Telephone!'

She turned. Dorothy was standing at the far end of the border flapping a duster. She began to walk quickly back.

'So sorry!' Dorothy said, 'but it sounds urgent. The vicar from Pitcombe - he says-'

The vicar-'

'Yes. A Mr Morris-'

Cecily ran. In the hall, the telephone receiver lay beside a luminous white hydrangea in a Chinese bowl.

'Mr Morris?'

'Ah,' Peter said. 'I'm so glad to speak to you. Nobody's hurt. You must understand that. All your family are unhurt. But I think you should come. I think they need you. I think your son would like you to come.'

'What's happened?'

Peter Morris said carefully, There has been an emotional upset.'

'What sort? What do you mean?'

'Could you come? It would be easier to explain to you, if you came-'

It would not, really, and he knew it. It would never be easy to explain but it was always worse on the telephone, when one was unable to see the other person's face. He screwed his own face up at the reproduction on his study wall of Carpaccio's St Jerome at his desk with the little dog badgering him silently from the floor nearby, and said, 'Everybody is well and being cared for, but your family needs your support.'

'I'll come,' she said. 'I'll be two hours.'

'Come to the vicarage. Come to me first.'

'Yes,' she said. 'Yes.' And he could hear her voice falter.

He put the telephone down and looked at the chair where she would be sitting when he told her that her daughter-in-law and Clodagh Unwin had become lovers and appeared to have no intention of ceasing to be lovers. He would have to tell her how Alice had come to him the night before, in a very bad way indeed, and asserted that her husband had tried to rape her. Rape, she had said, over and over. 'He tried to force me. He's mad, he's mad-'

He had sat her down in the rectory kitchen and made tea. Alice told him how good Martin had been initially, how accepting, and then how he had suddenly changed and come bellowing at her, accusing Clodagh of trying to fob him off with being the Unwins' lawyer as compensation for taking Alice, and how he had flung her on the floor and wrenched at her clothes and his own and been uncontrollably violent and savage, shouting all the time and weeping, and how James had come in and that of course had stopped things. Then Martin had locked himself in the spare room and could be heard sobbing there, and Alice had rung Clodagh who came down from the Park to help her comfort James, and she had left them together and come here because they needed a doctor, she thought, and more than a doctor probably, she didn't know, she could hardly think . . . The mug of tea in her hand was jerking uncontrollably and tea was splashing down on to her skirt, great hot splashes she hardly seemed to notice, so Peter took away the mug and sat and watched her until he thought she might be able to tell him again, more slowly, what had happened.

'He kept roaring,' Alice said. 'He kept roaring at me, "You're a lesbian, do you hear me, you're a lesbian"-'

'But you are. If what you tell me of you and Clodagh is true, you are.'

'And is that so wrong?'

'Yes,' Peter Morris said. 'It is very wrong.'

She gazed at him. Her mass of hair was loose and wild.

'But it made everything better, happier-'

'No,' Peter said. That is an illusion. It was a selfish, short-term pleasure. There is nothing good in a pleasure which inevitably creates innocent victims.'

'And if I was a victim before?'

'Free will,' Peter said. 'Always a choice, all your life.'

'I'm not bad,' Alice said, weeping suddenly, 'I'm not a wicked woman.'

'I know that. Goodness, essential goodness, does not guarantee anyone against wrongdoing.'

'It isn't wrong! How can love be wrong?'

'In itself, it can't. It is what you do with it.'

He had then telephoned the doctor at King's Harcourt and had walked Alice home through the Sunday twilight to The Grey House where there was silence behind the spare room door and in the kitchen a subdued, uneasy quiet while Clodagh read to James, and Natasha at the table filled in the diagrams in a dot-to-dot book. James was on Clodagh's knee, but when Peter and Alice came in she set him on the floor and came across to Alice and put her arm round her. Peter could not look at them. He went over to the table and admired what Natasha was doing.

'They don't, of course, look real,' Natasha said, drawing on. 'Because of all the corners.'

James went across to Alice and Clodagh, his thumb in his mouth, and leaned against them. He was in his pyjamas. Alice stooped to lift him and he put his arms round her neck and stuck his bare foot sideways so that Clodagh could hold it.

'Dr Milligan is coming,' Alice said. 'He will give Daddy something to help him sleep.'

'When I had chicken pox,' Clodagh said, 'when I was little, Dr Milligan gave me a biro and told me to draw round every spot I could find. It took a whole day.'

James chuckled, his face in Alice's shoulder.

'I shall go upstairs,' Peter said. 'I shall go up and wait for the doctor.'

Alice carried James back to the Aga and sat down with him on her knee. Clodagh stayed where she was.

'Alice-'

'Yes?'

'You're not wavering? What did Peter say to you-'

'That what we have is wrong.'

Clodagh snorted.

'I hope you took no notice.'

'I must take notice. But it does not mean, if I take notice, that my mind is changed.'

Natasha looked up and watched Clodagh.

'And your heart?' Clodagh said. Her head was high. She was wearing a brief, pale grey dress and she stood upright in it, a narrow shaft under her cloud of hair.

'Of all people,' Alice said, 'you know about my heart.'

Clodagh came forward suddenly and leaned on the table. She said urgently to Alice, 'It's real you know. Real. It isn't just pour epater Je bourgeoisie.'

'I know.'

Clodagh put her hand on Natasha's.

'It isn't selfish. It's giving. It folds in other people. It's what's best in women-'

'Clodagh,' Alice said, 'I know.'

Tears were running down Clodagh's face. She took no notice of them and they dripped on to the table.

'You must know it,' Clodagh said. 'Everyone must. They must see that it is as strong and real as ordinary love. I never knew that before but now I do. Oh, Alice-'

They were all watching her. James had taken his thumb out. Alice stretched out a hand.

'Clodagh. Clodagh, why all this, why worry-'

'Because of the centre line,' Clodagh cried out, letting go Natasha's hand and covering her wet face with her own. 'Because of that. Because I'm afraid of it, because I'm afraid it will pull you back, it will, it wUl-'

Natasha got hurriedly off her chair and came to her mother. Alice took her hand. She sat upright in her chair, holding her children, and although her face was quite drained by fatigue, she said in a voice of great calm, 'You needn't be afraid.'

Clodagh took her hands away from her face and went over to the roll of kitchen paper on the dresser and tore off a strip and blew her nose ferociously.

'Alice. Oh my precious Alice. You are such an innocent-'

And then the doctor had come. He had gone upstairs with Peter Morris to Martin, who, bruised to his very depths by his own behaviour as well as by the bitter discoveries of the last twenty-four hours, had conducted himself with the passive courtesy of a well-brought-up schoolboy, and had been helped into pyjamas and into bed, and given an injection to help him to sleep. Outside on the landing, with a weary distaste, Peter Morris explained the circumstances to Dr Milligan and then the two men went down to the kitchen and found that Clodagh had gone and that Alice was sitting at the table playing hangman with her children.

Dr Milligan said he would call again tomorrow but he thought Martin should be taken away for a while.

'So that,' he said to Alice, 'you can put your house in order.'

Alice said nothing. She stared at the spot on the table where the hanging lamp made a neat circle of apricot light.

'It isn't "F",' Natasha said. 'Only four more wrong and I've hanged you.'

Alice felt the two men looking down at her, big, greyhaired men in a late Sunday comfortableness of clothes. She heard Clodagh in her mind, Clodagh saying to her, laughingly, 'Why should men despise you? Honestly, you're a walking stereotype. Do women despise gay men? Alice, Alice-'

She looked up with difficulty.

'I will ring your mother-in-law in the morning,' Peter Morris said.

'Oh-'

'Yes,' he said firmly.

Doctor Milligan moved away towards the door.

'I'd get those children to bed if I were you. And yourself.' He opened the stable door. 'Rain,' he said, and went out into it.

Peter Morris came round the table and laid a brief passing hand on each child's head.

'You can always ring me-'

'Yes.'

'Martin will sleep all night.'

'Yes.'

'Get to bed now.'

When he had gone, Natasha said, sighing, 'It was all Uncle Anthony, wasn't it?'

'Well, partly-'

'Will Daddy be better in the morning?'

'A bit better.'

'Who's doing the school run?'

Alice thought.

'MrsAlleyne.'

James's lip trembled.

'No-'

'It's her turn-'

'I wantClodagh-'

'Yes. Yes. I know.'

She stood up and took James's hand.

'Come on. Bed.'

He trailed after her, dragging on her hand. They went slowly up the stairs, past the eloquently closed spare room door, and along the passage to James's room where his bed awaited him under a fly-past of model aeroplanes. He looked very small and fragile in bed. The sight of the back of his neck filled Alice with panic. She kissed him quickly for fear she might cry before she was out of the room, and for once he did not beseech her to stay, but put his forbidden thumb in and turned docilely on his side.