A Village Affair

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Alice said, ‘I don’t quite understand. Will you come in?’

  Rosie Barton said she would love to. She followed Alice across the hall and into the kitchen and Alice could feel her eagerness at her back, like an electric fire.

  ‘Coffee?’ Alice said.

  ‘I’d love it. What a morning!’

  She sat herself down at the table which still bore the children’s breakfast bowls and leaned on her folded arms and said with immense solicitousness, ‘How are you?’

  Alice had her back to her, putting the kettle on the Aga. She said, ‘I’m all right, thank you.’

  Rosie said, ‘Alice—’

  Alice turned. Rosie was not smiling but her whole face and attitude exuded sympathy.

  ‘Look,’ Rosie said, spreading her hands on the table. ‘Look, I know we don’t know each other very well, but I hope we can rapidly put that right.’ She smiled. ‘I’d like to. We’d like to. Alice, I’ve come to offer you our support, mine and Gerry’s. I don’t want you to be in any doubt about it.’

  Alice put her hands behind her back and gripped the Aga rail. God, why wasn’t Clodagh here? But she was taking the school run into Salisbury, because she had said she would be better able to brazen it out with Sarah Alleyne than Alice.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Rosie Barton said, and her voice was very kind, ‘I’m afraid a place like Pitcombe has some very archaic attitudes. They can’t be changed overnight, but we won’t give up because of that, I can promise you. But Gerry and I were worried that you might feel quite isolated. We feel it is always such a help to know you are not alone.’

  Alice went over to the dresser and took down two mugs. Then she put coffee into the glass filter jug and poured boiling water on to it, and put it, and the mugs, on the table among the cereal boxes and jam jars.

  ‘You don’t have to say anything,’ Rosie said. ‘I can imagine how you feel.’

  Alice said as gently as she could that she didn’t think so. Rosie took no notice of this but began to describe the many gay friends she and Gerry had, had always had, and how much they valued them and what sweet people they were. In fact, their youngest’s godfather was gay and he was a wonderful person and had been in a stable relationship for years.

  ‘Gerry and I,’ she said, ‘regard it as perfectly natural.’

  Alice pushed the plunger of the coffee pot down, very slowly.

  ‘Then you are wrong. It isn’t natural but it’s as strong as if it were. For some people, it is stronger and preferable to what is natural.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Rosie Barton.

  Alice poured coffee.

  ‘It’s kind of you to want to help, but I don’t think you can. And I don’t think we want help—’

  ‘But the village—’

  ‘I know,’ Alice said. She had yet to brave the shop, but today Gwen had said that she would not come to the house if Alice and Clodagh were in it together. Alice had laughed at her absurdity and Gwen had become very huffy, and Alice had suddenly seen that she was about to cry, and that she was in a real confusion of prejudice and affection, and been sorry, and said so.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Rosie said, spooning brown sugar into her mug, ‘that people are talking.’

  ‘Of course they are. But they won’t talk for long.’

  Rosie looked disappointed, but she said bravely, ‘Well, that’s a wonderful attitude.’

  ‘Not really. It’s more a sort of recognition.’

  ‘And your husband?’

  Alice stared at her.

  ‘This really is none of your business.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, I was only trying to help—’

  ‘I’ve told you,’ Alice said, ‘you can’t, and I don’t want it.’

  Rosie stood up.

  ‘Alice, I know you’re upset. Who wouldn’t be? I could kick myself, I’ve come far too soon. But I must tell you this. I do have experience of campaigns. A lot of experience. And you can’t run them alone, it simply isn’t possible. So in a week or two, just remember we are there. Anything we can do, anything—’

  ‘I am not a campaign,’ Alice said. ‘We are not. We never will be. We are people.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Rosie began to move towards the kitchen door. Her mind was already forming the profoundly understanding things she would say to Gerry about Alice. It was, of course, the fault of the village. The sheer weight of intolerance and narrow-mindedness was enough to drive anyone on to the defensive. From the doorway, she gave Alice a little smile and wave.

  ‘We’re always there. Don’t forget.’

  ‘Give me the whole village baying for blood,’ Alice said later to Clodagh, ‘the whole of Wiltshire if you like. Anything, anybody, rather than one more minute of Rosie Barton’s sympathetic understanding.’

  Then she made sick noises, and the children, who were eating tea in a desultory way, were enchanted by her and enthusiastically joined in.

  Miss Payne was so fond of Alice. Doing the church flowers with Alice had been such fun after all those years of Cathy Fanshawe and her passion for silk flowers when there were lovely real things in the garden, even if they didn’t last and shed petals three days after they were done. When Miss Payne heard about Alice and Clodagh she had been desperately upset and had had to take her angina pills again after not having to take them for seven months. Of course, Miss Pimm wouldn’t speak of it at all but just went round the village looking like the spinster aunt in a Giles cartoon, the one in a permanent state of shock. Buntie Payne wasn’t shocked so much as made utterly miserable. Every time she thought of Alice – and try as she might, she kept thinking of Alice – she thought of those little children and Alice being so sweet to her over some broken delphiniums, and all that Alice and Martin had done to the house, and the life of the village. That made her cry and then she had to put another tiny white tablet under her tongue, and make herself sit still.

  But when she sat still she had even more time to think, and then she thought about love which, in her virgin state, was very much more interesting and real to her than sex had ever been. She had never really loved a man beyond members of her own family, but she had loved – did love – women all right. Feeling the tablet fizzing away beneath her tongue, she asked herself what on earth she would do without her sister Marjorie, even if she did live in Taunton, and her friend Phyllis who lived at King’s Harcourt and whom she saw at least twice a week. She had said something of this to Lettice Deverel whom she had met on the field path that ran parallel to the village street behind the cottages, and Lettice had said, ‘It’s one of the curses of our age. Sex has driven out friendship.’

  Buntie Payne had said, did she mean the sixties and the permissive society, and Lettice had said well, partly, but the rot had begun with the Bloomsbury Group, much earlier.

  ‘The moment self-indulgence gets into the hands of the intellectuals,’ Lettice said, ‘society is in for sailing in a rudderless ship. It is now considered bourgeois to control yourself.’

  Buntie hadn’t really known what she was talking about, but being seized by a sudden spasm of bewildered, unhappy sympathy for Alice, cried out, ‘They mustn’t make it hard for her!’

  And Lettice said that you couldn’t stop them; all you could do was not join them.

  ‘Hypocrisy being, as it is, a national pastime—’

  Buntie didn’t need telling that. She had heard Sally Mott and Janet Crudwell airing their opinion of Alice in the village shop only the day after Janet’s two eldest had been brought back by the military police from Larkhill Camp at three in the morning. Buntie, choosing onions one by one, had been seized with indignation, and when Sally and Janet had left the shop and she had been handing her bag of onions to Mr Finch she had heard herself demand, ‘So. A hunger for love or a greed for money. Where do you stand on that?’

  But Mr Finch, whose imaginative capacities had recently been so stretched he could summon up neither opinion nor poetry, had simply goggled at her,
and said, ‘Pardon?’

  ‘It’s awful of me,’ Juliet Dunne said to Henry, holding her face in both hands, ‘but the whole thing absolutely turns me up.’

  Henry was filleting a kipper with extreme precision.

  ‘I really don’t want to talk about it—’

  ‘No, darling, but you never want to talk about anything in the least personal. Looking back, I can’t quite remember how you conveyed to me that you wanted to marry me. Did I set you a questionnaire?’

  Henry buttered toast in silence.

  ‘The thing is, I’ve simply got to talk to you because I have to get all this off my chest and you are all I have, by way of audience. Please stop crunching.’

  Henry put his toast down with an air of obliging martyrdom.

  ‘How can you eat?’

  He looked at his forbidden toast.

  ‘With great difficulty.’

  ‘Henry,’ Juliet said, and began to cry again.

  She had cried quite a lot of the night, and the previous evening. It wasn’t that Henry wasn’t sorry for her, because he was, but he was having rather a bad time with his own feelings and until he had got to grips with them, he hadn’t much energy to spare for Juliet.

  ‘Aren’t you revolted?’ Juliet said between sobs.

  Henry sneaked a morsel of kipper. He was revolted; less so than if Alice and Clodagh had been two men, but revolted all the same. And puzzled, intensely puzzled. And somehow let down, almost betrayed, almost – heavens, almost humiliated.

  Juliet blew her nose.

  ‘It’s incredibly reactionary of me, I’m sure, but it’s the truth. It turns everything upside down. It makes such a nonsense of everything we were brought up to. I hate it. I feel sick and I feel lost.’

  Henry picked up his toast again with one hand and reached out to pat Juliet with the other.

  ‘I’ve known Clodagh all my life,’ Juliet said. ‘I can’t believe it. All my life and she’s been like this. And Alice. I loved Alice. There was no one else I could complain to like I could to Alice—’

  ‘She isn’t dead,’ Henry pointed out.

  ‘How can anything,’ Juliet said, getting up to fetch the coffee percolator, ‘be the same again after this?’

  ‘Not the same—’

  ‘Trust goes,’ Juliet said. ‘Once that goes, you’ve had it. That’s why I couldn’t possibly stay married to you if you slept with anyone else. I’d never trust you again so we’d have nothing to build on any more.’

  Henry looked down at his plate and thought of Alice, and how he felt about Alice. And now here was Juliet talking as if Alice had deceived her personally and in so doing had destroyed the vital trust in a friendship.

  ‘Alice is your girlfriend,’ Henry said, ‘not your husband.’

  Juliet began to pour coffee, unsteadily, mopping at her nose with a tissue.

  ‘She was special to me.’ She stopped pouring. ‘At the moment, I hate Clodagh. Hate her.’

  ‘Shouldn’t do that—’

  ‘Well I do.’

  Henry pushed his plate away.

  ‘That’s not going to help Alice.’

  ‘She doesn’t want help—’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Rosie Barton went to see her and got very short shrift—’

  ‘And when did you and Rosie Barton ever see eye to eye about anything?’

  Juliet hid her face behind her coffee mug.

  ‘Henry. The truth is I don’t know what I’d say to Alice because I don’t know what I feel—’

  ‘Why don’t you just ring and say you’re still friends?’

  ‘But are we?’ Juliet cried. ‘Are we? I mean, can we be after this?’

  Henry stood up and began to rattle the change softly in his trouser pockets. He said, ‘I’m going to see Martin.’

  Juliet stared.

  ‘What’ll you say to him?’

  ‘Dunno. Nothing probably, nothing much.’

  ‘Poor Martin—’

  ‘Yes.’

  He went round the table to Juliet and she leaned tiredly against him.

  ‘You’re behaving much better than I am,’ Juliet said. ‘But then you always have. Haven’t you.’

  He put his arms round her and stooped to kiss the top of her head.

  ‘No,’ Henry said.

  Martin had several visitors from Pitcombe besides Henry. Sir Ralph Unwin came, and so did John Murray-French and Peter Morris. Only Sir Ralph spoke of Alice and Clodagh directly, but that was more, Martin could see, because he was literally exploding with his own feelings than because he thought it best to be straightforward with Martin. Martin was thrown, but he didn’t blame Sir Ralph for letting go any more than he blamed Henry or John or Peter for not letting go. He himself behaved with great control while they were there. Only when they were gone, and Cecily was safely in her study or in the garden, did he give way to the consuming and inarticulate rage that possessed him. At night it took the form of hideous dreams, dreams of violence and savagery and killing that sometimes had in them people he had not thought about for years like the prefect at school who had told him how pretty he was and who had then – because Martin had been afraid and disinclined to do what he wanted – instituted a campaign of brilliantly subtle mental cruelty.

  The rage was more exhausting than anything Martin had ever known. It fed on everybody, everything, and it refused to subject itself to reason. It boiled in him like some seething, evil broth, and whether he controlled it or gave vent to it out on the cliffs with his mother’s dogs, he felt no better. Sometimes he thought he would burst, and often he wished he would, trapped as he was in this boiling cauldron. Cecily would say to him sorrowfully that she wished he could let go. If only she knew! He suspected that if he let go entirely, he would die, and most days, for a spell at least, he wished for that. He imagined the cool, quiet, dark state of nothingness because, when it came to the crunch of thinking about Heaven, he discovered that he didn’t want to believe there was one. He could not bear the thought of any further existence, in whatever form. The most desirable state was nothingness, just not to be. That seemed to him the only state in which there could be no torment.

  The only crumb of comfort – the smallest crumb – came from the oddest quarter, from his father. When Richard came home from a journey to Australia, Martin saw at once, and to his amazement, that Richard perceived his rage. Richard made much less fuss of him than Cecily but he was, for all that, much more tender. He made Martin feel that he was not a broken child but a fellow man. Martin heard him, one morning, saying to Cecily in a voice of great anger, ‘For God’s sake, will you allow him his dignity?’

  He could not hear Cecily’s reply. He was sure she made one because she never let accusations just stand, she always had to defend herself. She looked old and tired just now. So, Martin thought, looking in the shaving mirror each morning, did he. He avoided looking at himself except for shaving because somehow the sight of his face made him desperate for his children, for Charlie particularly, in his cheerful baby simplicity. And he couldn’t think of them because that led back to Alice, to himself and Alice, man and woman, and then, of course, the path of thought went downwards suddenly into the roaring cavern of his anguish and his rage.

  Richard cancelled a follow-up trip to Australia because of Martin. Instead he told Martin they were going to pull down a stone shed that had once held a primitive pump engine, and use the stones to repair the wall at the far end of the famous potager. In the fields beyond, the fields that ran up between the woods towards the sea, they were harvesting, early. The huge combine, like a vast ship, went calmly up and down the golden slopes leaving behind it the shorn earth and the great rolled bales. At midday, there was always an hour of quiet and the odd bold rabbit would streak across the fields and vanish into the sanctuary of the woods. The air smelled of burned earth and dust because, although the sun rarely came out, it sailed imprisoned behind a steady veil of cloud which kept the land heavy and warm and quiet. M
artin and Richard worked mostly in silence. Martin said once, ‘I’d forgotten how good you are at this sort of thing.’

  And Richard, turning a piece of stone in his hands to see how it would fit, said, ‘So had I. I sometimes think I’ve quite a lot of talents I didn’t exercise. Usually through my own fault.’

  When the wall was finished, Martin said he wanted to return to work. Cecily grew very agitated and said how could he, where would he live, who would look after him, was he going to divorce Alice? He said he didn’t know about divorce, in fact he didn’t know about anything much, just now, except that he wanted to stop feeling an invalidish freak and go back to work. He would live, he said, with the Dunnes. Henry and Juliet had invited him for as long as he wanted.

  ‘But I shall have nothing left,’ Cecily said later, fiercely, to Richard.

  ‘There’s me—’

  ‘You! You need nobody. You never have.’

  ‘I am made up,’ Richard said, ‘of exactly the same human components of need as you.’

  And he went away then, and by some instinct went up to the old playroom in the attic and found Martin there, with a tumbler of whisky, weeping without restraint because he had thought nobody would hear him.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Most days one of the children asked when Martin would be better enough to come home. Usually Alice said, soon. Once a week Juliet came over and picked them up and took them home with her so that they could see Martin, and the night after these visits James usually wet his bed. It was the school holidays and the days yawned for occupation. Alice devised a list of duties, and Natasha’s was to go down to the shop. She liked this because all down the street people stopped and talked to her and asked her how she was and Mrs Finch would come out of the back part of the shop and give her sweets and sometimes a kiss pungent with Coty’s ‘L’Aimant’. The rest of the day she did not like so much. The feeling in the house was peculiar, without her father, and she missed school, and Sophie, who had been taken to Corfu by her family. She spent a lot of time in her bedroom, drawing a wardrobe for Princess Power, and she wrote a huge notice saying ‘Private – Keep out’ which she stuck on her door, four feet from the floor so that James could not possibly avoid seeing it. Behind the closed door, besides drawing, she spent a good deal of time painting her toenails with Clodagh’s scarlet polish.