“Well, I mean to,” said Violet, who had just been inspecting the larder with a wetted finger. “I can’t wait to get my hands on that trifle. I shan’t have any lunch tomorrow, I don’t think, so I can enjoy myself at the reception.”
“Think again,” said Heather. “The bride’s supposed to be far too nervous and ethereal to eat. Ma hasn’t half killed herself doing all that cooking for you.”
“You needn’t be so snotty. I haven’t noticed you helping much.”
“You’re the last one to talk. Have you done a thing, just one thing, towards your own beastly wedding?”
“You know I can’t cook,” said Violet, complacently.
“That poor Fred. But cooking’s not everything. Who went to fetch the flowers? Who’s decorated the church? Who sewed tapes on your dress so you won’t keep twisting and wriggling to hitch up your shoulder straps all through the service?”
“You know you love doing flowers,” Violet said. “And you didn’t fetch them; your mother-in-law did.”
“And gave some away to the conductress in the bus coming home, so that I had to go and get some more. And who’s spent all day telephoning Christie’s about the cake? Jolly clever of you to keep out of the house all day, so you couldn’t be asked to do anything. I almost hope the cake doesn’t come in time, except that it would be a let-down for Ma. What are you going to cut it with, anyway—a hay knife? Ma, look at her! The day before her wedding, and a dinner-party in her honour in an hour’s time, and she just sits on the floor in those stinking trousers, burnishing a curb chain with your saucepan cleaner.”
“Most important,” said Violet, shaking metal polish into her hands and jingling the curb chain between them as if she were playing in a rumba band. “It’s going on my honeymoon with me.”
“I don’t believe you’d notice if Fred got left behind,” said Heather scornfully, “as long as the horses were there.”
“Yes, I should,” said Violet, “because there’d be one horse too many, so sucks. I haven’t shown you my new saddle yet, have I, Ollie?” She tilted back her head to look at him. “Jolly super of Fred, wasn’t it? He wouldn’t tell me what it cost.”
“Darned sight better than what you’ve given him,” put in Heather. “I’d call off the wedding if my fiancee only gave me a set of new teeth for the clipping machine.”
“But it was what he wanted!” cried Violet in dismay. “And it was an awful fag getting them; they’re not making that sort any more. I had to go all the way to Birmingham in the end, didn’t I, Ma?”
“Yes, dear, you took a lot of trouble. Don’t be unkind, Heather, and if you two must bicker, as I’ve said hundreds of times, don’t do it in this room. And don’t do it anywhere where I am either, because my head’s going round and round.”
“Poor old darling.” Heather went over suddenly and kissed her on top of the hair-net that was preserving her elaborate hair-set for tomorrow. Mrs. North loved to be kissed, and none of her children did it often enough. “You do look tired. You almost look your age for a change. See what you’ve done, Vi? You weren’t allowed to kill your brother over your wedding, but you’ve succeeded in wrecking your mother. Let me get the dinner tonight, Ma. You stay here with your feet up and talk to Ollie.”
Mrs. North immediately sat upright and let down her feet at the idea. “That’s darling of you,” she said, “but I have a souffle to make.”
“You haven’t got a monopoly in eggs, ducky. Other people can make souffles, you know.”
“Not the way I make ’em,” said her mother. “Not mushroom souffles. You know how Violet likes my mushroom souffles, and it is her evening.”
“She’d eat anybody’s souffle, even if it was flat in the dish. Though I shouldn’t think she’d have any room after all that picking in the larder.”
“Violet, child, you haven’t! I dared you—”
“Keep your hair on,” said Violet. “I was only looking. You’re a mean sneak, Heather Sandys, and a lying swine. I shan’t be sorry to get away from you.” Without getting up, she crawled over to the table by the side window, hauled out a dog by the scruff of its neck, skidded it over the rugs and went out with a slam of the door that rattled all the mullioned window-panes.
“I shall miss old Vi,” said Heather. “She’s fun to tease, because she always rises, like Ma’s souffles. It’s going to be awfully slow having no one to fight with. She’s not a bad soul either, you know. I’m very fond of the old bird.”
“No one would think it to hear the way you talk to her,” said her mother.
“That? Oh, that doesn’t mean a thing. It’s the only language she understands. She gets out of her depth if you give her polite conversation.”
“She must be fathoms under with Fred then,” said Mrs. North. “He’s so darn polite it makes me nervous.”
“Oh, they get on fine,” said Heather airily. “They just never talk.”
Contrary to tradition, Fred was coming to dinner on the eve of the wedding. John, who had had the correct night out with the boys before he married Heather, had offered to arrange a party for Fred at the local roadhouse, but Mrs. North, who was getting a little oppressed by Muffet and Miss Smutts, begged him not to leave the women on their own. “It makes it so dull for Violet if we only have a hen party,” she said.
“I shouldn’t have thought it made it any more thrilling to have Fred,” piped up Heather, who never missed a cue, but her mother did not allow this sort of talk any more with the wedding so close. She herself, satisfied that it was what Violet wanted, was training herself to make the best of him. Besides being bad taste, she said, to criticise Fred at this stage, nothing that anyone said could alter the fact that he was within days of being a member of the family.
The best man, Kenneth Saxby, who had been at the Agricultural College with Fred, was coming to dinner too and going back to sleep at the cottage. He was a nice-looking, serious young man, with pimples on his forehead and an incipient carbuncle on the back of his neck which he had covered with Elastoplast. He was a vet, with a growing practice in Warwickshire, and the minute he arrived Violet cornered him for a free opinion on the canker in her old Labrador’s ear.
He was brought in to see Oliver before dinner, and Oliver noticed how differently Fred behaved with someone whom he knew well. His nose was quite a normal colour. He wondered how long he would have to know the family before he would shed his burning self-consciousness. Elizabeth came in with a loaded tray to lay the table and both men sprang at her.
“It’s quite all right, thank you; I’m so used to doing it, it doesn’t take a minute,” she said, picking up the little coffee table that Fred had knocked over on his way to help her. Oliver saw that Kenneth was struck with her appearance and was obviously trying to work out whether she was a superior kind of maid, a friend, or a member of the family.
Moving neatly about his room, so much at home in contrast to the awkwardness of the two men, she did indeed seem one of the family. Oliver could not imagine his room without her moving about in it. What would it be like to be awakened in the morning by someone less clean and fresh? For no one could ever look as spruce as Elizabeth before breakfast. What would it be like to have no one to whom to say the things which other people did not understand? True, Elizabeth did not always answer, and when she did she was sometimes indifferent and sometimes disapproving and sometimes even rude, but at least she always knew what he was getting at. Somehow, without seeming to be particularly interested in him, she understood his mind. Hers was rather similar: detached, independent, unexcit-able. He had long ago given up the idea of trying to woo her into tenderness. Any flirtatious attempts slid off her and left him feeling undignified. Arnold Clitheroe must have a better technique; he wondered how he went about it. It was difficult to imagine Elizabeth relaxing her guard. Perhaps she never did, and Clitheroe loved a poised and polished statue, without knowing what went on inside. Oliver thought he knew Elizabeth quite well by now, well enough at least to guess at what she
was thinking. Since the wedding preparations began she had been quieter and more withdrawn than ever, getting on with a hundred jobs without being asked, yet not entering into discussions and plans. She only seemed interested in the wedding as far as the work it made. This she accepted calmly and performed efficiently. She had given Violet a really attractive brooch, which Violet had not appreciated.
“It was very generous of her,” Mrs. North said, touched. “That’s an expensive brooch.”
“Probably one her boy friend gave her,” said Heather. Arnold Clitheroe seemed to give Elizabeth quite a lot of things. He seemed to be hot on the trail, from what Oliver could gather from Elizabeth’s guarded answers to questions.
She was looking unusually warm and pink tonight, and her eyes were smiling as if she were excited inside. She had made the enormous concession of having two cocktails. Fred and Ken had been summoned to the drawing-room to be social. Oliver watched Elizabeth lay the table, and when she was looking it over, standing on, one leg in a way she had when pensive, he said suddenly: “All this wedding business—does it inspire you to thoughts of doing the same?”
She looked at him calmly. “I imagine I shall get married one day,” she said. “I don’t mean to go on working for ever.”
“And you couldn’t go home, of course. At least, I gather that from what Muffet said you’d told her.”
“Muffet,” said Elizabeth, moving a knife into exact alignment with a soupspoon, “is a lying old busybody. She’d say anything to make it look as if she knew more than anyone else.”
“You wouldn’t really go and live with her, would you, like she’s always planning?”,
“I suppose one could do worse. Bit too insecure for me, though. I want to keep on the right side of the law if possible.”
“With someone like Arnold Clitheroe, for instance. No one could go wrong with a name like that.”
“I could do worse.”
“Liz, you’re surely not considering—? Why, the man must be at least fifty. Much too old for you, however nice he was.”
“I might. He’s always asking me, but I haven’t made up my mind. I tell him I want to see this job through first.”
“For God’s sake kill me off and go to him then,” said Oliver peevishly. “Go ahead and ruin your life.”
“Why shouldn’t I get married?” she asked. “Other women do. In fact, it’s considered a bit of a disaster if they don’t. Look at Vi. I mean, without wanting to be rude, no one would say Fred was the ideal husband, yet everyone’s glad, because it’s better than marrying nobody.” Elizabeth never came close to you on the rare occasions when she spoke her mind. She stood now with the table between them, talking to him across the room.
“But goodlieavens!” Oliver ran his fingers through his hair. “You can’t compare the two. Of course, Vi isn’t everybody’s meat, but a girl like you—”
“Yes, what about a girl like me?”
“Don’t fish. I’m not going to tell you you’re pretty, if that’s what you want. John can do that.”
“Oh, he does,” she said smugly.
“Stop being coquettish,” he said. “It doesn’t suit you.”
“How dare you,” she said, colouring. “You are the rudest, worst-tempered man I’ve ever known. You think that because you’re the spoiled baby of this house you can say anything you like and get away with it.”
“That’s a beastly thing to say.”
“You started the beastliness.”
“That’s right,” said Muffet, who never entered a room without listening outside first. “Having a little tiff. Won’t do you any harm; then you can kiss and make up afterwards. How pretty you look, Elizabeth darling, when you colour up, but I expect Oliver tells you that.” Conscious of resentment, but not caring, she went on: “I couldn’t bear it a moment longer in the drawing-room, Ollie. I had to come in here to make sure I was normal. That young man of your sister’s behaves as if I were the phantom of the opera. I strike him dumb. When I try to draw him out with kindly conversation he just opens and shuts his mouth like a fish, and never a word comes out. The other one, his friend, is quite an interesting fellow—clever too, he’s been telling me about some of his cases. He finds it very hard to get the right instruments, he says. I’m going to look round when I get back to London and see what I can find for him.”
“Fred’s very shy, you know,” Oliver said. “You have to make allowances.”
“Shy? No one’s shy with me; I can talk to anybody. But not to your future brother-in-law. Fve never met such heavy going.”
Mrs. North came in, untying the heliotrope apron with the labelled pockets. “I’m all ready to dish up,” she said, “if you are, Elizabeth. I thought I’d never be ready. My goodness, how we’ve got through it all, I don’t know. I keep going into the larder to gloat over the food; it really does look swell. Those fruit jellies of yours are setting perfectly.”
“I was going to put some cream on top,” Elizabeth said. “I thought they looked rather dull.”
“Couldn’t be half as dull as that fellow in there,” said Lady Sandys in her clear, carrying voice, jerking her head towards the thin wall of the drawing-room.
That fellow in there did the wrong thing, of course, by turning up next morning and asking to see Violet.
“She mustn’t see him! Don’t let her see him!” Mrs. North scuttled down the stairs when she heard his voice in the hall. “It’s terribly bad luck for the bride and bridegroom to meet on the wedding morning. Surely you know that?” she asked him crossly. She had been up since half-past six, and, so far, everything possible had gone wrong, from a sulky kitchen fire and soured milk to a child sick on the carpet and Violet’s petticoat showing two inches below her dress.
Fred was understood, through his stammering, to say that one of the horses was sick and Ken wanted some drugs. He himself must stay and help Ken with the horse, and the only other man who could drive had just put a load of grass into the dryer and could not leave the machine.
“Wouldn’t you know it? “wailed Mrs. North. “Wouldn’t you know something like this would have to happen? I wanted to keep Violet in the house all morning to be sure of her being ready on time. If she goes jaunting off to Shrewsbury, Heaven knows when she’ll get back.”
“B-but it’s a matter of life or death, Mrs. N-N-N”—gulp—“North,” said Fred, who had a sense of the dramatic on occasion.
“Heather, I suppose you couldn’t—?”
“I couldn’t,” said Heather firmly. “I’ve got all the flowers in the house to do, and the children to dress. And you’re not going to make John go in that draughty car.”
“What’s all the rumpus?” Oliver heard Violet come thumping down the stairs. “Oh, hullo, Fred,” she said casually. “How d’you like my dress? This petticoat thing isn’t meant to show; they’re just pinning it up.”
“He mustn’t see it! Fred, don’t you dare look at her. Have you children got no sense of what’s right? Violet”—as Fred started his stammering explanation again— “I’m afraid you’ve got to take the car and get some drugs from Shrewsbury. One of the horses is sick. And if you’re not back by twelve o’clock—”
“Which one?” Violet was immediately businesslike. “Colic? Marigold? Whee-ew!” She whistled like a man. “When should she be foaling?” In a moment she burst into Oliver’s room, her hair dishevelled from trying on and a flap of white silk hanging down at the back of the red silk dress in which she was going to be married.
“Can I borrow your trench coat, Ollie?” she asked breathlessly. “It’s raining like stink, and I don’t want to get this fancy dress wet going to the garage.”
“Now, Violet.” Mrs. North followed her into the room. “You’re not going out in that dress. You just go upstairs and take it off before you go.”
“Can’t, Ma, no time,” said Violet over her shoulder on her way out.
“The horse won’t die for the sake of two minutes. You can’t go shopping in your wedding dress!
And I have to alter the petticoat.” Her mother pursued her at a trot.
“Do it when I come back.”
“I’ll never have time. Take it off now.”
“Oh, Ma …” Oliver heard their arguing voices fading down the passage and presently his mother came back and lectured him for five minutes about his sister. She was rattled this morning. The capable command which had borne her through the last few days had succumbed at last to the waiting accumulation of fatigue. Her round, creased face was quivering with near tears.
“I shall never get through this day, Ollie, never. So many things have gone wrong already and I feel there are so many more to come. I can’t face it. What shall I do? I can’t face it.”
“Oh rot,” he said, “you’ll sail through it.” It made him uneasy to see her crumple. He remembered his childhood’s sudden panic of insecurity if he ever saw her tired or crying. Who could cope with life if she could not? “Go and have a drink, old dear,” he told her. “A good strong one, that’s all you need.”
“At this hour in the morning?” She consulted her pendant watch and checked it with her wrist-watch. “Oh well, it is three and a half minutes to eleven. Maybe I will, just to keep me going until the next disaster happens along. You know they haven’t sent the cake yet? My goodness, why didn’t I ask Violet to call for it in Shrewsbury? That shows you what kind of a state I’m in; I never thought of it. Darling, when this schemozzle is over I’m going to take to my bed for a week and rest up. I feel all to pieces, and I’ve tasted so many things I’ve gotten terrible dyspepsia. I’ve been taking bicarbonate all morning. I never thought I’d be envying you, but I reckon you’re the lucky one today to be in here out of it all. Yes, Mrs. Cowlin, what is it? Oh my gracious, take it off the fire, then, and find a rag to wipe up the mess. Not the teacloth—wait, I’ll come and see.” Slightly restored by this new challenge, she gave Oliver an exasperated look and followed Mrs. Cowlin out, nearly overbalancing in the doorway by aiming the pretence of a kick at the back of Mrs. Cowlin’s creeping black woollen stockings.
The Happy Prisoner Page 23