A Village Affair (8 page)

‘No one else offered.'

‘Allie,' Juliet said, ‘just get on with this baby, would you? You'll make a much better job of it than Martin in any case. I despair of myself but I think I envy you.'

Charlie was born, suddenly, a month early, and Alice went into a deep, deep decline. Sunk in the fogs of a profound depression, she was carried off to Dummeridge with the baby where she remained for a month, struggling inch by inch out of the depths into which she had tumbled. Pills, frequent small meals, sleep, confiding conversation and gentle exercise were prescribed as her regime. Martin, thankful to surrender this dismal conundrum to his mother, telephoned nightly for bulletins and was spoiled tenderly by Alice's friends who pitied his male dilemma in the kitchen.

She came home pale and thin and slightly sad, but she was better. Martin was very sweet to her but at the same time anxious she should know that he had suffered too, alone at night with the two elder children and responsible for the morning whirlwind of rejected eggs and lost gumboots. The week Alice returned, Cecily wrote privately to Martin, to the office in Salisbury, and said she thought Alice needed both a change and more support. She suggested a house move and offered to pay for help and for a holiday, a holiday without any of the children, the moment Charlie was weaned.

And then the gods produced The Grey House, out of casual conversation at a dinner party, and presented it to the Jordans on a plate. It was not just the house they offered, but village life, the chance and the need to be part of a proper community, where you couldn't even go to buy stamps, Alice thought excitedly, without meeting several people you knew. There would be a church fête, and a flower rota, and a list for driving old people into Salisbury, or to the hospital, and men from the Park would bring loads of logs in winter, and a Christmas tree, and in the summer she would pityingly watch the neat tourists emerge from the parked Toyotas and peer hopefully – but fruitlessly – down the pretty, sloping street for a tea shop. She would, she knew it, envy no one, long for nothing. In Pitcombe she would feel again what she had felt at Dummeridge ten years ago when she was twenty-one – she would feel she had come home.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘Now the county travelling
library
,' said Miss Pimm with the separating articulateness of Marghanita Laski, ‘is a
great
blessing.'

‘Tuesdays, did you say?' Alice said, obediently writing it down on her list.

‘Tuesday afternoons. Three to three-thirty. The librarian is an excellent vegetable gardener and to be relied upon for
brassicas
.'

‘Brassicas', wrote Alice.

James, leaning against Alice, thought, with wonder, that they were discussing underclothes. He had his finger up his nose. He pulled it out and offered it to Miss Pimm.

‘Gucky,' he said.

She averted her gaze.

‘Mrs Leigh-Brent runs the church
cleaning
rota. And Miss Payne is in charge of the
flowers
. I know Mrs Macaulay would
gratefully
welcome help on Mondays with the community
shop
and of course Mr and Mrs Fanshawe will be happy to register you with the local
Conservative
branch.'

Alice wiped James's nose hard enough with a piece of paper kitchen towel to make him whimper.

‘Don't be a disgusting little boy. I don't think I really am a Conservative, but my husband—'

‘Not?' said Miss Pimm, swivelling her gaze back.

‘No,' Alice said staunchly, remembering Sir Ralph, ‘I believe the Park—'

‘That,' said Miss Pimm, ‘is
quite
different.'

She looked round the kitchen. It looked rather
loud
to her, though considerably cleaner than in Major Murray-French's day. But she did not like being entertained in kitchens, even the kitchens of people newly moved in who might perhaps be forgiven for having nowhere else. When Miss Pimm had brought her mother to Sycamore Cottage fifteen years before, the
first
thing she had done was to make the sitting room respectable for callers. She remembered standing on a chair hammering in nails for the ‘Cries of London' above the fireplace, the position they had occupied in all the houses of her life.

Natasha came in through the door to the hall carrying a doll dressed like a teenage fairy, and wearing an expression of faint disgust.

‘Charlie's crying and he's pooey,' she said.

Alice stood up.

‘Would you forgive me, Miss Pimm?' she said, ‘I must just see to the baby.'

Miss Pimm sat on. There was much information yet to impart. She inclined her head.

‘I am in no hurry.'

Alice left the room. Natasha came up to the kitchen table and put her gauzy doll down. She looked at Miss Pimm who seemed to have nothing about her that Natasha could admire. The texture of her stockings reminded Natasha of drinking chocolate powder.

‘Pretty doll,' said Miss Pimm with extra elaborate articulation, as if speaking to a half-wit.

‘She's called Princess Power,' Natasha said. Her voice was proud. ‘She's got net petticoats, pink ones.'

She turned the doll upside down to demonstrate and Miss Pimm looked hastily away.

‘But,' said James slowly and earnestly, from across the table, ‘she hasn't got a willy.'

Panic blotched Miss Pimm's neck with purple patches.

‘Have you?' said James.

Natasha hissed at him.

‘Shut up.'

‘Charlie's,' said James with real sympathy, ‘is only little. But it'll probably grow.'

‘I'm afraid,' said Natasha to Miss Pimm, ‘that in James's class at school they talk about willies
all the time
. But you must just ignore him. Like Mummy does.'

‘School!' cried Miss Pimm on a high note of relief. ‘And do you like your school?'

‘No,' said James. ‘I hate everything except being at home.'

‘He cries every morning,' Natasha said. ‘It's so embarrassing. My best friend is called Sophie and she has Princess Power too only
her
petticoats are yellow. I like pink best.'

‘Yes!' cried Miss Pimm. ‘Yes! Pink!'

Alice came back into the room holding a large baby. Miss Pimm was afraid of babies. Alice sat down and picked up her pencil again, wedging Charlie into the space between her and the table.

‘So sorry about that,' Alice said. ‘Now, what else was there?'

Miss Pimm wanted to say that a cup of tea was one of the things. It was five past four. She would have liked a cup of tea and a Marie biscuit. She cleared her throat with meaningful thirstiness and said, ‘Well, there is our little
Sunday
group.'

Charlie seized Alice's pencil and drew a thick, wild line across her list. Instinctively Miss Pimm's hand shot out to prevent the desecration of neatness, but Alice didn't seem to notice.

‘Group of what?'

‘Why,
children
.' She looked at Natasha and stretched her mouth into an attempted smile. ‘We meet in the church room for songs and stories about
Jesus
.'

‘I know about
him
,' Natasha said. ‘He gave some people a horrible picnic with bare bread and fish that wasn't
cooked.
And then he walked about all over a lake and made a girl who was dead be alive again. If you ask
me
,' Natasha said darkly, ‘I don't believe that bit.'

‘Tashie—'

‘We have eleven little
members
,' Miss Pimm said hastily. ‘And I—' She paused and then said with quiet pride, ‘I play the ukelele.'

They stared at her. To her misery Alice found she didn't even want to laugh. Miss Pimm took their silence as an awestruck tribute to her skills and opened her black notebook in a businesslike way to show she was quite used to such admiration.

‘Now, may I tell Miss Payne you would be happy to join the
flower
rota? I believe Mrs
Kendall
lacks a partner. And what about Mondays? The community
shop
is such a boon to our
old
people—'

Go, Alice said to herself in sudden frenzy. Go, go, go. I hate you here, you mimsy old spinster, I hate you in my kitchen. Go.

‘We have unfortunately to share our vicar with King's
Harcourt
and
Barleston
which means mattins only once a month, but he is a
wonderful
man, and we must just be
thankful
—'

‘C'n I have some crisps?' James said.

‘No. Don't interrupt. I am sorry, Miss Pimm, but usually around now I give them—'

Miss Pimm slapped her notebook shut and stood up.

‘Naturally. I am sorry to interrupt family
routine
.'

‘Oh no,' Alice said, struggling to her feet clutching Charlie, and in a confusion of apology, ‘I didn't mean that at all, I only meant—'

‘I
came
,' Miss Pimm said, implying by her tone that at least some people were still in command of their manners, ‘just to
welcome
you to Pitcombe. I make a point of it, with newcomers.'

‘Yes,' Alice said faintly. ‘It's very kind of you and I'm sure when I've sorted myself out a bit—'

‘You should see upstairs,' Natasha said. ‘It's the most utterest chaos.'

Miss Pimm walked to the stable door and lifted the latch. She turned stiffly and gave a little downward jerk of her head.

‘Sycamore Cottage. Telephone 204.'

‘Thank you—'

‘Good afternoon.'

‘Goodbye,' Alice said. ‘Goodbye—'

The door clicked shut, one half after the other. Alice subsided into her chair.

‘Don't cry,' James said anxiously.

‘I'm not,' Alice said through a river of tears.

‘You are, you
are
—'

Natasha picked up Princess Power.

‘I expect you're tired.'

‘Yes,' Alice said. ‘Yes, I expect I am, I'm sure that's it—'

Charlie's face puckered. James came to lean on her again, his eyes filling with tears.

‘Don't do it,' he said. His voice was pleading. ‘Don't
do
it.'

But she couldn't stop.

The community shop, Alice discovered, was a large and battered van, owned and driven by Mr Finch, one-time boarding-house keeper and failed poet, who ran Pitcombe Post Office and Village Stores. Twice a week, the shop van trundled out of Pitcombe with its cargo of old age pensions, tins of marrowfat peas and packets of bourbon biscuits, to serve outlying cottages and the smaller satellite villages of Barleston and King's Harcourt. It made thirteen stops in three hours, either outside the cottages of the most infirm, or by the clumps of people standing with clutched purses and plastic carrier bags at designated places along the route.

Mr Finch was very excited to have Alice on board on Monday afternoons. Mrs Macaulay, who was the longstanding other helper on Mondays, despised his artistic sensibilities, believing, as she did, only in good sense and wire-haired dachshunds, which she bred with dedication. ‘My girls', she called her bitches. Within the first half-hour of her first Monday, Alice discovered that Mr Finch was misunderstood by his wife who yearned still for their boarding house in Kidderminster which had catered for actors at the Theatre Royal, and that Mr Macaulay had been called to the great dog basket in the sky ten years previously, much lamented by his widow and her girls.

‘He was a wonderful man,' Mrs Macaulay said to Alice, as they jolted out of the village, the tins jiggling on their barricaded shelves. ‘He could do anything he liked with animals. He inspired perfect trust.'

At the frequent stops, Mr Finch came out of the driver's cab and sat in the doorway of the van at the seat of change. Every time he appeared holding not only his cash box and ledger but also a battered notebook bound in imitation leather which he left nonchalantly on the edge of his little counter, with many a casually pregnant glance thrown in Alice's direction.

‘Take no notice,' Mrs Macaulay hissed at Alice, passing her a stack of All-Bran boxes. ‘Those are his terrible jingles. Don't give him the chance to mention them.'

At every stop, the van filled rapidly with people, heaving each other up the steps into the interior like an eager crowd of hedgehogs. Alice was stared at.

‘Who's 'er?' somebody said from close to the floor.

‘Sh, you, Granny. That's the new lady—'

‘Who's 'er?'

‘Mrs Jordan,' Mrs Macaulay said with great clarity. ‘She has just moved into the Major's house at Pitcombe.'

There was a sucking of teeth.

‘She won't like that. Miserable 'ouse, that is.'

‘But I
do
like it—'

‘It's very good of Mrs Jordan to help us,' Mrs Macaulay said, ‘because she has three little ones on her hands.'

‘Where's me spaghetti hoops, then?'

‘Hang on, Gran, they're coming,' and then, turning confidentially to Alice, ‘she loves them. She don't need her teeth in to eat them, see.'

At the end of the third stop, Mr Finch laid his hand slowly on his book of poems and looked roguishly at Alice.

‘Care for something to read before Barleston, Mrs Jordan?'

Mrs Macaulay was ready for him.

‘Sorry, Mr Finch, I've got the cereal section to explain to Mrs Jordan before we get there.'

Mr Finch placed the book flat against his chest, holding it in both hands.

‘Are you a reader, Mrs Jordan? I fancy you are.'