A Village Affair (31 page)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

‘I was going to take you out,' Richard said, ‘but then I thought that the moment either of us managed to say something we really wanted to say there'd be a waiter asking if we wanted pepper on our salads. So I went to Selfridges Food Hall and got this.'

Alice looked down at the coffee table in the little sitting room of Richard's flat. On it was a bottle of wine, a plastic envelope of smoked salmon, brown bread and a lemon.

She said, ‘Are you going to grill me?'

‘Heavens no. Why should I do that?'

‘Because you are Martin's father.'

He picked up the bottle of wine and went to find a corkscrew.

‘I'm a human being too. I'd have to be a pretty unpleasant one to drag you all the way to London just to tick you off.'

He disappeared for a moment into the tiny kitchen, reappearing with wine glasses.

‘You mustn't be defensive.'

Alice threw her head up.

‘I don't want to be. But I keep feeling driven into it.'

It had been so lovely in the train, coming up, being nobody. And the Tube had been even better, jammed in with people, all strangers.

‘London's a luxury,' Alice said, accepting a glass of wine, ‘after Pitcombe.'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘Yes, it would be.'

He put a hand on her arm and steered her into an armchair.

‘Are you hungry?'

‘Not terribly.'

‘Drink up then. We've got all day.'

‘But the office—'

‘It can wait.'

‘Martin said you had built a wall together—'

‘You
saw
him?'

‘Yes,' Alice said. ‘At Juliet's. It didn't really work.'

‘No,' Richard said. ‘It wouldn't have. Poor boy.'

Alice said nothing.

‘Poor boy,' Richard said again. ‘Poor boy. He's been misinformed, somehow, all his life. He wouldn't begin to understand. He's in a rage of not understanding.'

‘I don't blame him,' Alice said. ‘I wouldn't have understood either. Before Clodagh.'

‘Talk to me,' Richard said. He leaned forward and poured more wine into Alice's glass. ‘Talk to me.'

‘No—'

‘Yes. I may be one of the few people who can help. I love Martin.' He paused. ‘I love you. I think I understand Martin. I would like to understand you.'

‘I don't want this,' Alice said. ‘I don't want my marriage kindly mended.'

‘I don't want to mend it.'

‘You
don't
?'

‘No,' Richard said. ‘But I want a resolution. For him, for you, for my grandchildren.' He looked at Alice. ‘Talk to me, about Clodagh.'

‘I can't—'

‘Why not?'

‘Because you're a man.'

‘Alice,' Richard said, ‘I don't think you know very much about men, or you wouldn't say such a thing. Do you trust me?'

She thought.

‘I don't know—'

‘Pay me the compliment of knowing that I will believe you and probably understand what you tell me.'

Alice got up. She walked round the little room fiddling with things, an ashtray on a sideboard, a marble egg on a wooden stand, a foolish adult toy made of a heap of magnetic paper clips on a black glass base. Then she came back to her chair and sat down.

‘What makes it so difficult is that the love between women has
always
been belittled. Hasn't it? Down the ages. Treated as something at best foolish, like – like a kind of silly harmless hobby.'

She put her wine glass down and picked up the lemon, rolling it in her hands and sniffing it.

‘But what I feel – and I may never fall in love again – is that what Clodagh has given me has enriched me. It hasn't impoverished anything about me, hasn't taken anything
from
me, if you see what I mean. It's grown me up. It's enabled me to love everyone else in my life properly, and as far as I can see only another woman would do for that instructive kind of love because only another woman could see I needed it and could understand about the children and self and the permanent balancing act of motherhood and self. Only another woman,' Alice said firmly, ‘could understand and – and
supply.
'

Richard slid off his chair on to his knees beside the coffee table and began to make competent sandwiches.

‘If you want to know,' Alice said, rolling the lemon, ‘bed isn't the most significant thing. At least, after the beginning it wasn't. I think sex is more important for Clodagh than for me. If I'm honest. But what I love, what I'm terrified of doing without again, is the life force. A kind of elixir. Do you see?'

He nodded, peeling salmon off cellophane strips.

‘You can't imagine how much fun we have. You can't conceive of how differently I see myself, because of her. It's a kind of revelation.'

Richard took the lemon away from her, cut it and began to squeeze the juice on to his sandwiches.

‘I was so lonely,' Alice said. ‘I don't blame Martin. He didn't know what to do about me, and I didn't know what to do about me either. But Clodagh did. I woke up. When I looked back at getting married and honeymooning and then being married, I think I was simply asleep. I must have been. Twelve years, dawdling about in a kind of half-life.'

Richard put two sandwiches on a plate and balanced it on her knee.

‘Eat up.'

Alice looked at the plate, then at him.

‘Do I make sense to you?'

‘Yes.'

‘Can you imagine what I mean?'

‘Of course. I've felt something like it. But in my case it was for the opposite sex, rather than my own.'

‘Who was it?'

‘Cecily, of course,' Richard said.

‘
Cecily
!'

‘Yes.'

Alice took an unenthusiastic bite of sandwich.

‘You talk,' she said. ‘You talk now.'

There was a little pause, then Richard said, with great carefulness, ‘If you had had a confident, loving man make love to you, this would never have happened. You'll think that's just common or garden male arrogance. It isn't. There's a world of difference between making love and having sex. I was never able to make love to Cecily as I wished to because her mind was quite closed to me. The summit of her emotional life was Vienna and she would never allow anything to approach it in case it proved only an illusion and the giant, secret romance of her life crumbled to dust.'

He stopped, and rose to fill Alice's glass. She waited, watching him.

‘But I could have loved her, if she'd let me. At the risk of sounding incestuous, I could have loved you, because, like Clodagh, I know what you are like and what you like.'

He looked at Alice.

‘I'm not jealous of Clodagh. I'm only sorry that you should be put through this hoop for her, socially. I understand exactly what you say about loneliness. I've had a mistress for years – fifteen to be exact – because I'm a tender man and a passionate man and Cecily can't let herself allow me to be either. It doesn't suit her to acknowledge that I
like
women.'

‘Martin—' Alice said.

‘Cecily never brought the boys up to like women. She didn't try. They are both afraid of women. I didn't try either. I didn't see until too late. In that respect, I am quite as much to blame as she is.'

Alice reached over to take Richard's hand.

‘So sad,' Alice said. ‘So sad. You are actually exactly the right man for her.'

He smiled.

‘Oh, I know that. I've known that for forty years.'

Alice bent her head.

‘Forty years! The things people live with—'

‘Sometimes you have to. If you don't at heart want anything else.'

‘But a
mistress
—'

‘Would a string of call girls be better?'

Alice looked up.

‘You mean—?'

‘Yes.'

‘Jesus,' Alice said, with Clodagh's intonation.

‘I haven't been allowed to make love to Cecily for almost twenty years.'

‘But you
still
—'

‘Yes, I still.'

‘Wouldn't you like to have stopped? Loving her, I mean—'

‘Only very theoretically. And occasionally. Perhaps I'm just immensely pigheaded and won't admit to failure. Perhaps it's love.'

Alice flung herself back in her chair.

‘
Love
,' she said.

Later, when he was driving her to Paddington, Richard said quite casually that he would like to buy her a little flat or house in Salisbury, to be near the children's school. He said it would be a secret between the two of them. He said it would have no strings. She could have it for a month or a year or however long she wanted it for. She felt quite bewildered by the offer and said, looking away from him ‘But why?' and he said for the children first and for her and Martin second.

‘
Martin?
'

‘If you have some independence, he won't feel so threatened or resentful. It will make the next step easier. He cannot bear the thought that the law will require him to give money to a woman he believes has betrayed him. If you don't need so much from him, that's one less battle. One less battle is good for the children.'

‘But you can't, why should you—'

‘Mind your own business,' Richard said. ‘Just let me know when you know.'

In the train, tiredness fell upon Alice like a hammer blow. She put her head back on the orange tweed headrest with which British Rail sought to cosset its passengers, and closed her eyes. Through her mind a procession of people moved, Clodagh and her children and Martin, her parents, her parents-in-law, Clodagh's parents, all spinning slowly by, their faces seeming to wheel up out of a soft darkness and then melt away again into it. I am the link, Alice thought. All these people, through me, have their future. It's a horrible power, but it's real. And it's mine. Even if I don't want it, it's mine. Things aren't going to happen to me now because I have to make the next things happen. I have to choose. I am far beyond any point I ever was before and there's nothing to shield me now. I am in a high, bare, painful place . . .

‘Excuse me,' a voice said next to her, ‘but am I on the right train to make a connection for Didcot Parkway?'

Elizabeth Meadows opened the door of her sister's house in Colchester and found Richard Jordan there. She was so astonished that she almost shut the door again in fright. He said, smiling, ‘I wondered if you would have forgotten what I looked like.'

‘Yes,' she said, ‘No—'

From the through sitting room where she was polishing the brass fire-irons, Elizabeth's sister Ann called, ‘Who is it? I wish you'd shut the door.'

‘Come in,' Elizabeth said.

He followed her into the cream painted hall where a Swiss cheese-plant sat exactly in the centre of an otherwise empty table, and then into the sitting room. Ann Barlow was wearing cotton gloves to protect her hands from the brass cleaning wadding and a flowered pinafore with a big front pocket on which ‘Breakages!' was embroidered in royal blue stranded cotton. She scrambled to her feet, frowning. If there was one thing she hated more than an unexpected caller, it was an unexpected
man
caller.

‘You remember Richard Jordan. Alice's father-in-law—'

In Ann Barlow's mind, the Jordans were entangled with the breakdown of her sister's marriage. She pulled off a glove and held out an indifferent hand, making ritual noises about coffee which Richard said untruthfully that he would love. He was directed towards a flowered armchair from which he could see a regimented garden and a white painted seat and a line of washing hung up in strict order of size. Elizabeth did not know what to do with him. She resented him fiercely both for coming and for looking so at ease now he was here. She sat opposite him and stared at his well-shod feet and resolved that she would not help him conversationally.

He did not seem to mind her unfriendliness. He told her that James had learned to swim in Cornwall, which she remained inflexible about since Alice hadn't seen fit to tell her they were going to Cornwall in the first place. He admired the delphiniums and said Cecily was opposed heart and soul to the notion of the new pink ones. He remarked on the beastliness of the A12, to which Elizabeth managed to reply that she didn't drive any more, and then Ann came in with a tray of coffee and there was the usual fuss – Elizabeth despised Ann's houseproudness as deeply suburban – with little tables and spoons and plates to catch biscuit crumbs. When the fuss had subsided, Richard began to talk very differently. He said he was here without Alice's knowledge or permission but she had enough to cope with just now and he had made a unilateral decision to come that he would probably be punished for. He then said, with a calm Elizabeth found horrible, that Alice and Martin had separated because Alice had had a love affair with a woman, and that Alice was at the moment trying to determine her future and Martin was trying to recover from a breakdown. He then said, unwisely, that he hoped they would not be too harsh on anyone. At this point, Ann Barlow put down her coffee cup and left the room.

‘I hope,' Richard said, ‘that I have not shocked your sister.'

‘Of course you have.'

‘And you? Have I shocked you?'

‘Nothing,' Elizabeth said angrily, ‘nothing really shocks me.' She gave Richard the first proper look she had awarded him ‘You are a meddler,' she said. ‘And I doubt your motives.'