A Village Affair

'School!' cried Miss Pimm on a high note of relief. 'And do you like your school?'

'No,' said James. 'I hate everything except being at home.'

'He cries every morning,' Natasha said. 'It's so embarrassing. My best friend is called Sophie and she has Princess Power too only her petticoats are yellow. I like pink best.'

'Yes!' cried Miss Pimm. 'Yes! Pink!'

Alice came back into the room holding a large baby. Miss Pimm was afraid of babies. Alice sat down and picked up her pencil again, wedging Charlie into the space between her and the table.

'So sorry about that,' Alice said. 'Now, what else was there?'

Miss Pimm wanted to say that a cup of tea was one of the things. It was five past four. She would have liked a cup of tea and a Marie biscuit. She cleared her throat with meaningful thirstiness and said, 'Well, there is our little Sunday group.'

Charlie seized Alice's pencil and drew a thick, wild line across her list. Instinctively Miss Pimm's hand shot out to prevent the desecration of neatness, but Alice didn't seem to notice.

'Group of what?'

'Why, children.' She looked at Natasha and stretched her mouth into an attempted smile. 'We meet in the church room for songs and stories about Jesus.'

'I know about him,' Natasha said. 'He gave some people a horrible picnic with bare bread and fish that wasn't cooked. And then he walked about all over a lake and made a girl who was dead be alive again. If you ask me,' Natasha said darkly, 'I don't believe that bit.'

Tashie-'

'We have eleven little members,' Miss Pimm said hastily. 'And I-' She paused and then said with quiet pride, 'I play the ukelele.'

They stared at her. To her misery Alice found she didn't even want to laugh. Miss Pimm took their silence as an awestruck tribute to her skills and opened her black notebook in a businesslike way to show she was quite used to such admiration.

'Now, may I tell Miss Payne you would be happy to join the flower rota? I believe Mrs JCendoJl lacks a partner. And what about Mondays? The community shop is such a boon to our old people-'

Go, Alice said to herself in sudden frenzy. Go, go, go. I hate you here, you mimsy old spinster, I hate you in my kitchen. Go.

'We have unfortunately to share our vicar with King's Harcourt and BarJeston which means mattins only once a month, but he is a wonderful man, and we must just be thankful-'

'C'n I have some crisps?' James said.

'No. Don't interrupt. I am sorry, Miss Pimm, but usually around now I give them-'

Miss Pimm slapped her notebook shut and stood up.

'Naturally. I am sorry to interrupt family routine.'

'Oh no,' Alice said, struggling to her feet clutching Charlie, and in a confusion of apology, 'I didn't mean that at all, I only meant-'

'I come,' Miss Pimm said, implying by her tone that at least some people were still in command of their manners, 'just to welcome you to Pitcombe. I make a point of it, with newcomers.'

'Yes,' Alice said faintly. 'It's very kind of you and I'm sure when I've sorted myself out a bit-'

'You should see upstairs,' Natasha said. 'It's the most utterest chaos.'

Miss Pimm walked to the stable door and lifted the latch. She turned stiffly and gave a little downward jerk of her head.

'Sycamore Cottage. Telephone 204.'

'Thank you-'

'Good afternoon.'

'Goodbye,' Alice said. 'Goodbye-'

The door clicked shut, one half after the other. Alice subsided into her chair.

'Don't cry,' James said anxiously.

'I'm not,' Alice said through a river of tears.

'You are, you are-'

Natasha picked up Princess Power.

'I expect you're tired.'

'Yes,' Alice said. 'Yes, I expect I am, I'm sure that's it-'

Charlie's face puckered. James came to lean on her again, his eyes filling with tears.

'Don't do it,' he said. His voice was pleading. 'Don't do it.'

But she couldn't stop.

The community shop, Alice discovered, was a large and battered van, owned and driven by Mr Finch, one-time boarding-house keeper and failed poet, who ran Pitcombe Post Office and Village Stores. Twice a week, the shop van trundled out of Pitcombe with its cargo of old age pensions, tins of marrowfat peas and packets of bourbon biscuits, to serve outlying cottages and the smaller satellite villages of Barleston and King's Harcourt. It made thirteen stops in three hours, either outside the cottages of the most infirm, or by the clumps of people standing with clutched purses and plastic carrier bags at designated places along the route.

Mr Finch was very excited to have Alice on board on Monday afternoons. Mrs Macaulay, who was the longstanding other helper on Mondays, despised his artistic sensibilities, believing, as she did, only in good sense and wire-haired dachshunds, which she bred with dedication. 'My girls', she called her bitches. Within the first half-hour of her first Monday, Alice discovered that Mr Finch was misunderstood by his wife who yearned still for their boarding house in Kidderminster which had catered for actors at the Theatre Royal, and that Mr Macaulay had been called to the great dog basket in the sky ten years previously, much lamented by his widow and her girls.

'He was a wonderful man,' Mrs Macaulay said to Alice, as they jolted out of the village, the tins jiggling on their barricaded shelves. 'He could do anything he liked with animals. He inspired perfect trust.'

At the frequent stops, Mr Finch came out of the driver's cab and sat in the doorway of the van at the seat of change. Every time he appeared holding not only his cash box and ledger but also a battered notebook bound in imitation leather which he left nonchalantly on the edge of his little counter, with many a casually pregnant glance thrown in Alice's direction.

'Take no notice,' Mrs Macaulay hissed at Alice, passing her a stack of All-Bran boxes. Those are his terrible jingles. Don't give him the chance to mention them.'

At every stop, the van filled rapidly with people, heaving each other up the steps into the interior like an eager crowd of hedgehogs. Alice was stared at.

'Who's 'er?' somebody said from close to the floor.

'Sh, you, Granny. That's the new lady-'

'Who's 'er?'

'Mrs Jordan,' Mrs Macaulay said with great clarity. 'She has just moved into the Major's house at Pitcombe.'

There was a sucking of teeth.

'She won't like that. Miserable 'ouse, that is.'

'But I do like it-'

'It's very good of Mrs Jordan to help us,' Mrs Macaulay said, 'because she has three little ones on her hands.'

'Where's me spaghetti hoops, then?'

'Hang on, Gran, they're coming,' and then, turning confidentially to Alice, 'she loves them. She don't need her teeth in to eat them, see.'

At the end of the third stop, Mr Finch laid his hand slowly on his book of poems and looked roguishly at Alice.

'Care for something to read before Barleston, Mrs Jordan?'

Mrs Macaulay was ready for him. 'Sorry, Mr Finch, I've got the cereal section to explain to Mrs Jordan before we get there.'

Mr Finch placed the book flat against his chest, holding it in both hands.

'Are you a reader, Mrs Jordan? I fancy you are.'

'Novels,' Alice said hastily. 'As much fiction as I can get. But you know, with the children-'

Mrs Macaulay tapped her watch.

Time, Mr Finch, time.'

By the end of the second hour, Alice could gladly have lain down on the lineoleum floor of the van and wept with fatigue. Spring it might be, but the day felt raw and cold, and the depressing contents of the shelves, the tins of butter beans and the packet puddings, only compounded the bleakness. Alice had asked Mr Finch, in his shop the previous week, for an avocado pear, and Mr Finch had made it elaborately plain to her that left to himself his shop would be a profusion of avocado pears, but that the brutish character of his non-poetry reading clientele demanded nothing more outre than cabbages.