Gracious Living

by Andrea Goldsmith

  As it did. Oliver at twenty and Elizabeth at nearly eighteen had been going steady for over a year. Oliver was happy with the arrangement: Elizabeth, so sweet and pretty, suited him well. The two sets of parents were also happy, only Elizabeth was not. And so she grew fat, petite Elizabeth started eating and grew very fat indeed. She ate alone, pounds and pounds of chocolate, plain dairy-milk chocolate and chocolate-covered peanuts; she ate pineapple doughnuts and coffee scrolls and cheese by the pound. She grew fatter and fatter and Oliver grew ever more alarmed. Elizabeth was letting herself go, he said; when she gained a few more pounds he said she was letting him down, a few more and he was reluctant to be seen with her. It was during this period that Adrian Dadswell appeared, Adrian who was a bit overweight himself. Oliver had said that if Elizabeth gained any more weight he would leave: she did and he went. The two sets of parents were distraught; we will speak firmly with Elizabeth, the Bainbridges said to the Warbys, and arrange for some professional help; and we’ll speak firmly to Oliver, the Warbys replied, advise him to be patient. The Bainbridges put aside the list of wedding guests, golf continued, bridge began and the parents waited.

  Adrian at this stage played only a minor role. He was not interested in Elizabeth as a girlfriend, she was far too fat for that, but he liked her parents’ swimming pool and swam there on three or four occasions. And he was very pleasant to Elizabeth, joking and gossiping and treating her like one of the boys. Then the university year commenced and swimming stopped.

  Elizabeth was enrolled to study at the Melbourne School of Fine Arts, Adrian was in the final year of a law degree. Six months passed before they met again – at the twenty-first birthday of a mutual friend – and by then everything had changed.

  What had happened was this: Oliver left and with him the threat of a Bainbridge-Warby union, and Elizabeth commenced her art studies. Her new friends at the college seemed not to notice she was fat and if they did they did not bother about it. She was very happy and very productive. Early in the year she was invited to join the master sculpture classes, an honour rarely extended to a first-year student; it was an exciting time. As for the fat, it was there and then it was not, her body seemed to shrink exponentially with the growth in her work. At the end of first term she had returned to her old weight, at the end of second term Adrian had reappeared, and by the end of third term she had slept with him.

  Then there was no going back, not in 1965, not even if you had a nascent nervousness about the man you now had to marry. More than a nervousness, Elizabeth had a curdling suspicion that Adrian was loud and lightweight and mightily self-centred. But it was too late, she had slept with him and she was scared: scared of pregnancy, scared he would not propose, scared he might leave. The first problem, the one of pregnancy, she solved with a strange doctor in a strange city who had no notion that asking for a prescription for the pill was the most nerve-racking experience of her young life. As for the other problems, they persisted until two years later when Adrian proposed.

  They were in bed together, a single bed at the Bainbridge beach house, the place Elizabeth and Adrian went for Saturday-night sex after dinner or the cinema. For unmarried couples in the 1960s Saturday night was always the night for sex, but at the time Elizabeth did not know this and feared she was the only one. Adrian rolled over, propped himself on an elbow and proposed.

  ‘Well, what do you think?’ he said.

  What did she think? The relief was enormous! Elizabeth threw herself on top of him, laughing and hugging and crying and squirming and kissing big, wet, grateful kisses, and Adrian interpreting her relief as passion, joined in her excitement, and there she was bouncing on top of him like a baby, aware of his penis inside her but much more excited that she would not have to be a lonely old maid or a tarnished younger one. And suddenly the guilt of two years of sleeping with him evaporated. She sighed with pleasure. Adrian was delighted: ‘If I’d known it would have that effect, I would have proposed ages ago.’ He called her hot and sexy and congratulated her on the orgasm she had failed to notice. He suggested they marry in March of the following year. Again she felt that bliss of relief, that shiver of escaping stress, and Adrian now at the ready, finally understanding, he said, that insecurity about the future had dammed the full rush of her sexuality, and Elizabeth in a cloud of happiness moved with him in joyous rhythm, her large breasts bobbing above his face.

  Relief and gratitude in 1967.

  ‘But you already knew what he was like!’ Ginnie, the voice of the 1980s would say, and Elizabeth would respond that to a girl with a Bainbridge background who was no longer a virgin, Ginnie’s comment was simply not relevant.

  One of the problems, Elizabeth was to realise much later, was her limited experience of men. Of course she knew Adrian was a shallow and egocentric person who seemed happier with his male friends than with her, but then her own father was much the same, as were all the other men she knew. The boys at college had been different, but so different she hardly thought of them as men, and she was sure they did not regard her as a woman; they were peers, colleagues, friends with whom she talked for hours, days, years; as for girlfriends they went elsewhere. So, within her experience of men who became husbands, Adrian was not unusual: a little more raucous, a little more flirtatious than most, but the basic ingredients were the same.

  The Bainbridges disagreed; Adrian’s background was very different to Elizabeth’s, indeed, in Bainbridge terms Adrian had no background. Adrian’s father had been born in the north of England – Manchester – which was almost as bad as being a southern European. He had worked for years as secretary to an obscure company, and there he would stay until he died or retired, whichever came first. Adrian’s mother had at least been born in London, but that was where the good fortune ended. As soon as her children were at school she started work at Myer department store and was still there, in the homewares section, ‘So useful for when the children are married,’ she had said in what Mrs Bainbridge considered to be extremely poor taste. In truth, Mrs Dadswell was a buyer for the homewares section, a respected employee who had done extremely well, but as far as the Bainbridges were concerned, once a shop assistant always a shop assistant.

  The Bainbridges changed their mind about the marriage only after Phillip Warby, Oliver’s younger brother, turned out so badly. And if it could happen to Phillip who had enjoyed every advantage, then it could happen to just about anyone. The Bainbridges had known Phillip from babyhood, had watched him grow into a fine young man, had celebrated with him when he was accepted into medical school, and a year later commiserated with his parents when he dropped out. That marked the turning point: one day he was normal and the next he was touting the North Vietnamese flag and supporting the NLF. He was a communist, he said, and a draft resister, and he had pledged to smash American imperialism. Coincidentally, both the Bainbridges and the Warbys harboured a deep concern over the usurping of good British values by crass Americanism and were, therefore, more than happy for American imperialism to be crushed, but they believed it should be done quietly, with decorum, not with the vulgar ravings of Phillip and his companions.

  The Warbys were beside themselves. The Bainbridges did their best to reassure them that Phillip was only going through a phase; in time, they said, he would succumb to the lure of good breeding and return to the family that loved him. And return he did, but neither cured nor alone. Nor did he return for love, that, he said, he had found elsewhere, and introduced them to his friend, a big handsome man dressed almost entirely in a pale pink that clashed dreadfully with the red Phillip had taken to wearing in support of the people’s struggle. Phillip said he was a special friend, a homosexual who was out of the closet.

  Now, around 1967 in the Warby-Bainbridge circle there were no homosexuals either in or out of the closet, it simply wasn’t done. Mrs Bainbridge wondered if Phillip had been experimenting with some of the mind-expanding drugs one read about; Mr Warby blamed his wife’s great-uncle Herbert for their trouble, certainly
there was nothing on his side to account for Phillip. Mr Bainbridge spoke privately with Mr Warby, suggesting that what the boy needed was discipline, a spell in the army would, he believed, do the lad a world of good. Mr Warby couldn’t have agreed more, but by this time Phillip had been forced underground, having failed to register his name for the conscription ballot that was sending young men to Vietnam. For the next eighteen months, while Phillip was being shuffled from one safe house to another, the Warbys had time to recover from their son’s terrible defection. As for the Bainbridges they, too, had time, and while Phillip Warby was the only homosexual they knew, there were plenty of other young men who as 1967 advanced seemed to forget their privileged backgrounds and turn into rebellious riff-raff.

  Adrian Dadswell started to look a lot better.

  In September, after their nephew had been arrested outside the American embassy, the Bainbridges gave their consent; in October there was a magnificent ‘at home’ to celebrate the engagement. In March 1968 the wedding was held.

  And what a wedding! – although it was not without its difficulties. The church was the main problem. It was customary for wedding services to be held either in the groom’s old school chapel or that of his university college, but Adrian had neither. It was all so embarrassing, Mrs Bainbridge confessed to her sister, the mother of the nephew who had been arrested, a real dilemma. ‘Not at all,’ the sister said, ‘what about Elizabeth’s school chapel?’ So Elizabeth’s old school chapel it was, and in the years that followed the Bainbridges were to note with some satisfaction that Elizabeth’s wedding had started a trend, and the chapels at the various girls’ schools became a popular choice among some of the better-known families.

  The day of the wedding was perfect March weather, a day when the light rises rather than falls in a marvellous matt blue. Elizabeth saw the day and was pleased; she was searching for signs, omens to suggest she was doing the right thing. Not that she wasn’t happy and excited, she was, for this was her day, her own star-spangled day, but a mutinous spiral of doom, now no larger than a bacillus, was tailing her pleasure, wiggling and waggling and slowly gaining on it, and the future trembled in its wake.

  ‘All young brides are nervous,’ her mother said over breakfast, ‘and so they should be. It’s the biggest day of a girl’s life, the most important decision she’ll ever make.’

  Elizabeth sipped her coffee and said nothing. The decision to marry Adrian had, in fact, been quite simple, it was the decision to sleep with him that had been an agony. As for the wedding itself, once the announcement was made, little had been required of Elizabeth, she had merely drifted along in the grand wake of tradition and Mrs Bainbridge, meeting with caterer, dressmaker and florist as required. As for today, her own special day, all Elizabeth had to do was be accessible to the various hands that would do her nails, her hair, her face, dress her, guide her down the aisle and accompany her back up again. So when her mother leaned across the breakfast table to hold her daughter’s hand, the left hand with its emerald-cut diamond, Elizabeth gave it up without a thought; and when her mother said that Elizabeth had made a good choice in Adrian, Elizabeth promptly smiled – a blank smile thick enough to conceal the months of her parents’ opposition, their insistence that Adrian was a ‘nobody’, their pleas to ‘try Oliver again’, months soggy with blame and a bubble or more of hate.

  ‘You’ve made us so proud,’ Diana Bainbridge continued, ‘your father in particular. Both you and I know he’s not one for showing what he really feels, but he’s very proud of you and loves you very much.’

  Elizabeth heard it all across a great chasm of years; is this what she would be saying to her own daughter on her wedding day? ‘Darling, Adrian loves you, but he can’t tell you about it.’ Would these be her words? And if so, what is this fumbling atavism that renders fathers mute and mothers their apologists? She listened hard, trying to hear the words of love spoken to her unborn daughter, but could summon up only a picture of a kitchen much like this, with Adrian standing large and stern, and Elizabeth seated at a table her head in her hands, and the sound of voices sharp and urgent–

  ‘She hasn’t eaten properly, that’s the problem.’ Harold Bainbridge stood in the doorway of the kitchen while his wife knelt next to Elizabeth’s prostrate body loosening buttons, fanning the air, inspecting her daughter’s skin for injuries. ‘The girl’s got to eat to maintain her strength.’

  ‘Yes Hal, I know, but I can’t force-feed her.’

  Harold came a little closer. ‘Has this ever happened before?’

  Elizabeth’s throat felt dry and swollen, she asked for some water.

  ‘Well has it?’ Harold persisted, ‘have you ever fainted before?’

  ‘Of course.’ Make light of this, Elizabeth told herself. ‘Hasn’t everyone?’

  ‘I certainly haven’t.’

  ‘That’s because you’ve never been a young bride, Harold,’ said Mrs Bainbridge as she wiped her daughter’s brow.

  An hour later, fully recovered and fresh from a shower, Elizabeth sat in the living room while Tanya did her nails. Tanya, the volatile pixie from Hungary who knew women’s bodies better than their maker, was, according to Diana Bainbridge, crucial to the success of the wedding. Tanya, who shared the same opinion, had set aside the entire day so that Elizabeth and her attendants would look their best.

  ‘Now tell me about your bridesmaids.’ Tanya was rubbing cream into Elizabeth’s cuticles. ‘I know there’s your sister, Rosie.’

  ‘Yes, and Adrian’s sister Cathy. And my friend Susie Warby.’

  Tanya raised her eyebrows. ‘Surely not a sister of that Phillip Warby who’s doing all those disgusting things?’

  Elizabeth decided to ignore the question, Tanya the queen of gossip knew exactly who Susie Warby was.

  ‘And Lydia Branch, my matron of honour.’

  ‘Now there’s a lovely girl, really knows how to look after herself. Beautiful skin, perfect figure, truly feminine. I only wish we could cure her of her nail-biting.’

  Elizabeth glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece, nearly half past ten. ‘They’ll be here soon.’

  And there they were: fat Cathy, fat but desperately dieting Rosie, beautiful blonde Lydia and tall slim Susie, all chattering excitedly, reassuring Mrs Bainbridge that everything would be perfect, joking with Elizabeth about her imminent loss of freedom, admiring recent photographs of the happy couple, expressing approval of such an amiable husband – particularly Lydia Branch, whose own husband David was as dreary as he was devoted – discussing the groomsmen, and sharing rumours about Adrian’s bucks’ night.

  ‘Did you know there was a stripper?’ Susie was seated at the manicurist table; she twisted around to see Elizabeth’s reaction.

  ‘Yes, Adrian told me. I can’t see the attraction myself.’

  ‘That’s why bucks’ nights are for men only, I suppose.’ Susie stood up. ‘Who’s next for Tanya?’

  Steadily, efficiently, expertly, all nails were manicured, and at half past eleven the girls were sitting at the dining-room table with sparkling pink pearl extremities, even Lydia whose customary raw stumps had been extended with the latest in false nails. The table was laden with party food – ribbon sandwiches, egg and bacon slices, canapés filled with salmon, éclairs and vanilla slices, caramels and chocolates. ‘We may as well eat up,’ Rosie said, ‘it’s too late now to lose any more weight.’ And so they did, pink nails flashing, jaws gnashing, cream dripping, and all the while maintaining an incessant banter to soothe poor Elizabeth’s nerves. Talk of friends and clothes and holidays was interspersed with compliments about Adrian, truthful compliments, of that Elizabeth was sure, because everyone now adored him, adored him unequivocally, only Elizabeth had her doubts.

  Twenty years later with her eighteen-year-old daughter seated beside her, Elizabeth again recalled the doubts. The problem was that everyone told her the doubts were normal – her mother told her, Lydia Branch told her, anyone who was married told her, and Elizabeth
, who in those days was an indiscriminate listener, believed them all. So there she was at lunch on her wedding day, helplessness clutching the pit of her stomach, a throbbing despair in her temples, doing her best to be happy on this the happiest day of her life.

  After lunch, Antoine and his assistants arrived with a lorryload of dryers and head rests, shampoos and hairsprays, pins, rollers and hairpieces – not that he approved of the latter, Antoine was quick to explain, being a man of the Sassoon school, but he had noticed at the practice session that one of the young ladies had rather thin hair. He and his people set up their equipment in the main bathroom and adjoining dressing room.

  The girls had changed into button-through housecoats and within a short time Rosie was under the dryer, Lydia’s hair was being put into jumbo rollers, Susie was having a special conditioning treatment – hers was the hair that was thin – and Cathy’s hair was being washed. Antoine was telling Elizabeth of his plan to weave strands of hair through the band of miniature orchids which would hold her veil.

  ‘It will look perfect, trust me.’

  ‘But Antoine, I like the way you did it at the rehearsal.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ he smacked his lips, ‘but now I have something better.’

  And Elizabeth gave in – Antoine would do as he liked anyway, so she might as well be seen to agree.

  After the hair was finished the girls moved on to Tanya for makeup. By twenty past four the attendants were complete. Each wore an identical hairstyle: straight to the shoulders in a loose page-boy cut, a heavy fringe and the rest brushed back with a little height and liberal amounts of hairspray. Each girl wore a crown of miniature orchids with fine curls of pink satin ribbon to match the pink spotted voile dresses. Tanya had worked wonders with the makeup: all eyes had been enlarged and darkened, blemishes had been camouflaged, Rosie and Cathy had acquired cheek bones, and each girl had been given a moist, pearly pink mouth.