The Wedding Group (21 page)

‘Oh, yes, they came and put powder over everything, looking for fingerprints, but only found Mother’s.’

‘Ah, they wore gloves, no doubt. Artful customers, these burglars. You never know what little trick they’re going to think of next. Well, it was quite an adventure for you all. And I can’t see that your mother can complain, for I never saw her wear those ear-rings in her life. Couldn’t have done, for that matter, because she refused to have her ears pierced. Between you and
me, she preferred flashier baubles. She came to me with nothing else.’

‘She was dreadfully upset. And
that
upset all our plans. Cressy and I were thinking of moving to London; but how can we go now, and leave her there so isolated? Well, Cressy says we can’t. She’s devoted to Midge.’

‘Extraordinary,’ Archie murmured, and then went on uneasily, ‘Moving to London, did you say? Well, it’s not easy to find anywhere, or so I hear. Perhaps you are thinking that it is selfish of me to keep a house like this to myself. I don’t know if that was in your mind. But at my age I’m afraid that I don’t feel up to having a young child about me. Especially if he cries as much as you say.’

The idea behind this appalled David. He imagined them etiolated, suffocated in smelly darkness.

‘Don’t worry, it won’t happen,’ he said, as much to reassure himself as his father. That was one terrifying hazard he had not foreseen, so had not had to worry about it.

‘I don’t know if there is anything left to drink,’ Archie said. ‘I seldom take anything now, and keep no tally of it.’

‘I must go, anyhow.’ Making a getaway, he thought of it.

His father at once began to heave himself out of his chair. Yes, it was the smell of sebum, of greasy hair, David realised, going to help him. Strange, because Archie had none, was palely bald.

‘I hope you’ll be all right. Always let me know if you’re not.’

‘Don’t worry. I am at peace,’ Archie said, and the death-bed words alarmed David even more.

The usual shame came over him as he drove away, shame for his negligence, and for his lack of any but the most selfish feelings.

Now I’m going to be late home anyway, he thought, and decided to be later still. He made his way back to Nell’s flat to
ask her out to dinner. Nell, however, had just washed her hair. She wound a scarf into a turban round her head and, leaving him to pour out a drink, took up some covered dishes and went out to the Chinese restaurant to fetch some sweet and sour pork for their supper.

‘He didn’t come home at all,’ Cressy told Midge. ‘He rang up to say that he’d worked too late.’

‘Where from?’ Midge took off her gloves, smoothed them carefully, as if she were absorbed in the task.

‘What do you mean where from?’

‘Where was he when he telephoned?’

‘Oh, I see. At Jack Ballard’s. He had some supper there and stayed the night.’

Well, it was asking for trouble, this marriage, Midge thought. She remembered a saying of her father’s – Be careful what you want: you might get it.

‘The night seemed so long,’ Cressy complained. ‘Tim cried and cried.’

By the look of her, so had
she
, Midge thought.

‘It’s maddening to prepare dinner for someone who never arrives,’ she said slyly. She made the remark only for her own satisfaction, and let it go lightly, turning away to pick up the baby, who had begun to cry again. He had been sick – but not recently – and his woolly jacket was stiff and sour-smelling. She put him against her shoulder and patted his back, and a long chain of dribble settled on her collar, and was smeared against her cheek.

Cressy’s room was like a stage-set for some depressing play about young-married strife, the very background for bickering and disillusion. Napkins steamed round the fire; the ironing-board was piled high with unironed clothes, and the table with unwashed crockery. There was a feeding-bottle, empty, but with a curdy deposit round its sides.

Daringly, but feeling that she must rescue her grandson, Midge said, ‘I think it’s easier if one sterilises the bottles at once; and then leave them in cold water until they’re wanted.’

Cressy looked blank.

‘Otherwise… one can’t be too careful. The slightest thing can cause a tummy upset.’

‘He’s got one already.’

‘Yes, he’s windy; aren’t you, my poor darling? He keeps trying to draw his knees up.’

She walked up and down the room – her usual perambulating, but now to soothe Timmy, not herself. She picked her way round between table and ironing-board and pram, and Cressy watched her without hope. But, at last, the baby’s eyelids dropped, his wet lips parted, and he slept.

‘He’s gone off,’ Midge said softly. He had become heavier in her arms, as sleeping children do. ‘Shall I take him upstairs?’

‘He’ll only start to cry again. I just put him in his pram. It saves a lot of running up and down stairs.’

‘Let’s try. He’ll sleep better if he’s undisturbed.’

She carried him carefully upstairs and laid him in his cot. His eyelids fluttered for a moment, but then he put his thumb in his mouth, curved his fingers round his nose, and slept.

Midge, looking down at him, almost afraid to make a movement, was stirred by anxiety. He looked careworn, not like a baby at all. His eyelids were mauve, and his face shadowy and pale. His scalp was thickly scaly, and he smelled of sicked-up milk.

I could make something of him, she thought, feeling a sense of power strengthening her, and her concern for him strengthening that. If she had ever loved her own young children as much, it was so long ago that she had forgotten.

She crept downstairs, and nodded triumphantly at Cressy, who was shame-facedly trying to clean the feeding-bottle.

‘I really only looked in to see if you wanted anything in the village,’ Midge said. ‘But I could stay for a bit, if you’d like me to give you a hand.’

‘Stay for ever,’ Cressy said. ‘I hate it on my own.’

‘It’s a special sort of loneliness, being tied to the house with a sick baby. I can remember,’ Midge said, taking off her coat. But she could not remember. She was using her imagination.

Briskly, she plugged in the iron, and began to sort out the pile of clothes. David’s shirts were so badly washed that she longed to do them again. She was ironing in dirt, she told herself. His life – her son’s – had changed, and no mistake.

‘I can’t believe in silence,’ Cressy marvelled. ‘It’s simply like magic.’

All the same, they spoke in low voices.

‘You’re run-down and overtired, I think,’ Midge said. ‘Any time you want a sure night’s rest, I’ll have Tim. There’s David’s old cot up in the loft. Rather shabby, but I can paint it. Then it will always be there when wanted. I mean to be useful, you know.’

While she ironed, her mind went from one detail to another, making plans, for days far, far ahead.

After his visit to the hospital, David returned to Nell’s flat. Fog, for a week, had made a nightmare of the drive home. He had attempted it the evening before and had arrived very late and out-of-humour, to find Cressy out-of-humour, too.

‘If I had known, I could have spent the evening with Midge,’ she had complained. ‘You don’t realise how lonely it is here. If I put the television on it wakes Tim up.’

‘So you’d rather take the poor little bugger out in the fog?’

‘Midge would have fetched us and brought us back, and he would have been wrapped up warm, and in his carry cot.’

He knew that it would have been that way round: for Midge liked to have about her what she had created.

‘You’re so irresponsible it’s unbelievable.’

He had described it all to Nell. ‘I told her I’d save myself the trouble today. “You can go and spend the night with Mother,” I said. “You can move in, lock, stock and barrel, for all I bloody care.” I didn’t mean that last, of course. One loses one’s temper. The thing is she simply can’t manage the baby, and is afraid to be left alone with it.’

‘And Midge can manage it?’

‘Oh, yes, she can manage it all right. She’s made a dear little nursery for him, and sometimes she takes him off for the night, so that Cressy can have a good sleep. But Cressy’s always had a good sleep. It’s not Cressy who gets up in the night, and traipses up and down with the poor little fellow.’

‘How was your father?’ Nell asked, sprawled on the divan, nursing her little dog. She was tired of the subject of Cressy – that moronic child, as she thought of her. David had certainly married in haste to repent at leisure. He took his time about it, and hers too.

‘Oh, and my father,’ David said tiredly, oppressed by all his troubles. ‘It looks to me as if he’s going out fast. He just lies there taking little sips of air, like a stranded fish. It’s horrible to see. And then this awful look comes on his face, and you know he knows he’s going to have to cough and is afraid to. One doesn’t know how to help or what to say. He hates the whole set-up there. The nurses are so awfully matey, and call him “poppet”. My father! Poppet! And they tidy him up, just as if he were a baby. Of course, he worries about the money, though I can’t see that he need. “It’s all coming out of capital – just to die in private,” he says. You know what old people are like about touching capital. You’d think they wouldn’t care.’

‘Shall we have Chinese again?’ Nell asked, tired of all David’s subjects.

‘Or go round the corner for Italian?’ he suggested.

‘Yes, let’s go round the corner and have Italian,’ Nell agreed. ‘I am bored of Chinese.’ She always said that – ‘I am bored of.’ A childish expression she had never corrected.

In the street, the fog drifted. Passers-by came suddenly out of it, with the brief sound of footsteps, a snatch of conversation, and were immediately gone. Nell held her fur collar across her mouth, and plodded on grimly.

The Italian restaurant was nothing special. It had the usual plastic vine-leaves climbing up imitation bamboo, a blown-up photograph of the Bay of Naples as a mural, strings of onions, chianti-bottle lamp-holders, and the familiar menu, with melon and so-called Parma ham, and escallopes of veal, and cassata.

David began to relax, putting away from him thoughts of Cressy, the baby, his visit to the hospital. A pleasant bachelor feeling came over him. He poured out more wine and ordered another bottle. His ham – he ought to have known from experience – was mostly stringy fat. If he would not fill himself with canneloni, then Nell should not either, he thought; but watched with pleasure her pleasure as she did so. She wiped the sauce from her plate with a piece of bread, and when that was done, looked up and smiled at him, as if ready now for conversation.

‘It’s very good of you to listen to all my troubles,’ he said.

‘Oh, don’t mention it.’

‘This is like the old days. Do you remember that Spanish one we used to go to?’

‘Yes, we’ve fairly eaten our way round London. At least this doesn’t have dressed-up waiters. I’m so bored of their boaters, and butcher’s aprons, and gondoliers’ hats.’

‘And these stinking fishermen’s jerseys at the English Fish Parlour. They smell worse than the stale fish. Where do you go nowadays?’

‘Mostly nowhere. Since you jilted me I stay at home with my little dog.’

He laughed, for he was sure that he was meant to. ‘You always manage to put me in a good humour,’ he said.

She sipped her wine, not replying.

‘Would you like some brandy?’ he asked, when their coffee was brought.

‘Oh, yes, please. I’ll have the lot if I may,’ she said.

‘And then I suppose I must get on my way. It will take some time in this fog to get across to Jack’s.’

‘It probably will,’ she said calmly.

‘And it’s always worse down by the river.’

‘Invariably,’ she agreed, tipping her glass to get the last drop. She had wrapped some dried-up veal in a paper napkin for her dog, and she put it in her handbag and looked across at him, ready to go home. She was alert, as if expecting him to say something else.

‘It might go on for days,’ he said, meaning the fog. But tonight, at least, he would go to Chelsea, he decided, rather proud of his resolution.

Down by the river, the fog was much worse. There were hardly any cars, and no footsteps. Jack Ballard was going to bed, when David came back, but he had left the door-key under a shoe-scraper. He was now a fairly fashionable photographer, and could afford his own little house, with a glossy magnolia outside, and a beautiful fanlight, and an outlook of other pretty houses across the road. Tonight nothing of these could be seen, only blurred lights from them suspended in the thick air.

David had a divan in a spare room full of old photography equipment.

They drank some whisky together before turning in. The fog wrapped the house in silence. It had hung up Jack’s work for days, and the Street Markets series was interrupted.

‘What haven’t we
done
?’ he asked gloomily, looking ahead.

‘The subjects are endless,’ David said. ‘Name anything: we’ll take a look at it.’

‘It seems a long time since we came up with anything really clever. The Harry Bretton one was good, you know.’