralph, saying he’d better buy an improper book from Mrs Macaulay, took his small crowd with him. When he was out of earshot, Martin said, ‘I want you to go away. Now. Just go. Wherever you are you make trouble, and I don’t want you making it here. Just get the hell out, will you, now—’

  Anthony took a step away.

  ‘You want me to go because then you think you won’t have to face the fact that your wife is a dyke.’

  Martin fixed his eyes on Sir Ralph’s checked back stooping over Mrs Macaulay’s bookstall.

  ‘If I wasn’t in the Unwins’ garden, I’d smash your fucking face in.’

  Anthony sighed.

  ‘Smash what you like. It doesn’t change facts. No one but you could possibly have lived with such a set-up and not noticed. But then, you only ever have seen what you wanted to see.’

  Several people were approaching.

  Anthony lingered for a second as if contemplating saying more, but then he said, ‘Bye,’ quite lightly and moved away towards the drive. Martin straightened up and looked at his customers. They seemed to him miles away. Then the first one, Sir Ralph’s tractor driver, wearing a T-shirt which said ‘If you hate sun and sex . . . don’t come to Greece’ across the chest, said, ‘What do I have to get to beat the boss?’

  ‘A great man,’ Martin said, in mild reproof. His voice sounded perfectly ordinary.

  ‘Watch me, then,’ the tractor driver said. He held out a pound coin. ‘Watch me beat ’im then.’

  It was almost completely dark in the drawing room. They had been sitting there for hours while the light faded and the scent of the lilies John Murray-French had planted years before came pouring in through the open windows. There were just Alice and Martin. Clodagh had gone home after the children had been put to bed. She would not stay for supper, she said, they knew where she was if they needed her. They had been silent for ages now, quite silent since Martin had stifled a brief bout of weeping and declined to let Alice comfort him. He had been very polite. He had been polite all evening. Alice wondered if she had ever found him as lovable as she did now. She said to herself, ‘He is being wonderful,’ and was full of admiration.

  ‘You can’t comfort him,’ Clodagh said, before she left. ‘It’s arrogant to think you can.’

  He had uttered one cry of reproach. He had turned to her in the half-dark and said, ‘How could you?’ And she knew he meant not only how could you do this to me, but how could you fall for a woman, have sex with a woman? So she had leaned forward and said, trying to help him to see what was so crystal clear to her, ‘But you see, it wasn’t because Clodagh was a woman. It was because Clodagh was Clodagh. Can’t you see?’

  He’d given a little grunt.

  ‘I like everything I have better because of her,’ Alice said, and then, with the idiotic confidence of her happiness, in the midst of it all, added, ‘Even you. I like you better because of Clodagh.’

  That was when he had cried. Not for long, though. He had blown his nose with great decisiveness and after that they had stayed quiet in their chairs in the deepening darkness. Balloon had come in and made a few enquiring remarks and had jumped on Martin’s knee and been thrown off, with quite unfamiliar fury, and so ha
d stalked out again, aggrieved. At long last Martin said, ‘What about the children?’

  She turned her head towards him.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Well—’ He shifted in his chair. ‘You and Clodagh, influence and things. You know—’

  ‘No!’ she shouted. ‘I do not know. Clodagh adores them. So do I. We are two loving adults, not aggrieved minority group proselytizers—’

  ‘Shh,’ he said, calming her. ‘Shh. Sorry. I didn’t mean – I mean, I thought—’ He stopped. Then he said more firmly, ‘Do they know?’

  ‘They know I love Clodagh and she loves me. They love Clodagh. They don’t know about adult love because they are all under eight.’

  There was another pause. Then Martin said, ‘I could never reach you. Could I? Never. Just at the beginning a bit—’

  ‘Please—’

  ‘I remember thinking, taking you out to dinner once at some fearful joint in Marlow, I’ll propose to her, and I was longing to, and then I suddenly realized I had the power to wait, so I did. I was so happy. I suppose it was the only time I had the upper hand.’

  ‘I did love you,’ Alice said. ‘I do. I do love you.’

  ‘But not in love—’

  There was a little silence.

  ‘No,’ Alice said. ‘Not in love. Never with anyone.’

  ‘Till – now,’ he said painfully.

  ‘Till now.’

  He gave a little grunt. Then there was a thump and she realized, from where his voice came from, that he had stood up.

  ‘I’m going to bed.’

  ‘Martin—’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, forcing a little bark of laughter. ‘I’ll do the decent thing. I’ll sleep in the spare room.’

  ‘You’ve been so – marvellous—’

  ‘Long way to go yet—’

  ‘Not tonight.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not tonight.’ And then he went softly across the dark room and opened the door and a faint gleam of light from the landing above illumined him in the doorway.