Alice began to think that indeed it was. As the autumn wore on, she became privately very angry when Sunday night came and she had to leave Dummeridge, glimmering away in the firelight in its wealth of old stuffs and books. Lynford Road looked worse on each return, the scuffed carpet tiles in the hall, the uncompromising, harshly shaded ceiling lights, the black and green tiles in the bathroom, the mean proportions that confronted her everywhere, too high, too narrow. She began to long for Martin's Monday call, regular as clockwork, telling her when he was coming down to take her out. His arrivals, invariably punctual, became events of real excitement. Every time she found him standing on the tiled doorstep in Lynford Road, in a tweed jacket she had last seen him wear in the drawing room at Dummeridge and the brogues she could still hear striking the stone flags of the kitchen passage, her feeling of being rescued grew greater and more glamorous.

In the first week of December he arrived to take her out to supper in Marlow. He was wearing a suit and Alice, convinced he would say something to her, put on the black dress she had made from a length of jersey from the market, piled her hair high on her head and added some enormous copper earrings a friend at art school had made for an Egyptian exhibition. The restaurant in Marlow had pink napkins and red-shaded lights. Martin made a face.

'Sorry,' he said to Alice.

She wasn't entirely sure why he was apologizing; it looked to her just as she would expect a restaurant to look. In any case, she was far too full of anticipation to care if the panelling was phoney or Mantovani was being played whisperingly over the loudspeaker system. Martin ordered everything competently, told her about his week - she hardly listened to him - and then said he had something to tell her and something to ask her. She forced herself to look at him quite, quite straight.

'Tell first,' she said.

'My mother has two commissions for you. Two friends of hers have seen the paintings you have done of Dummeridge, and they want you to paint in their houses. Ma said she has asked a hundred and fifty for you. Each.'

'Each!' Alice said, and went scarlet.

'Well?' He was smiling hugely.

Alice clutched herself.

'It's - it's wonderful. So's she. Heavens. money-'

There was a sudden small hard lump in her throat. She supposed it to be amazement and delight.

'I rang her last night. She really wanted to tell you herself at Christmas, but I made her let me. That's the other thing. The thing I wanted to ask you.'

Alice couldn't look straight this time; she didn't seem able to look anywhere. She looked down instead into her melon and parma ham and Martin said to her bent head, 'Would you come for Christmas? To Dummeridge?'

There was a pause. Oh, Martin thought, you cool, cool customer, don't keep me dangling, don't, don't. Say yes, say yes, say...

'Love to,' Alice said. Her voice was warm but not in the least eager. It betrayed nothing of what she was feeling, nothing of the sudden fury that had seized her, a fury against Martin. Ask me, she had screamed at him silently, ask me, ask me. And he had said, come for Christmas.

That's great,' he said. They'll all be thrilled, I know it. What about-'

'My parents?'

'Yes-'

'I've spent twenty Christmases with them,' Alice said with a fierceness for which Lynford Road could not be blamed, 'and I think I deserve one off. Granny's coming, anyway.'

They arrived at Dummeridge on Christmas Eve to a house garlanded in green, with pyramids of polished apples and candles and the smoky scent of burning wood.

'So lovely!' Cecily said. To have a woman to do it all for.'

From the moment she and Martin got to Dummeridge, Alice was the star of Christmas. She could feel the atmosphere lifting as she entered rooms and knew that everything was being done for her, with an eye on her. She had a fire in her bedroom, and a Christmas stocking of scarlet felt, and wherever she went the eyes of the household were upon her and the hearts of the household were hers. Even Anthony, she noticed, was striving to please. She felt, moving through the lovely rooms, taking the dogs out for windy walks high above the grey winter sea, that this was what she was meant for, that she had somehow come home.

So confident was she, so queenly, that when Martin did propose she felt no elation, no sudden lurch of delight and relief, just a warm acknowledgement of the inevitable. It was Boxing Day and they were racing along Seacombe Cliff, shouting into the wind, when he seized her suddenly, breathless and laughing, and said, 'You will marry me, won't you?'

And she said, laughing back, 'Certainly not!' and ran away from him, and he knew she didn't mean it and chased her and pulled her to the ground and pinned her there, on the cold exciting turf under the racing wild clouds, and made her promise. Then he carried her home to Dummeridge and his father opened champagne and whenever she looked across at Cecily, Alice knew she could have made no other choice. She was loved here.

That night, relaxed and warm and full of power and confidence, she had an orgasm in Martin's arms. He had one rather later. She was a bit confused - the champagne perhaps - as to why she had had one and how much it had to do with what he was doing to her, which wasn't, actually, much at the time, but she felt great triumph that her body had taken her over, as she had been so anxious for it to do. It did occur to her that the release that had happened to her body didn't seem to have overwhelmed her mind at the same time, but she pushed that thought aside, as clearly, if she had had an orgasm with Martin she must be more in love than she thought, which meant in turn that it would, as a feeling, grow. She slept gratefully in Martin's arms until five, when he gently disentangled himself and went discreetly back to his own room. They met at breakfast in a mood of mutual, and visible, triumph, and Cecily, noting this with inexpressible relief, felt that thirty years of negative life had at last turned a corner.

CHAPTER THREE

They were married, in 1977, by unanimous agreement, at Dummeridge. Alice's mother, quite overwhelmed by Cecily, allowed all decisions to be made for her, including a shopping trip to Bournemouth for her wedding clothes. She returned, saying a little fretfully that she had never cared for green, but she was clearly elated, and refused to describe the trip in order to show her husband and her daughter that she too could have her lovely secrets. Alice didn't care. She went down to Dummeridge every weekend without fail, and made plans - where Martin should look for a job, what kind of house they should seek, where they should go for their honeymoon, what her dress should be made of, what she ought to put on her wedding present list.

'You mean I can actually ask outright for six cream bath sheets and a Spode blue Italian souffle dish and a dozen wine glasses and a tin-opener?'

'I most certainly do. People expect it.'

'Wowee! Now,' Alice said. 'Let's think what else-'

Martin was offered a job in Salisbury which he took with alacrity, and not long afterwards Alice and Cecily found a cottage on the edge of Wilton, with three bedrooms and a charming elevated fireplace made from an old bread oven, and an apple tree in the garden. It was May and the tree was luscious with blossom. In June, Alice left the art school, packed up her bedroom in Reading and moved down to Dorset. Her mother, truly wounded now, did not even try to stop her because it was so glaringly evident to everyone why she was doing it. Her father, however, did try.

'Are you sure,' he said to her, propping his attractive bulk against the kitchen cupboards and cradling a glass of whisky against his chest, 'that your head hasn't been turned?'

Alice said waspishly, 'Well, that's certainly something you would know about.'

He laughed. He had always been exasperatingly impossible to annoy.

'Come on, Al. You've only two months more to stick out here. It's a bit rough on us to be so publicly cast aside for the glamorous prosperity of the Jordans even before you're married. You look spoiled. We look inadequate.'

'I don't mind how I look,' Alice said, 'and I can't help how you look. The boys have both gone, I've had three years here on my own. At Dummeridge there isn't a permanent atmosphere and I can paint.' A tiny, proud pause. 'I have three more commissions.'

'You might perhaps,' Sam Meadows said unwisely, suddenly struck by the vision of opening the Lynf ord Road front door to find nobody but his wife inside, 'think of me.'

Alice snorted.

'I see. You'd like me to stay so that there's some sort of buffer state here between you and Mum. Well, bad luck. That's one of the reasons I'm going now.'

Sam took a gulp of his drink.

'Frankly, Al, I don't think I could take it on my own.'

Then you should understand exactly how I feel. Don't whine,' Alice said crossly. 'And don't try and make me feel guilty. I'm going, and that's that.'

Her father levered himself upright and came round the kitchen table to put his arm around her and plant a competent, whisky-scented kiss on her head.

'I don't blame you,' he said, 'and you shouldn't blame me for having a go at making you stay.'

'Blame,' Alice said, leaning against him and resentfully acknowledging how good he was at touching women. 'Don't talk about blame. It's a word never used at Dummeridge, and nor is guilt or loyalty or betrayal or any other of the awful emotional claptrap words you and Mum use all the time.'