The Wedding Group (6 page)

‘Enchanting!’ Nell said. ‘Enchanting!’ she said again, louder, as David came back into the shop with his friends. She held up a Wedgwood bridal group, and Alexia stood rigid until it was safely back on its shelf. ‘Yes, it’s one of our favourite things,’ she said, when she could breathe again.

‘So you’ve managed to get out into the wide world?’ David said to Cressy. The ‘wide world’ being just the village, she thought his words must be sarcastic. He was wondering how it could be any better sitting there in her dark corner amongst the polishing rags than up at Quayne feeding the hens, or whatever it was she so resented doing there.

To his dismay, he saw, before she bent her head, that her eyes had brimmed over. A tear actually fell on her dirty fingers. He dared not now introduce Nell to her, as he did to the others, or make any more inquiries, or even glance at her again. He simply seemed to include her in the general farewells, but not in the hope of meeting again that evening.

‘She is very sensitive,’ Toby said.

‘Touchy,’ said Alexia.

‘But willing.’

‘In a driven sort of way.’

‘And cheap.’

It was after dinner, in the red and white sitting-room, with a little fire, just lit, to brighten things up, as Midge had said.

They were discussing Cressy.

‘She
is
inclined to cry,’ Toby explained to David. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘One simply
can’t
worry over touchy people,’ Alexia said. ‘One would spend one’s life…’

Midge was usually in her element when she was contentedly, quietly pouring out coffee after a good dinner, listening to the young people talking; but, this evening, something was different – nothing deeply wrong, only the surface pattern of such occasions a little changed. She could not lay a finger on it, and was trying to, feeling abstracted, as she filled the cups and handed them to David.

‘Now sit back, Ma; you’ve done enough,’ he said, taking his own cup.

There were renewed praises for her cooking.

Of course, she reflected, the young people themselves were getting older. Nell, for instance, was almost like one of her own generation. Midge thought her so ungainly, although she carried herself well – like a caryatid, though with nothing more to support than the weight of all her auburn hair. Once in a chair, she slumped and sprawled, her skirt caught up above her fat legs, showing stretched stocking-tops, suspenders, edges of tatty lace. She had kicked her shoes off, and kept feeling about for them with her toes. Her ringed fingers combed through, puffed up her fringe. Older men, on the newspaper, thought her a ‘fine woman’, David had told his mother, finding it rather amusing.

Perhaps, Midge thought, it was Nell, with her careless, slovenly ways, who had ruffled the evening. She had decided last night, on her arrival, that she would easily be able to get on
with her. If David could find something in her, she would assiduously search for it herself.

There had been footsteps in the night, across the landing, a door softly closing. It was not her business, she decided. She had tried to go to sleep, willing her mind to other lines of thought, yet waiting all the time to hear the noise of the lavatory being flushed, and the footsteps returning. Nothing had happened, but a long, long silence, and she had fallen asleep while it still continued. ‘Under my roof!’ she had thought, on first waking in the morning. Then she had smiled, realising that the phrase sounded more like Archie’s than her own. At the back of her mind, so
far
back that she hardly knew it was there, was the idea that extramarital relations might make the other sort unnecessary.

They had finished talking about Cressy, and Nell was reading David’s palm, leaning forward over the dog on her lap, his hand in hers. She found all kinds of conflicting traits, the most broken heart-line she had ever set her eyes on, with a chain of islands; recklessness; fickleness: but in the end she could see, with perhaps a little stretch of imagination, calmer days ahead, and a child – certainly one child.

He listened mockingly and, as soon as he could, withdrew his hand.

Now it was Alexia’s turn. She held up her palm obligingly, but with her eyes fixed on Nell’s face, as if it were
her
character which was under scrutiny.

‘This couldn’t be more straightforward,’ Nell said. ‘There are just the four long, clear lines – life, head, heart and fortune. Great honesty and forthrightness.’ She turned Alexia’s hand about, folding the fingers, and uncurling them. ‘The girdle of Venus is the only unusual thing – very deeply marked with indentations.’ She ran a finger along it.

‘That’s where I cut my hand on some broken glass and had to have three stitches,’ Alexia said.

Nell returned the hand and sat back in her chair, stroking the dog. ‘It’s all crap, anyhow,’ she said.

‘Oh, please do mine!’ Midge begged.

‘My dear, it’s only a joke. My mother once said to me when I was young, “Just learn to make good coffee and tell fortunes, and you’ll never be at a loss.” She tried to make me smoke, too. Just one of the little social graces, she explained. Something to do with one’s hands, you know.’

As she was now using her hands to rake through her hair, and dandruff was falling, Midge thought that her mother had had a point.

‘Please!’ she implored, offering her palm.

‘What month were you born in?’

‘July. Cancer. That dreadful word.’

‘So you scuttle sideways?’

‘Not Mother,’ David said.

‘All right,’ said Nell. ‘Although it’s only nonsense. Let’s see how many bits of broken glass may have changed
your
fortunes.’ She spoke in a low, amused voice, and groped again for her shoes.

Toby and Alexia swept their hair from their foreheads and leaned forward.

She’s beautiful, David thought, looking at Alexia. She was something he had never dared; but he liked to have a little future daring in his mind.

Midge sat like a little beggar-girl on the rug before Nell, with her hand held up beseechingly. It was a thin hand, wrinkled and shiny, with dark, raised veins.

It would be more wicked, David thought, still watching Alexia’s intent face, really much more wicked than stealing another man’s wife.

‘The life-line,’ began Nell, with Midge listening like a child, ‘is long, but broken. However, there are parallel lines protecting
those breaks, reserves, I think, from strength of will.’ Midge blushed with pleasure. ‘From the head-line I see single-mindedness rather than deep intellectual powers. You see, you must forgive me; I speak as I find.’

‘And, as you explained, it’s all crap, anyway,’ David said.

Midge only murmured encouragement.

‘You are home-loving. The heart-line is unswerving. There is a deep concern for those you love, amounting to possessiveness, really.’

‘Oh, come off it, Nell,’ David said. ‘You go too far with your silly game.’

‘No, no!’ said Midge, trying to silence him. ‘Let Nell say what she thinks. After all, you’re the only one now that I have to be possessive
about
, so you are the only one who can know. I’m not in a position to judge.

‘Three children,’ Nell said, folding Midge’s little finger. ‘You see – one, two, three.’ She pointed to some creases.

‘You knew that already,’ David said.

I knew it all already, Nell thought. She looked away from the hand, at the fire. ‘Under the influence of the moon,’ she said, ‘so a woman of moods.’

‘David. Am I moody?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Who would like some brandy?’ He got up. Only his mother said ‘yes’.

‘Moody’s not necessarily derogatory,’ said Nell. ‘As I was saying the other day to a friend, it depends on the
predominant
mood. If that’s a dark one, it comes as a relief to have a change.’

David thought, you didn’t say that the other day to a friend. You’re saying it now to my mother. Who is your hostess?

‘Home-loving, Nell?’ he asked, attempting to get off dangerous ground. ‘Well, that’s true, isn’t it?’ He looked inquiringly at Midge, setting down the glass of brandy on the table by her chair.

‘I suppose I love it,’ Midge said, looking round the room. ‘Though sometimes, I can’t wait to get out of it.’ The evening before, for instance, when they – David and Nell – had gone off after dinner, without asking her to go, too. It was so unlike him, she had thought, pacing about the room after they had gone. Nell had made him behave out of character. If they had been going simply for a drink, she could easily have been invited, and would probably have refused. They had obviously driven up to Quayne Woods or somewhere of the kind, and made love in the car. So uncomfortable but, she supposed, many young people’s first experience of sex these days.

All this talk of ‘home-loving’ had annoyed her. They were trying to turn her into a
Hausfrau
, and the talk had gone back to praises of her cooking.

‘Well, you can hardly see
poulet à l’estragon
written deeply on my hand,’ she said, rather hastening over the French words.

Now she was impatient, and drew her hand away. She sat down again, and began to sip her brandy, feeling that Nell had been deliberately rude. And she was disappointed. There had been nothing about her courage, or sensitivity, or artistic leanings, or high romance, or her sense of humour. Especially, ‘artistic leanings’ and ‘a sense of humour’ she had hoped for and expected.

‘I myself loathe cooking,’ Nell said, leaning back again, and settling her dog in comfort. ‘To me, it’s like having a migraine. And all the fuss and nonsense that’s written about it. I read it on our women’s page. There was one last week about pastry baskets filled with cherries. “Make angelica handles if desired,” it finished up with. Who on earth could desire an angelica handle?’

‘I sometimes envy you career women,’ Midge said, looking from Nell to Alexia and back again.

‘Anyone can get a job,’ Nell said.

She had come for this week-end, wondering if she wanted to marry David, and if she could get her way if she did. She had made up her mind that she would not be sad, however it turned out, feeling sure that true love was something gone by: she had not been successful at it, and hesitated to run the risk again. But David or no, she decided she was not taking on Midge.

At Quayne, that Saturday evening, after beans and bacon, there were stewed windfalls, and a reading from D. H. Lawrence. This was followed by coffee and a monologue. Lawrence had set Harry Bretton off on one of his favourite tacks, and the discourse this evening – with no embarrassment at all to himself – was on the role of woman in the life of man.

Dabbing his lips with the red and white navvy’s kerchief tucked under his beard, he examined, with an attempted ruefulness, the nature of his own sex.

He had an extra stimulus to talk this evening – his friend, Leofric Welland, who was staying in the house. Leofric had written one book about Harry’s works, and had another in mind – and some of it on paper – about his life. Harry knew this was in his mind and liked to help build up the picture. He had even offered him a plot on which to build a house in the orchard, so that he could always be at close quarters, but Leofric’s wife had had enough of Quayne from time to time, and would no longer spend even a week-end there. Many different excuses had to be made.

‘In spite of all our grand ideas,’ Harry was telling him, ‘we are only perverse children at heart. If we have the intellect, it’s our women who have the wisdom. No one knows that better than one’s wife.’ He smiled at Rachel, and she smiled back. ‘One’s mate,’ he amended. ‘For all our precious ideals, our inventiveness, it’s the essential, instinctive mother-wife we crave at last.
We return, after our escapades or great deeds, to
her
, for forgiveness and healing and approval.’

Rachel tried to look forgiving and healing and admiring, but had an abstracted air.

He just makes me want to vomit, Cressy thought. Her mother, aunts, cousins were conditioned into acquiescence. Pet went quietly round the table, refilling coffee-cups over people’s shoulders. Mo kept pressing a finger into crumbs on the table and licking them. Joe MacPhail folded his arms across his chest and thought how he had wasted his life.

‘It is to that instinct we call and return.’

Leofric, who had been thinking for some time of leaving his wife, noted the words none the less, and hoped to remember them.

Unfortunately, Father Daughtry, who disliked this sort of talk, had drunk too much Guinness before supper, and was inclined to chatter about other things, trying to keep himself awake.

‘Did you never see that fillum of Ginger Rogers, now? What was the name of it?’ he asked Cressy, who had never heard of Ginger Rogers. He asked Gerald Fines, who glanced nervously at Harry, and then said, in a low tone, that he had no idea.

‘Ah, what was the name of it. I have it on the tip of me tongue. That was the best fillum I saw at any time.’

The cinema was a great pleasure of this last part of his life, and often he spent dozy afternoons there, on into the early evening when, before he caught the bus back from Market Harbury, he could have a jar or two at the Crown, where he had cronies.

‘In England,’ he said, ‘there’s nowhere to sleep but at the fillums. A man could make a fortune setting up some nice little dormitories, cubicles, don’t you know, where you could have a lie down for a shilling or two when you came over weary.’