The Wedding Group (7 page)

His glance wavered towards Harry, and away, having met the expression of kindly patience with which he waited for the interruption to cease.

He’s a good simple soul, Cressy thought. He must feel all at sea at Quayne. She was wearing her new dress, of chemically-dyed, machine-woven cheap material. She, too, had been to Market Harbury.

Her grandfather continued – in a not louder, but more distinct voice, his dissertation on the weakness of man; but he spoke of this weakness with both pleasure and arrogance. Woman, the haven to which the explorer returned, he treated of with reverence, for God had created her to this purpose.

‘It’s one-way traffic,’ Cressy suddenly said aloud, not having known that she was going to.

Her father, Joe, was thinking along the same lines, but only fitfully. Father Daughtry, having turned his mind for the moment from Ginger Rogers, had let the words ‘airy guff’ come into it. He glanced at Cressy in astonishment.

So the storm which had been building up for weeks was about to break. The upshot of the ructions. And at a mealtime, too; and in the presence of Leofric Welland. Cressy’s meek cousins looked down at the table. Her mother and aunts looked towards Harry. Yves and Gerald and her father looked at her.

Before Harry could speak, Cressy, burning her boats, said, ‘You think nothing of women. You won’t even let us vote at elections,’ she added frantically.

Feminism was to Harry an ungainly aberration. ‘What a lark!’ he always said – that women should have a vote, above all want one. Then he would go on to tell them how to use it.

Now, he said evenly, ‘The law of this sad old country refuses you the vote. Not I.’

‘I’m speaking as a woman,’ Cressy stammered, and her
cousins giggled, and then were suddenly quiet, feeling all about their bent heads, looks of reproval.

‘Cressy!’ Rose said imploringly.

‘Come, Cressy!’ her father said gently and pushed back his chair and got up.

‘It was a good fillum,’ Father Daughtry said, spreading Ginger Rogers on the troubled waters. ‘Only the name escapes me.’

Tears came to Cressy’s eyes, and she stood up, too, clumsily, with her face turned aside.

‘Don’t distress yourself, child,’ Harry said in a clear, low voice. ‘We have all been young, and know what a business it is growing up. I’m sure there is no one in this room who has not kicked against the pricks at some time, and understands the misery of it.’

Cressy, at the door, turned round bravely and let them see her brimming eyes. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any collection of people in the world who’ve done it less,’ she said.

Joe had his hand on the wrought-iron latch. He clicked it up quickly and took Cressy out into the moonlit courtyard.

Leofric Welland retired early that night, but not to go to bed. Various people about that courtyard could see his lighted window for a long time.

Harry went for a stroll and, coming back across the orchard, saw it, too.

‘Poor little Cressy! She can’t sing in tune with us any longer,’ Harry Bretton had said, when she had left the barn with her father. He had smiled with especial fondness at his two grandsons, Bartholomew and James, sitting at the other end of the table, on either side of their grandmother. Rebellion from schoolboys might have been more easily expected, he thought. But these two came and went, and revealed nothing. They led mysterious lives. They had just returned from staying with school friends – a good Catholic family, no doubt; but, all at once, it seemed to Harry that they were too much away from home. And in formative years.

Pet and Mo, always singing beautifully in tune with Quayne, were made to see Cressy in a harsh and ugly light – her distorted face, her clumsy rage and, now, her discordant voice. They had mixed feelings about her new dress.

Rose had wondered whether to get up and go after her husband and daughter. She hesitated, till she had left it too late, and remained where she was.

When at last she went over to the cottage, Cressy had gone to bed, and Joe had spread out his writing things on the table,
and was trying to get to grips with his book. He always turned to it when troubled by guilt and loss of self-respect.

‘Whatever has come over her?’ Rose asked in a peevish voice. ‘After all that Father’s done for her.’

‘She’s a perfectly normal girl. It’s we who are abnormal.’

‘Don’t let
us
have a quarrel.’

‘No, of course not.’

‘All this having to have a job. Serving in a shop! Well, there’s one thing,
that
won’t last very long. But you should have put your foot down.’

In bed, Cressy was, in her misery, longing for the shop. She dreaded the next day, and cursed it for being Sunday. She would feel as if they had hung a bell round her neck to warn her cousins of her approach.

Last night, Leofric Welland’s presence had no doubt saved her from an angry storm, but that would at least have cleared the air which she could imagine would be full now of wary amazement and sickening forgiveness.

She had not been far wrong, for the only sharp words next day were from her mother, and they were sharp indeed. She was blamed for ingratitude, for callow behaviour, for drawing attention to herself. The list reached much farther back than anything to do with last night’s contretemps; it touched on her wilfulness of many years, and the old troubles as a schoolgirl. A deep antagonism had grown between Rose and Cressy.

‘You are only shirty because you don’t get enough sex,’ Cressy said, in her coolest, most goading voice.

Rose was too staggered to do anything but gasp ‘How dare you!’ – which enabled Cressy to continue.

‘You’re all edgy, and it’s just because you’re afraid of having more children. “We aren’t meant to think of the sexual act separated from fertility.” The times I’ve heard that. So this house
should be full of children. Or else you daren’t
have
sex, and so you’re edgy, as I said.’

‘You are only a child. How can you understand what you’re saying?’

‘I understand that you don’t believe in birth-control; you’ve only had me; and you’re edgy.’

‘There are other ways…’

‘And I can see you’re too embarrassed to discuss them. And so should I be. But I don’t want to know.’

‘Those are private matters. One day, when you’re married…’

‘Don’t worry. I won’t be having that sort of husband, and I won’t be that sort of wife.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Rose said, turning aside with a look of distaste. Standing there by the window, drooping, her head half-averted, she might have been posing for one of her father’s pictures, as she so often had. Her skin looked pale against her peacock-blue dress, which was stitched with green and held against her breast with one of Yves Brisson’s pottery ornaments on a leather thong. She never wore make-up, and her hair was braided round her head.

She was not tearful, like her daughter, and never had been. In fact, she had had – apart from Cressy – so little to cry about. Her girlhood had been unclouded. Because her life at Quayne had been so right for her, she blamed herself, and not Quayne, that her daughter was at variance with it. She herself had been so contented. Her father had found for her, and kept for her, a beloved husband. She had never been parted from those she loved.

‘We will say no more,’ she said curtly, seeing Joe coming up the path.

During these quarrels, Cressy felt stimulated. She triumphed in shocking her mother, who seemed so much less articulate,
made defensive, relying on worn old phrases, whereas she herself was carried away from safety on a tide of words.

Afterwards, she was unhappy, and she knew that the quarrels had their ill-effects upon her father, whom she loved and pitied. Laziness had allowed him to give up his life, and strength had gone out of him, and she knew it, and guessed that, from time to time, he suffered.

‘You have a wicked little head on those young shoulders,’ Rose said, at the end of one angry scene. Those words had stayed, and echoed, of all the words her mother had ever said. They frightened her.

Apart from Rose’s attitude, there was everybody else’s.

Her grandfather was tender towards her – modelling himself on the Good Shepherd, she thought. Leofric Welland, who had prolonged his stay, thinking that interesting events might take place, at last departed, disappointed.

Her cousins she saw little. It was like school all over again, with the goody-goody girls warned off her.

Her father who, these last few days, was working on his book as never before, was sorry for her, but could do nothing. It was a hopeless relationship, the one pitying the other. Lately, she had begun to appear pitiable. She had a sad and distracted air. Her shop dress was new no longer, and looked as if it were a punishment inflicted on her; buttons had dropped off and been lost, and seams had come undone and frayed. She could not afford another.

She was grateful that Father Daughtry behaved to her as if nothing had happened. He had only a hazy idea of what had been said on that Saturday evening, and he liked the girl. Her nervy faith was being put to the test, and she needed peace and quiet. It was the worst that could happen to any mortal, and so many voices must confuse her.

‘Oh, I am sick at heart,’ Cressy told Mrs Brindle, as they met
on Quayne Hill, going in different directions to work. ‘If it weren’t for my job, I’d die.’

‘I’ll have a word. I’ll see what can be arranged. You leave it to me,’ Mrs Brindle had told Cressy, meeting her another time, dragging her way wearily up the hill from work on her half-day. She hated her half-day.

It was wonderful to Cressy to have someone say that to her. Although she feared nothing could be done to help her, the words themselves were a comfort.

She could not go on all her life – or even very much longer – with things as they were at home, with every mealtime an occasion to dread. Her sense of isolation was terrible.

Mrs Brindle was well known as a tower of strength. She knew it, and the knowledge spurred her on to greater efforts. ‘I can usually find a way round things,’ she said. She had said it when her husband died; when her son-in-law fell out of work, and the girl next door got into trouble. She had said it all through the war.

‘It’s hell up there for the poor girl,’ she told Alexia, who had shut the shop, but had been seen pottering within, by Mrs Brindle, who had propped up her bicycle and peered through the window. Alexia had unlocked the door. She was alone. Toby had gone to the other side of the country to a sale, and she was impatient for his return, longing to hear about his day, and to see what he had bought.

‘I just called in to see how she was getting on,’ Mrs Brindle said. ‘Five guineas!’ she cried, looking at a brass oil-lamp. ‘Oh, dear! Oh, dear! I threw all ours away when we went on to electricity. That makes me want to kick myself.’

Alexia smiled patiently.

‘No, I looked in,’ Mrs Brindle went on, ‘feeling a bit responsible, naturally, really having been instrumental in getting her
placed with you. I wouldn’t like to think I’ve done the wrong thing by either you or her.’

‘We’re pleased with her. I hope she’s pleased with us. She tries hard – if only she wouldn’t leave the cleaning things about.’ Alexia picked up a rag from a chair. ‘But I wouldn’t say anything. I’d rather go round afterwards. And if only she didn’t cry so much. I’m afraid customers may think we’re cruel to her.’

‘Customers
wouldn’t
think that. One glance at you and Mr Moorhead would suffice. They would surmise that she had private troubles, which is the fact of the matter.’

‘Otherwise, she’s so willing…’

‘She’s a good girl, worth double those others, with their niminy-piminy ways. Butter wouldn’t melt, etcetera, etcetera. She’s the only one of that bunch I’ve any time for. Barring that poor old priest. He’s always been very pleasant, apart from his dirty habits.
Personal
habits, I should say.’

Alexia wondered what other kind of habits could be dirty.

‘It’s as clear as daylight to me what’s going on up there – call it witch-hunt, or what you will. Poor girl! No, what I meant to say was he drops his food down his front – a nasty eater. Egg-stains, the lot. You name it, he’s got it. But he’s good at heart. It’s nice to meet a religious man like that. Of course, your father,’ she said hastily, ‘
he
was out of this world. One in a hundred. A saintly man. He was a byword, and that goes without saying. I’m sure I never heard one thing said against him at any time, and believe you me I get about this village, and have for more years than I care to think about.’

Alexia believed her. I wonder what she’s really come about, she thought.

‘But that poor old sod up there,’ Mrs Brindle went on, ‘although he’s not in the same class as your dear father, and never could be, all the same he wouldn’t harm a fly. It restores your faith in human nature, doesn’t it? Maybe there’s a bit too
much of this’ – she lifted her bent elbow – ‘but who’s to cast the first stone, after all? I always say that, I say, “Who’s to cast the first stone?”’

‘I sometimes say that too,’ Alexia remarked gravely.

Mrs Brindle swept on. ‘Sometimes he quite confides in me, knowing it won’t go any further. “Mrs Brindle,” he said the other day. “I’m a terrified old man this morning.” Some Monsignor was coming to lunch. “Monsignor” – is that the right word? I’m C. of E. myself, like you. He said, “There’ll be such intellectual arguments, I won’t dare to open my poor bloody mouth for fear of showing my ignorance. They speak French, you know,” he said. It emerged that he can’t. That’s the only time they buy shop wine at Quayne. It seems the Monsignors or what-have-you only drink claret. He enjoys that, but it makes him nod off. “They look down on me, Mrs Brindle,” he said. “They smell the turf on my poor old hands.” Where he comes from, they call peat that, you know. Just for the moment, I thought he was talking about his horse-racing. “They masticate their little ideas,” he said, “and I’m left out in the cold – my proper place.” “Proper place!” I said. I was beginning to boil. Yes, I can tell you, I was really beginning to boil.’ She seemed to rise up, and then simmer down. ‘He’s so human,’ she said, ‘You can’t help liking him.’ She glanced again, thoughtfully, at the brass oil-lamp, and then added, ‘No, if you had some little attic. It wouldn’t matter how small. I know it would seem like heaven to her.’