Joanna Trollope - A Village Affair

The rage was more exhausting than anything Martin had ever known. It fed on everybody, everything, and it refused to subject itself to reason. It boiled in him like some seething, evil broth, and whether he controlled it or gave vent to it out on the cliffs with his mother's dogs, he felt no better. Sometimes he thought he would burst, and often he wished he would, trapped as he was in this boiling cauldron. Cecily would say to him sorrowfully that she wished he could let go. If only she knew! He suspected that if he let go entirely, he would die, and most days, for a spell at least, he wished for that. He imagined the cool, quiet, dark state of nothingness because, when it came to the crunch of thinking about Heaven, he discovered that he didn't want to believe there was one. He could not bear the thought of any further existence, in whatever form. The most desirable state was nothingness, just not to be. That seemed to him the only state in which there could be no torment.

The only crumb of comfort - the smallest crumb came from the oddest quarter, from his father. When Richard came home from a journey to Australia, Martin saw at once, and to his amazement, that Richard perceived his rage. Richard made much less fuss of him than Cecily but he was, for all that, much more tender. He made Martin feel that he was not a broken child but a fellow man. Martin heard him, one morning, saying to Cecily in a voice of great anger, 'For God's sake, will you allow him his dignity?'

He could not hear Cecily's reply. He was sure she made one because she never let accusations just stand, she always had to defend herself. She looked old and tired just now. So, Martin thought, looking in the shaving mirror each morning, did he. He avoided looking at himself except for shaving because somehow the sight of his face made him desperate for his children, for Charlie particularly, in his cheerful baby simplicity. And he couldn't think of them because that led back to Alice, to himself and Alice, man and woman, and then, of course, the path of thought went downwards suddenly into the roaring cavern of his anguish and his rage.

Richard cancelled a follow-up trip to Australia because of Martin. Instead he told Martin they were going to pull down a stone shed that had once held a primitive pump engine, and use the stones to repair the wall at the far end of the famous potager. In the fields beyond, the fields that ran up between the woods towards the sea, they were harvesting, early. The huge combine, like a vast ship, went calmly up and down the golden slopes leaving behind it the shorn earth and the great rolled bales. At midday, there was always an hour of quiet and the odd bold rabbit would streak across the fields and vanish into the sanctuary of the woods. The air smelled of burned earth and dust because, although the sun rarely came out, it sailed imprisoned behind a steady veil of cloud which kept the land heavy and warm and quiet. Martin and Richard worked mostly in silence. Martin said once, 'I'd forgotten how good you are at this sort of thing.'

And Richard, turning a piece of stone in his hands to see how it would fit, said, 'So had I. I sometimes think I've quite a lot of talents I didn't exercise. Usually through my own fault.'

When the wall was finished, Martin said he wanted to return to work. Cecily grew very agitated and said how could he, where would he live, who would look after him, was he going to divorce Alice? He said he didn't know about divorce, in fact he didn't know about anything much, just now, except that he wanted to stop feeling an invalidish freak and go back to work. He would live, he said, with the Dunnes. Henry and Juliet had invited him for as long as he wanted.

'But I shall have nothing left,' Cecily said later, fiercely, to Richard.

There's me-'

'You! You need nobody. You never have.'

'I am made up,' Richard said, 'of exactly the same human components of need as you.'

And he went away then, and by some instinct went up to the old playroom in the attic and found Martin there, with a tumbler of whisky, weeping without restraint because he had thought nobody would hear him.

Most days one of the children asked when Martin would be better enough to come home. Usually Alice said, soon. Once a week Juliet came over and picked them up and took them home with her so that they could see Martin, and the night after these visits James usually wet his bed. It was the school holidays and the days yawned for occupation. Alice devised a list of duties, and Natasha's was to go down to the shop. She liked this because all down the street people stopped and talked to her and asked her how she was and Mrs Finch would come out of the back part of the shop and give her sweets and sometimes a kiss pungent with Coty's 'L'Aimant'. The rest of the day she did not like so much. The feeling in the house was peculiar, without her father, and she missed school, and Sophie, who had been taken to Corfu by her family. She spent a lot of time in her bedroom, drawing a wardrobe for Princess Power, and she wrote a huge notice saying 'Private - Keep out' which she stuck on her door, four feet from the floor so that James could not possibly avoid seeing it. Behind the closed door, besides drawing, she spent a good deal of time painting her toenails with Clodagh's scarlet polish.

When Cecily telephoned to suggest that she and Martin and Dorothy take the children to Cornwall - as usual, she said with emphasis - Natasha thought it quite extraordinary that Alice wasn't coming. James, in floods of tears, said he wouldn't go without Alice. Natasha said why couldn't they all go, Alice and Martin and Clodagh and everybody, and Alice said it was difficult to explain but she was desperately tired in the complicated way that happened to grown-ups sometimes and she had to be by herself for a bit.

'So Clodagh can come,' said Natasha.

'Well-'

'Clodagh isn't tired.'

'Clodagh can't come. Clodagh has got something else to do that she can't not do.'

'I'll ask her to come,' Natasha said. 'We can show her the witches'rock.'

James's eyes bulged at the memory of it.

'I can't come,' Clodagh said. 'I'd love to. But I can't. I've got to plan my future, you see. I've got to find a job.'

Natasha said then at least a holiday would make Daddy completely better and he could come home afterwards. Then she burst into tears. Alice, trying to hold her, said, 'I do promise you that when you come back, everything will be sorted out.'

But Natasha would not be held and shouted, 'I hate you!' and rushed out into the garden and picked up Charlie's sandpit spade and hurled it so that it sailed up into the air, far further and harder than she had meant, and came down through the greenhouse roof. Then she stood and screamed with panic at what she had done. James, standing in the kitchen doorway and watching her, began to pee helplessly into his shorts.

Cecily came to collect the children herself. She thought Alice looked awful, but she would have been even angrier if Alice had not looked awful. Indeed, she looked so awful that Cecily would almost have liked to say or do something affectionate but Alice, though perfectly polite, made such a gesture quite impossible. Together, they put the children's bags into the boot of the car, and then strapped in Charlie's car seat, and Charlie into his car seat, and urged Natasha and James to get in beside him. Nobody was quite crying but everybody almost was.

'Bring me some shells,' Alice said through the car window.

'Mummy-' James mouthed at her, not daring to speak for fear of letting out his sobs.

'You might find a starfish-'

Cecily put the car into gear.

'I'm sure we will. And James is old enough for the smallest surfboard now-'

'James! Isn't that lovely?'

The car slid forward. Three faces turned her way, crumpling, and Cecily's free hand waved from the driver's window. Alice made herself stand there and wave back until the car was gone between the hornbeams and then she turned and went back into the empty house.

'If we were city women,' Alice said slowly, 'we'd have a completely different life. It's being country women that makes it so difficult-'

She stopped. City or country made no difference to Clodagh. Clodagh was Clodagh wherever she was.

'Difficult for me, I mean. Even if I moved to a city, I'd still be a country woman now. I'd still feel visible.'

'You're visible because you're you.'

Tm too visible just now-'

There had been a nasty little moment in the shop that morning, a moment when Cathy Fanshawe had ignored Alice's greeting and turned effusively to speak to Stuart Mott who was buying cigarettes and staring at Alice with a look of such repulsive interest that she had felt quite sick. When she came out of the shop, Michelle had darted up to her, out of the shop yard, and had clutched her convulsively and wordlessly, but it wasn't enough to undo the silent insults of Cathy Fanshawe and Stuart Mott. Going up the street, slowly, with her head as high as she could get it, she thought that even the cottage facades looked as if they had taken stands, were holding their breath until she was past.

'You must get away,' Clodagh said.

They were lying in the orchard under the old Russet Egremont where Clodagh had suggested they plant a Paul's Himalayan Musk which would spread through the gnarled branches like a cascade of late blossom ...

'No,' Alice said slowly.

'Yes. Yes!'

Clodagh rolled on her side and propped her head on her hand. She put out her free hand and ran a forefinger down Alice's profile.

'Come with me. We'll go down to Windover. We'll start a new life there together, you and me and the children. I'll get a job. You'll paint. Alice-'

Alice turned her head to look at Clodagh.

'Windover will be just the same as here.'

'No. No. Here everyone knew you as a married woman. There we'll arrive as two women, you and me, no past. We can do it. We can do anything we want.' She pushed her face close to Alice's. 'You don't need money. I've got that. You don't need anything, you just need to come. I love you. Do you hear me? I love you.'

Alice just went on looking. After a long time, it seemed to Clodagh, she said, 'And I love you. More than I think I have ever loved anyone.'

'Then come, then come-'

Alice turned back to look at the sky. She pulled a long grass from its sheath beside her and put the juicy end between her teeth.

'Loving you makes all decisions much more difficult. Loving anybody does-'

Clodagh snorted.

'You sound like Lettice-'

Lettice had stopped Clodagh the other day, coming down from the Park, and had taken her by the shoulders and said, very fiercely indeed, 'If you love Alice Jordan, my girl, you have to let her go.' Clodagh had been amazed. She still was. She liked Lettice a lot but some of her opinions had got stuck in some kind of timewarp. Throw away the best thing that had ever happened to her? Deliberately? Causing heartbreak all round? Honestly.

Alice was frowning.

'Alice,' Clodagh said softly, to win back her attention.

'Mm?'

'Look at me-'

Alice turned.

'I'm looking-'

Tell me why you love me.'

Alice smiled, a slow, lazy smile.

'I love your gaiety. And your freedom of spirit. And your arrogance and strength and mad courage. And I love your love for me.'

After some time, Clodagh said, 'We don't have to go to Windover. I can sell it. It's worth millions, I should think. We'll go abroad. We can go anywhere. What about the South of France?'

'Lovely,' Alice said, but her mind had slipped into neutral once more.

'You have to come with me, you know. You'd only be half a person without me. Like I'd be, without you.'

'I know.'

Then when shall we go?'

Alice sat up and pulled her plait over her shoulder and began to pick grass seeds out of it.

'You must go.'

'Shut up!' Clodagh shouted in panic, springing up.

'Calm down,' Alice said. 'I just mean for a bit. I must be absolutely alone, for a bit-'

Clodagh stooped to seize her shoulders.

'You won't go and see Martin, promise-'

'Martin is in Cornwall.'

'Or Juliet. Or my mother. Or-'

'Clodagh-'

'Promise!' Clodagh screamed.

Alice slapped her.

'Shut up!'

'Sorry,' Clodagh said, crying. 'Oh God, Alice. Oh my God!'