The Great Husband Hunt (31 page)

41

No bride was ever more forgiving than Angelica. When my innocent words about honeymooning sent Murray running for a bathroom, where he bolted the door and refused to come out, she held her head high.

“Change of plan,” she told the waiting guests. “Murray's got a queasy tum, so we probably won't be making a move today. Probably bunk down here tonight.”

“Poppy!” Ma hissed. “What have you done with him?”

I might have guessed I would be blamed.

Bobbity took me to one side. “Is he refusing at the first jump?” she asked.

I said, “Well yes, he is. Isn't it extraordinary?”

“Not at all,” she said. “Merrick was the same.”

Angelica was bearing up very well.

“Do you know what?” she said. “I'll start up the motor anyway. It'd be a pity if the old rose petals went to waste. Em and Sapphy can ride with me. We'll just do a turn.”

And they did. Petals and rice and birdseed were thrown, and Sapphire and Emerald squealed with delight as Angelica gunned the motor down the drive, for a ceremonial circuit of the house, and a brief detour so the bridal flowers could be left on the fresh earth of Beluga's grave.

I asked Bobbity how long it had taken her to coax Sir Neville.

“Not long,” she said. “A night or two. I just allowed him full rein and eventually he trotted up nicely of his own accord. It's to do with their school days, you know? Life in the dorm. Even now I'm absolutely not allowed in Merrick's night table. He only has a biscuit box in there and a torch, but it's strictly orf limits.”

But Murray had never known life in the dorm.

“Don't worry,” Bobbity said. “Gelica is marvelous with nervy types.”

But even Angelica's wealth of patience and kindness wasn't enough to persuade Murray into the marriage bed. All he would say on the subject was, “I'd just rather not at the moment.”

They gardened together, they dined together and they uncled and aunted together, but there was never the least little bit of spooning.

Ma remarked, on the eve of her departure for New York, that Murray was almost as considerate a husband as Judah Jacoby himself.

“And Israel,” said my aunt. “Israel rarely troubled me.”

But word got around, and others were not so forgiving. The girl kept fetching out the wedding cake earmarked for the christening, brushing it with more brandy and sighing theatrically. When Murray happened to cross the stable yard while Bobbity's hunters were being shoed, the farrier stopped what he was doing and stared at him as though he had two heads. Eventually even Bobbity became impatient.

“I should really hate for this to turn out badly,” she said. “I should hate Gelica to become egg-bound.”

I said, “They do seem pretty happy.”

“Nevertheless,” she said, “I think Murray should be made aware Edgar Boodle-Neary was always rather keen. If this should continue…If Edgar should decide the plum is still for the picking…”

Then, one morning early in the spring of 1936, Murray and I found ourselves alone together over our oatmeal.

“I seem to have made a hash of things,” he said gloomily.

I said, “You do know it can all be undone? There not having been any romping, all you have to do is report back to the priest and it can all be canceled.”

“Yes,” he said. “All the gifts would have to be returned, of course.”

I said, “Well, Angelica might offer them, but Bobbity told me it would be very bad form for anyone to accept. Is that what you want to do? Call it a day?”

“I do like her, you know?” was all he said.

I didn't miss him at luncheon. I was obliged to go to Leicester, Leicestershire, whenever I wanted to buy scent or get my hair styled and I always went to Marshall and Snelgrove for tea and dainties before I motored home.

When the gong was struck for dinner I found Angelica waiting for me at the foot of the stairs. Her nose was red and swollen.

“He's god away, Poppy,” she sobbed. “He took his thigs ad I don't even know where he's god.”

The temperature at dinner was even lower than usual.

Bobbity was cross with Sir Neville for having driven Murray to the railroad station without finding out his destination, Neville was annoyed by Angelica's sniffing, and when the girl came in to clear and found everyone's soup unsupped, a further degree of frost set in.

I had no appetite for anything. I kept combing through recent conversations with Murray, looking for hints, but I found none. He had no friends in England. He had no friends anywhere, except for me. He was twenty-eight years old and yet he was such an innocent.

I couldn't sleep.

“Tossing and turning, old thing?” Reggie said, wrapping his arms around me.

“It's Murray,” I said. “Where on earth can he be spending the night?”

“At his club?” he said.

I said, “Darling, Murray doesn't have a club. He only has Kneilthorpe and East 69th Street.”

Reggie thought about this for a while.

“High time he had a club, then,” he said, “for precisely these occasions. Should I propose him for the Ramrod?”

It was difficult to quarrel with Reggie because he never really recognized a quarrel when he met one. He always saw things in the best possible light. Still, I sat up in bed and put on the light, so that at least he would understand we were having a serious discussion.

I said, “Reggie, you must know how unhappy he's been since the wedding. You must know how he feels he's let everyone down.”

“Does he?” he said. He was genuinely astonished. “But he's a completely decent sort. I couldn't like him more.”

I said, “Yes, but what about Angelica? He gave her expectations and he hasn't fulfilled them.”

“I see,” he said.

I said, “As a matter of fact, I don't believe he's even tried. And now there'll probably have to be an annulment or something.”

“Gracious,” Reggie said. “What a pickle.”

I said, “But he shouldn't have run away. He should have stayed and faced it, like a man.”

We sat side by side in silence for a while, leaning against our pillows.

I said, “Do you think it possible Murray is inclined
the other way?
Like Humpy?”

“Possibly,” he said, “quite possibly. But even so, that would be no excuse for disappointing Angelica. A great many husbands might prefer to linger over a game of billiards, for example, but they know where their duty lies. Perhaps it's because he's an American. I dare say his upbringing was very different over there.”

I said, “He was raised by his aunt, you know? He never knew his mother.”

Reggie slapped the counterpane.

“There you have it,” he said. “Raised by an aunt. Well, the very moment he returns I shall talk to him, man to man. And in the meanwhile I'll certainly put his name up for the Ramrod.”

But Murray never returned to Kneilthorpe. He vanished into that misty Melton morning and all we could do was watch for letters and hope for wires. If I could have known then how long it would be until I saw him again, I shouldn't have been able to face each new day and shop for amusing fabrics and attend Emerald's gymkhanas. And if I could have known how soon I would have to endure the sight of another empty seat at the table, I might have swallowed a whole bottle of Honey's Elixir of Hemp and never woken up. I have never wished to see the future.

42

Just a few weeks after Murray's departure, while spring was still holding out on us and even the bedside rug felt damp beneath my feet, Reggie set off for Archie Vigo's to view a litter of retrievers. He climbed astride the Flying Banana and roared away into yet another misty morning. The alarm wasn't raised until he failed to appear at dinner. Archie himself had already gone out to dine by the time we telephoned, but his butler, reluctant at first to give out what he called “private information,” eventually revealed that Reggie had never kept his appointment. The pick of the litter had gone to one of the Burton girls.

A party of nine set off to search for Reggie. Our outdoors man, and Walter the telegram boy, who unaccountably turned out to be sitting in our kitchen drinking tea with the girl, even though there had been no telegrams to deliver, and sundry peasants rustled up from our nearest tenant farms. Emerald begged to go too, excited by the sight of the rush torches, and when she was forbidden fell into a sulk, refusing either to go to bed or to play spillikins pleasantly.

It was a clear night, for a change, but with only a little cheese rind of moon. It was after midnight before they found where the motorcycle had left the muddy track and flung Reggie against a horse-chestnut tree.

They carried him back to Kneilthorpe on a stretcher kept for hunting misfortunes, and laid him on the billiard table. Doctor Liversedge was sent for, and a certain woman who did whatever it is such people do.

“They'll want to lift him off the nice baize,” I heard her say to the doctor, “before there's any leaking.”

I stood in the hall, waiting for someone to tell me something.

“They've tidied him up,” Bobbity said. “Are you ready to go in?”

“Going in” was what one was expected to do. Bobbity accompanied me and Angelica intended to as well, until she noticed Sapphire and Emerald were halfway up the stairs, watching, white-faced, and ran to bundle them away. In the billiard room an assortment of glass-eyed stag heads stared into the gloom.

It took only a second for me to see there was nothing could be done for Reggie. The man who had chatted to me so gaily over his oatmeal that morning had somehow gone away and left behind an understuffed manikin which bore a fair resemblance. There was a purple line across his brow.

I said, “Why did he have to go and do this?”

“Too beastly for words.” That was all Bobbity could say.

We joined Neville and the doctor for large whiskeys in the drawing room, and I noticed, before I had taken even the smallest sip, that everyone was talking in strangely hollow voices. They all denied doing it, but I know what I know, and they persisted in it for several weeks.

Angelica came down from the nursery.

“I think,” she said, “the tiddlers won't settle until you've been up and had a word.”

How I wished for Murray to be there. He would have found a way to soften Sapphire's hard little eyes.

“You spoil everything,” she spat at me. “Everybody goes away because of you.”

I said, “There was mud on the track.”

“You sent my daddy Gilbert away, and Mommy Honey and Uncle Murray, and Gray…”

Gray had been a very disagreeable pet rabbit.

“I didn't,” I said. “I really didn't.”

“And now Reggie's gone,” she said. “I hate you.”

“Maybe he'll come back,” Emerald suggested.

“You goose,” Sapphire sneered. “You're such a baby. Deads don't come back.”

She pulled the covers over her head and didn't say another word that night.

Emerald stood in front of me. Though she was blessed with silky Merrick hair, her ears protruded with the unmistakable hallmark of Minkel blood. Whatever other wrongs I did my children, I spared them the torture of nightly correction bandages.

“I don't hate you,” she said solemnly.

The girl had been hovering, with cups of hot milk that had grown wrinkly skins. Em shuddered when the skin touched her lip.

“Do I have to?” she said. She climbed into bed and I tucked her in tightly.

“Mommy,” she said, “is Uncle Murray a dead too?”

I'm sure he might as well have been.

“No,” I said. “He'll come back.”

“Yes,” she said, seeming quite satisfied. “And maybe all our daddies will come back, too. One for me and one for Sapphy.”

The girl couldn't even wait for me to leave the nursery before she began undoing all my tucking in.

“This won't do, will it?” she said to Emerald. “The Missus doesn't know how we like room to kick about.”

43

The day Reggie was to be buried the Vale of Belvoir paid their respects by canceling a meet, and the girls were excused their lessons to be taken by Angelica to Leicester, Leicestershire, to see a real stuffed giraffe. I watched out of the window all morning, until it was time to go to Buckby churchyard. I had a notion Murray might come driving up the gravel sweep, but he never did. Only Walter, with a wire of condolence from Ma and Judah.

“SUCH SADNESS,” it said. “NO WORD MURRAY.”

My stepfather had become rather careful. He didn't approve of costly messages when so many people were ruined and having to make do and only get their old furs remodeled instead of buying nice new ones.

Bobbity brought the wire in to me, and a glass of sherry wine.

“Fortification,” she said. “I'm afraid Merrick finished the scotch.”

I said, “I wish Murray were here. I've been trying to remember what we say for the dead. We have our own words, you know? Hebrew words.”

“Oh, don't trouble about that,” Bobbity said. “Our parson's an Oxford man. If any languages were needed he'd know them. But I'm quite sure they won't be. We always bury in English.”

Of course I knew that. But my mind kept casting around for the sound of those Hebrew words. Judah Jacoby had said them for my uncle Israel. I could almost hear them, but not quite. They dangled like an annoying little thread that I could see out of the corner of my eye but couldn't quite catch.

A great crowd of the lower orders were waiting to see Reggie brought into the church, and some of them were weeping. He had been loved for the way he tirelessly rode around from hovel to hovel, inquiring about their milk yields and taking them gifts of cake at Christmas. That was the kind of man he was.

Gordie came, from his castle, but not Humpy nor the P of W who had become the King of England. Archie Vigo was a pallbearer. And Flicky Manners drove over wearing poorly aimed lip rouge.

“Darling,” she said, taking me in her arms, “the good always die young.”

This was precisely what was troubling me most. I was only thirty-eight years old. Ahead of me stretched a long empty road, a theme my mother wasn't slow to take up.

“I sometimes feel,” she wrote,

that I have lived too long. To see both my daughters poor lonely widows and both stepsons hiding away when they might be here at dear Judah's side, helping him through such difficult times. Oscar says we are sure to have another war and Yetta says we must all be prepared for harder times yet and sacrifice, but we have already let go the driver and one of our help so I don't see what more can be asked of us.