A Village Affair

At the end of the white border there was a bower. It was made of golden hops trained around an arched trellis and it contained a stone seat with a back like an acanthus leaf. It had been photographed - twining goldgreen fronds, lichened stone, clumps of grey-leaved, white-flowered rock rose - for a dozen books on English gardens. Even now, on a grey day without the brilliance of blue sky behind the brilliance of the hop leaves, it was a satisfaction to look at. Cecily stood in front of it for some time, and considered how long it was since she had had a really creative idea. It was almost as if you could pour your creativity into people or into your work but seldom into both. There simply wasn't enough for both. Men knew that. Men didn't even try to cover both. She could weep, she thought, standing there in front of her acanthus seat, she could simply weep at the frustration of this division, this unwanted intrusion into the wholeness of herself ...

Telephone!'

She turned. Dorothy was standing at the far end of the border flapping a duster. She began to walk quickly back.

'So sorry!' Dorothy said, 'but it sounds urgent. The vicar from Pitcombe - he says-'

The vicar-'

'Yes. A Mr Morris-'

Cecily ran. In the hall, the telephone receiver lay beside a luminous white hydrangea in a Chinese bowl.

'Mr Morris?'

'Ah,' Peter said. 'I'm so glad to speak to you. Nobody's hurt. You must understand that. All your family are unhurt. But I think you should come. I think they need you. I think your son would like you to come.'

'What's happened?'

Peter Morris said carefully, There has been an emotional upset.'

'What sort? What do you mean?'

'Could you come? It would be easier to explain to you, if you came-'

It would not, really, and he knew it. It would never be easy to explain but it was always worse on the telephone, when one was unable to see the other person's face. He screwed his own face up at the reproduction on his study wall of Carpaccio's St Jerome at his desk with the little dog badgering him silently from the floor nearby, and said, 'Everybody is well and being cared for, but your family needs your support.'

'I'll come,' she said. 'I'll be two hours.'

'Come to the vicarage. Come to me first.'

'Yes,' she said. 'Yes.' And he could hear her voice falter.

He put the telephone down and looked at the chair where she would be sitting when he told her that her daughter-in-law and Clodagh Unwin had become lovers and appeared to have no intention of ceasing to be lovers. He would have to tell her how Alice had come to him the night before, in a very bad way indeed, and asserted that her husband had tried to rape her. Rape, she had said, over and over. 'He tried to force me. He's mad, he's mad-'

He had sat her down in the rectory kitchen and made tea. Alice told him how good Martin had been initially, how accepting, and then how he had suddenly changed and come bellowing at her, accusing Clodagh of trying to fob him off with being the Unwins' lawyer as compensation for taking Alice, and how he had flung her on the floor and wrenched at her clothes and his own and been uncontrollably violent and savage, shouting all the time and weeping, and how James had come in and that of course had stopped things. Then Martin had locked himself in the spare room and could be heard sobbing there, and Alice had rung Clodagh who came down from the Park to help her comfort James, and she had left them together and come here because they needed a doctor, she thought, and more than a doctor probably, she didn't know, she could hardly think . . . The mug of tea in her hand was jerking uncontrollably and tea was splashing down on to her skirt, great hot splashes she hardly seemed to notice, so Peter took away the mug and sat and watched her until he thought she might be able to tell him again, more slowly, what had happened.

'He kept roaring,' Alice said. 'He kept roaring at me, "You're a lesbian, do you hear me, you're a lesbian"-'

'But you are. If what you tell me of you and Clodagh is true, you are.'

'And is that so wrong?'

'Yes,' Peter Morris said. 'It is very wrong.'

She gazed at him. Her mass of hair was loose and wild.

'But it made everything better, happier-'

'No,' Peter said. That is an illusion. It was a selfish, short-term pleasure. There is nothing good in a pleasure which inevitably creates innocent victims.'

'And if I was a victim before?'

'Free will,' Peter said. 'Always a choice, all your life.'

'I'm not bad,' Alice said, weeping suddenly, 'I'm not a wicked woman.'

'I know that. Goodness, essential goodness, does not guarantee anyone against wrongdoing.'

'It isn't wrong! How can love be wrong?'

'In itself, it can't. It is what you do with it.'

He had then telephoned the doctor at King's Harcourt and had walked Alice home through the Sunday twilight to The Grey House where there was silence behind the spare room door and in the kitchen a subdued, uneasy quiet while Clodagh read to James, and Natasha at the table filled in the diagrams in a dot-to-dot book. James was on Clodagh's knee, but when Peter and Alice came in she set him on the floor and came across to Alice and put her arm round her. Peter could not look at them. He went over to the table and admired what Natasha was doing.

'They don't, of course, look real,' Natasha said, drawing on. 'Because of all the corners.'

James went across to Alice and Clodagh, his thumb in his mouth, and leaned against them. He was in his pyjamas. Alice stooped to lift him and he put his arms round her neck and stuck his bare foot sideways so that Clodagh could hold it.

'Dr Milligan is coming,' Alice said. 'He will give Daddy something to help him sleep.'

'When I had chicken pox,' Clodagh said, 'when I was little, Dr Milligan gave me a biro and told me to draw round every spot I could find. It took a whole day.'

James chuckled, his face in Alice's shoulder.

'I shall go upstairs,' Peter said. 'I shall go up and wait for the doctor.'

Alice carried James back to the Aga and sat down with him on her knee. Clodagh stayed where she was.

'Alice-'

'Yes?'

'You're not wavering? What did Peter say to you-'

'That what we have is wrong.'

Clodagh snorted.

'I hope you took no notice.'

'I must take notice. But it does not mean, if I take notice, that my mind is changed.'

Natasha looked up and watched Clodagh.