Joanna Trollope - A Village Affair

But Mr Finch, whose imaginative capacities had recently been so stretched he could summon up neither opinion nor poetry, had simply goggled at her, and said, 'Pardon?'

'It's awful of me,' Juliet Dunne said to Henry, holding her face in both hands, 'but the whole thing absolutely turns me up.'

Henry was filleting a kipper with extreme precision.

'I really don't want to talk about it-'

'No, darling, but you never want to talk about anything in the least personal. Looking back, I can't quite remember how you conveyed to me that you wanted to marry me. Did I set you a questionnaire?'

Henry buttered toast in silence.

'The thing is, I've simply got to talk to you because I have to get all this off my chest and you are all I have, by way of audience. Please stop crunching.'

Henry put his toast down with an air of obliging martyrdom.

'How can you eat?'

He looked at his forbidden toast.

'With great difficulty.'

'Henry,' Juliet said, and began to cry again.

She had cried quite a lot of the night, and the previous evening. It wasn't that Henry wasn't sorry for her, because he was, but he was having rather a bad time with his own feelings and until he had got to grips with them, he hadn't much energy to spare for Juliet.

'Aren't you revolted?' Juliet said between sobs.

Henry sneaked a morsel of kipper. He was revolted; less so than if Alice and Glodagh had been two men, but revolted all the same. And puzzled, intensely puzzled. And somehow let down, almost betrayed, almost heavens, almost humiliated.

Juliet blew her nose.

'It's incredibly reactionary of me, I'm sure, but it's the truth. It turns everything upside down. It makes such a nonsense of everything we were brought up to. I hate it. I feel sick and I feel lost.'

Henry picked up his toast again with one hand and reached out to pat Juliet with the other.

'I've known Clodagh all my life,' Juliet said. 'I can't believe it. All my life and she's been like this. And Alice. I loved Alice. There was no one else I could complain to like I could to Alice-'

'She isn't dead,' Henry pointed out.

'How can anything,' Juliet said, getting up to fetch the coffee percolator, 'be the same again after this?'

'Not the same-'

'Trust goes,' Juliet said. 'Once that goes, you've had it. That's why I couldn't possibly stay married to you if you slept with anyone else. I'd never trust you again so we'd have nothing to build on any more.'

Henry looked down at his plate and thought of Alice, and how he felt about Alice. And now here was Juliet talking as if Alice had deceived her personally and in so doing had destroyed the vital trust in a friendship.

'Alice is your girlfriend,' Henry said, 'not your husband.'

Juliet began to pour coffee, unsteadily, mopping at her nose with a tissue.

'She was special to me.' She stopped pouring. 'At the moment, I hate Clodagh. Hate her.'

'Shouldn't do that-'

'Well I do.'

Henry pushed his plate away.

That's not going to help Alice.'

'She doesn't want help-'

'How do you know?'

'Rosie Barton went to see her and got very short shrift-'

'And when did you and Rosie Barton ever see eye to eye about anything?'

Juliet hid her face behind her coffee mug.

'Henry. The truth is I don't know what I'd say to Alice because I don't know what I feel-'

'Why don't you just ring and say you're still friends?'

'But are we?' Juliet cried. 'Are we? I mean, can we be after this?'

Henry stood up and began to rattle the change softly in his trouser pockets. He said, 'I'm going to see Martin.'

Juliet stared.

'What'll you say to him?'

'Dunno. Nothing probably, nothing much.'

'Poor Martin-'

'Yes.'

He went round the table to Juliet and she leaned tiredly against him.

'You're behaving much better than I am,' Juliet said. 'But then you always have. Haven't you.'

He put his arms round her and stooped to kiss the top of her head.

'No,' Henry said.

Martin had several visitors from Pitcombe besides Henry. Sir Ralph Unwin came, and so did John MurrayFrench and Peter Morris. Only Sir Ralph spoke of Alice and Clodagh directly, but that was more, Martin could see, because he was literally exploding with his own feelings than because he thought it best to be straightforward with Martin. Martin was thrown, but he didn't blame Sir Ralph for letting go any more than he blamed Henry or John or Peter for not letting go. He himself behaved with great control while they were there. Only when they were gone, and Cecily was safely in her study or in the garden, did he give way to the consuming and inarticulate rage that possessed him. At night it took the form of hideous dreams, dreams of violence and savagery and killing that sometimes had in them people he had not thought about for years like the prefect at school who had told him how pretty he was and who had then because Martin had been afraid and disinclined to do what he wanted - instituted a campaign of brilliantly subtle mental cruelty.

The rage was more exhausting than anything Martin had ever known. It fed on everybody, everything, and it refused to subject itself to reason. It boiled in him like some seething, evil broth, and whether he controlled it or gave vent to it out on the cliffs with his mother's dogs, he felt no better. Sometimes he thought he would burst, and often he wished he would, trapped as he was in this boiling cauldron. Cecily would say to him sorrowfully that she wished he could let go. If only she knew! He suspected that if he let go entirely, he would die, and most days, for a spell at least, he wished for that. He imagined the cool, quiet, dark state of nothingness because, when it came to the crunch of thinking about Heaven, he discovered that he didn't want to believe there was one. He could not bear the thought of any further existence, in whatever form. The most desirable state was nothingness, just not to be. That seemed to him the only state in which there could be no torment.

The only crumb of comfort - the smallest crumb came from the oddest quarter, from his father. When Richard came home from a journey to Australia, Martin saw at once, and to his amazement, that Richard perceived his rage. Richard made much less fuss of him than Cecily but he was, for all that, much more tender. He made Martin feel that he was not a broken child but a fellow man. Martin heard him, one morning, saying to Cecily in a voice of great anger, 'For God's sake, will you allow him his dignity?'

He could not hear Cecily's reply. He was sure she made one because she never let accusations just stand, she always had to defend herself. She looked old and tired just now. So, Martin thought, looking in the shaving mirror each morning, did he. He avoided looking at himself except for shaving because somehow the sight of his face made him desperate for his children, for Charlie particularly, in his cheerful baby simplicity. And he couldn't think of them because that led back to Alice, to himself and Alice, man and woman, and then, of course, the path of thought went downwards suddenly into the roaring cavern of his anguish and his rage.

Richard cancelled a follow-up trip to Australia because of Martin. Instead he told Martin they were going to pull down a stone shed that had once held a primitive pump engine, and use the stones to repair the wall at the far end of the famous potager. In the fields beyond, the fields that ran up between the woods towards the sea, they were harvesting, early. The huge combine, like a vast ship, went calmly up and down the golden slopes leaving behind it the shorn earth and the great rolled bales. At midday, there was always an hour of quiet and the odd bold rabbit would streak across the fields and vanish into the sanctuary of the woods. The air smelled of burned earth and dust because, although the sun rarely came out, it sailed imprisoned behind a steady veil of cloud which kept the land heavy and warm and quiet. Martin and Richard worked mostly in silence. Martin said once, 'I'd forgotten how good you are at this sort of thing.'

And Richard, turning a piece of stone in his hands to see how it would fit, said, 'So had I. I sometimes think I've quite a lot of talents I didn't exercise. Usually through my own fault.'

When the wall was finished, Martin said he wanted to return to work. Cecily grew very agitated and said how could he, where would he live, who would look after him, was he going to divorce Alice? He said he didn't know about divorce, in fact he didn't know about anything much, just now, except that he wanted to stop feeling an invalidish freak and go back to work. He would live, he said, with the Dunnes. Henry and Juliet had invited him for as long as he wanted.

'But I shall have nothing left,' Cecily said later, fiercely, to Richard.

There's me-'

'You! You need nobody. You never have.'

'I am made up,' Richard said, 'of exactly the same human components of need as you.'

And he went away then, and by some instinct went up to the old playroom in the attic and found Martin there, with a tumbler of whisky, weeping without restraint because he had thought nobody would hear him.

Most days one of the children asked when Martin would be better enough to come home. Usually Alice said, soon. Once a week Juliet came over and picked them up and took them home with her so that they could see Martin, and the night after these visits James usually wet his bed. It was the school holidays and the days yawned for occupation. Alice devised a list of duties, and Natasha's was to go down to the shop. She liked this because all down the street people stopped and talked to her and asked her how she was and Mrs Finch would come out of the back part of the shop and give her sweets and sometimes a kiss pungent with Coty's 'L'Aimant'. The rest of the day she did not like so much. The feeling in the house was peculiar, without her father, and she missed school, and Sophie, who had been taken to Corfu by her family. She spent a lot of time in her bedroom, drawing a wardrobe for Princess Power, and she wrote a huge notice saying 'Private - Keep out' which she stuck on her door, four feet from the floor so that James could not possibly avoid seeing it. Behind the closed door, besides drawing, she spent a good deal of time painting her toenails with Clodagh's scarlet polish.