Clodagh dropped her gaze and let Alice go.

'Can we go and find him?'

The children rushed to seize her hands, Natasha shuffling but determined in her boots. They went out of the room and Alice could hear them beginning to clatter, chattering up the uncarpeted stairs. Singing softly, without meaning to, Alice fetched a pan and put her carrots in it, beside the pan of Clodagh's potatoes.

CHAPTER SIX

It was not in the least lost upon Peter Morris that Alice hadn't attended to a word of his sermon; indeed, that she had hardly come to church for any orthodox spiritual purpose at all. This was hardly uncommon. The reasons that brought his congregations to church seemed to him quite as various and tenuous and peculiar as those that kept them away. Folding his stole carefully after the service, Peter decided that Alice had probably come because an hour in church meant you could step off life for a space, stop time. That at least was how she had looked. And no doubt while she sat there, drifting, that decent young husband of hers - good midshipman material - was gardening and minding the children. Peter sighed. The Jordans seemed to him a thoroughly late twentieth-century combination of emotion and imagination on the one hand and Anglo-Saxon aversion to intensity on the other. A polite and lonely alliance.

The village, needless to say, had minutely observed the outward things. Even old Fred Mott, day in day out at his cottage window next door to the post office, had sufficient sight left to say approvingly on Peter Morris's weekly visits, That's a fancy piece. That'll make 'em all sit up.'

'Who?' Peter said. 'Who'll sit up-'

'All of them old dumps round 'ere. All them old bags.'

His little wet mouth widened into a grin.

'You're an old scoundrel, Fred.'

'Not 'alf what I was when I was young. Not 'olf.'

It was all very well, of course, to observe that something was troubling Alice, but how to help was inevitably much trickier. When he asked people around the village, the general view was that she was extravagantly blessed among mortals - lovely house, nice husband, dear little children, more than enough money - so that even if she was being helpful in the matter of the shop and the flower rota, that really was no more than her duty, living where she did and having what she had. Rosie Barton, who ran a very successful little computer business in Salisbury with her husband, Gerry, and who had very decided views on the sort of village Pitcombe should be, said, with the seeming deep sympathy that was her stock in trade, that Alice simply had to learn about a village community. Peter had pointed out that Wilton had hardly been an inner city situation to come from, and Rosie said indeed no, but the measure of involvement in the village was unique. Peter had said no more. The Barton child, an anxious four-year-old in the care of a succession of au pair girls, seemed never to require from his parents the involvement their business or village life did. And they came to church.

Alice, Peter Morris knew, would have been amazed to find how much she was watched and how much the village knew about her. It had amazed Peter himself, at his first country living in Suffolk, to realize that not a line of washing could go up nor an order of groceries be placed without every item being noticed, and conclusions drawn. When he heard someone in the Pitcombe shop say, 'She keeps the children nice,' he knew that meant that the frequency of lines of socks and knickers blowing in The Grey House orchard had not gone unremarked.

Even with the great Admiral aloft to talk and pray to, Peter Morris was very conscious of his solitariness. He had not really meant to remain a widower so long - his marriage had only managed two years before his wife's cancer had killed her, in four months, start to finish but he had never found another woman to whom he could talk as comfortably as he had to Mary. He had come very close to it in Suffolk, with a woman who, in the end, decided she could not be a parson's wife, and then, oddly enough, he had found quite recently an excellent friend in Lettice Deverel of Pitcombe. She was over seventy, scholarly, sharp and a Shavian socialist. She kept a harp in her muddled sitting room, and a green Amazon parrot in the kitchen and she had not a minute in the world for airs and graces. In the last three years, Peter Morris had taken to going up the lane from his sturdy early Victorian rectory to her Regency villa at the top of the village when he had a human knot to untie. Even if she said, as she often did, that she knew nothing about backward babies or neurotic spinsters or the male menopause or whatever the current problem was, she was a good sounding board, and simply went on making bread or potting up pelargoniums while he talked himself to some kind of conclusion.

Rose Villa contained an accumulation of a lifetime's energetic curiosity and culture. As a young woman Lettice Deverel had taught in an international school in Switzerland and had learned to ski in brown leather boots - there was a matching brown photograph to prove it. She had then come home to teach with the Workers' Education Authority, and gone on to be librarian of a famous collection on the history of women in England. All her life she had painted, cooked, gardened, written, read, travelled and kept animals and a diary. She played both the piano and the harp. She had always lived alone and had collected a wide and enthusiastic circle of friends. When Peter Morris added himself to the circle, she told him that she was agnostic and that she had never known a priest well before. He said in that case, she was about to learn. She said, meaning it, 'But I won't stand for God being dragged in all the time,' and he had replied, 'Well, He won't mind that as there's nothing He dislikes so much as no reaction at all.'

It had been a good start. Three years later, among a welter of weekly minutiae, they had together been through Clodagh Unwin's defection to America, the death of Miss Pimm's tyrannical but worshipped old mother, a crippling motorbike accident to the brightest boy in the village, cot deaths, Down's Syndrome babies, broken marriages, drunkenness, unemployment, fire, flood and pestilence. Alice Jordan seemed to Lettice Deverel a very minor problem indeed. She went on thumping her dough while she said, 'Of course, you wouldn't trouble yourself about her if she wasn't goodlooking.'

'Good morning,' the parrot said from his cage. 'And who's a pretty parrot then?'

'I might,' said Peter Morris, who never minded being found out, 'not trouble myself quite so much-'

'She may be a very spoiled young woman, for all we know. And of course spoiled people inevitably become discontented in time.'

'I don't think she's spoiled. I think she may be unhappy, but I don't think it's discontent. It might be disappointment, of course, in her marriage, maybe.'

Lettice Deverel had encountered Martin several times in the village; once, outside the shop, she had dropped a bag of flour and he had helped her, most assiduously, to scoop it into the gutter. She gave a fault snort.

The English public school system-'

'Well?'

'-renders most men incapable of recognizing or acknowledging their own states of mind. Makes them emotionally inarticulate.' She poked a floury finger at Peter. 'Makes most of them afraid of women. Drives any of them who go to Winchester quite round the bend.'

'I think Martin Jordan went to Rugby.'

'Stands out a mile off.'

She dumped fat sausages of dough into loaf tins and set them at the back of her ancient Rayburn to rise.

'If you're trying to make me say I think you should go and talk to her, you're out of luck. You leave well alone.'

'Laugh like parrots at a bagpiper,' said the parrot. 'Good morning. Merchant of Venice. Pretty parrot.'

'She's rather a good painter, you see,' Peter said, 'and she won't paint. Or can't paint.'

'Creativity isn't like carpentry.'

Peter Morris stood up.

'Why have you taken against Alice Jordan?'

'I've done no such thing. I've admired her about the village and I've noticed what you have noticed. But I haven't woven sentimental fantasies about her. You leave her be. She's got pride. Now come outside and have a look at the camellia I thought the frost had done for. You never saw such leaders-'

The last week of the spring school holidays was soft and warm, with the sun shining bright and hard through the still bare branches of trees. Pitcombe began to break the winter seal on its doors and windows and pot plants were put out on doorsteps, like invalids, to take a little reviving air. Lettice Deverel washed the blankets on her bed as a gesture to spring cleaning, and started to go for walks again, declining to do so in winter because she said there was no point in walking when you had to keep your eyes on your feet rather than the view. In rubbersoled brogues and grasping a thumb stick, she set off most afternoons at a determined pace and the village, noticing her departures, said to one another, grinning, that spring must have come if Miss D. was off again. Fred Mott's grandson, Stuart, who was unemployed and a competition gardener, took advantage of these walks to take a wheelbarrow up to Rose Villa by the field path where he would be less observed, and to help himself to some excellent and well-rotted compost.

Sometimes Lettice went up the hill and round the edge of the Park. Sometimes she went either way along the river path, or across fields by bridleways to King's Harcourt and Barleston. Her favourite walk, however, was to skirt the higher boundary of The Grey House garden and strike east along the hillside, with the river below her and a widening valley view opening out ahead. She noticed, with approval, that the window frames of The Grey House were being painted and that someone had begun to thin out the depressing hedge of mahonias that John Murray-French had simply ignored. There was a new sandpit on the lawn outside the kitchen door, and a tricycle and a pleasingly full washing line. Lettice had never wanted to marry but she was a staunch supporter of family life.