The Wedding Group (9 page)

‘G. and T.,’ she repeated, when Midge gave her order. ‘Ice and lemon, dear?’

Midge poured most of the tonic water into the glass. She had had nothing to eat, and was nervous about driving home. That was another thing, she thought. She liked to be taken out, not to have to fend for herself. She sat down by the bar, on one of the high stools, so that she could chat to the landlord and not seem solitary.

After a while, when she had lit her cigarette and settled herself, she looked round her. In a corner, the girl, Cressy, was sitting with her father. She had been staring at Midge, and smiled quickly when she caught her eye. She looked flushed and shabby, and at once began to make random conversation with her father.

Other conversations, from other parts of the bar, mixed and became a tangle in Midge’s head. There was a couple behind her, sitting at a table, drinking, very slowly, lager and lime. The young man’s hair was long; the girl’s short.

‘We ought to go and see my rich old aunt at Worthing,’ he said. ‘Considering I’m the only one she’s got to leave her money to. Not that you’ll see much evidence of it. She’s as mean as sin.’

‘All the better for you,’ the girl said.

‘I mean if you can put up with that awful house for half an hour. Show willing, you know.’

The girl listened intently, her hand on the table. He put a finger against one of hers, and kept it there in a proprietary way. They stared at one another, as if hypnotised.

‘Well, Mother, you’re getting quite giddy in your old age,’ said a loud and sycophantic voice.

Midge half-turned her head, as if hearing an echo.

‘I’ve got a rich aunt, too,’ the girl behind Midge said. Looking backwards, Midge saw the two fingers tapping about one another, lively and playful, as if with a life of their own, nothing to do with the conversation, or the long and penetrating looks.

‘Really rich?’

‘Well so-so.’

‘Anybody else but you?’

‘Nobody.’

There was a contented pause. Then, ‘How old?’ he asked in a low voice.

‘Thirty-nine.’

This information seemed to cause no stir of disappointment.

‘Married?’

‘No.’

‘Lesbian?’

‘I s’pose so.’

‘Don’t you, Mother?’ the other woman was shouting. ‘I said you like the Horseshoes, I said.’ Lowering her voice, she added, to the man beside her, ‘It makes a nice change for her. Poor old thing. And we’ve all got to get old one day.’

As I was telling myself earlier, Midge thought grimly, glancing at Mother, who was buttoned up tightly in navy serge. Poor old thing indeed. Growing deaf, carted about for her treat and having it rubbed in all the time. No wonder she looked so furious.

David shouting at
me
in a pub one day, Midge thought. Taking me for
my
treat, and everyone saying how good and patient he is.

‘She’s taken quite a fancy to coming here,’ the indefatigable daughter was saying. Her husband was mute, staring into the smoke-haze.

Midge listened with interest. They were just as David had
described them to her one night on his return from the pub, and now she was trying to remember every word that was said, so that she would have something to tell him when he came home from the Crabbe country.

‘Enjoying your drink, Mother? It goes down well, doesn’t it, after a hard day? She had all her washing out before nine,’ she said, turning to her husband. ‘Just look at her ankles, Ken. We could hardly get her shoes laced up.’

Ken did as he was told, but without much show of interest.

They were so awful, so very, very awful, Midge thought. But they weren’t funny, after all.

‘This is awfully nice,’ Joe said. ‘What I’ve missed, taking you out!’

In truth, he was finding it rather a strain, being cast together with her on their own. He realised that he had scarcely ever had a conversation with her before, and could think of little to say. He knew nothing about her, in fact, and was much too gauche to know how to find out. ‘But still,’ he added, smiling, ‘after all, you were hardly old enough.’

‘Not old enough? Oh, really! When you think what any other girl of my age would have done.’ But he wouldn’t have any idea, she decided.

‘I dare say. But girls grow up slowly at Quayne. Not a bad thing, you know.’ He added the last sentence from loyalty to Rose. Poor Rose – so stunned these days from the threat that what she thought of as her ‘whole’ vision of life, was really incomplete, as Joe had guessed all such visions must be.

‘Have you been away at all?’ the barmaid asked Midge. It was her stock question at this time of the year.

‘Nothing exciting. I went to stay with my father in Buxton. Lovely country all round, of course.’

‘So I hear,’ the young woman said vaguely, as she lifted ashtrays and glasses, wiping underneath them.

The visit to Buxton had been while David was in Rome with Jack Ballard. Her father, a widower now, had taken her round his haunts, driving the second-hand Bentley. A tour of the constituency, he said. Even she had found the pace fast and the routine boring. And she disdained to be seen with his entourage, those hard drinkers he had gathered round him in his retirement – men in belted, camel-hair coats, with trilby hats pulled forward over purple faces. They entered pubs in a gang, her father, Good Old Bertie, going ahead to buy the first round of doubles. Bertie Reynolds and his Outriders, Midge had once overheard them called. Each year, on her visit, the Outriders were fewer. There were so many funerals amongst them, wonderful send-offs, by all accounts, with the drinking-sessions immediately following them beginning in an air of exalted grief and then, through reminiscence – ‘Poor old Jack would have wished it this way’ – becoming more boisterous than usual.

‘And you?’ Midge asked the barmaid in her turn. ‘Have you been away?’

The sunburned cleavage had been acquired in Spain, it seemed.

Cressy, feeling rather muzzy, looked at Midge with great admiration. She wondered how much just such a soft, pale coat would cost. And such soft, pale shoes to match. She would have liked her to join them, but guessed that she was probably the very sort of woman her father could not bear.

‘I think we must be off,’ Joe said. ‘Your mother will wonder what has happened.’

Rose, he knew, would not wonder for one moment. but he had only a shilling left. Two sixpences. No mistake about them, hiding in the corner of his pocket.

‘Drink up, Mother.’

Mother took a gulp of brown ale, leaving a pale froth on
her upper lip. Her daughter whispered in her ear and Mother, straightening her hat crossly, touched her mouth with her glove. ‘She’s as pleased as Punch,’ her daughter said to Ken. ‘You couldn’t have done better if you’d given her ten pounds.’

Trying endlessly, but without luck, to keep everybody happy, had given the daughter a discontented look. Her cheerfulness had a snappy edge to it, and one day, Midge decided, deaf or not, she would look like Mother. Not very gruntled, to say the least.

‘Good-bye,’ Cressy said shyly, on her way to the door. She, too, had been pleased by her outing. David had not come; but on some other evening he might. And she was going back to her baked beans and her new life, and she felt elated now, and – whether it was the sherry or not she did not know – was no longer tearful. She would creep in through the back door and up the stairs, and go softly about between bedroom and landing, and be no trouble at all. They would not know that she was there.

The young couple had at last finished their lager and lime and had, with hands entwined, departed, and, next, Mother was hoisted up on to her poor old feet. Good nights were said; but not by her. She had become wary of saying anything, rarely having managed to hear what had gone before.

‘Well, let’s all have a drink,’ Midge said in a reckless tone, when they had gone. Without knowing, she was an echo of her father.

It was cosy and quiet – she and the landlord and the barmaid gathered together, and relaxed. She made up her mind to come more often on her lonely evenings.

‘That coat makes me green with envy,’ said the barmaid, woman-to-woman. ‘Here’s how!’ She took a sip of Guinness daintily. ‘That’s more like it.’ She poked a finger into her
piled-up hair and scratched secretly, pretending to be rearranging a pin. ‘And how’s that handsome son of yours?’ she asked.

‘Long time, no see,’ the landlord said.

Driving home after the bright lights of the bar was a different matter, and Midge regretted her outing, thinking of the empty house ahead, and wondered if, after all, she would ever make a habit of it.

As she was shutting the garage doors, she heard the telephone ringing. She ran across the gravel sweep, pushed the key into the lock with impatient hands, and almost fell into the hall. As soon as she did, the ringing stopped.

Frustrated and trembling, she stood still and listened. The silence had a terrible finality. She was, at first, afraid to disturb it, and when at last she could move, she took off her shoes and went quietly across the hall and up the stairs.

The two telephone-calls now seemed menacing – both the wrong number, and this unanswered one. She thought of burglars trying to find out if the house were unoccupied, or if a man’s voice replied.

She stood in her room, shivering, and chafing her hands, imagining men with nylon stockings pulled over their faces for masks, breaking windows and climbing over the sills, or forcing locks. There would be no need for them to gag her or tie her up, or knock her into unconsciousness, for, long before they could, her heart would have stopped from fright.

She undressed and from habit took off her make-up, creamed her face, and pinned up her hair. While she was doing this, she had a sudden idea. She collected together her gold bracelet, her pearls, her diamond brooch, some ear-rings, and her mother’s sapphire engagement-ring. She put them all into a polythene bag and dropped them over the banisters into the middle of the
hall floor. Perhaps – she hoped – that might satisfy any housebreakers, and save them the trouble of searching any further. Before she lay down, she pulled the telephone on to the bed beside her and, with all the lights on, closed her eyes and waited for sleep.

There were the usual night-noises about the house – creakings, sudden explosions and whirrings from the refrigerator, a rose-twig scratching on a window-pane. She tried to analyse each sound. Something dropped heavily in the garden; perhaps an apple, perhaps not. In the end, worn-out, she slept.

She was wakened by a downstairs door being quietly closed. It was the front door, she knew, from the sticking sound of its draught-proofing strips. Steps crossed the hall, and paused. The bag of jewellery was no doubt being examined. She laid her hand on the telephone, but was afraid to lift it, and let anyone hear her voice. And could the village policeman, a mile and a half away, help her now, or should she dial 999 and wait for a car to come from the town? Her heart-beat was like the sound of heavy boots lurching uncertainly through snow. The footsteps began again, were on the stairs. Without hope, she snatched up the receiver, tried to dial, tried to scream.

David opened the bedroom door and stood there, with the bag of jewellery in his hand. She slumped forward, dropping the receiver, covering her face, and began to weep – wonderful steady tears of relief and exhaustion.

When she was able, lifting her wet, creamed face to him, she tried to explain. He wore Archie’s bewildered frown, but not, happily, the look of distaste which had usually gone with it. He had never known his mother disorganised, his memory did not reach back so far. The shiny face, the hair pinned up, made her look old and, at the same time, piteously young.

He laid down the jewellery on the dressing-table with horror.

It gave a clue to premeditation, to a long fearfulness endured,
the terror she had striven to combat. He was filled with embarrassment and consternation and – that trembling hand on the telephone – with guilt.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said several times, punctuating her incoherent tale of terror. ‘I didn’t know. I simply didn’t think,’ he went on. ‘I tried to telephone, but I rang off quite soon, thinking you must be asleep.’

‘I feel so foolish,’ she cried. ‘A grown woman. It’s so absurd.’

‘Are you always scared of burglars when I’m away?’ he asked gravely.

‘Only at night. One seems so isolated here.’

He frowned again. The burden of it.

‘Well, I’m home now,’ he said, matter-of-factly, and smiled.

He knew that her possessions – her ‘nice things’, as she called them – were most precious to her, and yet they had been put out as an offering, a sacrifice, in the hall, a ransom for the taking. That was the proof of her alarm.

He said, ‘Jack had to go back early by train. I tried one or two hotels on the way home, but they were full, and then it was too late.’

She wiped away tears on the hem of the sheet, like an unhappy little girl.

‘Are you all right now?’

She nodded. ‘Only ashamed of myself,’ she said.

‘For heaven’s sake, don’t be.’

He came to the bed and kissed her forehead. It was clammy to his lips, and he felt repelled. She flinched away.

‘You don’t want this now,’ he said, putting the telephone back on its table.