The Brimstone Wedding

by Barbara Vine

  10

  Ned and Jane and Hannah spent that weekend in Tharby. He managed to phone me between the time I got home from work and the time Mike got back and he said he had to see me, it was urgent.

  Immediately frightened, I asked what was wrong.

  ‘Nothing's wrong. I just want to see you. I haven't seen you for ten days, so it's urgent. Isn't that reasonable?’

  The only possible arrangement was the four of us meeting in the Legion on Saturday night. Mike wouldn't have gone if I'd told him Jane was going to be there and I don't suppose Jane would have if she'd known she'd encounter the whole clan of us: Mum and Len, Janis and Steve, Nick and Tanya and, of course, Mike and me. Jane was wearing the same clothes she'd worn to meet Ned at Stansted, a narrow trouser suit of navy blue silk with a white shirt. Her red hair was up in a neat French braid. It's easy for me not to think of Jane when I don't see her, but now I look at her and wonder if he ever touches her, if like Mike and me they still share one of those married people's double beds and sleep each on an extreme edge of it, or if, because he is obliged to stay with her, he acts the same loving husband she has always known. We never speak of it and I would rather not know. Mum says men always tell their girlfriends they've stopped sleeping with their wives and get caught with egg on their faces (her words) when the wives fall pregnant. Rex Newland was that sort of man by the sound of it and probably told Stella all sorts of lies.

  You could see Jane didn't want to be with us. One of the teachers from UEA was there with her husband, sitting at a table in the corner, and Jane kept looking over in their direction, hoping to catch their eye. But when he'd bought our drinks Ned sat down next to me, between me and Steve, and reached for my hand and held it in my lap, between my thighs in fact, until I couldn't stand it and pushed his hand away. No one saw and no one saw our legs pressed close together – except Mum. She's blind to all sorts of things but when it comes to sex there's no escaping her eye.

  She beckoned me over. On the face of it her motive was to give me a bowlful of crisps for our table. ‘You thought of having them rods inserted, have you?’ she said.

  I hadn't the faintest idea what she meant.

  ‘They're the latest contraceptive, guaranteed a hundred per cent. They stick them in your arm, like planting bulbs. Because if you've got two fellows on the go you want to watch it. The Green girl that's Jill Baleham's niece, she was on the pill and she still fell. You've only got to have diarrhoea the once and that pill can go right through you.’

  ‘Mother,’ I said. It's not often I call her that but she knows that when I do she's said enough.

  I felt like throwing the bowl of crisps at her. I took them back to our table. Mike was talking about the building site in Regent's Park and the work soon coming to an end. Ned didn't look at me but the very fact that he didn't spoke what was running through his mind. I was sick with nerves. The dry white wine Mum's been serving lately takes the roof off your mouth, you could clean sinks with it. Janis said, right out in front of him, that she wished Peter'd get a job that took him away four evenings out of seven. She wouldn't be lonely, she'd like it, at which Peter said two could play at that game, and Jane, with a look of deep boredom on her face, got up and walked over to the UEA teachers’ table. They said something to her, she answered and they all got up and left together.

  Ned made excuses for her but you could see the others were offended. And Mike of course had all his worst fears confirmed. Five awkward minutes went by and then Ned said he'd better go home. The Norwich people were friends of Jane's and she'd obviously taken them back to Rowans for a drink.

  We all stood up. He managed to whisper close to my ear, ‘Please let me see you on Monday night, please,’ and that told me the fern in his shoe had worked.

  Then a strange thing happened. As the door closed behind him the other one swung open, the front door that's painted the colour of Stella's nails, and the woman who'd passed me twice in her car at Thelmarsh Cross came in. She's a bit older than me, blonde and good-looking, and now there was more of her on show than her head and shoulders, I could see she was a bit overweight but in an attractive way. I recognized her at once and I could tell that she recognized me, but we didn't smile at each other and we didn't look for long. We both turned our heads away in the same moment.

  ‘It was Gilda Brent,’ I said.

  Stella frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The mistress.’

  She was quite irritable with me. ‘I wish you wouldn't do that, Genevieve. I wish you wouldn't keep guessing at things. That's the second time you've done it. It most certainly was not Gilda. Gilda had quite another sort of part to play in my life but I hadn't even met her then. Rex's mistress was called Charmian Fry.’

  She was a single woman who had never been married and who had never worked for her living either. She came of one of those county families, gentlefolk. Her father had been a High Sheriff and one of her brothers was Lord Lieutenant of the County. There was family money and she had a private income. Those families always own several houses and she lived alone in one of them, a big house near Stowupland. You wonder what people like that do with themselves all day long, don't you? Stella said Charmian hunted and shot, she gardened and she made pots out of clay for planting things like geraniums in. She went to sherry parties and she went out to dinner. It doesn't seem to account for a life, but she had Rex. No doubt he took up some of her time.

  They'd known each other since he was twenty-one and she was eighteen. Much later, when she no longer cared, Stella asked him why he had never married her and he said it was because some women were for marrying and others were not. This didn't seem to depend on appearance or class or what Stella called reputation, it was just something he knew at a glance. Or so he told her. And it was true, she said, that she couldn't have imagined Charmian as anyone's wife, still less as a mother.

  How did she find out about Charmian? I forgot to say that, didn't I? Her father-in-law told her. He was in his eighties and dying and a bit mad too, I shouldn't wonder. He must have been mad or wicked to say a thing like that to a young woman who'd just had a child after an awful pregnancy, his own daughter-in-law too, just because she was ill and always pale and always weak.

  ‘If you don't give him what a husband's got a right to expect,’ he said, ‘you'll drive him back into the arms of Charmian Fry and a little bird's told me he's there already.’

  The rest came out. The old man wasn't at all unwilling to tell. It was a revelation to Stella and a terrible shock. Nothing in her life had taught her that men and women could behave like that. She had read about it in books, of course, but a husband's unfaithfulness could never happen to her or any woman she knew. It was impossible that a woman who sat down to dinner in her house, who kissed her cheek and called her by her christian name, could secretly do those things with her husband Stella thought of as sacred to marriage and a marital duty, even if not particularly delightful. It was impossible but, and she was obliged to face it, real and true.

  Becoming used to it, bitterly accepting, she still could scarcely understand how a man, any man, could prefer a gaunt black crow of a woman with a face as dark as leather and long black hair going grey, to herself. Sometimes she would see Charmian in Bury, arrived in her old shooting brake to do her shopping, and across the street, unsmiling, she would raise one arm in a salute. Then Stella turned and stared at her own reflection in the glass of a shop window, her pretty face and figure, her carefully chosen or carefully made clothes, and at Charmian distantly behind her in dirty worn tweeds and a man's felt hat.

  ‘Rex did come back to me,’ Stella said. ‘Whether he actually gave her up to come back to me is another matter. I had another miscarriage. It was a boy, it was far enough along to tell that, and of course he was dreadfully disappointed.’

  She kept remembering, she said, she couldn't help it, those words of his when he'd asked her to marry him about wanting her so much it was killing him. It was beyond her understan
ding why he'd said that. Hadn't he meant it, even at the time? Or had he meant it at the time and only then? Had she been a disappointment to him? Was there something wanting in her appearance, her manners, her voice, her social graces? At that time she spent a lot of time in front of the mirror in her bedroom, studying her appearance, trying out ways of improving it, talking to herself as she stared, listening to the sound of her own voice.

  ‘I thought it must be because I still hadn't given him a son. I didn't much like having babies, Genevieve. Of course it's worth it all for the child you get at the end, but suppose you get nothing at the end?’

  Stella was looking penetratingly at me. Then she closed her eyes and let her head slip back against the cushion. I thought she had finished for the day, and I was about to get up and creep away, when she opened her eyes suddenly and stared at me. She put her hand out, reaching for mine, and I held her hand, giving it a little squeeze.

  ‘I've just remembered the purpose of all this, Genevieve,’ she said. ‘It was to explain to you how I came to buy my house.’

  ‘Was it?’ I said.

  ‘Certainly it was. Just that. I didn't mean to go into so much detail. I feel… I fear – oh, I mean, there are things I've told you I shouldn't want my children to know.’

  ‘They don't know about their father and Charmian Fry?’

  ‘I believe Marianne may have come near the truth. Richard was much too young. I'd much rather they knew nothing and of course Marianne can't know. It can only be conjecture on her part.’

  I couldn't help thinking of my dad, who lived with one woman after another after he split up with Mum, got married again, got divorced, and now has a live-in girlfriend two years younger than me. No one's ever tried to keep all that from Janis and me and Nick, it wouldn't have crossed their minds. It must be a generation thing or maybe, more simply and what it more often is, a class thing.

  ‘You see, Genevieve, Marianne was very well aware there was a mystery attached to her father's death. Well, not his actual death. He died of heart failure, cardiac arrest.’

  ‘In a train,’ I said, and wished I hadn't, for she sat bolt upright, all six and a half stone of her, her free hand fluttering. The other let mine go abruptly.

  ‘How did you know that?’

  I tried to speak in a casual sort of way, offhand. ‘Richard told me. I don't remember why.’

  She relaxed a little. These spasms of excitement she has wear her out, and the first sign is the pallor that creeps into her face.

  ‘Well, of course he does know that. And it isn't quite true that Rex died in a train. He was taken ill in the train. He died in hospital in Bury.’

  He'd been visiting Charmian Fry. This was years later, the end of the sixties, and she had moved from one family house to another rather smaller one, this time in Elmswell which has a station on the branch line that runs from Stowmarket to Bury. Perhaps she chose to live there for that reason. Rex had given up driving by then, he drank too much to drive and he ate too much for his health. He was sixty-seven and too old and too fat to have been doing what he had been with old Charmian. They found him collapsed and in pain, slumped in the corner of a first-class carriage when the train drew in to Bury. The return part of a ticket from Bury to Elmswell was in his pocket and the hospital people gave it to Stella with the rest of his effects after he was dead. So she knew where he'd been. He'd wanted Charmian so much it had killed him.

  Marianne was fifteen. She knew Charmian lived in Elmswell and her father had been returning by train from there when he died. Stella was sure she made no connection between these two facts. She asked no questions. She had loved her father and she mourned him, ignorant of the life he had led. Stella's own attitude was that Rex could have kept a harem of women in Elmswell and visited them every night and she wouldn't have cared. She wouldn't have wished him dead but it was a relief when he died. All that was important to her as far as Rex was concerned at that time was to keep his doings a secret from her children, to have them believe a happy marriage had ended that night and left their mother a sorrowing widow. During those years between the boy she had miscarried and Rex's death, the most important thing of her whole life had happened to her. She hastened to tell me that she hadn't meant Richard being born, joyful though that was. She meant something quite different, she said, her eyes closing again, that ghost of a smile still there as she slipped into sleep.

  I was still sitting with her and I'd taken her hand in mine again, when there was a tap on the door and Richard came in. I put my finger to my lips and he tiptoed across the room and sat down carefully so as not to disturb Stella. We sat there together for ten minutes or a bit longer, not speaking but smiling at each other sometimes, until at last I got up and whispered to him that it was time for me to go.

  The cat that belongs to Sandra next door was torturing a greenfinch it had caught at my bird table. I managed to rescue it, it was a beautiful bird with bright yellow feathers in its khaki-brown wings, but it died in my hands.

  If a bird dies when you're holding it your hands will shake for ever. I buried the poor bird in our rose bed and my hands shook so much while I was doing it that I was frightened. I thought I might be left with a palsy like my grandad, who had Parkinson's, but the shaking stopped after a few minutes. Mum doesn't know all the answers with her omens and her portents. But as I was getting ready to meet Ned I remembered that a dead bird also means a death in the family.

  The sun had come out by the time I reached Molucca. It was going to be a fine evening. The sunshine was that gold colour you only see on autumn evenings, its rays long shafts of amber light. The trees in the fen were turning from green to yellow or brown and the dogwood to pink and crimson. Mountain ash berries, dropped by birds or half-eaten by birds, lay scattered over the doorstep. I was careful where I put my feet so as not to tread berries into the carpets, for they make stains like blood.

  We're due to put the clocks back on the coming Saturday and that means that next week it'll be dark by this time. The candles would be needed, not for romance but for lighting our way up the stairs and keeping us from stumbling into furniture. Autumn is mild, the mildest for years, yet every week it gets colder, the oil heaters doing less and less to warm the air and burn away the damp.

  I'd replaced those Christmassy candles with yellow ones and brought houseplants in pots instead of cut flowers. While I was waiting for Ned I had a look at the pictures that had been in the sideboard along with that photo Stella had wanted. They were much nicer than the insipid ones up on the walls, paintings of children with animals, or drawings rather, filled in with paint. There was one of a girl and a boy with kittens and one of the same boy with a tortoiseshell cat that had a coat like a Persian carpet. I wasn't feeling very kindly towards cats that evening but I could see how appealing these were. The interesting thing was that they seemed familiar. I'd seen those pictures somewhere before, though I couldn't think where. Each of them was signed in the corner with a name I couldn't read, an initial A, then a full stop and a T followed by a squiggle.

  It wasn't for me to rearrange Stella's house for her but I couldn't help thinking these pictures would look much nicer up on the walls than those blue-and-mauve washed-out things of moorlands and rivers. I was holding one of them up to cover one of the pale squares on the wallpaper when Ned's headlamps flooded into the room. The light poured across her portrait, her lively pretty face and the pink dress and the rose in her hand.

  He was full of loving apology, so sorry, sorry, sorry for what had happened on Saturday night. Hannah had been taken ill and their sitter was about to phone the Legion just at the moment Jane walked into the house. It was as well he went home when he did. Hannah was wheezing and gasping and crying for her father and Jane had given her the drug she uses but in the end they had to take her to casualty. It frightens him when Hannah is like that, he can't think of anyone or anything else.

  How can he tell me these things about Hannah and still believe he can persuade me to take him f
rom her? He wants both worlds. I'm not educated like he is or sophisticated in his way, but I know better than that.

  ‘Do you love me?’ he said when I was in his arms. ‘Say you love me, darling Jenny, say you love me.’

  I can hardly speak when he says these things to me, I can only whisper, and my voice came out on a gasp, ‘I do, you know I do.’

  ‘But I need you to say it, I desperately need that.’

  Other men aren't like him. They're frightened of that word. He needs it all the time. Like some need music playing or the spice of fear or a woman who'll dress like a whore, he needs to love and know he's loved.

  It was eleven when I got home but the phone was ringing in the dark house. I expected it to be Mike and he'd say he'd been trying to get me all evening, but it was Janis. Her voice was solemn and strange and she had to clear her throat before she could tell me.

  Our dad had died.

  He'd seemed so fit. I could hardly believe it. Janis said he'd been at home in Diss, cleaning this old Alvis he'd bought. A customer was coming round to take a look at it with a view to buying. Dad was polishing the chrome on the bonnet when he shouted out at the sudden pain in his arm and shoulder. Suzanne came running out but he was dead before she got to him, he'd fallen down dead of a heart attack.

  That was at five, much about the time the bird died in my hands. I was more awe-struck than afraid, and that feeling, of the strangeness of it yet of the certainty of so clear an omen, distracted me from grief. It was in the small hours that I woke up, remembered at once and cried for the loss of my dad who had been loving and kind until he went away from us long ago. To my mind too there was something wrong in not being able to mourn him properly, to cry along with Mum, in a home I knew and had shared with him. Alive, he'd been parted from me since I was eight, and dead he was Suzanne's.

  In the morning Stella had a visitor with her, not Richard or Marianne but a middle-aged woman according to Pauline, so it was the afternoon before I saw her. It's always so with Stella, when you think she's only interested in her own affairs, that she's wrapped up in herself the way most of the residents are, she surprises you with her thoughtfulness. When I came up to her in the lounge, sitting by the french windows, she saw at once that something was wrong. She put out both hands to me.