A Village Affair

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

On Friday nights, Sam Meadows went to Salisbury'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 Salisbury'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 Charlie. 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 noninterfering father. I also smell a rat.'

'Martin isn't here any more-'

'Allie-'

'I fell in love with someone. Martin's living in Salisbury.'

Sam pressed the receiver against his skull until it hurt, and closed his eyes.

'I'll come-'

'Please. You don't have to. I really am managing. There's a lot to be decided, but I'm doing it, bit by bit.'

'Where's this other fellow? Is he with you?'

'It isn't a fellow,' Alice said. 'She's a girl.'

Slowly Sam raised a clenched fist and knocked his knuckles on his forehead, bang, bang, rhythmically.

'A girl.'

'Yes.'

A kind of groan.

'Allie-'

'I can't possibly explain over the telephone. Nor can I convince you how all right I am. Sad, of course, but all right.'

The children, how are the children-'

'They miss Martin and they miss Clodagh - that's her name, Clodagh - but we are getting by, getting on-'

'You thought I was Clodagh, telephoning-'

'Yes,' Alice said. 'I did. We haven't communicated at all for three weeks.'

'I'll come down tomorrow.'

There was a little pause and then Alice said, 'I'd like that.'

'Hold on there,' Sam said. 'Hold on.'

He was close to tears.

'I'm holding,' Alice said. 'I promise you I'm not going to fall off anything.'

'I'll be with you by teatime. No, earlier, lunchtime. I'll be with you by lunchtime.'

He put the telephone down. It was quite silent in his kitchen except for a bluebottle that had got into one of the grocery cartons and was fizzing about noisily against the cellophane packets of pasta. Sam went over to the box, pulled out his new bottle of whisky and took it into his bedroom, holding it against him with both arms. Then he lay down on his bed, still holding the bottle, and began to cry and cry, like a baby.

Mr Finch was unpacking New Zealand apples from nests of blue tissue paper. It was the sort of job Michelle should have done, but Michelle had handed in her notice because she said she didn't like his attitude to Mrs Jordan. She must have said something similar to her mother, because she had then left Pitcombe and gone to live with her married sister in Poole, and Gwen was buying twice as many Silk Cut as usual and wearing a face like a boot. One of the Crudwells, Heather, who wore black stonewashed jeans so tight you wondered how she had got her feet through, had offered to come and help instead. But Mr Finch was frightened both of her sexuality and her light-fingeredness, and had declined. So she had brought two friends into the shop to laugh at him with her, and he had been very miserable. Even Mrs Finch, whose sympathy for him had run out long ago on account of his want of style, had been sorry for him.

'It's Alice Jordan's fault. Without all that business, this would never have happened.'

She said that a lot now, in between reminding him that she had never, being a woman of experience, been one to judge. In Mr Finch's view, almost everyone judged. It seemed to him that he was probably the only person who didn't, and that was not because he had no opinion but because he was so entirely bewildered. The strangeness of the affair paralyzed him, he had never come across anything like it. The element that really shook Mr Finch was the combination of emotional and sexual unorthodoxy and - you could see this plainly on Alice Jordan's face - the reality of it. The thing was actual and stupefying. However much of a good face Alice put upon things, it was all too evident that with Clodagh away she was suffering real pain, the pain of having new, vital, tender roots ripped up at just the moment they began to take hold and grow. It frequently occurred to Mr Finch that he understood far more about poetry than about life, because life was often just too peculiar to take in.

A very few people felt as he did. He knew that because of the things they were doing. He'd heard that Mrs Macaulay had been up to The Grey House to offer Alice a puppy, a free puppy. Gwen had told him that, contemptuous of Mrs Macaulay and disgusted with Alice, who had declined the puppy and then gone into the downstairs lavatory and cried her eyes out. Buntie Payne, though prone to immediate distress if Alice's name was mentioned in the shop, had flown like an enraged kitten at Sally Mott who had remarked, for Mrs Finch's benefit, that villages were too small to cope with bad influences.

'Don't you use the word bad of Alice Jordan!' Miss Payne had cried.

Sally Mott had banged out of the shop and Miss Payne had had to sit down to weep and be given a glass of water and to explain, over and over again, how strongly she felt but how she couldn't quite describe what it was that she felt so strongly about.

The pub, where Mr Finch allowed himself a weekly pint, was simpler in its approach, perhaps because fewer women went to it. In the lounge bar the subject was hardly mentioned, and in the public, led by Stuart Mott, there was briefly considerable crudity and then, with the football season starting up, loss of interest. As for the church - well, here Mr Finch's frail faith, born out of a love of ritual and a powerful wish that something, some day, might come out of regular church attendance, was very disappointed. He had hoped for a sermon on sin, full of words like evil and phrases like wrong-doing, not because he wished to see Alice condemned, but because he wanted a stout moral rail upon which to put his own hand. What he had got was a sermon on St Barnabas and another on inner city renewal. The strange part, thought Mr Finch, gazing fixedly at a single apple he held in his hand, was that a business like this, an upset like this Alice Jordan-Clodagh Unwin thing, was that it drove you in on yourself for hours and hours of self-examination. The firm ground you thought you stood on suddenly began to heave and shudder and give way. Mr Finch put the apple on the rack with its fellows and frowned at it.

Behind him, Sam cleared his throat.

'I was wondering if you could direct me to The Grey House?'

Mr Finch turned slowly. Sam was wearing a crumpled blue shirt and a red spotted handkerchief knotted round his throat, and had an air of comfortable bohemianism that filled Mr Finch with envy. He hoped it was not immediately visible that his own trousers were made of polyester.

'I shall be only too pleased-'

He took Sam out on to the pavement and pointed up the hill.

'Go straight up until you come to the cottage with the well in the garden - the well is purely ornamental - and turn right there. The gates of The Grey House are directly ahead.'

He waited for Sam to tell him who he was and why he was going to The Grey House, but Sam merely said thank you and climbed back into his car - the interior, Mr Finch noted with admiration, was chaos - and drove off as he had been directed. Forlornly, Mr Finch went back into the shop, reflecting that it was the lot of those who worked in service industries to be, for the most part, entirely invisible to those they served.

Alice, who had never been a demonstrative child in the least, seemed to want Sam to hold her; so he did. He held her for a long time in her bright kitchen while she neither cried nor said much beyond that she was pleased to see him and that she had had no idea that coming alive would be so hard. For the rest of the time she just had her arms round his solid trunk and her cheek on his chest. He was deeply touched by this. After many minutes she sighed and withdrew slowly and went to fetch a bottle of cider from the larder. While she was away, he leaned on the bottom half of the stable door and watched a pram under an apple tree which was rocking violently and intermittently. There was washing hanging out and a half-grown cat asleep in the sun and a trug of lettuces beside it. One of the things about humankind that had never ceased to amaze Sam was that in most cases, whatever the drama, life went on. Emotions and psyches were torn to ribbons, healths and minds were broken, lives were crushed, but on, on, went the relentless business of keeping the machine going, meal after meal, washing and sweeping and going to bed. Perhaps, he thought, turning to accept his glass of cider, it was the treadmill that stopped you going mad. Perhaps the need to do the laundry saved your sanity.

'Maybe I should have told you,' Alice said, sitting on the corner of the table, 'but I didn't tell anyone. I didn't want to. I felt so free. You know, there's been years of ought to's and have to's and suddenly there was pure, clear, strong want to. It was such a relief. There simply was no choice.'

She looked at Sam.

'Society isn't necessarily right about what's good for you.'

He drank.

'It's right,' he said, 'about what's good for most people. But not for everyone. It's the majority that makes the rules and then we call it society. A woman colleague of mine says she resents society for making divorce so easy. That's a circular resentment. She ends up, most likely, with herself.'

'You always do, don't you. That's the great battle, learning to live with yourself-'

'I don't think,' Sam said, looking at her, 'that it's a battle that ought ever to be won.'

'I hurt,' Alice said. 'I hurt all over. I don't think that there's an inch of me that doesn't hurt, inside or out. Every tiny bit of feeling hurts, loving most of all, which is the one thing I want to do, must do-'

Sam stopped leaning on the door and went across to Alice and held her pigtail at the base of her neck. She leaned her head back against his hand for a moment, and then she leaned it against him.

'I'm going to quote you something.'

'Poetry?'

'George Eliot.'

'I only ever,' Alice said mournfully, 'read The Mill on the Floss.'

This is Adam Bede.'

She turned her face into his shirt front.

Tell me.'

' "We get accustomed," ' Sam said into the space of kitchen above her head, ' "to mental as well as bodily pain, without, for all that, losing our sensibility to it: It becomes a habit of our lives and we cease to imagine a condition of perfect ease as possible for us. Desire is chastened into submission, and we are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence and act as if we were not suffering. For it is at such periods that the sense of our lives having visible and invisible relations beyond any of which our present or prospective self is the centre, grows like a muscle that we are obliged to lean on and exert." '

Then it was quiet. It was quiet for a long time and neither of them moved until a small commotion could be heard in the hall, and then the kitchen door opened and there, with James squealing joyously in her arms, stood Clodagh.

'You know why I've come back,' Clodagh said later while they were getting supper. 'Don't you?'

'Yes.'

'I think I'll remind you all the same. I've come back to collect you. You and the children. I'm selling everything. We can go anywhere.'

Alice went on slicing mushrooms. Upstairs Sam was reading Winnie-the-Pooh to Natasha and James, giving Australian accents to Kanga and Roo. It was a great success. Shrieks of pleasure filtered occasionally downstairs. Charlie, in his sleeping suit, was in his highchair in the kitchen eating raspberries with his fingers. Balloon, replete with supper, slept against the Aga. Outside the open stable door, the late summer countryside lazed in a syrupy sunset.

'Don't stonewall me,' Clodagh said. 'That's what you did when I went away. You said you must think. I've been away nearly a month and it's been a nightmare. Have you had a nightmare?'

'Yes,' Alice said. She slid the mushrooms into a casserole. 'I was silly to think I'd find any peace. There was no one but it was rampageously unpeaceful. I felt that I was in one of those little mechanical revolving machines used for stone polishing. Except that I seemed to be the one stone that wouldn't polish.'

'You needed me,' Clodagh said.

There was a little pause and then Alice said, 'I wanted you.'

'Needed.'

'I looked need up in the dictionary,' Alice said. 'It said it was a state that required relief. That seemed rather feeble.'

Clodagh put her hands on Alice's shoulders and turned her.

'If you don't have me, you'll stop living.'

'So you keep saying.'

Clodagh's eyes were bright with tears.

'Alice. Oh, Alice, have a little pity-'

She took her hands away.

'You can't imagine what it was like in London. Eleanor and Ruth were so kind but they have each other. Ma and Pa are trying to be kind, even Pa, but they haven't a clue. Loving you has stopped me belonging anywhere because I'm not fit for anyone else but you. You've ruined me for other people. I don't want anything any more but to make you happy. And your children. I'd do anything for your children.'

She looked across at Charlie who had fitted a raspberry on his finger like a thimble and was regarding it with wonder.

'I adore Charlie,' Clodagh said.

She sat down on a kitchen chair and bent herself round her knees.

'I hate whining like this. But it's so important. I want to give to you and the children. I know I'll be better if I do, a better person. I thought, while I was in London, that I'd like to work for you all. I was so happy when I thought of that.'

Alice came to sit next to her. She put a hand out and stroked her wild head, and thought, as she had thought before, that when Clodagh was distressed she became like an exotic broken bird with tattered, gorgeous plumage and splintered frail bones showing through.

'Clodagh.'

There was silence.

'Clodagh, I didn't want to say this now but we seem to have got to the point where I have to because there isn't anything else we can say with this between us. I'm not coming away with you. If it's any comfort, I'm not going back to Martin either. I expect you'll accuse me of being pompous, but I've made those decisions because it wouldn't be honest to live with either of you. Desire doesn't come into it. What does come into it is all the emotional leftovers I'd have to tow into either relationship and which I'd never be free of. It's no good blaming anyone and it would be worse to lug blame around with me.'

After some time, Glodagh raised her face and glared at Alice.

'I sometimes wonder if you even have a heart-'

Alice got up and went over to Charlie, lifting him out of his highchair. She said over her shoulder, 'I can't keep saying I love you. It loses value if I keep saying it, like some silly jingle. But I do. If you're in the pain you say you're in, you should be able to imagine how I feel too. I'm scared stiff of being without you. But I have to be.' She put her face briefly into Charlie's neck. 'I'm not telling you the way I wanted to but I suppose that's inevitable. I'll probably make an awful mess of telling Martin too.'

Clodagh was crying. Seeing her, Charlie's face began to crumple up.

'You see,' Alice said, 'we've got to stop this. We've got to stop all this not sleeping, and crying, and giving each other such agony-'

'Your way!' Clodagh shrieked. 'Your bloody way!'

Alice had a sudden spurt of temper.

'How you hate it, don't you, when you can't have yours!'

Charlie began to wail. Clucking at him, Alice took him out of the kitchen and up the stairs. From Natasha's room came the sound of Rabbit explaining something officiously to Tigger who wasn't listening. Alice carried Charlie into his cot where he settled at once into the private oblivious contentment that lived there. She pulled the string of his musical box which began to play 'Edelweiss' unevenly. Suppose, she thought, bending over Charlie while he sucked ferociously on his fingers, suppose that instead of coming down and attempting to storm her way to success, Clodagh had come to tell Alice that it was over and that she, Clodagh, had found someone new? What then? Would that have been easier? She straightened up. Easier, but worse. Once you had stopped letting things happen and started to make them happen, you couldn't go back . . . Clodagh had known that all her life, which was why she was in such anguish now, powerless, rudderless.

In a sudden rush of pity, Alice ran back downstairs to the kitchen, but of course Clodagh was gone, leaving all the knives and forks on the table crossed over one another in a childish gesture of love and anger.

'So you want a divorce,' Martin said.

'Yes.'

'I ought to tell you that I feel pretty bitter.'

'Yes. I know.'

'I'm not to blame.'

'It all,' Alice said, 'goes too deep for blame. Or apology.'

'I don't see it that way.'

'I know. I know you don't. You think that if I were to grovel and apologize abjectly you would suddenly feel better, everything would be all right. Well it wouldn't and nor would you because nothing's that simple and this particularly isn't.'

Martin had taken a flat overlooking the river. He had been most insistent that Alice should meet him there, whether to assert his independence, or to demonstrate the sad impersonality of his life now, she could not guess. It was a sunny flat, on the first floor of a substantial Regency house, furnished inappropriately in early Habitat. They sat in two foam-filled chairs covered in chocolate brown corduroy and watched the river and a family of swans with three beige, black-beaked, adolescent cygnets.

'You can't get away from the fact that I'm the victim,' Martin said.

'You speak as if I set out to hurt you. To punish you. As if I acted out of malice-'

'You did,' Martin said. 'I bored you. I disappointed you.'

Alice said nothing.

'I expect you wished you had never married me.'

Still she said nothing.

'You shouldn't have married anyone, anyway,' he went on, goading. 'Should you. You have to face that now, whatever else you refuse to see.'

She looked steadfastly at the swans.

'I don't expect a judge will be very keen on giving you care and control of the children.'

Alice said, 'Why must you insist that I am your enemy?'

'You are. You humiliated me the worst way a woman could humiliate a man. It's your doing.'

'Would you have preferred me to have slept with another man, thereby showing you up as an inadequate lover?'

'Yes,' Martin said. 'No,' and put his head in his hands.

'Stop thinking about sex. It isn't really about sex. At least, sex is only a part.'

'I can't-'

'I don't want a divorce so that I can live with Clodagh. I want a divorce because I'm not going to live with anyone. If you think you'll feel better by making it all difficult, I can't stop you. You have heaps of people on your side. But I'm not going to help make it a battle. I'd rather be your friend than your enemy. I'd rather be Clodagh's friend than her enemy. But I won't for all that pretend I regret what has happened because it wouldn't be true.'

'You must be mad.'

'I expect it's easier to think that.'

'Easier!'

'If you tell everyone I'm mad then you don't have to consider what I am or what I've done seriously. You don't have to acknowledge that I'm part of the human pattern. You don't even have to begin to look for anything good.'

She stood up.

'I must go. I'm lecturing. I seem to have an awful tendency to lecture at the moment.'

He gazed at her. He didn't want her to go and did not know how to make her stay.

'I'll see the children on Saturday-'

'Of course.'

'How much do they know?'

'What you would expect,' Alice said, 'at their age.! They just want everything to be normal again.'

'And whose fault is that?' Martin cried out, unable to stop himself. 'Whose fault is that, thAt it isn't?'

When Alice had gone, he went to his bathroom at the back of the flat and watched her walk across what had been the old kitchen yard of the house, to her car. Well, his car really; he'd bought it, after all. She was wearing a huge, fell, long denim skirt and a red shirt and a suede waistcoat and her plait fell down her back as straight as an arrow. He leaned his forehead on the glass. She opened the car door and climbed in, folding her skirt in after her, and shut the door. Martin closed his eyes. A sense of loss, a terrifying, savage sense of no longer having something that had been his alone, engulfed him in a black flood of bereavement.

Sam, sitting in the garden of The Grey House with a copy of the Times Literary Supplement, was half-supervising his grandchildren. This occupation struck him as being rather like invigilating public examinations, except that the children did not fix him with the anguished, reproachful stares of candidates immobilised by exam nerves or inadequate revision. Instead they seemed absorbed in some extraordinary ritual under a car rug hung between kitchen chairs and only came out intermittently to make him solemn offerings of daisy heads on a tiny plate which Charlie seemed eager to eat. Sam let him. The Elizabethan kitchen, after all, had made excellent use of violets and marigolds.

His presence in the house for the last few days had given it a solidity. Rituals had formed at once around him, as grandfather and as man, little tendrils of the instinct for security reaching out to cling to him. He liked it. He thought he liked it a great deal more than he remembered liking fatherhood, which had come at a time in his life when he wasn't ready for it. His grandchildren interested him a lot; he was struck by the dignity of Charlie's babyhood. He was sorry to think that his children had not interested him very much, a sign, he thought now, of his immaturity then. He saw the realistic female certainties in Natasha and the romantic male agonies in James and he now saw in his daughter, Alice, a mixture of both, as he supposed they ought to exist, in adults who were adults. He also saw, to his delight, that he had a role. The family came to him. They came, Alice had said - and she had said this sadly - in a way they had not come to Martin.

'He is too young,' Sam had said. 'Just as I was. He is still too full of self.'

She had been determined to go and see Martin. Sam had said it would achieve nothing and she replied that it wouldn't now, but that it might make some little difference, later. When she came back, Sam had a plan to put to her. They would all live together. With whatever her share of the proceeds of The Grey House came to and whatever he could get for his flat, they would put together and buy a house near Reading, for the five of them. He envisaged a menage of security and individual freedom. If, when the dust had settled, Clodagh wanted to visit them, well, he wasn't going to object. And Martin could of course come and go as he wished.

Charlie came crawling over the grass and hauled himself upright on Sam's trouser leg.

'Hello, old man.'

Charlie beamed. Sam thought of his journeys to Sainsbury's and how in future he would put Charlie in the child seat of the trolley. He lifted Charlie on to his knee.

'How about living with your grandfather then?'

Charlie examined a shirt button intently.

'We could have a dog.'

From the drive came the sound of Alice's horn, announcing her arrival home. Holding Charlie, Sam stood up and, calling the children to him, led them all round to the garage to greet her.