The Wedding Party

by H. E. Bates

‘Uncle Freddie was another dark horse. You’d never think he had it in him.’

  This blatant piece of observation wasn’t exactly a lie; it was just plain outrage. What was worse, she said it with an almost innocent lack of shame. It was exactly as if she were now trying to present Mr Benson not merely as the great angler but as the potential great lover, a Casanova, or something of that sort.

  It was small wonder Valerie winked at me. This time I didn’t wink back. Instead I was taken completely by surprise by seeing Aunt Leonora suddenly slit a perch up the belly with all the deftness of an extremely practised fishmonger. A moment later a cloud of blood filled the bowl and for a moment I thought Peggy would be sick.

  By now the morning was growing hot and it seemed to me an appropriate moment to test the temperature of the red-currant wine. I went to fetch a bottle from the lake. It was already beautifully cool but Aunt Leonora looked at it with a glare of dark disapprobation.

  ‘And who gave you permission to start on the wine?’

  ‘Uncle Freddie.’

  ‘Don’t fib.’

  I said I liked this. And added: ‘You, I suppose, don’t want any?’

  ‘Good grief, man, don’t be dim. And you’d better take a glass to Mr Benson. He certainly deserves it.’

  The two girls, I noticed, had retreated for a walk. Blood, scales, fins, tails and fish-gut were strewn everywhere. A strange, half-muddy, half-fishy odour hung on the air. I felt my appetite start to drift away.

  Farther down the lake Mr Benson’s luck, perhaps happily, had started to wane. He too was hot. Sweat was pouring from his brow and nose. Uncle Freddie greeted the sight of the wine with cries of relish and an enthusiastic: ‘Splendid thought, dear boy. Bless you. Absolute salvation.’

  Parched with excitement and thirst, Mr Benson sat on the bank and drank the wine in deep draughts, as if it had been mere rose-coloured water.

  ‘Any more fish?’ I said.

  Uncle Freddie said only two and not very large at that. They seemed, he thought, to be suddenly off feed. I said I would take them and a moment later started to carry away, in the keep-net, the brace of perch, not much more than tiddlers: so small indeed that half way to the camp fire, as much out of selfish regard for my appetite as a sense of pity, I dropped them quietly back into the lake.

  Gold spectacles dancing, her hands bloody as if from some messy sacrifice, Aunt Leonora demanded to know how the miraculous Mr Benson was faring now? His luck, I told her, had left him; the fish were suddenly off feed. This information, far from lowering Mr Benson in her eyes, merely seemed to elevate him further and she gave a half-ecstatic gasp and said:

  ‘He’s been marvellous. He’s saved the morning. Isn’t she lucky?’

  ‘Isn’t who lucky?’

  ‘That girl. Valerie.’

  ‘Good God, not Valerie. Anyway here they are coming back. For Heaven’s sake take a good look at them. Valerie’s the big golden one—’

  She wasn’t listening. Instead she was washing her hands of blood. When they were dry and clean again she laid a number of perch fillets, I think twelve or fourteen of them, side by side in the frying pan. They were a queer greenish mud colour, not at all unlike the colour of the frog I had seen jump into the lake, but she dabbed lavish lumps of butter all over them with something like reverent rapture.

  ‘Put more sticks on the fire. And where is the wine for Heaven’s sake? I suppose you men have been fairly slopping it down.’

  I put more wood on the fire; I said I would go to fetch the wine; and as I walked away I heard her call in shrill double command:

  ‘Girls! Start cutting bread. And call Uncle Freddie and dear Mr Benson. They’ve five minutes to get their hands washed. I’m cooking.’

  When I got back from fetching the wine and instructing Uncle Freddie and Mr Benson to get ready for lunch the strangest of odours filled the air. It floated everywhere with a sickly twang, a noisome compound of wood smoke, burning butter, drying mud and a fishmonger’s back-yard on a hot afternoon. There was also a monstrous sizzling to be heard as Aunt Leonora poked and turned the fish with an egg-slice.

  Valerie, I noticed, was vigorously making up her face and heavily spattering her bosom with perfume, but whatever scent she was using faded on the air like a delicate moth against a powerful flight of hornets. By contrast Peggy seemed shyer, quieter than ever and, I thought, awfully, ominously pale.

  Some minutes later Mr Benson and Uncle Freddie came slowly up the lake path, each carrying two bottles of wine. Ten yards from the fire Uncle Freddie suddenly stopped dead, said ‘Good God’ in an alarmingly loud voice and recoiled a good two feet from the pan of perch.

  ‘And what are you good-Godding about? You’ve washed your hands I hope? Sit yourselves down-we’re nearly ready.’

  ‘I mean it’s awfully hot – I mean the fire—’

  ‘Mr Benson, sit yourself next to Valerie. You,’ she said to me, ‘start pouring the wine. Don’t slack about so!’

  If I had any idea of doing anything about this shrill rebuke I was saved from the necessity of it by Uncle Freddie. With hands positively tottering and with the eagerness of a traveller at the end of some parching desert trek he was already pouring a large measure of wine for Mr Benson and an even larger one for himself.

  Mr Benson, I noticed, was ominously flushed. His normally pallid face was wreathed in a tipsy pinkish cloud. Aunt Leonora’s notions of taking him out of himself had succeeded so well indeed that he now seemed almost a stranger. His eyes had in them a moist groping glow and suddenly I saw him turn them on Peggy in a second, of fleeting, helpless appeal. She for her part could do nothing but appeal as mutely in return.

  In the smoky heat of that fishy, sombre midday Aunt Leonora suddenly gave a girlish shriek, said ‘Ready!’, brandished the sizzling frying pan and commanded all of us to sit down and fall to.

  For one awful moment I thought Mr Benson would fall. His legs seemed momentarily to totter under him. He ended by flopping heavily between Valerie and Peggy, most of his wine spilling on the way.

  All the time that monstrous canopy of muddy fishiness hung over us. And soon the fish itself was on our plates, greenish, gluey, glassy with hot butter. Then as we began to toy with it, some of us with politeness, some not, and most of us under heavy cover of bread, Aunt Leonora suddenly glared across at me from behind her dancing gold spectacles and demanded to know:

  ‘Well, how does it strike you?’

  In a low voice, from behind a hunk of bread, I simply said that it struck me.

  ‘Eh? What was that?’ Those charming big teeth of hers almost snapped at me. ‘Don’t mutter. I’ve told you before.’

  ‘Oh! the fish?’ I said. ‘Quite indescribable.’

  ‘What? How do you mean? Indescribable?’

  ‘Just indescribable.’

  She gave me one of those dark searching glowers of hers, at the same time masticating with blatant richness on a lump of perch, and then said:

  ‘Well, I won’t claim they have quite the finesse of those we had at Geneva – the waters are colder there anyway and that makes a difference – but I’ve had worse. I’ve had worse.’

  I was about to ask where? when she peremptorily accused Uncle Freddie of neglecting the wine.

  ‘Mr Benson’s glass is empty, isn’t it, Mr Benson? Disgraceful. If any man’s glass should be full it’s Mr Benson’s. Fill the dear man to the brim.’

  Mr Benson, who was in no position to know whether his glass was full or empty, gave a slight retching sound but otherwise made no reply. At the same time Uncle Freddie took an enormous swig of wine, gulped at some impossible lump of fish stuck in his throat, smacked his lips, and involuntarily belched aloud.

  ‘Freddie!’

  Peggy coughed weakly on a fish-bone. I hadn’t the heart to look at Valerie, nor she at me, but suddenly I felt the air to be full of desperation.

  ‘Oh! look at the swans, Aunt. And five cygnets.’

  She turned sharply to look at the
lake.

  ‘Swans? What swans? Where? I don’t see swans.’

  ‘Over there. No – not that way – farther up. By the island. You see the quince trees? Just beyond. You mustn’t miss them – they look like a bit of ballet.’

  Her nature, as well as being that of a schemer, is also an intensely curious one and she abruptly got up and walked over to the lake.

  In the interval of her being there I threw two buttery fillets over my shoulder, into a clump of cow parsley. Uncle Freddie solemnly wrapped two of his in a handkerchief. I saw Valerie slide one of hers under the table-cloth and for the second time within a few minutes drench her beautiful breast in perfume. She also winked at me and I, prompted by this, wrapped the remains of Peggy’s perch in a paper napkin. In return she had neither wink nor smile for me but instead was gazing at Mr Benson with a kind of remote and pained compassion. There were almost tears in her eyes.

  ‘What swans? You must be imagining things. I could see no swans.’

  ‘You were too late.’

  Before she could counter this Mr Benson staggered slowly to his feet.

  ‘Would you mind,’ he said, ‘if I just went for a little walk?’

  Flushed and tottering, he started to grope his way along the lakeside. He had scarcely gone twenty yards or so before Aunt Leonora, with that smile of divine triumph of hers, leaned over to Peggy, touched her lightly on the hand and said in a breath of almost secretive sweetness:

  ‘Go with him, dear. I think he needs your help.’

  As Peggy got up to go I could hear Mr Benson being horribly sick by the lakeside. At the first ghastly groan of his pain she broke into a cry and started running and for the rest of that sombre humid afternoon she sat under the shadow of a silver poplar, Mr Benson’s head in her lap, just occasionally shyly stroking his hair. And occasionally also, as Aunt Leonora looked with fond solicitude on the two of them, Aunt Leonora would give that charming, innocent toothy smile of hers and say something like:

  ‘You think they’re all right? They’ve had no food. You think we should take them a piece of pie? Perhaps not. Perhaps they’re best left together. When two people are together like that I don’t suppose they’re interested in food. No, let’s leave them. Perhaps they’ll have a zizz. Then they can have pie when they wake up. I thought the crust was so good today.’

  This triumph of divine end-shaping happened a long time ago. Mr Benson and Peggy are married now and once a year, on their wedding anniversary, Aunt Leonora always gives them a little dinner party, to which I too am invited. Always we drink red-currant wine and always, with that divine tactlessness of hers which so infuriates and fascinates, she serves one course of fish fried in butter. And always, half way through this course, I look up first at Peggy and then at Mr Benson and see on their two faces the same strange, lost, distant, groping look.

  It is exactly as if they had never met each other before.

  The Old Eternal

  Every year the elderly Miss Rigby and the slightly older Miss Pinkerton, affectionately known to each other as Spud and Pinkie, celebrated some part of Christmas by having a few glasses of port, a slice of plum cake and a wedge of Cheshire cheese in the old air-raid shelter that still stood, after so many years, under their bottom garden wall.

  ‘Sort of thanksgiving for what we got through at the time,’ they would explain.

  Late in the autumn, after the leaves of the pumpkins that always grew on the roof of the shelter had been blackened to sloppy pulp by the first frosts, Pinkie raked off the old dead vines, scrubbed down the interior corrugated iron with strong carbolic soap and opened the door for several days to give the shelter what she called ‘a bit of a sweetener’.

  Pinkie was small, very cherubic and fierily red in the face, with light blue eyes that protruded eagerly like little silver thimbles. After a few drops of what she called ‘the you know what’ she glowed hotly, with positively mustard-like excitement, and chattered with panting merriment, looking like a breathless Pekinese. In the household she rushed from object to object in sniffing and palpitating pursuit, as if everywhere seeking a hidden bone.

  Miss Rigby, Spud, was neither so active nor so lucky. She was big, slow, imperturbable and misshapen. Her face was so like a large discoloured potato that the name Spud really suited her. She suffered, among other things, from painful swellings of the legs, uneasy shortness of breath and false teeth that didn’t fit very well and continually got gummed together by pieces of marshmallow, her favourite sweetmeat. But these minor pains never discouraged her. She waddled everywhere with wheezy and jovial optimism, sometimes carrying large orange pumpkins about, nursing them in her arms like fat babies to which she had miraculously given birth.

  In the shelter all the antique paraphernalia of war-time – the war was so far away and yet sometimes seemed like only yesterday – was preserved as it had always been: stirrup pump and two buckets, one of water and one of sand, torch, candle in its holder, whistle and even a pair of gas-masks neatly hung in their khaki bags on the wall.

  A small square window, its glass of the kind that is reinforced with wire, gave out on to the garden, and here Spud and Pinkie sat on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, gazing at the damp earth outside, sipping port-wine and munching on cake and cheese.

  ‘We always seem to have good weather,’ Pinkie said. ‘Goodness knows what we’d do if it snowed.’

  ‘Of course you know what we’d do if it snowed,’ Spud said. ‘We’d sit here just the same. It would take more than that to put us off.’

  ‘I suppose so. I suppose so. I suppose it would, Spud dear.’

  ‘Do you remember how it snowed in 1940?’ Spud said. ‘We got snowed in and there were enormous drifts and we couldn’t get out again.’

  They laughed in chorus at this: Spud rather like a deep French horn, Pinkie like a cymbal.

  ‘And I blew so hard on the whistle to get Mr Ackerly to come and dig us out I thought I’d blow my teeth out,’ Spud said. ‘I always say that’s what first loosened them.’

  They laughed again at this and Pinkie poured more port. It didn’t seem like Christmas until they were well on with the port and they could hear the evening bells across the town. The candle always made a difference too and presently Spud said:

  ‘Let’s have the candle alight, shall we, Pinkie? I love the glow of the port in the candlelight.’

  ‘I’ll do it, Spud dear, I’ll do it. Don’t move.’

  In the candlelight it was not only the port that glowed. Pinkie glowed too, a fiery little cherub flashing silver thimble-eyes.

  ‘Funny how the candle all of a sudden makes it seem dark outside,’ she said. ‘And then you see that wonderful blue in the sky. And the first stars.’

  ‘They say the band will be coming this way on Christmas Eve this year,’ Spud said, ‘instead of Christmas morning.’

  ‘Oh! do they? I didn’t put their Christmas-box ready. You think I ought to pop back and get it in case they arrive?’

  ‘No, no. Sit still. We shall hear them when they come.’

  ‘You mean we will if we don’t drop off. You remember the year we both dropped off? And slept through that awful raid? Sound as babies. And everybody said how ghastly it was.’

  They laughed again at this stirring and hilarious memory and Pinkie poured out a further drop of port. War was awfully funny, really, depending on how you looked at it.

  ‘I don’t see it starting to rain, do I?’ Pinkie huffed on the little glass window and then rubbed it with the sleeve of her musquash coat and peered out. ‘No, I don’t think so.’ She champed on a piece of plum cake like an eager puppy. ‘I tell you what I do see. though. There’s somebody in the garden. Wandering around.’

  ‘Not the Angel Gabriel, is it?’ Spud said. ‘We don’t want him here. Not yet, anyway.’

  This was the signal for another jovial duet of laughter and then Pinkie opened the door of the shelter and called:

  ‘Hullo there. Who is it? Who’s about?’

/>   An answering voice called ‘Hullo there!’ and Pinkie said:

  ‘Oh! it’s you, Mr Ackerly. We’re in here. In the shelter.’

  ‘What’s come over him?’ Spud said. ‘He doesn’t usually call till Christmas Day. Everybody’s changing their habits.’

  ‘Come in, Mr Ackerly, if you can get in,’ Pinkie said. ‘Come and join us.’

  ‘Yes,’ Spud said, ‘come and join our happy throng.’

  Mr Ackerly, a tall stooping figure looking rather like a pessimistic giraffe with a bowler hat on, appeared from the outer gloom, carrying a bottle wrapped in tissue paper.

  ‘What a nice surprise,’ Spud said. ‘What brings you on Christmas Eve? You usually come tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh! I don’t know.’ Pessimism oozed out of Mr Ackerly like dark vapour; there was almost a cloud about the candle. ‘After all, there might not be a tomorrow.’

  ‘Now don’t start talking about The Bomb again,’ Spud said. ‘It’s Christmas Eve.’

  ‘No, no, not The Bomb, please,’ Pinkie said. ‘Have a drop of port. I’ll go and get another glass for you.’

  ‘Oh! I don’t know if I should—’

  ‘Oh! of course you should!’ Spud said. ‘Sit down. I don’t like you standing up. You’re so tall I feel you’ll lift our dear old shelter off its feet.’

  While Pinkie raced puppy-like across the garden to get another glass from the house, Mr Ackerly sat down and stared about him with increasing gloom. Our dear old shelter – did you ever hear anything like it? Heavens, it was awful. Whatever made them do it every year? Dear old shelter – there was a terrible monkish sort of odour about the place that repelled him. The mould of death lay on it – it really made him shudder.

  Candlelight always depressed him too, anyway. What with that and The Bomb it seemed a pretty desolate outlook, he thought, as he sat there staring at Spud, the trembling candle and all the silly, derelict paraphernalia of war-time. He couldn’t for the life of him fathom what made them do it. The future was bleak enough without dragging up the past.

  Cheerfully, actually humming a few bars of Christians Awake!, Pinkie came back from the house with a glass for Mr Ackerly.