by Marie Joseph
Then, in the next minute, he wanted to laugh aloud, to fling open the window, and shout his happiness across the heath.
But he knelt down by the side of the bed, and with a trembling finger, traced the outline of his wife’s mouth.
‘I knew it would be a boy,’ he told her, and his voice breathed gentleness and love.
‘The minute I started to slap blue paint on that pink front door – I knew it would be a boy . . .’
A Day of Daffodils
IT WAS AS though spring had waited for Barbie’s wedding day. That Saturday morning the air was still and fresh, with a gentle, sunlit warmth.
Moira, feeling very much the older married sister, shepherded Philip and Paul, her five-year-old twin sons, into a front pew on the ‘bride’s side’. They were pushing and nudging each other already, looking unfamiliar in their new grey flannel suits, with decorous watered partings in their straight dark hair.
Moira knelt down on a dusty hassock, and motioned to the boys to do the same. She spread her white-gloved fingers over her face, being careful not to smudge her hastily applied mascara.
Crouching uncomfortably, she found that she was trembling a little with the rush of it all. She wondered if her stocking seams were straight, and if her pale lemon suit wasn’t too obviously last year’s. She hoped that the borrowed hat wasn’t just that bit too fussy, and she prayed that Wanda, just three and a half years old and a bridesmaid, would remember all that she had been told.
She tried not to think of the night before, when Wanda, ashen-faced, with perspiration beading her short upper lip, had been sick with distressing thoroughness.
As she soaked sheets at two o’clock in the morning, Moira had doubted whether the excitable little girl would even be able to go to the wedding, but morning had found her pale and subdued, pleading far too early to be zipped into the yellow bridesmaid’s dress.
‘Please make her grow out of these bouts of sickness,’ Moira prayed. ‘Don’t let it be anything serious. She ought to be much bigger for her age, and I know that Martin worries about her, although he doesn’t say anything . . .’
Philip and Paul, sleek heads close together, were examining with glee the upturned soles of their beloved grannie’s new shoes. She had just arrived, and was praying earnestly in the pew immediately in front of them.
‘Hasn’t Daddy finished giving out the programmes at the door?’ Paul asked in a hoarse whisper, just as there was an excited flurry of movement from the back of the church.
Heads turned, and as everyone rose to their feet, Martin slipped into his place by her side. He nodded briefly at her, and Moira relaxed, knowing that he was telling her that Wanda was all right.
The shiny bald head of Mr Hawkins the organist, just visible above green curtaining, was touched to eggshell lustre by a sudden shaft of sunlight, and Moira noiselessly slapped Paul’s hand as he tried to point out this interesting phenomenon to Philip.
‘Praise my soul, the king of heaven,’ filled the old church with glorious sound, and then Barbie was there, drifting past their pew, beautiful in her white dress and veil, and heartbreakingly young.
Moira felt her throat contract and tears prick behind her eyelids, and she noticed how her mother’s elegant, silk-clad shoulders had squared themselves in an obvious effort at composure.
Barbie would never forgive them if they cried. More modern than tomorrow, their nineteen-year-old Barbie hated any display of what she called soppy sentimentality.
No frills, no fuss, no hearts-on-sleeves, that was Barbie. Her white dress flowed in uncluttered lines, and behind her the two grown-up bridesmaids’ dresses echoed its stark simplicity. Sandy and Debbie, Barbie’s friends from secretarial college. Moira never remembered seeing them in anything but tights, black and clinging, with massive pullovers falling in sludge-coloured folds round their slim hips.
Now they were transformed, moving with model-girl tranquillity, and behind them, at a carefully rehearsed three paces, came Wanda and a little cousin from the bridegroom’s side, both dressed in daffodil yellow.
‘Don’t look at us, darling,’ willed Moira. ‘Keep on walking, just as you were told, holding your posy of lilies of the valley, not too high, and not too low . . . But smile a little, darling, don’t look so terribly serious . . .’
Mr Hawkins made the great sounds from the organ swell and rise majestically and then Wanda was safely past; but the other bridesmaid, a blonde four-year-old, smiled radiantly at her mother, and even gave a little careless wave.
‘Let us pray,’ said the vicar in his patient voice, and amid a rustle of silk and hymn sheets, the guests sank to their knees.
Philip and Paul, both awed into temporary silence by the bridal procession, reverted to normal.
Paul, with tongue protruding, turned his clean white handkerchief into a pair of floppy rabbit’s ears, whilst Philip, from the pocket of the new grey suit, produced a large sweet of unrecognisable species, and under cover of his fist guided it swiftly into his mouth. He stared round him, and his jaws moved up and down rhythmically as he chewed.
‘Amen,’ said the vicar.
‘Stop that champing noise,’ said Martin out of the side of his mouth, and Moira saw her son obligingly remove the large wet sweet and replace it in the pocket of his new grey suit.
The vicar adjusted his reading glasses, and began the service.
‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God . . .’
‘Which is your mummy?’ asked the blonde bridesmaid in a light conversational tone.
Moira held her breath as Wanda turned completely round and pointed with her posy of lilies of the valley.
‘That’s my mummy. She has a white hat on.’ For what seemed an eternity the two little girls stared fixedly at Moira.
‘. . . soberly, and in the fear of God,’ continued the vicar, as Sandy and Debbie gently turned them about face and put admonishing fingers to their lips.
Three and a half is too little to be a bridesmaid, Moira thought. She doesn’t understand. How can she understand. How can she understand, standing there in a yellow dress, with her hair tortured into a wobbly and unfamiliar top-knot?
‘. . . that if either of you know any impediment why ye may not be lawfully joined together in matrimony . . .’ droned the vicar, and there was a moment of uneasy silence.
Wanda stood experimentally on one leg, then on the other, then one hand crept up to pat gingerly the broad satin band wound round her upswept hair.
Don’t touch it! Moira almost screamed. If you touch it, it will fall down, and if it falls down, you’ll cry. And when Wanda cried, she cried in great shouting sobs, her mouth held wide open, and the tears flowing copiously down her cheeks and dripping off her pointed chin.
But the moment passed, and the vicar turned to the tall young man by Barbie’s side:
‘Stephen, wilt thou have this woman . . . ?’
Stephen’s back, sober in the borrowed morning suit, made his solemn promise in a deep voice, and now it was Barbie’s turn:
‘Barbara Mary, wilt thou have this man . . . ?’
Her reply was low, betraying her nervousness, and Moira sighed . . . How could Barbie promise to forsake all others, to keep in sickness and in health, at nineteen years of age? What did she know of marriage? Of life, if it came to that?
Only a few months, it seemed, out of secretarial college, and already earning a fantastic amount as a private secretary buying suits, handbags, expensive perfume, as though those things were all her right. And they were, for a long time to come yet . . . Stephen had another six months of studying, and they had gaily planned that Barbie would ‘keep’ him until he got his degree . . .
The sheer audacity of it all . . . and Moira, from the depths of her twenty-five-year-old wisdom, shook her head in genuine dismay.
Their plans were made, their future mapped out, or so they thought, but the best-laid plans had a habit of going wildly astray . . . She glanced down at her two young sons, engaged in
pulling revolting faces at each other.
The twins had dealt a blow, a double blow, to any plans that she and Martin had made during the months of their engagement.
So much for the books they had read. So much for all their wise discussions on ‘that side of marriage’ as Martin had called it.
‘Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?’ asked the vicar, and Uncle David took a step forward.
Moira saw her mother fumble for her handkerchief, and knew that she was seeing her husband in the place of her tall distinguished-looking brother. It seemed so long since her father had died; he was only a vague shadowy figure in her mind, and Barbie remembered him hardly at all.
Help my mother not to be too lonely when Barbie goes away, prayed Moira in an anxious, private little prayer.
She pretends to be so brave, so determinedly gay, talking about her women’s institute and her voluntary work at the hospital, but the evenings will be the worst, when Barbie’s quick footsteps no longer come clicking down the hall . . .
Please help my mother through the loneliness that will surely come . . .
She opened her eyes to see Stephen grimly forcing the ring over the knuckle of Barbie’s outstretched finger, then, hand in hand, and at a whispered command from the vicar, they knelt down together.
The two young bridesmaids exchanged a few pleasantries as they wobbled their way on to their knees, and Philip produced a stub of pencil from seemingly nowhere at all and began to draw the back view of an elephant in the margin of his hymn sheet. Moira, trying not to look, bowed her head in prayer.
Then Barbie and her Stephen were being pronounced man and wife, and the usually shy and diffident Stephen lifted the veil from his young wife’s face and kissed her tenderly.
Auntie Madge, a relative from the bridgegroom’s side, rose up from her hiding place behind the choir stalls and cleared her throat as Mr Hawkins gave her a few introductory chords. Wanda turned round, and Moira saw with alarm that the freckles on her pale skin stood out like brown moles.
‘You don’t think that she’s feeling sick?’ she was asking Martin as Auntie Madge’s soprano voice soared into ‘O Perfect Love’, and Stephen and Barbie walked up the chancel steps to kneel at the altar.
Auntie Madge had pinned three full-blown silk roses to the front of her wide-brimmed hat; roses that nodded as she sang. Her top notes were quavery now, and Paul and Philip shook with barely suppressed giggles. Moira looked down at the four bare knees, battle-scarred and scrubbed to an unfamiliar pinkness, and at Paul’s hand tenderly stroking the handkerchief rabbit’s ears.
‘Thanks be to goodness,’ whispered Martin as the solo came to an end and Auntie Madge sank out of sight again.
In his well-modulated voice the vicar pronounced the benediction, and Stephen’s father came forward, holding out his arm to Barbie’s mother with old-world gallantry. Stephen’s mother, stout and homely in her flowered two-piece, put her hand on the arm of a beaming Uncle David, and the procession passed into the vestry.
‘Thanks be to goodness,’ said Philip to Paul, and popped the sweet, now coated with grey fluff, back into his mouth. Martin patted Moira’s knee, then went to take up his position by the door.
Now it was all over, she felt almost weak with relief, and nodded her permission to the boys when they pleaded to go outside.
‘But walk slowly,’ Moira cautioned, and the two dark heads nodded, then charged up the aisle, the steel protectors on the heels of their shoes ringing metallically.
Mr Hawkins responded to some unseen signal and plunged into the ‘Wedding March’, and a radiant Barbie smiled shyly at her guests as she walked between them.
But Stephen had eyes for no one but his young wife.
Seeing that look, the tenderness and adoration in it, Moira’s heart steadied. Yes, they would be happy, as harassed and happy as she and Martin were. She knew that now.
And outside, the first thing she saw was Paul’s head appearing from behind a weathered stone cross, obviously sheltering from a hail of bullets fired at him by Philip balancing precariously on a moss-covered gravestone.
Wanda, holding out her yellow dress, posed for the photographer with all the aplomb of an experienced model, and Martin came up quietly behind her as she stood and watched.
‘You look very beautiful today. As beautiful as the bride,’ he whispered. And Moira felt the tears prick her eyelids again, for Martin was a practical kind of man, not given to making pretty speeches.
Contentedly she held on to her husband’s hand, and smiled at Barbie.
What a lot of happiness there was in store for Barbie and her Stephen. It was indeed a golden day, the first real day of spring, a day of beginnings, a day of daffodils . . .
The London Look
DAVID WASN’T PARTICULARLY enjoying himself at the party. It was, after all, one of a long succession of Saturday-night parties, and a surfeit of anything, even parties, can become a bore.
They were more or less the usual crowd. Thirty or more people jammed into a room designed to accommodate comfortably no more than a dozen.
Over in one corner, a boy with hair curling over the turtle-neck of his sweater was playing a guitar. Smoke from too many cigartettes curled upwards and hovered, like a nicotine-scented cloud.
Three broken glasses were piled neatly on top of a bookshelf, and by the window an earnest group discussed a new play.
‘Satire as such, and pursued so obviously, can be rather pathetic,’ an earnest girl, half hidden in an undergrowth of hair, was saying. ‘I know that nothing is sacred any more, but once the first shock has worn off, what have you left?’
‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing,’ said a sad-eyed, poetic-looking boy.
David sighed. Why did all the people he’d met since coming down to London from Yorkshire have to be so – so clever?
He wouldn’t have described himself as exactly illiterate; but being of a practical turn of mind, he realised that in the crowd he had found himself involved with, his engineering course was considered to be too mundane for words. It certainly didn’t fit him for their brittle, sophisticated kind of existence.
Nobody would be in the least interested, he knew, in the fact that he could diagnose a fault in any car engine with the same skill and devotion to detail that a fine surgeon would expend on any one of his patients.
He had faced up to the situation quite early in his first term at college. Unless you could hold forth on the imminent danger to the world of overpopulation; unless you had seen the latest play in town, and pretended to like it, even though it had left you unmoved, or even revolted, you just didn’t seem to fit in.
And take the girls . . . David scowled round the room at a few.
Graham, the art student with whom he shared a flat, seemed to be engrossed in the deepest of conversations with one of them. All the girls Graham had introduced him to, David reflected morosely, were as alike as paper dolls cut in a symmetrical frieze.
He could have drawn up a blueprint for all of them . . .
Slim figures, hair straight and sleek, pale, pale cheeks, and lips blotted out as far as he could see with colourless lipstick; eyes made up like a prima ballerina’s, and long lacy-clad legs emerging from short and sleeveless shifts, ranging in colour from mud to black. Or sweeping, floor-length models that looked like nighties.
Out of the corner of his right eye he could see Graham beckoning to him with increasing urgency. So, because he knew that socially he was a great disappointment to Graham, as it were, he elbowed his way towards him, trying to tread on the minimum of toes en route.
His friend’s eyebrows moved up and down once, and David interpreted it correctly, as, ‘Be a pal and take over. I have other fish to fry.’
‘Jenny,’ Graham said briefly, flapping a hand in the direction of the girl by his side. ‘David,’ he concluded, and his duty well done, he stepped backwards and merged into the crowd.
Making a mental note to give Graham a large chunk of his mind
the minute they got back to the flat, David smiled down at the girl and tried to think up a devastatingly witty opening remark.
Then something happened to his breathing. He suddenly felt as if he had been dealt a body-blow. This girl, staring up at him with brown eyes ringed around with the inevitable eye shadow, was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen in his life.
Moulded from the same old blueprint, of course, but startlingly, breathtakingly beautiful . . .
Brown hair with the soft lustre of Chinese silk. Flawless skin with the creamy tint of milky coffee. David knew, instinctively, that during the summer she would have been a nut-brown girl. Her mouth, wide and generous, showed unexpected dimples at its corners, as she smiled.
She wore a near-nightie (of course), but in a warm butterscotch shade that became her, and a pair of tiny gold earrings were matched by a gold bracelet encircling her slim wrist.
David, who could describe any car in detail after one swift glance, but to whom all girls looked alike, noticed all this in one sharp moment of time.
Jenny, a nut-brown girl. Little Jenny Wren, David found himself thinking, and being the most unpoetical of men, swallowed hard at the thought that with very little provocation he would have said it aloud.
‘Shall we get out of here?’ he said, that being the wittiest remark he could conjure up at that moment.
She leaned her head back against his shoulder, laughing softly. ‘You haven’t got a chip on your shoulder, have you? Oh, no – you have a whole forest of trees.’
He closed his eyes against the fragrance of her hair. Let her tease him as much as she liked, just as long as they could sit like this, close together on the window-seat.
‘It’s getting late,’ she was saying in her light little voice. ‘If you really want to take me home, we’d better start straight away – or I shall have to drive back with Bernard. I live three and a half miles from here.’
Merriment sparkled in her eyes, and she held out a slim foot wearing, as far as David could see, a shoe consisting of a series of thin brown straps. She gave a mock sigh.
