Joanna Trollope: A Village Affair

It was John's. It would be hers and Martin's. It was the room she had dreamed of most, of lying in bed with the view of the valley surging in through those near floorlength windows. She knew where she would put her dressing table, and the little sofa her mother-in-law had given her, and where she would hang her collection of drawings of seated women, a collection she had begun when she was fourteen. She looked at the room now in panic. There was no malevolence in it, nothing in it but its usual graceful, placid charm. The panic was in her. She put her hands to her face. It was burning hot.

In the bathroom John's old pug was curled up in a basket in the bottom of the airing cupboard. The door was open so that he shouldn't feel claustrophobic. He grunted when Alice came in but didn't stir. It was a huge bathroom, with an armchair and a bookcase, ancient club scales, lots of magazines in ragged stacks, a lovely view and several friendly, doggy old dressing gowns hung in a mound on the back of the door. Alice shut the door behind her and locked it. She ran a basin of cool water and splashed her face, then she dried it on John's towel, which smelt attractively male, and sat down in the armchair. Deep breaths, one after the other. Close eyes. Idiotic Alice, mad Alice, lucky Alice. She was still holding John's towel. She buried her face in it. How good male things were when they were impersonal to you: the sound of a strange man's confident stride across a wooden floor, a man behind you at a newspaper kiosk rattling the change in his pocket, the contrast of wrist skin and shirt cuff and jacket sleeve on your neighbour at a dinner party, John's bald old bath towel. She felt better and stood up.

'Never a word of this to anyone,' she said to the pug and went downstairs.

In what would be Martin's study, and was now a fuggy and welcoming burrow where John spent winter evenings, Alice found Charlie sitting on Gwen's knee with her beads round his neck, and Henry Dunne. Henry was Sir Ralph's agent, and although John Murray-French had bought The Grey House from the estate long before Henry's day, it was still regarded as being in the fold. Henry and John's son had been at Eton together and Henry often came in on his way here and there across the estate, to tell him this and that and to describe the hunting days which were his passion and which John, leisuredly french-polishing his ducks, didn't seem to mind hearing about, over and over. John's patience meant that when Henry got home he didn't feel the urge to tell Juliet, his wife, all about hunting, which was just as well because it made her scream, literally, with boredom.

Henry thought Alice was wonderful. He thought her beautiful too, with her long dark blue eyes and her astonishing high-plaited hair, but he was rather afraid she might be quite clever. Last New Year's Eve he had hoped she thought him wonderful too because he had boldly kissed her, quite separately from all that lunatic midnight kissing which was always such chaos you might well end up kissing the furniture, and she had seemed to like it. He said, 'Goodnight, my lovely,' to her in a whisper when the party broke up at last and she gave him a long look. But when he saw her next it was in Salisbury, by chance, and she was pushing her baby in a little pram thing and although she smiled at him, she was absolutely composed and even said, 'Wasn't that a lovely party, at the New Year?'

He said, 'You made it lovely. For me.'

And she smiled at him and shook her head.

'Do you mean, Alice, that you didn't-'

'I mean that-'

She stopped. He said, 'What? What? Tell me.'

She looked at him again. There was a flicker of fear in her face, he could see it, even a dope like him whom Juliet was always saying had the perceptiveness of a myopic buffalo.

'Please not,' Alice said, and then she had kissed his cheek quickly and pushed her baby into Marks and Spencer.

She seemed only delighted to see him now. She kissed him, said, 'How's Juliet?' and 'Oh, you old ponce,' to Charlie, and sat down beside Gwen.

'The house looks so nice,' she said to Gwen, untruthfully, since she had hardly noticed.

'I do my best. Bit of a business, what with the Major's pipes and the carving and the dogs. But we struggle on, don't we gorgeous?'

Charlie made mewing noises in Alice's direction. She lifted him off Gwen's knee and returned the beads.

'Gwen says she's staying on,' Henry said.

'I know. Isn't it marvellous of her?'

'Four mornings I'll do here. And a day to muck out the Major when he's in his cottage. You should see the place now, walls running with damp-'

Alice stood up, holding Charlie against her shoulder.

‘Thank you so much for your kindness, Gwen. It's such a weight off my mind, knowing you'll help me. I ought to go and round up the children now.'

'I'll come with you,' Henry said. 'I only came to leave John the surveyor's report on his cottage.'

Gwen opened the front door for them both. Alice put a hand on it. Her front door. She took her hand away quickly and put it back under Charlie's solidly padded bottom.

'Bye now,' Gwen said. 'Mind how you go. Bye-bye, you lovely boy.'

When the door had shut, Alice said, 'Is she going to drive me mad?'

Henry looked mildly shocked.

'I don't think you'll find anyone else very easily. Everyone is crying out for help and I know for certain Elizabeth Pitt has her eye on Gwen, and so does Sarah Alleyne, except nobody can bear to work for her for more than a month.'

He opened the car boot so that Alice could stow Charlie away in his carrycot.

'We're all thrilled you have got this house, you know. It'll make such a difference to the village.'

Alice straightened up.

'We're so lucky.'

'I'll say. The hordes John has had to beat away don't bear thinking of. He said a chap appeared out of the blue driving a black BMW and offered him four hundred thousand.'

'What has a BMW got to do with it?'

Henry said, faintly nettled, 'He must have come down from the City. That sort of money.'

Alice said nothing. She stood quite still and looked at the house. The light was beginning to fade and Gwen had switched on a lamp here and there, coral-coloured rectangles in the soft grey facade. It looked idyllic.

'I'm sick with envy,' Henry said, watching her. 'Me and half Wiltshire.'

Alice turned slowly to face him. She reached out and touched his hand for a second.

‘The thing is,' she said, quite calmly, 'that now that I have it, I don't in the least want it.' And then she burst into tears.

'I don't know what it is,' Martin said into the telephone, keeping his voice down even though Alice was upstairs in the bath. 'She doesn't seem able to tell me. She thinks The Grey House is lovely, she doesn't want to stay here, but she says she is terrified of moving.'

His mother, fifty miles away in Dorset, said, 'Is it the moving itself?'

'Can't be,' Martin said. 'She never minds anything like that. I've never seen her like this.'

'She was very upset for a while after Charlie-'

That's all over,' Martin said. 'Pronounced A-one four months ago.'

'Have you,' Martin's mother said, 'been quarrelling?'

Too loudly Martin said, 'No.' Then he said, more ordinarily, The odd bicker, I suppose, over what we ought to offer for The Grey House, but not quarrelling.'

'Can I speak to her?'

'She's in the bath. She doesn't know I'm ringing you.'

Martin's mother, who loved her daughter-in-law dearly, said with some indignation, 'Behind her back, as if she was unfit to hear? No wonder she cries.'

Martin drooped. It was as it ever was. He couldn't remember a time when he hadn't longed to please his mother, to feel confidential with her, and then to know every time that he had failed. He knew she loved him but he wasn't ever sure she liked him. It was rather the same with his elder brother Anthony, except that Anthony was tougher and ruder, so that they sparred together. He remembered with customary bewilderment his mother saying to Alice ten years ago, 'I'm glad it's Martin you're marrying, not Anthony. I love Anthony but I know he is really a horrible boy.'