Her father had gone out then, and she had returned to her room to finish packing, and when she came down, her mother was sitting on the brown repp-covered, foam-filled sofa in the sitting room staring into space with her hands gripping one another in her lap. Alice squatted beside her.

'Martin's coming for me at five.'

'I know,' her mother said.

'There's not much difference,' Alice said with difficulty, 'between going now and going when I'm married. Honestly, there isn't.'

Silence.

'It isn't - it isn't because I don't - well, it's not that I'm - I'm not fond of you and Dad, it's just the atmosphere here.'

'I see.'

'Nobody asks me to take sides there,' Alice said, pleading. 'I haven't got to think who I'm going to upset every time I open my mouth.'

Elizabeth Meadows continued to stare at nothing.

'I see.' A little pause. 'And is the Jordans' marriage a happy one?'

Alice was rather startled. She had never stopped to consider such a thing, and now that she did it came to her that perhaps it wasn't particularly companionable as a marriage but it was perfectly all right, and anyway, they both had their own lives, that was the difference.

They don't want it to be everything in life to them, like you do,' Alice said, making everything worse. 'Cecily has her own career, Richard's very successful-'

'How perfect,' her mother said, as if spitting out broken glass.

Alice sighed. She got up and went over to the french windows that opened into a sad little strip of garden that her mother tended with ferocious tidiness, filling the parallel beds with salvias and African marigolds in regimented rows.

'Look,' she said, 'whatever I do, I can't get it right. Either you're upset or Dad is. So I'm going only a little bit before marriage decently allows me to, where I get it right all the time without even trying.'

Elizabeth said, 'You protest too much. I am not attempting to prevent you,' and then, blessedly, the doorbell rang and it was Martin.

Alice never slept at Lynford Road again. The two months at Dummeridge passed like a happy dream. Richard was away almost all the time, and Cecily was in America for three weeks, and as Martin, taking his final exams, could not be there except weekends, Alice had the house to herself, looked after by Dorothy and as free as air. She slept in a hammock in the garden at midday, and at night wandered about in the pale summer darkness and made herself voluptuous sandwiches filled with cream cheese and dried apricots and chopped walnuts which she sometimes ate sitting quite naked on the moonlit lawn or in the unlit drawing room. She went down to the sea at midnight, with the surprised but politely acquiescent dogs, and swam in the glittering black water, and then walked home barefoot and sat on the Aga, wrapped in a blanket feeling her salty hair dry into long whispering snakes down her back. She meant to paint, but she didn't. She knew she would have to, when Cecily, came back, so she spun out her time alone greedily, luxuriously, drifting through the hot hayfields beyond the house, leaning her cheek against walls and trees, lying on her stomach on the lawn with her arm plunged into the goldfish pool watching the light darting in the water and the bubbles of air pour upwards from the hairs on her arm.

She saw Martin off to London on Sunday nights without a pang; indeed, when the sound of the Mini's busy little engine had quite faded away she felt a bubbling up of her spirits, as if she were really free again. This made her go straight to the kitchen and sit down at the huge scrubbed table and write to him very lovingly, telling lum how much she looked forward to Friday, and how carefully he must drive. She wrote these letters in all sincerity. When she had written them, she would go down to the sea and swim and swim and swim. Dorothy, finding wet towels on the Aga rail so many early mornings, wondered whether she should say something about the lack of sense in swimming alone in the sea in the middle of the night and decided, looking at Alice, not to. The moment she was married, that freedom would vanish, you never got it again, so even if it was risky, it was worth it, and after all, everything worth having was a risk, one way or another.

Alice had only two visitors besides Martin, while Cecily was away. One was Anthony who arrived unannounced for the night, drank copiously at dinner and tried, in a very practised way, to kiss her afterwards. She said, standing quite rigid in his arms. 'But I don't fancy you at all. I don't find you in the least attractive.'

'Try me,' he said, bending his head.

She bent away.

'In any case,' she said, 'you are only having a go to score off Martin.'

So Anthony dropped his arms and went to bed, and was gone when she woke in the morning.

The other visitor was her future father-in-law, at home for two nights, between journeys. He telephoned her to say he was coming. She said, wanting to be dutiful, 'Is there anything I ought to do? I mean, anything you'd like or usually have-'

No, he said, nothing. She was to take no notice of him; Dorothy could do what had to be done. He would be there for dinner. So she went for a long, aimless, happy walk, spending a great deal of time in an unexpected stream building a dam, and came back about teatime to hear the sound of someone playing the piano. It could only be Cecily. Full of a sudden rush of pleased excitement, she burst into the drawing room crying, 'Oh, I wasn't expecting-' and found that it was Richard.

He stopped and turned round.

'But,' Alice said, 'you don't play the piano!'

He smiled.

'I do.'

'But Cecily-'

'I always have. I'm competent but uninspired, as you may imagine. I never play if I think there is anyone in the house.'

She crossed the room slowly, and stood beside him. He had been playing Schubert, too.

'I've really thrown you,' he said, 'haven't I.'

She felt her face grow hot.

'Yes. I thought-' she paused.

'I know,' he said. 'People do.' He got up from the piano and brushed his hands briskly together as if he were shaking off the disconcerting unfamiliarity. He looked down at her and she wondered if he were very slightly laughing at her, but all he said was, 'You look well. What have you been doing?'

And she said, looking back, 'Absolutely nothing.'

He had liked that. He wanted, later, to hear what absolutely nothing involved. She could tell him parts of it, though clearly to tell a man who is about to become your father-in-law that you had lain naked on his drawing room sofa eating sandwiches in the middle of the night was hardly on. She was, to her surprise, sorry when he went away, bound for Heathrow and then the Gulf of Mexico. He hadn't seemed, while he was at Dummeridge, either to take the house away from her and after all, it was his - or to encroach upon her freedom. On the contrary, he seemed to have his own private freedom which tantalized her a little, made her want to know more about him. When he was gone, she found to her intense annoyance that she was just a little lonely, so that when Cecily returned three days later she had the same kind of thankful, over-excited welcome from Alice as from her dogs.

'I shouldn't have left you so long, but this wretched tour was fixed up almost a year ago. Never, never do I wish to have to explain again that it is not possible to make an English spring garden in Selma, Alabama.'

Everything pulled itself together once Cecily had returned. Days and nights went back to their conventional roles, lists were made, letters were written, Alice's wedding dress - ivory chiffon over peachcoloured silk - was finally fitted. Presents arrived by every post, presents from complete strangers and from shops that had never been in Alice's orbit - the General Trading Company in Sloane Street, Harrods, Peter Jones, Thomas Goode, the White House. The dining room at Dummeridge slowly filled up with sheets and china and saucepans and Chinese lamps, things that she, Alice, had chosen and asked for and was now being given. As the piles grew, she discovered that she did not like it, even though she liked the things. It was not that she felt that she was being spoiled, but rather that these bales of towels and pairs of garden shears and boxes of brandy balloons were somehow buying her. She tried to say something of this to Cecily, and Cecily, believing her feeling to be the result of the material modesty of her upbringing, said she must simply lie back and lap it up.

'I promise you, people want to do this. They would think it most odd if you hadn't a list, and goodness knows you haven't been greedy.'

So Alice wrote her letters obediently and tried to decide constructively about flowers and asparagus rolls and the colour of lining for the marquee which was to be very grand and have f rench windows in case the day was cool. At night, instead of lying languorously in her linen sheets, Alice lay and worried, worried about details and little things and felt that from somewhere a pressure had arisen that was now sitting on her chest and her brow and making it difficult for her to see or breathe.

When her wedding day came, she was in no mood for it. It happened, of course, the great machine being inexorably in motion, and she went up the aisle most decoratively on her father's manifestly pleased arm, but she felt lonely, all day, and by the end of it she was tearful and exhausted from the effort of seeming as she wished she were feeling.

'She's tired,' Cecily said to Martin privately, tucking them into the car to go away while the guests, unnaturally jolly after champagne drunk unsuitably mid-afternoon, stood on the gravel and cheered. 'Look after her.'