The Brimstone Wedding

by Barbara Vine

  ‘I hate brandy,’ she said and she got a cigarette out of her bag and lit it. She closed her eyes and drew in the smoke. In fact, she'd smoked it all and stubbed it out before Lena smelt it and came in.

  Lena pulled a tissue out of Stella's box. She picked the cigarette end out of Stella's saucer, wrapped it in the tissue, and picked up the saucer that was full of ash and streaked with wet brown stain. Of course she couldn't say much to Stella. Stella was paying her £20,000 a year. All she could do was stage a coughing attack and open Stella's window as wide as it would go. I was to bear the brunt of it, as I knew I would.

  She got me outside and had a real go at me. I was spending too much time with Stella; if Stella wanted a private nurse she had better make other arrangements. And as for that cigarette! You'd have thought she'd caught poor Stella putting cocaine up her nose.

  ‘It's so disgusting in one of these old crumblies. Wouldn't you think that a person who has brought herself to the brink of death through a vile habit would at least have the sense to give it up now?’

  That was about as illogical as fitting a smoke alarm after your house has burned down, but I didn't say so. I didn't say anything much beyond being sorry. I knew Lena wouldn't sack me. She'd been advertising for more staff for months and had only had one reply and that was from a woman of seventy whose last job had been gutting fish on the beach at Lowestoft. People don't want to work with the elderly, they don't have the patience, they can't cope with deafness and loss of memory, let alone incontinence, and besides, there's no money in it.

  But I was discreet about going back to Stella. In fact, I waited till it was going-home time. After that I'd be just one of Stella's visitors, free to stay and talk as long as I liked. Usually when I go in she's reading the paper or doing the crossword or listening to a concert on the radio, or she's got her latest book. This time she was just sitting. She'd closed the window and she was staring at the treetops and the white sky. When she heard the door open she turned round and smiled at me and put out her hand.

  ‘I got you into trouble, Genevieve. I'm so sorry. Was it very awful?’

  She spoke as if I was a little girl at school, perhaps her little girl, who'd had a telling off from the head teacher. It irritated me a bit because sometimes I felt in an odd way older than Stella, older in experience, older in life. I was still thinking of her as having been sheltered from everything, a protected woman who'd never had to earn her own living, and what she said next – what she said quite unexpectedly – just confirmed that.

  ‘I want to tell you something. It's about my house. I bought that house when my father died. He left me his house, that was all he left me, it was all he had, and I sold it and bought Molucca. It was something of my own, you see. I had nothing of my own, everything was my husband's, even the house we lived in in Bury was entirely in his name.’

  ‘I didn't know you could do that,’ I said.

  ‘You could and can. Plenty of men had the houses they shared with their wives in their own name. Rex wouldn't have considered putting the house in my name as well. Of course he left it to me, it was mine when he died, but I'd had Molucca for five years before he died.’

  ‘I don't suppose he minded you having it, did he?’ I said. ‘I mean, it was your money if your father left it to you.’

  ‘I don't know if he'd have minded,’ Stella said, and she gave a little laugh. Her laughter is very sweet and warm, though growing hoarse these days. ‘He didn't know.’

  He didn't know, I thought, and your children don't know… ‘But why?’

  ‘It was private, Genevieve.’

  I tried to picture how Mike would react if my dad died and left me his house. Well, my dad doesn't own a house and he wouldn't leave it to me if he did, but one can still imagine.

  ‘Didn't he want to know what you did with the money?’

  She didn't answer. ‘You don't know what it was like when I was young, Jenny. My children don't know what it was like. I didn't have a bank account. My husband did, of course, but it wasn't a joint account. He gave me the housekeeping money every month and an allowance for myself but it was very small and most of it got absorbed in the housekeeping anyway.’

  But for nine years till Richard came along you only had Marianne, I thought. ‘You never worked?’

  ‘People always say that.’ Her voice held a weary note. ‘That was what Gilda said. People don't realize it's very hard work making a home and looking after a child and entertaining one's husband's friends. I had very little help, just a charwoman once a week. I was expected to give a dinner party single-handed at least once a fortnight. No one but a wife would do that sort of work and not get paid for it. Besides, my husband wouldn't have let me take a job.’

  It seemed a good idea to get her off the subject, but I couldn't help thinking of what my nan says. If work was such a good thing, the rich would have kept it for themselves.

  ‘So you bought Molucca?’

  For £4,000, she said.

  These days it would fetch £60,000, yet she'd held on to it and paid council tax on it, and she was the one talking about getting no wages for being a housewife.

  ‘That was what your dad left you?’

  ‘He left me his house and when it was sold it fetched nearly £5,000. I needed some extra to pay the charges to the estate agent and the legal fees. I had to buy furniture.’ She rested her head back against the cushion, tired from so much talking and tired too perhaps from her long day. ‘I'll tell you something about myself when I was young,’ she said. ‘I'll tell you tomorrow.’

  When I walked into the house the phone was ringing. I expected it to be Mike and it was Ned. Sometimes it's such happiness to hear his voice unexpectedly but such a shock too that I have to sit down before I can talk to him. And there are times when my voice won't come, or comes hoarsely, because for some reason I'm seized by fear.

  He wanted to tell me he had to go to Denmark on Monday. They were filming in Copenhagen, something about how to make a modern city in the European Union without losing the old style of the place or spoiling the skyline with tower blocks. He'd be away four days and he wanted me to go with him.

  I'd told him I had holiday owing me and Lena'd said she'd like me to take some of it soon. There was no reason that he could see why I couldn't go, Mike would be away in London as usual, by the sound of her my mother would cover for me, and he thought it likely I'd never been to a foreign country.

  Oh yes, I had, I said, I'd been to Mallorca and Tenerife. I didn't say the first was for our honeymoon and the second our tenth wedding anniversary, both fixed up as surprises by Mike.

  ‘Mallorca and Tenerife aren't foreign countries,’ he said. ‘They're tourist bedrooms with beaches. You'll love Copenhagen, we'll stay at the d'Angleterre, and I'll take you to Tivoli.’

  Of course I couldn't go. I couldn't dream of it. There were all the usual reasons, the film crew talking, Jane finding out, Hannah, lying to Mike about where I was, and one other reason. I had never thought of it before and I didn't say anything about it to Ned, but I knew that if I spent whole days with him and slept beside him all night, if I did this for days and nights, it would be worse for me afterwards, it would make our separations more painful and our final parting, whenever that came, like death to me.

  ‘Don't ask me that kind of thing again,’ I said.

  My voice must have sounded gruff and cross. It was all I could manage because I longed so to laugh and gasp and say, yes, oh yes, please. And when he rang off he was cross too, disappointed, and telling me I was unreasonable.

  ‘Till the week after then,’ he said. ‘I'll phone.’

  I went upstairs and lay on the bed and cried. Mike came home about an hour later. I heard Phil's car and then the front door and I was up splashing my face with cold water, but if it was still puffy Mike didn't notice. He'd bought me a new kind of cheese grater from a special shop in Soho and a hundred grams of Parmesan in a lump so that I could make pasta taste more like it does in an Italian
restaurant.

  ‘The London work's stopping by the end of the month,’ he said. ‘It'll be a relief to be done with all this travelling. And I reckon you'll be glad too, won't you, girl?’

  ‘Of course I will,’ I said, and I wonder what it does to you, saying these things, not lying about what's happened but denying your innermost feelings. It must eat you like rust corroding metal.

  ‘I thought of building us a conservatory,’ Mike said. ‘What d'you reckon? On the back of the dining room, maybe fifteen foot long. It'd keep me busy in the evenings.’

  I sat down with the dictionary. An encyclopedia and Chambers Dictionary are what keep me busy in the evenings as I look up long words and try to learn about unknown things. It's my way of keeping up with Ned, who is cleverer than I am and knows so much more.

  PART TWO

  9

  Stella was born in London, or about ten miles outside it rather, in a place called Wanstead. Her father worked for the Customs and Excise and her mother was a minister's daughter. They had a semidetached house off an arterial road called Eastern Avenue.

  ‘I expect you went to a co-ed school, didn't you, Genevieve?’ she said.

  I didn't know what she meant and I was still puzzled when she explained. As far as I knew, all schools were mixed-sex but for a few places like Eton, and I think they have girls now too.

  ‘They were quite a rarity when I was a child,’ Stella said. ‘But I went to one, so I was used to meeting a lot of boys. I wasn't one of those girls who leave school scarcely knowing any boys.’

  She was nearly sixteen when World War II started and her parents were so frightened of bombs that they sent her away to stay with an aunt in Bury. The aunt was really her mother's cousin and Stella was fond of her and had spent holidays in her house in Churchgate Street. Before she left London she'd just passed her School Certificate, which was the exam they did not just in the days before GCSEs, but before O Levels. They transferred her to a school in Bury and she stayed there for two years and passed another exam called a Higher.

  ‘I didn't want to leave London,’ she said. ‘Well, what I mean by that is I didn't want to leave my – she hesitated – ‘my friend, my best friend. Our school was evacuated, I could have gone with our school, they went to the Essex coast somewhere, but my mother wouldn't have that. She thought I wouldn't be properly looked after. Really, she meant I wouldn't be properly supervised – chaperoned, I suppose.’

  I'd assumed the best friend was a girl but I was wrong.

  ‘Alan, his name was Alan.’ Stella spoke awkwardly, rather as if that speech impediment I'd noticed before had come back. ‘Alan Tyzark.’ She moistened her lips as if the effort of saying it had made them dry. ‘He wasn't the boy next door either.’ The little light laugh she gave sounded forced. ‘His parents lived in Snaresbrook, not very far away. We were, Alan and I, I mean, we were – inseparable. Only we had to be separated.

  She told me all this while I sat with her the week Ned was away. I broke in sometimes to ask her questions, like to explain about the School Certificate for instance, but mostly I just let her talk. After she'd repeated it a few times she got to be able to say Alan's name as easily as she said mine.

  They thought it was homesickness that troubled her, but it was Alan she missed more than her home. She only wanted to go back to London if he was there, but he was in Maldon. They were neither of them much good at writing letters. She was allowed to have Christmas at home and so was he and they managed to meet. But it was the last time.

  ‘The last time for ever?’ I said.

  ‘The last time for years and years. Twenty years, Genevieve.’

  The following summer the bombings began. Nearly a year had gone by and she was used to Bury, she was happy enough and she'd made new friends, her memories of Alan were starting to fade. By the time she'd done that next exam, there was no question of her going back to London. It was coming up to the most dangerous time and no one went back to the cities unless they had to. Besides, if she was still a bit Alan-sick she was over feeling homesick, she even sometimes felt she liked the aunt and the aunt's husband better than her own parents, who had never shown her much affection. They'd often written to her at first but now letters came further and further apart and when she heard that her mother had been killed in an air raid she didn't feel much. Her father came to see her and talked as if Bury was her permanent home and she'd want to think about getting a job there.

  The aunt persuaded him to pay for a secretarial course. There was a place just off St Mary's Square where you could learn shorthand and typing and office management and Stella went there for a year. At the end of it she got a diploma and a job with a firm of solicitors.

  They were Newland, Newland and Bosanquet, and the younger Newland was the man she was to marry one day. He was the younger but he wasn't that young. The old man was over seventy, apparently you can go on being a solicitor for as long as you like, and his son was forty when Stella first went to work there. She wasn't working for him though, but for the partner called Bosanquet, Anthony Bosanquet. And she was going out with a boy.

  His name was David, and, can you believe it, Stella had to stop and think and rack her brains to remember his surname. She didn't remember it, not then, but had to go on with the story without it.

  ‘How did you meet him?’ I said.

  ‘Not at school. Mine was an all-girls’ school. His mother was Auntie Sylvia's best friend. She had a draper's shop and she was the manageress and David's sister served behind the counter. Oh, what was their name? I'll think of it in a minute. We were on clothing coupons, of course, and you had to use them for material as well. The only things that weren't rationed were blankets and that sort of thing. I used to make all my own clothes and I made myself a blue coat out of a baby's cot blanket and lined it with an old sheet of Auntie Sylvia's. I got my first pair of nylons from David's mother's shop. I think that was when I developed a clothes sense, Genevieve. When there's hardly anything to buy, and no choice like there is today, you either give up or learn to be discriminating. You learn good taste. And you learn to look after your things.

  ‘He wasn't Alan. I compared him with Alan all the time in my mind. I know you shouldn't do that sort of thing, it's not fair, but I couldn't help it. Beside Alan, or what I remembered of Alan, David was dull. But David admired me and that always goes for a lot with a girl, don't you think? He liked being seen about with me. He was the first person who ever told me I was pretty. It wouldn't have crossed Alan's mind. I wish I'd a photograph to show you, Genevieve, but Marianne has them all, and it's useless asking her to bring them here, she'll only forget. Anyway, the next thing was David was called up, he went into the RAF and I only saw him when he came home on leave.’

  Some people would say my life has been dull but it's been a rave compared to Stella's. To the early part, that is. At least I had boyfriends before Mike, I used to go out somewhere every night, and home might have been uncomfortable at times but it was never boring. And if you had a boyfriend in my teenage years, that was before AIDS, you went all the way with him as a matter of course. Not so for Stella. She and Alan had never even held hands. She'd been going to the cinema with David and for walks and round to his house for six months before she'd let him kiss her. If there'd been anything more he'd have lost respect for her, he wouldn't have wanted her afterwards. She seemed sure of that, men really were like that, and perhaps they were, but can there have been such a big change in less than fifty years?

  With David gone nothing happened to her at all. She lived at home with Auntie Sylvia and listened to what she calls the wireless and read books from the public library and made her clothes and unpicked old sweaters and used the wool to knit up new ones. Auntie Sylvia did home perms on her hair and she wore it in sausage curls all over her head. It took her fifteen minutes every morning to put her make-up on, foundation and rouge and lipstick, loose powder from a box and then more lipstick, and her eyebrows that were plucked drawn in with a pencil.
That was the only eye make-up they used. No shadow, no mascara, no liner. It's funny because that's the only make-up my sister Janis ever does use, she always does her eyes no matter what the rest of her face looks like. Stella said she would never have set foot outside the door without her make-up on, not even to go down to the shop on the corner. The girl who worked in the chemist was a friend of hers and used to save her a lipstick or a bottle of nail varnish when they got their quota in, she'd keep it under the counter for her till next she came in. She actually queued up once for something called Crème Simon and they sold the last jar to the woman in the queue ahead of her.

  And all of it was for Auntie Sylvia and Uncle Whatshisname and David's sister and Mr Bosanquet. You could be as beautiful as – Stella had to think about this – as beautiful as Margaret Lockwood, she said, but what was the use if you never met any young men? They were all away at the war. David came home on leave and asked her to get engaged but for some reason she wouldn't.

  ‘Didn't you fancy him then?’ I said.

  She surprised me by giggling, the sound a young girl makes. ‘I never thought about that, Genevieve. I don't know if I did or not. It was the draper's shop, I think, that put me off. He was going to go into the shop and I – well, you'll call me a snob and perhaps I was. I knew these shop people but I wasn't one of them. My mother's father had been a minister, a Methodist, you know, and my father was a civil servant, if not a very important one. Marrying David would have been a retrograde step.’

  It made me wonder what she must think of me. My mother's father was a cowman and my dad is a motor mechanic when he's anything. But the truth is she doesn't think about me like that, she doesn't see me in that light.

  ‘You said no?’

  ‘I said no, and next time he came home he brought this WAAF with him that he'd met and they got married on his next leave. Oh, Jenny, I've remembered his name! It was Conroy. He was David Conroy and his sister was Mavis. Of course I always called his mother Mrs Conroy and you'll think this very funny, but when we first met David called me Miss Robertson. It was the same in the office. I was Miss Robertson and of course the partners were Mr Newland and Mr Bosanquet and even we girls, the secretaries, we called each other Miss This and Miss That. It was the custom then. You can see why I'm not always happy about the way it's all christian names here. I mean, I know times have changed, but it's still a shock when the boy who mows the lawns calls me Stella.’