Fairness

by Ferdinand Mount

  ‘It’s real,’ she said ruefully, ‘Bobs insisted.’

  ‘So you really are married?’

  My lips could scarcely get round the word, which had the effect of making the enquiry sound roguish, verging on the obscene.

  ‘Of course we are. Didn’t Bobs say anything? You didn’t really expect us to stay engaged until you got back to give us your blessing?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘well done.’

  ‘You make it sound like coming third in an egg-and-spoon race.’

  ‘No, no, congratulations, really, it’s just that I didn’t know when you were going to do it.’

  ‘Do it, what a sad phrase.’

  ‘And, it’s a funny thing, but your mother didn’t mention it when I went to see her.’

  ‘You went to see my mother? Why?’

  While we were speaking, my gaze had drifted away from her to Bobs who had just finished talking to the waiter. He seemed intensely agitated, his squashed face almost trembling with emotions that you would have expected to be easy enough to read but weren’t. He looked proud and happy but somehow insecure, as though he himself had only just heard that they were married and, while wanting it to be true, suspected it might be some kind of misunderstanding or, worse still, an elaborate joke. He gazed at her adoringly, his eyes oddly screwed up at the corners. In fact, his look was so peculiar and unsettling that I had scarcely thought about what I was saying. Mrs Hardress hadn’t quite told me not to tell Helen that I had been down to Minnow Island, but on the whole if someone’s mother summons you to say how worried she is about her daughter’s drinking, the subject of such a visit should be introduced delicately, if at all.

  ‘Yes,’ I said lamely, ‘it was nice to see her. She was looking very well, I thought.’

  ‘I know how she is looking. That wasn’t what I asked. Do you normally go down to see your friends’ mothers to check how they are looking?’

  ‘Not often.’

  ‘She wanted you to spy on me, I suppose. She’s become all confident like that since Dad died. It’s peculiar.’

  ‘No, no, of course she didn’t. I mean mothers are always anxious but –’

  ‘You know why she didn’t mention us being married?’

  ‘Because she doesn’t approve?’

  ‘Of course she doesn’t.’

  ‘So she didn’t come to the wedding?’

  ‘She didn’t. But that’s not unusual in our family. Her parents didn’t come to their wedding, nor did Dad’s. The tradition probably goes back generations on both sides. Bobs’s Dad came to ours in spite of it not being in a church, and brother Gerald came because it wasn’t in a church. Gerald’s rather an amazing person, don’t you think? But Mum carries the tradition one stage further. She pretends it hasn’t happened at all and some charming surgeon or barrister is going to scoop me up any moment.’

  ‘How do you mean, pretends it hasn’t happened?’

  ‘Treats Bobs as if he were just some casual acquaintance. “Do bring that Bobs person down if you want to” when she’s in a good mood, or “Can’t you think of anyone else to bring?”, when she isn’t. That’s what I mean by weird. She’s totally in denial. This orange juice is disgusting, Bobs, tastes of drains.’

  The anxiety on Bobs’s face now seemed less mysterious. Repeated incredulity from Mrs Hardress might well wear down his own confidence in the reality of their being married. Keeping her on the orange juice must be an extra worry.

  ‘Peculiar,’ I murmured in feeble assent.

  After a couple of glasses of wine it seemed possible to tolerate the thought of them being married, tolerate it as a melancholy illustration of the cockeyed course of events, not as a good idea. When Bobs had finished his cannelloni, he interlaced his fubsy little fingers with hers, the chunky ring still showing above them, and he talked of how they were going to redecorate Padders.

  With the other hand, she was starting in on a goblet of assorted ices, demolishing it with strong swift scoops. How fast she ate and what a lot, but without an extra pound on her, her pale boat-shaped face just the same as when she had loomed up through the mist on the beach fifteen years earlier. If you were her mother, you certainly wouldn’t want her marrying Bobs, but then you wouldn’t if you were almost anyone’s mother. Still, what was marriage? No big deal, in fact a very modest deal, one scarcely worth thinking about, not a fit subject for agony or debate any more. If you did happen to go through with it, you made embarrassed excuses: we’ve just been posted to Poland or Saudi Arabia and it would be difficult if we weren’t, or she really doesn’t want to upset her parents. If you felt strongly, you wouldn’t do it even so, on principle. It was one of those compromises you could never quite recover from.

  ‘You’ll come and see us, won’t you?’ she said, placing her hand on mine but lightly, no entrelacement.

  ‘Yes of course,’ I said, the strong bitter coffee bump-starting my heart, a little flushed anyway from the volcanic Sicilian wine and the mixed emotions.

  ‘You’ll have to anyway, to keep up your reports to my mother. The spy who loved me,’ she added carelessly.

  Her annoyance about my visit to Minnow Island seemed to have melted. She never bore much malice. Perhaps she was really not very complicated either. A decent saltimbocca and a few scoops of ice-cream and she would forgive anyone.

  ‘The spy who lost me,’ I corrected with mock melancholy or melancholy masquerading as mock.

  ‘Double oh six and a half,’ Bobs added. Marriage had not done much for his wit. In any case, I suspected he had read the joke somewhere or heard it on a sitcom.

  It was time for me to go back to the office and I managed to say goodbye in a practised way almost as though they were old friends who had been married for years, so long in fact that we had begun to lose touch and we needed to protest that it had been much too long and we must not leave it so long next time. I was half-way down the street before I remembered my raincoat on the bulging coat-stand. They never noticed me coming back, were talking easily not intently to one another, already insulated from me by being married. Perhaps they were talking about me: how dull or stiff I had become, or how fat. One last look at them as I half-turned to pull the swing door towards me. No, not Beauty and the Beast. From this distance, his chubby fair face belonged to the same race as hers, he could have been her younger brother, a squatter, duller version but not wholly alien. That might make a subtler version of the fairy-tale: the Beast would be plain to look at but not unbearably ugly, only when he opened his mouth or perhaps not even then, only when he interlaced his fingers with hers would a shudder run through the audience, and the audience wouldn’t quite know why they shuddered. A hard trick for the director to bring off, though.

  They were gloomy days after lunch at the Salerno, days which lingered on into weeks. Gloomy is not the right word, that suggests a slow-paced melancholy which you might learn to enjoy. This gloom came in sharp pangs, a sudden stabbing awareness of missed opportunity, the kind of awareness that spreads from its original cause – my failure to see how much I wanted her – to a wider sensation that missing opportunities was my speciality.

  ‘Hallo. Isn’t it wonderful news? They are both thrilled and, well, for me it’s the only good thing that’s happened since Martin.’

  ‘Oh, hallo, how nice to hear from you,’ I said, recognising Mrs Hardress’s voice quickly enough, though she was so excited she hadn’t said who was calling.

  ‘You haven’t heard? I can tell you haven’t. How odd they didn’t tell you. Helen’s going to have a baby in April.’

  ‘Wonderful, absolutely wonderful,’ I said, thinking of Tolly and wondering how Bobs had done it.

  ‘She said she’d seen you. I’m surprised she didn’t tell you,’ said Mrs Hardress unable to keep the triumph out of her voice.

  ‘Perhaps she wasn’t quite sure then,’ I said, suddenly realising that I had completely misunderstood the orange juice.

  Bobs was now to be freely spoken of, it seemed, as a
n accredited or at least tolerated partner. True, Mrs Hardress had not yet graduated to using his name, referring to him as ‘he’, as in ‘He’s hoping to get that flat redecorated before the baby’. ‘Beryl. We’re going to call her Beryl. It’s going to be a her, I’m sure of it. I couldn’t possibly have a boy.’

  ‘You can’t call her Beryl.’

  ‘Yes we can. Why? Don’t you like it? Too common for you, I expect.’

  ‘Well, why do you like it?’

  ‘Don’t you remember?’ She giggled. ‘That lovely pale greeny colour.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You haven’t told Bobs that?’

  ‘Certainly not. I’m talking about the stone.’

  ‘I should have thought stones were rather a painful memory.’

  ‘Nothing Dodo could do would affect how beautiful the stone was, could it?’

  ‘No,’ I said, but thinking how strange she was wanting to refer back, even indirectly, to something so humiliating for her, even if she hadn’t heard the way Dodo had talked about her on Sting Ray. Then again, even if she had, she might still call her daughter Beryl, just to show that mere human villainy could not corrupt the scientific reality. The little stains we left on the earth would fade away soon enough.

  ‘You haven’t come to see the baby.’

  ‘I sent a telegram, didn’t you get it?’

  ‘Yes of course I did and thanks, but a telegram’s not the same. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because you’ll see her at the christening.’

  ‘Christening?’

  ‘Yes, you’ll be a godfather, won’t you, that’s why I’m calling, you believe in all that sort of thing.’

  ‘But you –’

  ‘Bobs’s Dad would be hurt if we didn’t and anyway I’m sure you’ll renounce the devil and all his works very nicely. I looked it all up, it’s weird, but you’ll love Beryl, she’s so funny.’

  It must have been five years, perhaps more since I had been to St Columba’s (not quite two years of the intervening period in the States). But the memory of it already seemed distant, as though it was in childhood that I had first seen the mottled green spire and the battered creamy finials climbing out of the dirty brick buttresses and the litter blown against the laurel hedge and inside the chocolate and blue tiles and the glowing stained glass telling how the faith first came to lona.

  We stood in a sparse little circle in the corner of the church squeezed up against a table piled high with SPCK leaflets which looked as though they had been there for a while.

  Helen stood by the font holding the baby. Both seemed indifferent to their surroundings. Bobs was fussing about, unable to decide where to put a brass vase of flowers that had been on the font. Next to Helen was Sue, her friend from work. They were both qualified social workers now, she told me. Sue was looking round eagerly as though this might be her last chance to gather the details of such an interesting folk ritual. Helen had made no concessions to the occasion, but Sue was smartly dressed in a royal-blue coat and skirt and a blue beret. Behind her Bobs’s brother Gerald stood utterly still, his face upturned at that misleadingly beatific angle affected by his father, who was telling us about the purpose of the service.

  ‘Now you godparents, Sue, and Gus, how nice to see you again, Gus, and Mrs Hardress who is kindly standing proxy for my niece Everilda who is in Botswana and is unable to be here, you’re here to speak up for Beryl. You’re her sureties, like a surety in a court of law who stands up to guarantee that his friend won’t skip bail. On her behalf you have to renounce the devil and all his works, and the vain pomp and glory of the world. That’s quite a lot to be going on with, isn’t it?’

  He cast his eye mildly round our little circle as though offering an opportunity for anyone feeling unequal to these challenges to opt out now. A powerful odour of mothballs came from somewhere very close to me, probably Gerald’s long black coat. I wondered whether his father’s sermon was making him boil with rage, but his beatific ceilingward gaze gave nothing away.

  Not for the first time in Mr Moonman’s sermons my mind began to stray to his old-fashioned diction, dwelling for quite a long time on its precise consonants and liquid vowels and his occasional ‘haugh’, which seemed to be a sort of shift-key marking the end of a passage, and while I wasn’t bored I didn’t take in much either. Odd words came to me, perhaps because he gave them that extra French-sounding accentuation. Now he was saying something about Christian belief, separating the two syllables of ‘belief in an un-English way, and I remembered Scrannel’s homily about how ‘belief really only meant ‘be lovable’ and how the words we now used to describe the impersonal physical reality of the world were once the language of our affections. In the old days ‘truth’ had meant simply loyalty to a lord or lover, or to a god or God. A ‘fact’ was some deed you had done, whether glorious or monstrous, not some dreary verifiable proposition. Nothing, Scrannel went on, betrayed more nakedly the irreversible and appalling shift in the nature of our world, from a world created for us, one in which what really mattered were the promises we made and the loyalties we bound ourselves to, a human-centred world, to the universe we now occupied, one of which we were merely an insignificant part, a chance conglomeration of atoms. The more we learnt of nature, the more power we acquired over nature, the more insignificant we became. That was the hideous irony. When we were weak, the world was strange and beautiful and our dealings with it shone with a heroic gleam. But now we were strong, and nothing we said or did mattered in the slightest. At the time, these remarks of Scrannel’s had seemed to me rather melodramatic. But now standing in the cold dusty light of St Col’s with Mr Moonman dismissing us with a blessing and in the same breath beckoning us to refreshments at the vicarage, I could see what he meant. These pledges and beliefs that we had muttered out together were hollow, not only because we lacked the sort of faith we were supposed to have but because the whole language was alien to us. We didn’t believe in our promises even when we kept them. That wasn’t the way we talked. How did we talk instead – but before I had got around to thinking of the answer, Gerald Moonman turned to me, or perhaps to Helen who was coming up behind me with the baby, and said: ‘Well, we got through that mumbo-jumbo all right.’

  Beryl, who had not cried once throughout the ceremony, squawked and splayed her rosy little fingers at him.

  ‘She didn’t seem to mind,’ Helen said, cocking her head to peer round the fleecy folds of the shawl at her daughter’s face which crinkled and then stretched into a yawny smile.

  ‘She seems to like church. I’m afraid she may have a vocation,’ he said.

  ‘It’s wind.’

  It felt hot outside. At first I thought only by contrast with the mildewed coolth of St Col’s. But the sun was really blazing fiercely for May and Helen put her hand out to shade Beryl’s face, although she had a white bonnet on. We walked in straggly file past the litter-blown laurels a little way down the hill to the vicarage which was also a confused building of grimy brick and crumbly cornices and mullions of creamy stone. The house was shabby and dark inside. All I took in at first was the sour cabbagey smell, less sickly than Mr Moonman’s own smell but no better. In a square bare room at the back with a greenslimed window into what looked like a conservatory there was a table with sandwiches and a large jug of some pale brown liquid which turned out to be cider. Sue poured it out for us. It started by tasting quite refreshing and then revealed a deep rotten aftertaste. The room had a lincrusta wallpaper in a ridged pattern of brownish roses. The only picture was a large framed engraving, also brownish, which despite being over the fireplace so undulated with damp that it was hard to identify the precise subject, though it looked rural. Today, it was hot and stuffy in the room and Mr Moonman sat down and mopped his brow.

  ‘I must say this cider is even better than last year. I make it myself you know, from the trees out there. Do go out in the garden, it’s the best time of year to go out in the garden, don’t you think?’

  With difficulty Bobs shoved
open the glass-panelled door and led us out past the conservatory which we could now see had fallen in on itself, most of the glass lying shattered amid the invading brambles. Beyond was tall grass tangled with cow-parsley and lanky buttercups and a few twisted apple trees with the last of the blossom still on them. The ground fell away beyond the tumbledown brick wall at the end, so that the view beyond was mostly sky.

  ‘It’s got fantastic potential, this place,’ Bobs said.

  Helen stood under an apple tree rocking Beryl, perhaps singing to her or perhaps just cooing. Even under the trees it was hot and I felt the sweat between my shoulder-blades. Gerald Moonman had disappeared. Then looking back at the house I saw a dark figure moving across the upper windows. After a minute or two, one of the windows was flung open and Moonman poked his head out and then thrust out his hand holding a silver candlestick which glinted in the sun.

  Helen laughed and nodded back at her brother-in-law, but Bobs frowned and turned away.

  ‘Gerald said he’d come mostly to make sure his father hadn’t flogged all his mother’s silver,’ she explained.

  Just then Sue came out through the glass door with a look of panic on her face.

  ‘Quickly,’ she said, ‘it’s Mr Moonman, he –’

  We hurried inside. The vicar was still sitting on the same chair with his mug of cider almost empty in front of him. His head had fallen on to his shoulder and at first he seemed lifeless, but when we ourselves had quietened down, we could hear his low, stertorous breathing.

  ‘I know this one,’ said Gerald, who had just come downstairs, ‘let’s take him out.’

  The brothers each took one side of the chair and carried him out, chair and all, and set him under an apple tree. Sue took his pulse, which she said was faint and fluttery but still there.

  ‘Leave him alone for a bit,’ said Gerald, ‘he’ll surface.’

  So we moved away and talked furtively among ourselves, leaving the bent figure in the chair to breathe for himself. And after a few minutes his head rose and with a few mild moans, scarcely more than a clearing of the throat, he began to look about him.