A Village Affair (27 page)

‘Mrs Jordan, I am sure you will not misunderstand me. I am also sure you will understand why I must, out of delicacy, say this to you, rather than allow Mr Finch to. Michelle will not be on the van with you this afternoon because her mother has requested that she shall not be.'

Alice began to laugh.

‘Don't be
idiotic
—'

Mrs Finch watched her.

‘I've lived a bit, Mrs Jordan. There isn't much I haven't seen. I'm not one to judge. But I'll tell you that in not judging, I am very rare. Very rare indeed.'

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 Clodagh 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 Clodagh 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 naïve painting of pigs she had always said she would
kill
Georgina for (and Georgina had half-believed 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.'