A Village Affair (11 page)

The black tunic and tights turned briefly from the small bright pink man she was talking to, said ‘Hi' and turned back again.

‘I told her,' Lady Unwin said in a stage whisper to Alice, ‘I told her to be especially nice to Nigel Pitt because I really need him for the hospice. Our present treasurer is threatening to retire, so tiresome but I suppose as he's nearly eighty I shouldn't bully. Come and talk to Susie. She knows everything there is to know about Indian palaces.'

‘I don't, actually,' Susie Somerville said, when they were left alone. She was small and leathery and in her forties, dressed in an evening suit of plum-coloured velvet. ‘I only know how to get a porter wherever I am and how to change a colostomy bag. Being a courier is murder, sheer murder. Our outfit is so expensive that only the ancient can afford it so I haul these disintegrating old trouts round Baalbek and Leningrad and Udaipur and spend every evening mixing whisky and sodas and Complan. It's a nightmare.'

‘Why do you do it?' Alice said, laughing.

‘Money. They give me vast tips, especially the Yanks who love it that I'm titled. I'd miles rather be married, but I only ever want to marry people who don't want to marry me. So I've got horses as substitute children and a lot of friends and this ghoulish job. D'you ride?'

‘No,' Alice said.

‘You've got a man,' Susie Somerville said, draining her glass, ‘you don't need to.'

Ralph Unwin, in a deep blue smoking jacket and smelling of something masculine and Edwardian, came up to take Alice in to dinner.

‘Is Susie trying to shock you?'

‘I can't shock anybody any more,' Susie said. She jerked her head towards the fireplace. ‘How's Clo, now she's back?'

Ralph Unwin spoke quietly.

‘We think she's fine. She won't speak of why she left, so we are simply biding our time.' He glanced at Alice. ‘Our daughter, Clodagh. It looked as if she might be going to marry a chap in New York, but she's suddenly come home.' He smiled very faintly. ‘Young hearts do mend.'

Susie Somerville and Alice both looked across at the
Struwwelpeter
shock of curls. Alice said suddenly, surprising herself, ‘Of course it hurts, but it's better to feel something so strongly that it half-kills when it's over than—'

She stopped.

‘Hear, hear,' Susie Somerville said. ‘Story of my life. Come on, Ralph. Margot's gesturing like a windmill. Nosebag time.'

In the doorway to the hall, there was polite congestion. Alice found herself next to Clodagh, whose face was difficult to see on account of her hair. Alice could not, out of delicacy, mention New York but she felt she ought to say something.

‘We've just moved in to John Murray-French's house.'

‘I know,' Clodagh said and moved on to catch up with her mother.

At dinner, Clodagh was next to Martin. When she turned towards him, Alice could see her face, which was neither pretty nor in the least like either of her solidly handsome parents. It was the face of a fox, wide-cheeked and narrow-chinned, except that her mouth was wide too. Because Alice was new to the village she had been put next to her host, and in order that she should not be alarmed by too much social novelty, John Murray-French was on her other side. In front of her was a bone china soup plate edged with gold containing an elegant amount of pale green soup sprinkled with chives.

‘Watercress,' John said. ‘They grow it further down the Pitt river. Are you liking my house?'

‘Enormously.'

‘You're too thin.'

‘I don't think,' Alice said, leaning so that Shadwell could pour white burgundy over her shoulder into one of the forest of glasses in front of her, ‘you know me well enough to say that.'

‘It doesn't need intimacy. It needs an aesthetic eye. I don't just know about ducks.'

‘Ducks,' Ralph Unwin said. ‘Perfect bind. I gather they are coming off the river up the village street again.'

‘Does that matter?'

‘Only in that someone, sooner or later, slips on what they have left behind, and as they are reckoned to be my ducks, I end up visiting the victim in Salisbury hospital. My dear girl, you haven't any butter.'

Down the table Martin and Clodagh were laughing. She was doing the talking, very animatedly, and Alice could see her excellent, very white teeth. On Martin's other side, Susie Somerville and Mr Fanshawe were having a boastfully comparative conversation about international airports, and opposite Alice a gaunt woman in a grey silk blouse pinned at the neck with a cameo was drinking her soup with admirable neatness.

‘You know Elizabeth Pitt, of course,' Ralph Unwin said.

Mrs Pitt leaned forward.

‘I know
you
. Two dear little boys and a girl. They look exactly the age of Camilla's three. And you've taken on the dreaded shop.'

Ralph Unwin gave a mock shudder.

‘The shop!'

‘It's jolly good,' John Murray-French said. ‘Has just the kind of food I like. Left to myself I'd live on beans and biscuits and whisky.' He indicated his soup. ‘Can't really see the point of vegetables.'

‘Are you,' Sir Ralph said to Alice, ‘going to start a vegetable garden?'

Alice smiled at him.

‘I'm hoping my mother-in-law will do that.'

‘Not
Cecily
Jordan!'

‘The same—'

‘My
dear
,' said Elizabeth Pitt.

‘Does Margot know? You won't get a minute's peace—'

‘Yes, she does.'

‘I
told
you Martin was Cecily's son, you know,' John said. ‘It's odd how nobody listens to a word you say unless you are offering them a drink, when they can hear you clear as a bell three fields off.'

Sir Ralph bent his blue gaze directly upon Alice.

‘What wonderful luck. Has Martin inherited her talent?'

She looked down the table. Martin was describing something to Clodagh and using his hands to make a box shape in the air. She looked utterly absorbed.

‘Not really. I mean, he's very good at keeping a garden tidy, but he hasn't really got her eye.'

‘This child's a painter,' John said across her, ‘but she won't paint.'

‘Won't?'

‘I can't, just now,' Alice said unhappily.

Sir Ralph put a hand on hers.

‘Sort of painter's block?'

‘I suppose so—'

‘I know!' Elizabeth Pitt said triumphantly. ‘Juliet Dunne has a charming one, in her sitting room. Now Juliet,' she said, turning to Sir Ralph, ‘has got a brilliant scheme for the hospice garden party—'

Sir Ralph bent towards her. John Murray-French turned away to say to the woman on his far side, ‘I gather your trout have got some nasty ailment—'

Alice looked back down the table at Clodagh. She could watch her for a bit now, without distraction. It looked as if she hadn't touched her soup, and she had broken her roll into a hundred pieces and scattered it messily round her place, just like a child. She had very good hands. As far as Alice could see, they were without rings, but her nails were painted scarlet. Her eyes were set slightly on a slant, and even though her hair was light, her brows and lashes were dark. She didn't seem to have on any jewellery except an immense Maltese cross suspended round her neck on a black ribbon, invisible against her black tunic. She was saying something to Martin, looking down, and then she suddenly looked up and caught Alice gazing at her but her expression remained quite unchanged. Alice felt snubbed. She looked towards Sir Ralph and Mrs Pitt, but they were deep in county politics, so she looked instead at all the Unwins on the walls in their gilded plaster frames, regarding the dinner party from beneath their unsuitable, practical twentieth-century picture lights.

When the salmon came, John Murray-French turned back and told her that his son Alex was married, to a French girl whom he had met in Athens. Alice said she was so glad. They ate their salmon talking companionably and Alice tried to be interested in Alex's new job as an investment analyst and at the same time tried to remember the flavour of Alex's brief, ardent interest in her. During pudding – a chocolate roulade or apricot tart – and cheese – Stilton and Blue Vinney – Sir Ralph devoted himself to Alice. He was very charming. He told her of his childhood at Pitcombe, and how two spinster great-aunts had lived in The Grey House then. He told her how his three children had exactly the same nursery rooms as he and his sister had had, which gave Alice the chance to ask a question to which she perfectly well knew the answer.

‘And is Clodagh your youngest?'

He immediately looked fond.

‘She is. Twenty-six. Of course, she could have been married a dozen times over, but she has impossibly high standards. She's much the brightest of our three. She worked in publishing in New York. Somebody and Row. I'm afraid I'm putty in her hands.'

Alice rather wanted to say that it looked as if Martin was, too. But instead, she said, ‘Perhaps she could get a job in English publishing, now she's back.'

‘You must forgive a fond old father, but I rather want her here for a bit. Perhaps you could help me devise a scheme to keep her. I know she'd love to see your paintings.'

‘Oh no!' Alice said, genuinely alarmed.

‘All you creative people, so modest. Now tell me, when are we going to be allowed to meet your mother-in-law?'

When the cheese had been borne away, Lady Unwin rose and swept the women out of the room before her.

‘
Strictly
twenty minutes,' she said to Sir Ralph, and then to her charges, ‘Clodagh thinks we are absolutely barbaric. Don't you, darling? I suppose Americans wouldn't dream of such a thing.'

Clodagh said, ‘The Americans I knew ate in restaurants all the time,' and then she went up to Susie Somerville and said, ‘Come on, Sooze. I want a horror story from your latest trip.'

‘Braced for it?' Susie Somerville said delightedly, going up the great staircase beside Clodagh. ‘Well, you simply won't believe it, but I had an eighty-five-year-old junkie who chose
Samarkand
as the spot to trip out—'

Margot Unwin took Alice's arm.

‘My dear, I do hope they looked after you at your end of the table.'

‘Beautifully, thank you—'

‘Let's find you a loo, my dear, the geography of this house is a nightmare for strangers.'

They went up the stairs together behind Susie and Clodagh, Margot talking all the time, and across an immense landing peopled with giant Chinese jars to one of several panelled doors. Margot thrust it open with her free hand and pushed Alice into the pink warmth beyond.

‘Take your time, my dear.'

Alice was suddenly desperately tired. Shut into this baronial bathroom done up in a style Cecily would describe as Pont Street 1955, she could at last look at her watch. It was only ten past ten. There would have to be half an hour without the men, and then half an hour with them, before she could even begin to signal home to Martin across the room. She looked in the mirror. To herself she looked badly put together and amateurish. Perhaps it was time to cut off her pigtail.

Outside the bathroom, Sarah Alleyne was waiting for her. Sarah was fair and expensive looking, and Juliet Dunne had said that she was brilliant on both horses and skis.

‘I wondered,' she said now, languidly, to Alice, ‘I wondered if we could talk about sharing a school run. My wretched nanny's pregnant and I'm quite stuck, just for now—'

In the drawing room the ladies were gathered, holding cups of black coffee and feigning indifference to a silver dish of chocolates. Neither Clodagh nor Susie Somerville was there. Lady Unwin sat Alice beside her on a little French sofa, and talked about the village. She went through a kind of vivacious inventory of inhabitants, from old Fred Mott who was nearly a hundred through Miss Pimm and Miss Payne to some old thing called Lettice Deverel who played the harp. After twenty minutes, Alice realized that she had not been asked a single question. After twenty-five minutes, the men came in, and after thirty, Susie and Clodagh returned still absorbed in some conversation. Martin was holding both brandy and a cigar, neither of which he normally touched, and he sat down beside the gaunt Mrs Pitt with every show of enthusiasm. Alice realized, with amazement, that he was really enjoying himself.

She could not drag him away until almost midnight, and only then because other people were beginning to look round for Shadwell and their coats and to say, ‘Come on, old thing, eight o'clock church tomorrow, don't forget.' Both Unwins kissed Alice goodnight but Clodagh, talking to the Harleyford man whom Alice wondered if Lady Unwin intended to be the next boyfriend, just waved from across the room and called, ‘Look at the beams!' to Martin.

‘What did she mean?' Alice said in the car.

‘She and her brother carved swear words into the beams in the room above our garage, for a dare, when they were little. She couldn't remember what the words were, though.'

He began to laugh.

‘Was she nice?' Alice said.

‘Good fun,' he said, still laughing. ‘Good fun.'

At home they found James asleep in their bed, clutching Alice's nightie. Gwen said she was sorry about it, but he'd been a proper handful. Martin carried him to his own bed, and then drove Gwen home while Alice sat on the floor of James's room and waited for him to sink down into deep oblivion again. She sat with her arms round her knees and her head bent and thought, without enthusiasm, of the dinner party. When Martin came back, she crept out of James's room and went to their bedroom where Martin was chucking his clothes over the back of a chair.