New and Collected Stories (37 page)

It was the best joke in years: three crimson faces choking behind the windscreen of the descending lorry. Bert pulled into the side of the road and switched off, tears flowing from all but Donnie, who knew it was a good story, but wasn't paralysed by it. When the lorry started again he felt happy – in spite of the half-soaked cap (rescued at the last minute from the pool) whose damp side ate through to his hair – singing to himself because Dora might have another boy. He still didn't know why he'd insisted that they eat in Heanor because, all said and done, it didn't matter to him where they ate, as long as he was able to fill his aching guts with something.

Revenge

The service was over, and we signed the book, stood outside the late-English Perpendicular nondescript church, while the buffed-up blackened eye of the camera fixed us forever in the bewildered yet happy world.

Confetti snowed down, coloured snow, tips of spring flowers falling over our bent backs as we got into the car. Life was beginning, and we laughed, never wondering whether or not we would cry at the far end of it all. The preacher's claptrap still fed my humour, though it wasn't long before I began to look back on it as one big farce. My mates didn't even grin when I agreed to a church wedding. They thought I was quite right to give in to her, the spineless lot, and so I was glad to change into another department where the hypocrisy of friendship hadn't had time to jell, so that we could all concur how soft I'd been to slide back on my principles, even though it hurt me to say so.

I was nearing forty, and Caroline who became my wife had just turned thirty, so it was late for both of us. But every old sock finds an old shoe, as those at work laughingly put it. With my parents dead, I lived alone in the house I had just finished buying, and that as an only son I had grown up in. It was a house of the better sort, with three floors instead of two, and set a few yards back from the pavement. My bride now came there for the reception.

She looked so beautiful, among all our friends at the table, that I wondered how she'd come to marry me, which explains why I'd let us be spliced in church perhaps. But looks never counted for much between us. I'm well set up and stocky, with all my hair still and swept back neat. What's more I've never been got at by illness. All that bothered me was a tape-worm in Gibraltar during the war, but it wasn't so rare as to be a real sickness, though such a thing growing inside me, no matter how much they pulled it out, took weeks to get rid of. In fact I became so badly that I was shipped home, and sometimes I wonder if I'm not still harbouring it, I feel so jumpy. Maybe it's just the memory, and time will tell, though it has enough to live on in the meantime if it really is down there chewing away.

I was looking at the darling I'd married, tall and thin-faced, with fine fair hair that I hoped she'd now grow long (though she never did), and good features when she was pleasantly smiling. Otherwise I'd stick my thumb towards the earth and enjoy feeling a swine – but it's too early to start being hard on myself. I'd only met her six months before, and what all the hurry was I couldn't now say. Certainly, I didn't know then that she'd gone through a bout of mental trouble at twenty. Even if I had known there'd have been no backing out, but rather I would have worn the fact in my buttonhole to show everyone what a noble sort I was.

So many presents piled on the sideboard gave me a funny feeling, a disturbance I couldn't remark on because it hardly existed, and in any case it wouldn't have been polite to do so at such a time. Around the glory of the cake was a spread-out zone of toasters, dinner-services and tea-sets, electric blankets, transistor radios, horseshoes and telegrams, records and ashtrays, plastic fruit and paper flowers, kettles and bedside lights, that everyone looked avidly over, stuff which almost brought tears into Caroline's eyes when she passed them by to take off her dress upstairs.

Two rooms had been opened into one, and the space was full, tables put together down the middle and bordered by every chair in the house, plus a few brought by her brother in his brand-new estate car. Trimmings were up, lights on, and drink was flowing. What could go wrong with such a spread of cake and salad, ham and wine? I said so in my speech after we'd all set to. A friend from work mumbled something about going at it like a bull at a gate, but I stopped him in mid-flight. I didn't like a thing like that, because I considered it the vilest kind of talk. Times were changing, and there was no call for smutty humour any more. It brought silence for a few moments, but I noticed how Caroline smiled her thanks, and that was good enough for me. As for Bernie, I'd plaster him when I got back to work, unless it slipped my mind, which it most likely would. I was glad again. The lights were back on in the attics of my brain – except when they glimpsed that sideboard-pile of presents.

‘Ladies and gentlemen!' I shouted, and they fell quiet. ‘Friends, boys and girls, I've come here today' – they were already rocking with laughter because it was good clean fun, and I was known as a bit of a jokester – ‘to let you know that I am now … oh my God! I've forgotten the word. Now, what was the word I wanted? Eh? Tell me somebody, please.'

‘Married!' Bernie shouted, my old friend.

‘Married. Thank you. That was it. To tell you that I am now
married
! You can't know how much it means to me when I tell you that, but I thought I'd explain the presence of all this food and drink, and those gifts you can see behind me, all that fantastic stack of gifts … otherwise you might wonder!'

‘Good old Richard.'

‘Get on with it then!' That was from Bernie again. He never could leave well alone.

‘So here's a toast to my presence here, and to Caroline, and to all of you who've come to honour us. We left it rather late, but better that, I feel, than the other way. I'm not much of a hand at weddings, this being my first. I didn't go to my parents', like some people I've met who might have done, so excuse any lack of formality, dear friends.' I was sweating now, and more and more toasts didn't help. Neither did the food, which I wasn't able to touch. The arrangement was that we'd stay in the house that night, and leave for Hastings at ten the next morning, and train times kept going round in my head.

The only thing now was to render a couple of songs for them, which I did. My voice was good, and I'd often entertained at friends' houses and on bus-outings from work. I gave them, but mainly for Caroline's sake, because I knew she loved both: ‘I'll Walk Beside You' and ‘Abide With Me'. But that was the last time I did any such thing, which was a pity, because I was always proud of my voice.

One by one they left, wishing me luck and happiness. I felt like going with them, shaking hands with the bride and invisible bridegroom, bestowing on them the best of health, then vanishing into the autumn dusk of chip smells, fog and freedom. Yet it was my wedding, proved by those glittering and intimidating presents on the sideboard, above all by that pagoda of pots, the kingpin dinner-service in dazzling flowers and cottages. I couldn't believe I'd have to use them for the rest of my life, drink out of them, eat off them, warm myself by them. One or two people didn't want to leave, or were too drunk to do so, and the trouble is I wasn't too drunk to envy them. But I remembered my position as man and husband of the house, and helped them out into the street.

Everything had gone like clockwork and by the book. The last women to depart had washed the pots and straightened up. Neatness made the house so barren, yet I'd been looking forward to this moment for weeks and, I believe, so had Caroline. The fire was burning well, and now we could sit by it and relax, laugh over the day's routine.

I kicked off with a harmless enough remark: ‘It went easier than I expected.'

‘Perfect,' she smiled, ‘thanks to you, Richard. The service was beautiful. “Whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder”.'

‘Ay,' I assented. ‘They know how to say it.'

‘That was it, wasn't it?'

‘It was.' I was conscious and absolutely clear in my brain of the effect every word was going to have before I said it, though it had no brake whatsoever on my self-control. ‘They ought to get out an EP record of the marriage service.'

‘What a marvellous idea.'

‘Add on the first night and make it an LP.'

‘What, Richard?'

‘The morning after would make it an album, I expect. Sell like hot cakes.'

‘Are you a bit jangled?' she asked, having just caught the reek that all wasn't well.

‘If you like.'

‘Can I get you some aspirin?' My head was burning, but I said no, that I was all right. She smiled, forgiving when there was no need to be. If there had been, the balloon would have gone up already. ‘You don't have any regrets, do you love?'

It was too early to say. Did she think that nothing more was to come? ‘None,' I said, putting my arms around her. I loved her even more than I loved myself, and no man could say fairer than that. I was taken out of myself, as happy as if I were flying over a desert that was just sprouting flowers again. My arms tightened, and her head leaned comfortably on my shoulder. I'd drunk enough that day and perhaps it helped, yet it was something more that set my blood melting. Certainly I didn't have to tell myself that I was four hours married in order to feel all the breeding and manners ever instilled into me drifting away.

She stood up quickly. ‘I can't, Richard. It must be in the right way. Not yet.'

‘Why not?' I shouldn't have said that, but it came before I could help myself, throwing me back on to a filthy pavement at the butt-end of summer – which is about the only sort of earth I've ever known in my deeper moments.

‘It was the same before we were married,' she cried. ‘Always in too much of a hurry. It's almost uncouth.'

The ‘almost' clawed right through me, a mincing qualification that would have made a plain ‘uncouth' laughable by comparison. It bit deep, sounded like the worst of insults, because a real insult is when somebody tells something about yourself you've half-known all along. That's the cut. If you are told something you couldn't possibly have known, you just laugh, because it's not true, what you could not know.

I was unable to answer, and she thought I was sulking in order to get my own back. ‘Why spoil it?' she said. ‘Would you like a glass of sherry?'

I screwed out a smile. Maybe Bernie had been right after all about a bull at a gate. ‘Please, love.'

‘A slice of ham?' she called from the kitchen.

Blood in my mouth: I'd bitten my tongue. ‘No thanks.' I looked around and the spread of presents shrivelled my brain. It was a carnival that lacked a death's head, skull and crossbones and the King Snapdragon of the lot. I closed my eyes, then opened them with the thought that if I didn't they might stay shut forever. I spied a heavy poker standing by the fire, one of the gifts already unpacked, squared-off at one end and falling to a point, a beautiful instrument made by a couple of friends at work, the firm's metal but their skill and sweat – and regard for me.

I picked it up, weighed and balanced it, lifted it high and stood over the whole patchwork regalia. I've always taken pride in my arm strength, felt it gathering now in my shoulders for a job to be bloody well done.

There was a shout from the doorway: ‘Richard!'

Her face was white, thinner than I'd ever seen it, and I saw then how much this so-called marriage ceremony had worn her out. I was filled with pity, which I knew to be good and honest because I lowered the poker.

‘What are you doing?' she righteously demanded.

‘Feeling the weight of it. It's a lovely piece of work. Last forever, if you ask me.'

She put the tray down. ‘You were going to do something you'd never forgive yourself for. And I wouldn't want you to do that, because I've got to live with you.' She was always lucid during trouble, and I admired her for it. We looked at each other. She couldn't stand the silence like I could, after such a day, and I can't blame her. ‘Oh dear,' she said in sudden exultation as if that organ music was starting all over again. ‘I was right.'

I had a blinding vision of our four wounded parents squatting among that trash like a collection of grinning gnome-faced jugs, prophesying and winking at each other over the idiotic unknown step I'd taken with the darling of my life, their hats askew and atremble in delight at what we were about to do to ourselves, which was all that they had done, right to the point of out-living regret and bitterness by the time old age came upon them, which lasted a few years and enabled them to fix a grin forever that advised us to live through the rottenness like them, because we'd come to enjoy it in the end and join them in helping to pass it down to oncoming innocents forever.

The force of my arm drove a canyon down that dinner-service and split it asunder, quartered and shattered it by wave after wave of strength and agony. It was rocking, knocking every transistor out of its pocket, buckling ashtrays, irons, pot-dogs, bowls, bows, a shop-window of all the catalogue-goods of servitude spending under my poker quicker than they'd ever reach the dustbin by normal wear and tear. When I thought there was nothing left, I noticed a walnut polished biscuit-barrel untouched at one corner on the edge of the bomb damage. Coaxing it into the middle – no cooper would ever own it from henceforth – I splayed it flat like a star.

I must have taken my time over it, because Caroline had her coat on, a suitcase by her side that she'd gone to Butlin's with the year before. ‘Right,' I said, sitting exhausted on one of the stools, ‘going home, are you?'

‘Yes,' she answered coolly, while my own breath could hardly move.

‘But this is your home, so let's have your coat off. Put that case away and be sensible.'