A Village Affair (23 page)

She said to Martin, ‘I can't think why brandy should make me think of my mother, but really I
must
go and see her.'

‘Of course,' Martin said.

‘Maybe Clodagh could come and help me with the children—'

‘Good idea.'

‘Next month—'

Martin stood up, yawning.

‘Whenever you like. I'm dropping.' He gestured at Anthony. ‘Sleep well. No hurry in the morning.'

‘You must feel very proud of him,' Anthony said, when Martin had gone.

‘Of course I do.'

‘So glad.'

‘Anthony,' Alice said, ‘enough games for one evening. Time for bed,' and she leaned forward to blow out the candles, and as she did so Anthony found that his long scrutiny of her and of Clodagh had been rewarded and that he had made a most interesting discovery. And so, in order to consider it at leisure, he was quite happy to be shooed upstairs with the remainder of his brandy. The goodnight kiss he gave Alice on the landing was compounded both of admiration and appreciation of the probable complexity of the future.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

On fine afternoons, Lettice Deverel carried the parrot in its cage outside and hung it in an apple tree. It liked this and made bubbling noises of deep appreciation. As long as she was in sight, bent over a nearby border in an ancient Italian straw hat, it continued to bubble contentedly, but if she moved too far away it grew agitated and screamed at her that she was a surly bagpiper. Sometimes she wished she had not confined its education solely to literary references to parrots because now it seemed resistant to learning anything new. Peter Morris had attempted to teach it prayers but it became overexcited and shrieked ‘Parrot, parrot, parrot' at him and then cackled with ribald laughter.

Margot Unwin, finding no one in Rose Villa, one warm, still, late afternoon, came round the house into the garden, calling for Lettice. Lettice was at that moment tipping a barrowload of weeds on to her compost heap, but the nearest apple tree remarked conversationally in Lettice's voice, ‘Well, Polly, as far as one woman can forgive another, I forgive thee.'

Margot Unwin gave a faint squawk. Lettice appeared with her barrow through a gap in her immense and burgeoning borders. Margot flapped a hand at her.

‘I always forget about your wretched bird.'

‘Did he say anything improper?'

‘Only that he forgave me.'

‘Oh,' Lettice said looking pleased, ‘that's his bit out of
The Beggar's Opera
. He hardly ever says it. You are much favoured.'

Margot inserted her face sideways under the hat brim and gave Lettice a kiss.

‘I need to talk, Lettice.'

‘Clodagh?'

‘Clodagh.'

‘Come and sit over here. No, not near the parrot. He always wants to join in and I wouldn't put eavesdropping past him.'

‘Why
do
you have a parrot?'

‘I like him,' Lettice said, brushing garden bits off a wooden seat. ‘He is contrary and amusing and independent. Margot, you look tired.'

‘So annoying. But I'm worried.'

Lettice sat on a second chair and removed her hat. Underneath it her grey hair was tied up in a red spotted snuff handkerchief. She wore a rust linen smock over wide blue trousers and elderly espadrilles. Margot Unwin wore a sweeping print frock.

‘I shall get us some tea.'

‘No, dear. Don't trouble. It's the sympathy I've come for.'

‘I doubt there's anything I can
do
'

‘You can listen.'

Lettice had been listening to Margot for thirty years, from the time she had bought Rose Villa and had only been able to spend weekends and holidays there, travelling up and down in the train from Waterloo with her pockets stuffed with sketches of what she would do to the garden. Only young Ralph had been born then and Margot was pregnant with Georgina and very handsome and spirited and impatient with being pregnant at all. There were endless parties up at the Park, weekend parties and shooting parties and tea parties for the children where the guests were accompanied by nannies in Norland uniforms. Margot started by inviting Lettice up as a curiosity, relying on the fact that she would wear breeches or a cloak or clogs and that she would express her decided opinions in a fresh and unconventional way. But then, at one lunch party, Lettice told the table at large that she was not a performing monkey, and went home. Margot followed her. She stood in Lettice's extraordinary and absorbing sitting room in her Belinda Belville dress and the Unwin pearls and said she was sorry. Very sorry. Then she burst into tears and Lettice, who recognized a true if incongruous friend, forgave her.

They had not quarrelled since but Lettice had always, tacitly and tactfully, retained the upper hand. As with Peter Morris, Lettice came to represent a confidante. When Margot Unwin supposed herself out of love with Ralph and very much in love with someone else, when Clodagh ran away from school, when a rampantly attractive and unprincipled Argentinian polo player besieged the defenceless Georgina for months on end, it was to Lettice that Margot came. Perhaps, Lettice sometimes thought, it was simply because their backgrounds were so different that their friendship was so real. Lettice, growing up in an austere academic household in Cambridge, might have come from another planet to that of Margot's adolescent society whirl. But after the apology, Lettice knew an excellent heart beat beneath the Hartnell suits and cashmere jerseys, and, as she grew older, she was inclined to think she valued excellence of heart above all things. She leaned across now and patted Margot's hand.

‘I've had half a mind to speak to Clodagh myself. It's time she got on with her life.'

‘That's exactly it. And Ralph has made it infinitely worse and has insisted on breaking up the trust so that Georgina and Clodagh get their farms now. Poor George. She doesn't even
want
hers yet but of course she's much too obliging to object. And now Windover becomes Clodagh's and neither she nor her father, it seems to me, have any intention she should do anything other about it than treat it as a giant piggy bank. I'm quite appalled and Ralph is as stubborn as a mule. As for Clodagh—'

Lettice stood up.

‘I
am
going to make some tea. Or would you rather have gin?'

‘
Much
rather.'

‘I won't be a minute. You sit and admire my white delphiniums. All descendents from the ones you gave me.'

‘Lettice,' Margot said, ‘you are a prop and stay.'

She sat and looked obediently ahead of her and tried to be sensible and not seized with wild envy of Lettice's single blessedness. After a few minutes, Lettice returned with two magnificent gilded Venetian tumblers and a yoghurt pot of pine kernels for the parrot. As she crossed the grass having put these in its cage, it could be heard exulting over its luck.

‘It's a nice parrot, really,' Margot said.

‘It's a dear parrot. There you are. Now then. It seems that all incentive for Clodagh to do anything enterprising ever again has been removed from her.'

‘Exactly.'

‘And she is still dancing attendance on those young Jordans?'

Margot took a swallow of her drink.

‘Do you know, I was so pleased about that! They are charming, Alice particularly, and those dear little children, and I thought how lovely for Clodagh, how
normal
, how good for her. And now she never goes anywhere else, never wants to do anything else, never wants to see anyone else. I wish them no ill, Lettice, but I wish they had never come. I thought I might try another angle and wheedle Alice's mother-in-law here by getting her to talk to the county WI but she was most peculiar on the telephone. I was unnerved, to be honest. She said she had promised herself to keep quite clear of Alice's territory.'

‘Perhaps,' Lettice said, ‘you should simply throw Clodagh out.'

‘I thought of that. I even said it. She said of course she wouldn't stay for ever and the moment I wanted her to go she would go down to The Grey House or to a farm cottage at Windover. Then she told Ralph about this conversation and we had the most horrible evening. Thank goodness it was Shadwell's night off.'

Lettice pushed the lemon slice in her drink under the surface and watched the bubbles streaming upward.

‘Then you must talk to Alice Jordan.'

‘Poor girl. She's done nothing wrong except befriend my bad daughter.'

Lettice was silent for a moment, considering how to economize with the truth.

‘She is fond of Clodagh. Fond enough it seems only to wish all the best for her. If she sees that hanging about here for too long is bad for Clodagh, she may help to urge her to go. She ought to go—' She stopped.

Margot looked at her.

‘Go on.'

‘Young marriages like that,' Lettice said, ‘don't need permanent extra adults hanging around them.'

Margot looked indignant.

‘Clodagh would never do a thing like that! In any case, Martin Jordan isn't in the least her—'

‘All the same—'

There was a pause. It would not be, Margot considered, the first time Clodagh had made mischief; made it not out of malice but purely because she had the power to do so. She stood up.

‘I shall talk to Alice Jordan. After the fête.'

‘The fête—'

‘Saturday, Lettice, and don't you dare to pretend you didn't know about it.'

‘Oh I do, I do. That plant stall—'

Margot smoothed down her skirt.

‘If we don't make a thousand, I shall suggest we put our herculean efforts into something else. The work is quite appalling.' She looked up at the sky. ‘Pray for a fine day.'

‘I have never,' Lettice said staunchly, ‘prayed in my life.' She stood up and drained her glass. ‘But if I
did
,' she said reflectively, ‘I'd save it for Clodagh, not the weather.'

‘In the old days,' Stuart Mott said, leaning against the shop counter and eyeing Michelle, ‘the shop'd always give something for the fête. Dad said.'

Mr Finch disliked Stuart Mott. He disliked all the Motts. He thought them shiftless and dishonest. They were also a plain family. At least the Crudwells, who proliferated in Pitcombe as the Motts did, had some Romany blood and were picturesque to look at, even if their girls were without morals and were constantly being caught up at the army camp at Larkhill. Mr Finch had come to abhor human sexuality. He supposed that his abhorrence was the result of thirty-three years of Mrs Finch. He leaned on the other side of the counter and said to Stuart, ‘The old days were different. The village shop got used properly then because nobody had cars to take them into Salisbury. I can't afford to give away so much as a packet of cabbage seeds.'

‘Don't need cabbage seeds,' Stuart said, still looking at Michelle. ‘Got more'n enough cabbage plants. We'd like a nice box of chocolates for the tombola, though.'

Michelle was friends with Stuart's daughter Carol and she thought Stuart was dirty to keep staring at her like that. She wasn't going to open her mouth and give him the chance to speak to her, though, so she turned round with her back to him and began to rearrange hairslides on a blue card hanging against the shelves where Mr Finch kept what Mrs Finch called toiletries. Along the shelf where the soap and talcum powder stood, Mrs Finch had tacked a swathe of mauve net and an imitation orchid.

‘I'll give you a box half-price,' Mr Finch said, ‘and bang goes my profit and then some.'

Michelle was going to help Alice and Clodagh on the white elephant stall. They'd asked her themselves. And Martin had made a sort of speed game with pegs on a wooden board which you had to cover with plastic cups, as many as you could in thirty seconds, because Lady Unwin had asked him to. Gwen was doing teas with Sally Mott and Miss Pimm was taking the money for them. Mrs Fanshawe was in charge of the cake stall and at this moment, to judge by the smell, Mrs Finch was in her kitchen in a ruffled nylon apron making her contribution of iced fancies. ‘My specials,' she called them. Even Michelle, who could eat four Twix bars at a sitting, wanted to throw up at the sight of all that pink and yellow fondant icing. While she baked, Mrs Finch was working her way through the score of
The Merry Widow
. She had reached the waltz. Stuart Mott pointed to the largest box of chocolates.

‘I'll give you two quid for that one.'

Mr Finch lifted down a small box of fudge which said it had been made of clotted cream in a cottage.

‘This is my best offer. Sixty pence is all I'm asking.'

With elaborate reluctance, Stuart Mott counted out sixty pence in very small change.

‘You helping Mrs Jordan, then,' he said to Michelle's back.

She shrugged.

‘Might be.'

‘She's taken a fancy to you, hasn't she. I know all about that. Nothing goes on up there that I don't see.'

He picked up the box of fudge. Michelle hadn't turned round and Mr Finch, priggishly mindful of Lettice Deverel's opinion of gossip, turned aside to wipe his bacon slicer.

‘That brother's staying on,' Stuart said. ‘He's a funny bloke. Nice car. You seeing our Carol later?'

‘Dunno—'

Stuart walked over to the door.

‘See you Saturday.'

‘Goodbye,' Mr Finch said, wiping vigorously.

Michelle said nothing. The one thing her eleven years of schooling had taught her was that you could be infinitely ruder if you kept your mouth shut.

‘If I wasn't here,' Anthony said to Martin, surveying Pitcombe Park just before the fête opened, ‘I wouldn't believe this sort of thing still went on.'