Joanna Trollope - A Village Affair

And it seemed then, standing there together, that he was both the answer and the refuge, and so she clung to him and was full of grateful love.

She did, of course, go to see her mother. They sat either side of the kitchen table with their elbows on the worn formica, and Elizabeth said at once, 'I know he won't come back. I have to face having dedicated myself to a man who is quite able simply to remove himself and leave me with the ashes of our life together. My life was his. Now I don't have one.'

'Perhaps,' Alice said, 'he didn't want all that dedication.'

She felt sorry for her mother. Her eyes were quite dead, like pebbles, and she was painfully thin.

'There was no way to please him. There was no way to hold him. It was all I wanted, ever, and it was the one thing I couldn't have.' She began to cry, silently. 'I don't want to live any more.'

Alice put her hand out and held her mother's wrist.

'Stop it.'

Elizabeth said, 'You haven't the first idea what I am talking about. You have never felt passionately about anyone in your life. You are so immature.'

Alice took her hand back again. With an immense effort she said, 'I'd like to help. If you'll tell me how.'

'You can't,' her mother said. 'It's nice of you to want to, but you can't. Nobody can except one person and he has finally refused.'

Alice got up and leaned her hands on the table so that she could thrust her face at her mother.

'All right, then. Drown in self-pity if you want to. Refuse help. Keep your stupid melodrama. But just don't forget I offered and you turned me down.'

Elizabeth turned her face away.

'Why should you care?' she said, in the low, bitter voice she had used since Alice arrived. 'There you are, safely married to money and status before you are twenty-one. You're spoiled. The Jordans have seduced you but you'll regret it because nobody, nobody, has life that easy.'

Alice left the house then, and went for a long and angry walk around the streets where her brothers had done their long-ago paper rounds, and when she returned her mother had made tea and announced, with no preliminary, that she was going to Colchester anyway, to live with her sister.

'So all that scene just now,' Alice said, incredulous and on the verge of tears, 'was for nothing? You knew all along, you were going to live with Aunt Ann?'

'I have nowhere else to go,' her mother said. 'Who would want me?'

'Who indeed,' Alice said to Martin later, dolloping sour cream into baked potatoes for their supper. 'I don't know what to make of her. She's certainly a sensational mother, that's for certain.' Martin made soothing noises. In his book, parents were not for objective criticism; they should be exempt, somehow, from personal discussion. He hardly knew his mother-in-law and the unmanageable neurotic bits of her he simply closed his mind to. She had been to university and read law, and that he could encompass quite comfortably, but the rest - best for everyone's sake not to dwell on it. And however much cause she had, he didn't like Allie sounding sarcastic about her. He cut into his potato and cold ham with energy and told Alice about a colleague of his who had a flat in Verbier which he let to friends at reduced rates, and which he had offered to them, in February.

Two weeks later, Elizabeth Meadows left for Colchester and the neat villa of her widowed sister. She took almost nothing with her but her clothes, and left her wedding and engagement rings in a saucer on the kitchen table. Lynford Road was sold, and Sam bought a flat near the university where he could live the kind of life that his greedy, kindly temperament was best suited to. He came to Apple Tree Cottage several times a year, where his benevolent bohemianism made him a great favourite among Alice's new friends who treated him with the same indulgence they might have shown an elderly and affectionate labrador who had suddenly learned to speak. Elizabeth never came. Once a year Alice, with a sinking heart, went to Colchester for a night with the two sisters, and sat miserably in their precisely tidy sitting room while their joint grievance at losing their men occupied the fourth chintz armchair with the strength of a palpable being.

The next three years were - happy. Martin was entirely so, not just in the possession of Alice, but also because he knew - and the knowledge pleased him enormously his life's major decisions were taken. He had not only taken them, he liked them. His job, which would finally make him a partner, was exactly what he had unambitiously expected, he had a pretty cottage and enough money, and he had Alice. The having of Alice was an incalculable asset, both for what she gave him and for the way in which people saw him, having her. She had taken to plaiting her long hair high on her head on honeymoon, to keep it from tangling like weed in the sea, and now she wore it like that all the time, and people looked at her a good deal. She wore boots and shawls and clothes from India and Peru, while the wives of Martin's colleagues wore navy blue loafers and striped shirts and pearl earrings. She painted borders round the rooms of the cottage, and pictures on the cupboard doors, and gradually people began to want her to paint their cupboards and walls and to do watercolours of corners of their houses that they felt best expressed their personalities, which they then gave to one another for Christmas and anniversaries.

She made curtains for the cottage, great dramatic billowing things that she hung from poles, while her friends turned their own cottages into sprigged milkmaid boxes, and felt, returning to them after supper with Alice and Martin, that they were altogether too timid. Alice learned to cook too, and to garden, and brought to both the eye and the confidence that it is no good wishing for if you are born without. Alice, it was generally agreed, in the rural circles around Salisbury, Alice Jordan had style.

And when having style exhausted her, Alice went off, of course, to Dummeridge. For those first three years of her marriage she went two or three times a month, driving down the comfortable southern roads through Cranborne and Wimborne and Wareham to spend a night with Cecily. They were usually alone, but if Richard happened to be there, he made little difference to their aloneness, and Anthony had taken his demanding and difficult personality off to Japan, with an investment company. Cecily was writing a new book on kitchen gardens which was an attempt to revive the ancient potager. A prototype was being laid out at Dummeridge, as complex and orderly as a knot garden, and Alice drew the plan, painting in each red-leaved lettuce, each gooseberry bush trained to grow like a lollipop, each radiating brick path, with the charming stiff precision of a sampler. Cecily had shown her the foreword to the book.

This book owes so much to other people besides myself. Some of them are dead, like those vegetable heroes of the past, Richard Gardiner and William Lawson. Some are very much alive, and foremost among those is my daughter-in-law, Alice Jordan, whose exquisite plan for my own potager here at Dummeridge you will find as a frontispiece.

'I would take you to America with me, next time,' Cecily said, 'but I don't think it would be quite fair on Martin.'

However, to both of them, a trip to Venice seemed perfectly fair. Martin did not, after all, want to go.

'Honestly,' he said, 'I'm not brilliant at endless churches and pictures of saints. You know me.'

Alice was torn. She felt quite easy at going without him, but at the same time a small disquiet that he didn't want to come. This was somehow compounded by the fact that he was so manifestly satisfied at the prospect of his wife and his mother going off to be cultural together. He said this so often and so complacently to people that in the end Alice lost her temper with him and dispensed with her compunction. They had been married almost two years.