The Wedding Group (11 page)

Cressy seemed to look right through him as she opened the door. ‘They’re out,’ she said.

‘What on earth’s the matter?’ he asked. There was quite a
smell of alcohol about her, and he wondered if she were drunk. Then he saw the wet patch on her dress.

‘What’s happened?’ he asked.

‘I shall have to run away,’ she said.

He shut the door behind him and drew her farther inside, away from the glances of people coming home from church. ‘You only need mopping up,’ he said, ‘as far as I can make out.’

‘I shouldn’t have touched it. I only wanted to find out what it was like, from the smell. I wouldn’t have drunk any. You do believe that, don’t you?’

‘Of course.’

When he had got some of the story out of her, he asked. ‘What were you doing in their room anyway, when they were out?’

‘Well, when they are in, I can’t have a proper look at anything. And I was lonely.’

This was beyond him.

‘I can never explain it to them. They will think I creep down when their backs are turned and help myself to their drink.’

‘Well, I don’t think they will think that. I shall make sure they don’t. Let’s mop the mess up, and I’ll explain it to them, if you like.’

‘They won’t be back till late.’

‘Well, I’ll still explain it somehow.’

‘And I’ve wasted all that. However much worth, do you think?’

‘Oh, a little goes a long way, you know. Don’t worry. Run and fetch a wet cloth.’

He went into the sitting-room and looked round. When Cressy came back with the cloth, she said, ‘That dresser! It’s really for stock.’ She had a great awe of stock – spoiling any of it being so much on her mind.

He took the cloth from her, for she seemed incapable of
doing anything sensible, and he swabbed the dresser and the carpet. ‘When that’s dry, it won’t show a mark,’ he said confidently. He felt disposed to add, ‘Least said, soonest mended,’ but decided she might think less of him for giving such advice. To make a clean breast of it she was plainly determined, now that she no longer seemed to be thinking of running away. And he could understand how alarming Toby and Alexia might seem to her – cold in their self-sufficiency; their indifference verging on callousness.

He knelt down and began to sponge the skirt of her dress. ‘Not much damage there, either,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Hang it up somewhere to dry, and put on something else, and I’ll take you out for a drink.’ After all, I did promise them I would, he remembered. He had been so busy, though, that it had gone out of his mind. Even at week-ends, he had had no time, feeling new responsibilities towards his mother, and taking her out to dinner, or having little parties at home. Nell Stapleforth had come down once or twice. She had given up the idea of David as a husband, but liked her dog to get into the country.

Cressy had seemed to flinch at the word ‘drink’, so he added, ‘Or anywhere else you’d care to go.’

‘Could we go to a Wimpy Bar?’ she asked, her expression suddenly eager.

Oh, my God! he thought. All those youths with studded leather jackets; ghastly smell of fried onions. ‘On a Sunday, surely they’re all closed,’ he said. ‘And we’d have to go into the town, and I don’t want to be away too long. My mother’s on her own.’

‘Then couldn’t we go and see your mother?’ she asked, just as eagerly. ‘I like her so much.’

‘I didn’t know you knew her. But that’s fine.’ To be able to kill two birds with one stone was David’s idea of luck. ‘Wimpy
Bar another day,’ he said. ‘The car’s outside. Get moving. Run and change your dress.’

Cressy had no intention of appearing before Midge in Quayne clothes, shabby as her shop-bought dress was. ‘I haven’t another,’ she explained. ‘I think this will dry quite quickly, though.’

She stood before Midge’s bright, crackling fire, and held out her steaming skirt. ‘My dreams have come true,’ she said, looking round the room. She had made up pictures in her mind of such a room, full of pretty things, and nothing hand-woven in it.

‘I’m sure you’ll think it very odd,’ she told Midge, ‘but I had never seen coal burning before I went to live at the shop. At school, we only had radiators, and at home we just have wood, and it usually seems to be damp and won’t get going at all; then it suddenly flares up for a minute or two. Even in the pub, they have that electric thing with imitation coal. My father and Father Daughtry make speeches about it, but they make speeches about everything – the price of the Guinness and not having proper draught beer. And frozen food. They all go on about
that
at Quayne. Well, I don’t agree. I bought a little packet of peas, and thought they were the nicest I ever had in my life. And no trouble, and no maggots.’ Her skirt seemed to have dried, and she looked about in contentment. ‘So you just live here together? How nice that must be. I hear your husband left you,’ she said in a polite tone to Midge.

‘Yes, he upped and went.’

‘What would you like to drink?’ David asked Cressy.

‘I’d very much like a cocktail, please,’ she said airily. David looked gravely at Midge, who was bringing him some glasses. They did not smile.

Midge was enjoying her evening. The girl’s naiveté drew the
older ones close together in complicity. They shared her, and quite delighted in her. They really could hardly believe in her.

‘And you have a television set,’ she said wonderingly.

Midge thought it spoilt the room and it was half hidden in a corner behind an étagère with pots of fern and white cyclamen.

‘I’ve seen it in shop windows,’ Cressy said. ‘My grandfather was on it once. But he always said “I appear on it, but I don’t have it”.’

She seemed so happy, sipping her drink, enjoying the heat of the coal fire; but, once, she sighed sharply, looking at David with frightened eyes, suddenly remembering.

‘Don’t let it spoil your evening,’ he said. ‘I shall do all the explaining for you. I promise it will be all right.’

‘I shouldn’t
bother
to explain,’ said Midge, who had been told the story. ‘There’s no harm done. Why drag it up?’

‘But the drink I wasted,’ Cressy said. ‘It’s so terribly expensive.’

‘That won’t worry
them
. They’re all right.’

Cressy turned questioningly to David. ‘Rather my own sentiments, I must confess,’ he said.

‘Then if you two say so, I am sure it is right,’ Cressy said in a relieved voice. ‘I shall just enjoy this beautiful cocktail and forget it.’

As it was Sunday evening, Midge said that they would have supper by the fire. There was a creamy dish of braised kidneys, a cheese in a little wooden box, and a plate of figs arranged on vine-leaves. They drank claret, and she told them about the Monsignors. She told them a great deal about Quayne, chattering happily, with colour in her cheeks. Midge was deeply interested.

When it was time for David to take Cressy home, Midge went out to the door with them. ‘Oh, it is almost winter,’ she said, standing in the porch, shivering. ‘You must be frozen,
child.’ She touched Cressy’s bare arm. ‘Come again, won’t you, and cheer me up, for the long dark days I can’t abide.’

‘Oh, I will,’ Cressy said. She felt vindicated now in the steps she had taken. Life was beginning to open up as she had promised herself it would. Sometimes, lately, during the day’s routine of cleaning and customers, and the evening’s loneliness, she had almost despaired. But she had held on, and now was rewarded.

‘Your mother’s marvellous,’ she told David, as they drove away.

‘I think so.’

‘She seems so young. To be able to have clothes like that…’ she sighed, but more in wonderment than envy.

‘I hardly ever go in a car,’ she said. ‘It’s so enjoyable.’ Harry Bretton had a very old Rolls-Royce, and she and her cousins had always been driven to the station in it to catch the train for school. Otherwise, it was rarely taken out of its barn. It was consequently very damp and smelled of fungus.

‘I always wanted to ask you,’ Cressy began. ‘I heard what you said about me that day in the shop, when you came in with that friend of yours with the dog. Why did you call me “bothersome”? I’ve never been to you. It was the other way round. That thing you wrote bothered me dreadfully.’

David felt that he was always making amends to her. ‘You shouldn’t listen to other people’s conversations,’ he said feebly.

‘But
am
I bothersome?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, after a pause. ‘But don’t keep putting me in the wrong, or we’ll never be friends.’

As they reached the valley, she became quiet again.

‘If you’re sure you think I needn’t say anything…’

‘Now, forget it,’ he said sternly. ‘Stop making mountains out of mole-hills. You must know by now that Toby and Alexia loathe a fuss.’

‘All right,’ she said contentedly. ‘It’s been such a wonderful evening – the nicest of my life, I think.’

David could not help being pleased at the idea of having given someone the nicest evening of her life. Most of the girls he knew would not have dreamed of saying so, if it were true.

Cressy was a little disappointed that he did not suggest a date for their next meeting; but, all the same, she went happily to bed.

David was back home in no time, before Midge had finished clearing up. Usually when he took girls home, she would go to bed and to sleep, and not see him again until morning.

‘You go out into the highways and by-ways and bring me back some delightful entertainment,’ Midge said.

‘Yes, but we could soon have that one round our necks.’

‘“I hear your husband left you.” Didn’t you adore that? No one’s ever said it to me before. They do sound such a rum lot up there, at Quayne. It’s practically medieval.’

‘They’re a rum lot all right. Well, I think I’ll go up now. I must make an early start tomorrow. For I’m off to Little Gidding in the morning,’ he began to sing, but then stopped, and looked anxiously at her. ‘Only two days. You’ll be all right, will you?’

‘Of course,’ she said brightly. It would be got over, she thought.

For the rest of her life, this responsibility, he was thinking. Of all things, responsibility he seemed to resent the most. It should be her husband’s concern, he told himself crossly, going upstairs to bed.

‘I have always wanted to get into a fast set,’ Cressy said. She was breathless from her Charleston lesson with Midge. David was sorting out records for them. At his age, he thought he should give up dancing. Too self-conscious now to shake and shudder with the teenagers, he felt that he belonged to a bygone age of dances in which the sexes were clasped together, cheeks touching – and even conversation, however banal, was carried on. ‘Do you come here often?’ and all those jokes of long ago; but one had to say something. The memories were sobering and ageing.

Midge, however, had risen above these considerations: nor was she now the least bit breathless. Still under the spell of the rhythm, she flung her little heels out sideways, and her elbows, she crossed and re-crossed her hands on her pink-trousered knees, all angles, like a puppet.

‘I haven’t enjoyed myself so much with my clothes on,’ she declared, recalling the old times, when she had often said that and raised a smile – those days when everyone had been scared of her, and Archie had come courting, with his talk of poetry and romance, and winning her, she now most furiously realised, with quotations from Rupert Brooke – and, of course, by being
a cut above car salesmen and brewers’ representatives; better educated; better off. To have been taken in by Rupert Brooke annoyed her most of all. ‘If you look like that, you don’t have to be a good poet,’ she said nowadays, for she was very sensitive to what was currently admired.

David was a little put out by the change in his mother. Cressy seemed to have gone to her head, and he wished she had not used the last phrase in front of her.

‘Now what?’ she asked, and said to Cressy, ‘You’re doing very well.’

Archie had been no good as a dancer. He had trundled her about. She ought to have been warned by that; for dancing and sex were linked, she knew, not only in her mind, but in the minds of far cleverer people – she had leafed a bit through Freud, looking for other things – and Archie, she had soon discovered trundled through sex.

Cressy was wearing trousers, too – pale yellow ones, the colour of her hair. Midge had given them to her, saying she had outgrown them, and Cressy, in her endeavours to get them on, had cast buttons all over the place – so that Midge had the pleasure of her gratitude and the pleasure of the scattered buttons as well.

To David and Midge, having Cressy about was like having a marvellous child to care for. They were perpetually under the excitement of giving treats. Sometimes, he felt that they were almost like grandparents, with a world to bestow and not too much responsibility. Very
young
grandparents. Dancing grandmother.

He put on a tango and then wished that he had not. Once Midge had done a burlesque tango with Jack Ballard. They had all thought it amusing at the time – apache stuff, rose clenched in teeth, back bends, snarling, stamping. But they had been drunk at the time; now he was not.

His mother was transformed by being admired. She, who had always looked quite young, looked five or ten years younger.