The Brimstone Wedding

by Barbara Vine

Most pairs of lovers in those circumstances would go away to a hotel in a holiday resort somewhere or go to Paris. I couldn't have afforded that – I had my children's education to think of – I couldn't have afforded it for both of us and he couldn't pay his share. He'd reached a point when he only had the income he made from selling landscapes in pubs at ten pounds a time and drawing cat pictures for birthday cards. But apart from that we both wanted to go to Molucca. It was the place where we had always met, the only place for the past six years, it was the scene for our being married game. All the things the two of us had collected together were there, our books, our records, our pictures. We kept clothes there. The crockery and cutlery, the linen, were ours, bought together, bought specially for us for that house. We'd cooked our favourite food in the kitchen and the utensils we'd used were all there. Our favourite drink was in the sideboard, gin and angostura, and our favourite white burgundy in the wine rack. You see, when we were together we never made do with the second-rate. We ate and drank the things we liked best, we did only the things we liked best, we were complete hedonists.

  The one thing we'd never done was spend a night together. Ridiculous, wasn't it? We'd been lovers for ten years and we'd never slept side by side for a whole night in the same bed. I longed for that and so did he. The previous year, with my children both away, we'd often met at Molucca, but Gilda was at home, watchful, checking on his movements, already suspicious. There was no question of his staying away overnight.

  When you're in love you want to see the person you love in every possible circumstance, in all possible situations, performing every action it's possible for a human being to perform, to see him when he's aware of you and when he's unaware. I'd seen Alan asleep but never by night, never in the darkness of the night, never seen a dream make him smile or an anxiety make his eyelids tremble. I'd never seen him wake up in the morning. I didn't know if he was a hard or an easy waker, if he lay there slowly surfacing or if he jumped out of bed, as alert first thing in the morning as at midday.

  We meant to spend all those nights together, ten of them if we were lucky. Part of the game was talking about those nights, how we would start the early evening with the right sort of dinner and the right sort of drinks. We planned what I'd wear and even the things we'd say. We knew that Gilda wouldn't be back till the end of the second week of September, nor would Marianne, and Richard wasn't expected till September the 8th, two days before his school term began. How I remember those dates! I could have made a statement to the police after all. Even Aagot had gone away. Not home to Norway but to be with her boyfriend who was at Durham University and had a holiday job in Newcastle. I even lent her my car to go in. It wasn't entirely altruism. She couldn't have gone without free transport and free petrol.

  As it happened Alan and I never did have our ten nights together, not one night together. For we didn't even have one. We never did. We never came to sleep side by side in the same bed for a whole night. That's not to say we didn't pass a night together, we did, two long nights together, the longest I've ever known. Well, that is what I am going to talk about.

  Whichever is the sooner turns out to be my voice. You can hear how hoarse I've become. I will do some more tomorrow.

  Alan came down from Tivetshall St Michael to fetch me in his car, the old grey Rover that he'd had ever since I'd first known him. It was eleven in the morning, August the 29th, and very hot. We'd planned to go straight to Molucca and have our lunch there, then out for a drive to the coast perhaps. We were going to have dinner out, in some nice hotel, a romantic dinner in a lovely place, because after that was going to be our first night together. I believe he'd done a lot of work he didn't care to do to be able to afford that dinner.

  You'll think it absurd the way I was dressed. But people's clothes were more formal in those days, and I – well, I think I was a lot more formal than some others. I suppose I still dressed in much the same way as I had in the fifties. Those were the styles that suited me, dresses with tight bodices and tiny waists with wide belts and full skirts, stockings, high-heeled shoes. I didn't possess a pair of trousers. I never wore sweaters or cardigans. When Alan came to fetch me I was wearing a cream-coloured cotton dress printed with pink and blue flowers, high-heeled cream patent shoes, a diamond watch, pearl earrings. The dress was very low-cut and off-the-shoulder and I wore a double-strand pearl necklace. My hair was turned under in a short pageboy, back-combed and lacquered. A woman wouldn't dress up as much as that to go to a dinner party these days, would she? Marianne goes out to dinner in jeans and an Indian shirt.

  I don't know why I've talked about the clothes I was wearing, it seems irrelevant, but it wasn't, not really. If it were possible to make things worse, the way I was dressed made things worse. I didn't have any more – well, suitable, I suppose that's the word – suitable clothes at Molucca, just more dresses and more court shoes and the kind of raincoat that's more for show than it's waterproof, a shot-silk thing, silver and blue, you may even have found it there in the wardrobe. Are you surprised that I remember all these details, that I remember everything?

  It was very hot. We had all the car windows open but there was no wind, not the least breeze. The farmers were taking advantage of the stillness to burn off the fields. There was always a risk unless you were very careful of setting hedges alight but that risk was much increased in windy weather. A day like this one was a godsend to them. A pall of smoke hung over the horizon, a thick pale grey that quite obscured the blue of the sky, and into this greyness spires of darker smoke rose as from chimneys on winter nights.

  The idea was to kill weeds, I believe, rather than plough them in. Ploughing took place after the burning. I suppose there must have been fields where the farmer or one of his men remained behind to watch the progress of their fire, but I never saw any. I only saw the flames running through the lanes between the stubble, the whole field alight and the smoke pouring off it in black clouds, untended, unwatched, filling the air with a stifling, choking darkness. Scraps of charred stalk danced in it like swarms of flies. We closed all the windows. I already had black on my hands, powdery yet greasy fragments that smelt like dead matches.

  We stopped once to buy food and he bought a bottle of champagne. I don't think we saw a soul apart from the shopman on that drive up over the Waveney to Curton. We followed one car for a while and met two. The countryside up here was very remote twenty-five years ago. Unspoilt, they called it. Suffolk was the second least spoilt county of England, and that must have gone for the borders of Norfolk too. But you'll know that, you'll have heard it from your mother and grandmother. There were places where you could drive for twenty miles, look across empty fields and woods, see perhaps three farmhouses and half a dozen cottages in all that distance. The Breckland was still a wild, strange place and the fens still lonely and silent.

  The rolling smoke was behind us when we reached Molucca. The sky was blue over the fen behind the house and we could breathe the air without inhaling charred remains of barley. It was utterly quiet. Birds only sing at dawn and before they go to roost, not at midday. We could be in that house for hours without a single car passing along the road beyond the long grassy space.

  Once inside, would you have expected us to go straight to bed? We were past that stage, though we might have done if, like the previous August, we had only the daytime. But we thought we had ten nights. No, by then we thought we had a lifetime, because as we entered the house Alan said to me, ‘This isn't a holiday, sweetheart. This is for ever. I'm never going back. I've left her.’

  He took me in his arms and kissed me. I kissed him and hugged him and we danced.

  The years between then and now began on September the 1st.

  There was August the 29th and the next day and the night that followed and the next day, and then twenty-four years. I don't suppose I saw it like that at the time but that's how I see it now. At the end of those years.

  These days they would call what I had a clinical depression, a term I've le
arned from Richard. I would have treatment, drugs, therapy, counselling. Then, I had nothing. I drifted through grey days, from which all the light had gone.

  I am not asking for pity. Whom anyway could I ask it of? No one will listen to this. And I deserve no pity, though Alan does. I had my children. He had no one. His predicament was terrible but I could do nothing to relieve it. The thought of him, his name, memories of him, paralysed me. Even if I'd wanted to – and of course I wanted to – I could not physically have lifted the phone or dialled his number. I did write to him. The letters were never sent. How do I know that the same was true of him? That he too wanted to phone and tried to write? I know it, that's all.

  Because this wasn't one of Gilda's films, we hadn't broken off immediately and dramatically. Gilda said I knew nothing of life but I know it isn't like that. We met the day before Richard came back, not at Molucca but at an hotel, a place where we had sometimes been to eat. We sat in the bar, not drinking our familiar favourite but he whisky and I some vermouth mixture. It was as if we each set out to do things differently from the past.

  Events hung between us but they could not be talked of, we had each silently acknowledged that. How strange that there should be nothing else to say. We who had had so much to say, so much in common that we talked all the time we were together, had nothing to say. There are couples who can be together in ‘companionable silence’ but we had never been among them. The silence that descended on us was not companionable. It was nothing, a blank, that as it lasted filled with a kind of panic. Because we scorned small talk, or rather had kept it for others, knowing it was not for us, we rejected it now.

  It was not that we wanted to talk of her or what had happened, but that what had happened had driven away everything else. Some people boast of living in the present, but if you try it you will find it's not possible. We were trying it, blotting out the past because it was too outrageous, unable to imagine a future, living in the here and now. And we discovered there was no present, only an emptiness that if you tumbled and fell into it would drive you mad.

  I wanted him not to touch me, not even touch my hand, and if he felt differently he gave no sign. We drank our drinks and said we had better be getting back. To what? To two empty houses. Before we parted he said, in a tone made artificially light and casual,

  ‘I'll pop over on Saturday, shall I? I'd like to see my son.’

  The way he talked to Richard when he came to our house I recognized as a farewell. To me his words, though to the child only friendly and interested, were loaded with the sadness of last times. And when Richard had gone out into the garden on his own he said to me,

  ‘It isn't going to work, is it?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘It was lovely knowing you,’ he said. ‘It was the best thing I ever had. I don't suppose you want to kiss me and the funny thing is I don't much want to kiss you. That's the way it goes, I suppose. I won't hang about here any longer. Say goodbye to Richard for me, will you?’

  Once Richard was back at school I drove over to Molucca. I was very nervous about driving, I was terrified. The house was in a mess. I cleared up, I emptied ashtrays and washed glasses. There were some flowers in a vase but they were still fresh and I couldn't bring myself to throw them away. They were love-in-a-mist, there's an irony for you. For some reason – did I think I would go back there again? – I took Alan's drawings off the walls and put them into the sideboard. The photograph of us that the man who came to ask the way had taken I took out of its frame and put with the drawings.

  I switched off the refrigerator and opened the door but I didn't look inside. There was ham in there and a piece of cheese as well as the champagne. It seemed unlikely to me that I would ever drink champagne again. I went upstairs to find the dress I had worn that day and the next night, I intended to fetch it and take it to the cleaners, but the sooty sulphurous smell of it when I opened the wardrobe door made me nauseous. I pushed it along the rail to the far end and shut the door.

  Before I left I went into the garage and looked at Gilda's car. No one would come looking for it. I knew that as well as I knew that this house was mine and my name was Stella Newland. No one would need or wish to look for it. Of course if I had it moved away or otherwise tried to dispose of it, that would be another thing. If, for instance, I tried to sell the house. But I wouldn't sell the house.

  I drove home. That night I was ill, that was the start of an illness that was like a protracted flu. When I recovered I told Aagot I would never drive again.

  Other people should have made things easier. They made them worse. It seems to me that everybody I knew asked me if I still saw Alan and Gilda. Where were they? Why did they never come? Why did I never go to them? By ‘everybody’ I suppose I mean Marianne – well, mainly Marianne. Since the scene at Easter Priscilla had behaved as if Gilda didn't exist, as if she had never existed. Jeremy took a slightly different attitude. He congratulated me on ‘getting rid of’ Alan and Gilda, those ‘rackety people’.

  One day Madge Browning told me she had encountered Alan in Diss. He was waiting at the bus stop. She hadn't asked him why he had no car and she hadn't asked after Gilda, but he told her all the same. Gilda had left him and gone to live in France. It upset me terribly when she told me that. Not about Gilda going to France, not that, he had to say that, but just that she had seen him and talked to him and – oh, I don't know. That was when Marianne interfered. She phoned him, asked why he had dropped me, what sort of a friend was he? I was ill and I needed him. Please to come as soon as he could. It's ironical really. I think, I really think, she hoped to marry us to each other, she was matchmaking.

  I have hardly ever been angry with my children. She was terribly taken aback at my anger. Poor little one, she meant well, she was only eighteen. Of course he didn't come, he knew better than that, he no more wanted to come than I wanted to see him.

  I never saw him again. I haven't seen him since September twenty-four years ago. It would be nice if I could say I've thought of him every day and never ceased to love him but I can't say that because when I have thought of him and tried to recapture my love for him I can only remember the burning fields and a green scarf and blood on the grass. And these things blot out the good memories the way smoke blots out the sun.

  The next two tapes I make will be – what is it Marianne says? – for real. Yes, the next two will be for real. I shall label them and ask Richard to see that Genevieve gets them after I am dead. Perhaps they will be lost and she will never hear them or perhaps she will use them to record something without knowing the words they contain. So be it. I am not inclined to write cryptic messages on them. She will listen or she will not.

  I only feel that for reasons which will become clear, of all people on this earth it is she who should be told. This is a dramatic and fatalistic way of looking at things, I know that. It is my way of giving some meaning to life, a pattern prescribed by destiny, that is all.

  And what is she supposed to do then?

  I paused, I stopped. Footsteps hesitated outside the door and then passed on. I asked what she was supposed to do. What she likes. Something or nothing. Whatever she likes.

  19

  I was moving into the country of last times. It's a strange place and being in it gives weight to everything you do. Mike had gone off to Leeds and I'd given him the last kiss I'd ever give him. For the last time I'd said I'd be seeing him on Friday, I'd walked down to the bottom of our garden for the last time, thrown out the last dead flowers from the wall vase. As for Stella, she'd eaten her dinner in the dining room for the last time, maybe done her last crossword puzzle, smoked her last cigarette.

  But I felt no nostalgia for the home I was soon to leave, I'd lost all interest in it, I never wanted to be there. It was just a house Mike and I had bought on a mortgage, not because we liked it but because it was all we could afford, not in a place we chose but the only place we knew. Most of the people I know lived like that, not in the way they wanted to
live but in the best and most prudent way they could manage. I wondered if that expedient way of living, that economical, obligatory way, was going to change now. To change for good.

  My house, mine and Mike's, had been due, soon, to feel like a small and cosy prison, with two inmates and two prison officers, so I was going before that could happen. I was going while I still could and when I had a reason. Work was where I wanted to be, not in that house, so I'd told Lena I wouldn't take my day off, I'd swap with Carolyn.

  Again, as I came up to Stella's door, I heard the murmur of her voice from inside. There was no one with her, she was talking to herself. It was rather eerie, like one of the women of my family speaking an incantation. Only in Stella's case there were no pauses for a candle to be lit or sulphur cast into the ring. My fingernail scraping the wood before I knocked was enough to alert her. Her silence was as sudden as an explosion. I could almost hear her jump. She must have expected to see Lena or Pauline – when had I last knocked? – for I found her sitting in her chair clutching the new patchwork dressing-gown about her, her expression quite guilty.

  The old, lovely smile stretched her wizened face. She put up her arms. I kissed her and she managed a feeble hug. That, too, was a last time. She hated to complain, she said, but the pain was bad now. Lena had agreed to call the doctor. That's who she thought it was when I knocked. Did she want me to stay and talk? She shook her head, her eyes half-closed. I left her. I don't know why I broke my rule and, coming past her door an hour later with Gracie's tray, put my ear to one of the top panels of the door. Stella wasn't asleep, she was talking again, and although I couldn't make out the words they sounded far from a description of her symptoms to a doctor.

  Next morning, when I went to her room, she was in bed and something about her colour and the way she was lying told me she wouldn't get up that day.

  Her face was beginning to change. The dying get a certain look a few days before they die. The eyes stare, the flesh falls. I sponged her face and hands and combed her hair. She wanted me to sit with her and for once Lena didn't object. Her right hand crept out from under the sheet and clasped mine. It was no longer a strong grip that she had. The fingers were weak and not quite steady. But after a while she was able to sit up against the pillows and talk. She asked me about her house, if I'd liked it, if I with what she called my superstitiousness had sensed unpleasant things there, forces, elements. I was able to tell her I had nothing but good feelings, a sense of happiness, comfort and peace.