The Wedding Group (16 page)

David’s comfort was gone, and he mourned it: and responsibility had come, and irked him. Like a child, Cressy both exasperated him and endeared herself to him. If only we could live in London, everything would be all right, he told himself, for the hundredth time, driving home one particularly dreadful night, with snowflakes swirling towards his headlights and clotting on the windscreen. The wipers moved slowly, then jammed. He got out of the car and stepped into a foot of soft snow. He began to think of a base plan for staying the next night in London, inventing excuses. She can go to Mother’s he decided. For the duration. (Of the snow, he meant.) He cleared the windscreen and drove on, his socks sopping wet as the snow on them melted. He dreamed of civilisation – he and Nell
dining at the White Tower, perhaps; or chop-sticking somewhere.

At the Three Horseshoes, he stopped for a drink and a warm by the fire before facing the day’s disaster at home. Quayne was cut off from the village, so Joe MacPhail and the Father must have been forced to drink parsnip wine at home. No one was about. The saloon bar was empty.

‘Surprise, surprise!’ the barmaid said, perking up as he entered. ‘And what is your pleasure, kind sir?’

‘I’ll have a pint of the usual.’

She pulled on the beer pump, and the bitter swelled up in the glass and, as he watched it, watching her, up swelled his own misery, keeping level with the beer until, like that, it threatened to spill over. Her arm muscles moved, and there was a movement of her breast, as she drew on the lever. She was conscious, he knew, of the sexuality of this.

He took his beer to the imitation log-fire and tried to warm one foot, then the other. ‘Stepped into a great snow-drift,’ he explained.

‘Did you, darling?’ she asked, with professional sympathy, hardly listening, but looking at his cross and handsome face. ‘How’s the wife?’ she asked.

‘She’s well, thank you.’

‘I hear that poor little cousin of hers up at Quayne is in the club. So it goes in the village.’

So it does, does it! David thought. ‘I’ll have a large Scotch,’ he said, putting down his empty glass.

‘And so you shall, dear.’ She reached up to the optic, with the same display of bosom movement. The door opened and, to David’s relief, Toby came in.

‘Stepped in a snow-drift,’ David said, putting down the money for his drink and Toby’s.

‘I thought you looked sorry for yourself. I must say I’m bloody
glad
I
don’t have to go out to work. Can you find such a thing in the pub as a bottle of Burgundy?’ he asked the barmaid.

‘Might do,’ she said, taking a bunch of keys from the hook.

‘We’ve a great winter’s night stew going on,’ Toby said.

‘Lucky sod.’ David had gone back to the fire, and moodily held out one faintly steaming shoe.

‘Well, you’re more than welcome,’ Toby said. ‘It’s in a casserole the size of a cauldron. But I suppose Cressy has something waiting.’

‘You know you suppose nothing of the kind.’

Toby looked uneasy. Come to think of it, he could not imagine Cressy, with the best will in the world, accomplishing anything; but there was no need for David to be sour with him about it. He had not made him marry her.

The barmaid came back from the cellar with a bottle misted with cold, and Toby set it down by the fire. ‘Give her a ring,’ he said, meaning Cressy.

‘The telephone’s packed up.’

‘Well… as I say… come and warm your feet for a minute and have a drink with Alexia.’

‘That’s right, make off with my one and only customer,’ the barmaid complained. ‘What have I done, I’d like to know.’

‘I mustn’t stay a moment,’ David said. The temptation not to go home, in spite of Cressy, was too great. With the bottle inside his coat, Toby said good night to the barmaid, and led the way.

The room at the back of the shop was beautifully warm. There was a rich smell of meat and cloves and bay-leaves cooking, and Alexia fetched a pair of socks, and stuffed his wet shoes with newspaper and put them near the fire to dry.

‘I’ve still got to get through the snow to the cottage,’ David said, drinking some more whisky and, apart from the prospect before him, feeling much better.

‘But you’ll start off warm,’ she said.

She’s so beautiful, he thought, watching her. Beautiful jaw; beautiful cheek-bones; beautiful movements – and none consciously made.

Before long, he was sitting with them at the table, and Alexia was ladling out meat from the casserole on to his plate.

‘I don’t know how you face that awful drive down from London day after day,’ Toby said.

‘If it weren’t for my mother, I wouldn’t.’

‘You should make her go to live in London, too, Alexia said.

‘She loves her home here.’

‘Her having it both ways is at a pretty great cost to you, isn’t it?’ Alexia said. ‘My God, Toby, this wine is freezing,’ she added, obviously not wanting David’s answer, having made her point.

When at last he reached home, Cressy had gone to bed. On the table in the kitchen was a dish covered with some blackened pastry. He felt muzzy from the wine and whisky, and he peered closely at it, but came to no conclusion. He poured out another drink and, when he had finished it, went upstairs.

Cressy was sitting up in bed, with the light on, wearing one of his sweaters against the cold. She began to cry as soon as she saw him. He thought of bolting downstairs to get another drink. I can’t go through it, he told himself, thinking of the crying bout ahead. Too tired, too cold, too bored.

‘I thought you were dead,’ she said. ‘I’m only crying from relief.’

‘Why should I be dead? I happened to meet Toby. I’d just walked into about three feet of snow, I’d have you know. How would you like that?’

‘Your supper got spoiled.’

‘Yes, I saw something peculiar down there.’

‘And I particularly wanted it to be nice for you.’

‘Quite a change of heart,’ he said heavily, sitting down on the edge of the bed with his back to her, taking off his shoes.

‘What do you mean “a change of heart”?’

‘Only that if I’d known you were actually cooking something, I’d have come home earlier.’

‘And I had my news to tell you.’

He waited for it indifferently, tugged at a shoe and threw it across the floor.

‘Your mother came here this morning – all through that snow, just to bring me some cakes.’

‘Really! That news I don’t find very exciting.’

‘But I haven’t told you yet. Your mother thinks I am going to have a baby.’

He turned round to stare at her. ‘What do you mean, my mother thinks you are going to have a baby?’

‘I was being sick when she came.’

She pulled the neck of his sweater up round her chin, and shivered, staring back at his astonished face.

‘But you’ve taken your pills, haven’t you?’

‘Yes, of course. I’ve hardly missed a single day. Don’t you
want
a baby? Your mother was so pleased by the idea, and I thought you would be. She said she’d never really had the chance to be a grandmother – with the others so far away.’

‘What my mother wants is beside the point. If
we
wanted a child, why in God’s name take the pills at all? You are completely feckless,’ he said furiously.

‘Oh, don’t be angry,’ she pleaded. ‘Don’t be angry with me.’

He began to undress. ‘Look, I’m tired,’ he explained wearily. ‘I’m cold. I’ve had a bloody awful day, and now you face me with this. I’ve got just about enough on my plate at present – without babies.’

‘And I’ve had a bloody awful day, too,’ Cressy said, weeping loudly. ‘Hour after hour on my own, and the television’s gone
wrong. It was snowing on that, too. I’m afraid the hot-waterbottle’s gone cold,’ she said timidly, as he threw back the bedclothes and let in a draught.

‘And my feet are like ice.’ With an exaggerated air of patience, he replaced the bedclothes, put on his dressing-gown and slippers, took the cold bottle and went downstairs. He filled the kettle and refilled his glass and stood by the stove, drinking. In no time at all, it would be the black and silent morning, the beginning of another dreadful day, with new tracks of little animals on the freshly fallen snow when it was light enough to see them, waste-pipes frozen, trouble with the car. He ruffled his hair tiredly, drained his glass, waiting for the kettle to boil.

In this weather, Aunt Sylvie died. It was as Archie had foretold. She simply diminished and faded away. He watched her going, with great sadness.

David went to the funeral, drove with his father behind the hearse, through the grey, town slush. A few black figures walked between the snow-laden bushes up the path to the church. From the religion she had not believed in was borrowed the final tidying-up. Archie could think of no other seemly kind of sendoff, and she had left no instructions, apart from those – mostly impossible to carry out – for the disposal of her belongings.

Standing in the cemetery, David wondered how they had managed to dig the grave – the ground was like iron. Even the mauve and white chrysanthemums looked nipped with cold. He worried about his father, standing there shivering, his eyes watering.

They drove back to the house.

‘Shouldn’t we have asked the Vicar for a cuppa, or a drink or something?’ David asked.

‘Never took to the fellow. He was poor Sylvie’s sparring-partner. Shan’t be seeing much more of
him
.’

Who will he be seeing much more of, David wondered, as they went into the dark and ugly house.

‘Can’t say I’m not a bit cut-up,’ Archie said, looking about the hall, feeling very strange about the emptiness of upstairs.

‘Shall I make
you
a cuppa?’ David asked.

His father winced. ‘Let us have a glass of something,’ he suggested. ‘We need to drive out the cold.’

‘We do indeed.’

Archie brought the decanter of port and the biscuit-barrel from the sideboard in the dining-room, and they settled by the oil-heater in the drawing-room, Archie with his rug about his knees.

‘Father,’ David began nervously, ‘you simply can’t go on living here alone. You’ve done one duty; now what about the other?’

‘I have no other, dear boy. My great, grown-up sons can look after themselves. And very well they seem to do it. Most proud.’

‘You have a very lonely wife. She has to face old age on her own. As
you
will have to now.’

Archie made secretive, crumbling movements of his fingers about his nostrils. ‘But she’s got you to hand,’ he said slyly. ‘And that young girl of yours. Seems to have worked out very well.’

‘But, dammit, I can’t take a husband’s place. And why should I have to try?’

‘She wouldn’t want me back, would she?’ Craftily, Archie watched David’s face. ‘I wasn’t much of a success, you know.’

‘We could soon find out.’

‘No, I simply couldn’t stand the pace. I couldn’t then, and now it’s out of the question. Here, there, and everywhere, and all at the same time, it seemed to me. I remember that once I had to go to the Golf Club Dance. Imagine it. Does she still go dancing?’

‘No,’ said David, ‘for there is no one to take her. I am a little ashamed that I do not.’

‘Oh, you’d enjoy it, I’m sure.’

‘In any case,’ David said hastily, ‘she no longer cares for such things.’

Archie was silent to express his disbelief.

‘But what will you do here, all on your own?’ David asked him.

‘Oh, I am always on the go. I do my housework, when Mrs Thingummy doesn’t turn up, and I cook luncheon. Then a little snooze, I must confess, and after tea I do the crossword-puzzle, unless it is one of my silver evenings. And by then, it’s time to change for dinner…’

He was like a very bad repertory actor in the part of an old man, David thought – the quavering voice and wavering gestures. One of the many lines across his forehead might be the join of an almost bald wig.

‘And you could live in comfort, and be looked after and eat delicious food.’

There was a little cackle. ‘Sarcasm is held to be the lowest form of wit, but I must say I always enjoy it,’ Archie said. ‘No, I am very well as I am, and I think you know it.’

David refilled their glasses, and took another stale, soft biscuit. It tasted of sadness, appropriate to the day, and the surroundings.

‘Cressy, my wife, is expecting a baby,’ he said.

‘Poor little boy,’ said Archie.

The thaw began the day after the funeral. Great shelves of snow came crashing down from Midge’s roof, and drops off branches pitted the melting snow. With the thaw, Mrs Brindle came again, but too full of news to do much work.

‘I was sorry to hear about the little cousin up at Quayne,’ she
lied. ‘I wouldn’t have mentioned it, but it’s all round the village now. You know what villages are like.’

During the bad weather, she could not go up to Quayne, so had busied herself in other ways.

The village was inimical to Quayne, and had in general received the story gladly: even usually charitable people forgave themselves easily for caring less than they should about another’s unhappiness, for self-sufficiency is an irritating thing in a small village, where giving and taking is the accepted order. Quayne did not even give its custom to the shopkeepers – could manage largely without them, it seemed – took no part in anything, did not even go to church. Joe MacPhail’s and Father Daughtry’s visits to the pub were all the village saw of Quayne money, and as often as not, they put their drinks on the slate.