The Wedding Group (5 page)

On this evening of David’s visit, Archie had been in the kitchen, cleaning silver, and he led his son back along the passage, and sat down again at the table and went on with his job, wearing an apron over his velvet smoking-jacket. It was his evening for the finger-bowls and candelabra.

David sat down near by and watched him, knowing that it was no use offering to help, thinking that he would have sold the lot if it were his – the dreadful drudgery of it, and all so ugly.

‘How is Aunt Sylvie?’ he asked.

‘Frail, very frail. Every day there seems to be less of her. One morning, I’ll look in, and she’ll have gone – nothing left.’

‘Can’t you get a nurse?’

‘What on earth for? A nurse would be quite unnecessary. And, anyhow, she wouldn’t hear of it. She gets about up there. She can take a bath. I fetch a chair and sit outside the bathroom door and chat to her, and she chats back, and then I know that she’s all right.’

‘It’s not much of a life for you.’

‘There’s one’s duty. One must do as much of it as one can. Apart from that, I’m fond of her. She brought me up from six years old. One has been cared for when one was helpless oneself, and now it is time for one to repay the debt.’

David thought of having to repay such a debt himself and was appalled. In the natural order of things, it would have been
his mother’s task to look after the poor old chap, when the time came. As this would not be, it seemed to him that he himself was in a bad position.

‘Have you heard from Geoffrey or Edward?’ he asked, thinking that it was just his brothers’ luck to live so far away.

‘I had a nice long letter from Edward. They took a trip to Melbourne. And very hot it was. A hundred and something.’

But David had heard of that letter before. It was way back – Christmas-time.

‘And nothing from Geoffrey?’

‘Nothing from Geoffrey,’ his father said unwillingly. ‘Not for some little time… let me see… oh, quite a little while it must be.’

Months and months, no doubt, David thought indignantly.

‘How is your mother?’ Archie asked, in a tone of great politeness.

‘She is very lonely,’ David said, staring accusingly at his father’s busy hands.

Archie sighed, as if there were nothing to be done about Midge’s loneliness. He looked resigned. ‘She seems to have been in another life,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I don’t often think about her. Sometimes dream of her. It was all a sorry business. Aunt Sylvie was right. Don’t you ever marry a woman so much younger than yourself. You’ll only live to rue the day if you do.’

‘I don’t know any young girls nowadays – only ageing spinsters.’

‘Well, take my word for it. She wasn’t quite up to my weight, your mother. Aunt Sylvie said that from the start. “She’s not up to your weight, Archie,” she said. I remember her saying that.’

‘What’d she mean?’ David had an incongruous picture come into his mind, and tried to keep a straight face.

‘Well… you know. Her father was in the hotel business.
Still is for all I know. Your grandfather, of course. Funny notion, that.’

He rambled on, working with an old toothbrush amongst the scrolled acanthus leaves of a candelabrum.

David hated sitting here in this depressing kitchen, listening to his mother being run down. It always happened thus. He looked about him, at the enormous dresser, at dish-covers and meat dishes of a size to conceal or carry twenty-five-pound turkeys, or sucking pigs, or haunches of venison. He wondered how long ago it was that they were last used.

‘I only met him once or twice,’ his father was saying. ‘At the wedding of course. He was in his element then. You never saw so much champagne in all your life. It was just like a musical comedy, that do in the church. All those bridesmaids – only chosen for their looks, as you can imagine. Your cousin Ruth passed over because she had buck teeth. Of all the nonsense. And the hymns. “O Perfect Love”, or some rot like that. Well, one soon saw what happened to
that
. “The Lord’s My-hy Shepherd I’ll not want,”’ the black-smudged hand beat time to his wavering voice. ‘“God be in my head.” Well, He never was, thank God. I have other things in my head. Of course, neither your aunt nor I has any religion. But in spite of it, the Vicar still calls. I used to think he had hopes of converting her – bringing her to God, don’t they call it? But they must have gone by the board years ago. I think he just enjoys sharpening his wits on her. Your mother’s managing all right on the money, is she?’

‘I presume so.’

‘What’s she been up to lately? Does she still paint?’

‘Paint?’ It was an astonishing side to his mother he had never heard of before.

‘Her face. And all that gin.’

‘What do you mean “all that gin”?’

‘Oh, she used to like her little tipple, you know.’

‘Who doesn’t?’

‘I take your meaning. The decanter is in the usual place.’

‘I don’t mind if I do.’

His father sighed. The boy was picking up some of his mother’s silly expressions.

In the dining-room, the table was elaborately laid for Archie’s lonely dinner. More silver. More, too, on the shadowy sideboard, where the sherry decanter stood next to the tantalus, amongst biscuit-barrels and knife-boxes and epergnes. David poured out two glasses of sherry, and remembered to put them on a little silver tray.

His father had finished his polishing and was washing his hands.

‘I never thought gin was quite the thing – a common sort of drink, like most of those who take it.’

Oh, Lord, he doesn’t half go on, David thought, yawning.

Archie looked into the oven at some simmering mince, and then began to prepare Aunt Sylvie’s tray, adding a plastic daffodil in a fluted vase.

‘Such a good notion, don’t you think? Nothing grows in the garden, except the Michaelmas-daisies later on, and the price of shop flowers is exorbitant. This came free, with the grocery order. It looks quite real, don’t you think? I’m sorry, my boy, to be asking you to drink sherry in the kitchen.’

‘What’s the odds?’

Another of his mother’s sayings.

‘Smoking before dinner?’ Archie smiled and shook his head reprovingly, as if he didn’t know what the boy would get up to next. Taking the cigarette from a squashed old packet, too. Sordid.

‘What happened to your silver case?’

‘Nothing happened to it. It’s at home.’

He must have driven Mother nearly mad, thought David.

‘It’s a long time to
my
dinner, anyhow,’ he said.

‘And when it comes it won’t be worth eating, if I know anything.’

‘I’m always telling you, Mother’s a very good cook. Surely you haven’t forgotten that.’

‘Well, we won’t have an argument about it. You’re the one who’s got to eat the stuff. I will only say that in my day she couldn’t even boil a kettle.’

He cut some faded-looking grapes off a bunch and put them in a dish on the tray with one of the newly-cleaned finger-bowls.

‘I shall have to go,’ David said, finishing his sherry.

‘It’s been very good of you to look in. I do greatly appreciate that. Please don’t bother to wash the glass. I’m glad to say that Mrs Whatshername will be here in the morning. She deigns to give us an hour or two on Fridays.’

‘Shall I carry up Aunt Sylvie’s tray?’

‘No, she will expect me to do that.’

He could not say that Aunt Sylvie would not be pleased to see ‘that hussy’s boy’. David’s brief visits to her room raked up all her old grievances about his marriage to Midge.

‘I haven’t made the sippets yet,’ he added. He glanced at the clock, and then fetched a loaf from the larder.

‘Well, I’ll just nip up and say “Hallo”.’

‘I shouldn’t if I were you, dear boy. It’s her Italian day, and you know how rigid she is. And yours is so poor.’

‘Non-existent.’

‘Well – then…’

On Mondays, his father and Aunt Sylvie spoke only in French to one another; on Thursdays, in Italian – to keep their tongues in, although David could not think for what. And why those particular days, he had not asked.

‘O.K., then. I’ll be dropping in again soon. Is that all you’re having, mince and toast?’

‘It’s ample for our ageing digestions,’ his father said. He had a nice, gentle smile, David thought, regarding him as the stranger he was.

As he drove homewards, he suffered the by now familiar sensations of shame and pity and irritation. He was always relieved to escape from that house, where the old clocks ticked, the old hearts beat. He felt protective towards his father and was annoyed that he should do. Everything about Archie had been irksome, whether in the family or out of it, and especially in his way of leaving it; and he was amazed that his mother, easygoing though she was, could have borne his behaviour for sixteen or something years.

When he reached home, he found her in an especially gay mood. ‘All that gin,’ he thought, refusing some. ‘I’ve been drinking sherry,’ he said.

‘Oh.’ This was all the comment she allowed herself, and it was after a hesitation. She knew where he had been, but would not refer to it. None the less, she let her gaiety underline the contrast between here and
there
, and dinner was especially delicious.

So she could not even boil a kettle! David thought. His father’s memories were clouded by injustice. As he ate, he thought of the little dish of mince amongst all those giant tureens and ladles and silver-plated covers; and, after the mince, those two pecking at a few grapes, like sad old birds.

Cressy’s first steps towards freedom had not taken her very far from Quayne – only down the hill and into the village, making the reverse journey of Mrs Brindle’s.

It was Mrs Brindle, in whom she often confided, who had found her the job at the antique shop on the Green. It was one she had been offered herself, but had been unable to take because of what she called ‘the poor remuneration’. In the village, she acted as a free employment bureau, always being able to place someone, or oblige someone else, knowing who could spare an hour or two, or sweep a chimney, or mend a teapot.

The village was on a main road between London and the sea, and was dominated by motorists, the passing trade. With its black and white cottages and hollyhocks, the trim Green and the pond, its partly Saxon church, it was a place to run out to, or pause at – for tea at the Walnut Tree café, a drink at the Three Horseshoes, to stretch cramped legs with a little amble past the shops, all bright with paint and swinging baskets of geraniums and wrought-iron signs.

The antique shop was rather more austere than the rest –
white-painted, bow-fronted, with the name
Moorhead
in plain black letters above the window.

If David had been disposed to, he could have found the job for Cressy even before Mrs Brindle did; for the Moorheads were his friends. But Cressy’s future had been something he would not meddle in. He had written his deft little letter of apology to her, and ignored her plea for help. She had decided to make her own way and had angrily tried to put him out of her mind, hoping, she told herself, that she would never see him again.

Yet, at the end of her first day at work, she did. She was at the back of the shop, polishing brass, when he walked in with Nell Stapleforth. ‘Well, well,’ he said, raising his eyebrows, and went through to the room at the back to have a word with his friends, leaving Nell to potter about the shop as she had wanted to.

Toby and Alexia Moorhead were brother and sister. Their father had been the local Rector. When he died, he had left them a little money, and they had started their antique shop. It had solved for them the problem of finding some kind of work which they could do together, and both had a flair for buying and had made a good business of it. They were a quiet pair, and self-contained, with a physical beauty which seemed the reason for their never separating, never being seen with inferior partners. Both were tall, and had silky black hair, and a gesture of putting it aside from their brows. They had dark skins and rather long, fine features. They looked like twins, but were not; though of a near age, in their late twenties. This morning of David’s visit, they were wearing the same putty-coloured shirts and trousers.

‘What on earth is
she
doing here?’ David asked. ‘It
is
that MacPhail girl from Quayne, isn’t it?’

‘She’s cleaning a coal-scuttle, I hope,’ Toby said.

‘You know, I wouldn’t wonder if she isn’t quite a bothersome and eccentric girl.’

‘Hush,’ Alexia said, going on with her accounts.

All the same, Cressy, sullenly polishing the scuttle beyond the half-opened door, had heard him.

‘Charming!’ Nell kept saying to her, taking up, and putting down, and peering short-sightedly at porcelain marks and price tickets. She had a little dog like an ant on a silk-cord lead. It was hardly a dog at all, and made her seem even larger by the absurd contrast.

Cressy, wondering who she was, felt spiteful towards her, and would not have minded if she had dropped something and broken it, or if her dog had lifted its leg against the needlework-covered stool.