A Village Affair

'Mind,' Cecily said, 'I should think not.'

She took off her gardening glove and held her hand out to Alice.

'More than welcome, Alice Meadows,' she said.

She had put Alice to sleep in the little south bedroom that she privately thought she would use for herself when Richard was dead. It had a brass bedstead, polished floorboards with rough cream Greek rugs, blue and white toile de Jouy curtains, deep windowsills, and, in a corner, a huge china jardiniere out of which a violently healthy plumbago cascaded in a riot of starry pale blue flowers.

'Do you like it?' Cecily said, unnecessarily.

'In everyway.'

'It's my favourite room. It has a very nice personality.' She glanced at Alice. 'Are you and Martin serious?'

Alice returned her look, entirely unperturbed. The house and the room and this fascinating, strong-looking woman with her drill gardening shirt and trousers, her beautifully coiffed hair and her ropes of pearls, made her feel that there was nothing to fear or to be decided it would all be done for her.

'No,' Alice said. 'We have known each other for two weeks. Martin met my brother, playing squash, and my brother brought him home. We have been to the cinema twice and to the pub a bit. You know. And then he asked me here.'

She ran her hand round the fat brass knob on the bed end.

'Do you think,' she said to Cecily, 'that I was wrong to come if I don't mean to be serious?'

'No. Whatever you end up being, you were right to come.'

They went down into the garden again together and Cecily left Alice under a willow at the edge of the lawn while she went to make tea. Alice lay back in an old cane chair whose arms were unravelling in spiny strands, and looked up at the strong blue sky through the fading blond-green fronds of willow and felt - she hunted about in her mind for a word. Happy? Too thin. Content? Too sluggish. Gorgeous? Too self-regarding. But all were right in their way, and so was replete and sleek and blissful, and so was-

Would she, Alice wondered abruptly across her own thoughts, tell Martin's mother about her family? Would she say that to come to this ancient and lovely house, to drowse in this romantic and sensual garden, was an answer to a prayer, the antidote to her own home where the unlovely walls echoed, day in, day out, with her mother's steady complaining? I am ripe for this, Alice told herself, pushing off her shoes with her toes and stretching her bare feet in the sun. I am an absolute sucker for this paradise, I was a pushover even before Martin's mother opened her mouth. She shut her eyes and let the willow dapple its shadow softly across her eyelids. At home now, at Lynford Road, Reading, her mother would be drinking Indian tea out of an ugly mug given away by a garage, while not listening to Kaleidoscope or the end of Afternoon Theatre on Radio , but instead storing up in her mind all the day's grievances which were, indeed, a lifetime's grievances, against her friendly, amiable philandering husband, Alice's father, who was probably, even now, taking a seminar on the Metaphysical Poets at the university and thinking about sex.

She wouldn't leave him. It was one of her complaints to Alice that she wouldn't because she loved him and look how she was treated, how her loyalty was abused. Alice had come to see that it was closer to tyranny than loyalty, even though her father's carryings-on disgusted her. She felt, as she got older, that even her friends weren't safe from him; they all thought him dishy and flirted with him when they came to collect Alice for the cinema or a disco. Alice's mother wanted her to take sides, to defend her, but Alice wouldn't. She thought they were both wrong, and she knew that the moment she had finished art school, she would leave Reading and the hideous house with its charmless contents and her mother's bitter laments and her father's selfindulgence and she would go, like her brothers had, and not come back.

One of her brothers had gone right away, to Los Angeles, where he was a tremendously successful taxi driver. The other had only gone to London, to live happily in a huge disordered flat with six others off Lavender Hill, and do his Law Society exams. It was he who had brought Martin Jordan home - well, not home exactly because passing through was all he could take - on their way to play squash in some tournament in Oxford, and because Alice had been upstairs painting in an absolute fury after the newest student conquest had telephoned quite openly to ask to speak to Professor Meadows, they had taken her to Oxford too. She wouldn't watch them play squash, but went to the Ashmolean instead and looked at the Caernavon marbles, and came away much soothed. Martin Jordan had come down from London four times in two weeks to take Alice out - the last time he had brought flowers for her mother which nobody had done, Alice thought, in twenty years - and then he had telephoned and said he was coming through Reading, on his way to Dummeridge, and that he would collect her. If she'd like to go.

Alice said Reading wasn't on the way to Dorset from London.

'It is,' Martin said, 'if I'm coming to collect you.'

So he had, and they had driven away from Lynford Road and Alice would not look back to wave at her mother because she knew herself to be the cause of a new complaint for daring to go off to enjoy herself while her mother was forced to stay behind and suffer. And here she now was, as long and supple and warm as a stretched-out cat, lying under a willow in a place like heaven, while someone wonderful brought tea which would be, Alice knew, China, in pretty cups, with slices of lemon to float in it and perhaps almond biscuits.

'There,' Cecily said, 'what a contented looking girl.' She put down the tray. 'I hope you like China tea. And Dorothy, who helps me, has made some shortbread.'

Alice said laughing, 'I said almond biscuits in my mind.'

'And China tea?'

'Oh yes-'

Cecily smiled broadly and sat down in a cane chair.

'Martin is still glued to the box.'

'I don't mind. As long as he doesn't want me to be glued too.'

'He says you paint.'

'Yes.'

'Things you see, or things you imagine?'

'Things I see coloured by things I imagine.'

'Lemon?'

'Oh, please-' She swung herself upright and put her bare feet down on the brisk, warm, late summer grass.

'You don't know,' she said to Cecily with some energy, 'how heavenly this is.'

'I do, you know. Don't forget that I have virtually made it, so I like to take all the credit.'

She held out a shallow eggshelly cup painted with birds of paradise.

'Where I live,' Alice said, taking it reverently, 'everything is as ugly as possible. I think it's my mother's revenge on life for not making her happy.'

'Almost nobody is happy,' Cecily said. 'It's rather that one must devise ways of cheating or eluding unhappiness. And of course, some people love unhappiness with a passion.'

'My mother just loves it with a grim determination,' said Alice and let out a burst of sudden laughter, 'Oh, oh, I'm mean, mean-'

'Yes,' Cecily said, looking at her with great liking, 'you are. Now, you had better tell me all about her and your clever father. I fear you have come into a gravely illiterate household. I believe my husband reads nothing but newspapers and engineering periodicals, Martin reads nothing but colour supplements and his brother Anthony reads nothing at all. What about you?'

Alice put her cup down carefully and lay back again in the cane chair.

'Love stories. I'm mad on love. Do you think it's the answer?'

'Now that,' Cecily said, thinking of her son Martin, 'is something you will have to find out for yourself.'

Even as a baby, a brand new baby, Martin had looked faintly anxious. He was a pretty baby and then a dear little boy and then an attractive bigger boy and finally he emerged as a sturdy, fair, good-looking man. But he still looked anxious. If you were in a good mood, Cecily always thought, you wanted to comfort that anxiety away, but if you were not, his expression resembled the silent reproachful pleading of a dog who has nothing to do all day but beseech you for a walk you haven't time to give it. She loved Martin very much but she didn't want him with her a great deal; she never had. He was undeniably rather dull, but she wouldn't have minded that. It was his want of boldness she found so discouraging, his unadventurousness, his lack of curiosity. Bringing this uncommon girl down was the most enterprising thing he had done in twenty-four years of life. Not only had he brought her down, but he was handling her beautifully. Cecily would have expected him to be too eager, too slavish, but he wasn't. He was quite challenging in fact, and even though Cecily suspected him of being besotted, he gave little hint of it. Alice had the same bold, free manner with him; there were no longing glances or furtive looks. When Anthony came home, later, for dinner the first evening, Alice took almost no notice of him at all even though he was dramatically rude in order to attract her attention. He was so rude that his father, roused from his inner world at the far end of the table, said suddenly, 'Leave the room.'