A Village Affair

But when she sat still she had even more time to think, and then she thought about love which, in her virgin state, was very much more interesting and real to her than sex had ever been. She had never really loved a man beyond members of her own family, but she had loved - did love - women all right. Feeling the tablet fizzing away beneath her tongue, she asked herself what on earth she would do without her sister Marjorie, even if she did live in Taunton, and her friend Phyllis who lived at King's Harcourt and whom she saw at least twice a week. She had said something of this to Lettice Deverel whom she had met on the field path that ran parallel to the village street behind the cottages, and Lettice had said, 'It's one of the curses of our age. Sex has driven out friendship.'

Buntie Payne had said, did she mean the sixties and the permissive society, and Lettice had said well, partly, but the rot had begun with the Bloomsbury Group, much earlier.

'The moment self-indulgence gets into the hands of the intellectuals,' Lettice said, 'society is in for sailing in a rudderless ship. It is now considered bourgeois to control yourself.'

Buntie hadn't really known what she was talking about, but being seized by a sudden spasm of bewildered, unhappy sympathy for Alice, cried out, 'They mustn't make it hard for her!'

And Lettice said that you couldn't stop them; all you could do was not join them.

'Hypocrisy being, as it is, a national pastime-'

Buntie didn't need telling that. She had heard Sally Mott and Janet Crudwell airing their opinion of Alice in the village shop only the day after Janet's two eldest had been brought back by the military police from Larkhill Camp at three in the morning. Buntie, choosing onions one by one, had been seized with indignation, and when Sally and Janet had left the shop and she had been handing her bag of onions to Mr Finch she had heard herself demand, 'So. A hunger for love or a greed for money. Where do you stand on that?'

But Mr Finch, whose imaginative capacities had recently been so stretched he could summon up neither opinion nor poetry, had simply goggled at her, and said, 'Pardon?'

'It's awful of me,' Juliet Dunne said to Henry, holding her face in both hands, 'but the whole thing absolutely turns me up.'

Henry was filleting a kipper with extreme precision.

'I really don't want to talk about it-'

'No, darling, but you never want to talk about anything in the least personal. Looking back, I can't quite remember how you conveyed to me that you wanted to marry me. Did I set you a questionnaire?'

Henry buttered toast in silence.

'The thing is, I've simply got to talk to you because I have to get all this off my chest and you are all I have, by way of audience. Please stop crunching.'

Henry put his toast down with an air of obliging martyrdom.

'How can you eat?'

He looked at his forbidden toast.

'With great difficulty.'

'Henry,' Juliet said, and began to cry again.

She had cried quite a lot of the night, and the previous evening. It wasn't that Henry wasn't sorry for her, because he was, but he was having rather a bad time with his own feelings and until he had got to grips with them, he hadn't much energy to spare for Juliet.

'Aren't you revolted?' Juliet said between sobs.

Henry sneaked a morsel of kipper. He was revolted; less so than if Alice and Glodagh had been two men, but revolted all the same. And puzzled, intensely puzzled. And somehow let down, almost betrayed, almost heavens, almost humiliated.

Juliet blew her nose.

'It's incredibly reactionary of me, I'm sure, but it's the truth. It turns everything upside down. It makes such a nonsense of everything we were brought up to. I hate it. I feel sick and I feel lost.'

Henry picked up his toast again with one hand and reached out to pat Juliet with the other.

'I've known Clodagh all my life,' Juliet said. 'I can't believe it. All my life and she's been like this. And Alice. I loved Alice. There was no one else I could complain to like I could to Alice-'

'She isn't dead,' Henry pointed out.

'How can anything,' Juliet said, getting up to fetch the coffee percolator, 'be the same again after this?'

'Not the same-'

'Trust goes,' Juliet said. 'Once that goes, you've had it. That's why I couldn't possibly stay married to you if you slept with anyone else. I'd never trust you again so we'd have nothing to build on any more.'

Henry looked down at his plate and thought of Alice, and how he felt about Alice. And now here was Juliet talking as if Alice had deceived her personally and in so doing had destroyed the vital trust in a friendship.

'Alice is your girlfriend,' Henry said, 'not your husband.'

Juliet began to pour coffee, unsteadily, mopping at her nose with a tissue.

'She was special to me.' She stopped pouring. 'At the moment, I hate Clodagh. Hate her.'

'Shouldn't do that-'

'Well I do.'

Henry pushed his plate away.

That's not going to help Alice.'

'She doesn't want help-'

'How do you know?'

'Rosie Barton went to see her and got very short shrift-'

'And when did you and Rosie Barton ever see eye to eye about anything?'

Juliet hid her face behind her coffee mug.

'Henry. The truth is I don't know what I'd say to Alice because I don't know what I feel-'

'Why don't you just ring and say you're still friends?'

'But are we?' Juliet cried. 'Are we? I mean, can we be after this?'

Henry stood up and began to rattle the change softly in his trouser pockets. He said, 'I'm going to see Martin.'

Juliet stared.

'What'll you say to him?'

'Dunno. Nothing probably, nothing much.'

'Poor Martin-'

'Yes.'

He went round the table to Juliet and she leaned tiredly against him.

'You're behaving much better than I am,' Juliet said. 'But then you always have. Haven't you.'

He put his arms round her and stooped to kiss the top of her head.

'No,' Henry said.

Martin had several visitors from Pitcombe besides Henry. Sir Ralph Unwin came, and so did John MurrayFrench and Peter Morris. Only Sir Ralph spoke of Alice and Clodagh directly, but that was more, Martin could see, because he was literally exploding with his own feelings than because he thought it best to be straightforward with Martin. Martin was thrown, but he didn't blame Sir Ralph for letting go any more than he blamed Henry or John or Peter for not letting go. He himself behaved with great control while they were there. Only when they were gone, and Cecily was safely in her study or in the garden, did he give way to the consuming and inarticulate rage that possessed him. At night it took the form of hideous dreams, dreams of violence and savagery and killing that sometimes had in them people he had not thought about for years like the prefect at school who had told him how pretty he was and who had then because Martin had been afraid and disinclined to do what he wanted - instituted a campaign of brilliantly subtle mental cruelty.

The rage was more exhausting than anything Martin had ever known. It fed on everybody, everything, and it refused to subject itself to reason. It boiled in him like some seething, evil broth, and whether he controlled it or gave vent to it out on the cliffs with his mother's dogs, he felt no better. Sometimes he thought he would burst, and often he wished he would, trapped as he was in this boiling cauldron. Cecily would say to him sorrowfully that she wished he could let go. If only she knew! He suspected that if he let go entirely, he would die, and most days, for a spell at least, he wished for that. He imagined the cool, quiet, dark state of nothingness because, when it came to the crunch of thinking about Heaven, he discovered that he didn't want to believe there was one. He could not bear the thought of any further existence, in whatever form. The most desirable state was nothingness, just not to be. That seemed to him the only state in which there could be no torment.