Joanna Trollope - A Village Affair

After twenty minutes or so, Alice came and stood in the kitchen doorway.

'Martin's gone for a walk. It's so kind of you to have him.'

Juliet had her back to Alice, stirring her soup.

'You know I'm not kind.'

'And it was kind to have us both here-'

'Shut up,' Juliet said. 'Stop mouthing crappy platitudes at me.' She turned round. 'Did you get anywhere?'

'No.' Alice paused and then she said, 'He wants me to apologize, I think. He wants it to be all my fault.'

Juliet said nothing. She took the soup off the cooker and peered at it.

'Henry'll never eat this. Looks like pond slime.'

Alice said, 'I'll go home now. But thank you.'

Juliet banged her saucepan down.

'What the hell do you expect from him? What has he done, poor brute, except be the boring old Englishman he's always been - the one you married?'

'It isn't as simple as that-'

'Simple? You bet your life it isn't simple.' She came across the kitchen, holding the wooden soup spoon. 'Allie. Allie, how could you?'

Alice looked at her.

'How could you treat Martin like this? How could you be so absolutely normal all these years and then suddenly

- God, Allie, have you fallen off your trolley?'

'In order to even begin to understand,' Alice said, 'you have to want to.'

'And what about you trying to understand Martin?'

'I do.'

'You do?'

'Understanding unfortunately doesn't mean I can wave a wand and put everything right, but it does mean that I'm trying to take everyone into account.'

Juliet marched back to the cooker.

'Too good of you.'

Alice left. As she went out of the Dunnes' house, she could see Juliet's little boys on a climbing frame across the lawn. She got into her car. On the floor there were bits of Lego, and a cassette tape of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and a bangle of Clodagh's, purple and gold, that Natasha had borrowed to take to school and awe Sophie with. There were also rather a lot of sweet papers.

'I want you to be more slutty,' Clodagh had said to her. 'My beautiful, sexy, slutty Alice. I want you to let your elastic go. Life to the senses, death to sense.'

Alice started the car, and drove slowly down the drive to the lane. The heavy August green of the countryside weighted the land right down. Some days, when it was still, you felt the fields could not breathe. Gross weeds lined the lanes, tangling on the verges. Alice thought she felt like it looked, exhausted, weighed down, ripe for harvest. She put her hand up for her pigtail, and held it as she drove, one hand on it, the other on the steering wheel.

As she came into The Grey House the telephone was ringing. An immense happy certainty seized her. It would be Glodagh. Clodagh had been away a week and it would be so like her to ring now, in the early evening, so that Alice didn't have another whole night to get through, wondering where she was. She took her time, confidently, getting to the telephone, and when she picked up the receiver, she was smiling.

'Hello?'

'Alice,' Richard said.

'Richard-'

'I won't ask how you are because you can't be other than awful.'

'Yes.'

'I'd like to see you.'

She closed her eyes. Tearless for so long now, she could feel the floodgates weakening.

'Alice?'

'Yes. Yes, I'm here-'

'I'd like to see you. Would you like to see me?'

'Yes.'

'Come to London. I'd come to Pitcombe except that I don't want to be curtain-twitching fodder. Come before the children get back. Have you heard from them?'

"Postcards-'

'Ill see you on Tuesday,' Richard said. 'Come to the flat. We'll have lunch.'

'Yes,' Alice said, crying.

'Come on, love. Come on-'

'Don't be kind to me, it's hopeless-'

He laughed.

'I'll see you on Tuesday,' he said.

It was mattins on Sunday morning. The sun was out, and the clumps of hollyhocks by the lych gate were jubilant with their papery trumpets. Mattins was preferred by the Protestant habitues of Pitcombe because the hour was civilized and there was no delicate dilemma as to whether one should eat, or not, before communion, and if not, in Miss Payne's case, risk the humiliation of breakfastless internal rumblings in all the quietest and most holy moments. Once she had been compelled to go out of the church entirely and suffer an agony of blushes by a table tomb in the churchyard.

August was usually a poor month for congregations because of holidays, but this particular Sunday seemed to fall between the end of Europe and the beginning of Scotland in the Pitcombe holiday calendar. The narrow nave, decorated with immense white phlox sent down from Pitcombe Park, intermingled with royal blue artificial delphiniums provided by Cathy Fanshawe - 'Good God,' Henry Dunne said, hunting for hassocks, 'is it Lifeboat week?' - filled satisfactorily with people, redfaced from harvest and Cornwall, brown-faced from Umbria and Tenerife. Miss Pimm, in a brown print, with tremulous bare arms, sat at the organ. The choir, a mixed bag of Motts and Crudwells and the reluctant Barton child who was required, by his parents, to participate, sat below her, picking their noses and whispering.

Rosie and Gerry Barton sat in the front pews on the right, opposite the Unwin pew. The Bartons were smiling, the Unwins were attempting to. Behind the Unwins, the Dunnes formed a loyal cohort, Henry in a blazer with his old regimental buttons, Juliet in a blue flowered frock, their boys - whom Henry intended to hold in halfnelsons for most of the service - in identical T-shirts and shorts. Buntie Payne sat across the aisle from them and smiled at the children, which emboldened them to make grisly faces. Down the rest of the aisle, scattered in twos and threes, sat the Fanshawes, a local farmer, John Murray-French with his cricket-watching panama on the pew beside him, several visitors, Michelle and her friend Carol, a new family who had modestly chosen a back pew, and old Fred Mott, in his wheelchair, wheeled up by Mr Finch who believed him to be an absolute test case for the promise of universal redemption. He sat wheezing a little, fingering his trousers and loudly sucking on Fishermen's Friends.

Peter Morris came out of the vestry in the green stole of Trinity and looked pleasedly at the church. He went down the aisle greeting people, and then up to the choir to say a few admonishing words. He often thought he would have forgiven them a great deal if they had been able to sing at all. Then he went back into the vestry for a few private moments, moments in which he was always surprised at how easily and earnestly prayer came, and went back into the church and saw Alice Jordan, sitting alone and very upright two pews behind the Dunnes. She was staring straight ahead. Instead of embarking upon the bidding prayer, Peter went down the aisle to her and said, in the resounding silence, 'How nice to see you, Alice,' to which she said thank you. He then went back to the chancel step, opened his arms wide and began.

Alice, kneeling, sitting, rising, told herself she must get through it. She said the Lord's Prayer, but she did not say the General Confession or join in the hymns which everyone else seemed to sing with a land of exaggerated gusto. It occurred to her that the atmosphere was like the one she imagined prevailing in doomed aircraft, tremendous stoicism tussling silently with incipient hysteria. Sir Ralph, as churchwarden and sidesman, came round with the collection bag during 'Lead me, Heavenly Father, lead me' and Alice dropped in her coins without looking at him. During the sermon, the little Dunne boys, who had known her all their lives, twisted round to beam broadly at her, and were cuffed back into place by their father. It was only at the end that her courage faltered, and in the last hymn she slipped quickly out of her pew so that Buntie Payne, who had been planning to kiss her in front of everyone, turned eagerly to do so after the Peace and cried in a voice loud with disappointment 'Oh, it's too bad! Really it is! She's gone!'