Going Gently
Page 12
‘Oh, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t take advantage under those circumstances. You know what they say about a dead man’s shoes. Well, a dead man’s toad-in-the-hole, it wouldn’t be right. I just couldn’t stomach it, knowing.’
‘Mr Watson isn’t dead, Hilda. He’s gone home.’
‘Oh. Oh, well, I suppose that’s all right, then.’
‘That’s the ticket. There you go.’
What other nation, thought Kate, could have invented sausage in a batter pudding? What other nation, having invented it, could have called it toad-in-the-hole? What other nation, having invented it and called it toad-in-the-hole, could have eaten it?
‘Your condition has certain advantages, Ma,’ said Maurice. ‘You are spared toad-in-the-hole. What other nation could have invented toad-in-the-hole, and Little Chefs, and Marmite?’
They’d always been on the same wavelength.
Surely if Maurice had murdered Graham, he wouldn’t have drawn attention to himself by writing ‘Sorry, Ma’ and leaving a name plate from Leningrad railway station?
She wished she could ask him how Clare was.
‘Clare sends her love. She’s very well.’
It was uncanny.
Shortly after supper, Mrs Critchley had a visitor. As ill luck would have it, he came just after Mrs Critchley had been escorted to the lavvy, as she called it. This gave him an opportunity of explaining himself to a ward that wasn’t remotely interested. ‘My name is Pilchard. I also live in Orchard Close. Mrs Critchley lives in number 33 and I live in number 12, but due to a certain irregularity in the numbers in the cul-de-sac, I am actually opposite her. I don’t get much sense out of her, but it cheers her up to see me.’
Mr Pilchard’s theory was not borne out by Mrs Critchley’s first remark on her return from the lavvy, which was, ‘Get out of here! You took my Jennifer from me and I never want to see you again.’
‘I’ve never heard of her Jennifer,’ Mr Pilchard told the ward. ‘Not one of her better days. A strategic withdrawal is indicated.’
Glenda’s husband arrived shortly afterwards, and Glenda told him he looked thin.
‘You aren’t getting enough to eat, are you?’ she said.
‘Yes, I am. I made myself a steak-and-kidney pie.’
‘Since when could you make pastry?’
‘You don’t need to make pastry these days. You buy it.’
When it was Glenda’s turn to be helped to the facilities, as she called them, her husband offered to take her.
‘No,’ explained Janet. ‘She may need help, know what I mean?’
‘Who better than me to help her? I’m her husband,’ said her husband.
‘Sorry. It’s a ladies. I have to do it. Besides,’ she added rather grandly, ‘she might need professional assistance.’
When Janet had taken Glenda on the long trip down the corridor to the facilities, Glenda’s husband Douglas told the ward, ‘She thinks I can’t look after myself. I can. I made a soufflé yesterday. It didn’t rise, but it was tasty. Can’t tell her that, she’d go up in smoke.’
Maurice joined in the discussion of the techniques of making soufflés rise.
‘Mine never rise very much,’ admitted Douglas, ‘and it’s the same difference with cakes. There’s nothing I can do about it. The gaskets have gone on the oven.’
Hilda had no visitors, she never did, and there were no other visitors for Kate. ‘Nigel and Timothy have left the field clear for me,’ explained Maurice.
Shortly before nine o’clock, a time which seems like three in the morning in hospitals, Glenda’s husband took his leave of her, and Maurice squeezed his mother’s hand in farewell.
By ten o’clock the other three patients in the ward were asleep. Mrs Critchley was snoring loudly, Hilda was emitting whistles which reminded Kate of shepherds training dogs in the Welsh hills, and Glenda was giving short rasping breaths accompanied by occasional low moans and staccato farts which would have shocked her gentility to the core, had she known about them. Kate was now able to allow herself the luxury of opening her eyes for whole minutes at a time.
There, in that small, square ward, lit by the barley-sugar night-light, Kate took up her time travels again. The barley-sugar night-light became the Cotswold sun, and, just after a fart from Glenda so loud that it almost woke her, Kate met Maurice’s father for the first time.
6 Walter
HE TURNED AND looked at her, as if prompted by some sixth sense, just as she walked down the aisle of the magnificent, airy, Perpendicular church. Her immediate impression was of his great size and of the luxuriant anarchy of his jet-black hair. He smiled at her, and she found herself smiling back. Well, why not smile? It was a wedding.
He sat on the bride’s side, she of course on the groom’s. She knelt, in imitation of a woman at prayer, feeling ashamed but knowing that she’d have felt even more ashamed if she’d shocked her parents by not kneeling. Her mother, radiant in a black dress of Welsh lace embroidered with curling Celtic patterns, turned and smiled at her, and Kate turned, as if to look at the fifteenth-century stained glass for which Fairford Church is justly famed, and whose importance the golden boy had explained. ‘They’re all very proud of the glass, for goodness’ sake swot up on it, so you can hold your own,’ he’d urged, more keyed up than she had ever seen him, though that wasn’t surprising.
Yes, the windows were beautiful, but it wasn’t because of them that she turned round. She turned to see if she could meet the big man’s eyes again. She did. An uncharacteristically coy impulse made her slide her eyes past him and up to the great west window, then she looked back at him and grinned in admission of the deception. He grinned back. There was nothing classically good-looking about him, he was too ungainly, his shoulders were too bulky, he seemed slightly hunched, as if embarrassed by his size. But Kate thought him the second most handsome man that she had seen that day.
The most handsome, of course, was her brother. The luxuriance of Oliver’s childish curls had gone, but he still had a delightful curliness which managed to avoid any suggestion of effeminacy. He was exactly six foot tall, almost slim, always elegantly dressed. His smile was warm. His teeth were perfect. Nobody was surprised when the younger of the Pelt-Wallaby girls fell for him. He was the golden boy, the most popular house surgeon in the hospital, charming, dashing, deft, quick-witted, athletic, humorous, generous, judged even at twenty-three to be certain to go far, and seemingly never troubled by thoughts beyond the range with which he was comfortable. He stood there, in front of the glittering congregation, at the side of his best man, Gareth Herbert, son of Herbert Herbert (Herbert Herbert Cricket, not Herbert Herbert Politics), in all his afternoon glory in his morning suit, top hat in his left hand, right hand fiddling with his private parts through his pocket, somebody should stop him, nervous as any young man would be who was marrying the younger of the Pelt-Wallaby girls.
Kate met Enid’s eyes, and smiled. Enid had a headache, which might or might not develop into a full-blown migraine, and her answering smile was tense. At her other side Bernard shifted uneasily in his ill-fitting morning suit. He’d nicked himself shaving. A tiny sliver of cotton wool still adhered to his cheek.
The Pelt-Wallaby side of the church was crowded with men whose morning suits fitted like gloves, and elegant women whose gloves fitted like morning suits and whose simple but expensive knee-length ensembles had the somewhat fuller figure that was coming back after the straight look of the mid-twenties.
There were far fewer people on the Thomas side, and the man’s hired morning suits didn’t quite fit, and the women’s dresses were too straight, in the fashion of the previous year, and they’d tried too hard, they had too many accessories, and Kate’s heart went out to them. She thought up a silly little jingle about it.
There is no compassion in fashion
There is no forgiveness in dress.
The more that you wore, the more people saw
That you hadn’t got more, you’d got less.<
br />
This made her feel better, and she was pleased to realise that she didn’t feel the least bit embarrassed, she just felt full of love that day for all her relations. Nevertheless, she was delighted when a contingent from the hospital, good-looking young doctors and pretty young nurses, came in at the last moment to swell the groom’s ranks.
She saw her mother touch John Thomas Thomas’s arm. There was no answering touch. John Thomas Thomas was communing with his Maker.
There was a rustle of excitement, a turning of heads, she was able to look backwards and to her joy saw the big man wait until he’d smiled at her before he turned to gaze at Fenella Pelt-Wallaby, sliding along as if on castors on the arm of her father Horace. Fenella seemed in a trance of ecstasy, looking neither to left nor right, smiling distantly. She was actually short-sighted and terrified of tripping. Her nose was too long, and her forehead too wide and her mouth too narrow, but her family was rich, and everyone agreed that she was a great beauty.
The service was impressive and elegant. Oliver spoke the responses with just the right degree of hesitation. The sermon was impeccably brief, the singing of the last hymn brought tears to the eyes of all except those whose make-up was liable to be ruined by crying.
As they made their stuttering way back up the aisle, behind the happy couple, towards the great west window with its vivid and imaginative depiction of the Damned in Hell, Kate felt uneasy, not because of the window, she didn’t believe in Hell, she didn’t believe she was Damned, she didn’t believe in Things with Capital Letters, but she had felt very exposed, very self-conscious since Arturo’s suicide. Whenever she met people, she wondered if they were thinking, behind their polite faces, was it her fault, was she responsible for his death? She’d wondered if the pain of Gwyn’s death would ever go away, and in the end, to her great relief and regret, it had. Now she wondered if her feeling of guilt would ever go. She had to brace herself to face the rigours of the reception.
Outside the church, they stood around in a great throng, and watched the taking of photographs. She even appeared in one of them, standing between Enid and Bernard in a family ensemble. Bernard said, ‘It all seems vaguely indecent, somehow, all this show in the middle of a depression, I beg your pardon?’
Enid said, ‘Oh no, I think it’s wonderful,’ but she looked small and bleak, her dress hadn’t worked, she looked far too old in it. ‘I think it’s all utterly lovely.’
‘Oh yes, Enid,’ said Kate impulsively. ‘But, oh Enid, if only Dilys and Myfanwy could be here,’ and Enid’s eyes filled with tears, which might have been tears of joy for Oliver and Fenella, though they didn’t look like tears of joy, or they might have been for the sad absence of Myfanwy and Dilys, or they might have been, Kate felt herself ungenerous for thinking, tears shed for herself and for her fear that no man would ever stand at the altar in his morning suit fiddling with his balls through his pocket because of her.
The reception took place in a marquee in the box-hedged garden of the Pelt-Wallaby home, a mellow, honey-gold Cotswold manor house. Smart waitresses held trays of orange juice, elderflower cordial and champagne.
Alcohol had been a major issue. Kate still had vivid memories of the evening on which the thorny question had been raised. She’d had nowhere to live after the shock and, yes, the disgrace of Arturo’s suicide. She’d had no money and precious little chance of earning any with two small children to bring up. So she had moved back with the children into the family home, into her old room. There, watched by the Stag at Bay, warned by the strict messages on the samplers, chilled by the linoleum, with a view over the slate roofs towards the new houses being built high above them on Town Hill, she had slowly rebuilt her confidence and her nerve.
One weekend, all the family had been present. Oliver had come from the hospital to discuss the wedding. Bernard, a trainee accountant in London with Simms Fordingbridge, had come because he adored and worshipped Oliver. After they’d finished their Saturday tea – tinned salmon and salad, with tinned pears to follow, and as much bread and butter as you could eat, and Welsh cakes and bara brith – and after they’d made light work of the washing-up, and after Kate had put the boys to bed, they had all gathered round the fire, even though it wasn’t lit. Annie had been knitting. Bronwen had been embroidering. Enid had been marking homework. John Thomas Thomas had been reading his Welsh religious newspaper, Y Tyst (The Truth). Bernard had been studying an accountancy manual. Kate had been reading Middlemarch. Oliver had cleared his throat and said, ‘Father, Mother,’ so gravely that John Thomas Thomas had lowered his newspaper, and Bronwen had gone quite white. Kate had never seen Oliver look so nervous. He’d been terrified.
‘Father, Mother,’ he had repeated. ‘I . . . I have to tell you that there will be alcohol at the wedding. There will be champagne and wine.’
John Thomas Thomas had folded his newspaper and placed it neatly on his lap.
‘Oh dear,’ he had said.
‘The Pelt-Wallabies would find it very odd not to have alcohol at a wedding.’
‘We understand, dear,’ her mother had said, looking anxiously at John Thomas Thomas. ‘It’s their daughter. It’s their wedding. They must do as they please.’
‘We would be considered a very narrow family, in London, I beg your pardon?’ Bernard had said. He had told Kate that he went to pubs with his friends from Simms Fordingbridge and drank hock with his Wienerschnitzel when he dined at Schmidt’s in Charlotte Street.
‘Narrow, is it?’ John Thomas Thomas had replied. ‘I think, Bernard, I would be happy to be called narrow, in London. Well, thank you for telling us, Oliver. We don’t need to drink any of it.’
‘I will drink it, Father, in moderation,’ Oliver had said. ‘I have no wish to offend my new relatives.’
‘And what about your old relatives?’ John Thomas Thomas had asked very quietly.
‘Hush, dear,’ Bronwen had said. ‘He must do as he thinks fit.’
‘Well, be very moderate. You aren’t used to it.’
Oliver had met Kate’s eyes. She had known that he was very used to it.
‘The rest of you are not to touch a drop,’ John Thomas Thomas had commanded.
‘Oh, Father, I’m thirty,’ Kate had said. ‘I think I can be trusted to lead my life the way I think fit.’
‘I haven’t seen much sign of it,’ John Thomas Thomas had said, and Annie had choked, and Kate had seen her mother angry with John Thomas Thomas for the first time.
‘For shame, John Thomas,’ Bronwen had said. ‘For shame. That was not a Christian way to speak.’
‘I’m sorry,’ John Thomas Thomas had said. ‘I apologise, Kate. I’m upset, but that is no excuse. Drink alcohol if you must.’
‘I don’t pretend that I must,’ Kate had said. ‘But I will. I like it. In moderation. I see no harm in anything in moderation.’
‘Really?’ Bernard had said. ‘Do you see no harm in poverty in moderation? Do you see no harm in murder and starvation, in moderation, I beg your pardon?’
‘I spoke foolishly,’ Kate had said. ‘I’m upset too. I love this family. I hate quarrels.’
‘Well, I shan’t drink alcohol,’ Enid had said smugly. ‘It gives me migraines.’
‘How do you know?’ John Thomas Thomas had thundered.
Enid had gone bright red. All her smugness had vanished in an instant.
‘I . . . er . . .’ she had floundered, ‘I had it once at a party. It was put in my orange juice. I didn’t know.’
‘Good. If that is the truth you are not to blame, though I hope you’ll learn not to go to parties where there are wicked unprincipled people present,’ John Thomas Thomas had said.
‘That would cut out most of Swansea, I beg your pardon?’ Bernard had said.
‘Well, I shan’t touch alcohol,’ Annie had said. ‘I’m so fortunate to be going to this wedding at all. I have to pinch myself sometimes, to believe it’s true.’
Kate smiled to herself, standing near the doorway of the marq
uee, remembering that conversation. She had a glass of champagne, so did Oliver, and she had seen Bernard take one when he thought no one was looking, sip a little, and pour the rest into his orange juice.
She sailed across to a group of assorted Pelt-Wallabys, who welcomed her with broad smiles, although the smile of the elder of the Pelt-Wallaby girls was just a little forced, since Kate was so very much prettier than her.
‘Your house is so beautiful,’ said Kate. ‘In Wales we don’t have architecture. We only have buildings.’
They laughed, as if Kate had said something very witty, and she began the serious business of charming them for Wales. Enid was so quiet and wan, Bernard so unkempt and serious, John Thomas Thomas so stiff and stern, Annie so red and coarse and Bronwen too loyal to John Thomas Thomas to even attempt to shine. Kate kept her end up, for Oliver, lest the smooth, suave Pelt-Wallabys and their county friends thought him an escapee from a tribe of uncouth Celts.
All the time she was talking, Kate was aware of the broad-shouldered man with the jet-black hair, standing in a group to her right. She had looked at the seating plan. She was sitting between Doctor Ian Pelt-Wallaby and Mr Walter Copson. Her heart sank at the prospect. She wanted to sit next to the big man. But she showed none of this. She continued to charm the Pelt-Wallabys, but it was a performance, given for her brother’s benefit to an audience who, she hoped, knew nothing about her part in Arturo’s death. Out of the corner of her eye she saw her mother all alone for a moment and her heart went out to her. She excused herself from the Pelt-Wallabys and went over to Bronwen.
‘Happy?’ she asked.
‘Very.’
‘Proud?’
‘Extremely.’
‘Me too. Oliver is wonderful. Aren’t you having any champagne, Mother?’
‘Of course not.’
‘It seems such a shame. Wouldn’t you like to?’
‘Of course not, Kate. Do you think a drink can compare with the love of a good man?’
They were summoned to the wedding breakfast, and Kate forgot all self-consciousness, all past worries, when she discovered that Mr Walter Copson was none other than the huge man with the jet-black hair. She had just not expected that he would have so blunt a name.