by Angela Huth
‘I feel a bastard taking you away from them,’ said the professor. Virginia laughed. Now it was over, now they were out of the gates, she felt better.
‘You were marvellous with them,’ she said. ‘You didn’t let me down.’
‘You wait, my love, you wait,’ he joked. ‘My God, marriage is a state of perpetual crisis, didn’t you know that? Sometimes one is not always strong enough to deal with it in the best way.’ He saw a look of fear flinch in Virginia’s eyes. ‘No – for heaven’s sake. I was exaggerating. With you, it will all be calm and peaceful. At least, mostly. Won’t it?’
‘I hope so.’ said Virginia.
Before the train left, in the carriage, the professor told her he loved her considerably more this afternoon, if that was possible. Other people’s appreciation of her had added to his own. He was impatient for the week they had left to go by.
‘I want you, my love,’ he said, ‘profoundly.’
Nevertheless, when his train had gone, Virginia went to the station waiting-room and began him one more letter.
Oh my dear love – we can’t, we can’t, we can’t. I don’t believe we should …
But she knew that there was no point in going on, that she would never send it.
Instead of taking the bus, she walked home. On the way she planned her escape: London to-night by train. The Golden Arrow to Paris – her passport was in order. Then, the first train south. On to Italy, Greece, Turkey. She had saved enough money. She would send postcards to say no one was to worry. The professor would forget her. In a year, she might return. Find a new life. If she had the courage to carry out this decision, she might be rewarded.
At home she found her mother, still in her Speech Day hat, in the kitchen making curry.
‘I’m doing your father’s favourite,’ she explained, in a more subdued tone than she had used for several weeks. ‘Poor Ted. I don’t know what’s wrong with him. He’s been quite down, not at all himself lately. When they gave you those flowers and cheered you like that he became quite tearful. I’ve never seen him like that before. So I thought he’d like a curry again. I haven’t had much time lately, have I? – Here, would you peel me a few apples?’
Virginia went obediently to the sink. She wondered at what point during the evening she could escape to get her things together, and how she would word the letter that explained her departure.
The day of the wedding was, as Mr Fly pointed out, a very average day for mid-July. The sky was a taut blue, and a few spongy white clouds, hesitant to cross the sun’s face and cast shadows on the proceedings, hovered above the line of trees. The air smelt of flowers – not from the flower beds, which were nothing but thin lines of crumbled grey earth this year, due to Mr Fly’s numerous weekend visits to the new friend in Hastings, but from the pedestal vases feathered with great blooms that stood snootily in the marquee. This contraption had been put up some nights before. Virginia resented its presence. It meant that from her bedroom she could no longer see the garden. The tent’s canvas spine and sloping sides blotted out the familiar view. And in the last few days she had felt a desperate need for familiarity.
But, everywhere, it had almost disappeared. The sense of the strangeness of the house increased from day to day, culminating in the morning of the wedding. The dining-room, at breakfast, was darkened by the marquee. Most of the furniture had been moved out of the sitting-room. The hall and kitchen smelt of cheese fingers. Mrs Fly wore an apron, slippers, and no stockings while she busied about giving orders to Mrs Thompson. Men in white coats came in and out carrying trays of petits fours. Mr Fly wandered up and down the side of the marquee, testing the guy ropes with both hands. He expressed a sudden and unusual concern about the strips of gritty earth that he called his flower beds: hoped too many people wouldn’t stand upon them. Mrs Fly’s hopes were that Caroline would manage to come, for Virginia’s sake, and the caterers had spelt the professor’s name correctly on the cake. Virginia, unable to think of anything useful to do, counted the bridge rolls smeared with mashed sardine.
Mid-morning, she found a small, fat, bald-headed man looking bewildered in the hall. He introduced himself: Inigo Schrub, best man. Of course. Virginia remembered him from their brief meeting at the professor’s lecture. He had studied music with Hans in Vienna. Now, he was first violin in a Midland orchestra. He smiled, his eyes magnifying uncannily behind his thick glasses.
‘I wondered – I don’t really know my duties – but would it be in order to take the bride for a drink?’
Virginia accepted gratefully. Anything to get out of the house.
They walked a quarter of a mile to the nearest pub. Inigo seemed slightly out of breath: walking and talking at the same time was not easy for him.
‘Hans, my old friend, is a lucky man indeed,’ he gasped. ‘He deserves so delicious a woman. He deserves after all these years an admirable wife.’
‘Then he shouldn’t be marrying me,’ Virginia heard herself saying. ‘I’m not at all the right person for him. I’ll be a dreadful wife. I’m too – set in my ways. I can’t explain. I just know we’re making a mistake.’ For a fleeting moment she had a feeling this stranger would understand, even rescue her. ‘Can’t you tell him, even now? You’re his best friend. It’s not too late. We could put it off. We shouldn’t go through with it. Really.’
‘My dear girl, pre-wedding nerves. I know just how you feel.’ He patted her arm, a million miles away. ‘What you need is a drink. It’s always the bride who suffers before the wedding. Here, what shall I get you?’
As she didn’t answer, he bought her brandy and they sat at a tin table under a small awning advertising beer.
‘There, now, you look very pale. You shouldn’t have worked yourself up into such a state.’ A friendly, caricature grandfather, he was. ‘Hans wouldn’t make a decision about marriage unless he knew what he was doing.’
‘He knows what he’s doing. He doesn’t know what I’m doing, that’s the point,’ Virginia’s voice was very high.
‘My dear Virginia, you are very young.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Compared with Hans.’
‘Oh, compared with Hans, I suppose. But what has that to do with anything?’ She sighed, suddenly very weary. Inigo, completely at loss how to help her, drummed his knuckles on the tin table top.
‘It will work out all right, you’ll see. It’s the shock of the plunge, I expect, after waiting some years of your life. You know how reality is. It always shatters illusion in the most cruel way. In a most devastatingly cruel way.’ He shook his large round head from side to side. Balls of sweat ran from his temples to his puffed out cheeks. ‘But that is what we’re here for. That is our function – to live with the reality and bury the dreams, no matter how long we’ve lived with them … There, I’m preaching. I apologise.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Virginia, shyly, ashamed. ‘I’m being very hysterical. Put it down to nerves, as you said. Nonetheless,’ she added, then paused for a moment. ‘Nonetheless, I’m convinced I’m doing the wrong thing.’
‘My dear girl, no more of this talk.’ Inigo sounded almost impatient, then noticed her eyes. ‘Why are you appealing to me? How can I help you? The marriage is in two hours. You must think of my friend Hans. Don’t you think that to let him down now would be a grave injustice?’
Virginia raised her head and smiled at him, self-mockingly.
‘Hans, luckily, is not very concerned with my past. I don’t think he knows or cares that I have never loved anyone. He doesn’t know that I was raped by an American penfriend, for example, or went to bed with a man I had great stupid hopes for, only to be turned out by his wife.’
Inigo Schrub coughed, confused. The copper colour of his face deepened.
‘These are dramatic situations …’ His voice trailed away. Virginia was no longer listening.
‘You wait till you see my wedding dress,’ she was saying. ‘Funny, but even over that I gave in in the end. It was always easier,
for peace and quiet, not to resist my mother. Not to argue.
‘My father and I always supported each other,’ she went on, ‘but he had these ridiculously high hopes for me. I never won anything at school, except for art. It would have made him the happiest man in the world if I’d been the sort of girl who won prizes. I let him down over and over again. He was brave about it, but disappointed. So when he suggested I should become a teacher, I agreed. I didn’t want to. I wanted to paint. But my decision pleased him so much, I couldn’t go back on it. He deserved something, didn’t he? It wasn’t such a dreadful sacrifice, after all his support. It was easier.
‘Believe me,’ she added, ‘I must have been an awful child. Goody Goody they called me at school. Goody Ginny Goody. I used to make devilish plans to provoke them into liking me. They all failed .. Perhaps I was shy and awkward, more so than I realised. I know I was plain. Anyhow, I gave up a certain amount of hope.’
‘You could never have been plain,’ interrupted Inigo Schrub. The top of the table was warm under Virginia’s flattened palms. She twitched one of her hands slightly, so that the shaft of sun on her knuckles was forced to slide down the long slopes of her fingers.
‘Instead, I settled for anticipation,’ she went on, ‘Much better. You can thrive, you know, anticipating on small things you’re sure will happen. That’s far less gloomy than hoping for bigger things that may never come about.’ Virginia spoke so softly that Inigo Schrub had to bend his head to hear. She narrowed her eyes. The midday sun was hard.
‘You can watch yourself from a long way off, for many years – maybe all your life,’ she continued. ‘You can see your pathetic gestures, know what you are doing wrong. And yet you’re powerless to change your actions. You may hate yourself for your inability, but still you remain powerless.’
‘You watch yourself become crushed, then,’ observed Inigo. He signalled for more drinks. Virginia’s glass had been empty for some time.
‘Quite,’ she agreed, seeming to realise his presence again, ‘though in my case I fitted in, rather than became crushed. Fitting in is easy, once you have the knack. It becomes the simplest way of life. People like you for it. You’re no trouble. But they don’t love you for it.’
‘Then you will be submerged.’ Inigo Schrub suddenly banged his fist on the table top, making it echo. ‘You have no right to watch yourself drown.’
‘I have little alternative, Mr Schrub. I have no pity for myself, only a certain dread for our future, the professor’s and mine.’
Inigo’s body, almost as wide as the table top, seemed to have sunk down.
‘You will resist, believe me,’ he said. Virginia drank her second brandy with thirst.
‘I doubt my resistance,’ she said.
‘If our whole life were not cast about with such doubts, then certainty itself would be of no value. As it is, believe me, please, you can be certain of Hans’s devotion to you. And don’t deride yourself too far. You have such affection to give …’ He petered out once more, embarrassing himself by his display of conviction. To detract from his confusion, he looked at his watch and suggested they should go. After all, there was no more to say.
On the way back, what with the sun and the brandy, and Inigo’s guttural voice, so similar to the professor’s, and his fat supporting arm, Virginia felt quite strong.
She and Inigo joked about the preposterous events of the afternoon ahead, and even laughed.
After an attempt to eat a small lunch – no one tried very hard – Mr and Mrs Fly, Mrs Thompson (who had installed herself a week before to help) and Virginia went to their separate rooms, watches synchronised.
Virginia sat on her bed wondering what to do first. Under the candlewick bedspread she could feel the squares of folded blankets: her bed as it used to be no longer. It was very hot in the room, in spite of two open windows. Breezeless. Through the canvas of the marquee came the voices of people shouting orders.
Her case was packed, open. Only the things for her face and hair on the dressing-table. The dress – a horrible compromise of a dress – hung outside the cupboard. Virginia had refused the stark white, long satin her mother had longed for. But she had eventually agreed not to wear floppy crêpe of brightly coloured flowers. The compromise was a pink taffeta thing (’salmon’s blush,’ Mrs Thompson called it, meaning it as a compliment) of indeterminate shape. In a hundred years’ time, found in an attic, it would be hard to place the decade it belonged to. Pink satin shoes to match, toes demurely touching under the cupboard. And the hat, shimmering on its stand: a bundle of pink flowers whose petals sprouted forth a paler pink veil. If it hadn’t been so awful, it would have been funny, Virginia thought.
A knock on the door. Mrs Fly and Mrs Thompson, together. Mrs Thompson seemed to have powdered her face with flour. Blue feathers from her head cascaded down one cheek. Already they were becoming floury. Mrs Fly was a shock of emerald green. Nylon gloves covered her elbows, each one done up with fifty pearl buttons. The wedges of her arms, between the top of her violent gloves and capped sleeves, were rough with nervous goose pimples. Mascara and lipstick, both smudged, blurred her mouth and eyes.
They stood, side by side, in the door.
‘Oh, Ginny. Not ready yet?’ Mrs Fly took a small step forward. ‘Your father’s expecting you down in twenty minutes. Don’t keep him waiting, will you?’ She paused. ‘May I kiss you?’
Virginia stood.
‘If you like,’ she said. Mrs Thompson, too, took her chance to peck at the offered cheek. They both patted her, said stupid things in difficult voices, and left.
Alone again, Virginia sat at her dressing-table and brushed her hair. The curls which had been put in yesterday had fallen out over night, leaving it straggly with ill-formed waves. Her face was chalky white. She burnished it with rouge, and greased her dry lips to make them shine.
Dressed, she looked at herself in the small mirror once more. The pink bodice of her dress shone up into her translucent face. It caused a nasty reflection. The petal hat rested uneasily and uncomfortably on her disappointing hair, and the satin shoes already hurt her feet.
With a calm hand, quite resigned, she pulled the salmon veil down over her face. She thought, suddenly, of Inigo Schrub.
‘Virginia Fly is drowning,’ she said to herself, out loud. She dabbed her wrists with scent, ran both hands very fast along the candlewick bedspread, so that they were left tingling for several moments, and went to the door.
Downstairs, her father, in hired morning suit, paced up and down the cheese-straw smelling hall. At the sight of her on the stairs he smiled. Neither of them spoke.
In the large black hired car, its seats covered in soft material, the air smelt of a previous hirer’s cigar. There was a space of grey seat between them; Mr Fly laid his hand there. Virginia covered it with hers. It felt strangely different – curiously smooth. Looking down, her glance hidden by her veil, Virginia saw her father had shaved his knuckles. Quickly, she withdrew her hand.
They drove to the church with appalling slowness.
‘I’ve been averaging it out, several evenings this week, in the mini, so as I could tell the driver exactly how long …’ Mr Fly began. His voice petered out. He put out a clenched knuckle as if to tap the window that divided them from the driver, but withdrew it.
At the gates of the Victorian church, its red brick a sour colour in the vivid sun, a small crowd craned and murmured. Stepping from the car, Virginia felt very cold. Her father supported her with shaking hand. They took small steps up the bright pathway. Virginia was conscious that her ankle bones clacked together.
They reached the porch of the church, stony cool and dark after the sun. Through the open door, they could see the multi-coloured litter of hats and backs fixed to the pews. Compelled by some strange instinct – a compliment to past closeness, perhaps – a mass of small heads at once strained round to try to see Virginia. All my pupils, she thought. The words went through her head like beads. Then, breaking the spell
, she saw her mother raise her arm to point out something to Mrs Thompson. The spine of pearl buttons flashed on her dreadful green glove.
At the altar, stiff waxy flowers were arranged top-heavily on pedestals, their pale petals chequered with garish lights from the stained-glass window. Beside, and almost under one of them, Inigo Schrub, his fat back strained into a small black coat, stood to attention. The professor’s grey head was lowered towards his. He whispered something. But the best man did not respond. On one of his trouser legs his fingers drummed in time to the ponderous Bach.
When the music came to an end, at some sign invisible to Virginia, the congregation rose with a unanimous clatter strangely noisy for people in such light summer things. For one moment they were silent. Virginia’s hand crept to the stomach of her dress. Protected by her bouquet of salmon pink carnations cast in fern, she scratched.
Love Divine, all loves excelling,
Joy of Heav’n, to earth come down…
The hymn had begun. Faces turned. Singing mouths paused, open, as the eyes looked. Virginia felt herself move. Suddenly she was in the aisle, her father beside her. Within a few paces, Mr Fly found himself out of step. Thus, in uneasy tandem, they approached the hideous altar where the professor waited for Virginia to become his wife.
For
Patricia Strachan
my sister
First published in Great Britain by William Collins & Sons 2011
Copyright © Angela Huth 2011
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
The moral right of the author has been asserted.