A Village Affair

And she said, looking back, 'Absolutely nothing.'

He had liked that. He wanted, later, to hear what absolutely nothing involved. She could tell him parts of it, though clearly to tell a man who is about to become your father-in-law that you had lain naked on his drawing room sofa eating sandwiches in the middle of the night was hardly on. She was, to her surprise, sorry when he went away, bound for Heathrow and then the Gulf of Mexico. He hadn't seemed, while he was at Dummeridge, either to take the house away from her and after all, it was his - or to encroach upon her freedom. On the contrary, he seemed to have his own private freedom which tantalized her a little, made her want to know more about him. When he was gone, she found to her intense annoyance that she was just a little lonely, so that when Cecily returned three days later she had the same kind of thankful, over-excited welcome from Alice as from her dogs.

'I shouldn't have left you so long, but this wretched tour was fixed up almost a year ago. Never, never do I wish to have to explain again that it is not possible to make an English spring garden in Selma, Alabama.'

Everything pulled itself together once Cecily had returned. Days and nights went back to their conventional roles, lists were made, letters were written, Alice's wedding dress - ivory chiffon over peachcoloured silk - was finally fitted. Presents arrived by every post, presents from complete strangers and from shops that had never been in Alice's orbit - the General Trading Company in Sloane Street, Harrods, Peter Jones, Thomas Goode, the White House. The dining room at Dummeridge slowly filled up with sheets and china and saucepans and Chinese lamps, things that she, Alice, had chosen and asked for and was now being given. As the piles grew, she discovered that she did not like it, even though she liked the things. It was not that she felt that she was being spoiled, but rather that these bales of towels and pairs of garden shears and boxes of brandy balloons were somehow buying her. She tried to say something of this to Cecily, and Cecily, believing her feeling to be the result of the material modesty of her upbringing, said she must simply lie back and lap it up.

'I promise you, people want to do this. They would think it most odd if you hadn't a list, and goodness knows you haven't been greedy.'

So Alice wrote her letters obediently and tried to decide constructively about flowers and asparagus rolls and the colour of lining for the marquee which was to be very grand and have f rench windows in case the day was cool. At night, instead of lying languorously in her linen sheets, Alice lay and worried, worried about details and little things and felt that from somewhere a pressure had arisen that was now sitting on her chest and her brow and making it difficult for her to see or breathe.

When her wedding day came, she was in no mood for it. It happened, of course, the great machine being inexorably in motion, and she went up the aisle most decoratively on her father's manifestly pleased arm, but she felt lonely, all day, and by the end of it she was tearful and exhausted from the effort of seeming as she wished she were feeling.

'She's tired,' Cecily said to Martin privately, tucking them into the car to go away while the guests, unnaturally jolly after champagne drunk unsuitably mid-afternoon, stood on the gravel and cheered. 'Look after her.'

He did his best. She slept most of the way to Athens next day and he was very solicitous and tucked blankets round her and motioned the air hostesses not to bother her with lunch and drinks and duty-free watches. A friend of Cecily's had lent them a villa on Patmos, and they were alone there except for the couple who were caretakers and who were so assiduous in both house and garden that they were quite difficult to elude. They swam and slept and lay in the sun, and Alice drew a bit, and at night Martin made love to her which she didn't mind but didn't seem able to look forward to much, either. What he felt about it she didn't know because they didn't talk about it. They were perfectly companionable and years later, when both of them, separately, tried to remember their honeymoon, neither could, in any detail.

'I think,' Alice was to say to her father-in-law, trying to be truthful and fair, 'I think I was simply asleep.'

When they returned, wearing the tan and the faint, pleased air of achievement expected of honeymooners, Alice's parents took the final step of obliterating Lynford Road from her life. They had hardly been home two weeks, and Alice was still in the state of early nesting, where to find the perfect place to hang a washing line gives the keenest pleasure, when her father arrived, quite unannounced. He looked absolutely normal; it was Alice who was astonished. She took him proudly into her little sitting room, sat him down in the only proper armchair they possessed and pointed out various aspects of the room he might admire while she went to make coffee. He said he would rather have a brandy.

'Brandy?' Alice said.

'Yes, brandy.'

'We haven't got any brandy.'

Sam Meadows closed his eyes.

'What have you got?'

'A wine box.'

'Then a glass of wine box, please.'

Alice went out to her kitchen and took one of her new glasses out of her newly painted cupboards and filled it from the wine box. The wine, she noticed irrelevantly, appeared to be being sold by a mustard company. She took the glass back into the sitting room and Sam said, before he even had it in his hand, 'You see, I've come to tell you that I have left your mother.'

Alice, distanced by Apple Tree Cottage and Greece and Dummeridge from her parents' ancient torments, said only, 'For whom?'

'For nobody,' Sam Meadows said. 'For my sanity.'

Alice put the glass of wine in his hand. She said, 'Did you plan this?'

'Oh yes. I'd been planning it for years. I knew I couldn't stay once you were all gone, but on the other hand if I had gone before you might never have been able to leave yourself.' He took a swallow. 'I left the night of your wedding day.'

'You what-'

'We drove home from Dummeridge in complete silence. I think the only word either of us uttered was when she said "Mind" passing a bicycle somewhere near Andover. When we got home, she began. Nothing new, just all the usual things, over and over. So I went upstairs and packed a bag - silly really, just like some melodramatic telly thing - and I drove to a university residence where I knew there was an empty room destined for an American postgraduate who had never turned up. I'm still there.'

'But I've spoken to you,' Alice said. 'And to Mum. And neither of you ever said-'

'She thinks I'll go back. She thinks thirty years of marriage makes it inevitable.'

Alice looked at her pretty fireplace which she had filled with flowers and leaves.

'You've been an awful husband.'

'I haven't been a faithful husband.'

That's awful. I couldn't stand it.'

Sam finished the wine.

'I wasn't unfaithful in order to hurt your mother.'

'I know that. It's just that she has nothing else.'

'It was that I nearly died of.'

Alice looked at him. She felt both a faint disgust and a mild affection for him, but mostly she felt that none of it had much to do with her.

'What will happen to Mum?'

'I don't know. Of course, I'll give her half of everything. But at the moment she won't discuss anything because she thinks I must return. So-' He looked across at Alice.

'So you want me to go and tell her that you are not coming back and she must think what she wants to do.'

'Yes.'

'All right,' Alice said.

Her father stood up.

'You don't sound much concerned. One way or the other.'