The Brimstone Wedding

by Barbara Vine

  After I'd played this back I played Genevieve's present to me, the Boccherini – lovely and so civilized, just what I needed. The music came through on the tape, an exquisite contrast to what went before.

  My own voice sounds surprisingly strong. The moments of hoarseness can't be helped. This, as I said at the beginning, is the test tape. I shall destroy what I have said in a minute but first, because the more I talk of these things the easier it is – psychologically easier, I mean, not physically – I have a few more things to say about that summer.

  Something about the way the farmers were tearing out the hedges in those days, uprooting ancient hedges and burning them. Because I'm not a keen walker and I don't at all care for sitting in the open air, having a picnic for example, many people have thought I am not interested in nature. In fact, natural history has always been an interest of mine. It was one of the many I shared with Alan, for we had a lot of tastes in common, the same books, the same pictures, the same music, the same attitudes to life. We loved the wild flowers of the fen and of the Suffolk coast. Both of us hoped to see a swallowtail one day. We hated autumn and winter and loved the summer. Neither of us ever walked if we could go in a car. We even liked the same food and we hadn't known each other long when we found we both had a favourite drink that had already by then gone out of fashion. It was a pink gin, gin and angostura bitters. Does anyone drink that now? Could you go into an hotel, for instance, and ask for a pink gin? And would they know what you meant?

  The games we played, that we both liked to play, they were innocent games. Even Mr and Mrs Darlint had a sort of simplicity about them and a sweetness. The dressing-up was really for a rehearsal, practising for an ideal, not to titillate tired appetites. We weren't tired, our love was fresh, and every love-making like a young couple's first excitement.

  But I have wandered off the point and now I can't recall what the point was. Perhaps there was no point, perhaps I was only talking for practice. But I'm tired now, anyway, and have practised enough.

  Tapes are better than life. You strip off the words and make them new and afterwards it's just as it was before you said those things. You don't have to live for twenty-four years with certain acts and words, for you've wiped them away. They have flown away to the planets on invisible waves.

  17

  Someone sent Gilda a card with ‘Now you are Fifty’ on it, an unsigned card. The picture on it was of an oldish smiling woman with waved silver hair, holding a bunch of flowers. Stella, of course, had sent her a card, the kind that makes no reference to the number of the birthday, and she was surprised, almost shocked, when Gilda showed her the unsigned one. She had expected her to conceal this landmark in her age or to lie about it, to stay forty-nine for the next ten years. But Gilda showed off the card, just as she showed off the two anonymous letters that had come.

  Printed words had been cut from a book, not a newspaper, and stuck on to cheap notepaper. One said, ‘Your husband has another woman’, and the other, ‘Alan is in love with a woman who is well known to you’. Stella wondered why they were shown to her, why she and Priscilla and Jeremy and even Marianne were shown that birthday card and those crude letters, why they were flaunted.

  Stella began to look suspiciously at those she thought she could trust, at her neighbours, at Aagot, the new au pair. Then, when interest in the letters seemed to have died down, Gilda confessed to Alan that she had sent them herself. She had bought the card, the ugliest and most vulgar she could find, and she had composed the letters herself, cutting the words from one of the Figaro and Velvet books Alan had illustrated. The book was taken down from the shelf and she showed him the mutilated pages.

  Because it was a children's story, the range of words available to Gilda was limited. He told Stella that she boasted of her resourcefulness, she was very proud of finding ‘husband’ and ‘woman’, words that occur rarely in children's books. Why then had she chosen that particular book? Because ‘Alan’ was on one of the early pages where the illustrator was named. And perhaps too because he valued it and spoiling it would hurt him.

  Of course he asked why had she done it. Why send letters to yourself? What was the point?

  ‘It was a way of telling myself the truth,’ she said.

  ‘I remember now,’ he said to Stella. ‘It came in one of her films. It's the classic domestic-thriller situation. A woman she played was receiving anonymous letters, only they were sent by an enemy.’ He laughed. ‘I've always said Gilda's her own worst enemy.’

  Stella couldn't laugh. Any hint of madness affected her, as it does most people, with fear. Alan, as always, joked about it.

  ‘That book was a first edition,’ he said. ‘I told her to use Country Life next time.’

  But Gilda's own cryptic reply stuck in Stella's mind. It was a way of telling herself the truth. And Stella began to understand. Gilda lived in a world of role-playing, of so much acting and pretence, that it was not enough for her to know the truth, the reality, she had to see it written down. But even the writing down, the black-and-white of it, had to be a fake, had to come out of second-rate cinema. Because that was the only truth she knew?

  Gilda still dressed well in the old glamorous clothes, the dramatic film-star dresses. The blonde hair was dyed now but it was still long and thick. The figure remained slender, if by now more string-like than willowy. When she told Stella that Alan had become indifferent to her, that they no longer made love, she struck a pose under the painting, leaning backwards, her head flung back, her long hair streaming, her breasts thrust upwards and her arms hanging.

  ‘He'll never leave me,’ she said. ‘He can't. The house is mine and so is most of our income. He really hasn't got a bean.’

  She said it dramatically and, bouncing forwards, threw out her hands. She leaned towards Stella in the confiding way she had, her head on one side, her neck stretched out. Her large blue eyes bored holes in Stella's face.

  ‘Any fool who took up with him would have to be rich. But no one like that would look at him, what do you think?’

  Stella wanted to defend him, to say that any woman would want him, but she dared not. When her opinion was asked or she was directly questioned she always felt that Gilda already knew and that she was testing her, interrogating her, laying traps. The ‘woman you know’ of the letter was herself and Gilda was waiting for her to admit it. Sometimes, in frank detail, she would describe to Stella the methods she considered using to ‘get Alan back’. What did Stella think? And then she would fling herself down on the battered settee opposite Stella and inquire of some invisible non-existent third person what was the point of asking advice of someone so sheltered and innocent.

  Yet always Stella waited for the direct challenge and tried to prepare herself.

  ‘It's you, isn't it?’

  The greatest surprise was when Gilda revealed that it wasn't Stella but, of all women, Priscilla that she suspected.

  ‘When he was coming to me or to Molucca, she thought he was visiting Priscilla. She and Jeremy lived near Ixworth. It couldn't be me because in her estimation I was too old. Priscilla was only in her late thirties.’

  Gilda judged people like that. Men wanted women because they were young or beautiful or both. Women looked for husbands who were rich and lovers who were ‘good in bed’. She wasn't young any more, though she admitted no loss of beauty, but she told Stella she was confident Alan would stay with her because she ‘held the purse strings’.

  ‘One day in the spring Gilda invited herself to lunch. She knew Priscilla and Jeremy were coming with their children and John and Madge Browning. I was happy because Alan would come too. I can't remember what the occasion was, perhaps just Easter Saturday, perhaps Richard's birthday, though I would have had a children's party for that. Aagot cooked the lunch, she was an excellent cook, and after that, much later when we were having tea, Gilda made a terrible scene.’

  She had been staring at Priscilla throughout lunch and afterwards. In her innocence, Stella had se
ated Priscilla next to Alan with Gilda opposite and Gilda kept her eyes fixed on Priscilla, leaving her food untouched. She had some sort of anorexia, if you can be anorexic at fifty. Nobody knew about it then, it was just losing your appetite because you were worried or ill. Stella thought Gilda was starving herself to stay thin and in fact she had got thinner and thinner, you could see the lines of her ribcage through her clothes. She always wore very tight clothes and that Easter she was in a bright green silk dress, very short, with a wide black belt cinching in the waist. Her beautiful strained face was brightly painted and her gold hair was shoulder-length.

  She hardly spoke. The terrible thing was, Stella said, that no one seemed to notice. She alone noticed, perhaps because she was so alive to everything Gilda said and did at this time, but the others were happy to talk among themselves and possibly they were glad of Gilda's silence. After all, Gilda had become a great bore, she could only talk of the world of film in the forties and fifties, what this actor said to that actor, and the famous people she'd known – most of them half -forgotten by then – and of her own triumphs and, worse, the way she had been misunderstood, passed over and victimized. Probably she had always talked like that but people put up with it, were even happy to listen to it, when Gilda was young.

  It was about four in the afternoon when Gilda broke her silence and broke her staring. Marianne and Priscilla's daughter Sarah had made tea and brought it in with a simnel cake. Gilda shook her head at the cake as if it really did contain the poison Alan used to joke about giving her. She waited till Priscilla had put a small square of cake with marzipan into her mouth and then she said,

  ‘Tell me where you and my husband have been meeting.’

  The extraordinary thing was, Stella said, that she recognized the line. She and Gilda had been to Sudbury a few days before to see The Skies Above Us. Gilda was playing the wife of an Air Force bomber pilot who suspected her young sister-in-law – with justification – of being in love with her husband, and when she confronted her those were the very words she used. Because of that, for a moment, Stella thought it must be a game. She thought Gilda was quoting from the film in order to start talking about the film.

  Priscilla knew nothing about film. She never went to the cinema. ‘What?’ she said.

  Gilda said it again, just as she did in the film. Patricia Roc, who's the sister-in-law, breaks down and confesses everything, promises never to see the pilot again and in the end everyone is made happy by the wife, the Gilda character, getting killed in an air raid.

  But Priscilla wasn't going to conform to any of that. She said very quietly to Gilda that she simply didn't understand. Gilda replied by more quotations from the film, a whole speech of accusations. Then she came back to reality, to real people or what she thought was real. She knew Alan and Priscilla were lovers and had been for years and she wanted it to end. But Jeremy should know the truth and Priscilla's children know what their mother was. It was time too that Stella's eyes were open to reality and she understood the kind of people she had invited to her house. Priscilla and Jeremy could do as they pleased, but for her part she would forgive Alan and take him back if the affair stopped now.

  Priscilla behaved with great dignity. She apologized to Stella, she was sorry this had happened to spoil the day, she would phone her next day. She said to Jeremy, ‘We'll go now,’ and to the children, ‘Get your coats. Don't argue, please. We're leaving.’

  Alan had said nothing throughout all this. Stella had said nothing. When they spoke of it afterwards to each other they agreed that there was nothing they could have said. Alan, of course, could have denied it. There was no truth in that particular accusation, but no denying that he was constantly and consistently unfaithful to Gilda. It was just that Gilda had got the wrong woman. And for that reason, because Stella was the right woman, she too had felt unable to speak in anyone's defence.

  When Jeremy and Priscilla had gone Gilda began to scream. It was the scene at St Michael's Farm about the child she couldn't have all over again. She threw and smashed two ornaments of Stella's, she lay on the floor. You are supposed to slap people's faces in these circumstances but no one slapped Gilda's. Marianne stared, appalled, then went away upstairs. Only Richard seemed unaffected. He continued to read the book Madge Browning had brought him, sitting on the floor in a far corner of the room.

  But all that came later, after months of Gilda constantly raising with Stella the possibility of Alan's infidelity. Stella tried – had been trying for years – to see less of her. For one thing she felt guilty about taking the role of friend while she was having a love affair with Gilda's husband. For another, she had begun deeply to dislike Gilda.

  ‘You could leave her,’ she said to Alan. ‘We could sell this house and go and live with Richard in my house. We could live on my money. It would be ours, yours and mine.’

  Oh, she hated talking about money but she did to Alan. She had to. She held out Richard as an inducement because she knew Alan loved him. He loved children. Wasn't he an illustrator of books for children?

  ‘You should have let me kill her,’ he said.

  ‘It was said so – well, so laconically, Genevieve,’ Stella said. ‘Just as someone else might say, you should have let me – oh, I don't know, close the door, make a phone call. I couldn't be angry. I couldn't help laughing.’

  ‘Did you ever think of just stopping seeing Gilda? Cutting yourself off from her?’

  ‘I did try. Even if I'd stopped being friends with her I'd still have seen Alan. Our relationship no longer depended on chance meetings, they were just a bonus. But Genevieve, you're the person you are, aren't you, you can't change yourself radically no matter how you want to. It wasn't in me to tell someone who'd been my friend I didn't want to see her again, tell her to go, break off with her. I can't be rude – sometimes I've wished I could. And then I was the – well, the guilty party, wasn't I? Being rude to her, breaking with her, would have seemed like adding insult to injury. Can you understand that?’

  They lived twenty miles apart but Gilda was always ‘dropping in’. She often seemed to come at the time Richard arrived home from school. Stella wondered if she purposely came at that time. Sometimes she was terrified. She fancied she saw her staring at Richard. Gilda had long ago given up saying she wanted a child of her own. Now she said she didn't like children. She had always been subject to mood swings and her present mood or her pose was that she disliked children, children were a nuisance. ‘A drag,’ she called them. She often said she was in sympathy with Herod who killed all the little boys in Bethlehem. And then she would smile as if a smile and a pat on Richard's shoulder made things all right.

  Going out to tea in some country hotel had become a favourite thing to do, or finding some cinema where one of her own films was showing. She'd go into the cinema very self-consciously, smiling and nodding to the woman selling tickets and the usherettes. She was like a celebrity at an airport, certain everyone would recognize her, and that embarrassed Stella because she was sure no one did.

  Richard had of necessity to be left behind. ‘You can leave him with the au pair,’ Gilda said, as if he wasn't there. She always pretended not to be able to pronounce Aagot's name. ‘You need a break from that child.’

  And then she would stare at Richard, the way a child stares at another child before making a terrible face, curling up its nose and sticking out its tongue. Gilda didn't make the face, she just looked as if she was going to. Stella always hugged Richard when Gilda spoke about him unkindly. She'd take him out of the room to Aagot and then come back and ask Gilda not to talk in that way. It took the summoning up of courage to speak like that to Gilda and the suppression of all those guilt feelings. For what right had she to reproach Gilda for anything? She had taken Gilda's husband from her, and worse, had made a game with him of killing her, talking about her in the worst possible terms behind her back, furthering her husband's disloyalty.

  Richard was such a mother's boy, Gilda said. He needed a father
, someone to take him to cricket matches and show him how to kick a ball. It was always these cliché ways of being a father that Gilda seized on; mothers were for hugging and kissing, fathers were for outdoor sports. She smiled at Stella in a particular way she had. It was as if she'd learned at acting school that this was what you did when you wanted to seem rueful and pitying, put your head on one side, lifted your shoulders, raised your eyebrows and smiled. She'd done it several times in Lora Cartwright. It was a pity, she said, that Stella was unlikely to marry again. A pity for her and for Richard.

  That was more than even Stella could stand and she asked Gilda what she meant.

  ‘Oh, you know what I mean, little thing,’ Gilda said. ‘He may need a father but a man would only take on a teenage girl and a little boy if he were madly in love, and that's not likely, is it?’

  ‘At my age, do you mean?’

  ‘That among other things. I know you don't care how you look or I wouldn't say it, but you've never laid claims to much in the beauty department, have you?’

  Short of telling her they were no longer friends, she didn't want to know her, there was nothing Stella could have done. I would have said those things, and Mum would have said a good deal more, but Stella couldn't. She took the coward's way, pretending illnesses, previous engagements that didn't exist. Once she even pretended to be out when Gilda called, ashamed of herself because she had to make Richard pretend too, hide with her upstairs in a bedroom. She said she crouched on the floor and covered up her ears so that she couldn't hear Aagot telling lies to Gilda at the front door.

  ‘Were you still playing the game?’ I said.

  ‘The game?’

  ‘Killing Gilda,’ I said. ‘Did you still talk about that, pretend about that?’

  ‘Oh, that,’ she said. It mystifies me that policemen and lawyers think they need a machine to find if a person is telling the truth. The face itself and the tone of voice are lie-detectors. ‘That was all over. It was only a joke, Genevieve, and never a very funny one.’