The Wedding Group (13 page)

‘I came to ask Cressy out for a drink.’

Toby held the door open wide. ‘A splendid idea,’ he said.
‘Alexia just said that we should invite her down and we were both wondering how we decently could not. However, we had this very minute decided that we mustn’t leave her up there crying on her own another evening – no matter what conditions we had at the beginning. You see,’ he said, opening the door of the sitting-room, ‘we are not entirely heartless – though very nearly. He has come in the nick of time, Alexia.’

She looked up with relief from peeling a pear. The remains of supper were on the table, wine-glasses, a plateful of walnut shells, and opened books – a scene of easy peacefulness. David could understand what a sacrifice they had been about to make.

‘Yes, we are very nearly heartless,’ Alexia agreed.

‘What is all this crying?’ David asked.

‘It’s worse than ever, I can tell you.’

‘Oh, come off it, David,’ Toby protested. ‘She is a love-sick wraith. You’ve started something you know, and we are suffering for it. We think you are very nearly heartless, too.’

‘And for the slipperiest customer we’ve ever known,’ Alexia said calmly, ‘we find this entanglement surprising.’

‘Entanglement? What has the child got into her head now?’

There was no need for a reply, and Alexia began to eat her pear.

‘I’ll go and ask her,’ David said. ‘But perhaps she won’t want to come.’

This seemed to need no answer, either. Toby looked longingly at his open book. ‘I’m afraid she may be rather a tear-stained little thing for the Horseshoes. But no doubt she can blot herself and put on a dash of powder.’

‘If she wants, I will lend her my dark spectacles,’ Alexia offered.

Cressy opened her door, holding some knitting in her hand. She was very much taken aback at seeing David, and said incoherently, ‘It won’t come right. I have to keep unpicking it.’ She
put the knitting to her eyes, and turned away. The room looked like some old-age pensioner’s last, lonely refuge.

‘Well, forget it for now,’ he said, ‘and let’s go for a drink.’

‘How can I, looking like this?’ she asked dramatically.

‘Alexia said she’d lend you her dark glasses.’

‘So you’ve been talking about me. How, for God’s sake, did
they
know my knitting had gone wrong?’

‘It’s not your knitting that’s gone wrong – or if it has,’ – he looked doubtfully at the strange-shaped thing she was holding – ‘if it is, that’s not what’s troubling you.’

‘I don’t want to go to the Horseshoes. Father Daughtry might be there.’

‘Well, we can go somewhere else, somewhere a bit farther on to give you more time to recover. You don’t look too bad, anyway. Nothing that a bit of powder won’t put right.’

‘I look terrible.’

She really did. He picked up a brush and began to smooth her tangled hair, while she stood before the little looking-glass, her knees bent so that she could see into it, and dabbed her face with a grubby powder-puff. Very gently, he took her long hair in one hand, and brushed it with the other, loosening the snarls without at all hurting her. He imagined her lying on the bed weeping, tangling her hair against the pillow, and he was very moved and contrite.

‘Why did you come?’ she asked, and her eyes suddenly glittered again and looked about to spill over.

‘Come along, or it will be closing-time.’

‘You only think about drink,’ she said, smiling for the first time.

‘Well, I’m not going to one of your Wimpy Bars at this hour of the day. I’ve had my dinner.’

Then, as he turned away to put the brush down, he saw on the chest of drawers a plate with some crumbs, and the silver
foil from a triangle of processed cheese, and he suddenly thought about her present to Midge. ‘Unless you’re hungry,’ he said.

‘I couldn’t eat a thing.’

‘You know, you shouldn’t have given that present to my mother. It was far too expensive.’

She pushed the plate out of sight angrily. ‘I can read you like a book,’ she said.

Although, as they passed the Three Horseshoes, Father Daughtry was getting ponderously into a car to be driven up Quayne Hill by one of his cronies, they did not go in. It certainly would be too embarrassing, David thought – with Cressy’s eyes still red with crying.

Once, she had imagined that the very limit of bliss would be to drive in such a car as this, with someone like David; now it was not enough. She sat, with her hands folded in her lap, staring ahead of her at the light fog drifting across the blurred light from the headlamps.

He was making for another pub called The Squirrel, but before they reached it she had begun to cry again, so he drove on. He was surprised to find himself touched and distressed, and not irritated, by her tears.

‘You do seem nervy,’ he said.

‘I am trying to give up biting my nails and it is quite a strain,’ she said, clasping her hands tightly.

‘Oh, I should bite them,’ he advised kindly.

‘And I was trying so hard, for your sake,’ she said.

‘Don’t let’s go to any pub,’ he said. ‘Drink isn’t really all I think about. It just makes a sort of pattern in one’s life, as other things don’t seem to.’

He wanted a pattern so much, and for the first time consciously knew it.

He stopped the car under some trees, and she looked up apprehensively.

‘Cressy, darling, will you marry me?’ he asked, almost to his own astonishment.

She drew in her breath as if aghast, and leaned away from him. He felt her staring in his direction.

Waiting for her answer, he realised that he knew nothing about her; and he was frightened, either way, of how she would reply. She began to bite her nails.

There was a long silence, in which he almost wished to start up the car and pretend that nothing extraordinary had happened. Then she said, in a pinched voice, ‘But are you sure I shan’t be an inconvenience to you?’

David and Nell went on their Sunday afternoon walk in the damp countryside, down lanes between holly bushes choked with dead beech-leaves, under the singing, hissing electric pylons, in another direction from Quayne. Each time a car came by, she snatched up her dog, and held it to her bosom, and glared, backing into the hedge. ‘What on earth are they doing, driving about on a Sunday afternoon?’ she complained.

‘Taking Mother for a spin,’ he suggested.

Because of all the cars, they seemed to be walking in single-file most of the time. He suggested taking a short cut home through the woods, where she stumbled over brambles, cursing, clutching her dog, and laddering her stockings.

Holding back a thorny branch for her, he said, ‘I want to tell you, Nell, that Cressy and I are going to be married.’

She stopped, and stared at him.

‘Cressy? That little girl?’

‘Cressy. That little girl.’

He pulled the branch back farther, impatient for her to get on, and discomfited by her stare.

‘You must be joking,’ she said, not moving a step forward.

‘I am in dead earnest.’

‘My God, your mother will go up the wall.’

He looked at her with what he meant to be an expression of disdain. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You bloody do, old dear.’

‘I had to get married some time,’ he said, betraying his understanding.

‘And often I’ve wondered how you were going to manage it.’

‘As a matter of fact, I haven’t told her yet.’

‘I can understand that.’

At last, she moved on, and he could let go of the bough.

‘I haven’t told anyone, in fact,’ he said.

When they came to the edge of the wood, she heaved herself up on the stile, large and ungainly, all bent legs, like a cow getting up, he thought. ‘You could knock me down with a feather,’ she declared.

As they neared home, she said, ‘Well, I’m looking forward to my tea.’ She pictured the fire, the buttered toast, and all her delightful new speculations about poor, unwary Midge.

Rose took up her usual place by the window, so that she could look out of it, when she could not trust herself to face the others.

David addressed himself to Joe, who roamed about, rolling one cigarette after another, continually relighting them, or twisting them, unlit, in his fingers. Cressy, who had refused to be left out of this drama, sat on a stool by the fire, looking interested and excited.

She was of an age when David felt he must ask permission to marry her. Never, for any of his other girl-friends would he have done that, and he was feeling like someone from a bygone age.

He could tell that his request had come as a relief to Joe, but Rose’s reaction was another matter.

‘But… I’m very sorry, it sounds so rude,’ she began, turning briefly from the rain-covered window. ‘It is all such a shock, such a surprise. We don’t even know you.’ Her own husband had practically been chosen for her, so that she had been sure all was in order.

‘I hope you will come to see my mother very soon,’ David said stiffly.

‘Yes, of course. I believe we are quite neighbours. But, at Quayne, we seem so self-sufficient, we rarely visit.’

‘Cressy and I want to live near here,’ David said soothingly. ‘We cannot go very far away, for my mother’s sake. She will be quite alone when I go.’

‘Your father is dead?’

‘My father and mother are separated.’

He might as well have thrown in bankruptcy, syphilis, congenital madness, haemophilia, indecent exposure, treason and fraud. From the expression on her face, it seemed no more could make a difference to Rose.

‘I’m glad you think of your mother,’ she said, with her back turned to Cressy.

Harry would have to be told, she thought. And who was going to do that?

‘And where will you be married?’ she asked fearfully.

David understood that these words were the only permission he would be given.

‘Neither Cressy nor I have any religion. We shall go to the registry office in Market Harbury,’ he said.

And then Rose moved to a chair and sat down, thinking her legs would support her no longer.

Midge – but she did not know – was the third one to be told of the engagement, and on this occasion, Cressy was not allowed to be part of the drama; although, as it turned out, if
she had been there, she would have thought the way it was played very right and proper, and what could have been expected, and so unlike the bleak performance in her own home.

Before dinner one evening, David, feeling doomed and self-conscious, stripped off the wrapping from a bottle of champagne, and then broached both the bottle and the news.

His mother’s pleasure was more than he could have imagined. She seemed quite shocked with joy. Her lips trembled so that she was scarcely able to say how delighted she was, and tears – unbelievably – brimmed her eyes.

‘You must forgive me,’ she said, wiping them away, ‘for it is such a very special evening.’

She, like Rose, turned aside for a moment, and she put her glass down before she had taken a sip.

‘So fizzy!’ she explained, when she picked it up again. She wrinkled her nose, and then said, ‘To you both, darling!’ and drank a little. ‘Oh, heavens, what a happy thing,’ she added.

Taking her glass with her she went into the kitchen to look into the oven. She stayed there for as long as she could. Her hands were very cold, and her mind confused. For once, she let something burn.

‘In my excitement,’ she explained.

After dinner, she said, ‘Will you take me out for another celebration drink?’ She had never before asked him to take her out; but she knew that she could not be at home alone that evening, not even at home alone with him. Only when she was safely in bed, with the light out, could she face anything, or be herself again.

‘Yes, let’s do that,’ David said eagerly. ‘Shall I fetch your coat? We’ll go down and get Cressy and Toby and Alexia, and celebrate.’

*

On a Wednesday evening, neither French nor Italian day, David went to see his father. This time, Archie was not cleaning silver, but arranging some whiting, tails in mouth, for frying.

A very old wireless-set was on in the kitchen. Through sounds like gales roaring and twigs crackling, Archie had been listening to the weather-forecast. It was just coming to an end. ‘There may even be some dry spells in the South,’ a callous voice announced. Archie switched it off.

‘They always break their promises,’ he said. ‘That’s one thing I couldn’t do.’

‘You broke the biggest one of all,’ David said. ‘You promised to love, cherish and whatever it is your future wife.’

‘That was in church, and the words were put into my mouth, almost one by one, as if I couldn’t take in a whole sentence at a time. It was very galling. I was in an appallingly false position. Such a coarse service – “for the procreation of children” and so on. Well, they were procreated all right. For my sins.’ He chuckled. ‘I should have preferred to have been married in a registry office. But your mother wanted this comic opera display.’