The Wedding Group (2 page)

Father Daughtry, like all those of Taylor’s characters who glimpse the abyss, tries to forget with alcohol: in enormous quantities. Her protagonists weave through the woods and cake-shops on a tide of whiskey, light ale and Quayne’s vestal virgins’ parsnip wine. When poor Cressy, horribly lonely, sniffs the antique dealers’ hidden Cointreau and spills most of it on her dress, she thinks she has lost Paradise: ‘I shall have to run away.’ Instead she is rescued by David, because he feels sorry for her, and so begins the destruction of Midge’s hopes and dreams.

Not Cressy’s, though: to a girl raised on bean stews and Fairisle, the mere thought of Wimpy bars, launderettes and ‘high-teas in depressing cinema cafés’ is very heaven. Here, as in all her novels, Taylor writes so brilliantly about the muckiness of humanity: the way that our natural crudeness, our liking for a drink or private bad behaviour, seeps around the edges of our efforts to be sophisticated, from the barmaid who ‘poked a finger into her piled-up hair and scratched secretly, pretending to be rearranging a pin’ to Bretton’s ‘pearly-grey teeth’ to the cleaner, Mrs Brindle, and her running commentary on life at Quayne: ‘I must say my blood ran cold at one of the conversations I had no means of not over-hearing. The girl was crying – they’re great for floods of tears up here… this was in the kitchen where they were having a bit of a
tête-à-tête
and taking not a blind bit of notice of me in the scullery. Clattering about with the dishes, I was, and coughing my head off.’

Taylor’s matchless ear for dialogue, her eye for human ridiculousness, make her the mistress of the simile: a dog like an ant; a jaundiced baby like a blood orange; a man who seems to be overdoing his decline into old age, so that even his forehead resembles a bald wig. ‘Cressy’s room was like a stage-set for some depressing play about young-married strife, the very background for bickering and disillusion.’
The Wedding Group
is Margaret Drabble’s
The Millstone
rewritten by Ruth Rendell, with other echoes too: Louis MacNiece’s ‘Hidden Ice’, in its understanding of the rocks and currents which lurk under ‘calm upholstering’; the bad housewifery and conjugal disappointments of Murdoch’s Dora Greenfield in
The Bell
, who is the sort of woman men marry and then regret. However, what makes it entirely Taylor is the way that it combines their squalor and darkness with such wit and humanity and daring, so that one finishes it feeling exhilarated, expanded by compassion, like poor Midge whose heart has ‘grown large with love’.

So what is to be Elizabeth Taylor’s fate now? Will she sink slowly into obscurity again? Will she hover for a time at this new unsatisfactory level of semi-acclaim, fêted as a ‘writers’ writer’, for the little that is worth? Or will she continue to rise? The author of
The Wedding Group, Angel, A View of the Harbour
surely deserves to be better known. It is in your hands. Forget her reputation: read her books. Then decide.

Charlotte Mendelson, 2010

The Quayne ladies, adjusting their mantillas, hurried across the courtyard to the chapel.

The three daughters of Harry Bretton – painter and pronouncer – had plain names which were impossible to shorten: Rose, Jane and Kate. At the time of the mass conversion – the whole family at once – to Roman Catholicism other Christian names had been added, but were not used.

The grand-daughters, two of whom followed them across the courtyard, had somehow lost their first names – Imogen, Cressida and Petronella were now Mo and Cressy and Pet.

Quayne was mostly a world of women.

At communal meals in the great barn, Harry Bretton presided, with the Chaplain, Father Daughtry, and Harry’s wife, Rachel, at the other end of the long table, usually almost hidden behind an enormous tureen. He had no son. His daughter, Jane, had two – but the name was lost.

Cressy, this morning, watched them going into the chapel.

‘I dare say I am abandoning my faith,’ she had startled her mother by saying at breakfast one day.

‘You “dare say”! What do you mean “you dare say”?’

Breakfasts at Quayne were taken in the daughters’ separate houses, otherwise Cressy could not have made the remark. Her father, Joe MacPhail, did not raise his eyes from the newspaper; but her mother, Rose, put her cup back on its saucer with a shaky hand.

‘One cannot
abandon
a faith,’ she said at last, after staring first at Cressy and then, but without seeing anything, out of the window. The postman came bicycling up the path, right through her vision, but her brain did not take him in, and when something heavy fell through the letter-box, she started painfully.

Rose’s father – Harry, the Patriarch – would take such behaviour as a personal insult, as if it were he whom Cressy was rejecting. There would be a Quayne rumpus, as there had been before, and Rachel, the grandmother, would get the worst of it, but none of them would escape entirely.

‘Don’t worry,’ Cressy said coolly, irritated by her mother’s expression. ‘It never meant much to me. I shan’t feel the lack. After all, you palmed it off on me without my being asked.’

Of all the girls, this one of Rose’s had been the questionable one. The word ‘recalcitrant’ had been used on school reports. Her cousins had been so good and biddable, but – for Rose – there were always frightening interviews with Reverend Mother and, in the end, Cressy had not been allowed to finish her last year. Not exactly expelled, but the suggestion was that, all the same, it would be better if she did not remain. She had broken bounds, was often missing for hours at a time, and had had some strange notions, which younger girls were all too ready to listen to.

‘You must talk to Father Daughtry,’ was all that Rose could say now.

‘He was only important when I
had
my religion,’ Cressy said. ‘Now he’s no more than anyone else.’

This cloud had not yet broken, but it was building up to a great darkness, Cressy was thinking this morning, when they had all gone into the chapel, and the door was closed. Worse would follow. A dreadful fuss would follow. A great deal of talk. From some so much embarrassing and awful talk. From others, silences.

Would it not be easier, she wondered, to continue to go through the empty practices, for the sake of peace and quiet – since the religion meant nothing to her. At worst it could only be a waste of time and loss of self-respect. But she had wondered about this before, and decided no. She would rather – but only just – put up with the rumpus. The upshot of the ructions. That came in one of her father’s Irish songs.

Whilst they were in the chapel, she wandered about the deserted courtyard, where hens pecked between the paving-stones. A Church of England charwoman, exempt from religious duties, was scrubbing the table in the barn, but she was the only sign of life.

Time always went slowly for Cressy, now that her school days were over. She had come home from the convent to nothing. To be a part of a busy, useful, self-sufficing community, her mother had said. This meant helping to bake bread, hoeing the kitchen garden, weaving dress lengths. The good life. Rejecting her religion was rejecting Quayne. The good life was the whole life. All parts hung together.

She would be expected to marry. Whom? Perhaps one of the young men who came to work in the studio with her grandfather. They would live pennilessly in one of the out-buildings (restored), and take their place at the long dining-table. She visualised it with the greatest of ease.

Leaning over the warm brick wall of her Aunt Jane’s cottage, she picked an unripe fig. It was sheltered at Quayne. Peaches and nectarines grew well. Most years, grapes ripened on the
south wall of the courtyard, against the studio, which Harry Bretton called the workshop.

The courtyard was large, had once been a rickyard. One side was the old farmhouse, the house of Harry, who had begun it all – the family growing into the community, with its religion and its way of life; all thought out by him, step after step, since the early days of his marriage, and his first successes as a painter.

The chapel, which they had built themselves of handmade bricks, was thinly white-washed, with windows of greenish wavery glass. In the farm cottages lived the daughters with their husbands.

The husbands were in no case of much account. As they had been acquired after the conversion, they were of the proper faith. Cressy’s father was the Irish one. Gerald Fines, Kate’s husband, worked at the B.B.C., and had to drive off to London very early most mornings, and returned home only just in time for eight o’clock supper in the evening – the great rallying point of the day, when they were entertained, over coffee, by a passage from Thomas Aquinas read by Harry who, even more than most people, loved the sound of his own voice. There was not, and never had been, any question of Gerald and Kate living somewhere nearer to London and more convenient to him.

Jane had married a Frenchman, Yves Brisson, who was a potter, and had a workshop in a clearing beyond the orchard, where he worked rather short hours. There was no proselyte amongst the husbands, who appeared at Quayne – sometimes a little too easy about religious matters. Joe especially, who would serve at the altar in slacks pulled over his pyjama trousers, for he found it difficult to get up in the mornings, and was always behind-hand.

There was also – from the husbands – a lack of reverence towards Father Daughtry, the Chaplain, who was ending his boozy days at Quayne. The two compatriots – he and Joe –
would sit in the village pub and, hazy with stout, talk of their Irish days. They were a great deal too much at the pub, thought Harry Bretton, who, at the end of a day’s work, liked talk and music at home, where there was mead to drink, or cider, or his wife Rachel’s elderflower wine.

The Father and Joe were both writing books, but neither of these works was likely to emerge for a long time, as their authors detested being alone in a room, without talk, for more than ten minutes, so that the necessary conditions for getting on with the job were seldom achieved.

Cressy loved and despised her father, and wondered how it could be possible to do both. Lolling against the wall in the sun, chewing the fig, she waited, as if doomed, for the others to come out of the chapel. I have a lot of my father in me, she thought. I only wish he had more of me in him. He had seeds of rebellion, but they came to nothing, choked by Quayne.

Here, at Quayne, everything was all of a piece; everyone, everything, fitted into the Master’s scheme; for Harry Bretton had views on every aspect of life, and had, with what seemed to be the greatest luck, found that all formed part of the whole vision. Here, there was nothing he thought of as spurious, nothing meretricious, nothing counterfeit. All was wholesome, necessary, simple; therefore good and beautiful, too.

The outside world had jerry-built houses, plastic flowers, chemical fertilisers, materialism, and devitalised food. Beech woods on four sides protected Quayne.

It was to that world beyond the beech woods that Cressy was looking. She dreamed of Wimpy Bars and a young man with a sports car, of cheap and fashionable clothes that would fall apart before she tired of them. In that world she might find a place for herself. It was worth trying; for there was none here. She knew that she was about to become – if it had not happened already – the one flaw in the Way of Life – the first blemish upon
Quayne. Something which did not hold good, which ruined the argument.

Not only because of religion. One thing leads to another. Especially did so at Quayne. If one part of the concept was by the outside world seen to have railed, were not the others suspect? (Quayne, though cut off from the outside world, seemed curiously sensitive to its reactions.) So might not – for the sake of argument, not likelihood – Mo and Pet follow her own deviation? Coming to supper in shop dresses and plastic sandals, sighing for synthetic custards and tinned spaghetti. Then the world of Quayne might collapse, Rachel, in terror, trying to patch it up for Harry’s sake, desperately ladling out the good soup – for the Quayne crises were very much mealtime events – and passing down bowls as fast as she was able. Cressy could imagine her poor grandmother.

From her place by the wall, she saw at last her cousins – Mo and Pet – come out of the chapel with their grandmother. They shook their long, blonde hair loose in the sunshine, and went off towards the kitchen, and their duties there. There was church for them – at one time or another – every day of their lives. And every day, too, mounds of potatoes to be scrubbed, or hay to be turned, sheets to be mended. (Cressy lumped church in with the other labours.) They knew nothing of the outside world, except for their school years at Chantoiseau in Sussex, and occasional holidays – mass holidays – in Wales. The company they had was one another. All three had been born within two years. The boy cousins were on holiday from Ampleforth, the school bills from there being paid by Harry.