In the Time of Greenbloom

by Gabriel Fielding

  “You don’t even look the same! Whatever’s happened to your face?”

  “Oh that! I was going to tell you; but somehow it doesn’t seem interesting any more.”

  “What was it? A fight?”

  “Yes.”

  “How silly! We never fight; but I suppose boys are different.”

  He took a deep breath and looked at his feet. “As a matter of fact, if you want to know, it was for you! Someone was beastly about you, and I went into the ring with him and beat him up.”

  She was silent; and after a moment or two he looked up just in time to catch her eyes breaking away from their regard of him. Moving closer to her he took her hand impulsively and shook the slender fingers hard.

  “Please! Do let’s start again. Let’s be different so that we shall end up by being the same. I didn’t mean to quarrel with you and all this could be so wonderful.”

  “All right,” she said, “but you mustn’t criticise your mother any more or it will spoil everything.”

  He smiled. “I promise,” he said. “Let’s have some champagne like we said we would in our letters. Let’s drink to our First Wedding—before she”—he corrected himself hastily—“before they all come back.”

  “Be quick then,” she said. “It was very sweet of you to fight someone for me. What was his name? What did he say? How old was he?”

  “I’ll tell you later.” He was filled with returning gaiety. “But will you tell me something first? Just this once and I won’t mention it again?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did you have all this talk with my mother?”

  “Some of it in the Russell Hotel before you came, and some of it in the cloakroom just now. She’d had a long letter from Enid, thanking her for inviting me to the wedding, and in it I think Mummy must have been rather sad about her own wedding.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s really what upset me. I kept thinking about them, Enid and my Father starting off like this in a Church years and years ago and then ending by getting divorced.”

  He thought hard, trying to imagine her life with Enid who was her mother, so smooth-faced and arranged, a very careful woman like a programme. He imagined the hotel holidays, the occasional breakfast-table letters from her father and the annual visit to the rich farmer who lived in the Moors and was always wanting to marry Enid and be Victoria’s stepfather. It had never worried him before; but now that Mother had somehow unexpectedly got mixed up in it, it was important that he should understand it. If he didn’t, Victoria might begin to feel differently about him, she might think that he was in an outside world and turn against him and then he would have no one to dream about or write to, no one to love as gloriously and secretly as he had loved Victoria and the very idea of her ever since ‘the Lake’.

  “I’ll get the champagne,” he said, “and something for you to eat: would you like a meringue if I can find one, if all these people haven’t scoffed the lot?”

  “Your mother said I wasn’t to worry—she said that some marriages weren’t made in Heaven at all—”

  “Don’t let’s talk about it any more—Oh dear they’re coming back! it’s too late for our feast now.”

  “Never mind—I’m quite happy. I had coffee and sandwiches with your mother at the hotel. Have you had anything to eat?”

  “No nothing.” He was emphatic. “But I’m jolly well going to. Don’t move away from here, will you?”

  “No; but you’ll have to hurry because I’ve got to leave at two-thirty. Miss Empson made it a condition that I was to be back at Hill Cote by four at the latest and it takes a good hour to get out to Richmond.”

  His heart put in an extra beat. “But you can’t be,” he said. “I’m going to take you on the river, we’re going to find an island and eat fruit and sweets. Don’t you remember?”

  “Oh I know, it was a lovely idea and things are rather horrid today. I tried terribly hard, honestly I did; but she wouldn’t budge. She kept on saying, ‘Now remember, you’re only thirteen, Victoria; and it’s a very great concession that you are being allowed to go at all.’ So there wasn’t anything I could do. I just had to promise.”

  “I see.”

  “Now go and get us some meringues,” she said, “and don’t be miserable. I’ve got some wonderful news for you. Something that will cheer you up no end.”

  “Nothing could.”

  “I bet you this will.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ll tell you just before I go—it’s about the holidays.”

  At the far end of the room Major Albright called loudly for silence and everyone stopped talking.

  Carefully and quickly John made his way to one of the tables and helped himself to an asparagus roll. It tasted of nothing but he ate it dully and with a certain satisfaction, following it up with several more while the cake was being cut and the telegrams read. He didn’t want to hear anything or to look at anyone; the strangers filled him with a cold hostility, and the family he had loved and so desperately imagined both in the absence that lay behind him as well as in that which lay ahead, were the centre of a sorrow and a pain that was colder even than hostility.

  He wished he had never come. It didn’t do to see people in the wrong places, in the wrong settings. They should all have stayed in Northumberland; Mother was quite right and should have insisted on having the wedding there.

  Even Victoria was changed by all this. London and school had done something to her so that she seemed older and more remote. She too was unhappy; she had said so. Everyone was unhappy, and so was Mother; Mother most of all.

  He gulped at a half-empty glass of champagne and then slid it quickly back on to the table-cloth. The wine fizzed down inside him like Eno’s fruit salts and left an exciting taste on his tongue. Mother! Mother! Mother! always Mother. She had bewitched the wedding, she had bewitched Victoria; Mother had bewitched London. It wasn’t London that was wrong and it wasn’t Mother. It was the two together.

  In front of him a fat man with a round back and purple cheeks suddenly called out ‘Speech!’ and then turned and gave a gobbling smile to a bridesmaid by his side. Several other people took up the cry. From different parts of the room, the word, short and raucous as the squawk of a hen, was echoed by the standing figures; and as each one pronounced it he looked immediately pleased with himself, as though in uttering it he had made some important discovery or had in some way finally established himself in the sight of everyone else. After a few seconds the cries reached such a crescendo that the noise became embarrassing and made a short silence which was ended when the fat man started to clap. Soon everybody was clapping, and then there was another pause in which Alexander Flood could be heard clearing his throat.

  John edged past the fat man so that he could see the group in front of the wedding cake. Prudence and David were standing together, and next to David: Mother, Alexander Flood, and the officiating clergyman, the Reverend the Hon. Stephen Counter. On Prudence’s other side Father stood between Mrs Cable and Major Albright. With the exception of Alexander Flood who was smoothing his already smooth hair and evidently trying to look at something just above the heads of his audience, they were all looking at the carpet. Mother and David especially, he noticed, looked isolated; they were standing very close together like the middle and ring fingers of a hand and he saw in fact that David did give her hand a little squeeze just before Alexander Flood started to speak.

  It was a silly speech scattered with pauses and throat-noises. He told everybody how often he had contrived to be a best man before—and how much he always enjoyed being a best man—even though it entailed making speeches ha! ha! which he always believed in keeping very short ha! ha!; and then he proposed a toast which everyone, even including Mother, drank very quickly. Then David, who was looking very flushed, made a speech begging that Prudence be excused from making a speech; because, as everyone knew, or should know, Prudence Blaydon was almost as shy as Prudence Cable had been, and had tak
en a lot of catching (at this Mrs Cable looked extremely pleased), so much so in fact that he had been forced to go into the cage to get her (at this Mother looked very pleased), but that now he had got in he had no wish to get out again because it was a most delightful cage.

  At this point people began to change legs or brush ash off their coat-sleeves, and there was an unpleasant pause which was ended by Major Albright clapping loudly and someone else proposing a second toast which was drunk busily. Then, from the back of the room someone, either Simpson or Lizzie, called out ‘The Mistress!’ and the rest of the parishioners immediately took up the cry.

  Mr Boult the auctioneer, nudged by his wife Grace, increased the noise so effectively by bellowing out the words ‘Mrs Blaydon! we want Mrs Blaydon!’, that everyone else was deafened; and Mother, exactly as if she had heard her cue when taking the lead in one of her own plays, stepped forward and waited.

  She looked excited; for she loved speaking and never pretended otherwise. She would speak on any possible occasions: at meetings, open-air festivals, bazaars, fetes and pageants and, of course, at the annual Church Assembly in London. She had only to confront an audience from a sufficient height in order to hold its instant attention and to set its members trembling inside themselves with bright expectations.

  Now as she stepped forward John could see that her little fists were white, her eyes hazy and misty, pale blue and disembodied as though they floated in some other world whose visions saddened her with the enormity of her desire to express them. He felt his heart sink and rise again in a vertigo of fear and exultation. He wished he was back at the Abbey, under the sea, or safely in bed in a foreign country miles and miles away; and yet he longed to hear what she had to say and would have sprung at anyone who tried to stop her.

  Everyone else, he knew, felt the same; this time no one was looking at their feet, even unruffled strangers were looking rigidly and directly at the tiny pale-blue red-headed figure as though it embodied an imminent threat; a threat so loud and bright, so inevitably near, that, like a thunderstorm, there was no point in trying to cover it up or ignore it, or even in attempting to flee out of its path; and strangely, he knew that everyone was glad. All morning, from the very first, there had been mutterings, sudden silences, flights of dark fancies, the accumulation of omens, followed by welcome but fleeting clearances; now the tempest was here; it had gathered and would burst. They were glad to stand their ground. They clapped impatiently and Mother started to speak.

  “I suppose it’s not very usual for the Bridegroom’s Mother to speak at her son’s wedding,” she said, “but then I am not very used to having my children marry. In that sense, this is my first wedding, the wedding of the first of my four sons, and I’ve come a long way to know it; a very long way—”

  She paused and looked from one face to another, and John trembled at the gentleness of her start.

  “Such a long way, in fact,” she went on, “that my husband and I had to pass our own silver wedding on the journey. So you’ll see that for me it was not a very usual wedding. But that doesn’t really matter and it’s not what I wanted to say. What does matter is that for you too it is a most unusual wedding because it is the wedding of a priest; and that is always an event—quite different from the weddings of doctors or solicitors or anyone else. As my husband would tell you, a priest is more than a man and therefore a priest’s wedding is different. In a sense, when a priest gets married it is always a case of bigamy! That sounds shocking, I know; and as an admission I’m sure it would make our friends in Rome laugh at us—but I’ll deal with that in a minute. What I want to make clear now is that every priest, whether he’s a bachelor or not, is married at his ordination; he is married to the Church and the Church is his first wife, as she will be his last wife whether he dies a widower or not.”

  People rustled and made small movements, one or two of them looked at Mrs Cable.

  “The Church may not be a wealthy wife,” Mother went on, “and she may have very little to offer him in the way of worldly comforts; and that is as it should be. Another thing, she may not be very young, some of us claim that she is nearly two thousand years old! but even so she is a rival to be reckoned with and any priest will tell you which of his two wives keeps her looks the longest.”

  With perfect composure she stopped and smiled at Father; and this time John looked at Mrs Cable as she stood beside Prudence. They looked amazingly alike, almost as though they were one young-old person; their expressions were so similar, the very way they stood with their hands frozen in front of them. It embarrassed him to look at them and he began to have misgivings about the meaning of Mother’s words. She was talking much faster he noticed, and an anger of which he had at first been unsure was becoming more and more frighteningly obvious.

  “Some Christians, not of our persuasion, think it wrong for a priest to get married in this wordly sense at all. There are a good many references which they will quote in support of it. I can only remember two of them, one from an epistle of St Paul where he says that for a priest to be unmarried is ‘the more excellent way’ and another, I think from St Matthew, which quotes Our Lord as saying that there are some who are eunuchs for His sake. I must admit that there have been times when I have wondered just how much of an asset I have been to my husband in his work as a priest, and other times when I found it in my heart to hope that any son of mine who took Holy Orders might find his vocation a sufficient consort.”

  So intense now was the attention of the crowded room that the people in it might have been figures in a shop window.

  “But that is all over now and it’s a consolation to me that my son David has been blessed with such a happy choice. Prudence, my new daughter, I know will bring with her those qualities which he is going to need in the arduous years that lie ahead of them both. She need bring nothing else, nothing at all,” she repeated with a quick glance at Mrs Cable, “neither scrip nor purse—and I hope she won’t; these things are only an encumbrance to the cure of souls. For my part, I care for nothing but their happiness in their work; and if that happiness is to be sure they must have it in the sight of that rock on which all true marriages are founded; the rock upon which God struck the Ten Commandments, the rock which Moses smote for water in the wilderness, and the Rock upon which Christ built His Gracious Church; and that, if you wish nothing else, is what I would like you to wish for them today, that nothing, no man, or woman should come unscathed between them and their Witness; so that not only this marriage which you have seen today but that other more important marriage to which I referred earlier should continue strongly in the sight of God.” She touched her eyes with a tiny handkerchief. “And there is no more to be said.”

  From the back of the long room came a gathering movement, a disturbance which became a murmur and a murmur which became a sound in the determined clapping of hard hands, in cries, and even shouts. Someone started to cheer, others took it up. A wind seemed to be sweeping the taller trees at the back and John felt tears as sharp as blown sand behind his eyelids. She had done it; Mother had done it again and momentarily he was proud of her: all his animosity was swallowed up and lost, completely dissolved in the strong solvent of his affection and pride. But beside him, the clapping was soft and short-lived. He looked about him and saw wooden faces, tall dresses, and necks stiffening under the draught; sensed an anger blind and hunted, which, although it knew no sure direction, was as real as a boar driven between the standing trunks by unseen hunters.

  Mother saw it too; she quivered and retreated a pace; she held up a small peremptory hand. There was silence.

  “I thought I’d said enough. I may have said more than enough; I don’t know,” she said, “but then I’m not very used to London and London may not be very used to me. In the North it’s different; they know me up there”—“We do that!” shouted someone—“and I know them, and I’m no more afraid of them than I’m afraid of London.”

  There were laughs now, proud laughs from the back;
but John did not contribute to them, he was dumbly terrified that she would go too far as once she had gone too far in an Election speech; but he feared even more that she might drift into what he privately called her ‘Gracie-Fields-ending’.

  “And the reason I’m not afraid is—because I know there are only two people here who could object or have any right to object to anything I have intentionally said: my son David and his wife Prudence! and they won’t. So now, I’m going to propose a toast! It’s the first one I’ve ever proposed and I hope it’ll be the last.” She turned to Alexander Flood, who although he had not moved for quite ten minutes, contrived like a man suddenly awakened from a strange dream, to hand her a full glass of champagne which she held up before them.

  “And the toast I propose is, The Church!”

  “The Church,” they echoed; and they drank.

  At the back they drank deeply and with audible satisfaction; at the front they tilted their glasses with a dreadful reluctance. Mrs Cable sipped as hurriedly and abstemiously as if her glass had held poison, and even the Reverend the Hon. Stephen Counter looked as though he were being forced by his enormous wife to swallow a disagreeable medicine.

  There was a last burst of clapping and then people started to move. Major Albright; brighter, more red, more apoplectic than his name, seemed to feel that some sort of a precision and a direction ought to be given to the trance-like movements by which he was confronted. He announced in a loud uncertain voice, “Well—ah—I think now that aftah all that—ah—the Bride and Groom will have to—ah—change and—ah—be on their way.”

  Alexander Flood rocketed forward into the crowd as though he had been fired by Major Albright from an invisible gun, Prudence kissed Mrs Cable desperately, David hugged Mother like a wrestler and taking Prudence’s arm swept her down the length of the room through the aisle cleared by the Best Man, and disappeared with her through the glass-fronted doors.