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towards this unexpected baby for mapping out her life for her again and threatening her with its needs. Martin seemed extremely pleased except for taking out, with immense ostentation, an insurance policy against school fees which he appeared to regard, Alice felt, as something he was nobly doing for her .
    â€˜Ignore him,’ Juliet said, ‘just fade him out. It’s the only way to survive living with a man.’
    â€˜But the baby isn’t just mine!’
    â€˜You try telling any father that. Henry will acknowledge William and Simon when they are captaining the first eleven, and strictly not before. If you wanted anything else, you shouldn’t have married an Englishman.’
    â€˜No one else offered.’
    â€˜Allie,’ Juliet said, ‘just get on with this baby, would you? You’ll make a much better job of it than Martin in any case. I despair of myself but I think I envy you.’
    Charlie was born, suddenly, a month early, and Alice went into a deep, deep decline. Sunk in the fogs of a profound depression, she was carried off to Dummeridge with the baby where she remained for a month, struggling inch by inch out of the depths into which she had tumbled. Pills, frequent small meals, sleep, confiding conversation and gentle exercise were prescribed as her regime. Martin, thankful to surrender this dismal conundrum to his mother, telephoned nightly for bulletins and was spoiled tenderly by Alice’s friends who pitied his male dilemma in the kitchen.
    She came home pale and thin and slightly sad, but she was better. Martin was very sweet to her but at the same time anxious she should know that he had suffered too, alone at night with the two elder children and responsible for the morning whirlwind of rejected eggs and lost gumboots. The week Alice returned, Cecily wrote privately to Martin, to the office in Salisbury, and said she thought Alice needed both a change and more support. She suggested a house move and offered to pay for help and for a holiday, a holiday without any of the children, the moment Charlie was weaned.
    And then the gods produced The Grey House, out of casual conversation at a dinner party, and presented it to the Jordans on a plate. It was not just the house they offered, but village life, the chance and the need to be part of a proper community, where you couldn’t even go to buy stamps, Alice thought excitedly, without meeting several people you knew. There would be a church fête, and a flower rota, and a list for driving old people into Salisbury, or to the hospital, and men from the Park would bring loads of logs in winter, and a Christmas tree, and in the summer she would pityingly watch the neat tourists emerge from the parked Toyotas and peer hopefully – but fruitlessly – down the pretty, sloping street for a tea shop. She would, she knew it, envy no one, long for nothing. In Pitcombe she would feel again what she had felt at Dummeridge ten years ago when she was twenty-one – she would feel she had come home.

CHAPTER FOUR
    â€˜Now the county travelling library ,’ said Miss Pimm with the separating articulateness of Marghanita Laski, ‘is a great blessing.’
    â€˜Tuesdays, did you say?’ Alice said, obediently writing it down on her list.
    â€˜Tuesday afternoons. Three to three-thirty. The librarian is an excellent vegetable gardener and to be relied upon for brassicas .’
    â€˜Brassicas’, wrote Alice.
    James, leaning against Alice, thought, with wonder, that they were discussing underclothes. He had his finger up his nose. He pulled it out and offered it to Miss Pimm.
    â€˜Gucky,’ he said.
    She averted her gaze.
    â€˜Mrs Leigh-Brent runs the church cleaning rota. And Miss Payne is in charge of the flowers . I know Mrs Macaulay would gratefully welcome help on Mondays with the community shop and of course Mr and Mrs Fanshawe will be happy to register you with the local Conservative