The Wedding Group (15 page)

David decided that rural living was only tolerable if gracious and backed by plenty of money. His life was gracious no longer, and Cressy cooked breakfast in her old school dressing-gown, tied round her middle by a frayed cord.

Her inertia did not trouble her mother-in-law, who was quite unruffled at seeing the dressing-gown at eleven o’clock one morning. She had called to take Cressy shopping in the car, and she sat down calmly to wait. Then Cressy, re-tying the cord of her gown, said, ‘Well, I only wanted a few potatoes and a packet of fish-cakes, so perhaps you could get them for me as I’m not ready.’

Midge, who had hoped for company, got up at once, with a nice smile, and left.

She knew all of Cressy’s weaknesses, and foresaw the ones to come; for the new life was full of snares and opportunities – the dressing-gown, the dust, and, no doubt, in due time, a falling-off in looks. Midge used all her imagination on Cressy, not on her son, and when the girl came to stay, she would feed her with creamy sauces and brandied puddings, and there was always a little drink to hand.

‘You mustn’t stuff her up with all those things,’ David protested one day, when he and Midge were alone. ‘She’s getting fat.’

‘But she likes them, dear,’ Midge said placidly, almost as if she hadn’t heard.

And this morning, after buying the fish-cakes and the potatoes, she went to the Walnut Tree for a box of éclairs.

‘I was wondering… how is your mother?’ she asked when, later, she had returned to Cressy. She smoked, while Cressy ate an éclair.

‘I don’t know. She never comes to see me.’

‘But
you
should go to see
her
,’ Midge said, trying to laugh over the reproof. She rather missed the old stories about Quayne and, alone so much as she now was, would have liked the continuing saga to engage her thoughts. She had been once to Quayne, for what those there had called the wedding-breakfast – game pies and cold pheasant laid out on the table in the barn. It had been very different from the champagne-and-canapés weddings of her other sons, and she was the only one wearing a hat.

‘That awful hill!’ Cressy said, taking another éclair.

The next day, though, she made the great effort to please Midge, puffing up the hill, her breath blown back horribly, like moist fur, against her face. Everything dripped. There was this sound, and someone a way off felling a tree, and her own heavy breathing, and the commotion from starlings gathered over a ploughed field on the horizon. They looked like tea-leaves in the watery-grey distance, Cressy thought, and she could almost imagine the sky slowly turning brown from them. Here and there, leaves of a glossy, venomous green, splodged with black stains, poked up through the dead leaves under the hedges.

‘I’ll have to walk all this way back,’ she told herself forlornly.
But she was doing her duty and this – as it does to people who do their duty very seldom – brought a surprising exhilaration.

‘You mustn’t let your mother think
I
have appropriated you,’ Midge had said.

Cressy, plodding up the hill, could now hear voices on her right. Instead of a muffled, echoing sound from the middle of trees, these voices had clarity, floating away freely, as if from an open space; and, as she turned one of the bends in the lane, she saw a great clearing and the felled beeches lying about. There were shouts, a dry creaking noise which set Cressy’s teeth on edge, and another tree crashed down across the low undergrowth. She watched for a while, thinking the empty space a great improvement, letting the light in so, and wondered if it would be filled one day by willow-herb or bluebells.

Another figure was watching, from higher up on the ridge of the hill – her grandfather, in his shepherd’s cloak. She moved nearer to the hedge and out of his sight, and waited there until he turned and moved away, back towards the house.

When she reached there, neither her mother nor her father was at home. Rather than go to look for them and risk all sorts of meetings, she took off her coat and made up the fire, and thought she would give them ten minutes, and then leave a note, and go, having – no one could deny – done her duty. She could not face her cousins at their weaving, nor the chance of running into her grandfather crossing the courtyard to the studio.

The simple room was very neat and clean and quiet. She stood by the fire, warming her hands, shifting her chilblained feet uneasily in her shoes, wondering why, after all, she had come. Simply to please Midge, she decided.

On the chimney-piece was a photograph of her wedding group, taken by Jack Ballard, after that peasant-like feasting in the barn she guessed that Midge had deplored. They were all
arranged in the courtyard, with the chapel, as a reproach, in the background – the whole lot of them, with Cressy and David in the middle, and Harry Bretton, for once in his life, standing to one side. Midge was dressed in a dark suit and a white fur cap; the other women wore tweed coats and sensible shoes – they stood there sturdily, their hands in their pockets, their hair braided and coiled about their heads; they were making the best of a disappointing day. Father Daughtry looked owlish – perhaps the mulled wine, Cressy thought. It was rather touching of her mother to have framed the photograph and set it up in such an eye-catching place.

Cressy had dreaded Quayne having anything to do with her wedding day; but the right thing to be done had been pointed out to her, and she was overruled, even by Midge and David. It had to be, they explained to her, and, to her great surprise, had said that it was her mother’s day as well.

During the brief proceedings at the registry office, Rose had felt sick, and trembled. It was not a true marriage to her, and she had no other child. Only she and Joe had come from Quayne. It was like, for special reasons, a very quiet funeral. And the others, at home, had prepared the feast in the same spirit, lugubriously and dutifully, as for mourners returning.

It was not at all like the Wedgwood wedding group, Cressy thought, looking at the photograph while she warmed her hands – no white dress, or flowers, or attendants.

Her father seemed glad to see her when he came in. Without stopping to wash his earth-caked hands, he came over to the fire to warm them, rasping them together. He stooped over the blaze Cressy had made, looking sideways up at her.

‘Your mother’s gone with Kate and poor little Petronella to see Dr O’Connor. In the Rolls-Royce,’ he said with solemnity.

‘Is something wrong?’ Cressy guessed there was, from Pet having been given her full name.

‘Not with your mother. God bless you, no. But we’re all at sixes and sevens here.’

He pulled at a loose end of wool in the sleeve of his jersey and began to unravel it. Both watched, fascinated.

‘Is Pet ill?’ Cressy asked.

‘It’s very much feared she’s in the family way, don’t you know.’

‘How
should
I know?’ Sometimes her father’s turns of phrase enraged her.

‘Well, no, of course,’ he said mildly, ‘but that’s the way it appears to be.’

‘But who on earth does she know?’

Her father stopped unravelling the wool, and tried to tuck it inside his sleeve out of sight.

‘This is not divulged. Or not to me. Not divulged,’ he repeated vaguely, straightening his back and looking about the room. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘No, it’s too much trouble.’

‘A glass of milk then?’

She nodded her head, thinking furiously, but not of what he was saying. Her meek and mild little cousin, who had turned away in contempt when Cressy had told her of the discoveries she had made amongst her grandfather’s books. She almost felt that Pet, in her new situation, had stolen a march on her.

She followed her father into the kitchen and rummaged in tins in the larder. There was a new kind of cake she could not remember her mother making, and it seemed strange that they should go on eating meals without her, even making experiments, just to please themselves.

‘Has Grandfather had any of those young men about lately in the workshop?’ she asked.

‘No, no. I thought of that too.’ Her father held a glass to her in his grimy hands. They sipped in silence, and Cressy ate
a piece of cake, while going over the possibilities – the cousins, Bartholomew and James; but they were schoolboys and always treated aloofly by the three girls. Incest, perhaps; but not her father, Joe, for he had said the name was not divulged to him. She even thought with horror of her grandfather, and of Father Daughtry, of the nasty little man who came up to slaughter the pigs, or the postman, meeting Pet secretly in Quayne Woods, propping his bicycle against the hedge.

‘Your mother will be sorry to have missed you,’ Joe said.

‘I can always come again. Are they going to get married?’

‘Who?’

‘Why, Pet and this undivulged man?’

‘I believe it’s not on the cards.’

‘Is he married already then?’ Or a priest, she wondered.

‘When you come next time you shall talk to your mother about it. She will tell you what has to be told. I’m not in the know much. It’s more in the women’s province.’

Cressy felt that it would be easier to come now. The trouble Pet was in was not as bad as having been married in a registry office; but it was bad enough.

‘How is your book going?’ she asked politely. She went to fetch her coat, and he took it and held it for her.

‘It’s coming along nicely now,’ he said, as if it were an invalid, and he was pleased to have it inquired after.

‘Good. Well, I’d better go. Will you give my love to Mother?’

‘I’d walk down with you, but I have to go over and help your grandfather shift some canvases.’

‘And what does
he
say about it?’ Cressy asked.

Half-way down Quayne Hill, Midge was waiting in the car. She had made it a little den of cigarette smoke, was listening to the six o’clock news, hunched up in her sheepskin coat.

‘Jump in,’ she said to Cressy, leaning over and opening the door. ‘I thought you’d be tired.’

‘Oh, you are the most thoughtful woman I ever knew,’ Cressy said, getting in. Indeed, Midge did have a great number of thoughts. Few could have more.

‘I was at a loose end, anyway,’ she said. ‘And how are things at Quayne?’

‘My father says they are at sixes and sevens, which is a funny way of saying that my cousin, Pet, is pregnant.’

Midge drove slowly, so glad that she had persuaded Cressy to pay her call. The news was better than anything she could have envisaged; for she hated Quayne and all about it, had felt herself patronised there, and thought it had been the most terrible wedding she ever was at.

‘And what does your grandfather say about
this
?’ she asked, in a voice braced with anticipation.

‘Father says that the odd thing is that he is so taken up with a trouble of his own that he scarcely has time to think about poor Pet.’

‘A trouble of his own?’ It was getting better and better, Midge thought. Perhaps the rot of all time was setting in. She sincerely hoped so.

‘They are cutting down Quayne Woods to build six Regency houses there.’

‘You can’t build Regency houses at this time of history.’

‘Type.’

‘I thought the woods belonged to him.’

‘To the Castle. And they are getting hard up there.’

The Castle was miles away. Quayne was once one of its farms. Selling it to Harry had been the first of the measures against death duties. Other measures had followed. They had opened the place for half-crowns, but there was nothing to see inside, but damp stone floors, black, almost faceless portraits,
and threadbare carpets: no one was interested, felt nothing but pity or contempt. Then timber had been felled; now, to more purpose, to make room for Regency-type houses for commuters.

‘I can’t see that that’s too bad for him,’ Midge said, disappointed. ‘Shall we have a quick one at the Horseshoes? Or must you hurry back to cook dinner?’

‘It’s only bangers,’ Cressy said.

Just as branches were beginning to bud, there was a spell of bad weather. Snow came heavily. Midge’s garden was gradually pillowed and bolstered. There were miniature nursery-slopes in the angles of walls, and trees with borne down branches holding an unaccustomed weight.

At the window for long periods, watching the birds making arrowed tracks across the snow to scraps of bread, she could imagine the predicament of everything in the garden, of the trees especially. I have been snowed upon myself, she thought.

From all the whiteness of outside, her drawing-room was brilliantly coloured, and two-dimensional – a painting by Matisse.

The snow isolated her – deep on the paths, and in a drift against the garage door. An occasional red-faced, mufflered tradesman drove along the lane, churning up gravelly slush, and plodded to the back door, leaving a bottle of milk, which sank inches into the snow on the step, or cold parcels of groceries. To find the damp newspaper stuck in the letter-box was the high point of the day. Mrs Brindle did not arrive.

The house, for all its brilliant colours, was dead. There
seemed nothing to hope for between getting up and going to bed.

Cressy was worse off across her field; for pipes froze and the telephone wire had come down; but the television worked, and she had her little store of beans and sardines, so her life was not too much disrupted. More than ever, David cursed the country, and having to come home to it at night, and even when he had reached it, having to shovel snow and try to unfreeze the pipes. Driving home at night, he had disloyal thoughts about Cressy, marvelling at his madness in marrying her. He loved her – especially for bringing out in him a tenderness he had never felt before; but she cost him a good deal in comfort. The only meals he enjoyed now were those at his mother’s house. As she was so willing to invite them, and both of them so eager to go, they were there more and more often. (‘Can’t you teach Cressy to make this?’ he had once asked. ‘I’m not that sort of mother-in-law,’ Midge had said primly. ‘I could never learn, anyway,’ Cressy said.) Midge thought that for her the old saying was half untrue – she had lost a son, and gained a daughter. It was a novelty to her.