A Village Affair (34 page)

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, Clodagh 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 ménage 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.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The cottage was undeniably ugly. It was built of yellowish brick under a blue slate roof and stood in a long garden that ran down to the lane, a tangled garden with aggressive great clumps of delphinium and hollyhock and ornamental sea kale. There was also an apple tree groaning with fruit; it was clearly in the habit of being so prolific because one long, low, laden branch was propped up on a stout wooden stake driven into the ground.

The cottage was uncompromising as well as ugly. It had four rooms upstairs and two downstairs, and in a narrow wing running out at the back, a bathroom above a depressing kitchen. The previous owners had believed very much in hardboard. It was nailed over fireplaces and panelled doors and bannisters and beams, and had then been painted in either mauve or apricot emulsion to blend in with the surrounding walls. In the sitting room there was a fireplace of faintly iridescent tiles and below every tap in the house stains spread in green and brown tongues.

Two miles further up the valley there had been a pretty cottage for sale. It was built of stone and the interior was beamed and friendly. There had been great pressure on Alice to choose it because even if many of those exerting pressure didn't much, at the moment, care where she lived, they wanted the children to live somewhere attractive. But Alice had been adamant. She had been adamant about a lot of things and choosing East Cottage rather than the pretty stone one was one of them. The others were that she would live alone and that she would not, because of the children and their schools, leave the Salisbury area. She would move to the other side of the city, but she and Martin would have to risk meeting by mistake now and then. She was also adamant that he and the children should see a great deal of each other.

Natasha was disgusted with East Cottage. Her bedroom was the size of a cupboard and smelled of mushrooms. The walls were papered with fawn bobbly stuff and there was a grey bit on the ceiling that looked squashy. Alice said the room would be absolutely transformed, just you wait, but Natasha didn't want to wait, any more than she had wanted to leave Pitcombe. She told Alice quite often that she hated her and was confused and miserable to find that she felt no better after saying it, so she said it again, louder, to see if that worked. Even school didn't seem the same, with no Grey House to go home to, and Sophie wouldn't be friends this term, so Natasha turned to Charlotte Chambers who was slow and charmless but who had a swimming pool at home and a huge drawing room with a white carpet. The sitting room at East Cottage had no carpet at all, just a piece of rush matting. Alice said that room was going to be wonderful too, just you wait, so Natasha had gone to stay for a whole weekend with Charlotte Chambers, to punish Alice. But the punishment had gone wrong because Natasha had been so homesick. She came home on Monday night, after school, and she shouted, ‘I hate this house!' and then she cried and cried and clung to Alice. Alice said to her, ‘I know it's hard to feel it, but every day we are going forward.'