by A. S. Byatt
Bill peered furtively round the door and then made a little dash in. Alexander was at a loss; he enquired if he should find Winifred, or Daniel and Stephanie. Bill said no, no, he was simply putting in an appearance, and an appearance, simply, was all he wanted to put in. He would creep about the peripheries, Alexander need not bother. Alexander did bother. He attracted a waitress, with a tray.
“That’s right,” said Bill. “Have one of my drinks, do. I do foot the bill. They are determined to confine my activities to that useful function. Very wise, no doubt. Which of us is going to make the speech as Bride’s Father or Close Friend of the Family? Have you prepared a few notes? I hoped you’d have gone so far. I shall leave it all in your capable hands. I detest speech-making. I shall enjoy listening to you deputising for me. It will amuse me. Now you go and mingle and I’ll go and wander up and down. Please don’t worry about me.” He swallowed a glass of wine, took another, and hurried away, his hat dangling now on the back of his head, looking distinctly tripperish.
“Hell,” said Alexander, and discovered Frederica, standing near the mock orange. He was almost pleased to see her.
“I found your father in the churchyard.”
“So I see. I expect he’d got all there was to get out of not being around, so now he’s going to try being around. You should have locked him in the vestry or something.”
“I don’t quite understand if he wants to make a speech.”
“Well, he will, if he does, and he won’t, if that would be worse, and there’s nothing to do about that. If I were you I’d keep out of his way and drink rather a lot.”
Alexander found another waitress to refill both their glasses. Stephanie could be seen, somewhat plumply flowing between the guests.
“I hope nothing spoils it for her. She seems so happy.”
“Do you think so?” sharply.
“Don’t you?”
“How do you tell? I know he’s being awful, but basically he’s got a point. What’s in that world, for her?”
“I like Daniel.”
“Oh, I like Daniel, I suppose. Daniel’s O.K. In some ways. But I don’t see how she can think she knows him.”
“Maybe knowledge, as such, isn’t necessary to love.”
“Love,” said Frederica. “Love. She was in love with you until just a few weeks ago, as far as love goes. And then this.”
Alexander involuntarily turned to stare at the bride, now bending again over Daniel’s little Mum, holding the veil from her face with a self-consciously ringed hand. She looked suddenly very secret and interesting. He remembered spanning her waist that morning. Frederica watched him watch Stephanie. He said, “That’s nonsense. She really barely knows me …”
“You’ve just said yourself knowledge isn’t necessary. She thought hard enough, anyway. You were a great topic of conversation. And speculation. And passion. If thinking had had anything to do with knowing you’d be scanned through and through.”
Alexander felt stupid and, as she had meant him to, uneasy. Frederica said, “You were a beautiful hopeless passion. She’s very shy. And you didn’t notice.”
“No. I didn’t, I must say.”
“You wouldn’t,” said Frederica, with great finality. Alexander was needled by her manner, which had become very faintly patronising towards the end of this exchange. He had a quick-come, quick-gone mental flash of the two of them, earnestly, head to head one evening, talking him out of shape. He drew himself up and together and looked down on Frederica. She gave a little grin.
“Anyway, it settled something for me,” she said.
“What did?”
“That service. I can’t do it. I couldn’t ever go through that myself. All very well, with my body I thee worship, but St Paul I can’t stomach. I was struck by how mad I was getting. I don’t want to be loved because a man loves his own body, that’s ridiculous. And all this about Christ and the Spouse. Can you see any point in that? This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the Church. And all this about submission like the body to the head. It’s horrible. It’s degrading.”
“You must have some historical …”
“I have, I have, but I’ve also got a respect for words and up with those I will not personally put. Saying ‘obey’ is the least of it. I even might obey, but I’m not having those analogies said over my body, dead or living.”
“You are very vehement.”
“I know. I surprise myself. Let’s talk about something else.”
Stephanie moved amongst the guests, thanking people for things. Her gift of recall came into its own: she could see each salad bowl, teaspoon and towel, and frame appropriately detailed gratitude. Suddenly, at a distance, she caught sight of her father, in his horrid clothes, peering between Daniel’s youth club boys. She waved. He ostentatiously pretended not to see. She took a few steps and waved again. He began to dodge away towards the gate, behind bushes and clusters of people. Unthinking, she caught up loops of white dress in her fists and began to run, scudding across the grass, bundled and floating. The sun suddenly flowed out from behind a racing cloud. People laughed as she passed them, as though some primitive festal act was taking place. Bill dodged back behind the tump on which the tables were. Stephanie, her face stiff with alarm, took a leap up the tump, and clashed down, veiling floating up, hanging a moment, sinking lightly.
“Stop,” she said. Bill stopped, and faced her, but said nothing. Then he began to inch away again. Involuntarily, she said, “Oh, don’t go.”
“I’m not officially here. I’m only putting in an appearance.”
“Please don’t go.”
“I can’t say I feel very welcome. I can’t say I feel exactly at home.”
“We were very glad of the cheque.”
“I do what I can do.”
“It was very generous.”
“I wouldn’t like to be ungenerous.”
“Well, please stay, come and see Mother … Daniel … now you’ve …”
“I only wanted to see what had been done with my resources.”
Even he looked alarmed then, at the ungraciousness he achieved with this last sentence. He scrubbed with his veldtschoen in the gravel path. He had a wooden look, a marionette jerked by clumsy powers. She thought she might step forward and kiss him, and was prevented by a very clear mental image of him pushing her fiercely over in the grass and dodging away again.
“Oh, why are you like this?”
“I feel,” he said. “I feel …”
Daniel came over the hump and stepped heavily down. Bill jerked to life, staring shiftily as though confronted by a policeman about to make an arrest.
“Glad to see you,” said Daniel, briefly.
“I’m sure,” said Bill. “I was just off. I only just looked in, just to … I’m not really here. I’ll go.”
“You are here,” said Daniel. “We see you. They want to cut the cake. Will you come?”
“I have no part in this.”
Daniel felt murderous. He wanted to take up Bill Potter and grind his head, panama and all, into the gravel. He received a hot gust of impotent passion from the figure in the path: if it had been to do with himself, he would have left him there. He said, “Please come. We want you to come.”
Bill opened and closed his mouth like a nutcracker. Daniel said: “Stephanie,” and began to walk steadily back up the hill. He would have taken her hand, but he sensed that the proprietary gesture would have puffed wind into the flames. She turned to Bill, her face crumpling.
“You are my first-born,” said Bill, emotionally, fiercely, with self-directed sorrow. “After all.”
“Please,” she said dutifully, “Please.”
Together they ascended the hummock, and together the three of them stood by the cake, between the hissing urns. From that small eminence Bill peered at the coalescing half-moon of guests with a cross between rage and hobgoblin glee.
“Don’t mind me,” he said to Alexander, who was there, glass i
n hand, to propose the toast, “I am not really here, I am just looking in. I look forward to hearing your few words. Don’t let me delay them.”
Alexander spoke briefly and gracefully. Inhibited by Bill’s presence he stumbled over the reasons for his own participation in this ceremony. He spoke a few words of admiration for Daniel’s work, and a few about Stephanie’s wisdom and beauty. He compared the bride to a white rose. He raised his glass, pale gold liquid slanting in it, and felt the pleasurable trouble stirred by the confidences Frederica had imposed on him. He quoted Spenser’s epithalamium, clear and florid. This in its turn moved in him his Tennysonian passion of the past, the sense of other moments of vanished perfection, or translation. He spoke of the pleasurable conjunction of tears and laughter. He asked everyone to drink to the happy couple.
The form was for Daniel to reply. He had indeed eased a postcard of notes from a breast-pocket. But Bill Potter stepped out between the urns, hat and shoulders back, slewing the blue trousers round on his hips, to announce his intention of adding just a word or two to what his colleague had very eloquently said. He was not, as they might know, officially there at all, but a few words of unofficial good will might just be acceptable. He referred to his colleague’s white rose. He said it was hard for him to believe that this vision of delight was his daughter who seemed to himself hardly out of the days of sticky fingers, uncertain elastic, and grubby serge knickers. He waited for laughter. He described his little girl trotting off to school under a tucked-up blazer and a battered satchel. He quoted her school reports, interpreting these. “A valuable member of the community” meant an orthodox slave-driving prefect – well, she would need that, where she was going. “Undoubtedly gifted when her interest could be engaged” meant pig-headed, frequently lazy, but with a head on her shoulders. Well, that head had got her to Cambridge. In due course she had swopped the serge knickers, sugared petticoats, and the devoted inky slaves for a string of besotted, indistinguishably solemn young men who were given to “just dropping in” at Blesford Ride on their way from Bristol to Cambridge, or some equally circuitous trip. (He thought she had found time to put in an appearance or two at the Library.) He had never managed to identify one young man before he had been replaced by the next. And now there was Daniel – for whom it could at the least be said that he was identifiable, by indubitable signs. He trusted Daniel would be happy. He hoped it was hardly necessary to warn him that the child was mother to the woman, and that whatever Daniel’s Church might say about obedience, he had personally found his daughter to be rather an irresistible force on matters where her excellent mind was fixed. But then, there was evidence that Daniel was an immovable object. He wished them happy, he was sure.
It was generally felt that Bill had acquitted himself with great good humour.
Daniel pulled out his postcard and thanked everybody, on the gallop, Winifred, Ellenbys, Thones, Alexander, Frederica, and Bill, woodenly, for his words of goodwill, using Bill’s own phrase. He managed to do this without any reference to himself or to his wife. He then retreated.
Alexander felt a sharp blow in the lower part of his shoulder blade. It was the ubiquitous Frederica. She hissed at him: “I almost thought he was going to say she has deceived her father and may thee, didn’t you? Honestly, what an exhibition. That was all lies you know. She was never grubby, not Stephanie, and her knickers always fitted, and the boyfriends, if there were any, never came here, for very obvious reasons. That settles it. If ever I marry, he’s coming nowhere near, it’ll be secret, secular and miles away from Yorkshire. I liked what you said. Even the Spenser, though I prefer Donne. Go to where the Bishop staies, To make you one his way, which divers waies, Must bee effected. Don’t you like all that grammatical layering he goes in for? I like things separate that are.”
Alexander reflected that what this dreadful girl had somehow managed, by sheer persistence, was to impose on him a tone of long and accepted confidentiality, which he was too well-mannered to break. Moreover, it would be quite hard to acknowledge it enough to break it without somehow exacerbating it. And further still, what she said had its interest.
“Really not true?” he enquired, looking behind, to see if he was overheard.
“Not a word of it. You can see, it’s just a string of the sort of cliché anyone who knows her at all would know she most wouldn’t want.”
“I wish I could have stopped him coming.”
“You must admit, it has its awful drama.”
The pillared cake was dismantled and cut. The flowers, bride’s and bridesmaid’s, lay by its crumbling ruins in the sun. They were a little limp and bruised, now: the vices of wire showed. People began to nudge the couple into going away. They left on foot, through the wicket gate, down the steep path to Far Field and Masters’ Row, where they were to change. Since they were going nowhere, since there was no money for a honeymoon, the guests waved at the garden gate: only the family, and Daniel’s Mum, went down with them. Alexander went too, but at the railway bridge he stopped, and decided to turn back. He was nobody’s father, bridegroom, or relation. He was not necessary, and he had had enough.
So he stood and watched them, strung out under the sun, bustling, trotting, strolling across Far Field, past the Bilge Pond, out under the goal posts, on the other side. Black Daniel, white Stephanie, thin gold skipping Frederica, Winifred, her dark helmeted head down and weary, Bill winding across the field in sinuous loops, deflecting people, little Mrs Orton making a rolling effort with jutting shoulders and quavering head. Marcus, last, tall and stick-like in his dark suit, his straw-smooth hair neatly brushed. Frederica looked round for Alexander, and he waved, pointed behind him, indicating his intentions unequivocally. He remembered how he had stood in this place, the day his play was accepted, had seen that none of this, none of these people, nothing of this world, was now necessarily either related to him or limiting for him, and that therefore he had found them interesting. Today he had been with them too long, too close. He had almost become part of them, and almost lost interest. As they lessened across the playing field, entering like mannikins in at the garden gate, he breathed deep, grew, became substantial. He remembered other places: an Oxford garden, a terrace at Grasse, Dorset chalk heights, the Bois de Boulogne. No, for all the incidental pleasures of white roses and yew pollen and Cranmer’s prose, a man might do more, so much more, than settle for the repetitive rectangles of Masters’ Row. He remembered the unmysterious woman’s mess in the bride’s bare box of a room that morning, and he remembered the moment when he had looked through Jennifer’s pretty printed bedroom curtains at a very small square patch of blue sky. He would get out. He was almost sure he would make arrangements to leave after his play, come what may. Across the field a small yellow figure pranced and fluttered something white. He took off his silk hat, swept it finally to and fro, settled it back on his head, and turned back up the lane.
31. Honeymoon
Daniel had imagined darkness, but it was high summer and the light went on and on. Morley Parker drove them from Masters’ Row to Askham Buildings, along scaled-down crescents and artisans’ terraces of back-to-backs, grimly compact, slate-roofed, coal-smoke rising. There were six Buildings, laid out in two three-sided rectangles around what the Plan had shown as two grassy courts with blossoming trees. These areas were in fact churned clay and cracking concrete paths, heavy clods, caterpillar-tracked, sprouting plantains, willowherb, yarrow and sowthistle. Their flat was on the ground floor at the back; the ground floor flats had back-gardens, small patches of turned and clotted subsoil, surrounded by wire netting, concrete posts, little creaking metal gates. People upstairs had concrete balconies with iron railings and networks of clothes-line. From the kitchenette you saw a black rubber tyre, hanging on a knotted rope from a kind of scaffold, and a hawthorn tree, an old one, twisted, scored, black-barked, and at that moment bright and airy with green leaf. It was older than the Buildings. It had been spared when the bulldozers roared in to prepare the site.
It was about seven o’clock. Daniel, considering his home and, sidelong, his wife, wondered if he should have arranged to have supper, with a number of people, out. She stood quietly, looking around, not at him.
“What shall we do?” he said.
“We could sit down and eat all this food.”
“Aye.”
“Or open the packets on the sofa.”
“Aye.”
“But I don’t feel very hungry, not after so many toasted morsels and cakes and wine.”
“No.”
He realised he must have thought they would simply walk into the bedroom, pull the curtains, tear off all the tidy clothes they had just put on, and fall into the bed. He saw it would not be like that. She had gone away from him and was aimlessly turning things over on the kitchen dresser, new canisters, scissors, lemon-squeezer. She said, handling the scissors as though they were some unrecognisable engine whose nature she was required to guess blindfold, “What I do want is to take my shoes off. Just to take my shoes off.”