A Village Affair (29 page)

‘But I shall have nothing left,' Cecily said later, fiercely, to Richard.

‘There's me—'

‘You! You need nobody. You never have.'

‘I am made up,' Richard said, ‘of exactly the same human components of need as you.'

And he went away then, and by some instinct went up to the old playroom in the attic and found Martin there, with a tumbler of whisky, weeping without restraint because he had thought nobody would hear him.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Most days one of the children asked when Martin would be better enough to come home. Usually Alice said, soon. Once a week Juliet came over and picked them up and took them home with her so that they could see Martin, and the night after these visits James usually wet his bed. It was the school holidays and the days yawned for occupation. Alice devised a list of duties, and Natasha's was to go down to the shop. She liked this because all down the street people stopped and talked to her and asked her how she was and Mrs Finch would come out of the back part of the shop and give her sweets and sometimes a kiss pungent with Coty's ‘L'Aimant'. The rest of the day she did not like so much. The feeling in the house was peculiar, without her father, and she missed school, and Sophie, who had been taken to Corfu by her family. She spent a lot of time in her bedroom, drawing a wardrobe for Princess Power, and she wrote a huge notice saying ‘Private – Keep out' which she stuck on her door, four feet from the floor so that James could not possibly avoid seeing it. Behind the closed door, besides drawing, she spent a good deal of time painting her toenails with Clodagh's scarlet polish.

When Cecily telephoned to suggest that she and Martin and Dorothy take the children to Cornwall – as usual, she said with emphasis – Natasha thought it quite extraordinary that Alice wasn't coming. James, in floods of tears, said he wouldn't go without Alice. Natasha said why couldn't they
all
go, Alice and Martin and Clodagh and everybody, and Alice said it was difficult to explain but she was desperately tired in the complicated way that happened to grown-ups sometimes and she had to be by herself for a bit.

‘So Clodagh can come,' said Natasha.

‘Well—'

‘Clodagh isn't tired.'

‘Clodagh can't come. Clodagh has got something else to do that she can't
not
do.'

‘I'll ask her to come,' Natasha said. ‘We can show her the witches' rock.'

James's eyes bulged at the memory of it.

‘I can't come,' Clodagh said. ‘I'd love to. But I can't. I've got to plan my future, you see. I've got to find a job.'

Natasha said then at least a holiday would make Daddy completely better and he could come home afterwards. Then she burst into tears. Alice, trying to hold her, said, ‘I do promise you that when you come back, everything will be sorted out.'

But Natasha would not be held and shouted, ‘I
hate
you!' and rushed out into the garden and picked up Charlie's sandpit spade and hurled it so that it sailed up into the air, far further and harder than she had meant, and came down through the greenhouse roof. Then she stood and screamed with panic at what she had done. James, standing in the kitchen doorway and watching her, began to pee helplessly into his shorts.

Cecily came to collect the children herself. She thought Alice looked awful, but she would have been even angrier if Alice had not looked awful. Indeed, she looked so awful that Cecily would almost have liked to say or do something affectionate but Alice, though perfectly polite, made such a gesture quite impossible. Together, they put the children's bags into the boot of the car, and then strapped in Charlie's car seat, and Charlie into his car seat, and urged Natasha and James to get in beside him. Nobody was quite crying but everybody almost was.

‘Bring me some shells,' Alice said through the car window.

‘Mummy—' James mouthed at her, not daring to speak for fear of letting out his sobs.

‘You might find a starfish—'

Cecily put the car into gear.

‘I'm sure we will. And James is old enough for the smallest surfboard now—'

‘James! Isn't that lovely?'

The car slid forward. Three faces turned her way, crumpling, and Cecily's free hand waved from the driver's window. Alice made herself stand there and wave back until the car was gone between the hornbeams and then she turned and went back into the empty house.

‘If we were city women,' Alice said slowly, ‘we'd have a completely different life. It's being country women that makes it so difficult—'

She stopped. City or country made no difference to Clodagh. Clodagh was Clodagh wherever she was.

‘Difficult for me, I mean. Even if I moved to a city, I'd still be a country woman now. I'd still feel visible.'

‘You're visible because you're you.'

‘I'm
too
visible just now—'

There had been a nasty little moment in the shop that morning, a moment when Cathy Fanshawe had ignored Alice's greeting and turned effusively to speak to Stuart Mott who was buying cigarettes and staring at Alice with a look of such repulsive interest that she had felt quite sick. When she came out of the shop, Michelle had darted up to her, out of the shop yard, and had clutched her convulsively and wordlessly, but it wasn't enough to undo the silent insults of Cathy Fanshawe and Stuart Mott. Going up the street, slowly, with her head as high as she could get it, she thought that even the cottage façades looked as if they had taken stands, were holding their breath until she was past.

‘You must get away,' Clodagh said.

They were lying in the orchard under the old Russet Egremont where Clodagh had suggested they plant a Paul's Himalayan Musk which would spread through the gnarled branches like a cascade of late blossom . . .

‘No,' Alice said slowly.

‘Yes. Yes!'

Clodagh rolled on her side and propped her head on her hand. She put out her free hand and ran a forefinger down Alice's profile.

‘Come with me. We'll go down to Windover. We'll start a new life there together, you and me and the children. I'll get a job. You'll paint.
Alice
–'

Alice turned her head to look at Clodagh.

‘Windover will be just the same as here.'

‘No. No. Here everyone knew you as a married woman. There we'll arrive as two women, you and me, no past. We can do it. We can do anything we want.' She pushed her face close to Alice's. ‘You don't need money. I've got that. You don't need anything, you just need to come. I love you. Do you hear me? I
love
you.'

Alice just went on looking. After a long time, it seemed to Clodagh, she said, ‘And I love you. More than I think I have ever loved anyone.'

‘Then come, then
come
—'

Alice turned back to look at the sky. She pulled a long grass from its sheath beside her and put the juicy end between her teeth.

‘Loving you makes all decisions much more difficult. Loving anybody does—'

Clodagh snorted.

‘You sound like Lettice—'

Lettice had stopped Clodagh the other day, coming down from the Park, and had taken her by the shoulders and said, very fiercely indeed, ‘If you love Alice Jordan, my girl, you have to let her go.' Clodagh had been amazed. She still was. She liked Lettice a lot but some of her opinions had got stuck in some kind of timewarp. Throw away the best thing that had ever happened to her? Deliberately? Causing heartbreak all round? Honestly.

Alice was frowning.

‘Alice,' Clodagh said softly, to win back her attention.

‘Mm?'

‘Look at me—'

Alice turned.

‘I'm looking—'

‘Tell me why you love me.'

Alice smiled, a slow, lazy smile.

‘I love your gaiety. And your freedom of spirit. And your arrogance and strength and mad courage. And I love your love for me.'

Alter some time, Clodagh said, ‘We don't have to go to Windover. I can sell it. It's worth millions, I should think. We'll go abroad. We can go anywhere. What about the South of France?'

‘Lovely,' Alice said, but her mind had slipped into neutral once more.

‘You have to come with me, you know. You'd only be half a person without me. Like I'd be, without you.'

‘I know.'

‘Then when shall we go?'

Alice sat up and pulled her plait over her shoulder and began to pick grass seeds out of it.

‘You must go.'

‘Shut up!' Clodagh shouted in panic, springing up.

‘Calm down,' Alice said. ‘I just mean for a bit. I must be absolutely alone, for a bit—'

Clodagh stooped to seize her shoulders.

‘You won't go and see Martin, promise—'

‘Martin is in Cornwall.'

‘Or Juliet. Or my mother. Or—'

‘
Clodagh—
'

‘Promise!' Clodagh screamed.

Alice slapped her.

‘Shut up!'

‘Sorry,' Clodagh said, crying. ‘Oh God, Alice. Oh my
God
!'

She fell on her knees beside Alice.

‘I'll kill myself if you leave me.'

Alice put her hands over her face.

‘Think what we've shared,' Clodagh said. ‘Think what we do together. No one else can do that for you, no one. Only me. We'll go to France. We'll have a house in the sun, we'll all go naked in the sun. We'll have a garden with lavender and thyme and a terrace over a valley. We'll never have to be apart, nights and days together, days and nights. The children will be bilingual, brown as nuts and bilingual. We'll make love when we want to, quite free, in sunlight and moonlight, and you'll come so alive you'll wonder you ever called it life before—'

Alice's hands were shaking. From behind them she said, ‘Be fair.'

‘
Fair
?'

Alice put her hands in her lap and held them tightly.

‘I expect you think I am deeply bourgeois but I can't come to paradise dishonestly—'

‘Dishonest? What the hell's dishonest about us? It's being so bloody
honest
that's half-killing you!'

‘Clodagh,' Alice said. ‘Clodagh. I can't think while you're here.'

‘I'm terrified of your thinking—'

‘What would you do,' Alice said, ‘if you had three children?' She looked at Clodagh squarely. ‘And a husband.'

‘It's excuses,' Clodagh said at once. ‘All excuses—'

‘Call it whatever names you like. Nothing changes what is, what I have in my path that you don't have in yours.'

Clodagh grew excited again.

‘I see, I see. You're going to be the sacrificial lamb, nobly giving up the best happiness you'll ever be offered—'

‘I didn't say anything about giving up anything. I have thought about sacrifice and I'll think some more. You could think about it too. You could think about a good deal, and stop shouting at me.'

‘Alice,' Clodagh said, ‘I'm scared as hell.'

Alice put out a hand and took Clodagh's.

‘I remember the day you told me your lover in New York was a woman. We were down in the river meadow and the children had made a boat out of a log and you were wearing your wizard's cloak. I shan't ever forget that conversation. I shan't ever forget that I suddenly could see the powers and freedoms that might be mine. “We all have a choice,” you told me. “You, me, everyone.” Well, you had chosen, and then I did. Nobody made us, we chose. And now here we are with the results of our choice and we have to choose again—'

‘I can't
believe
what I'm hearing!'

‘Yes you can. You know it's true. “If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen,” you said to me.'

Clodagh snatched her hand away.

‘But you won't stay in the kitchen
with
me!'

‘I didn't say that. I haven't decided anything. But we must be apart for a bit. I don't want it but I can't think at all while there are emotional demands all over me, yours, the children's, anyone's. It isn't just the now, you see, it's the future too. Things never stand still, do they.' She looked at Clodagh. ‘You ought to think about your own future too. For your own sake.'

Clodagh stood up. She was wearing a peculiar patchwork skirt with long handkerchief points to the hem, which brushed against Alice's bare arm. Alice looked with love at the triangle of red and yellow cotton lying against her skin.

‘Just a week,' Alice said.

‘I'll go to London.'

‘Yes.'

‘Who knows' – defiantly – ‘who I may meet?'

Alice said nothing. Clodagh moved away to lean on the apple tree trunk.

‘Wouldn't you care?'

‘Of course—'

‘Would it make you angry?'

‘No.'

‘Sad?'

‘Very.'

‘Alice – Alice, why don't you resent anyone for anything, damn and blast you?'

‘I do.'

‘You
don't
—'

‘I do. I just can't resent anyone for something I've done—'

‘Go to hell!' Clodagh shouted. She swirled from the tree in her gypsy rags. ‘Priggish, conventional, bloody bourgeois! I'm going, I'm
going
and you'll never know where!'

And then she ran from the orchard and across the lawn by the sandpit and Alice heard her car start up and roar furiously round the house and down the drive. Then Balloon came, dancing through the long grass, to remind Alice that, crisis or no crisis, a cat would like his supper.