The pub, where Mr Finch allowed himself a weekly pint, was simpler in its approach, perhaps because fewer women went to it. In the lounge bar the subject was hardly mentioned, and in the public, led by Stuart Mott, there was briefly considerable crudity and then, with the football season starting up, loss of interest. As for the church - well, here Mr Finch's frail faith, born out of a love of ritual and a powerful wish that something, some day, might come out of regular church attendance, was very disappointed. He had hoped for a sermon on sin, full of words like evil and phrases like wrong-doing, not because he wished to see Alice condemned, but because he wanted a stout moral rail upon which to put his own hand. What he had got was a sermon on St Barnabas and another on inner city renewal. The strange part, thought Mr Finch, gazing fixedly at a single apple he held in his hand, was that a business like this, an upset like this Alice Jordan-Clodagh Unwin thing, was that it drove you in on yourself for hours and hours of self-examination. The firm ground you thought you stood on suddenly began to heave and shudder and give way. Mr Finch put the apple on the rack with its fellows and frowned at it.

Behind him, Sam cleared his throat.

'I was wondering if you could direct me to The Grey House?'

Mr Finch turned slowly. Sam was wearing a crumpled blue shirt and a red spotted handkerchief knotted round his throat, and had an air of comfortable bohemianism that filled Mr Finch with envy. He hoped it was not immediately visible that his own trousers were made of polyester.

'I shall be only too pleased-'

He took Sam out on to the pavement and pointed up the hill.

'Go straight up until you come to the cottage with the well in the garden - the well is purely ornamental - and turn right there. The gates of The Grey House are directly ahead.'

He waited for Sam to tell him who he was and why he was going to The Grey House, but Sam merely said thank you and climbed back into his car - the interior, Mr Finch noted with admiration, was chaos - and drove off as he had been directed. Forlornly, Mr Finch went back into the shop, reflecting that it was the lot of those who worked in service industries to be, for the most part, entirely invisible to those they served.

Alice, who had never been a demonstrative child in the least, seemed to want Sam to hold her; so he did. He held her for a long time in her bright kitchen while she neither cried nor said much beyond that she was pleased to see him and that she had had no idea that coming alive would be so hard. For the rest of the time she just had her arms round his solid trunk and her cheek on his chest. He was deeply touched by this. After many minutes she sighed and withdrew slowly and went to fetch a bottle of cider from the larder. While she was away, he leaned on the bottom half of the stable door and watched a pram under an apple tree which was rocking violently and intermittently. There was washing hanging out and a half-grown cat asleep in the sun and a trug of lettuces beside it. One of the things about humankind that had never ceased to amaze Sam was that in most cases, whatever the drama, life went on. Emotions and psyches were torn to ribbons, healths and minds were broken, lives were crushed, but on, on, went the relentless business of keeping the machine going, meal after meal, washing and sweeping and going to bed. Perhaps, he thought, turning to accept his glass of cider, it was the treadmill that stopped you going mad. Perhaps the need to do the laundry saved your sanity.

'Maybe I should have told you,' Alice said, sitting on the corner of the table, 'but I didn't tell anyone. I didn't want to. I felt so free. You know, there's been years of ought to's and have to's and suddenly there was pure, clear, strong want to. It was such a relief. There simply was no choice.'

She looked at Sam.

'Society isn't necessarily right about what's good for you.'

He drank.

'It's right,' he said, 'about what's good for most people. But not for everyone. It's the majority that makes the rules and then we call it society. A woman colleague of mine says she resents society for making divorce so easy. That's a circular resentment. She ends up, most likely, with herself.'

'You always do, don't you. That's the great battle, learning to live with yourself-'

'I don't think,' Sam said, looking at her, 'that it's a battle that ought ever to be won.'

'I hurt,' Alice said. 'I hurt all over. I don't think that there's an inch of me that doesn't hurt, inside or out. Every tiny bit of feeling hurts, loving most of all, which is the one thing I want to do, must do-'

Sam stopped leaning on the door and went across to Alice and held her pigtail at the base of her neck. She leaned her head back against his hand for a moment, and then she leaned it against him.

'I'm going to quote you something.'

'Poetry?'

'George Eliot.'

'I only ever,' Alice said mournfully, 'read The Mill on the Floss.'

This is Adam Bede.'

She turned her face into his shirt front.

Tell me.'

' "We get accustomed," ' Sam said into the space of kitchen above her head, ' "to mental as well as bodily pain, without, for all that, losing our sensibility to it: It becomes a habit of our lives and we cease to imagine a condition of perfect ease as possible for us. Desire is chastened into submission, and we are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence and act as if we were not suffering. For it is at such periods that the sense of our lives having visible and invisible relations beyond any of which our present or prospective self is the centre, grows like a muscle that we are obliged to lean on and exert." '

Then it was quiet. It was quiet for a long time and neither of them moved until a small commotion could be heard in the hall, and then the kitchen door opened and there, with James squealing joyously in her arms, stood Clodagh.

'You know why I've come back,' Clodagh said later while they were getting supper. 'Don't you?'

'Yes.'

'I think I'll remind you all the same. I've come back to collect you. You and the children. I'm selling everything. We can go anywhere.'

Alice went on slicing mushrooms. Upstairs Sam was reading Winnie-the-Pooh to Natasha and James, giving Australian accents to Kanga and Roo. It was a great success. Shrieks of pleasure filtered occasionally downstairs. Charlie, in his sleeping suit, was in his highchair in the kitchen eating raspberries with his fingers. Balloon, replete with supper, slept against the Aga. Outside the open stable door, the late summer countryside lazed in a syrupy sunset.

'Don't stonewall me,' Clodagh said. 'That's what you did when I went away. You said you must think. I've been away nearly a month and it's been a nightmare. Have you had a nightmare?'

'Yes,' Alice said. She slid the mushrooms into a casserole. 'I was silly to think I'd find any peace. There was no one but it was rampageously unpeaceful. I felt that I was in one of those little mechanical revolving machines used for stone polishing. Except that I seemed to be the one stone that wouldn't polish.'

'You needed me,' Clodagh said.

There was a little pause and then Alice said, 'I wanted you.'

'Needed.'

'I looked need up in the dictionary,' Alice said. 'It said it was a state that required relief. That seemed rather feeble.'

Clodagh put her hands on Alice's shoulders and turned her.

'If you don't have me, you'll stop living.'

'So you keep saying.'

Clodagh's eyes were bright with tears.

'Alice. Oh, Alice, have a little pity-'

She took her hands away.

'You can't imagine what it was like in London. Eleanor and Ruth were so kind but they have each other. Ma and Pa are trying to be kind, even Pa, but they haven't a clue. Loving you has stopped me belonging anywhere because I'm not fit for anyone else but you. You've ruined me for other people. I don't want anything any more but to make you happy. And your children. I'd do anything for your children.'

She looked across at Charlie who had fitted a raspberry on his finger like a thimble and was regarding it with wonder.

'I adore Charlie,' Clodagh said.

She sat down on a kitchen chair and bent herself round her knees.

'I hate whining like this. But it's so important. I want to give to you and the children. I know I'll be better if I do, a better person. I thought, while I was in London, that I'd like to work for you all. I was so happy when I thought of that.'

Alice came to sit next to her. She put a hand out and stroked her wild head, and thought, as she had thought before, that when Clodagh was distressed she became like an exotic broken bird with tattered, gorgeous plumage and splintered frail bones showing through.

'Clodagh.'

There was silence.

'Clodagh, I didn't want to say this now but we seem to have got to the point where I have to because there isn't anything else we can say with this between us. I'm not coming away with you. If it's any comfort, I'm not going back to Martin either. I expect you'll accuse me of being pompous, but I've made those decisions because it wouldn't be honest to live with either of you. Desire doesn't come into it. What does come into it is all the emotional leftovers I'd have to tow into either relationship and which I'd never be free of. It's no good blaming anyone and it would be worse to lug blame around with me.'

After some time, Glodagh raised her face and glared at Alice.

'I sometimes wonder if you even have a heart-'

Alice got up and went over to Charlie, lifting him out of his highchair. She said over her shoulder, 'I can't keep saying I love you. It loses value if I keep saying it, like some silly jingle. But I do. If you're in the pain you say you're in, you should be able to imagine how I feel too. I'm scared stiff of being without you. But I have to be.' She put her face briefly into Charlie's neck. 'I'm not telling you the way I wanted to but I suppose that's inevitable. I'll probably make an awful mess of telling Martin too.'

Clodagh was crying. Seeing her, Charlie's face began to crumple up.

'You see,' Alice said, 'we've got to stop this. We've got to stop all this not sleeping, and crying, and giving each other such agony-'

'Your way!' Clodagh shrieked. 'Your bloody way!'

Alice had a sudden spurt of temper.

'How you hate it, don't you, when you can't have yours!'

Charlie began to wail. Clucking at him, Alice took him out of the kitchen and up the stairs. From Natasha's room came the sound of Rabbit explaining something officiously to Tigger who wasn't listening. Alice carried Charlie into his cot where he settled at once into the private oblivious contentment that lived there. She pulled the string of his musical box which began to play 'Edelweiss' unevenly. Suppose, she thought, bending over Charlie while he sucked ferociously on his fingers, suppose that instead of coming down and attempting to storm her way to success, Clodagh had come to tell Alice that it was over and that she, Clodagh, had found someone new? What then? Would that have been easier? She straightened up. Easier, but worse. Once you had stopped letting things happen and started to make them happen, you couldn't go back . . . Clodagh had known that all her life, which was why she was in such anguish now, powerless, rudderless.

In a sudden rush of pity, Alice ran back downstairs to the kitchen, but of course Clodagh was gone, leaving all the knives and forks on the table crossed over one another in a childish gesture of love and anger.

'So you want a divorce,' Martin said.

'Yes.'

'I ought to tell you that I feel pretty bitter.'

'Yes. I know.'

'I'm not to blame.'

'It all,' Alice said, 'goes too deep for blame. Or apology.'

'I don't see it that way.'

'I know. I know you don't. You think that if I were to grovel and apologize abjectly you would suddenly feel better, everything would be all right. Well it wouldn't and nor would you because nothing's that simple and this particularly isn't.'

Martin had taken a flat overlooking the river. He had been most insistent that Alice should meet him there, whether to assert his independence, or to demonstrate the sad impersonality of his life now, she could not guess. It was a sunny flat, on the first floor of a substantial Regency house, furnished inappropriately in early Habitat. They sat in two foam-filled chairs covered in chocolate brown corduroy and watched the river and a family of swans with three beige, black-beaked, adolescent cygnets.