'Hello, old man.'
Charlie beamed. Sam thought of his journeys to Sainsbury's and how in future he would put Charlie in the child seat of the trolley. He lifted Charlie on to his knee.
'How about living with your grandfather then?'
Charlie examined a shirt button intently.
'We could have a dog.'
From the drive came the sound of Alice's horn, announcing her arrival home. Holding Charlie, Sam stood up and, calling the children to him, led them all round to the garage to greet her.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The cottage was undeniably ugly. It was built of yellowish brick under a blue slate roof and stood in a long garden that ran down to the lane, a tangled garden with aggressive great clumps of delphinium and hollyhock and ornamental sea kale. There was also an apple tree groaning with fruit; it was clearly in the habit of being so prolific because one long, low, laden branch was propped up on a stout wooden stake driven into the ground.
The cottage was uncompromising as well as ugly. It had four rooms upstairs and two downstairs, and in a narrow wing running out at the back, a bathroom above a depressing kitchen. The previous owners had believed very much in hardboard. It was nailed over fireplaces and panelled doors and bannisters and beams, and had then been painted in either mauve or apricot emulsion to blend in with the surrounding walls. In the sitting room there was a fireplace of faintly iridescent tiles and below every tap in the house stains spread in green and brown tongues.
Two miles further up the valley there had been a pretty cottage for sale. It was built of stone and the interior was beamed and friendly. There had been great pressure on Alice to choose it because even if many of those exerting pressure didn't much, at the moment, care where she lived, they wanted the children to live somewhere attractive. But Alice had been adamant. She had been adamant about a lot of things and choosing East Cottage rather than the pretty stone one was one of them.
The others were that she would live alone and that she would not, because of the children and their schools, leave the Salisbury area. She would move to the other side of the city, but she and Martin would have to risk meeting by mistake now and then. She was also adamant that he and the children should see a great deal of each other.
Natasha was disgusted with East Cottage. Her bedroom was the size of a cupboard and smelled of mushrooms. The walls were papered with fewn bobbly stuff and there was a grey bit on the ceiling that looked squashy. Alice said the room would be absolutely transformed, just you wait, but Natasha didn't want to wait, any more than she had wanted to leave Pitcombe. She told Alice quite often that she hated her and was confused and miserable to find that she felt no better after saying it, so she said it again, louder, to see if that worked. Even school didn't seem the same, with no Grey House to go home to, and Sophie wouldn't be friends this term, so Natasha turned to Charlotte Chambers who was slow and charmless but who had a swimming pool at home and a huge drawing room with a white carpet. The sitting room at East Cottage had no carpet at all, just a piece of rush matting. Alice said that room was going to be wonderful too, just you wait, so Natasha had gone to stay for a whole weekend with Charlotte Chambers, to punish Alice. But the punishment had gone wrong because Natasha had been so homesick. She came home on Monday night, after school, and she shouted, 'I hate this house!' and then she cried and cried and clung to Alice. Alice said to her, 'I know it's hard to feel it, but every day we are going forward.'
'But I want to go back.'
That's the saddest thing to do. Nothing is ever as good as you thought it was. Because you change. You see the old things with changed eyes and they aren't the same.'
Lettice Deverel came to tea. She came bumping up their stony drive in her old car with the parrot in its cage on the back seat. It was not a good passenger and had screamed most of the way but was pleased to be stationary and accepted a slice of apple with goodish grace. Lettice said that it would probably live for about sixty years more than she would, and that she must find a very kind, interesting person who would look after it when she was dead. James, mesmerized by the parrot's self-possession and humour and little grey blue claw holding the apple, went into a fantasy of being considered sufficiently kind and interesting. He gazed ardently at Lettice, to make her notice.
'Margot Unwin would like to see you,' Lettice said to Alice.
'Lord-'
'She needs to. It's very pathetic to see someone so capable so sad and confused. And of course she cannot talk to Ralph because she wants to understand and he cannot bring himself to.'
'Do you mean she wants me to explain-'
'I think so.'
'Lord,' Alice said again.
'She wants you to go to the Park.' Lettice looked at Alice. 'I'm afraid Clodagh is going back to America.'
Alice said in a low voice, 'I thought she would.'
'I hope it's just a passing impulse.'
'To be made a fuss of, do you mean, to be comforted?'
'She has never been hurt before, you see.'
Alice looked at her children.
'I think it's worse to leave being first hurt until you are grown up.'
'You never know,' Lettice said. 'You never know in life, which is good experience and which is damage. Do you?'
After tea, they went out of the cottage to the long shed where Alice was making a studio. Her easel was already set up and there was a trestle table with a workmanlike array of paints and bottles and jam jars of brushes.
'I shall keep myself,' Alice said. 'Martin is keeping the children, but I shall keep myself. And about time too, I can't help thinking.' She picked up a drawing. 'Peter Morris has commissioned a painting of Pitcombe Church. The interior. So I'll have to sneak back to do that.'
'Don't you sneak anywhere,' Lettice said. She took the sketch and looked at it. 'What is this horrible cottage for? A hair shirt?'
'It isn't horrible. It's real. You wait until I've finished with it. You see - oddly enough - it's easier to bear things here. It feels mine. Partly because it isn't what's expected of me, I suppose. That isn't defiance, just the best way to go forward-'
She stopped. Lettice eyed her.
'Will you be lonely?'
'No,' Alice said. She took the sketch from Lettice and propped it on the easel. 'Are you?'
'No.'
Then you see-'
'Yes,' Lettice said, thinking of the sufficiency she had made for herself. 'Yes. Of course I see.'
Sam came most weekends. He was an enormous asset, not only emotionally, but also because he proved to be very capable with tools. He was delighted with himself, over this.
'If you'd told me, ten years ago, to re-hang a door, I'd have gone straight to the pub. But look at this. Go on, push it. See? Smooth as silk. Come on, Jamie, pick up my hammer. What use is an apprentice if he won't even carry my clobber?'
He was entirely unresentful that Alice had declined to set up house with him, and as the weeks wore on he came to think that she had been quite right and that he very much liked his new double life, single in Reading, family at East Cottage. He began, too, to feel first pity and then affection for Clodagh. Without Clodagh, he would not have had these enriching and complementing roles. He made a list of winter projects for East Cottage
- 'Replace gutters where necessary - Clear wilderness behind shed - Start log pile - Replace all lavatory glass with plain, etc. etc.' - which he tacked up in the kitchen so that Elizabeth, who came, astonishingly, for two nights, was drawn back and back to it, to read it over and over as if she couldn't believe her eyes.
The children thought her peculiar, but peaceful, because she did not attempt to be affectionate. She seemed to like East Cottage and professed herself quite prepared to paint window frames, which she then did patiently for forty-eight hours. She declined, to Alice's relief, to have any kind of conversation even approaching a heart-to-heart, and only said, while they were washing up once and the kitchen was noisy with the children, 'Well, you've taken a very long time to work yourself through all that nonsense, and you chose a very strange way out, but you've done it. And that's a great deal.'