The Brimstone Wedding

by Barbara Vine

  I suppose I would have said I had more important things to think of.

  Almost at once, within half a mile, we had driven into the kind of atmosphere there must have been in industrial towns on hot days in the last century. And this was the countryside in 1970. It was caused through stubble burning but for a while we couldn't see any smoke. We couldn't see the sky either, for the heavy overcast. A dense hot fog hung, still and brooding, over the fields and woods. The air smelt like a smoke-filled room.

  There was no traffic. That's not quite true. Of course there was some, but I think we passed no more than one car before the accident happened. Alan was driving very fast. That is, he was probably driving at no more than fifty miles an hour but that's fast on narrow roads that run straight for a quarter of a mile and then inexplicably turn a right-angled bend. He wanted to get Gilda home fast, he wanted to be rid of Gilda. As we passed through Curton he had to slow down a little. In the heat and under the choking smoke its inhabitants seemed all asleep. I didn't notice the garage at the end of the village street, Curton Cars Ltd, the last building in the street. I noticed nothing but Alan and Gilda sitting side by side and the countryside travelling past, hazy, flat, still.

  As soon as Curton was left behind he speeded up again. No one spoke – have I said that? We sat in silence. No one had spoken since Gilda said she was Alan's wife and I was to go in the back and I'd said I would. I remember her long blondish hair with the silver threads in it hanging over the back of the passenger seat, and the scarf she wore showing a harsh emerald green between the strands. I remember watching Alan's hands on the steering wheel. I wanted him to touch me, I ached for his touch. It was hours and hours, before Gilda came, since I had felt his hand on me, his mouth on my skin. We were never together without touching and the deprivation made me feel rejected and hungry.

  He drove very fast round those bends and faster on those long straights. The car bounced over a humpbacked bridge that crossed a stream and Gilda gave a thin shriek. He must have been driving at more than fifty when the smoke rolled across the road in front of us. It came suddenly, a dense black cloud, almost horizontal, pouring over the hedge, engulfing the car.

  Have you ever experienced that? Do you know what it's like? From inside a car you rely entirely on sight, on the visible world, and when it's taken away by a shattered windscreen or a sheet of cardboard blown against the glass you're as blind as if your corneas had gone.

  That cloud blinded us. It blinded Alan. It blanked out the windscreen as surely as a coat of grey paint. I felt him flinch, I felt the seat in front of me jerk, and the reflex of his foot slamming the brake, the car leaping and buckling. But I don't remember the crash itself, only the bang, the huge explosion that wasn't in fact an explosion but the noise of violent impact. It was the loudest sound I have ever heard.

  The car doors flew open. Do I remember that or did he tell me? I don't know. Somehow, from some instinct of protecting one's own and oneself, but also from that desire I had to touch him, a split instant before the impact, I had flung my arms round him from behind and held on. The seat was between us, a buffer between us, but still I held him as hard as I could and he said I saved him from the windscreen or the steering wheel piercing his chest, he said I was his seat-belt. I don't know. How do I know?

  Perhaps I did in fact save him from being thrown out of the car when the doors were flung open. There was no one to hold on to Gilda. That was the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes, that Gilda wasn't there, that Gilda was gone, the passenger seat was empty. But I did nothing at first, I didn't ask him. I held on. I pushed my face into his neck like an animal nuzzling. There was some feeling in my mind of staying there for ever, of being there, clasped together, closing our eyes, sleeping even. I could feel a pulse beating in his neck and hear his harsh breathing.

  He said my name in a voice that was a vibration without tone.

  ‘Stella.’

  I moved my face. My mouth was wet with his sweat. When I withdrew my hands I saw that they were covered with blood and that made me whimper. That is what you do when you've been in a car accident, you shake and make frightened sounds. You can't control your lips, they quiver and wobble. Your whole body trembles. My hands were covered with innumerable tiny scratches and my fingers were the same colour as my nails. The noise of the crash was still in my head, repeating itself and reverberating like the sound of big guns firing over and over.

  He got out of the car, he staggered and then righted himself, and came round to the back and made me get out and then he put his arms round me. I was crying by then and uttering cries but I had to stop, I made myself stop. Alan wiped my hands with the handkerchief he'd used to wipe Gilda's saliva off my face. His were bleeding and blood was running down his face from a cut on his forehead.

  I said, ‘Where's Gilda?’ My teeth were chattering.

  ‘I don't know,’ he said.

  The smoke had passed. The air hung heavy with hot smoky fog. In front of us loomed through it a huge farm machine, a combine I suppose or a baler. It had been parked half on the road and half on the grass verge and Alan had gone into the back of it. The car was pushed into the yellow iron slab that was its rear end as if it had been welded there, its front wheels lifted off the surface of the road, its bonnet stove in like a crushed tin can.

  Since that single car had passed, there had been no other. But one came then. If the driver saw us he didn't stop, though Alan tried to flag him down. He turned back to me with clenched fists and swore. I don't think I'd ever heard him swear before. When the van from the garage in Curton came it seemed like coincidence, an amazing stroke of fate, but it wasn't really. The garage man was on his way home, he always passed at that time, at five.

  But it wasn't yet five when Alan stood there cursing, his fists clenched. I said,

  ‘We must look for Gilda. We must find Gilda.’

  The verge was wide, twenty feet wide, with trees growing on it and behind was a ditch and the hedge. We found her lying at the foot of a tree in the long grass. I say ‘we’ but it was Alan who found her. I gritted my teeth and clutched one hand in the other. He knelt down beside her, looking into her face. She opened her eyes and muttered something. I couldn't see a mark on her. We had all escaped injury by a miracle.

  Or so I thought. It was absurd I suppose, what I said. ‘Gilda, are you all right?’

  Her eyes were fixed on Alan's face. She said something but I couldn't make it out.

  ‘She'll be all right,’ he said. ‘She'll be fine. Let her rest there for a bit and she'll be fine.’

  It was grotesque, only I didn't see it like that at the time. He knew her, he knew about these things, he knew best.

  She had only been thrown a few yards out of a car. The green scarf was still round her neck. Then I saw the blood on her hair, seeping from the back of her head, brownish and wet on the blades of grass.

  ‘Alan,’ I said, ‘I think she hit her head against that tree.’

  He didn't look at Gilda, he looked at the tree. It was just a tree, I can't remember what sort, if I ever noticed. The bark was dark brown and rough. I couldn't see any special marks on it but it was all over marks, that was its texture, to be covered with scars as if a hundred people had been hurled against it.

  All this time I was shaking, though it was subsiding a bit. I was coming back to reality, to practicalities. My hands had stopped bleeding. I sat down on the grass. I was wearing stockings and high-heeled shoes and there was a ladder in one of my stockings. It's strange how you notice these things. I was thinking about Charmian and how I'd behaved then, ridiculously, like a stupid child, I'd run down the street screaming. I said to Alan,

  ‘One of us will have to walk back to Curton and phone for an ambulance.’

  And then the van came. It was red and it had ‘Curton Cars Ltd’ printed in white on the side of it. There was no question of this driver not stopping. His window was open and he waved at us, made a thumbs-up sign. He pulled into the verge on the othe
r side of the combine, got out of the van and came over to us.

  He was in overalls, a tall, good-looking man, much younger than we were, perhaps thirty. He looked at the wreck of Alan's car, the bonnet crushed in, welded to the great steel bulwark of that combine, its front doors blown open, and then he looked at Alan. He asked the question that changed everything. Afterwards I thought of him as a messenger from fate, a not quite human character from a Greek play, someone come to give us a choice and offer us an answer. But he was an ordinary man, smiling and sympathetic at the same time. I was relieved to see him.

  He asked the question.

  ‘Just the two of you, was it?’ he said.

  A simple casual question. I nearly denied it. I nearly shouted, no, no, we were three, there was someone else, there was someone who's been hurt. I didn't. He wasn't talking to me but to Alan, to the man. I was the woman, taken for granted as the passenger, not the driver, someone who it was assumed, would know nothing. Besides, I was used to leaving things to men's decisions. What did I know? I could drive but I barely knew how the internal-combustion engine functioned. He repeated what he'd said, more gently this time. He must have thought we were in shock.

  ‘Just you two, was it?’

  Alan shut his eyes, opened them, said very quickly, ‘Yes. Just the two of us.’

  I don't know how I kept silent. I held my hand over my mouth. My fingers were all over scratches and I tasted the blood. The garage man was up by the wreck by then, walking round it, examining it.

  ‘I ask because whoever was riding shotgun –’ he looked at me – ‘must have been thrown out, taken quite a header.’

  Alan said, ‘My wife.’

  For a moment I thought he was going to tell him about Gilda, show him Gilda, but it was me he meant. I was his wife.

  ‘You were lucky.’ He looked at the blood on Alan. ‘Cut yourself shaving, did you?’ And he winked.

  Alan smiled. It amazed me, that he could smile. He said, ‘I've got a lot of hair on my hands.’

  They both laughed. They laughed knowingly the way men do, all boys together, the conspiracy of men is what Marianne calls it.

  ‘No need to call the fuzz, then? Not if there's no one hurt.’

  ‘No,’ said Alan.

  ‘Better not if there's no necessity.’

  Alan said no again. He said it thoughtfully. It was as if he was learning, taking advice, catching on. He was like someone who knows a certain amount of a foreign language but needs to listen carefully when it is spoken to catch the hidden meaning. He was thinking, following the garage man's movements with his eyes. And then he had moved from where he was standing, he repositioned himself so that his body kept Gilda from view. No one in the road could have seen Gilda where she lay, deep in the long grass, but he was making doubly sure, screening the hidden woman.

  It was then that it registered with me, how silent she was. Why didn't she cry out, moan, whisper something? A little breeze, the first of that day, ruffled the leaves of the tree above her. I looked away.

  The garage man said he would go back to Curton and fetch his ‘stuff, a pick-up truck and a towing bar. He'd be ten minutes, if that. Alan remained standing where he was until the van had gone. There was something in his face I'd never seen there before, something calculating, assessing his chances maybe, I don't know. He said,

  ‘I'm going to move Gilda out of the sun. She ought not to be in the sun.’

  I was a grown woman, I was a middle-aged woman of forty-seven. Why didn't I insist on fetching an ambulance? Why didn't I point out the absolute imperative of telling the police? I don't know why. I didn't know then. Blame it on shock perhaps, on what had gone before the accident, the accident itself, on the amount I had drunk. I seemed to have no strength, no will. I was aware of more smoke billowing over us, of coughing and looking at my hands that were smeared with blood, blackened with burnt barley, of another car passing but not stopping, of Alan bending down and lifting Gilda up in his arms.

  He carried her into the shade. But there never was much sun, was there? Was there really much difference between the smoky gloom under that tree and the shadow of the hedge? Now where he had laid her she couldn't have been seen except by someone specifically searching. He asked me if I would be happier sitting in the car. It would at any rate be more comfortable. I shook my head. I said to him,

  ‘You said there were just the two of us?’

  It was a strange reply he gave me. ‘As far as I'm concerned there are just the two of us.’ And then he said, ‘You know, I'd never have thought of that if he hadn't suggested it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘I was about to start bleating about Gilda being injured and calling an ambulance and fetching the police and God knows what. And along he came and put that splendid idea into my head, that there were just the two of us.’

  He gave me a cigarette and lit one for himself. I sat on the grass and hugged my knees. I sat there in my fussy dress and high heels and laid my head on my knees and shut my eyes. I had a raging thirst, the result of drinking, I suppose.

  Alan had gone away from me. I lifted my head once and looked round for him but I couldn't see him anywhere. I could see only the road and the tall grass and that tree with the wounded bark. I closed my eyes again and saw the redness of light through the lids. And still the garage man didn't come. Water was what I wanted, a long long drink of water, and then sleep. A pulse was throbbing steadily inside my head.

  Ages passed. I suppose it was about ten minutes. I opened my eyes and got to my feet. I looked up into the tree and saw Gilda's sunglasses caught on a branch. There was blood on my dress by then, but it didn't show among the flower pattern unless you knew. I reached up for the sunglasses. Alan was kneeling beside Gilda. I couldn't see Gilda, the grass was too long, more like hay, tall grass with tall plants in it, wormwood and thistles and tansy and willow herb. He got up and came to me and said,

  ‘Don't scream. Cover your mouth. She's dead.’

  24

  I stopped for a while. I had to. Someone came in with my coffee while I was talking. The trouble is I no longer have the strength to prop a chair under the door handle. It was only Sharon and she thinks I'm an old madwoman, anyway. What could be more natural than for me to talk gibberish to myself?

  She has gone and I can resume.

  We were there at the roadside, waiting for the garage man to come back. Alan knelt down in the grass beside me. He took hold of my hands.

  ‘She's dead,’ he said again. And abruptly, ‘Do you want to see?’

  I shook my head. I couldn't speak.

  He was very pale. His eyes were so bright I thought there must be tears in them. The enormity of what he had said was too much for me. I could only stare at him.

  He said, ‘I can hear the beating of your heart.’

  ‘Oh, she can't be dead,’ I said, ‘she can't.’

  ‘Darling, you must keep calm.’ He was quite calm himself. ‘Listen. Here's our garagiste,’ he said. ‘Trust the French to have a word for it.’ Once again he took my bloodied blackened hands in his bloodied blackened hands. ‘Don't speak, sweetheart. Be struck dumb by shock, will you? Leave it to me. It's best.’

  The garage man was cheerful and reassuring. He kept saying what a lucky escape we'd had. I don't think he could understand the way I was behaving, as if I'd suffered more than shock in the accident, more than a few scratches to my hands. He eyed me the way men eye women who are ‘making a fuss’, indulgently, making allowances but with a level of contempt.

  He told Alan, who I'm sure hadn't even thought about it, that he knew who the combine belonged to, he could give him the name. Then he fastened – but it's no use my trying to describe what he did, I don't know the names for these things, the tools, the techniques. What it amounted to was that he managed to pull the car off the combine and tow it behind his truck. While he was doing this he didn't speak to me at all. I don't mean he was rude. It was just that I was a woman, so could kn
ow nothing of these things, men's things.

  We got into the truck with him. In the front, in the middle of the windscreen, a horseshoe was hanging, suspended on strings tied to its ends. He saw me looking at it and he winked.

  ‘It's up that way to stop the luck running out.’

  He didn't call Alan anything but he called me ‘ma‘am’ and once he referred to me as ‘your wife’. I let it pass. I didn't say, I'm not his wife, and Alan didn't say, she's not my wife.

  ‘Cheer up, ma'am,’ he said to me. ‘It's not the end of the world. Let's see you smile.’

  He didn't see me smile. I had begun to shiver. We left the wreck of Alan's car on the garage forecourt in Curton and went into the office and the man said did I want a cup of tea.

  I have to call him ‘the man’ because I never heard his name. I don't think Alan did. What difference would it have made? There was a photograph on the desk. I sat there and looked at it while he made tea for us. It was of two little girls and a baby boy and when he came back I asked him if they were his children. He seemed pleased to be asked, he told me their names. I said his older girl must be about the same age as my boy. It was just small talk, something to avoid speaking of the accident.

  Alan asked him if he had any jump leads. I didn't know what jump leads were then, I didn't know what he meant, but the man said of course he had, and when we'd drunk the tea he drove us home to Molucca. He'd get on to the farmer who owned the combine if we liked, he said, but Alan said no, he'd do that.

  Gilda's car was outside the house. Of course it was, but I had forgotten about it, I had forgotten it wouldn't start. The garage man lifted up the bonnet, produced the wires they called jump leads and connected them to the Anglia's battery. I went into the house and started clearing up the mess, the litter of bottles and glasses and cigarette butts. It was something manual to do, a mechanical activity that needed no thought. When I went back Gilda's car engine was running and Alan was in the driver's seat with his foot touching the accelerator.