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.'

And she meant it. It wasn't a doting mother's joke. Martin wondered uneasily what his mother had said to Alice about him; there was so much she had said to Alice that he would never know.

'Of course talk to her,' he said now, stiffly, 'if you think it'll do any good.'

'Get her to ring me,' Cecily Jordan said, 'when she's out of the bath.'

He sighed and put the receiver down. He was frightfully tired. He had got back from a long day, and everything looked entirely as usual, children in bed, supper ready, Alice in the low slipper chair by the fire in their tiny sitting room, stitching at some tapestry thing until she turned her face up for his greeting kiss and he saw she had been crying. She then cried on and off all through supper. She said, between crying and mouthfuls, that she had an awful feeling of foreboding that it just wasn't going to work. He had said, 'The Grey House, you mean?'

'No - no - not the house exactly, just living there, us living there-'

'But it's the thing you have always wanted!'

'I know,' she said, pushing her plate away half-full. 'I know. That's why I am so afraid.'

He tried to jolly her.

'You're not afraid of anything! You never have been. You terrify me, skiing.'

'Oh,' Alice said dismissively, 'physical things. Easy. This is something much more alarming, a sort of utterly lost feeling, as if I'd staked everything on something that wasn't there at all.'

Martin began to finish the lasagne she had left.

'I don't understand you,' he said.

He still didn't. Perhaps his mother was right and it was the remains of post-Charlie blues. He felt sorry for her, but at the same time faintly aggrieved that she couldn't behave normally about something she had said she desperately wanted and that he had really had to battle to achieve. He'd had to sell a lot of shares, a lot, for The Grey House. He looked round the room, tiny but full of fascinating things and bold stuffs and extraordinary paintings which he wouldn't have chosen himself in a million years but which he found he really liked, now he saw them. Very Alice. He looked into the fire. He felt she was failing him.

When she came down, in a yellow dressing gown with her plait pinned up on top with a comb, he said, trying not to sound surly, 'Ma says would you ring her.'

A kind of light came into Alice's eyes, a look of relief and hope.

'Oh yes,' she said. 'Did she ring?'

'I rang her.'

'Martin, I'm not being deliberately neurotic. I detest feeling like this. If I could stop, I would.'

He got out of his chair and went to kick a log in the fireplace. He thought of his mother's tone to him, on the telephone. He said to Alice, 'Is it me? Is it something to do with me? Are you sick of me?'

Alice gave a little gasp.

'Oh no!'

He grunted.

'Just wondered.'

The wrong note in the melody sang out again, tiny and harsh, in her mind. She went across the room and put her arms round him from behind, laying her cheek against his back.

'You know it isn't that. Haven't I kept telling you that I want The Grey House because I know we'll be happy there?'

'But that doesn't fit in with all this panic.'

'Exactly. It's probably some hormone imbalance. That's what I've been thinking about in the bath.'

He turned round and held her. He thought how much more often he needed to make love to her than she wanted to have it made to her. He took a deep breath.

'Go and ring Ma,' he said.

CHAPTER TWO

Before Cecily Jordan had married, she had been, briefly, a Lieder singer. She had gone to Vienna, to train, in 1937, in the teeth of her parents' opposition, and had, at eighteen, fallen wildly in love with music, with Vienna, and with a young Jewish composer and political activist. It was he who introduced her to the pure and lovely solo songs of Schubert and who taught her to vary her performance from lyrical to intensely dramatic, as the Lied required. This he did partly by technical instruction, and partly by taking her to bed and awakening her to a consciousness of her own powers which she found quite natural to express in song.

In the winter of 1938 he made her promise, by threatening never to see her again if she wouldn't comply, to go home at once to England if anything should befall him. He made her write the promise down and sign it. In June 1939, he was arrested while crossing the Ringstrasse, in midday sunlight, and a note from him, containing the written promise, was brought to her while she stood in her sunny, dusty, cluttered room out by the Prater Park, doing her voice exercises.

To break your promise will make everything infinitely worse for both of us and I should despise, not admire you for it,' her lover wrote. The best thing you can do for us now is to take that lovely voice we have made together back to England, and use it as a light in a dark world.'