'But I want to go back.'

That's the saddest thing to do. Nothing is ever as good as you thought it was. Because you change. You see the old things with changed eyes and they aren't the same.'

Lettice Deverel came to tea. She came bumping up their stony drive in her old car with the parrot in its cage on the back seat. It was not a good passenger and had screamed most of the way but was pleased to be stationary and accepted a slice of apple with goodish grace. Lettice said that it would probably live for about sixty years more than she would, and that she must find a very kind, interesting person who would look after it when she was dead. James, mesmerized by the parrot's self-possession and humour and little grey blue claw holding the apple, went into a fantasy of being considered sufficiently kind and interesting. He gazed ardently at Lettice, to make her notice.

'Margot Unwin would like to see you,' Lettice said to Alice.

'Lord-'

'She needs to. It's very pathetic to see someone so capable so sad and confused. And of course she cannot talk to Ralph because she wants to understand and he cannot bring himself to.'

'Do you mean she wants me to explain-'

'I think so.'

'Lord,' Alice said again.

'She wants you to go to the Park.' Lettice looked at Alice. 'I'm afraid Clodagh is going back to America.'

Alice said in a low voice, 'I thought she would.'

'I hope it's just a passing impulse.'

'To be made a fuss of, do you mean, to be comforted?'

'She has never been hurt before, you see.'

Alice looked at her children.

'I think it's worse to leave being first hurt until you are grown up.'

'You never know,' Lettice said. 'You never know in life, which is good experience and which is damage. Do you?'

After tea, they went out of the cottage to the long shed where Alice was making a studio. Her easel was already set up and there was a trestle table with a workmanlike array of paints and bottles and jam jars of brushes.

'I shall keep myself,' Alice said. 'Martin is keeping the children, but I shall keep myself. And about time too, I can't help thinking.' She picked up a drawing. 'Peter Morris has commissioned a painting of Pitcombe Church. The interior. So I'll have to sneak back to do that.'

'Don't you sneak anywhere,' Lettice said. She took the sketch and looked at it. 'What is this horrible cottage for? A hair shirt?'

'It isn't horrible. It's real. You wait until I've finished with it. You see - oddly enough - it's easier to bear things here. It feels mine. Partly because it isn't what's expected of me, I suppose. That isn't defiance, just the best way to go forward-'

She stopped. Lettice eyed her.

'Will you be lonely?'

'No,' Alice said. She took the sketch from Lettice and propped it on the easel. 'Are you?'

'No.'

Then you see-'

'Yes,' Lettice said, thinking of the sufficiency she had made for herself. 'Yes. Of course I see.'

Sam came most weekends. He was an enormous asset, not only emotionally, but also because he proved to be very capable with tools. He was delighted with himself, over this.

'If you'd told me, ten years ago, to re-hang a door, I'd have gone straight to the pub. But look at this. Go on, push it. See? Smooth as silk. Come on, Jamie, pick up my hammer. What use is an apprentice if he won't even carry my clobber?'

He was entirely unresentful that Alice had declined to set up house with him, and as the weeks wore on he came to think that she had been quite right and that he very much liked his new double life, single in Reading, family at East Cottage. He began, too, to feel first pity and then affection for Clodagh. Without Clodagh, he would not have had these enriching and complementing roles. He made a list of winter projects for East Cottage

- 'Replace gutters where necessary - Clear wilderness behind shed - Start log pile - Replace all lavatory glass with plain, etc. etc.' - which he tacked up in the kitchen so that Elizabeth, who came, astonishingly, for two nights, was drawn back and back to it, to read it over and over as if she couldn't believe her eyes.

The children thought her peculiar, but peaceful, because she did not attempt to be affectionate. She seemed to like East Cottage and professed herself quite prepared to paint window frames, which she then did patiently for forty-eight hours. She declined, to Alice's relief, to have any kind of conversation even approaching a heart-to-heart, and only said, while they were washing up once and the kitchen was noisy with the children, 'Well, you've taken a very long time to work yourself through all that nonsense, and you chose a very strange way out, but you've done it. And that's a great deal.'

When she left, she said she was going to work for the Citizens' Advice Bureau and had taken a flat in central Colchester.

'I should have done it ten years ago. Ann is a very enervating companion. But I'm doing it now, just in time. Don't come and see me, it's a dreadful journey. I shall come and see you.'

When she had gone, James said, 'Was that really a granny?'

'Yes!'

'Oh,' he said, 'I thought she was a school lady.'

From Cecily and Richard, Alice heard nothing. Cecily saw the children when they were with Martin, and they would return to East Cottage with new jerseys and bars of chocolate and books. This enraged Alice.

'It shouldn't,' Sam said. 'They are just the sad symbols of frustrated power.'

'I loved her so much,' Alice said. 'And now I can hardly bear to think of her. She wanted to eat me up.'

'Didn't Clodagh?'

Alice looked deeply distressed.

'Oh,' she said, 'Don't-'

Sam was sorry.

'I didn't mean they were the same. In any way. Oh, Allie-'

But she wouldn't speak of it any more and after a while Sam heard her, in her bedroom, crying.

'Why is Mummy crying?' Natasha said.

'Because she is missing Clodagh.'

Natasha nodded.

'Sometimes,' she said, 'that makes me cry, too.'

/

East Cottage was half a mile out of a village. It was an odd village, without a shop or a pub, and the church only had a service every three weeks. The priest, a young, cadaverous, scowling man, who was deeply frustrated to find himself with five rural churches instead of the inner city parish he had wanted, came to see Alice and sat drinking mug after mug of tea while he told her how useless he felt. He'd had some sort of breakdown - he would not, mysteriously, be precise - and this living was supposed to be his stepping stone back to his real calling. He was called Mark Murphy. Alice liked him. On his second visit - he came for supper and ate as voraciously as he had drunk tea - she told him, as a kind of test, about Clodagh, and he said, 'Love's terrifyingly hard to come by, isn't it? You have to grab it when you get the chance.'

His vicarage was a small, unappealing modern house in a neighbouring village which he said had the soul of a shoebox. He took to coming on Saturdays sometimes, to help Sam with clearing the garden, and when Sam asked him if he shouldn't be at home with his family, he said there wasn't one to be at home with because his wife had left him two years ago and had gone home to Newcastle with their baby.

'I'm sorry,' Sam said.

'Yes,' Mark Murphy said, and sighed. 'So am I. She said she had no idea that the other woman in a priest's life might turn out to be God.'

Sometimes, in the lane going down to the main road to Salisbury, Alice passed a fair girl driving a dented Citroen with the back full of children. They had passed each other indifferently several times and then, by mutual consent, began to smile and wave. The girl left a note in the wooden mail box at Alice's gate.

'I'm Priscilla Mayne,' the note said. 'I live half a mile the other side of the village in the Victorian ruin that looks like a squat. No telephone yet. Come and see me when you feel like it.'

Alice thought she would feel like it very soon. When a postcard came from Anthony - she put it in the Rayburn at once - and one from John Murray-French which said, The new Grey House people are decent and dull. Don't lose touch,' she felt in some peculiar way that the possibilities in the as yet unknown Priscilla Mayne had somehow much more reality than her past, known though it was. Sam told her that this was the stuff of freedom, and that she must learn to drink whisky.

'Why?' she said laughing.

'Robert Burns. "Freedom and whisky gang together." Actually, freedom is headier than whisky but why not celebrate one with the other?'

It was almost Christmas before Juliet came to East Cottage. She came on a wet day when the cottage, still in a state of raw upheaval, presented its most lowering aspect, and Alice came upon her standing by her car and staring at the mountainous, sodden bonfire of Sam's clearance schemes.

'AUie-'

Alice seized her arm.

'Come in. Come in out of the rain. I've just made some unsuccessful bread.'

In the kitchen, Juliet burst into tears.

'Allie, it's all so awful-'

'No. No, it isn't. I like it here.'

'I don't mean here. I mean life in Pitcombe.'

'Don't be silly. We can't have left that big a hole-'

Juliet said, sniffing, 'You've left heaps of holes. Great black ones. People are falling in all over the place. I've been in one for months. That's why I didn't come.'

'Isn't everyone making rather a meal of it?'

'Of course they are. Villages just do. Martin's seeing someone called Sophie. I cannot tell you how suitable she is. She drives a Mini and has a King Charles spaniel. Allie, I really hate you.'