He wondered what they would all think when they saw him; probably it wouldn’t even be worth making out that it had been an heroic fight, a question of honour, because they wouldn’t be interested. Mostly they would all be looking at David and Prudence in the way people did at weddings, greedily, as though there were something special about them that might never show or be seen again. But Victoria would notice; she would wonder what had happened to him. She might not like him because of it, it might embarrass her and make her decide to ignore him and pay attention to someone else. But he didn’t think so; she wasn’t like that, and as soon as he could explain in a roundabout way that but for her it would never have happened, she might even be pleased that he’d fought for her. Yes she might; and if she were pleased it would have been worth it.
He sat farther back in his corner and looked at the other people in the carriage. They were all very correct and old; nobody young except himself. They seemed to be annoyed at having to travel together, sat very carefully in their own places with their own things above them on the rack and their own papers handbags pipes and magazines in their hands. They would obviously have liked it better if the seats had been sub-divided by glass partitions with little blinds that could be drawn down so that they would not have to know whether or not anyone was next to them; and yet, if the train crashed, if there were lurches and shrieks from the wheels on the rails, thumpings rendings and tearings from the front or the rear and a few people killed, they would probably be very kind and very friendly, sharing their thermos flasks and biscuits with the dying and with one another, and tearing up their shirts and pyjamas to make bandages. People always were kind when things were bad enough. However silent and separate they might have been when things were going well and they were moving safely from one place to another, they would link arms and sing when ships foundered. Perhaps Mother had been right when she had said that disaster was necessary. He was sure that when she got to Heaven she would occasionally prod God if she felt that things were going too smoothly down below.
After the Lewes stop he went into the corridor and walked down into the Guard’s van. It was full of the usual leathery smell as though it had been carrying a cargo of sheepskins overnight. There were a number of packing cases three milk churns and a sad-looking dog in a box with a barred door. The Guard was absent and John sat down in his seat and looked out through the window directly along the sides of the leading carriages. From this position it was possible to see that they were not travelling in a straight line as he had imagined but in a series of beautiful curves, winding along between hills villages and towns, gliding over embankments and slicking through sinuous cuttings. They could not go wrong; the driver had only to watch the signals and keep his hands on the right levers, and provided the signalmen were awake, by twenty to eleven the train would inevitably have reached Victoria Station however many curves and digressions it might have made on the way. Were he in charge of it he would make it go even faster; he wanted to get there; he wanted to see them all; and then, afterwards, if he could, slip away somewhere with Victoria, take her a long way back to school and tell her very nearly everything.
He had hardly slept at all during the night. In his imagination he had travelled the railway to London over and over again; had been through the wedding and the reception twenty or thirty times working out ways of fitting everything into them: Victoria, the family, the talk with David and Prudence, and then Victoria again. And now as the train clicked and swayed on the shining rails, as the tunnels and telegraph-poles flicked past, as the churns rattled and the dog whimpered in its locked box, he dozed contentedly against the red plush cushion and waited for the terminus to arrive.
As soon as they crossed the Thames and began to slow down at the approach to the station, he went back to his carriage, collected his boater and camera, and was first out onto the platform. He found a taxi quite easily, jumped into it, and was swirled swiftly round Buckingham Palace and deposited a few minutes later outside the sooty porch of St Juliana’s.
Just as he had imagined it, there was the red-and-white striped awning jutting out over the pavement, the red carpet, and the rows of patent leather limousines. The organ was playing and an usher after looking at his card led him into the nave and down the wide centre aisle.
At first he could not see the family at all; the pews were full of half familiar backs and shoulders, shiny straw hats concealing profiles he only vaguely remembered. At last, however, he recognised Mrs Walton and two of the Walton girls looking as though they had been taken out of a cupboard, dusted and polished and put on show on some proud chimney-piece; and when someone else turned as he passed and flashed him a familiar wink from beneath hair as compact and yellow as brass, his heart hesitated with immediate grievous delight as he recognised Simpson with Lizzie beside him, and next to her, Cissie Booth the housemaid.
But the others! He could not think how they had all come, nor why they had set out. There were people like the Hadleys whom he had only seen once at a Point-to-point, and who always said that everything was ‘bleak’; there was Fischmann, David’s Oxford friend who wrote books about foreign poets, and with him an ex-Grammar-school boy who made a living by selling tinted antique maps to his friends; there was Emma Huggins, Grace Boult and her husband the auctioneer who could talk faster than any grown-up he knew and who had a whole collection of jews’ harps in his sitting room in Beddington; while in a sombre little group half way down the aisle there were two moth-bally pews full of more humble parishioners: Lizzie’s father whom Mother had forced to sign the pledge, Mrs Mudd with her crow feather hat, Ernie Smelt, and Gladys the girl who always fainted at the Eucharist. It would not have surprised him to see Fish Harry there in his white apron with his basket and spring scale beside him on the seat of the pew. And seeing all these people, so much a part of his own peculiar and individual home life, he began to feel very important and to wish more than ever that he had been looking his best.
Mother must have hired a charabanc to fetch everyone down here all the way from Beddington, and he realised that there was something extraordinarily grand and Blaydonish about the mixture of them. If only Father had been a bishop, a gentleman bishop, or better still a lord, then this would have been like one of those Tatler weddings where the tenants were given beer outside the stables while their wives curtsied to the Rolls-Royces sweeping past the second lodge.
But still, he thought, it was a pretty good effort and he betted that Victoria was very much impressed. Thinking of her he immediately stopped in the middle of the aisle. The usher beckoned him but he took no notice; and then he saw her; the swift white smile from beside Mother’s shoulder, the creamy schoolgirl-hat with the brim flattened against the nape of her neck. He had just time to feel his face spreading delightedly outwards into the flush and expansion of his own answering smile, before he was shown into his pew, the second from the front and immediately behind hers as she sat beside Mother and Father. He himself, he found, was sitting between Michael and Nanny. He squeezed Nanny’s nervous hand, leaned over and kissed Mother, smiled at Father wonderfully tall and parsonic in a morning coat, and then kneeled down on the blue hassock and said his prayers.
She was here, they were all here; the whole of Home, the whole of Northumberland; and she was with them. Wonderful David to have kept his promise and won mother round about Victoria and Mrs Blount. Afterwards, he would thank him; he would even try to like Prudence and hope that she too would be happy even though she was taking him away from them all. For there would never be anyone like David again; Geoffrey was in Canada, farming and going bankrupt, Michael was an owl-face and would probably become a solicitor, whilst Melanie and Mary didn’t count, they were just two halves of one person, replicas of one another, both red-haired and as boringly predictable as marmalade cats. He crossed himself and eased himself back on to the pew, edging up as close as possible to Nanny. On her opposite side Melanie leaned over to him.
“Whatever’s happened to your face John?
You look awful.”
“I don’t feel it, I feel wonderful,” he whispered back.
“It’s all swollen.”
“I know,” he lied scornfully, “I had eight teeth out yesterday.”
He was longing to attract Victoria’s attention but was intimidated by her nearness to Mother; he also wanted to see what was going on up at the altar and make sure that David was there with the best man, Alexander Flood.
Alexander was very aristocratic and drank whisky. He was a school friend of Michael’s and John remembered the discussion about his suitability during the Summer Holidays. Mother had said that she didn’t want David going out on a lot of ‘daft stag parties’ the night before, and Michael had said that he was Lord Remove’s nephew and would therefore be bound to meet with the approval of Prudence’s side; and this, though it had not stopped her writing warning letters to David, had finally decided her in Alexander’s favour.
Suddenly the organ paused and everyone stood up. There was a rustle all the way down from the back of the Church, the organ started to play again and everyone turned round. Prudence with her uncle beside her and followed by twelve bridesmaids, including Mary and the third Walton girl, came slowly down the aisle and passed through the arch of the rood screen to the chancel. The tremors of the organ died away and there was a silence into which the voice of the priest rose indistinctly.
Now that they had all gone beyond the rood screen the remainder of the Church seemed darker even than before. The congregation picked up the cards on which the order of service was printed and waited eagerly for the first hymn. In front of him, John saw Mother tweak Father’s sleeve impatiently; Father leaned over her reassuringly and patted her shoulder very quickly and gently as he always did when he suspected that she might be going to be upset. But he had misunderstood her, and lowering her lorgnettes, she looked up at him fiercely and whispered:
“Change places with me Teddy. I can’t see anything.”
“What’s that dear?”
“Oh,” she breathed, “don’t be so tiresome! I’m stuck down here and I can’t see over that great screen.” And she started to burrow angrily behind him until she forced him to step out into the aisle and was thus enabled to take his place.
Once there she craned out over the upright of the tall pew, gazing through her lorgnettes and through the archway of the rood screen, as still as a small statue. From where he stood John could see the side of her cheek and just the translucent segment of one pale eye to whose lid clung a half formed tear which she brushed impatiently away. The hand holding the printed card was trembling and when the first hymn began she was so rigidly preoccupied in trying to see what was going on up at the altar that she quite forgot to join in the first verse; and this, as Nanny would have said was ‘very surprisin’’, because usually Mother sang very loudly and eagerly and always at first a little faster than anyone else. She prided herself on not stopping at the end of a line unless there were a comma, and those of the family who were sitting near her took their time from her, so that by the middle of the hymn at the latest, most if not all of the congregation, like herself, would be just half a bar in front of the organ.
But today she did not seem to be at all interested in the singing and even her ‘amens’ were quieter than usual. When they kneeled she no longer sank her face into her hands, but at every possible opportunity raised her lorgnettes in an attempt to see the kneeling figures just visible between the opposing lighted rows of the bridesmaids as they stood in the chancel.
Her attention; so desperate; as intense as though everything: the course of the service, David’s happiness, and even the future of all the bridesmaids gathered up there before the altar, depended upon it, was very distracting. It was like being near someone in great pain, someone whom agony had deprived of speech so that she was no more than a mute and dreadful presence claiming all of one’s sympathy and allowing no thought which was not directed towards herself.
In front of him, only a few feet away he could see Victoria as she stood and kneeled in unison with him. Her ears, he knew, heard the same swells and chords of the music from the great grey pipes of the organ; her eyes sought the chancel and the bride and he was sure that she longed to turn and smile at him intimately just as he himself longed to acknowledge the secret which they shared and which the smile would express. But neither of them could do so because they were both involved in and fascinated by Mother; and he knew that they were not the only ones. Beside him, the others were all watching her. Glancing down his pew he could see that although they were pretending to sing and pray their eyes continually strayed to all that they could see of her from their different positions; and he was sure they were afraid that at any moment one or other of them would have to go to her and be near her; and what was more, they were watching jealously; he was sure of it; anxious to be the first to stand by her side if she should start openly to weep or to demand a change in the order of the service, the positions of the bridesmaids, or even a postponement of the whole ceremony.
He tried hard to switch his mind away from her, away from them all, to think only of Victoria standing in front of him, to remember the things they had written said and promised in the long days of the old summer and in their constant secret letters to one another.
But it was very nearly impossible. Even in the opposing pews he noticed that heads were turning and taking swift looks at Mother. She must have attracted their attention when she and Father stepped out into the aisle at the beginning of the service; and now everyone sensed the uneasiness of the family, the anxiety which had spread back down the ‘home’ side of the church to the very last row of pews.
Mrs Cable, and Josephine, Prudence’s sister, and their immediate relatives and friends were beginning to look silently disapproving. They were all very smart people and even before the service began he had known that they were different in every way from his own people. The men stood more casually and the women looked more used to their clothes; it was obvious that they had worn fine and expensive things before and had not just borrowed or bought them especially for the occasion. There were fewer of them too, the pews were less liberally filled and there were no common people at all. There were one or two stuck-up looking boys, some girls with plaits, and several pink-faced men with big stomachs, carnations, and proud white hair; and all of them, he was sure, had their weather eye on the Blaydon front pews and on Mother.
He began to pray earnestly that nothing would go wrong. He apostrophised God and said, “I will not think even of Victoria, O God, if you will only promise that Mother will not do anything, that she will just keep quiet until the end of the service.” And then he began to think of David and thanked God hurriedly for having put him on the far side of the rood screen where he could not see Mother and where she could only see his back.
He prayed so hard that he forgot to listen out for the promises of David and Prudence, and this was a leaden disappointment. He had longed to hear them saying “I do” and “I will”; to mark David’s loved voice saying, “For richer for poorer, for better for worse, in sickness and in health,” but he was so concentrated on his own intercessions for quietness from Mother, for no alarms, no dreadful unexpected action or interruption from her, that the spoken words were passed before he was alert for them, and when they rose to their feet again he was ready to weep for having missed them.
But so far everything was alright, and with warm relief he saw that Mother was beginning to sing in her old style now that the last hymn had been reached, while simultaneously he sensed a relaxation in the attention of Michael, Melanie, and Nanny. He could feel the whole congregation warming to the task it had so nearly completed and saw that small smiles of satisfaction were being exchanged between adjacent pews; and then, when the organ paused for the Blessing before sounding out into the triumphant melody of Mendelssohn, when David and Prudence came down the aisle from the vestry and went lightly past them to the western end and the waiting car, he was able at last to greet
Victoria, to stretch out his hand to her and stammer his delight. She said nothing; but her hand, softer than anything he had ever held, lay passively in his own and she smiled with such beauty and gaiety that he could not long meet her eyes and, instead, kneeled hurriedly to say a last prayer before leaving the church. But he caught her again in the porch whither she had been swept by the tumble of people on their way out.
He could not be sure, he never could be sure of these things, was forever uncertain as to whether or not he had imagined them out of the stress of his fears or desires; but she seemed to be awaiting him with a diffidence which was almost indifference; as though already she were regretting the openness of the delight she had shown him only a few moments before. And he for his part, conscious of Melanie and Michael’s observation of him and the closeness of the family, was stiff and awkward in his manner.
He heard her “Hello” and his own restrained somehow silly echo of it with dismay and anger, wanted to take her hand again but could not; and instead, jostled by the others on their way out into the gaping street, said firmly:
“You’re coming with us, aren’t you? I mean there’s nobody with you, is there?”
“No,” she said.
“Come on then, stick close to me and we’ll follow the others.”
Obediently, she edged up behind him and they joined the rest of the family on the pavement. A number of passers-by had stopped on either side of the red carpet: strange London women with big fronts and faces, one or two thin businessmen and some children. The little rectangle before which the cars and taxis drew up was very public and in the middle of it Mother was showing off. She had collected Mrs Mudd, Lizzie, Lizzie’s father, and Gladys and was insisting that they should all travel in the family taxi.
In the Time of Greenbloom Page 8