Joanna Trollope: A Village Affair

'Oh, John-'

'I've lived here for thirty-five years. Can't believe it. I'd hate it to go to a stranger.'

'I promise we'll love it. I mean, we already do. In fact, I think it's the answer-'

'The answer? To what?'

There had been a tiny pause.

'Oh,' she said, in a more matter of fact voice, 'three children, more space, studio for me. You know.'

She let the car creep between the hornbeams. The children, sensing the drama, began to give little squeals of excitement in the back. Natasha had already written, in all her books, partly from pride, partly to prevent James ever claiming them:

This book belongs to:

Natasha Jordan

The Grey House

Pitcombe

Wiltshire

And there it was. Long, low, grey, with its pretty sashed eighteenth-century windows reaching almost to the floors, its heavy panelled door with pediment and lion's-head knocker, its three brick chimneys, its terrace over the valley, sitting so beautifully in its pleasing sweeps of golden gravel and green grass. Sinuous grey arms of wisteria twined up over the pediment and along the facade, and either side of the front door a bay tree grew glossily in a Versailles tub. It was perfect.

Alice climbed out of the car and released the children. They raced down the lawn at once, still squealing, to climb the iron park railing that separated the lawn from the paddock below. Alice opened the back and picked up Charlie. He was very pleased and beat about in the air with his hands and crowed. She went up to the front door and rang the bell. John had said not to bother but she didn't want to alienate Gwen in any way, hoping she would stay and clean the house for her, as she had done for John for a decade.

Gwen opened the door after a very long time, clearly meaning to upstage Alice, but was undone in an instant by the sight of Charlie in his blue padded snowsuit.

'Ah. Bless him. Isn't he lovely? Come in, Mrs Jordan. The Major said you'd be over.'

Alice turned to shout for the children. They were still on the railings.

'I'd leave them,' Gwen said. 'Can't come to no harm. Who's a lovely boy, then?'

Charlie regarded her impassively.

'He's very good,' Alice said, anxious to be friendly. 'The best of the three, really. But he weighs a ton.'

'Would he come to Gwen, then?'

She held out her arms. Charlie allowed himself to be transferred without protest. He examined Gwen's face solemnly for a while and then her pink blouse and her maroon cardigan. Finally, after long scrutiny, he put a single shrimp-like finger on her crystal beads.

'Aren't you gorgeous?' Gwen said to him, quite melted. 'Aren't you and Gwen going to have a nice time, then?'

Alice felt a rush of gratitude towards Charlie.

'Actually, I was going to ask you-'

Gwen turned a beaming face on her.

'I thought you might be. Course I'll help.' She turned her face back to Charlie. 'Gwen's not going to turn down an old heart-throb like you, now, is she. I'll take him into the study, Mrs Jordan, and you just poke about. The Major said to. I'll keep an eye out for the children. Now then,' she said to Charlie, 'I wonder if we could find a biccy?'

Alice said faintly, 'He's only got two teeth. He's only eight months. Perhaps-'

'Who's a big boy?' Gwen said moving off rapidly. 'Who'd have thought it? Eight months-'

The drawing room ran for twenty-five feet along the front of the house to the right of the door; the dining room rather less to the left. Behind them were a study for Martin, a room for a playroom, and a kitchen which opened with a stable door on to a wide brick path and then grass and then the eastward view. The stable door had seized upon Alice's imagination when she had first seen it; she had visualized a summer morning, with the sun streaming in through the opened top half, and herself up a ladder, surging while she stencilled designs her head was full of round the tops of the walls. She could feel how happy she would be. The kitchen was rather grim now because John was only concerned with it as a place to open tins in, but she had known the moment she saw it how lovely it could be. Looking at it now, darkly cream painted, shabby linoleum floored, with its scrubbed centre table cluttered with half-empty marmalade jars, and corkscrews and newspapers and ripped-open brown envelopes, she suddenly had a tiny twinge.

It was very tiny, but it was there. It was like a sudden, faint, malicious little draught of cold air on a golden summer day, or a wrong note in a melody, very transient in itself but leaving something unnerving behind it. Alice shook herself, took hold of the comforting end of her plait, and looked sternly at the kitchen. Pale yellow walls, she had settled on that, white woodwork, strip, sand and polish the floor, scented geraniums along the windowsills, dried hops along the ceiling beams, jars of pulses and spices on the dresser, a rocking chair, patchwork cushions, a cat . . . She began, without warning, to cry. It was horrifying. Why was she crying? Huge sobs, like retching, were surging up brokenly inside her and these vast tears were spilling over and she couldn't see. She fumbled frantically for a handkerchief, scrabbling in the pockets of her coat and her skirt, up her sleeves, in her bag. She found a crumpled tissue and blew her nose violently. She never cried. Strong Alice who hadn't cried since after Charlie which was obviously post-natal. She sat down in one of John's scuffed kitchen chairs and bent her head. She was frightening herself.

Probably she was tired. It had been quite a strain wondering if they really would get The Grey House, and Martin wasn't good at this kind of thing and fussed a lot about money and surveys and things like that. She had said to him, trying to encourage him, 'But the right things are right, aren't they? I mean, the house feels right so I can paint again and make a bit of money at last, and perhaps we could have a pony. It never matters with money in the long run, does it? We always manage. We will now.'

He said crossly, 'I manage you mean.'

She tried not to feel furious. She tried not to remember that Martin had a private income, even if it wasn't huge, so that money never was a proper problem to them, as it was to other people. They weren't rich, but they weren't uncomfortable either. Martin hated her to talk about his private money; he was very secretive about it. She thought that his pride suffered from knowing he did not earn very much as a country solicitor and probably never would. She told herself he had to pretend he earned all their income, for his own self-esteem. So she waited, looking at his rough, fair head bent over the newspaper, and after a bit she said, 'You see, I think we'll be so happy at The Grey House. That's the element I think is so important.'

They had many such conversations. Sometimes Martin said, 'Aren't you happy here, then?' and sometimes he said, 'Oh I know, I know, I'm just being an ass, you know how I hate thinking about money,' and once he said, 'Thanks a bloody million,' and stamped out. She began to follow him but stopped, and they went to bed that night hardly speaking. That kind of thing was, of course, terribly tiring, far more tiring than digging a whole cabbage patch or painting a ceiling or spending an entire day in London Christmas shopping in the rain. Alice blew her nose again now and stood up. She would go into the drawing room. Nobody could ever want to cry in the drawing room.

But she did. She stood by the fireplace in the lovely long low room with its bookcases, and windows to the terrace, and imagined decorating the Christmas tree in that corner, and doing a vast arrangement of dried flowers in that, and hanging up those marvellous miles of ivory moire curtain that Martin's mother had given her, at all the windows, and she felt worse than she had in the kitchen. She felt despair. At least, she thought it was despair, but she did not think she had ever had a feeling like this in her life with which to compare it. She fled from the drawing room to the dining room, confronted images of herself smiling down the candlelit length of the table across dishes of perfect food, and fled again, upstairs and into the first bedroom she came to.