Joanna Trollope - A Village Affair

'I can't write-'

He raised his other hand and pushed the bitten biscuit at her mouth.

'Darling. Don't-'

'Eat it!'

'No, Jamie, no, it's all licky-'

He jabbed it against her lower lip and it broke.

'You broke my biscuit.'

'You broke it. Being silly. Move your gun so I can write.'

He kept his hand on the gun and screwed his foot round on the piece of biscuit that had fallen on to the floor until it was a brown powder.

There.'

Alice took no notice. He threw another bit down and did the same thing. Alice gripped the table edge and her pen and glared at what she had written.

'After thinking it over and over, I know I must decline your offer. The price - the price of having to rely on you - is too high. I can't do it. You are too protective, somehow, too administering. I couldn't breathe. I don't really know if I trust you.'

She thought, I should be saying this, not writing it, but if I say it he will argue with me and try to persuade me otherwise. And I may say, like last time, all kinds of things that I should not have said.

'Gun,' said James loudly. 'Gun, gun, gun.'

He pushed it roughly into her pen-holding hand and hurt her. She held the hurt hand in the other, tense with pain and fury, and he watched her.

'Gun,' he said again, but with less confidence.

'Go away,' Alice said. 'Go away until I have written my letter. Go and play with Tashie.'

He shook his head, but he was chastened by the red mark on her hand. He crept under the table and lay down and put his cheek on Alice's foot, and after a while she could feel tears running into her sandal. She moved her toes, so that he could feel them, and with an immense effort picked up her pen again.

'I can't,' she wrote to Richard, 'be the cure-all for your frustrations. I don't want that ever again, the prison of gratefulness. I am grateful, but I'd rather be it from a distance, on equal terms.'

She felt James's hand on her other foot.

'Jamie? You're a bit tickly-'

He giggled, faintly.

'You trapped me,' Alice wrote, 'didn't you. You trapped me into talking. I'd rather not think why you wanted to do that and I'd rather not think why you want to help me. But what has happened to me has moved me out of the objective case into the subjective case so that I am not available for anyone else's plans just now.'

She signed the letter, 'With love from Alice'. When it was licked up and stamped, by James, they put Charlie into his pushchair and found Natasha, who was arranging her Cornish shells into an interminable exhibition all around the upstairs windowsills, and went down to the post. On the way they met Lettice Deverel who was very kind and ordinary and invited them to tea to meet the parrot. When they got home, Alice made cheese sandwiches for lunch and they ate them in the garden while the children talked about all the things they would do when Daddy and Clodagh came home again.

'Have you seen her?' Clodagh demanded.

Lettice held the telephone at a little distance from her ear.

'Yes. Yes, I have.'

'And? And?'

'We didn't speak of you, if that's what you mean.'

'How did she look?'

'A little tired. That's all.'

'Lettice,' Clodagh shouted. 'Lettice. How can you be so awful to me?'

There was a little silence. The parrot, across the kitchen, clucked approvingly at a grape it held.

'I used to think,' Lettice said, 'I used to think that you had promise and originality. And courage. Now I don't know. I'm more depressed by this episode than I can tell you. You seem to me like some kind of Hedda Gabler, all style and shallow selfishness.'

In London, sitting on her fortunate friends' sofa, Clodagh began to cry.

'Except you have a heart,' Lettice went on. 'I know that because I can see it's been touched. Oh, Clodagh dear, I do beg you to moke something of your life.'

'No!' said the parrot. 'No. No. No. Not pretty.'

It threw the grape stalk out of its cage.

'I can't give this up,' Clodagh said. 'I can't. I'll die.'

'On the contrary, you will live much better.'

'Is she missing me? Does she look as if she's missing me?'

'Don't ask me idiotic questions. Ask me how your poor parents are.'

'Well?'

'Much in need of hearing from you. You should have rung them, not me.'

'I couldn't ask them about Alice.'

'You shouldn't be asking anyone.'

'What about the children then? Did they mention me?'

'No. We only spoke of the parrot.'

'Oh, parrot,' said the parrot. 'Dear parrot. Dear me.'

Clodagh's voice grew small.

'I Jong to come down.'

'I dare say-'

'But I'm not crawling to anyone-'

'If you don't get off your bottom, Clodagh Unwin,' Lettice said, 'and make an independent decision, you'll find that Alice will probably have made them all for you.'

'What d'you mean? What's going on? What did

Alice-' 'I mean nothing, except that Alice has three children and no money of her own and can't fiddle-faddle around

like you can.'

'Has Martin been around?'

'No. He's living with a friend in Salisbury.'

'I'm coming down, damn what everyone thinks-'

'Think!' Lettice cried. Think! You try a little thinking.'

The parrot hooked its beak into the wires of its cage and began to haul itself up to the top. When it got there, it hung upside down for a bit and then it said, with great calm, 'Damn and blast.' Lettice began to laugh.

Delighted, it joined in, and Clodagh, hearing what appeared to be a roomful of merriment in Pitcombe, put the telephone down, in despair.

Martin was just waiting. He had stopped talking to anyone about Alice, particularly to Cecily. He had a very comfortable room in a friend's house on the edge of the Close in Salisbury, and he was working hard, and seeing his children once a week when Alice left them for him at The Grey House and went out, and he was making sure he played tennis a good deal and golf a bit, and he had accepted an invitation to stalk in Sutherland in October. He was making quiet plans to sell The Grey House. Whatever happened next, they couldn't possibly stay there.

Cornwall had restored him in some measure, certainly as to how he stood with his children. He liked being with them but was amazed at how much they needed done for them, how insatiable and helpless they were. Except for the brief time over Charlie's birth, he had never been responsible for them, a thing he didn't like but was perfectly prepared to do, if he had to. He felt perfectly prepared for a lot of things. That was the trouble, really, feeling like that. Nothing seemed violently upsetting any more or impossible to face or to be worth very much angst of any kind. When he tried to think what really mattered now, he couldn't. So he thought he would just get on with each day, as unremarkably and pleasantly as he could, and wait. In any case, if he waited, in the end it would be Alice who had to do something. And that would be only just. Wouldn't it?

On Friday nights, Sam Meadows went to Salisbury's. He had grown rather to like the expedition because the store was full of people who had just finished work and who were full of a pre-weekend relief and excitement. As the years of his lone living went on, he found to his amusement that he was making sure he had no teaching commitments early on Friday evenings to get in the way of going to Salisbury's. He also noticed how he was beginning to buy the same things, whisky and white bread and black cherry jam and pasta and jars of pesto, and how he would make for the same check-out because there was such a dear little woman on the till, who ducked her head at him, bursting with half-hidden smiles.

Since he had left Elizabeth, a good many women had tried quite hard to live with him. He had let two of them begin but they had both had over-clear ideas about how life should be lived, and had been unable to keep those ideas to themselves. The only woman he had wanted, in ten years, to come and do whatever she liked with his life as long as she came, hadn't wanted to. She liked his bed, but preferred her own life outside it. Because of this, Sam had continued to love her and had stopped collecting his pupils like an array of Barbie dolls. They still flirted with him, particularly if essays were late, but these days he could just let them. In any case, the university now had a ferocious female Committee Against Sexual Harassment.