The Quality Street Wedding

by Penny Thorpe

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  ‘He’s a good lad, is your Peter.’ It wasn’t a throwaway remark. Reenie’s father was shuffling from one foot to the other, turning his cap in his hands in front of him. He exchanged a glance with Mrs Calder which plainly said why don’t you tell her, you’re her mother?

  Reenie did not notice the silent battle of wills which was going on over her head between her parents because she was elbows deep in the cupboard underneath the Welsh dresser, rummaging for a length of string.

  ‘You could do a lot worse than your Peter,’ her father persisted with hesitant steps.

  ‘Did you ever doubt it?’ Reenie emerged triumphant with a shank of good cotton string and then caught a look between her parents. Something was afoot. ‘Am I missing something, Mother?’

  Mrs Calder pursed her lips at her husband in the universal signal of displeasure and then said to her daughter, ‘It’s just that we want to know if you’re thinking of setting a date right soon, you and Peter.’

  Reenie couldn’t imagine what had got into her parents, but she hoped that it passed right soon. ‘What? For announcing an engagement? I’ve said I don’t mind us having an understanding, but it’s a bit soon to be talking about properly announced engagements.’

  ‘Your mother didn’t want to ask you about engagements, she wanted to ask you about a date for a wedding.’ Mr Calder’s eyes were wide and earnest. This was a topic neither of her parents took lightly, and the realisation that they had planned to speak to her about it together – and without her siblings present – was now dawning on her.

  Reenie put down her string. ‘What do you want to go thinking about weddings for? There’s no hurry and neither of us are thinking of doing anything hasty. Peter said he didn’t mind us having a long engagement so’s I could stop on at Mack’s a while longer and make the most of my time in my job, and—’ Reenie stopped short and narrowed her eyes at her parents. ‘This isn’t because you think I’m in trouble, is it?’ She looked down at the fit of her dress, a little more irritated than self-conscious. ‘I’m not in trouble, I’ve just got a very healthy appetite!’

  ‘I know, love,’ Reenie’s mother was consoling, but at the same time casting accusing looks at her husband which plainly suggested that she thought this misunderstanding could have been avoided if he’d done a better job of saying the things which they had both agreed he ought to say. ‘It’s not that we think you’ve done anything wrong – quite the reverse – we think you’ve found yourself a lovely young man. It’s just that we think it would be a good idea if you set a date, perhaps early in the summer.’

  Reenie pulled back a chair and slowly lowered herself to the kitchen table, keeping her eyes all the while on both her parents. ‘Early in the summer? It’s spring now! You were the ones who said you wanted me at home and not in a boarding house in town—’

  ‘We’re not trying to get shot of you!’ Mr Calder was quick to interject. ‘We just don’t want you left with nothing, like my sisters!’

  ‘There’s war coming.’ Mrs Calder was nothing if not pragmatic. ‘We read the papers same as everyone else. They’re making munitions and the government’s talking about stockpiling food.’

  ‘When the war comes,’ Mr Calder said with obvious reluctance, ‘we don’t want you working in a factory. There were air raids with bombs during the last war, and now that aeroplanes are bigger they’ll only be worse this time. It was in the paper only last Christmas that they’d made it law that all factories have to have shelters in case they’re bombed with gas. Gas, Reenie! We think it would be safer if you weren’t at the factory. Perhaps now’s the time to think about setting a date for a wedding and giving up work at Mack’s.’

  A silence hung heavy in the air before Reenie asked, ‘What did you mean about my being left with nothing like your sisters? Neither of them worked in a factory, they were both on the farm.’

  ‘You know they both had young men who went off to fight and they were both dead set on long engagements. Wanted nothing hasty; wanted to wait until the war was over. Thought it would be over by Christmas. Both lads were killed and there was not a widow’s pension for either of them. Your Peter is a young man so he’ll be one of the first to be called up. Marry him now, lass, because you don’t know what tomorrow will bring. Your mother says have a summer wedding, but I remember the last war; I remember couples who clamoured at the register office and the parish church wanting to be wed, but who couldn’t get their names down for the queues. When war’s declared you might not be able to get anyone to marry you in time. I say do it now. We’ll pay for the licence and any bit o’ clothes you want, just don’t wait. There’s none of us know if there’ll be anything left to wait for.’

  Reenie felt tears sting her eyes. She had been blithely going on with her work and her busy social calendar and had never thought that she would be faced with a decision like this one. Of course she knew the sad story of her maiden aunts who had never married, and who would never marry, but she’d always thought of them as so different from herself. They were powerless spinsters to whom things happened, whereas Reenie would always have her get-up-and-go; Life didn’t happen to Reenie, Reenie happened to Life. The thought that a future like theirs was waiting for her, that she might be about to stumble into it, terrified her. But so did the thought of having her job taken away. She had never planned to go and have a career at Mack’s, the job had been an unexpected birthday present. But once she had it she realised she never wanted to be anywhere else or do anything else. The sense of belonging she felt, the sense that she has a talent that no one else had, and that it was being put to good use – it was too precious to explain.

  ‘There might not be a war.’ Reenie said it weakly, almost pleading with providence. She knew in her heart of hearts that the chances of peace were shrinking by the day.

  ‘If there’s no war, what have you lost?’ Her father was keen to emphasise that what they were suggesting was a good and happy thing. ‘Either way you gain a cracking good husband and they’re not easily come by. All right, you’re a bit on the young side, but only a year younger than your mother was when she married me.’ Mr Calder hesitated, then asked, ‘You do love him, don’t you, Reenie?’

  Reenie didn’t answer. It wasn’t an easy question for a seventeen-year-old.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  ‘Broadsheets are better for catching ball bearings; there’s more for them to stick to.’ Peter’s intriguing statement might have proved fertile ground for a conversation with Reenie about the romance of bicycle maintenance and repair, if it were not for Reenie’s failure to find enthusiasm for the mechanics of bicycles. It was uncharacteristic, in her case, because machines had always fascinated her, and bicycles were a kind of machine, but there was no teamwork about a bicycle and perhaps that was why, when faced with an evening of keeping Peter company while he poked cone-shaped tools at his wheels, Reenie chose to read a library book and eat a scone.

  ‘Mother’s baked Moggy for you.’ Reenie produced a sticky dark loaf sliced into thick, moist slabs, all wrapped up in cheesecloth. Her mother like to bake Moggy because she still thought it was funny that Peter had believed – when he first heard about it – that they were somehow baking the cat, not a wonderful sticky ginger cake. Reenie sat down on the edge of the wall for a long evening’s vigil while Peter covered the yard behind his boarding house in the greasy parts of his bicycle. She was staring intently at the open pages of her library book, but she was thinking seriously about the question her father had asked her.

  ‘How’s your mother?’ Peter asked, absentmindedly biting into the slice of Moggy he held in one hand, while rooting through his collection of tools with the other. He didn’t notice that Reenie hadn’t answered his question. She hadn’t been paying attention.

  One of the particular comforts of their early courtship had been the way their routines had slotted together. They were both in the privileged position of having their own modes of transportation – Reeni
e her horse and Peter his Raleigh bike – and the upkeep of both had rubbed along together. Peter’s Raleigh was new when he first met Reenie – an investment in his future by his parents when they sent him to Halifax to take up his career at Mackintosh’s – and because it was new it did not need quite so much maintenance as a well-used machine. Other girls frequently failed to understand the time that boys needed to invest in their cycles, but Reenie had her horse to tend to and it was companionable to brush Ruffian down in the stable while Peter cleaned his bicycle chain and they chatted away to one another. The shift in their relationship had been subtle at first, but now it was becoming more pronounced. Peter would need to cycle over to Reenie’s farm if he wanted to see her in the evenings, but he couldn’t if the bicycle needed a repair. Then there were the times he could come to her, but he wanted to do some unnecessary but enjoyable alteration to the bike, like swap out the gear set for a better one, or try a lighter set of pedals he had on approval, or check all the ball bearings in the wheel for wear before re-greasing them. On those evenings Reenie could ride out to him and sit in the back yard of his boarding house while he worked, but she’d have to bring her own sandwiches because Peter’s landlady wasn’t going to allow a female visitor to cross the threshold, let alone join them for dinner.

  In those early days, when they were fresh back from their Norwich factory adventure, they had been eager to criss-cross the valley for one another, with packed tea and a thermos to warm themselves. But time had wrought its changes; Peter needed to spend more time taking the bicycle apart at his boarding house and Reenie was more and more reluctant to ride into Halifax in the dark every evening (after she’d been home to change) just to sit in a cold yard, eating cold sandwiches. Like an old couple who don’t remember when they drifted into separate beds, or separate rooms, Reenie and Peter hadn’t noticed that they weren’t saying goodnight to each other any more.

  ‘My parents were asking after you.’ Peter sounded tentative; there was something he was holding back.

  ‘Oh, really? When did they write?’

  ‘They didn’t write this time, they asked me in their last letter to go down to the post office and have a telephone call with them. They’ve got a telephone at home now.’

  ‘How did it sound? Have they got a good line?’

  ‘Not bad. They’re sharing it with a neighbour who’s quite close by, so it’s a convenient one.’

  There was a silence. In the old days their silences had been comfortable, easy, contented. Now these silences were hard work sometimes.

  ‘Reenie, my mother would like me to think about making some plans for if there’s a war.’

  Reenie bristled: had her parents written to his? ‘Do you mean about what you’d do in an air raid?’

  ‘No.’ The silence was long until Peter himself broke it. ‘They want me to go to Sandhurst; they want me to go for an officer.’

  ‘Do you want to go?’

  ‘No. But I don’t want there to be a war either and we’ve got to make the best of what is. They think if I go for an officer now I’ll be well into a career when war starts and I’ll be in less danger.’

  ‘What do you mean “now”? You don’t mean soon, do you?’

  ‘When do you think you would like to be married, Reenie?’ It was a tentative question, heavy with the fear of rejection, but heavy too with that sense that they had lost the closeness they once had; he couldn’t read her thoughts any more.

  ‘We talked about this not long since.’

  ‘We talked about it six months ago and you said you wanted a long engagement. Six months is long.’

  ‘We’re not engaged yet, though. We’ve got an understanding, but—’

  ‘If this isn’t an engagement – if this isn’t the waiting part – then when does the waiting start? How long will it be?’

  ‘What’s put this in your head all of a sudden?’

  ‘It’s always in my head – isn’t it in yours?’

  ‘We’re very young, Peter. Are you saying all this because you think that if we marry your parents won’t make you go for a soldier? You’re old enough to tell them yourself—’

  ‘No, Reenie, I want to take you with me! If we marry now we won’t have to be separated, but if we don’t marry before I go, then …’

  ‘First you want to go off to Spain to fight the fascists and face near-certain death, and now you want to be an officer so’s you don’t have to fight. Make up your mind, Peter, do you want to fight or not?’

  ‘Not with you, but it does feel a lot like we’re fighting! If you must know, my parents made me realise how selfish I was being by not making provision for you now, so I’m doing this for you. If the worst happens and we’re not married—’

  ‘Have you been talking to my parents about this?’

  ‘No, of course not, I just—’

  ‘You might not have to fight! You’re making all kinds of assumptions about what might happen, but you don’t know anything at all! If it’s anything like the last war they’ll have reserved occupations and you’ll probably spend the whole time in the factory as a fire marshal. Throwing up your job at Mack’s and going for a soldier is—’

  ‘It’s Mack’s, isn’t it? You don’t want to leave Mack’s and you know you’d be out on your ear if we married. That’s why you’re hanging on for a long engagement. You’re choosing the job over me!’

  Reenie wanted to argue with him – but she knew in her heart of hearts he was right.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  When Dolly Dunkley next saw Percy Palgrave it was in the visitor’s reception of the Mackintosh’s toffee factory. Percy had arranged himself another VIP tour of the factory and this time Mrs Starbeck had encouraged Dolly to show him around.

  ‘This is where we make the Caramel Cups,’ Dolly said proudly as they stood on the viewing balcony above the Mint Cracknel line, the menthol from the vats of hot melted sugar stinging the eyes of the tour guide who accompanied them, and who had long since stopped giving any commentary.

  ‘My goodness me,’ Palgrave chuckled, ‘what a lot of funny little people! They look miniature from all the way up here. And what are those ones up to?’ Percy pointed towards some men who were cutting fingers of soft, glistening, minty sugar with rotating blades, ready to separate the pieces and slide them along a conveyer under an enrobing curtain of hazelnut-brown liquid chocolate.

  ‘Oh,’ Dolly shrugged noncommittally, ‘they’re just on some cleaning duty or other, you can ignore them. The next room is the best.’ Dolly led him on to the experimental line where she’d heard rumours of an exotic spider on the loose. ‘This is the most dangerous room to work in at the entire Mackintosh’s factory. They handle nuts and fruits and things from tropical countries and sometimes there are dangerous animals in them. They had a scorpion attack a worker recently.’

  At this the tour guide had to intervene. ‘I think you’ll find it was a child’s toy which someone mistook for a—’

  ‘Oh no, miss, I’m quite sure your colleague here knows what she’s talking about.’ Percy’s patronising tones silenced the tour guide immediately. ‘Miss Dunkley, like myself, has a wider experience of the world than just Halifax. We both know scorpions when we see them.’

  Percy Palgrave had given Dolly the impression of sophistication and wealth from the very first. He’d talked dismissively about Halifax and had said he was only there with his mother on sufferance because his London club was closed for cleaning.

  To Dolly, a native of nurturing Halifax, this was proof of good breeding: someone who scorned the rest of the nation in favour of the capital. ‘I expect you see a lot of scorpions when you’re away in Burma,’ she said now.

  Percy leant close enough to Dolly to whisper in her ear, ‘Bit rum having this guide girly tailing us everywhere. It’s like being followed around by a footman!’

  ‘Well, you’d know about having footmen,’ Dolly sniggered.

  Percy had talked about the cheapness of servants in Burma
and the luxuries colonial life could afford for an enterprising young man, had spoken also of his own distaste for a career in his own land. In short, he boasted and whinged constantly and Dolly found it intoxicating. Percy Palgrave was not a man of very much charm, but he had just enough of it to make his griping sound like the boastfulness of the better off and this was Dolly’s language.

  They moved on to the tin-making section, where men and women with calloused hands flicked gigantic sheets of painted metal into cutting and shaping machines as if they were no more trouble than the centre pages of a tabloid. The sound of billowing tin was terrific and an outsider could have been forgiven for thinking they were hearing thunder. A man on the shop floor, with age-weathered cheeks and creased brow, pulled a length of shining tin towards him which was at least eight feet long and made a singing noise like a musical saw as he ran an oiled rag down its edge.

  ‘Plum-looking job, that.’ Percy waved in the direction of the man who had mastered metal in his youth. ‘Money for nothing, moving around scraps of tin all day. He ought to try my job for a spell, then he’d know what hard work really was, I can tell you.’

  A brighter girl than Dolly might have noted that Percy had not mentioned any servants of his own when he talked about their cheapness where he lived; he didn’t mention experiencing any of the luxuries of colonial life himself; and – crucially – he didn’t mention the name of this London club which was so conspicuously ‘closed for cleaning’ at a time when it would be in much use. Dolly had always been a girl who could avoid facts which were inconvenient to her immediate desires, and in Percy she had found a wealth of inconveniences to ignore.

  ‘You know, I’ve always been terribly, terribly interested in Burma.’ Dolly had little experience of successful flirting, so she attempted the only topic she could think of as they moved from the racket of the tin-making room to the relative peace of the factory corridor beyond.