‘Excuse me,’ a voice said next to her, ‘but am I on the right train to make a connection for Didcot Parkway?’
Elizabeth Meadows opened the door of her sister’s house in Colchester and found Richard Jordan there. She was so astonished that she almost shut the door again in fright. He said, smiling, ‘I wondered if you would have forgotten what I looked like.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘No—’
From the through sitting room where she was polishing the brass fire-irons, Elizabeth’s sister Ann called, ‘Who is it? I wish you’d shut the door.’
‘Come in,’ Elizabeth said.
He followed her into the cream painted hall where a Swiss cheese-plant sat exactly in the centre of an otherwise empty table, and then into the sitting room. Ann Barlow was wearing cotton gloves to protect her hands from the brass cleaning wadding and a flowered pinafore with a big front pocket on which ‘Breakages!’ was embroidered in royal blue stranded cotton. She scrambled to her feet, frowning. If there was one thing she hated more than an unexpected caller, it was an unexpected man caller.
‘You remember Richard Jordan. Alice’s father-in-law—’
In Ann Barlow’s mind, the Jordans were entangled with the breakdown of her sister’s marriage. She pulled off a glove and held out an indifferent hand, making ritual noises about coffee which Richard said untruthfully that he would love. He was directed towards a flowered armchair from which he could see a regimented garden and a white painted seat and a line of washing hung up in strict order of size. Elizabeth did not know what to do with him. She resented him fiercely both for coming and for looking so at ease now he was here. She sat opposite him and stared at his well-shod feet and resolved that she would not help him conversationally.
He did not seem to mind her unfriendliness. He told her that James had learned to swim in Cornwall, which she remained inflexible about since Alice hadn’t seen fit to tell her they were going to Cornwall in the first place. He admired the delphiniums and said Cecily was opposed heart and soul to the notion of the new pink ones. He remarked on the beastliness of the A12, to which Elizabeth managed to reply that she didn’t drive any more, and then Ann came in with a tray of coffee and there was the usual fuss – Elizabeth despised Ann’s houseproudness as deeply suburban – with little tables and spoons and plates to catch biscuit crumbs. When the fuss had subsided, Richard began to talk very differently. He said he was here without Alice’s knowledge or permission but she had enough to cope with just now and he had made a unilateral decision to come that he would probably be punished for. He then said, with a calm Elizabeth found horrible, that Alice and Martin had separated because Alice had had a love affair with a woman, and that Alice was at the moment trying to determine her future and Martin was trying to recover from a breakdown. He then said, unwisely, that he hoped they would not be too harsh on anyone. At this point, Ann Barlow put down her coffee cup and left the room.
‘I hope,’ Richard said, ‘that I have not shocked your sister.’
‘Of course you have.’
‘And you? Have I shocked you?’
‘Nothing,’ Elizabeth said angrily, ‘nothing really shocks me.’ She gave Richard the first proper look she had awarded him ‘You are a meddler,’ she said. ‘And I doubt your motives.’
He shrugged.
‘I hoped to smooth Alice and Martin’s path—’
She snorted.
‘I’m not a fool. Prurient is the word that springs to mind. Prurient is how I should describe your action in coming here.’
He lowered his head. She thought his colour was darkening.
‘Heaven knows,’ Elizabeth said, ‘heaven knows what your motives are, what they have ever been.’
He kept his head down.
‘Could they not be,’ he said into his chest, ‘could they not be altruistic?’
‘Impersonally, of course they could be. In your case, I doubt it. I resent your coming. I resent your crude translation of my daughter to me. I resent your possessive attitude to grandchildren who are as much mine as yours. I resent your patronage. I resent the divisions you have, as a family, made in mine.’
He got up, abruptly, clumsily.
‘I had better go.’
She said nothing. He was beside himself with rage.
‘I shall tell Alice of this—’
‘You are wrong to suppose she will have any sympathy for you. Much less gratitude.’
He wanted to shout at her that he saw exactly why Sam Meadows had left her, why Alice had seen in Cecily the mother Elizabeth had declined to be. He began, but she went past him to open the sitting room door and then the front door and he found himself outside, beside a bed of stout begonias, bellowing to himself in the quiet residential road, almost before he had said a quarter of it. There was nothing for it but to drive back to London.
Two days later, Alice received two letters at The Grey House. One was from her mother,
‘I had a call from your father-in-law,’ Elizabeth wrote, ‘in the course of which I learned a great deal more about him than about you. Perhaps you will write. Perhaps you will even come and see me. Do not be afraid of coming, because I would not try to counsel you.’
It was signed, ‘With love from your mother, Elizabeth.’ The other letter was no more than a postcard. It was undated and unsigned, and it simply said, in Clodagh’s wild black writing, ‘Women need men like fish need bicycles.’
That was all. The next day the children came home and Alice realized, holding them with great relief and love, that in the fortnight they had been away she had come to no decision at all.
‘What are you doing?’ James said. He was holding a plastic ray gun and half a biscuit.
‘Writing to Grandpa.’
‘Can I too?’
‘Yes, but not on this paper. On your own bit of paper.’
James put the ray gun down on Alice’s letter. He did that all the time now, putting his spoon on her plate, his book across her newspaper, his toothbrush into her mouth.
‘Jamie—’
He put his hand on the gun. Silently he dared her to move it away.
‘I can’t write—’
He raised his other hand and pushed the bitten biscuit at her mouth.
‘Darling. Don’t—’
‘Eat it!’
‘No, Jamie, no, it’s all licky—’
He jabbed it against her lower lip and it broke.
‘You broke my biscuit.’
‘You broke it. Being silly. Move your gun so I can write.’
He kept his hand on the gun and screwed his foot round on the piece of biscuit that had fallen on to the floor until it was a brown powder.
‘There.’
Alice took no notice. He threw another bit down and did the same thing. Alice gripped the table edge and her pen and glared at what she had written.
‘After thinking it over and over, I know I must decline your offer. The price – the price of having to rely on you – is too high. I can’t do it. You are too protective, somehow, too administering. I couldn’t breathe. I don’t really know if I trust you.’
She thought, I should be saying this, not writing it, but if I say it he will argue with me and try to persuade me otherwise. And I may say, like last time, all kinds of things that I should not have said.
‘Gun,’ said James loudly. ‘Gun, gun, gun.’
He pushed it roughly into her pen-holding hand and hurt her. She held the hurt hand in the other, tense with pain and fury, and he watched her.
‘Gun,’ he said again, but with less confidence.
‘Go away,’ Alice said. ‘Go away until I have written my letter. Go and play with Tashie.’
He shook his head, but he was chastened by the red mark on her hand. He crept under the table and lay down and put his cheek on Alice’s foot, and after a while she could feel tears running into her sandal. She moved her toes, so that he could feel them, and with an immense effort picked up her pen again.
‘I
can’t,’ she wrote to Richard, ‘be the cure-all for your frustrations. I don’t want that ever again, the prison of gratefulness. I am grateful, but I’d rather be it from a distance, on equal terms.’
She felt James’s hand on her other foot.
‘Jamie? You’re a bit tickly—’
He giggled, faintly.
‘You trapped me,’ Alice wrote, ‘didn’t you. You trapped me into talking. I’d rather not think why you wanted to do that and I’d rather not think why you want to help me. But what has happened to me has moved me out of the objective case into the subjective case so that I am not available for anyone else’s plans just now.’
She signed the letter, ‘With love from Alice’. When it was licked up and stamped, by James, they put Charlie into his pushchair and found Natasha, who was arranging her Cornish shells into an interminable exhibition all around the upstairs windowsills, and went down to the post. On the way they met Lettice Deverel who was very kind and ordinary and invited them to tea to meet the parrot. When they got home, Alice made cheese sandwiches for lunch and they ate them in the garden while the children talked about all the things they would do when Daddy and Clodagh came home again.
‘Have you seen her?’ Clodagh demanded.
Lettice held the telephone at a little distance from her ear.
‘Yes. Yes, I have.’
‘And? And?’
‘We didn’t speak of you, if that’s what you mean.’
‘How did she look?’
‘A little tired. That’s all.’
‘Lettice,’ Clodagh shouted. ‘Lettice. How can you be so awful to me?’
There was a little silence. The parrot, across the kitchen, clucked approvingly at a grape it held.
‘I used to think,’ Lettice said, ‘I used to think that you had promise and originality. And courage. Now I don’t know. I’m more depressed by this episode than I can tell you. You seem to me like some kind of Hedda Gabler, all style and shallow selfishness.’
In London, sitting on her fortunate friends’ sofa, Clodagh began to cry.
‘Except you have a heart,’ Lettice went on. ‘I know that because I can see it’s been touched. Oh, Clodagh dear, I do beg you to make something of your life.’
‘No!’ said the parrot. ‘No. No. No. Not pretty.’
It threw the grape stalk out of its cage.
‘I can’t give this up,’ Clodagh said. ‘I can’t. I’ll die.’
‘On the contrary, you will live much better.’
‘Is she missing me? Does she look as if she’s missing me?’
‘Don’t ask me idiotic questions. Ask me how your poor parents are.’
‘Well?’
‘Much in need of hearing from you. You should have rung them, not me.’
‘I couldn’t ask them about Alice.’
‘You shouldn’t be asking anyone.’
‘What about the children then? Did they mention me?’
‘No. We only spoke of the parrot.’
‘Oh, parrot,’ said the parrot. ‘Dear parrot. Dear me.’
Clodagh’s voice grew small.
‘I long to come down.’
‘I dare say—’
‘But I’m not crawling to anyone—’
‘If you don’t get off your bottom, Clodagh Unwin,’ Lettice said, ‘and make an independent decision, you’ll find that Alice will probably have made them all for you.’
‘What d’you mean? What’s going on? What did Alice—’
‘I mean nothing, except that Alice has three children and no money of her own and can’t fiddle-faddle around like you can.’
‘Has Martin been around?’
‘No. He’s living with a friend in Salisbury.’
‘I’m coming down, damn what everyone thinks—’
‘Think!’ Lettice cried. ‘Think! You try a little thinking.’
The parrot hooked its beak into the wires of its cage and began to haul itself up to the top. When it got there, it hung upside down for a bit and then it said, with great calm, ‘Damn and blast.’ Lettice began to laugh. Delighted, it joined in, and Clodagh, hearing what appeared to be a roomful of merriment in Pitcombe, put the telephone down, in despair.
Martin was just waiting. He had stopped talking to anyone about Alice, particularly to Cecily. He had a very comfortable room in a friend’s house on the edge of the Close in Salisbury, and he was working hard, and seeing his children once a week when Alice left them for him at The Grey House and went out, and he was making sure he played tennis a good deal and golf a bit, and he had accepted an invitation to stalk in Sutherland in October. He was making quiet plans to sell The Grey House. Whatever happened next, they couldn’t possibly stay there.
Cornwall had restored him in some measure, certainly as to how he stood with his children. He liked being with them but was amazed at how much they needed done for them, how insatiable and helpless they were. Except for the brief time over Charlie’s birth, he had never been responsible for them, a thing he didn’t like but was perfectly prepared to do, if he had to. He felt perfectly prepared for a lot of things. That was the trouble, really, feeling like that. Nothing seemed violently upsetting any more or impossible to face or to be worth very much angst of any kind. When he tried to think what really mattered now, he couldn’t. So he thought he would just get on with each day, as unremarkably and pleasantly as he could, and wait. In any case, if he waited, in the end it would be Alice who had to do something. And that would be only just. Wouldn’t it?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
On Friday nights, Sam Meadows went to Sainsbury’s. He had grown rather to like the expedition because the store was full of people who had just finished work and who were full of a pre-weekend relief and excitement. As the years of his lone living went on, he found to his amusement that he was making sure he had no teaching commitments early on Friday evenings to get in the way of going to Sainshury’s. He also noticed how he was beginning to buy the same things, whisky and white bread and black cherry jam and pasta and jars of pesto, and how he would make for the same check-out because there was such a dear little woman on the till, who ducked her head at him, bursting with half-hidden smiles.
Since he had left Elizabeth, a good many women had tried quite hard to live with him. He had let two of them begin but they had both had over-clear ideas about how life should be lived, and had been unable to keep those ideas to themselves. The only woman he had wanted, in ten years, to come and do whatever she liked with his life as long as she came, hadn’t wanted to. She liked his bed, but preferred her own life outside it. Because of this, Sam had continued to love her and had stopped collecting his pupils like an array of Barbie dolls. They still flirted with him, particularly if essays were late, but these days he could just let them. In any case, the university now had a ferocious female Committee Against Sexual Harassment.
Sam had five years to go before he retired. When he retired, he thought he would go and live in Wales, preferably in a fishing community, and write a book on the power of language that would become an indispensable text book in schools. When he had done that, he would write fools’ guides to the Bible and classical literature because he was still so exasperated, after thirty years of teaching, to find that clever modern students of literature were so ignorant of both that they couldn’t get through a line of Milton without having to look up the references. After that, he thought he would probably die, and be buried in an austere Welsh hillside under the wheeling gulls. He didn’t really want a headstone but he did want something to indicate that he had meant to be a poet, so that posterity should know that inside his apparently phlegmatic, idle, pleasure-seeking bulk, quite a lot of striving had gone on.
Standing in the Sainsbury’s queue one August Friday, he was offered most of a very small, very wet dolly mixture by a gregarious baby in the child seat of the next trolley. He accepted it gratefully and ate it. It tasted of scented soap and reminded him of the sweets of his childhood. The baby reminded him of Char
lie. Or rather, not of how Charlie looked, because Sam had only seen him once when he was too new to look like anything, but more that Charlie existed, that Sam had a baby grandson. In the early spring, Alice had sent Sam photographs of The Grey House and had said that it would all be ready for him, when he came for his annual summer visit. After that, he had heard nothing. He hadn’t minded or noticed much, because he presumed that she had been too busy, and because he had been busy himself, but now, standing in the queue and smiling at the strange baby (it was not a pretty baby, it had a high domed forehead and its chin was glossy with dribble, but the gift of the dolly mixture had been true generosity in one so young), he thought that perhaps Alice’s silence was beginning to have a flavour of oddness. Half the summer vacation had gone and she had not even telephoned. No more had he, he wasn’t blaming her, but now that he thought about her, he found that he wanted to see her and his grandchildren. By the time he had got his groceries to the car, he wanted to see them very much indeed.
When he got home, he put the grocery boxes on the kitchen table beside the remains of a very good lunch of Scotch eggs and Guinness, and went to the telephone. Alice answered it with a kind of breathless eagerness, but when she heard who it was she became constrained.
‘What’s up?’ Sam said.
There was a silence.
‘Come on,’ Sam said. ‘Come on, Allie. Is something wrong?’
‘A great deal has happened—’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Oh yes. Perfectly.’
‘And the children?’
‘Fine. Absolutely fine.’
‘Don’t fool around with me,’ Sam said. ‘I am your non-interfering father. I also smell a rat.’
A Village Affair Page 24
