A Village Affair

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

'You will not,' Sir Ralph said, banging his fist into his open palm, 'stay here one more hour. You will not. You will leave Pitcombe.'

His face was scarlet. Margot and Lettice Deverel, who had been summoned from a peaceable kitchen supper with the parrot, both endeavoured to speak, but he brandished his arms at them, commanding them silence.

'I put all my faith in you. All my faith. And you have betrayed me and perverted all the decency of your upbringing-'

'Ralph,' Margot cried. 'Ralph. Don't be so exaggerated. It doesn't help. Clodagh is still Clodagh.'

'Of all people,' Sir Ralph said. 'Of all my treasured people.'

Clodagh was sitting very upright on a small sofa in her father's library. She had gone to her mother soon after her return from London about seven o'clock and it was now after ten. Mrs Shadwell had as usual left a cold supper in the kitchen but nobody had been near it. It seemed, when she had begun upon it, that there was far more for Clodagh to tell her parents than she had supposed, particularly as she had had to repeat many things and explain many more. The separateness of her intimate life, which she had come to believe was inviolable, seemed not to be so; the purity of her independence was, before her eyes, being trodden all over by violent distress and abhorrence. Margot had not, whatever her feelings, said one unkind word. Her father had made it plain that her sexual tastes revolted and bemused him and that he was personally outraged that she should have sought to gratify them in Pitcombe. She had tried to explain about love, and it was his reaction to that that had sent her mother to the telephone for Lettice Deverel.

Sir Ralph had always been fond of Lettice. Privately he admired her brain and strength of personality, and publicly he called her, with affection, our jolly old bohemian. When Lettice came into the room, still in her gardening trousers, he held his hands out to her piteously and said, 'What are we to do? Oh, my dear, what is to become of us?'

Lettice had taken his hands and kissed him, and then gone over to kiss Clodagh, before saying, 'We are not going to lose our heads.'

'You don't understand-'

'My dear Ralph, I do. I understand you all.'

He had been calmer then, and while Lettice talked to him Clodagh had sat with her head bent and attempted to quiet her own storm of rage by thinking of Alice. No one should say a word against Alice, she was resolved upon that. But then her father did, he could not help himself; he cried out that Alice must have persuaded his daughter and Glodagh screamed with fury at him and then he said she must leave Pitcombe within the hour. It was melodramatic, crude, stupid, oh all those things and worse, but it was human and, most of all, it was happening.

There is no end to the horror,' Sir Ralph said. 'It will be round the village like wildfire, round the county. The reputation of centuries-'

'Ralph,' Lettice said warningly.

'It will,' he insisted.

'It will be a nine days' wonder. What do you suppose goes on inside some of your own cottages? In intimate matters,' Lettice said, placing a hand on each of her trousered knees, 'your tenants are infinitely more experienced than you.'

He glared at her.

'How dare you.'

She was unperturbed.

'It will be a nine days' wonder. Seven if Glodagh goes quickly.'

Margot made a little mewing sound of misery.

'We are both going,' Clodagh said. 'Alice and me. We will go together.'

'I hope not.'

'Alice has children,' Margot said.

'They come too.'

'I hope not,' Lettice said again. She looked at Clodagh. 'That should not be the future. There is no future in that. The future lies in you using your able head for the first time in your life. It wouldn't hurt you-' She paused. 'It wouldn't hurt you to learn to be alone.'

Clodagh turned her head away.

'You may have been spoiled,' Lettice said. There's no call to spoil yourself.'

Clodagh's teeth were clenched.

'I'm thinking of Alice.'

'Are you? And her children no doubt. How will they fare, brought up as they have been, if you take them to Dorset and expect local society to accept you both as an ordinary couple? Rural society can't do it. Maybe city society can, though I doubt it does. I believe it to be thin, sham stuff. And what has their father done, beyond be a man? A dull man perhaps, an unexciting, inhibited man, but no brute. Just a man. Live with that, will you? World well, lost for love, eh?' Lettice leaned forward and prodded the air towards Clodagh. 'If Alice was a free woman, I'd say off with the pair of you and good luck to you. Shut up, Ralph. But she's not and I can't say it.'

Clodagh felt not only anger now but fear. She couldn't delude herself that Lettice was a conventional, orthodox, right-wing old puritan, however hard she tried, and if Lettice said they couldn't because of the children... She tossed her head. Nonsense. Of course they could. The battle would just be bloodier. She said so.

'I shall never have your children at my knee,' Sir Ralph said suddenly, ignoring her remark.

Margot, even in the emotional state she was in, could not look at Lettice.

If that's what's worrying you,' Clodagh said brutally, 'I can easily bear a man for that-'

Sir Ralph gave a little cry. Margot got out of her chair and came across to slap Clodagh's hand.

'Behave yourself!'

'Bed,' Lettice said, getting up.

'Well, certainly no more of this-'

Clodagh got up too and went swiftly over to the door. It was huge and panelled and painted white, and as she stood against it for a moment before she opened it she looked to Margot as she had looked before she was twelve, when the mischief of her childhood turned into the waywardness of her adolescence.

'You are not,' said Lettice, watching Margot, 'going to start asking yourself where you went wrong.'

Clodagh went up the dim stairs without putting the lights on. The air was deep misty blue, but not dark. On the landing the enormous Chinese ginger jars that had come home with an adventuring eighteenth-century Unwin gleamed like fat-bellied barbaric gods. There were eight of them, on rosewood plinths, and as a child Clodagh had named each one. Now she went past them as if they were strangers, past the little Chippendale sofa where she had posed, every birthday, for a photograph, past the naive painting of pigs she had always said she would kill Georgina for (and Georgina had halfbelieved her), past the icon of St Nicholas she had once believed could see her conscience, past the cabinet of fans and the cabinet of snuff-boxes, past her mother's bedroom door and off the plushy broadloom overlaid with Afghan rugs of the main landing, on to the haircord of the old nursery passage and her bedroom which looked south towards the beeches, the beeches which hid Alice from her view.

She knelt on the window seat and looked hard down through the beeches. Alice was there. Alice, who needed her. Alice whom she had rescued. That had been the most exhilarating discovery of Clodagh's life, that discovery that Alice didn't believe, deep down, in her own value. When that became plain to Clodagh, when she saw that however different, however stylish Alice looked, she didn't have real faith in herself, she even doubted the worth of what she was, out here in the demanding conventionality of country life - then Clodagh had felt real intoxication coming on. She could wave the wand. She could do for Alice what Alice couldn't quite do for herself.

And she had done it. Alice was changed, but then, so was she. She laid her cheek against the smooth wood of the folded shutters. She needed Alice now. She hadn't meant to; in fact, having never needed anyone, only wanted them, briefly, it hadn't occurred to her that needing might happen. The thought of not having Alice made her want to scream and scream, hysterically, and break things. Nobody should make her bear such pain. Alice was hers. She would woo her again, a second time. She had wooed her to be hers, now she would woo her to be hers for ever, to come away with her.

She leaned forward so that her forehead rested on the windowpane. It was nearly as dark as it would get. If she went and stood in front of St Nicholas now, and stared at his intractable dark Byzantine face, she would be able to look at him without a tremor. She had done a good thing. After a quarter of a century of doubtful goodness, Clodagh had no doubt that now she was on the right track. She had made an unhappy woman happy, and the happiness had spread all round her, to her children, to her friends, to the village. As for Martin - well, that was a slight casualty, but one outweighed by all the benefits. Clodagh's mind went rapidly over Martin, a small thing taken in proportion to the whole. In any case, he had, consciously or unconsciously, damaged Alice. And it was Clodagh who had healed her.

She left the window and went over to her bed and put on the lamp beside it. A moth with a pale furry head and black pin-dotted wings immediately began to bang senselessly about inside the shade. Clodagh watched it. Then she spread out her hands in the glow of the lamplight and looked at them. On the wedding finger, she wore the silver band Alice had given her. She had given Alice a ring too, a ring as fine as a thread, and Alice had slipped it on her own wedding finger, under the ring Martin had given her. They had not spoken at all during that little ceremony, just sat, touching hands, across Alice's kitchen table one afternoon while Charlie, on the floor, rattled a wooden spoon inside a plastic mug and shouted at it. That was how it had always been, so unstagey, so strong and unsentimental, so real And that was how it would always be.

'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 Glodagh 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 MurrayFrench 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. Martin 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.