11 April

Once upon a time, a couple moved to a small Suffolk village, in search of a better quality of life and a small rural community in which to raise their children. The couple – let’s call them Tom and Mary – quickly became respected and liked, and in due course pillars of their new community; lay figures of the church, active in the village school, dispensing benevolent charity and wisdom wherever they went. He is tall and patrician, kindly with a hint of severity, she is elegant and eternally pleasant; the kind of people who make you feel clumsy and gauche. (Whenever I used to meet them in the village I would morph into a sort of Waynetta Slob figure, screeching at my children, who would invariably lose all hint of charm and become whiny and sullen). Tom and Mary became close friends with another village couple, the same age, the same lifestyle – we’ll call them John and Clare. There was always something a little more louche, a little more cavalier, about John, but with his wife he made the perfect foil for John and Mary, who glowed with sweetness and virtue. Tom and Mary’s son grew up, in the fullness of time, and married John and Clare’s daughter, their lives now bound together irrevocably, quiet and respectable middle-class lives played out against a backdrop of timeless English countryside. Then one day the village – and Clare – reeled with the news of John’s long standing infidelity with another woman in their circle (I’ve forgotten her name, but she doesn’t come into the story much). The people who seemed to take it worst of all were Tom and Mary, particularly Tom. Distraught on behalf of Clare and his daughter in law, he railed against John, publicly and privately, and seemed to feel personally betrayed by this slipping of standards and descent into brutal personal chaos. John eventually left the village with his new woman, but not before the one-time friendship with Tom and Mary had descended into war. It seemed to involve everyone; the vicar, parishioners, neighbours; apparently the Bishop was appealed to at one point, since neither Tom nor John would enter the church if the other was in it. They didn’t have adjoining houses, luckily, but their not inconsiderable gardens were separated only by a shallow stream, the foxgloves in one garden close enough to sneer at the dahlias in the other. When John left, the village sighed with relief; now the whole sorry mess could be a nine-day wonder, and slip back into the annals of local lore. And no-one wanted to make things hard for Clare, either; despite the gossip at the shop, the whisperings behind the prayer-sheets, the raised eyebrows at the font, anyone with a shred of empathy could understand the horror of a fractured life.

Tom and Mary, for some reason I can’t quite fathom, also seemed strangely diminished by the affair. Perhaps it was the shock of the break-up of their little set, or some vague realisation in Tom’s mind that the whole saga had got out of hand, but they seemed suddenly older, more querulous, less glowing with an aura of sanctity. They sold their big house and settled into a cottage nearer the heart of the village. They sold their house to a young couple, Rose and Charles, who had moved here with their toddler son and baby girl. They seemed set, in the fullness of time, to take over the role, vacated by Tom and Mary, of village elders, so perfectly did they reflect the youth of the older couple. Head to toe Boden, confident and genial, they adapted with ease to creeping middle age in the shires. But hubris was lurking just around the corner, beckoning in glee. Tom, at the point of slipping gently into old age, had a very public affair. With Rose, some twenty years his junior. Two more broken families. More shock and gossip for everyone else. Tom, Rose and Charles all, at varying points, moved away. And what of Mary and Clare, the abandoned wives, brought up to smile rigidly in the face of disaster? They sold their respective houses and moved in together (platonically, as far as anyone is aware), in glorious defiance of fate, to this day still pillars of the local community. And they say nothing ever happens in the country.