The Brimstone Wedding

by Barbara Vine

  ‘What is it, Genevieve?’

  I told her. Most people don't really care, do they? They pretend to sympathize but they're not involved, they're embarrassed more than regretful. That's why I was so surprised by Stella's attitude, by her sudden pallor, the concern in her voice.

  ‘But he must have been quite a young man.’

  ‘He was fifty-five.’

  ‘I'm so sorry,’ she said, as if she'd known him. ‘I'm so very sorry.’

  We sat in silence for a while, looking out into the garden where there were still flowers on the buddle bush and still a few last butterflies, a tortoiseshell, a painted lady.

  ‘I shall never see a swallowtail now, Genevieve,’ Stella said at last. ‘Will there be flowers at your father's funeral?’

  I said I'd already phoned the florist and ordered a spray, but I didn't know when the funeral would be or who would arrange it. Janis had been seven and Nick only three when Mum and he separated. Ages had passed since any of us had been involved with our dad beyond seeing him maybe three times a year and sending a Christmas card. And there came into my head the thought of Hannah. If Ned left her things would be like that for her. Like me, she'd be a one-parent person and when he died someone else would decide whether or not he had flowers. Stella seemed to be pondering. Then she turned to me.

  ‘My father's funeral was in January and it was very cold. Richard was nine months old and I left him with Rex's niece – well, his nephew Jeremy's wife. That was she who was here this morning, by the way, that was Priscilla. I thought I'd have to go alone to London for the funeral, Rex wouldn't come, said he couldn't take a day off “for a mere father-in-law I only met once”, but –’ she hesitated, then brought the name out very self- consciously – ‘Alan came with me.’ She gave me a sideways glance. ‘He met me on the platform at Bury and came up with me in the train.’

  ‘The Alan who was your friend at school?’ I said.

  ‘The very same.’

  ‘You'd met him again?’

  Instead of answering, she said, ‘You've never heard of him? Alan Tyzark?’

  I shook my head. ‘Should I have?’

  ‘No, not after all these years. Perhaps not even then. He was an artist. A painter. When you were a child did you have any of those books called Figaro and Velvet?’

  As soon as she said that I remembered. That was where I had seen those pictures before, in a book that someone, my Auntie Rita I think, gave me for my birthday when I was seven. A girl and a boy and their cats. Middle-class children, not like us, children who lived in a big detached house with both parents, a dad going to the office and a mum who stayed at home, and who had a pretty velvety tortoiseshell cat with magical powers. I liked the magical powers, that at any rate meant something to me.

  ‘Alan Tyzark illustrated those books,’ Stella said.

  He'd come back into her story out of the blue, simply someone who had been at her father's funeral. ‘He was a very funny man,’ she said. ‘He gave you the impression he was amusing without trying to be. These days they'd call it laid-back and they'd call some of his humour black humour. I was feeling very low in the train that day, not because of my father, I hardly knew my father any more, but for – well, other reasons, and Alan set himself out to entertain me, to amuse me. He turned a horrible day into a day out.

  ‘He'd made a plan for the day. We would get the funeral over, then he'd take me out to lunch, there were things he wanted to show me in London, a house with an interesting history, a statue in the park, a monument, then tea at the Ritz. I'd never known anyone like him. I'd never known anyone who thought about these things. I must have known him for four years then because we – we renewed our acquaintance in 1959.’

  I didn't know what to say. ‘Was he good at art at school?’

  ‘I suppose he was. He took art for his School Certificate, but so did most of us. He used to draw animals, I remember that.’

  ‘And you just met him again?’

  ‘He was Gilda Brent's husband, you see. He'd married Gilda.’ She looked away from me, back at the sprays of purple flowers, now brown at the tips and drooping, a single red admiral with a ragged wing clinging to a stem. ‘He did a terrible thing.’ She seemed to be talking to herself. ‘Well, we did a terrible thing together.’ I tried not to stare. What did she mean? That she'd slept with him? When she turned back she had put on a face of sympathy. ‘Genevieve, we shouldn't be talking about me, we should be talking about your father. Tell me about him.’

  The important thing about my dad was his passion for cars. He loved cars the way some people love animals, dogs or horses. If it had been possible to breed cars he would have. It was sad really that he never had the money to drive the ones he wanted. He was doomed to selling them to people he knew would never value them the way he did. Even the Alvis he was polishing when he died was soon to be someone else's. I told Stella some of that but she's old and ill and what Ned calls her attention span wasn't very long any more. It wasn't her fault that she nodded off and was asleep before I'd finished. And she'd never told me how she came to buy her house.

  Next day she was feeling better than she'd been for weeks. She said it was the sunshine, it was the little bit of summer we often get round the third week of October, but it's more likely to have been the radiotherapy. I'd already wheeled Arthur outside and Stella said she'd sit on the terrace for a while, outside the window where she watched the butterflies. It's rare for her to sit in the open air and without her book or her music.

  ‘I'll tell you how I met Alan and Gilda, shall I?’

  She doesn't realize I can't spend all the time with her that she'd like me to. Or, come to that, I'd like to. She's like most people who haven't worked for their livings, or haven't for a long time. They don't understand what a job means, that you can't just take hours off when you want to.

  ‘Stella, I'd like to stay but I've got a lot to do.’

  All the years when you're young and middle-aged and young-elderly you hide the way you feel. You smile and pretend you don't mind when people are late or won't stay or change the subject or show they're bored. But children aren't like that. They protest about these things and sulk and get angry. Maybe you know when a person's really old by the way childhood protesting and anger have come back.

  Stella said quite sharply, ‘Oh, all right, Genevieve. I don't suppose I'm very good company any more.’

  ‘It's not that, you know that. I have to work. I'll come and sit with you at four, shall I?’

  She said what I'd known she would. ‘If I'm on my own. I may not be, I may have a visitor.’

  But of course she was alone, as she mostly was. Radio Three was on and so was her recording machine. A woman's voice was singing, clear and very high, I suppose it was opera. I expected her to put a finger to her lips but instead she did something she'd never done before. As I came up to her chair and put out my hand she took it and, pulling me towards her with surprising strength, kissed my cheek. I kept silent, I didn't have to be told, and on an impulse put my arms round her, hugging her close. The music stopped and almost at the same time the tape clicked off. I stood up and looked at Stella. There were tears in her eyes.

  ‘What is it?’ I said.

  ‘Nothing. Just the music. And I'm sorry I was so hateful to you this morning, Jenny.’

  I said to forget it. ‘You were going to tell me about Alan Tyzark.’

  ‘You remembered his name!’

  I sat down on the bed and took hold of her hand.

  Her eyes were fixed on some distant point. When I'd spoken I fancied she flushed and the colour was still in her face. She had to make several efforts before she spoke, she seemed not to know how to begin. It was as if she had the same difficulty talking about this man in a normal way as I would have when speaking of Ned. Eventually she spoke boldly, but she had to clear her throat several times first.

  ‘It was ages before I knew who it was that had come to consult Rex. Rex told me, of course, but he always said Gil
da Brent and her husband. I suppose I thought he must be a Mr Brent. Even when Rex referred to him as Alan I didn't make the connection, I just thought of him as Alan Brent. I didn't know my Alan had become a painter, you see.’

  Gilda Brent and Alan Tyzark had consulted Rex Newland about recovering money owed by a film company to Gilda. The company was no longer in existence in its old form, it had collapsed, and Gilda Brent had never been paid for the last two films she had made, The Wife's Story and The End of Edith Thompson. Or that was what she said.

  It took a long time but eventually Rex was able to recover quite a lot of the money, about £2,000, which doesn't seem much, but remember this was 1959 Rex had had a good many meetings with the Tyzarks by then. They lived in Tivetshall St Michael, a village near Pulham Market, in a farmhouse called St Michael's Farm. Neither of them seems to have been doing any real work at this time. They were living on what came in from what they'd done in the past and on the occasional bit of money they inherited. Alan's father had died and left him a few hundreds. Gilda lost three aunts in quick succession and all of them left her money and some quite valuable objects, Stella didn't say what. But you wouldn't have guessed they were quite poor. They were a well-dressed, stylish and attractive couple.

  Rex asked Stella to invite them to dinner. It was always the way with him. Anyone new he met and thought was good-looking or amusing or from the right background had to be asked to dinner. I wonder what I'd say if Mike came home and told me he wanted me to cook a meal for four fellows he'd met on the site and their wives too. It's pointless speculating because he wouldn't. Rex seems to have taken it for granted. He presented her with a guest list, including Charmian Fry. I don't know why she didn't throw it at him, let alone said yes. But of course Alan's name was on the list, his full name, and that's how she came to know who it was.

  ‘I didn't say a word to Rex. I didn't give anyone a clue Alan and I had known each other before. It was twenty years, after all. But I don't really know why I didn't. And when he came I didn't. I shook hands with him, I behaved as if we'd never seen each other before. And he must have taken his cue from me because it wasn't till we were at the table, sitting next to each other, that he – well, he told me he recognized me.’

  Charmian came to the party, dressed in a floor-length grey lace evening dress with holes that might have been in the pattern of the lace or made by moths. She explained that the dress had been her grandmother's, she had found it in an old trunk. With a loud laugh, in her loud county voice, she said it was a real find and that it would last her out. Gilda Brent stared at her in astonishment but, when Charmian came close, drew away from the smell of camphor.

  Gilda herself was very beautiful.

  ‘She had the sort of appearance,’ Stella said, ‘you only have when you've been taught how to dress and make up. You only see it in actresses and mannequins – I mean models. Gilda's make-up was terribly professional and she had – don't laugh – the cleanest hair I'd ever seen. I don't think women washed their hair as much then as they do now, once a week was quite enough. Gilda's hair was golden and shoulder-length and – do they call it “squeaky” clean, Genevieve?’

  There was a shampoo ad that used to, I said.

  ‘She had a green dress on in the style they called “the sack”, it was the latest fashion, falling straight from the shoulder to the knee. She was tall and thin and she had just the same legs as Marlene Dietrich. Her manner – well, what can I tell you? She seemed so self-confident, she called me darling the second sentence she spoke to me. I'd never met an actress before. Of course I got used to her, I came to accept her, but that first time I think I'd have gazed at her the way she gazed at Charmian if – if it hadn't been for Alan. Alan made everyone else fade, I suppose.’

  At the table he sat between Stella and the niece by marriage who had been to see her the day before, Priscilla Newland, then a girl of twenty-six. He still had the face of a schoolboy, Stella said, young and cheeky. His hair was brown and not as short as most men wore it then and his eyes were a light clear brown. He grinned at her and said,

  ‘We're making a conspiracy of this, aren't we?’

  ‘Do you mind?’ she said.

  ‘No, I like it. Let's keep it that way. Don't you love secrets?’

  She had never thought whether she did or not. He looked at Charmian in her dirty dress and with her long grey hair and said,

  ‘Have much of a coven round here, do you?’

  Stella said she'd never felt like laughing about Charmian before, she'd always seen her presence in their lives as a tragedy, but suddenly, because of what Alan said, Charmian became ridiculous to her, an ugly, elderly joke whose hold over Rex must be through some obscene secret rituals. She said what she had never before said to anyone, had scarcely admitted in actual words to herself,

  ‘She's my husband's mistress.’

  When she had said it she was frightened, although her voice had been a whisper, and she put her hand over her mouth. It was what a schoolgirl does, she said, the kind of behaviour Rex hated to see in her. Alan said, ‘Double, double, toil and trouble,’ and made a face, an eyebrow-raising, looking-down-the-nose face. Then he said, ‘We won't mind them. Let's pretend they're not there, they've gone off to hell on her broomstick, your old man riding pillion,’ and Stella found herself saying she wouldn't mind if she had someone like him to talk to about it. She was overcome by her own daring, she blushed, and then she laughed.

  She had a marvellous evening. She couldn't talk to him all the time but it made her feel good just knowing he was there. It was like having a wonderful unexpected present, but better than that. Stella said that for the first time in her life she felt as if she was with the person she most wanted to be with in the whole world. At school it hadn't been like that, it had been simple friendship, and now that experience seemed shallow to her. The years had enriched what they had, though they had spent them apart. During the evening she several times caught his eye and he smiled at her, once he winked, and before he and Gilda left he came over to her alone and whispered that he was happy. That was all, he was happy.

  ‘But you know, Jenny,’ she said, ‘the way we order society, he couldn't be my friend. That was what I thought I wanted but a married woman can't be friends with a married man.’

  I knew it well.

  ‘It was Gilda who became my friend. I often wonder how many women make a friend of a woman because it's her husband they really like. And that's the only way to get to see him. Even then you'll only see him when you see her or when all four of you are together. It's better than nothing, that's all.’

  ‘Didn't you like her?’

  She thought. After all these years she still had to think about it. ‘I don't know. I suppose I did at first. The point was, she seemed to like me. She rang me up next day to thank me and asked if she could drop in and borrow some book I'd mentioned I'd read and said I'd lend her. That was the beginning of our friendship.’

  ‘You often saw him?’ I said.

  ‘Alan? If I went to St Michael's Farm to see Gilda I'd see him. They were always coming to dinner and we were always going to them. I was never alone with him. For one thing, in the afternoons I'd have Marianne with me. I must have been very silly, Genevieve, because I didn't realize what was happening to me. You see, I'd never been in love before. Apart from my little girl, and that's different, I don't think I'd ever loved anyone before. The best I'd had was just finding someone quite nice to be with.

  ‘When we became lovers at last, it was like a whole new world. You hear about born-again Christians, I was born again, I became a different person, I understood about being happy, that it was something positive, not just an absence of unhappiness. But that was quite a long way off in 1960. It was all still to come. It was long before I began to – make arrangements for us.’

  She was tired now but there was a question I had to ask. I said,

  ‘Did you ever think you might marry?’

  Her look said I'd asked somethin
g no sensible person would have thought in doubt.

  ‘Of course I did. We did. Especially after Rex was dead. I told you I always took an interest in the law. By the end of the sixties they were talking about new divorce laws. It looked as if divorce might be possible by mutual consent or even because just one party wanted it.’

  Her eyes had closed. She spoke sleepily. ‘We were going to be together. When I was a girl people were horrified by a couple living together without marriage, if a woman did she had to pretend to be married and wear a ring, but all that changed. It changed so fast, Genevieve, it was quite amazing. I would have lived with him and not worried at all.’

  I couldn't follow the logic of it, if there was any logic. ‘If Gilda was dead, you could have married, couldn't you?’

  ‘Of course we could,’ she said and she fell silent, closing her eyes.

  11

  Red and white flowers mixed together were the worst possible omen, Janis said, and she wanted the wreath of carnations and petunias our cousin's wife from Thetford had sent kept off Dad's coffin. Otherwise there'd be another death. She wasn't convinced that I'd made things better by picking a head of purple clary out of the hedge and poking it in among the carnations.

  It was a good thing Mum wasn't at the crem to see it. Dad's second wife Kath wasn't there either. In fact it was a poor turnout, no relatives but Janis and me, not a single friend, and Suzanne in deepest black standing in the rain and crying. Dad's former partner in the garage business sent a wreath of yellow chrysanths and ivy in the shape of a bull-nosed Morris, but he didn't come himself.

  It was because of the flowers that I wouldn't tempt providence further and meet Ned on Hallowe'en, the day he suggested. All Saints’, the next evening, wasn't possible for him, so it had to be All Souls', November 2nd, which is a funny sort of night in my opinion. Philippa's Katie was born on All Souls' and she has always been a strange one, not needing much sleep, not afraid of the dark, a night bird. Some say it's when the dead come back and walk, Nan swears she's seen old Mrs Thorn in the churchyard on All Souls', picking the moss out of the letters on her own gravestone, and I didn't feel too happy going alone into Stella's dark house.