A Village Affair (3 page)

‘Bye now,' Gwen said. ‘Mind how you go. Bye-bye, you lovely boy.'

When the door had shut, Alice said, ‘Is she going to drive me mad?'

Henry looked mildly shocked.

‘I don't think you'll find anyone else very easily. Everyone is crying out for help and I know for certain Elizabeth Pitt has her eye on Gwen, and so does Sarah Alleyne, except nobody can bear to work for her for more than a month.'

He opened the car boot so that Alice could stow Charlie away in his carrycot.

‘We're all thrilled you have got this house, you know. It'll make such a difference to the village.'

Alice straightened up.

‘We're so lucky.'

‘I'll say. The hordes John has had to beat away don't bear thinking of. He said a chap appeared out of the blue driving a black BMW and offered him four hundred thousand.'

‘What has a BMW got to do with it?'

Henry said, faintly nettled, ‘He must have come down from the City.
That
sort of money.'

Alice said nothing. She stood quite still and looked at the house. The light was beginning to fade and Gwen had switched on a lamp here and there, coral-coloured rectangles in the soft grey façade. It looked idyllic.

‘I'm sick with envy,' Henry said, watching her. ‘Me and half Wiltshire.'

Alice turned slowly to face him. She reached out and touched his hand for a second.

‘The thing is,' she said, quite calmly, ‘that now that I have it, I don't in the least want it.'

And then she burst into tears.

‘I don't know what it is,' Martin said into the telephone, keeping his voice down even though Alice was upstairs in the bath. ‘She doesn't seem able to tell me. She thinks The Grey House is lovely, she doesn't want to stay here, but she says she is terrified of moving.'

His mother, fifty miles away in Dorset, said, ‘Is it the moving itself?'

‘Can't be,' Martin said. ‘She never minds anything like that. I've never seen her like this.'

‘She was very upset for a while after Charlie—'

‘That's all over,' Martin said. ‘Pronounced A-one four months ago.'

‘Have you,' Martin's mother said, ‘been quarrelling?'

Too loudly Martin said, ‘No.' Then he said, more ordinarily, ‘The odd bicker, I suppose, over what we ought to offer for The Grey House, but not
quarrelling
.'

‘Can I speak to her?'

‘She's in the bath. She doesn't know I'm ringing you.'

Martin's mother, who loved her daughter-in-law dearly, said with some indignation, ‘Behind her back, as if she was unfit to hear? No wonder she cries.'

Martin drooped. It was as it ever was. He couldn't remember a time when he hadn't longed to please his mother, to feel confidential with her, and then to know every time that he had failed. He knew she loved him – but he wasn't ever sure she liked him. It was rather the same with his elder brother Anthony, except that Anthony was tougher and ruder, so that they sparred together. He remembered with customary bewilderment his mother saying to Alice ten years ago, ‘I'm glad it's Martin you're marrying, not Anthony. I love Anthony but I know he is really a horrible boy.'

And she meant it. It wasn't a doting mother's joke. Martin wondered uneasily what his mother had said to Alice about him; there was so much she had said to Alice that he would never know.

‘Of course talk to her,' he said now, stiffly, ‘if you think it'll do any good.'

‘Get her to ring me,' Cecily Jordan said, ‘when she's out of the bath.'

He sighed and put the receiver down. He was frightfully tired. He had got back from a long day, and everything looked entirely as usual, children in bed, supper ready, Alice in the low slipper chair by the fire in their tiny sitting room, stitching at some tapestry thing until she turned her face up for his greeting kiss and he saw she had been crying. She then cried on and off all through supper. She said, between crying and mouthfuls, that she had an awful feeling of foreboding that it just wasn't going to work. He had said, ‘The Grey House, you mean?'

‘No – no – not the house exactly, just living there, us living there—'

‘But it's the thing you have always wanted!'

‘I
know
,' she said, pushing her plate away half-full. ‘I know. That's why I am so afraid.'

He tried to jolly her.

‘You're not afraid of anything! You never have been. You terrify me, skiing.'

‘Oh,' Alice said dismissively, ‘physical things. Easy. This is something much more alarming, a sort of utterly lost feeling, as if I'd staked everything on something that wasn't there at all.'

Martin began to finish the lasagne she had left.

‘I don't understand you,' he said.

He still didn't. Perhaps his mother was right and it was the remains of post-Charlie blues. He felt sorry for her, but at the same time faintly aggrieved that she couldn't behave normally about something she had said she desperately wanted and that he had really had to battle to achieve. He'd had to sell a lot of shares, a
lot
, for The Grey House. He looked round the room, tiny but full of fascinating things and bold stuffs and extraordinary paintings which he wouldn't have chosen himself in a million years but which he found he really liked, now he saw them. Very Alice. He looked into the fire. He felt she was failing him.

When she came down, in a yellow dressing gown with her plait pinned up on top with a comb, he said, trying not to sound surly, ‘Ma says would you ring her.'

A kind of light came into Alice's eyes, a look of relief and hope.

‘Oh yes,' she said. ‘Did she ring?'

‘I rang her.'

‘Martin, I'm not being deliberately neurotic. I detest feeling like this. If I could stop, I would.'

He got out of his chair and went to kick a log in the fireplace. He thought of his mother's tone to him, on the telephone. He said to Alice, ‘Is it me? Is it something to do with me? Are you sick of me?'

Alice gave a little gasp.

‘Oh no!'

He grunted.

‘Just wondered.'

The wrong note in the melody sang out again, tiny and harsh, in her mind. She went across the room and put her arms round him from behind, laying her cheek against his back.

‘You know it isn't that. Haven't I kept telling you that I want The Grey House because I know we'll be happy there?'

‘But that doesn't fit in with all this panic.'

‘Exactly. It's probably some hormone imbalance. That's what I've been thinking about in the bath.'

He turned round and held her. He thought how much more often he needed to make love to her than she wanted to have it made to her. He took a deep breath.

‘Go and ring Ma,' he said.

CHAPTER TWO

Before Cecily Jordan had married, she had been, briefly, a Lieder singer. She had gone to Vienna, to train, in 1937, in the teeth of her parents' opposition, and had, at eighteen, fallen wildly in love with music, with Vienna, and with a young Jewish composer and political activist. It was he who introduced her to the pure and lovely solo songs of Schubert and who taught her to vary her performance from lyrical to intensely dramatic, as the Lied required. This he did partly by technical instruction, and partly by taking her to bed and awakening her to a consciousness of her own powers which she found quite natural to express in song.

In the winter of 1938 he made her promise, by threatening never to see her again if she wouldn't comply, to go home at once to England if anything should befall him. He made her write the promise down and sign it. In June 1939, he was arrested while crossing the Ringstrasse, in midday sunlight, and a note from him, containing the written promise, was brought to her while she stood in her sunny, dusty, cluttered room out by the Prater Park, doing her voice exercises.

‘To break your promise will make everything infinitely worse for both of us and I should despise, not admire you for it,' her lover wrote. ‘The best thing you can do for us now is to take that lovely voice we have made together back to England, and use it as a light in a dark world.'

He did not write that he loved her. Sitting in a series of hideous trains crawling home across Europe, Cecily reflected that he had never said it either. She hadn't noticed, so busy had she been doing the loving for both of them. She arrived in battened-down England in August, numb and almost speechless, and went out to Suffolk to her parents' house, where her mother was relishing the prospect of the privations of wartime, had already sold all her childhood books for salvage and had painted a red line round the bath, four inches from the bottom, as a peculiarly irritating kind of Plimsoll line.

Cecily tried to sing, but she couldn't. War was declared in September but it seemed to her that the news came from very far away and had no direct relevance to her. She slept badly and spent a greater part of each night lying awake reliving Vienna. By day she went for punishing walks and talked a good deal about joining up, which she did not do. Then suddenly, out of the blue, she announced she was going to Canada, to Toronto, to teach singing in a large girls' school. She went for six years. Her parents thought she might marry a Canadian, but she married no one. She returned to England in the grisly winter of 1946 and the following June she married Richard Jordan, whom she had met on the train that she had taken from Southampton after leaving her transatlantic ship.

Richard Jordan was an engineer. He had been in Southampton looking at a bombed site as a possible place for a factory to make drills for wells. He prospered. He and Cecily had two sons in five years and bought a manor house in a wooded valley a mile from the sea beyond Corfe in Dorset. Cecily, who found in due course that she could not naturally enjoy the company of any of the three men in her life, discovered some kind of recompense in the manor's garden. She became a gardener of imagination and then distinction. She wrote books on gardens and was invited to lecture all over England in the sixties and, as her fame spread, all over Eastern America in the seventies.

And then, in 1976, her younger son, Martin, brought Alice home. It was a September day of ripe perfection, the gardens at Dummeridge replete in the late warmth, bursting fallen plums lying stickily in the long grasses, fat things humming and buzzing in the borders. Cecily had been out by the eighteenth-century summerhouse she had discovered derelict in Essex and had transported to Dorset, tying up a heavy double white clematis that obligingly bloomed twice a year, when someone behind her said, quite easily, ‘You must be Martin's mother.'

She turned. There was a tall girl standing six feet away. She wore jeans and a blue shirt and her abundant brown hair was tied up behind her head with an Indian scarf.

‘I'm Alice Meadows,' the girl said. ‘Martin wanted to catch up with the cricket but I said I couldn't bear not to come out here. I hope you don't mind.'

‘
Mind
,' Cecily said, ‘I should think not.'

She took off her gardening glove and held her hand out to Alice.

‘More than welcome, Alice Meadows,' she said.

She had put Alice to sleep in the little south bedroom that she privately thought she would use for herself when Richard was dead. It had a brass bedstead, polished floorboards with rough cream Greek rugs, blue and white toile de Jouy curtains, deep windowsills, and, in a corner, a huge china jardinière out of which a violently healthy plumbago cascaded in a riot of starry pale blue flowers.

‘Do you like it?' Cecily said, unnecessarily.

‘In every way.'

‘It's my favourite room. It has a very nice personality.' She glanced at Alice. ‘Are you and Martin serious?'

Alice returned her look, entirely unperturbed. The house and the room and this fascinating, strong-looking woman with her drill gardening shirt and trousers, her beautifully coiffed hair and her ropes of pearls, made her feel that there was nothing to fear or to be decided – it would all be done for her.

‘No,' Alice said. ‘We have known each other for two weeks. Martin met my brother, playing squash, and my brother brought him home. We have been to the cinema twice and to the pub a bit. You know. And then he asked me here.'

She ran her hand round the fat brass knob on the bed end.

‘Do you think,' she said to Cecily, ‘that I was wrong to come if I don't mean to be serious?'

‘No. Whatever you end up being, you were right to come.'

They went down into the garden again together and Cecily left Alice under a willow at the edge of the lawn while she went to make tea. Alice lay back in an old cane chair whose arms were unravelling in spiny strands, and looked up at the strong blue sky through the fading blond-green fronds of willow and felt – she hunted about in her mind for a word. Happy? Too thin. Content? Too sluggish. Gorgeous? Too self-regarding. But all were right in their way, and so was replete and sleek and blissful, and so was—

Would she, Alice wondered abruptly across her own thoughts, tell Martin's mother about her family? Would she say that to come to this ancient and lovely house, to drowse in this romantic and sensual garden, was an answer to a prayer, the antidote to her own home where the unlovely walls echoed, day in, day out, with her mother's steady complaining? I am ripe for this, Alice told herself, pushing off her shoes with her toes and stretching her bare feet in the sun. I am an absolute sucker for this paradise, I was a pushover even before Martin's mother opened her mouth. She shut her eyes and let the willow dapple its shadow softly across her eyelids. At home now, at 4 Lynford Road, Reading, her mother would be drinking Indian tea out of an ugly mug given away by a garage, while not listening to
Kaleidoscope
or the end of
Afternoon Theatre
on Radio 4, but instead storing up in her mind all the day's grievances which were, indeed, a lifetime's grievances, against her friendly, amiable philandering husband, Alice's father, who was probably, even now, taking a seminar on the Metaphysical Poets at the university and thinking about sex.