'It goes on all over England. Every summer. Thousands and thousands of village fetes. Can you find me a flat stone?'
They had been allotted a corner of the great grass terrace below the house, under a laburnum tree. To their left Lettice Deverel, in a blue hessian apron with a sort of kangaroo pocket in front for money, was pricing geranium cuttings and courgette plants rooted in old cream cartons at ten pence each. Miss Payne, her helpmeet at the plant stall, was surreptitiously marking most of these down to five pence before arranging them invitingly on a trestle table draped in green dustsheets that had been dyed expressly for this purpose ten years before and which spent three hundred and sixty-four days of the year folded up in Miss Payne's box room.
Beyond the plant stall, an old kitchen table by a magnificent yellow peony bore a depressed collection of second-hand books, mostly paperbacks, the throwouts of the village's collective holiday reading. Mrs Macaulay, who never read anything except Good Housekeeping and dachshund breeding handbooks, arranged her stall according to the width of books, so that War and Peace and old medical dictionaries lay between hefty doses of improbable espionage and pornography. Mrs Macaulay was, of long experience, realistic about her afternoon and had brought her knitting. She would sell any historical romance she had to Mrs Finch, anything with thighs and breasts on the cover to Stuart Mott and have a terrible time finding anything for the Unwins or the vicar who were all obliged, by tradition, to make a purchase from every stall. Beyond that, she would have plenty of time in her folding chair beside the peony to negotiate the shawl collar of her cardigan jacket.
As close to the house itself as they could get - and laughingly insisting that that was where they had been put - Gerry and Rosie Barton set up what they called their community stall. This had involved both of them visiting every cottage in the village for a contribution, explaining, with unfading smiles, that they wanted every person in Pitcombe to feel just a little bit involved. Granny Crudwell, interrupted in a Saturday afternoon's wrestling on television, had told them to bugger off. Other people had produced scraps from their gardens and jars from their larders and, in Miss Pimm's case, two mustard cotton crocheted dressing table mats, so that the community stall under its banner 'Your Village Stall!' resembled the kind of nameless detritus people are thankful to leave behind when they move house. Rosie and Gerry were not attending to their stall; they had left their fat and despairing German au pair girl, whose sole aim in life appeared to be the meticulous correctness of her lifeless English, in charge. They themselves were flitting from stall to stall, smiling and encouraging the stallholders and indulging in the little jokes which inferred, no more, that we, the village, were somehow in cahoots, and superior cahoots at that, against the Big House, and all that it stood for. Sally Mott and Gwen admired Rosie Barton. At least she didn't give herself airs. There were some people round here, Sally said to Gwen as they filled the Mothers' Union tea urn, who needed to be reminded we were living in the twentieth century. When Rosie had started her Village Wives' group, Sally Mott had been the first to sign up. As she said, living with Stuart and old Fred made you desperate for some area of your life where you could be sure you'd never meet a man.
The tea stall was flanked on one side by Stuart Mott and his tombola, and on the other by the white elephant stall which Alice and Clodagh had taken real trouble over. Every bit of rubbish they had collected had been mended and washed and polished and Alice had made a huge banner to pin on poles above the stall on which a line of elephants, trunk to tail, was dancing. It had been an immense amount of work organizing the stall, and Alice had been grateful for it because it had given her something to do with Anthony. Anthony had been staying for over a week now, and he was beginning to get her down. He watched her, all the time, and spoke to her in words that were very affectionate, but neither his look nor his tone matched his words. Clodagh had stayed up at the Park far more while Anthony was around and when she did come to The Grey House, to help with things for the stall, she was sharp and aloof. Alice had tried to corner her to talk about what was happening, and twice she had tried to telephone secretly, but Clodagh had simply said, 'Wait till he's gone, Alice, wait.' But for Alice, who had at last woken up and who was full of appetite and gratitude, this was almost impossible. She resolved she would ask Martin to move Anthony out; after all, Martin didn't want him there, hadn't wanted him at all in the first place, it was she, with her overflowing heart, who had said come, do come, I'll be nice to you, I'm nice to everyone just now. But he'd brought something nasty with him and he had added to it since he came. Arranging a row of little cut-glass bottles on a piece of white cotton lace, Alice thought she would ask Martin tonight to ask Anthony to go. And at the idea her heart simply lifted and she turned to give Clodagh a smile of pure love.
Clodagh put a cardboard box of fivepenny and tenpenny pieces into Michelle's hands.
'Run over to Martin with these, would you? It's his float. Twenty-five pence a go or five for a pound.'
Michelle went off across the lawn in her new white stilettos.
'What a bloody week,' Clodagh said. 'I've missed you. I've never missed anyone so much. When is that bastard going?'
Alice looked quickly at Natasha who was piling their float money into neat categories.
'As soon as possible. I'll ask Martin-'
'He knows. Anthony knows. He knew at once.'
'Knows?'
Mrs Fanshawe was approaching with a paper plate of cupcakes.
'I don't care,' Alice said. 'I don't care if the whole world knows.'
'I've brought these,' Mrs Fanshawe said, 'because you stall ladies always get left out at tea time.'
She put the plate down.
Thank you,' Alice said. A vast relief was bubbling up in her.
Mrs Fanshawe looked quickly over the white elephants.
'Do you know, my grandmother had exactly that vase? I remember it distinctly. You helping Mummy with the change, dear? That's never your baby! He's grown so . . . Must fly, you know how they all fall up on the cake stall the moment they're let in. Must be at my post! Granny Crudwell's made one of her fruit cakes and to tell the truth you can almost smell the brandy from here
She backed away. Clodagh made her nervous. Alice said softly, 'I'd like to tell her. I'd like to tell everyone.'
Over by the pair of Union Jacks wedged in painted oil drums that marked the entrance, Shadwell blew on a whistle. At once a surge of thirty or forty people hurried into the circle of stalls and made purposefully for their particular objects. As the first two possible competitors, a couple of boys of about twelve, approached the game under the laburnum tree, Anthony said casually to Martin, apropos of nothing they had been saying before, 'Of course, Clodagh Unwin is a lesbian.'
Martin said, 'What do you mean?' and then the bolder boy held out fifty pence and, when Martin began to explain the rules, said, 'I know. I played it before.'
Martin handed him a stack of plastic cups and set his stopwatch.
'Ready? Rubbish, Anthony. Anyway, how do you know-'
Anthony said nothing. He waited for the boy to score, and then for his shyer friend to score two higher and for their scores to be entered in a notebook, and then he said, 'I know because she is having an affair with Alice.'
There was a silence, and then Martin said with great distinctness, 'Alice is my wife.'
'Alice, your wife, and Clodagh Unwin are having an affair.'
A small girl was being helped up towards Martin by her granny. She was holding twenty-five pence. Martin explained the game, very carefully, and between them the granny and the small girl slowly put six cups on the pegs in thirty seconds and then the stopwatch rang and the child began to cry. Her granny, promising treats, took her away with an accusing look at Martin.