A Village Affair (4 page)

She wouldn't leave him. It was one of her complaints to Alice that she wouldn't because she loved him and look how she was treated, how her loyalty was abused. Alice had come to see that it was closer to tyranny than loyalty, even though her father's carryings-on disgusted her. She felt, as she got older, that even her friends weren't safe from him; they all thought him dishy and flirted with him when they came to collect Alice for the cinema or a disco. Alice's mother wanted her to take sides, to defend her, but Alice wouldn't. She thought they were both wrong, and she knew that the moment she had finished art school, she would leave Reading and the hideous house with its charmless contents and her mother's bitter laments and her father's self-indulgence and she would go, like her brothers had, and not come back.

One of her brothers had gone right away, to Los Angeles, where he was a tremendously successful taxi driver. The other had only gone to London, to live happily in a huge disordered flat with six others off Lavender Hill, and do his Law Society exams. It was he who had brought Martin Jordan home – well, not home exactly because passing through was all he could take – on their way to play squash in some tournament in Oxford, and because Alice had been upstairs painting in an absolute fury after the newest student conquest had telephoned quite openly to ask to speak to Professor Meadows, they had taken her to Oxford too. She wouldn't watch them play squash, but went to the Ashmolean instead and looked at the Caernavon marbles, and came away much soothed. Martin Jordan had come down from London four times in two weeks to take Alice out – the last time he had brought flowers for her mother which nobody had done, Alice thought, in twenty years – and then he had telephoned and said he was coming through Reading, on his way to Dummeridge, and that he would collect her. If she'd like to go.

Alice said Reading wasn't on the way to Dorset from London.

‘It is,' Martin said, ‘if I'm coming to collect you.'

So he had, and they had driven away from Lynford Road and Alice would not look back to wave at her mother because she knew herself to be the cause of a new complaint for daring to go off to enjoy herself while her mother was forced to stay behind and suffer. And here she now was, as long and supple and warm as a stretched-out cat, lying under a willow in a place like heaven, while someone wonderful brought tea which would be, Alice knew, China, in pretty cups, with slices of lemon to float in it and perhaps almond biscuits.

‘There,' Cecily said, ‘what a contented looking girl.' She put down the tray. ‘I hope you like China tea. And Dorothy, who helps me, has made some shortbread.'

Alice said laughing, ‘I said almond biscuits in my mind.'

‘And China tea?'

‘Oh yes—'

Cecily smiled broadly and sat down in a cane chair.

‘Martin is still glued to the box.'

‘I don't mind. As long as he doesn't want me to be glued too.'

‘He says you paint.'

‘Yes.'

‘Things you see, or things you imagine?'

‘Things I see coloured by things I imagine.'

‘Lemon?'

‘Oh, please—' She swung herself upright and put her bare feet down on the brisk, warm, late summer grass.

‘You don't know,' she said to Cecily with some energy, ‘how heavenly this is.'

‘I do, you know. Don't forget that I have virtually made it, so I like to take all the credit.'

She held out a shallow eggshelly cup painted with birds of paradise.

‘Where I live,' Alice said, taking it reverently, ‘everything is as ugly as possible. I think it's my mother's revenge on life for not making her happy.'

‘Almost nobody is happy,' Cecily said. ‘It's rather that one must devise ways of cheating or eluding
un
happiness. And of course, some people love unhappiness with a passion.'

‘My mother just loves it with a grim determination,' said Alice and let out a burst of sudden laughter, ‘Oh, oh, I'm mean,
mean
—'

‘Yes,' Cecily said, looking at her with great liking, ‘you are. Now, you had better tell me all about her and your clever father. I fear you have come into a gravely illiterate household. I believe my husband reads nothing but newspapers and engineering periodicals, Martin reads nothing but colour supplements and his brother Anthony reads nothing at all. What about you?'

Alice put her cup down carefully and lay back again in the cane chair.

‘Love stories. I'm mad on love. Do you think it's the answer?'

‘Now that,' Cecily said, thinking of her son Martin, ‘is something you will have to find out for yourself.'

Even as a baby, a brand new baby, Martin had looked faintly anxious. He was a pretty baby and then a dear little boy and then an attractive bigger boy and finally he emerged as a sturdy, fair, good-looking man. But he still looked anxious. If you were in a good mood, Cecily always thought, you wanted to comfort that anxiety away, but if you were not, his expression resembled the silent reproachful pleading of a dog who has nothing to do all day but beseech you for a walk you haven't time to give it. She loved Martin very much but she didn't want him with her a great deal; she never had. He was undeniably rather dull, but she wouldn't have minded that. It was his want of boldness she found so discouraging, his unadventurousness, his lack of curiosity. Bringing this uncommon girl down was the most enterprising thing he had done in twenty-four years of life. Not only had he brought her down, but he was handling her beautifully. Cecily would have expected him to be too eager, too slavish, but he wasn't. He was quite challenging in fact, and even though Cecily suspected him of being besotted, he gave little hint of it. Alice had the same bold, free manner with him; there were no longing glances or furtive looks. When Anthony came home, later, for dinner the first evening, Alice took almost no notice of him at all even though he was dramatically rude in order to attract her attention. He was so rude that his father, roused from his inner world at the far end of the table, said suddenly, ‘Leave the room.'

‘Father—'

‘Leave the room.'

Anthony turned to his mother.

‘Go on,' she said.

‘This is barbaric—'

‘Leave the room,' Richard Jordan said, and suddenly there was a bull-like threatening look on his face. Anthony got up.

‘What will Alice—' He stopped. They were all watching him. He left.

Cecily seemed quite unmoved.

‘I believe a Frenchwoman has written a book describing how she finally got rid of her five sons. I must buy a copy.'

Martin did not try to come to Alice's room that night. She had thought he might and had rather hoped he wouldn't. She had been to bed twice with men before, once when she was seventeen to see what it was like and get the first time over with, and once six months before, driven by a simple physical longing to be made love to. She had, somewhat inevitably, preferred the second time, but neither had been what she was hoping for, which she put down to not being in love with either man. She was quite clear that she wasn't in love with Martin either, and so didn't want sex with him to become some litmus paper test. But she thought, lying there in linen sheets in her charming room while a disgracefully theatrical copper harvest moon hung outside, that she would very much like some good sex. She would like to be taken over by some huge physical force inside herself and feel every atom of her body as a
body
. One of the lecturers at the art school – rather a creep, in fact – had said that good sex made you a better painter. Alice had thought about this and finally had dismissed it as a very sixties view. What about Toulouse Lautrec and Van Gogh for starters? What Alice really wanted to know, she decided, her hands flat on her cotton nightie-clad belly, was what an orgasm really felt like, what it did to you. Then she could stop
wondering
.

She turned on her side, and slid both hands between her thighs. This was the most wonderful place she had ever been to. If Martin asked her to marry him tomorrow, standing perhaps in the creeper-clad stableyard while the white pigeons flew erratically about in the blue air above them, she would say yes. Then she could always come here and, best of all, Cecily would be her mother-in-law. She began to giggle, helplessly, out of happiness and excitement, and Martin, standing in the dark passage outside her door, was very nearly, but not quite, brave enough to come in and ask her what she was up to.

He knew he wanted to marry her. He knew it the moment her brother Josh had pushed open the back bedroom door in that grim house in Reading, and there was Alice in black and red striped tights and a vast blue smock smeared all over with paint and her hair screwed up on top with a paintbrush thrust through it, painting away in a terrible temper. He didn't even look at what she was painting, he was so busy looking at her. He had never seen anyone who looked so – so
vital
. She flung herself at Josh, who seemed equally pleased to see her. And then they had carried her off to Oxford and Martin had felt that his little Mini was absolutely pulsing with interest and life even though Alice didn't say much. She just sat in the back and existed, and occasionally he glanced in the driving mirror at her and felt his guts melt. This was
something
.

He found she gave him courage. He could dare with her, conversation with her was a kind of game. He realized, leaving a pub with her ten days later, that he didn't even feel dull or conventional, he felt brilliant. He grew afraid that if he didn't make her his, for ever, that brilliance would go, he would go back to being the dear, ordinary old Martin who fussed about train times and driving conditions and made his mother – however she strove to conceal it – visibly sigh. Asking Alice down to Dummeridge was a brainwave, an absolute corker of an idea, and now here was Alice adoring the house and getting on with his mother like a house on fire. And even his father . . . Anthony had once said, in a rage, that living with their father was like living in a house where the biggest and best room was always locked, and though Martin, by nature both conventional and loyal, was distressed by the image, he recognized the truth of it. His father wasn't exactly dull, he was just ruthlessly private, but he was watching Alice, Martin could see that, and what was more, he liked her. Being Alice – Martin felt himself dissolve at the thought – she didn't appear to notice that Richard was withdrawn. She talked to him, and so he talked back. He smiled at her. The only person she ignored was Anthony and that was Anthony's own stupid fault, all that capering and showing off to attract her attention, trying to impress her by bitching the parents. It was the first time, the first glorious time in Martin's life, that he had scored over Anthony, that he had something Anthony wanted that he couldn't have, that he had found something of real stupendous quality that his father and his mother applauded him for. He was ten feet tall. He was a new, a different man. If he could keep Alice, everything would fall into place from now on, there would be a goal, a future, he would work for
her
.

With stupendous self-control, and guided by a subtlety of instinct he had never experienced before but which he entirely trusted to, he did not propose to Alice for three months. They saw each other every week, and two weekends a month he arrived in Reading with russet or mauve chrysanthemums for Mrs Meadows (‘Only get her hideous flowers,' Alice said. ‘She despises pretty ones.') and drove Alice down to Dummeridge. He had a half-gun in a local shoot, and sometimes Alice went with him, to beat, and sometimes she stayed at Dummeridge and painted and talked to Cecily. Cecily admired her paintings a good deal and persuaded her into both watercolours and painting pictures of corners of the house. Alice painted a cobwebby window at a turn of the cellar stairs, and a scattering of hens on the old stone mounting block and a corner of the drawing room where a battered little alabaster bust stood on a table shrouded in an Indian shawl against a faded, striped wall covered in miniatures.

At lunchtime they ate eggs and salad and home-made brown bread by the Aga, and Cecily always gave Alice wine – at home there was beer and whisky for her father and sherry for her mother which of course she wouldn't touch for fear of feeling better, but never wine – and they talked as Alice had never talked before. Cecily even – and it was thirty years since she had mentioned it to anyone – talked about Vienna. The story fired Alice with a yearning passion, not just the love story but the foreignness, and the powerful romance of the voice that blossomed and was then locked away in a box for ever when all the circumstances that had awakened it were wrenched away. Alice had never travelled, except on a school trip to Paris which was chiefly distinguished by interminable and sick-making hours shut up in a bus. The Jordans had all travelled; they took it as a matter of course. Richard travelled constantly, on business; the boys went skiing and both had been on safari in Kenya; Cecily went on her lecture tours and on her own to France and to Italy to look at things, she said, and to eat and drink both literally and metaphorically.

‘You should go,' she said to Alice. ‘It's criminal that you haven't been to Italy.'

Alice began to think that indeed it was. As the autumn wore on, she became privately very angry when Sunday night came and she had to leave Dummeridge, glimmering away in the firelight in its wealth of old stuffs and books. Lynford Road looked worse on each return, the scuffed carpet tiles in the hall, the uncompromising, harshly shaded ceiling lights, the black and green tiles in the bathroom, the mean proportions that confronted her everywhere, too high, too narrow. She began to long for Martin's Monday call, regular as clockwork, telling her when he was coming down to take her out. His arrivals, invariably punctual, became events of real excitement. Every time she found him standing on the tiled doorstep in Lynford Road, in a tweed jacket she had last seen him wear in the drawing room at Dummeridge and the brogues she could still hear striking the stone flags of the kitchen passage, her feeling of being rescued grew greater and more glamorous.