A Village Affair

'Please forgive me,' she said. Her voice was an urgent hiss and her curious grey-gold eyes were bright with intensity.

'You made me feel a fool last night,' Alice said, 'and you're doing it again now. I don't like it. That's all.'

Clodagh dropped her wrist. In a voice so low only Alice could hear it, she said, 'You were the only person last night who didn't look a fool.'

Alice went away to find carrots and a bag of frozen peas. When she came back, Martin had gone out again, James and Clodagh were singing and splashing at the sink and Natasha, without being asked, was laying the table, back to front.

'Clodagh's staying,' Natasha said. 'Daddy asked her.'

Clodagh turned round.

'But I won't if you don't want me to.'

'Of course stay. It's very ordinary lunch-'

'You're really kind.'

Natasha stretched up to her mother's ear.

'Oh I so want her boots-'

'Aren't they smart.'

Without turning round, Clodagh kicked her boots off backwards.

Try them.'

Natasha gave a little squeal. James put his arms around Clodagh's waist in case the boots should create a bond between her and Natasha. She dropped a kiss on his head and he looked up at her with passion.

'You've no idea,' Clodagh said, 'how unutterable American children are. We had one that used to come to the apartment loaded with toys and if you admired the smallest thing, he'd say. "Don't touch. OK?" at the top of his voice.'

James thought this was brilliantly funny.

'Don't touch, OK, don't touch, OK, don't touch, OK-'

'Look-' Natasha breathed, bending over to admire her feet.

'You look like Puss in Boots.'

'I love them.' She looked up at Clodagh. 'Are they American?'

'Sure thing, baby,' Clodagh said with an American accent, 'Henry Bendel, no less.'

Martin came back with a bottle of wine. He was humming. He kissed Alice's cheek on his way to fetch a corkscrew and then again on his way to fetch the glasses. At the second kiss, she laughed.

'Feeling better?'

'Yes,' she said, surprised.

'I expect church made you feel better,' Natasha said, stroking the boots, 'I think it's supposed to.'

When everyone laughed she looked tremendously pleased and said, in Gwen's phrase, 'Well, this really is my day and no mistake.'

Martin poured wine for himself and Clodagh and Alice. Clodagh finished the potatoes and put them on to boil and scooped the peelings out of the sink into the rubbish bin. Alice stared at her.

'Isn't that right?' Clodagh said. She had pushed up the sleeves of her jersey and stood there, shoeless, like a grey and yellow bird.

'It's absolutely right. I just don't associate New York flat dwellers with-'

'Oh,' Clodagh said quickly, smiling at her, 'I always did things like that. I used to scrub floors and stuff as therapy when the whole scene got a bit heavy.'

She came round the table to where Alice was peeling carrots and looked at her intently.

'Hello,' she said.

Alice took a quick swallow of her wine.

'Is this another kind of game? Like last night?'

'No,' Clodagh said. 'I could kill myself for last night.'

Alice's hands were shaking. She put down her wine glass not at all steadily.

'You haven't met my baby.'

'He's so sweet,' Natasha said, still mooning over her feet. 'He's the nicest baby in my class.'

Clodagh dropped her gaze and let Alice go.

'Can we go and find him?'

The children rushed to seize her hands, Natasha shuffling but determined in her boots. They went out of the room and Alice could hear them beginning to clatter, chattering up the uncarpeted stairs. Singing softly, without meaning to, Alice fetched a pan and put her carrots in it, beside the pan of Clodagh's potatoes.

CHAPTER SIX

It was not in the least lost upon Peter Morris that Alice hadn't attended to a word of his sermon; indeed, that she had hardly come to church for any orthodox spiritual purpose at all. This was hardly uncommon. The reasons that brought his congregations to church seemed to him quite as various and tenuous and peculiar as those that kept them away. Folding his stole carefully after the service, Peter decided that Alice had probably come because an hour in church meant you could step off life for a space, stop time. That at least was how she had looked. And no doubt while she sat there, drifting, that decent young husband of hers - good midshipman material - was gardening and minding the children. Peter sighed. The Jordans seemed to him a thoroughly late twentieth-century combination of emotion and imagination on the one hand and Anglo-Saxon aversion to intensity on the other. A polite and lonely alliance.

The village, needless to say, had minutely observed the outward things. Even old Fred Mott, day in day out at his cottage window next door to the post office, had sufficient sight left to say approvingly on Peter Morris's weekly visits, That's a fancy piece. That'll make 'em all sit up.'

'Who?' Peter said. 'Who'll sit up-'

'All of them old dumps round 'ere. All them old bags.'

His little wet mouth widened into a grin.

'You're an old scoundrel, Fred.'

'Not 'alf what I was when I was young. Not 'olf.'

It was all very well, of course, to observe that something was troubling Alice, but how to help was inevitably much trickier. When he asked people around the village, the general view was that she was extravagantly blessed among mortals - lovely house, nice husband, dear little children, more than enough money - so that even if she was being helpful in the matter of the shop and the flower rota, that really was no more than her duty, living where she did and having what she had. Rosie Barton, who ran a very successful little computer business in Salisbury with her husband, Gerry, and who had very decided views on the sort of village Pitcombe should be, said, with the seeming deep sympathy that was her stock in trade, that Alice simply had to learn about a village community. Peter had pointed out that Wilton had hardly been an inner city situation to come from, and Rosie said indeed no, but the measure of involvement in the village was unique. Peter had said no more. The Barton child, an anxious four-year-old in the care of a succession of au pair girls, seemed never to require from his parents the involvement their business or village life did. And they came to church.

Alice, Peter Morris knew, would have been amazed to find how much she was watched and how much the village knew about her. It had amazed Peter himself, at his first country living in Suffolk, to realize that not a line of washing could go up nor an order of groceries be placed without every item being noticed, and conclusions drawn. When he heard someone in the Pitcombe shop say, 'She keeps the children nice,' he knew that meant that the frequency of lines of socks and knickers blowing in The Grey House orchard had not gone unremarked.

Even with the great Admiral aloft to talk and pray to, Peter Morris was very conscious of his solitariness. He had not really meant to remain a widower so long - his marriage had only managed two years before his wife's cancer had killed her, in four months, start to finish but he had never found another woman to whom he could talk as comfortably as he had to Mary. He had come very close to it in Suffolk, with a woman who, in the end, decided she could not be a parson's wife, and then, oddly enough, he had found quite recently an excellent friend in Lettice Deverel of Pitcombe. She was over seventy, scholarly, sharp and a Shavian socialist. She kept a harp in her muddled sitting room, and a green Amazon parrot in the kitchen and she had not a minute in the world for airs and graces. In the last three years, Peter Morris had taken to going up the lane from his sturdy early Victorian rectory to her Regency villa at the top of the village when he had a human knot to untie. Even if she said, as she often did, that she knew nothing about backward babies or neurotic spinsters or the male menopause or whatever the current problem was, she was a good sounding board, and simply went on making bread or potting up pelargoniums while he talked himself to some kind of conclusion.