The Wedding Group (3 page)

They were now, the girls, quite isolated from the world.
Quayne Only
was on the signpost at the bottom of the hill, pointing up the rutted, leafy lane, down which water ran in torrents when there was a storm.

Harry came out of the chapel last, and stood for a moment
looking about him. The Master, one of his students had called him, and the family had taken it up, not unencouraged by him. At first they had used the name with a mingling of teasing and respect. It had stuck; until it seemed natural. He even thought of himself by the name, and now surveyed his world as someone of that title should. All that was done, and had been done, he thought with satisfaction, was to the glory of God, simply, reverently, and also by hand.

Cressy watched him with dislike, and she trembled a little.

He was a short man with a grey beard, rather long hair, thin on the crown, and protruding eyes. Always he wore a blue painting smock and sandals. He had hired a suit when he went to get his C.B.E., and he and Rachel – in clothes borrowed from her sister, a worldly woman – had looked very odd as they set out.

He came now slowly across the courtyard on his way to the workshop. Cressy made herself stay there by the wall, although she longed to dart away, and knew that she should be in the kitchen with her cousins. She had always feared and disliked her grandfather. When he came close to her, she stared into his brilliant blue eyes without blinking, waiting for the storm to break. He rested his hand on her head for a moment, as if she were ill, and then went on towards the barn.

‘So many leaves,’ Midge said. ‘So many, many leaves.’

With a glass in her hand, she stood at the window looking at them.

Some sons may have a picture of their mother knitting by the fireside – but David’s was of Midge with glass in hand, railing against something. The railing was hardly ever seriously meant. It was intended to interest, or amuse, or fill in a gap in the conversation, which was something Midge deplored.

This was a completely different world from Quayne, although David, at that moment, opened a letter from there.

‘One is smothered,’ his mother went on. ‘Smothered and stifled by them. All dark green and black and dripping. I feel that they are growing out of my ears.’ She was still on about the leaves. ‘And so much grass! Your father always said that grass should be brown, if at all.’

Not that one took into account what
he
had said, she thought: but that little remark, which she had argued about at the time, had somehow stuck.

David, reading his letter, murmured something in reply to her, but the letter was so surprising that it held his attention.

‘Dear Mr Little,

‘Your article in the coloured supplement has caused me great concern.’ The writing was childish and also backward-sloping. He read on, managing to get the sense of it, despite all the spelling faults. ‘It was very wrong about me, and I feel I should explain this. To begin with, the photograph of me and the pig was really my cousin Petronella and the pig. Also, I am eighteen, not seventeen. And I have never called my grandfather the Master in all my life, and never would. Or call him anything.’ (The last sentence had been scratched out.)

‘It is unfair of you to accuse me of being religous without even asking me. As it happens, I make a point of not being, and at great cost to myself, if I may say so. And I only wear those sack-like dresses, as you so rudely call them, because I have no others, and I hate and curse them with all my heart every minute of the day.

‘It is not our fault that we do not earn our livings and are oblidged to be maids-in-waiting –
your
description!!! But it is untrue to say that it is because we have never been educated, because we have, and can speak French for a start.

‘More than anything in the world I would like to earn my living, and not remain here untill I am old. If you could ever find me a job, so that I could escape from this place it would ensure my everlasting grattitude, and my forgiveness for the injuries you have done me. This is a cry from the wilderness.

‘With kind regards,

‘Yours sincerely,

‘Cressida MacPhail

‘PS. I would do
anything
. Perferably something in your own line of country.’

Having remembered her husband’s making his remark about the grass being brown, had silenced Midge for a minute or two, and David had been able to finish the letter in peace.

‘You’d never believe it,’ he said, and began to read it again, aloud.

When he had finished, he explained, ‘It was that article I wrote about the loony-bin on Quayne Hill.’

‘Those dreadful women,’ his mother said.

‘There’s nothing like giving a good ticking-off before asking a favour. I like that. Poor little girl. She sounds at war with all the world.’

He went to find that coloured supplement to the paper he worked on, and when he brought it back, turned over the pages until he came to Petronella and the pig. Those girls had all looked much the same to him, and he had never been sure which one he had been talking to. All had pale faces and long, pale hair. Their brown feet, in clumsy, home-made sandals, were rough and scuffed. All bit their fingernails he noticed, and had thought ‘no wonder’.

Communal luncheon was the subject of another photograph – all taken by his friend, Jack Ballard. The Master, sitting in a more impressive chair than the rest, had come out well, although his eyes and smock were a rather blurred and exaggerated blue. In fact, none of the colours was quite true, and the girls’ hair had a greenish tinge. On the bare boards were loaves of dark bread, a casserole of beans, home-made cheese and flagons of cider. The faces were as plain as the food; but the young girls had a touching quality suggestive of another time in history – the turn of the century, or earlier. Girls were no longer like that, no longer even looked like that. On the white-washed brick wall behind the Master hung one of his paintings. It was of Christ, wearing an open-necked shirt and flannel trousers, carrying the cross, and followed by
men on bicycles. In the background were factory chimneys and an English sky. The painting had come out quite clearly in the photograph.

‘I wondered at the time,’ Midge said. ‘If that job wasn’t rather too much on your own doorstep.’

She had just come back from the kitchen, and a delicious, steamy smell of mint followed her.

‘Meeting them in the pub and so on,’ she added.

She slopped some gin into her glass, adding vermouth in the same unheeding way. ‘It will be another quarter of an hour,’ she said, referring to dinner.

‘It’s only the Irish one – Joe MacPhail – of course, this one’s father – that I meet in the pub, and only to pass the time of day. He kept well out of the way when I did the interview. All the others seemed to be lapping it up. Now this girl…’

‘And the
priest
you meet,’ his mother said.

‘The Master lapped it up most. That awful meal. He harangued us all endlessly, about humility in art, humility in life. It’s what he’s got, he implied. No one else spoke, all the way down the table. Too humble, I suppose. They just went on eating beans; heard it all a thousand times before. Only the tame priest tried to put in a word or two, and then the Master took the chance to down some food, chewed and swallowed like mad, and then was at the ready again. Poor little girl,’ he added, glancing back at the letter. ‘“French for a start.” I like that. Who brought this, anyway?’ He picked up the envelope which was unstamped.

‘Mrs Brindle.’

Mrs Brindle, Quayne’s Church of England charwoman (one of the true faith could not be come by), shared out her working mornings between Quayne and Midge Little. She brought a lot of interesting talk about Quayne to Midge, and would have
liked to do vice versa, but Quayne was not interested in the Littles and their stereotyped and artificial world. Why she kept on there Mrs Brindle sometimes said she did not know, with that hill to push her bicycle up, and all the scrubbing when she got there.

‘Mrs Brindle? Ah, yes, we have a go-between.’

‘Will you answer the letter?’

‘I’ll apologise for mistaking her for her cousin. No one likes that – and especially as she’s the prettier of the two. I can see that now. I’ll post
my
letter, though.’

He was studying the photographs again – one, very Pre-Raphaelite, of the three girls gathering Madonna lilies for the chapel.

‘I like that one,’ Midge said. ‘And the one of them all going
into
the chapel. It’s like abroad.’

‘The whole place was a treasure from my point of view.’

‘It’s come off better than anything you’ve ever done, I think.’

She walked about the room, sipping from her glass. She walked, she perched on the arms of chairs, she never flopped back on a sofa, as her son now had.

It was a beautiful room, mostly white and red, with bits of surprising pink and lime-green. Her husband had left all his books behind when he had run away, and they covered one long, red-papered wall, and gave richness and texture to the room, especially in firelight. This evening there was no fire, but even in the twilight of a dull summer evening, the interior of the room was not gloomy. It was a great feat on Midge’s part that it was not. Outside, too close to inside, were all the leaves she had complained of, jasmine fringing the windows, dense lilac trees beyond. The garden was small, but there was a long, wide view of the woods, rising gently, blue, then grey, to the horizon. Somewhere up there, hidden, was Quayne.

David’s hand kept dropping down and groping carefully for his glass which was on the floor. He began to compose in his mind a light-hearted, apologetic avuncular letter. He knew from a little – and not very recent – practice how to be an uncle. His mother did not seem to have learned how to be a grandmother. Her pink velvet trousers. ‘For a start,’ he thought.

He did not know that she dressed with the utmost care for his homecomings in the evenings. He imagined her always as she was now, had never – that he could remember – seen her otherwise. At breakfast, before he left, she was already shipshape, never caught on the hop. An organised little woman. She looked her age, but in the smartest possible way.

All day, the evening was what she awaited. Dinner was organised, too. In the old days, before her husband went away and her other two sons had married, meals had been slapdash, badly timed, some of the food nearly raw, other things over-done, especially meat, either too much salt or salt forgotten. But he had no memory of those days. He thought of his home as one that had always run smoothly, revolving about him, where his friends came often, and liked to come, for Midge was a perfect hostess – mother, easy, undemanding. Kept young by her enthusiasms, ready to try everything, learn anything.

He knew that her two daughters-in-law did not like her. They seemed to be expecting her to harm them, to encroach, to monopolise their husbands. He was sure that she never would. But both lived so far away that the risk could scarcely arise.

He looked at his watch, feeling hungry. A quarter of an hour she had said, and a quarter of an hour it would be. From the kitchen through the open doors, came a smell of singeing meat, splutterings and sizzlings. Soon be ready, whatever it was. Smelt wonderful.

He considered his life with contentment, his appetite stimulated, juices running. Remaining at home, unmarried, might have been a problem to him. But if it had been a problem, he would not have done it, he told people who asked him if it were. To reveal to journalist friends in London that he lived in the country with his mother, usually caused a stir of surprise and disapproval. Apron-strings and umbilical cords came into the conversation. Even his brothers had urged him to set up house on his own until, amongst his many women friends, he decided on the one he would marry.

But the friends who came to the house understood the situation. And he fancied that some of the married ones – and most were married by now – occasionally envied him his life, with its series of light-hearted love-affairs, its lack of responsibility, the freedom to come and go as he wished.

His mother called him, on her way to the dining-room, with a dish in her hands.

As they sat down to dinner, he said, ‘There’s a girl – a woman – I’d like to bring down one week-end.’ He could not get it into his head that he no longer had girl-friends, but women of his own age, who for some reason or another had not married. And even they were not so easy to come by nowadays. The cream had been skimmed off.

Midge appeared to welcome his suggestion, but had a rule that she must never ask him questions. Sometimes she took the rule much farther than was natural, or even polite.

‘Nell Stapleforth,’ he said, since his mother did not ask her name. ‘She’s to do with the advertising side of the women’s page.’

‘How interesting,’ said Midge. She was always at the ready for these friends of his, on their side about everything from the start, woman to woman – often teasingly ranging herself with them against David.

She ate little herself, with pauses to watch
him
eating a great deal. This had been one of the pleasures of her life as a mother – his beautiful appetite, even in the days of the sketchy meals and all the failures. The other two boys had been such capricious eaters, finicking over kipper bones and cutting off fat, leaving the burnt frilled edges of fried eggs, and scorning her soufflés because they were tough and full of holes. David had eaten everything. With gusto. She liked that phrase. It summed him up, and she believed it summed herself up, too, in her approach to life.