The Wedding Group (12 page)

‘I can’t… I can’t… keep up,’ gasped Cressy, flinging herself on to the sofa. The tango had not got very far.

‘Oh, this is the nadir of life,’ she said, reaching for her drink.

‘The nadir?’

‘Yes, don’t you know, the nadir of the gods. I’ve heard my father talk of it.’

Midge smiled at David more warmly than he at her.

The drinks he gave Cressy were more grenadine than anything, and they always seemed to suffice; but he was not sure of his mother’s mixtures, and this evening Cressy had been there before he arrived. She very often was.

He wondered if she ought to be discouraged from coming so often. If his mother tired of her, it would be a sudden thing, and there would be no going back on it, and only heartbreak or deep bewilderment for the girl. At present she seemed so happy – equally happy with his mother or himself. Sometimes, he had taken her out alone, calling for her when the shop closed on Saturdays, and he had found himself, to his amusement, in all kinds of strange places he would never have dreamed of going to without her – sitting in coffee-bars, for instance, among bamboo, plastic vines and fishing-nets, while the juke-box never let up and the coffee-machine gasped and gurgled, and all round him was the younger generation. Her pleasure in such places was unbelievable. She looked about her with shining eyes. And there were all the other places, where they ate hamburgers and there was much the same din and an overpowering smell of onions frying; or where there were fruit machines, or ten-pin bowling. They had high-teas in depressing cinema cafés. He had even had to take her into a launderette on their way home late one night, to have a look round. He often felt foolish, but was too amused to mind. He also felt
much older. But her enchantment was something not to be missed – her falling in love with the present time.

This evening of the dancing, he was very quiet. He knew that Cressy had changed – he had watched her changing – and it had been his theory that people never did. All his father said about his mother in the old days he discounted as the errors of an old man’s rancorous memory. In his own eyes, Midge had always been the same. Yet Cressy had altered, and in a very moving way. It was not just a matter of the yellow trousers or the made-up eyes (for she was no longer waifish); but she was all in blossom, as if the spring had come. She was like an indulged pet, who responded with the warmest affection. She suggested a confidence in the world that was almost alarming to him.

They had dinner. Midge now seemed to find it more of a satisfaction to cook for Cressy’s praise than David’s. Anything the girl liked especially was bound to reappear.

‘Meat on Friday,’ Cressy said with satisfaction, when she had finished her steak. ‘I have never had it before.’

‘Oh, my dear…’ Midge said, as if she were appalled… ‘I simply didn’t think.’

‘But why not have it? I never saw the sense of that. What’s the difference between fish and meat, anyhow. One’s no more of a treat than the other, and they’re both the flesh of dead creatures.’

‘Oh, Cressy, please,’ said David, who ate more slowly.

‘You should have reminded me,’ Midge said. ‘Now I feel like the devil himself.’

‘Are you religious?’ Cressy asked, in a rather suspicious voice.

‘That’s a bit difficult to answer. Of course, one knows it must all have had a beginning…’

‘Do you go to Church?’

‘Well, I’ve always thought… whatever one’s vague ideas…
one can do just as much good without going. I know I try to, if I say it myself.’

‘Then you’re not,’ Cressy said, and sounded relieved.

Later, when David had taken Cressy home, Midge lay in bed, listening for his car. She had begun to feel nervy and agitated, and could not explain to herself why.

He shouldn’t keep her out so late, she thought. After all,
she
has to work in the morning, if he hasn’t, she rationalised. All words of calm reason, she decided. But she was not calm. She was angry with David. She’s so young, she kept telling herself. And at the back of her mind, a voice said nastily, ‘Now they will have secrets
you
cannot share.’

In the morning, he said nothing, but to suggest Nell Stapleforth’s paying a visit the following week-end.

So what has gone wrong? Midge wondered, keeping fairly silent herself. If something had happened, and she was never to see Cressy again, she would find it difficult to forgive him. He would have taken away the only fun she had nowadays, and condemned her to be alone again for all those slow-going hours.

She spent a wretched day, waiting for a mention of Cressy that never came, looking for signs in him, clues in his behaviour, but he simply carried on in a null way, working most of the time in his room, finishing an article.

It was an almost soundless day, damp, still. Midge was on her own downstairs, and thought the hours would never go by.

Self-pity, the despised emotion, so difficult to overcome, set in as did the promised fog rising from the valley. Four o’clock in the afternoon she had always hated. There was no sound from upstairs. A bird squawked briefly in the garden, the thinnest of noises, with all of winter in it.

Where will he go this evening, she wondered.

He went nowhere. He looked at the television but as if
seeing nothing, and was just as boring as his father had ever been.

On Wednesday afternoon, which was Cressy’s half-day, she arrived at half past three, carrying a parcel. She looked forlorn once more.

‘It’s for you,’ she told Midge, when she had held one blue hand to the fire for a moment.

‘For me? You ought to wear gloves, my dear. You’ll get chilblains.’

‘I wanted to give it to you ages ago, but I’ve only just managed to save up for it.’

It was true. What she had deprived herself of in the last weeks, Midge would never guess.

‘You mustn’t give me presents,’ Midge said, looking mystified, as she untied the string. She unwrapped the Wedgwood wedding group.

‘My dear,’ she said gravely, ‘this you should never have done.’

‘Why not? You gave me everything. I didn’t want to think it had been that way round all the time.’

‘Gave,’ Midge noted; and ‘had been’. So no more was to be given?

‘My dear child, it must have cost the earth. I feel terrible about it.’

‘Well, don’t,’ Cressy said. ‘It was quite expensive but I got it cheaper than a customer would. I think it’s pretty hideous, but you admired it the first time I met you.’

‘So I did. I remember. Oh, it’s the most lovely present I ever had. Let me put it against this red wall. There, it looks so beautiful. Is that where you would like to see it when you come in?’

‘I shan’t be coming in. David wants it all to stop.’

‘Wants what to stop?’

‘My coming here, and being bothersome. That’s a word he has for me.’

She began to cry and Midge, who did not know about her weakness for tears, could not have believed the girl could look so pitiful, with her shoulders hunched, her thin hands covering her face, her hair falling forwards.

‘It was my fault,’ Cressy said, fumbling up her sleeve for her handkerchief, and then smothering her face with it.

Midge let her cry for a while and then asked, hardly breathing, ‘What happened? I think you should tell me.’

‘It was on Friday. Going home that night, through the woods, I asked him why he didn’t make love to me. I thought men always did when they had girls in cars, and it was dark. I was worried that he never seemed to think of it. I wanted so much to try it. I never have,’ she said, looking at Midge, showing her red and swollen face for a moment. ‘Am I so awful? I felt I had every right to find out.’

‘You know,’ Midge began, and paused. She was rather taken aback, and could not at once think of anything to say. ‘Perhaps there’s nothing so dangerous as having led a sheltered life.’

‘But it was only from experience I was sheltered. I know a great deal about sex, as I explained to David. Some of my grandfather’s books have to be seen to be believed. When he and my grandmother went up to Buckingham Palace to get his C.B.E., I read them all day long, and tried to work out the illustrations. Of course, my mother told me when I was little, but I never thought she had much idea. But those books were an eyeopener. I thought to myself, if it’s as complicated as that, I’d better get the hang of it, so that I don’t feel a complete idiot when the occasion arises.’

At the thought of the pornographic books, she had stopped crying. She rubbed her wet cheeks like a child.

‘I think you would have been better off with just your
mother’s explanation,’ Midge said. ‘She wouldn’t have left out love. Of course, I don’t know what books they were, but I can guess.’

She could, for her own father had had them hidden away, and she herself had snooped when young. She was quite shocked that a religious man like Harry Bretton, a national figure, should sink to the level of Bertie Reynolds and the Outriders, or some of those regulars in the saloon bar when she was young, slipping folded papers from their wallets and slyly handing them round. It was quite disgraceful.

‘They are artistic books,’ Cressy said with dignity.

‘Yes, I dare say. But you try to forget them, my dear. When you get married, that will be the time to make your discoveries. It will be as simple as can be, and mugging up all those acrobatics you’ll see was quite unnecessary.’

She sounded just like Rose, Cressy thought in horror.

‘And, meanwhile,’ Midge went on, ‘you’d better not go about offering yourself to young men. They might not all have David’s sense of responsibility.’ Then could have wished the words unsaid, for she knew nothing of what had really happened that night, and he had been a very long time coming home. She felt rather foolish, lit a cigarette and waited.

‘I can read your thoughts,’ Cressy said. That Rose-like speech had made her hostile. ‘I assure you that your dear son was just as upright as you hope he was. It was I who made a fool of myself.’

‘Not irreparably,’ Midge said.

‘I’ve ruined our friendship, that’s all I know, and it was the only thing I had. He never wants to see me again.’

‘Oh, nonsense!’

‘Well, I never want to see him again.’

‘He probably feels that he put you in a false position. After all, he’s years older than you.’

‘And so was your husband years older than you.’

‘But look at that poor little marriage…’

‘Why bring marriage into it?’

‘Darling, stop skating about and being cross. I’ll speak to David. May I? I know him so well, and I know that responsibility scares him stiff. But there’s no earthly reason why you shouldn’t be friends again.’

‘I’m too ashamed to want to meet him again ever.’

‘Don’t play theatres, darling. I’m going to make some tea now. At least I know that’s the right thing to do.’

Cressy was crying again, and angrily dashing away tears.

On her way out of the room, Midge paused to look again at the wedding group. ‘I love it so much,’ she said.

‘I find I miss the child,’ David said, sitting down by the fire after dinner, looking worn-out, as if eating the meal had exhausted him. ‘And the very
thought
of Nell coming down on Friday. I wish I’d never asked her.’ His life seemed suddenly too tedious for words.

Embarrassment can be both tiring and confusing. The conversation about Cressy had made him feel like a shying horse. It was not a fit subject for mother and son to discuss.

‘If I hadn’t cared about her, I’d have laughed it off and never have stopped the car,’ he confessed.

‘
Cared
about her?’ Midge asked in astonishment. She had not bargained for this. She quickly righted her voice, and went on as if the question had not been asked, and it was not answered. ‘She
was
put out,’ she said lightly.

‘Yes, so you said. It’s all unbelievable. Girls like that shouldn’t be let loose. She makes me feel so bloody old, too. I find myself talking to her like a Dutch uncle, whatever they may be.’

‘I know. I find myself doing much the same.’

But Midge had enjoyed the experience. It had been rather a pleasant change, and she had felt so completely in authority.

‘Drinking again,’ David said, watching her dully. ‘I can’t think what my father would say.’

Midge smiled; but she knew that his remark, which he might have made on any other evening, this time sprang from hostility.

Serious matters they had always approached lightly. There had not been so very many of them, but the worries that had occurred had been treated in an offhand, amused manner. It will all come out in the wash. Indeed they had no other manner with one another. For this reason, she had talked of Cressy’s visit and her confession, as if it were rather absurd; entertaining, certainly. Intuitive though she usually was with him, it had been a little time this evening before she realised that he was not smiling, might even be angry at her flippancy. He thought the subject should not have been broached – there had been too much talking altogether – and he wished that Cressy had kept her mouth shut, had stayed away, in fact. Midge could not coax him into laughter.

So now she was pouring herself out a drink and trying to think of something quite different to talk about. All would fall into place, she was sure. She would be able to manœuvre them out of this dangerous situation. Nell’s coming that week-end would be a help, whatever David might think at this moment, and Midge began to wonder how she could make a very special time of it, to put right this evening’s misunderstanding – and that, of course, to her, meant in the way of creature comforts. She fetched a cookery book – always, these days, her favourite reading – and as she turned the pages, she could sense his stillness, as he sat sprawled in his chair, staring at the fire. Then the stillness was suddenly broken. ‘I think I’ll go down for a pint,’ he said, getting up abruptly.