“Darling!”
“Sweetie …” She was actually holding his damp penis in her hand.
“You couldn’t get … have a baby like … that … could you?”
Angela giggled. “Georgie! Do you want me to tell you about the birds and the bees?”
It was her tone of voice that made him say, “Have you ever … done it?”
No answer. George said: “I wouldn’t mind. If you had … darling.”
She was suddenly sitting upright, holding a blanket up over her chest. Her eyes were fierce and appalled. “What a horrible, horrible, horrible thing to say!”
“Oh Christ, Angela, I’m sorry, all I meant was—”
“It’s too vile for words. It’s filthy. How could you? It’s because you’re a beast, isn’t it? It’s because you’ve done it with horrible prostitutes. In the docks. I don’t want to hear about it, George. Your women. The beastly things you do. You’ve got a disease! You’re infected! You’ve got VD!”
George wept. He said sorry a hundred times. He hated himself. He loved Angela. He told her that he was more ashamed of himself now than he’d ever been in his entire life. He tried to hold her, to comfort her for the dreadful thing he’d said, but it was a good ten minutes before Angela frostily began to allow herself to be mollified.
“Oh, George, it’s too awful,” she said happily. “I don’t know whether I shall ever be able to trust you again.”
It was another five minutes before George heard her giggle.
“What? Darling?”
“Nothing. I was just thinking.” She raised herself on one elbow and looked down on him. “Georgie? Do you think I’d look funny, wearing black?”
“Grunff!” George said, putting a circle round the cross of his position. He was just as ashamed of himself here as he was there, and hardly less baffled by Angela’s lightning manoeuvres. Christ, but she had him on the run now! He was skipping about for her like a miniature dachshund doing tricks for biscuits.
The Eddystone Lighthouse was showing now as a hairline crack on the horizon far away to the southeast. George took its bearing. 124°. Just right. He stepped out on to the foredeck and winched up the big tan mainsail, watching the wind uncrease it as it climbed the mast. He raised the jib, flapping and banging overhead, and walked back to the cockpit to tighten the sheet. His father was there—seated on the gas locker wearing his summer alpaca jacket and straw boater.
Fuddle-headed, George did his best to concentrate on hauling the jib in against the wind and wrapping the end of the rope around the wooden cleat. When he turned round, though, his father was still there, staring at the sea with much the same sort of suspicious disdain that he might have shown to a rally of Primitive Methodists. His lips were pursed, his eyes narrowed against the sun.
“You look cold,” George said. The rector’s dress was hopelessly wrong for a mid-March morning out at sea. “Shouldn’t you be wearing something warmer?”
His father shook his head distractedly. When he turned his face to George, it moved stiffly, like a tortoise’s, above the wattles of his neck.
“Mightn’t it be a good idea to wait for a while, old boy? And see how you both feel about it in six months’ time? Don’t you think?”
Calliope leaned to starboard in a long gust. The rector, arms spread along the gunwale, opened his mouth and let out a small bubble of fright. He’d never been good on boats. Crossing the Irish Sea, in a flat calm, from Liverpool to the Isle of Man in ’39, he spent the entire passage sitting rigid in a corner of the saloon holding The Times upside down in front of his face.
He said: “Of course, Angela does seem a frightfully nice girl.” Then, “What do you say, old boy—about giving it six months?”
Nice? Nice? How dare his father call Angela nice! George said: “We’re not waiting. I don’t suppose you’ve noticed, Daddy, but there happens to be a war on. Chaps are getting killed, you know.”
His father gazed at the Eddystone, the one stable point in a gently rolling world. He looked as if he wanted to put his arms around the lighthouse and cling to it for dear life.
“Yes,” he said; “there’s that, of course. Though it’s an argument that could cut two ways, old boy.”
“There’s no ‘argument’ about it,” George said. “It’s fixed, Daddy.”
The rector’s hands fluttered on the gunwale. His unhappy eyes were hunting for his son. For a sickmaking moment, George saw that his father was actually a few years younger than he was himself. Poor bloody sod. He was muffing it so badly, too. George wanted to shake some life into him—if only he could make a present to his father of the words that the rector couldn’t find, perhaps …
“You’re only nineteen—”
Oh, damn you, Daddy, for that stupid, frightened, bald, uncalculating move!
“I’m old enough to be an officer! I’m old enough to fight this fucking war!”
“George!”
“All right, then, lovely war! Nice war! Pretty little war! Whatever you want! But just wake up, will you, to the fact that I’m a man and this is my life and I am running it, and if you don’t like it you can lump it!”
The words tasted leaden and stale in his own mouth. It was George, after all, and not the rector, who needed a fresh script. He felt lumbered, condemned to rehearse this old degrading patter of every son to every father. Poor father, poor son, trapped in the same leaky boat.
Pat on cue, his father said: “The last thing that either your mother or I want, old boy, is for you to be unhappy—”
“Then you won’t try and stop Angela and me from getting married—”
“No, George, I shan’t do that.”
The rector looked away at the curling wash behind the boat; the wind tugged the black half moon of his clerical stock clear of his pullover and made his thin jacket balloon round his chest. What a pair of scarecrows they must look, George thought: two old buffers, peevishly wrangling out of sight of land, one in a boater, one in a baseball cap … you’d have to laugh. But he couldn’t bear the thought of what was coming next.
His father reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and held out a sealed envelope to George.
“Every happiness, old boy,” he mumbled. Then he said it again, too loudly, “Every happiness.”
So his father had known all along that he’d lose. The envelope was addressed “For George and Angela, with love from Deny’s and Mary.” There was something uncomfortable in seeing his parents’ Christian names like that; they looked nude.
“Thanks awfully,” George said.
“You’d better open it, old boy. Save the suspense …” His father pretended to transfer all his attention to a tickle behind his ear, but the boat rolled again and he had to clutch at the toerail, his legs stiffly splayed, the wide turn-ups of his shiny trousers flapping.
Inside the envelope, a cheque for seventy-five guineas. For George’s father, it was a fortune, a king’s ransom. Seventy-five guineas, from the rector, whose favourite word was “rectitude”! To write a cheque like that, he must have lain awake at nights, conducting an auction with himself and watching the price of marriage steepen, from twenty to twenty-five, past thirty, and rocket through the ceiling of fifty. It was no wonder that the writing on the cheque didn’t look like his father’s hand at all but had an artificial copperplate precision, as if every letter had taken several seconds to inscribe. It was a cheque to make one doubt one’s eyesight, a cheque to frame and publish, a cheque perhaps designed to announce that the Greys were perfectly well able to hold up their heads with the Haighs of the world.
This, though, wasn’t what struck George about the cheque when he first saw it. His first thought was that he’d better tell Angela that it was for a hundred; seventy-five was so shabbily, transparently middle class. Seventy-five, in fact (and he hated that five), was Just about Typical. The other thing about the cheque was that it came from Lloyds Bank. Angela’s family all banked at Coutts, and George was planning to transfer his account t
here too. The trouble with Lloyds’ cheques was that they gave one away so, like cheap shirts.
“Thanks awfully, Daddy,” he said, a little less enthusiastically than when he’d taken the unopened envelope. “I know it’ll … come in jolly useful.”
His father watched the cheque disappear into George’s pocket as if he was following a conjuring trick in which turtle doves were going to sprout from George’s cuffs any moment now. He laughed—a dry, embarrassed little titter. “I thought you’d prefer money, old boy—when Mummy and I got married, all we seemed to get from people was bone china and sheets.”
George said: “Mr Haigh says he thinks he can rustle up an unused ’39 MG. Apparently the company owes him a favour.”
Suddenly sag-shouldered, the rector stared blankly out to sea. A broken fish crate floated past with two gulls standing on it face to face like a pair of bookends. The rector’s voice when it came back to George was thin and distant, filtered by the breeze.
“A motor car, George? Where do you think you’re going to get the petrol from to run a thing like that?”
George ducked his head inside the wheelhouse to check the compass course; stepping back, he found he had the cockpit to himself. With the engine switched off, there was only the slop and gurgle of his freshwater supply in its fifty-gallon tank, the irregular ticking of the autopilot and the creak of the planking on the frames as the hull flexed to fit the sea. He went below to put a kettle on the stove for coffee.
Down in the saloon, it was like being in an echo chamber full of noises. There were whispers, the rustle of dresses in a room, the sound of doors being opened and closed, a woman sobbing, a man’s distant laughter. No wonder people heard and saw such odd things when they sailed alone: listening to Calliope as she lolloped through the waves was a bit like putting one’s ear to a crack in the wall when one’s neighbours were throwing a party. It was lonely and cosy all at once.
He carried his mug of coffee back up to the wheelhouse and studied the horizon. About two miles off on the bow there were three ships steaming north in line, on course for Plymouth Sound. Warships, from the look of them. George focused his binoculars on them. Yes, that was the Navy: two destroyers and a frigate, out on manoeuvres. The frigate quivered unsteadily in the lenses as George took in its angular sharkishness, its immaculate paintwork of armoured grey. It was his colour—the colour of rain clouds, cinders, schoolboy trousers. As it headed closer, he could pick out its twin radar scanners rotating slowly on their stalks, and its big guns wrapped like parcels in tarpaulins.
He switched on the VHS to see if the warships were talking, and found the radio full of voices that made him start because they sounded so like his own. Younger, of course, and lighter in pitch; but George heard them as his voice. OK, Halifax, roger and out. He found himself repeating the words out loud as he watched the ships pass less than a mile to port. He followed them with the binoculars until they melted into the sky. Well, he’d had his chance to be on that course once. He’d be retired now anyway; and the chances were that he’d never have got beyond Commander; and he’d probably have found one of those girl scout service wives that Mr Haigh meant when he said “adequate”. He put the binoculars down and sipped his bitter instant coffee.
George and Angela were married by his father in his father’s church. The Haighs swept down from London in a Roman triumph, bringing hampers, top hats and tailcoats, cine equipment, two bridesmaids and a best man called Rodney whom Angela had found at a dance. Rodney had failed his Army medical on account of his asthma, and did quite a lot of this sort of thing, he said.
“Pity it’s too late to have a staggers,” he said on the wedding morning. “Had a bloody good staggers last week for a man called Tommy Jarvis.” Rodney had flap ears, tow hair and a spotty complexion which reminded George of a raspberry mousse. George was rather ashamed of him, but Angela called him Roo, out of the Winnie the Pooh books, and said he was a sweetie, really, who just adored making himself useful to people. George didn’t tell her that Rodney had just asked him for five pounds, which was what he called “the usual”.
But Angela was wonderful. She cut through the gloom of the rectory like a blaze of sudden light. She was so wonderful with other people, too. She asked George’s father how on earth he’d managed to find himself such a darling little church, and made the rector blush—a first, in George’s lifetime. To his mother she said she knew she couldn’t possibly hope to take as good care of Georgie as Mrs Grey had done, there was so much she didn’t know, so much to learn, and she just knew that in Mrs Grey she’d found a second mother, and wasn’t that too heavenly? George’s mother put her arms round Angela and cried fit to bust.
Angela neglected nobody. To Uncle Stephen and Aunt Eileen, who had come down from Scotland specially for the wedding and were staying at the rectory for a week, she said, “Oh, Scotland! I adore Scotland! It’s my very favourite! Do you have a simply huge castle?”
Uncle Stephen explained that they had a small house in the centre of Dumfries.
“Fibber!” Angela said. “You’re being modest, aren’t you? I don’t believe a word of it. Georgie? Your Uncle Stephen’s been leading me up the garden path.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, he has. He’s been telling me he’s only got a teeny little house in Scotland. I only have to look at him to see great big turrets and battlements, and acres and acres of wild romantic moorland absolutely swimming with grouse and funny old ghillies and salmon and stags and things. Don’t dare to disillusion me, darling, or I’ll die—”
George winked at his uncle and said, “Actually the King’s always trying to swap Balmoral for Uncle Stephen’s place, but Aunt Eileen won’t allow it because she says Balmoral would be far too poky for them.”
“You see!” Angela gave Uncle Stephen a skittish little push in the chest. “I knew. I’m always right. And I bet you’re a terrible old meanie to all your ghillies and people, too.”
Uncle Stephen and Aunt Eileen loved her. You could see. Though Angela’s wit was a bit above their heads. They weren’t used to the way that people talked in London. George supposed that Uncle Stephen’s managerial job (it had something to do with Scottish reservoirs) had never given him much of an entrée into Society.
The church service was, as Angela said afterwards, divine. George stood at the altar shivering with disbelief in his astounding luck. This was what grace meant, in the real, religious sense—a sort of marvellous, unasked-for providence that just descended on you, like that—from where else but heaven? He tasted the mouldysweet air of the church, felt Angela, veiled in a cloud of lace, standing close beside him, and believed absolutely in the existence of God for the first time since he was thirteen.
The organ music, Angela and Jesus were all mixed up with each other in a holy stew. Exalted, lost in the sheer wonder of the thing, George swam to his bride through a sea of beautiful words. His borrowed dress sword clanked on the stone as he and Angela kneeled together in front of his father, and George realized that if he was kneeling, it must be done already. He was—married.
He heard his father saying something about Isaac and Rebecca and heard his own voice crack on an Amen—the first word he’d ever spoken since becoming a Husband. He sneaked a glance at Angela’s clasped hands. The ring was there. He was aware of Rodney’s knees on an embroidered hassock just behind him, and of the folds of his father’s surplice out in front. Each cautious sensation—the sight of the worn red altar carpet, of the Mothers’ Union banner beyond the pulpit, of the grinning choirboy’s face in the front stall—was registered by George as an amazing novelty. So this was how the changed world looked to a married man.
Outside the church, Mr Haigh had set up his cine camera on a tripod. For several minutes, everyone was made to huddle in the porch, while Mr Haigh panned low over the wet tombstones in the churchyard. He filmed the old women from the village who were waiting by the wall, and a squall of rooks clattering into the sky from the elm trees. Then Angela and Georg
e walked arm in arm out of the church and down the gravel drive towards the lych-gate.
“Cut!” Mr Haigh shouted, and made them do it again.
They came out of church seven times. At George’s fifth step (amended to the seventh on Mr Haigh’s fourth take), they stopped, kissed, and Angela let a flower fall from her bouquet on to the gravel. Then they walked on towards the camera, unlinking their arms so that George could squeeze by on one side of Mr Haigh and Angela on the other.
“Do you remember the wedding sequence in von Stroheim’s ‘Greed’?” Mr Haigh asked George.
George’s father was talked into putting on full vestments and got three takes to himself. He strode through the nettles along the side of the church, robed in gold.
By now, the crowd from the village was packed along the churchyard wall. George saw Vivienne Beale there, and nodded at her, a star acknowledging a fan; and when the wedding party left through the gate, it was Vivienne Beale, George noticed, who threw the most confetti.
At the rectory, the Haighs had laid on a three-tiered wedding cake, smoked salmon, turkey breasts and a whole crate of Mumms champagne. Mr Lewis-White, the rector’s warden, said, “I haven’t seen a spread like this since war broke out,” while Uncle Stephen, who had a problem with rich foods, eyed the three trestle tables brought in from the church hall and said that in Scotland, of course, no-one saw much of the Black Market. Rodney’s speech (it was apparently included in the five pounds) went down rather badly. Mr Haigh said first that he wasn’t going to announce that he had lost a daughter and gained a son, then said it all the same. He seemed distracted, and kept on looking at his watch. George was desperate to be alone with Angela. Since becoming man and wife, they’d barely spoken; and at the reception Angela seemed like a glamorous intimidating stranger—the sort of person whom you see across a room but know you’re never going to meet.
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