Joanna Trollope - A Village Affair

'Sandwich?'

'No thanks. Nothing. Not hungry.'

'Alice,' Clodagh said, 'this is no moment to have the vapours. We are just beginning to get somewhere.'

Alice smiled. She picked up Clodagh's hand and laid her cheek on it.

'It's not the vapours. It's lack of sleep and lots to think about. And anyway, I must go. Shop day.'

Clodagh opened the door.

"I'll be here when you get back. We all will. Waiting for you.'

They stood and looked at each other. Then Alice leaned forward and kissed her and went out into the garden towards the drive.

The Community Shop was standing as usual in the yard behind the post office. Also as usual, Mr Finch was standing on some aluminium steps washing the windscreen with a plastic bucket in one hand and a sponge in the other. The back doors of the van were open, and what was not usual was that Mrs Finch, in a frilled floral blouse, was inside stocking up the shelves. Mrs Finch prided herself on having no manual part in the business though she kept an eagle eye on the books, and if she was minding the shop when a customer wanted potatoes she would pull on rubber gloves before she touched them and make it very plain, with deprecating remarks and smiles, how unaccustomed she was to this aspect of what she called the commercial world. Alice went up the steps into the van.

'Hello, Mrs Finch. No Michelle?'

Mrs Finch paused, holding two bottles of vinegar.

'No, Mrs Jordan. No Michelle.'

'Is she ill? She was fine on Saturday-'

'She is quite well. She is serving in the shop.'

'I see,' said Alice, who didn't. 'Well, let me do that. I know you don't like it-'

'Mrs Jordan,' said Mrs Finch, clasping her bottles, 'I am not one to flinch.'

She took a breath. She had rehearsed this to herself several times, ever since Gwen's astonishing visit to the shop shortly after midday. She put the bottles in their allotted place and turned towards Alice with her hands folded against her sunray pleated skirt.

'Mrs Jordan, I am sure you will not misunderstand me. I am also sure you will understand why I must, out of delicacy, say this to you, rather than allow Mr Finch to. Michelle will not be on the van with you this afternoon because her mother has requested that she shall not be.'

Alice began to laugh.

'Don't be idiotic-'

Mrs Finch watched her.

'I've lived a bit, Mrs Jordan. There isn't much I haven't seen. I'm not one to judge. But I'll tell you that in not judging, I am very rare. Very rare indeed.'

'You will not,' Sir Ralph said, banging his fist into his open palm, 'stay here one more hour. You will not. You will leave Pitcombe.'

His face was scarlet. Margot and Lettice Deverel, who had been summoned from a peaceable kitchen supper with the parrot, both endeavoured to speak, but he brandished his arms at them, commanding them silence.

'I put all my faith in you. All my faith. And you have betrayed me and perverted all the decency of your upbringing-'

'Ralph,' Margot cried. 'Ralph. Don't be so exaggerated. It doesn't help. Clodagh is still Clodagh.'

'Of all people,' Sir Ralph said. 'Of all my treasured people.'

Clodagh was sitting very upright on a small sofa in her father's library. She had gone to her mother soon after her return from London about seven o'clock and it was now after ten. Mrs Shadwell had as usual left a cold supper in the kitchen but nobody had been near it. It seemed, when she had begun upon it, that there was far more for Clodagh to tell her parents than she had supposed, particularly as she had had to repeat many things and explain many more. The separateness of her intimate life, which she had come to believe was inviolable, seemed not to be so; the purity of her independence was, before her eyes, being trodden all over by violent distress and abhorrence. Margot had not, whatever her feelings, said one unkind word. Her father had made it plain that her sexual tastes revolted and bemused him and that he was personally outraged that she should have sought to gratify them in Pitcombe. She had tried to explain about love, and it was his reaction to that that had sent her mother to the telephone for Lettice Deverel.

Sir Ralph had always been fond of Lettice. Privately he admired her brain and strength of personality, and publicly he called her, with affection, our jolly old bohemian. When Lettice came into the room, still in her gardening trousers, he held his hands out to her piteously and said, 'What are we to do? Oh, my dear, what is to become of us?'

Lettice had taken his hands and kissed him, and then gone over to kiss Clodagh, before saying, 'We are not going to lose our heads.'

'You don't understand-'

'My dear Ralph, I do. I understand you all.'

He had been calmer then, and while Lettice talked to him Clodagh had sat with her head bent and attempted to quiet her own storm of rage by thinking of Alice. No one should say a word against Alice, she was resolved upon that. But then her father did, he could not help himself; he cried out that Alice must have persuaded his daughter and Glodagh screamed with fury at him and then he said she must leave Pitcombe within the hour. It was melodramatic, crude, stupid, oh all those things and worse, but it was human and, most of all, it was happening.

There is no end to the horror,' Sir Ralph said. 'It will be round the village like wildfire, round the county. The reputation of centuries-'

'Ralph,' Lettice said warningly.

'It will,' he insisted.

'It will be a nine days' wonder. What do you suppose goes on inside some of your own cottages? In intimate matters,' Lettice said, placing a hand on each of her trousered knees, 'your tenants are infinitely more experienced than you.'

He glared at her.

'How dare you.'

She was unperturbed.

'It will be a nine days' wonder. Seven if Glodagh goes quickly.'

Margot made a little mewing sound of misery.

'We are both going,' Clodagh said. 'Alice and me. We will go together.'

'I hope not.'

'Alice has children,' Margot said.

'They come too.'

'I hope not,' Lettice said again. She looked at Clodagh. 'That should not be the future. There is no future in that. The future lies in you using your able head for the first time in your life. It wouldn't hurt you-' She paused. 'It wouldn't hurt you to learn to be alone.'

Clodagh turned her head away.

'You may have been spoiled,' Lettice said. There's no call to spoil yourself.'

Clodagh's teeth were clenched.

'I'm thinking of Alice.'

'Are you? And her children no doubt. How will they fare, brought up as they have been, if you take them to Dorset and expect local society to accept you both as an ordinary couple? Rural society can't do it. Maybe city society can, though I doubt it does. I believe it to be thin, sham stuff. And what has their father done, beyond be a man? A dull man perhaps, an unexciting, inhibited man, but no brute. Just a man. Live with that, will you? World well, lost for love, eh?' Lettice leaned forward and prodded the air towards Clodagh. 'If Alice was a free woman, I'd say off with the pair of you and good luck to you. Shut up, Ralph. But she's not and I can't say it.'

Clodagh felt not only anger now but fear. She couldn't delude herself that Lettice was a conventional, orthodox, right-wing old puritan, however hard she tried, and if Lettice said they couldn't because of the children... She tossed her head. Nonsense. Of course they could. The battle would just be bloodier. She said so.

'I shall never have your children at my knee,' Sir Ralph said suddenly, ignoring her remark.

Margot, even in the emotional state she was in, could not look at Lettice.

If that's what's worrying you,' Clodagh said brutally, 'I can easily bear a man for that-'

Sir Ralph gave a little cry. Margot got out of her chair and came across to slap Clodagh's hand.

'Behave yourself!'

'Bed,' Lettice said, getting up.

'Well, certainly no more of this-'

Clodagh got up too and went swiftly over to the door. It was huge and panelled and painted white, and as she stood against it for a moment before she opened it she looked to Margot as she had looked before she was twelve, when the mischief of her childhood turned into the waywardness of her adolescence.

'You are not,' said Lettice, watching Margot, 'going to start asking yourself where you went wrong.'

Clodagh went up the dim stairs without putting the lights on. The air was deep misty blue, but not dark. On the landing the enormous Chinese ginger jars that had come home with an adventuring eighteenth-century Unwin gleamed like fat-bellied barbaric gods. There were eight of them, on rosewood plinths, and as a child Clodagh had named each one. Now she went past them as if they were strangers, past the little Chippendale sofa where she had posed, every birthday, for a photograph, past the naive painting of pigs she had always said she would kill Georgina for (and Georgina had halfbelieved her), past the icon of St Nicholas she had once believed could see her conscience, past the cabinet of fans and the cabinet of snuff-boxes, past her mother's bedroom door and off the plushy broadloom overlaid with Afghan rugs of the main landing, on to the haircord of the old nursery passage and her bedroom which looked south towards the beeches, the beeches which hid Alice from her view.

She knelt on the window seat and looked hard down through the beeches. Alice was there. Alice, who needed her. Alice whom she had rescued. That had been the most exhilarating discovery of Clodagh's life, that discovery that Alice didn't believe, deep down, in her own value. When that became plain to Clodagh, when she saw that however different, however stylish Alice looked, she didn't have real faith in herself, she even doubted the worth of what she was, out here in the demanding conventionality of country life - then Clodagh had felt real intoxication coming on. She could wave the wand. She could do for Alice what Alice couldn't quite do for herself.