The Wedding Group (14 page)

‘Yes, I’ve heard about that before. Well, I shall do better than you, for I am
really
going to be married in a registry office.’

‘I am glad to have had a little influence,’ Archie said in a casual voice. He studied the whiting with pride and interest. ‘We usually have fish on Wednesdays. It’s a good day for it. How is she?’ he asked, when he had floured the two fish and put them aside. ‘Your mother?’

‘She is a responsibility I feel very keenly.’

‘I can imagine
that
. You really ought to get married, you know.’

‘I
am
going to get married.’

‘Although it’s a vicious circle. Marriage ruined me, and to stop
yourself
being ruined, you feel you must go and run the
same risk. Is there no alternative? Now you have made
me
feel responsible.’

‘I’m very glad to hear it.’

‘I only hope your wife will get up for breakfast. Properly up, I mean. Shipshape and Bristol fashion. I can remember to this day that horrible quilted dressing-gown that would never fasten in the front. She was the first and only slut I ever knew.
Breakfast
, I said. A strange word to describe that horrid brew and a piece of squeaky cold toast.’

Oh, his cankered, aggrieved old mind, David thought. The enormities of his imagination.

‘Now that chore is chored,’ Archie said with satisfaction, rinsing his hands at the sink, drying them, and drawing down the cuffs of his velvet jacket, ‘so let us repair to rather less sordid surroundings. A glass of sherry in the drawing-room.’

In the drawing-room, an oil-stove gave out fumes, but no heat. While David fetched the sherry from the dining-room, Archie tucked a travelling-rug about his legs.

‘You don’t seem very much interested in my news,’ David said.

‘What news, my boy?’

‘That I’m going to be married.’

‘There’s another rug on the sofa,’ Archie said hospitably. ‘I hope you’re not after some money, you know. Much as I should like… but keeping your mother in gin has not exactly eased my situation. What with her gin, and this socialist government. Things daily go from bad to worse. I can’t remember a time when I can look back and say,
then
we were decently governed.’

‘Under Palmerston?’

Archie smiled his touching smile. ‘I think you’re teasing me; but I’m glad you know something of history. I believe so many of our troubles stem, much later, from the suffragettes.’

‘Harry Bretton thinks so, too.’

‘I can’t place a Harry Bretton. My memory doesn’t improve.’

‘My future grandfather-in-law.’

‘This is good news, dear boy. To marry into a family with sound ideas is what I did not do. They were in the hotel business…’

‘I do know that much.’

‘Of course, in the hotel business they are all Tories, but for the wrong reasons. For the feathering of the nest, and not for principles.’

‘Father, don’t you want to know about the girl I am going to marry?’

‘Girl?’ said Archie, looking alarmed, spilling some sherry on the travelling-rug. ‘I hope you’re not going to make my mistake, dear boy.’

‘Your greatest mistake was in leaving Mother.’

‘Never say it. Never say it.’

If he could mend his parents’ marriage he could get on with his own in peace and with optimism, David had decided. Then he and Cressy could live in London, with her Wimpy Bars all round her, and his friends all about him, and his work near by.

Before he had left that morning, he had told Midge that he would be late home. ‘I am going to see Father and tell him the news,’ he had said. She had not answered. Greatly daring, he had asked, ‘Any message?’ (He can come home now, was all the message Midge could think of.) ‘Kind regards, etcetera, etcetera,’ she had said.

‘You don’t seem in the least interested in whom I’m going to marry,’ David said to his father, in an offended tone of voice. ‘Haven’t even asked her name.’

‘Well, what’s her name, then? Out with it, young man.’

‘Cressida Mary MacPhail.’

‘“Cressida” is pretty. Yes, “Cressida” is very pretty. The surname sounds a bit wild; but, of course, you’ll be altering that.’

‘She’s nineteen years old.’

‘Her parents can’t be in their right minds to consider it. I trust it will be a long engagement. Well, I give you my blessing for what it’s worth, and I hope it won’t turn out too badly for you. I think, in the circumstances, another glass of sherry, don’t you?’

‘But first I must nip up and see Aunt Sylvie. She should be speaking her own language today.’

‘Don’t linger and tire her, there’s a good chap. And don’t upset her with all this talk of marrying. She’s really getting very frail – less and less and less of her, poor darling. I’ll give you five minutes, and then I must fry my whiting.’

Upstairs, in her room, Aunt Sylvie was relabelling some of her possessions. David knocked on the door and was bidden to enter by a quavering, suspicious voice. She was just setting down a tortoiseshell box, whose label she had been altering – simply by crossing out one name and writing another. Underneath every piece of furniture or ornament, stuck behind pictures and inside box-lids were little gummed tickets, so that Archie would know where everything was to go when she died. He would not know, because some of the names were those of people who had died; but Aunt Sylvie had forgotten their deaths. She had, in fact, just been crossing off a great-nephew who had not been to see her for many years. Looking at an old photograph of him, Aunt Sylvie had suddenly got into a huff at being so neglected, forgetting all the grief there had been when the young man had been killed in the landings in Normandy.

David, not knowing what she had been doing, and for something to say, admired the tortoiseshell box. She stared him out grimly. No matter how he hinted or wheedled, his name would never be written on anything of hers, she thought. No use! No use! She whispered to herself, ducking her chin down, blowing into her bodice, for the room was very warm. Even that hussy,
his mother, she remembered, had not dared to try to curry favour and cadge things out of her. Unless she now had changed her ways, and sent him foraging.

David was glad that he had been told to make a brief visit. She was very difficult to talk to. She had a regal manner of raising her eyebrows and shifting her eyes about, as if she had had enough of the conversation, and was waiting for a courtier to rid her of this troublesome kinsman.

He spoke of the weather, which had no meaning to her in that stuffy room, and he inquired after the Vicar, who Aunt Sylvie thought was none of his business. At the end of five minutes, he looked at his watch and said that he must go. ‘And Father must fry the whiting, he said,’ he added.

As he went to the door, Aunt Sylvie said nastily, ‘Another time I should like you to remember that I prefer my dinner to be a surprise.’

So grim the garden was, with all the old cabbage stumps and the reeling line of beansticks.

‘Grass it over,’ Midge had said, determinedly optimistic, while Cressy and David stood dismayed. Neither of them loved the country, and this cottage seemed in the very depths of it and had, perhaps, for that reason, been empty since summer. Back from the road, across two fields and up a bumpy track it stood, and the nearest house was Midge’s own. Throughout all their house-hunting, she had continued to see its possibilities, and every new bundle of circulars from estate-agents had seemed a threat to her.

Inside the cottage and in every room, she saw possibilities. Walls could be knocked down at little cost, or proofed against damp, and dreadful
art-nouveau
tiles round the sitting-room fireplace were so hideous that they were ‘fun’, she said. She suggested they might even be made a feature; and then added that it
was
only a suggestion, thinking she had made too many.

They had clumped dolefully upstairs and about the bare bedrooms. Even in the largest one there was no place to fit in a
double bed. ‘I shall get my chilblains again, going from one bed to the other,’ Cressy said.

‘
I
will get the chilblains,’ David gallantly promised.

Midge looked aloof.

In the end, she had won all her points, and David and Cressy were married, and living in the cottage, and looking out, every day, at the tangled garden where, now, glossy young leaves of plants unknown to them were beginning to push up under a wilderness of brambles and dead growth.

Hand-woven curtains, a wedding-gift from Rose, hung at every window, and a white-painted surround strove to make a feature of the fireplace tiles, but no one was ever seen to be taken with mirth at the sight of them. The furniture was a strange jumble – resulting from David’s mistakes, Cressy’s apathy, and Midge’s advice, discernment, and generosity. The effect was of everything cancelled out, and Toby and Alexia thought they had never seen such a conglomeration. Neither cosiness nor beauty had been achieved.

They – David and Cressy – had missed the worst of the winter there, they thought, but the cold and damp were bad enough during that early part of the year, and Cressy’s chilblains came back. In the evenings, she sat by the fire and scratched her stockinged feet, while David tried to take her mind off them by stroking her hair and feeding her peppermint creams, as if she were his pet dog. He dreamed of a flat in London, and a fire to be switched on and off.

On Midge’s visits – and she seldom at first came unless she were invited – her glances were all about her for ways of making improvements; and she brought chilblain ointments, and draught excluders, and ordered sweaters from the Isle of Aran, and never came empty-handed.

She was sometimes asked to dinner, and was quite wonderful about it, David thought. She would recall – as she sat before
dinner with one drink after another – how long it had taken
her
to learn how to get potatoes done at the same time as the meat; and how on earth
could
one tell, she asked, if the apples under the piecrust were done or not. She chewed them valiantly, and even asked for more, murmuring ‘delicious’ – she, who had always pretended to eat to keep him company.

‘I was quite frightened when she first came to dinner,’ Cressy confessed one day to David, remembering how brussels sprouts had bobbed about in the boiling water and would not cook, and she had stood by the stove, trying to prong them with a fork, and crying. ‘But she seems so appreciative.’ She had gone back to her gas-ring food, which, in any case, she enjoyed more, and they had baked beans, and hamburgers from the shop, and tinned peas, and everything from then on seemed to her to go better.

Most things, apart from the awful garden, seemed to her to be going well; and that wilderness did not bother her, except that David lost his patience with it, and came indoors on Sundays from the hopeless battle, irritated and depressed.

Making love especially went well, she thought. In bed, she was what David described to himself as ‘enthusiastic’. ‘No holds barred,’ she had said, the first time, in excited anticipation. Often, he wondered where she got all her ideas from, she was so full of bizarre suggestions. And, sometimes, he felt very old, as if he were no longer in the prime of life.

When he was away from home, she was never lonely, as he had feared. She drifted contentedly through the day, with a wonderful sense of freedom – and she had her television. This, unlike Midge’s, was the focal point of the room. She looked at everything, beginning in the mornings, with perhaps Engineering Science for schools; then, as the day delightfully went on, there were programmes in Welsh, Flower-pot men for toddlers, racing, or Rugby Football, State Visits, puppets,
quizzes, disasters, politicians, and old, old films of days before her time. She could hardly bear to get up to heat the beans, when David at last came home.

He hoped she would soon tire of it. Once, he wrote his name in the dust on top of the television-set, and she fetched a duster, and still stooping to watch a Highland reel, wiped it off.

When he was away for a night, she moved in with Midge and basked by the fire, and ate the lovely food, and so his absences were something neither of them minded.

The cottage fire was nothing like so cheerful as Midge’s, and when the wind was the way it usually was, it smoked, and grime crept up the newly-painted walls, and chains of specks floated before their eyes as if their livers were disordered.