The World is a Wedding

by Wendy Jones

  Wilfred stood as still as he could. This was a proper wedding in an ancient chapel, and standing next to him was the woman he wanted as his wife. Out of the corner of his eye he looked at Flora Myffawny—beauty was around her like lavender—and thought to himself that this was the happiest day of his life. And there was the night to come as well. He felt the muscles in his belly contract and the long muscles heat and flare inside him. It would be the happiest night of his life, too, when the air between them was hot. He had not yet had conjugal relations and did not know the exact ins and out of these things, but he had lain in bed with a woman before and he felt confident this practise would hold him in good stead tonight. He glanced at Flora Myffanwy.

  ‘Wilfred, you’re twitching!’ Arthur Squibs reprimanded. ‘Six seconds and seven seconds . . .’

  Flora was looking at the camera lens with her solemn beauty and serious eyes. It wasn’t always like this at a wedding, Wilfred knew. But he wouldn’t think about that today. That was the past. Whomever else he had professed to love, honour and obey was gone. He would dwell on it no more. He would put it behind him. Flora was his wife now and he couldn’t be happier. To think that the days earlier in the year had been so dark, so imprisoning, when all had seemed lost . . . and now here he was.

  And Flora had loved before, but the chap had died in that dreadful war and so that was all over and they could both begin a new life. The past was gone for Flora, too. She loved him now. He must remember Mr. Ogmore Auden’s advice. Mr. Auden had asked him, when he was an apprentice undertaker: ‘Do you know the secret to a happy life?’

  ‘No, Mr. Auden,’ he’d replied.

  ‘Two words: “Yes, dear”.’

  Wilfred decided, there and then, that he would call Flora Myffanwy ‘dear’ and he hoped that she would like that. It was important to call one’s wife ‘dear’. It was called a term of endearment, Wilfred knew, and was the opposite of a term of abuse. One would never call one’s wife a term of abuse. That was unthinkable.

  ‘Nine seconds and ten seconds,’ Arthur Squibs counted. There was the fat click of the camera then a fizz of the photograph being taken. A dignified round of applause broke out.

  I will kiss her cheek, he thought to himself, and felt the gentle warmth of her skin.

  ‘There is good to have flowers so near you,’ Wilfred remarked on Flora’s posy. ‘Dear,’ he added. Flora looked up at him quietly. Still waters run deep, he thought to himself, though she had said the only words that mattered to Wilfred: ‘I do,’ and in the gentlest voice he could ever imagine. Wilfred put his hand tenderly around her small warm waist and looked at the woman he could almost barely believe existed. And he could see the smile coming in her eyes. Wilfred was aware that he knew very little about women, as his mother had died on the fourth day of his life. Women were different from men. He had already noticed, and he’d only been married five minutes.

  ‘Shall the bride throw the bouquet?’ Mrs. Willie the Post suggested.

  ‘Those flowers are more beautiful than poetry,’ Mrs. Cadwallader remarked.

  ‘There’s an abundation of lilies for you,’ Mrs. Annie Evans agreed, ‘and with the smell of the scent of paradise.’

  ‘Jeffrey, if you catch the bouquet it will be your wedding next,’ Mrs. Willie the Post encouraged.

  ‘Good God Almighty, there’s a thought!’ Handel Evans retorted.

  Flora smiled, turned her back to the expectant crowd but the bouquet slipped from her hands, falling onto the soft grass. Wilfred, removing his top hat, bent down to pick it up.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, blushing a little.

  ‘Let me. Dear,’ he offered, picking up the bouquet and handing back the slightly crushed lilies. Flora took the flowers and threw them carefully behind her to a cheer of joy and excitement from the anticipating crowd.

  2.

  TEA AT THE RITZ

  London, midsummer 1925

  The Ritz is a machine that manufactures tranquillity.’ The butler pulled a fat gold watch from his waistcoat and noted the time. He continued: ‘A beautiful, purring machine oiled by money and cleaned by maids. Guests create chaos, the maids provide order.’

  Grace held her hands protectively in front of herself and watched while the butler smoothed the shining bald dome of his head with a starched handkerchief, then drew the blinds to cut out the summer sun.

  ‘So you want to work in the Ritz.’

  Grace nodded.

  The butler leaned back on his mahogany desk-chair and peered at Grace over his half-moon spectacles. ‘You are not alone. In these times of increasing unemployment,’ he pontificated, ‘many girls come from the provinces—and the Valleys,’ he flicked a hand at her, ‘to earn money so their brothers and sisters can eat. And,’ he folded his arms, ‘because a certain breed of young girl likes to serve—and ape—the rich.’ He asked sharply, ‘Have you worked as a servant before? Are you a servant?’

  ‘No.’ Grace waited while the butler refolded his handkerchief and dabbed the sweat on his jowls.

  ‘What have you done?’

  What, indeed, had Grace done? She had cooked and cleaned under her mother’s critical eye, she had read novels and she had kept bees, and the keeping of bees was what she was most proud of. The honey she’d collected from her hive, then sold, was a rich amber and flecked with pollen, but she had no illusions: beekeeping was fruitless to her here. She had been in the city only a few days but she doubted there were any honeybees in London; there were so few flowers. But she was alone and must earn her own money.

  ‘Are you in good health?’ the butler enquired, in response to her silence.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘In which case, Mrs. . . . ?’ He looked down at his papers and straightened his glasses.

  ‘Rice,’ Grace mumbled, feeling herself tense from telling a lie.

  ‘And am I to suppose that you are a war widow?’ he asked with a weary sigh.

  Grace nodded.

  ‘In which case, Mrs. Rice, you will be a chambermaid. You’ll work six and a half days a week. One week’s holiday a year—unpaid, of course. Stand up straight, girl.’

  Grace stood up straighter.

  ‘Report to the head housekeeper’s office in two hours’ time, at six o’clock sharp. She will apportion you your uniform. You will sleep in the maids’ dormitory from tonight and begin work in the morning.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘No visitors in the dormitory. On pain of immediate dismissal.’

  Grace nodded; she expected no visitors.

  ‘You are dismissed.’

  Grace wandered the labyrinthine, muggy streets behind the Ritz, unwilling to venture far, frightened she would be late returning to the hotel. As she walked along the pavements, Grace thought how much had happened, and how quickly: within a matter of weeks she had married, divorced, left home and now become a maid. It was as if her life had been suddenly concertinaed, when before it had been an expanse of sameness. Grace was bewildered, numb and in shock, and amidst these changes, all she seemed able to understand was the unstoppable forwardness of life.

  She walked until she found a small ladies’ dress shop squashed between a tobacconist’s and an Italian café. The bell above the door rang shrilly when Grace entered and she tentatively browsed while the assistant finished serving a woman with a Pekingese dog, who was purchasing a clutch bag embroidered with King Tutankhamun.

  ‘Customers are asked to refrain from opening the cabinet drawers,’ the shop assistant announced with a tight smile. ‘Madam is looking for a corset?’

  Grace wanted to turn and walk out of the door, away from this shop hidden behind Piccadilly, its window crowded with mannequins—armless, legless, headless figures which suggested that a butchering of the body was needed to buy clothes here—but the shop assistant quickly steered her into a changing room, in which stood yet another mannequin,
like a cloth Venus de Milo.

  ‘Madam should try a Rayon Corset first. It has steel stays,’ pronounced the woman, standing close to the curtain dividing them. Shortly, a hand poked through the dusty, ruched curtain and gave her a corset. Grace yanked her dress down and took the rolled-up piece of elasticated fabric.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said automatically, heat flushing over her. Grace dragged on the corset; it was too tight over her hips and stomach, forcing her to breathe in and stand bolt upright.

  ‘And would madam like a brassière as well? Perhaps a Symington Side Lacer, which flattens the bust and is lined with net?’

  ‘Madam’ sounded incongruous in this cramped shop selling coarse, drop-waist dresses: cheaply-made copies of Vogue fashions for poor girls who wanted to wear the chic styles but could not afford them. Was the woman being sarcastic? Grace didn’t like the complexity of sarcasm, the amount of thought it demanded. It reminded her of her mother: ‘Were you thinking of cleaning the hearth, Grace?’ ‘Were you thinking a man would look at you in that frock?’ and the accompanying laughter that wasn’t funny.

  Grace fiddled with the stocking suspenders so they hung straight and barely dared look at herself in the mirror.

  ‘Or perhaps madam would prefer a larger size?’

  Grace squirmed. ‘Is this the biggest corset you have?’ she asked, closing her eyes when she spoke, emboldened by the curtain that hid her from the prim woman standing on the other side.

  ‘Would it be of use, madam, if you adjusted the corset? Let the buckles out?’

  ‘No,’ said Grace, something new and stronger—an instinct to survive—rising within her.

  ‘I will check the cabinet drawers.’

  While Grace waited she thought of the print of the Old Lady of Salem: it was of a woman in Capel Salem who was committing the sin of Vanity, and so the devil hid in the folds of her shawl. It was her mother’s favourite painting—she had collected nine tokens from Sunlight soap powder to receive a free print—and it hung in the drawing room above the fireplace. Her mother said that when Grace looked at the woman, if she saw the devil’s face, then Grace had the devil in her.

  ‘Here,’ the woman pronounced with a distant contempt and thrust another thick corset through the curtain. ‘This is the Spencer Corset, which corrects ptosis. Seventy women in one hundred suffer from ptosis,’ the shop assistant declared, ‘and the Spencer Corset cures it. It will prevent your intestines sagging out of place, resolve your figure faults and control your diaphragm.’

  Grace tugged on the new corset, which reached from under her ribs to the top of her thighs.

  The woman was waiting impatiently on the other side of the curtain. ‘The whalebone provides considerable support for the spine,’ she added pushily.

  The corset was tight and hard but it would do. She would buy it and she would be a chambermaid. She was binding her body and binding her life.

  Grace dragged the undergarment off, pulled her dress on, drew the curtains apart and there, standing too close, was the woman. Grace stepped back into the changing room.

  ‘Is madam going to take the underbust corset, the one in blush pink?’

  ‘I will,’ said Grace.

  ‘Certainly, madam.’ The woman held out her hand to take the garment, showing Grace she hadn’t yet paid for it so it wasn’t yet hers, trotted behind the counter, wrapped the corset in crisp brown paper and tied it with string. Then she wrote out the bill with exactitude. Grace paid the nine shillings with a sense of anxiety, which she tried not to show. It was some of the money she had been given when she left Narberth.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, from habitual politeness rather than gratitude.

  ‘I hope you will find your purchase of use, madam. One mustn’t let oneself go, must one?’

  Grace sat on a bed in the maids’ dormitory. She had returned to the Ritz at six o’clock sharp, collected her uniform from the housekeeper and spent the rest of the evening embroidering her initials onto the two black dresses and four white aprons she would be expected to wear from tomorrow. When she had finished, she glanced down at herself. She had thought she would have put on weight and was starving herself so as not to do so. She focused on her feet, the bones jutting out as she unrolled her threadbare stockings. Her toenails needed cutting. She used the scissors from the cheap manicure set she had bought earlier in the tobacconist’s next to the dress shop; she had forgotten to pack scissors in her rush to leave.

  Grace looked around at the white room with the black iron beds and the modern electric lightbulb hanging starkly from the ceiling, shocked to find herself here, somewhere so strange to her and far from home. But this stuffy dormitory under the hotel roof would do for tonight, perhaps a few weeks, a couple of months at most. Then . . . she didn’t know. A time would come when she would need her own bedroom but she didn’t know where to find privacy in this populated city.

  A maid turned over, pulled a blanket over her head and Grace heard muffled sobs.

  ‘Don’t mind her.’ The girl sitting opposite indicated the shrouded outline of the weeping maid. ‘She’s homesick. Cries herself to sleep every night. She’s from the Lake District. Says Windermere isn’t like London.’ The girl pulled off her cap and let down her black plait, slipped out of her uniform, undid her brassière and was soon naked. Grace looked away, shocked.

  ‘You new? Did you answer the “Maids Wanted” advertisement in the Evening News?’

  Grace nodded.

  ‘My feet are killing me,’ the girl moaned, hopping into bed, her breasts wobbling freely. ‘Right, switch the electric light out. Go on, new girl.’

  Grace went to the Bakelite switch on the wall and then fumbled her way across the cramped, darkened attic into bed. The lyrics of a swiftly paced song and the sound of a saxophone, full of longing, drifted upwards.

  ‘He landed with a splash in the River Nile

  A-ridin’ a sea-goin’ crocodile.

  He winked at Cleopatra, she said, “Ain’t he a sight!

  How about a date for next Saturday night?”

  ‘Not going to cry yourself to sleep, are you?’ the girl asked. ‘I don’t think I can take any more snivelling.’

  ‘No,’ Grace said.

  ‘Good,’ the girl retorted. ‘It only stops you sleeping.’

  ‘You have a problem with beds,’ the girl with the plait stated the following morning, lifting the mattress for Grace and folding the sheet in one practised, mechanical gesture. It was Grace’s first day of work at the Ritz. They were bending down to do hospital corners on a bed in the Louis XIV Suite but Grace’s did not have the origami exactness of the other maid’s: Grace’s sheet was pleated like the edge of a puff-pastry confection. They finished the bed in silence, Grace following the other maid’s lead.

  ‘Watch,’ the girl ordered. ‘Keep copying me.’ She dropped a dented yellow cushion with a plop onto the Persian rug, picked it up, thumped it and arranged it on the chaise longue. ‘That’s how you plump up a cushion properly,’ she explained, flicking her plait over her shoulder. ‘And the guest who’s worn this,’ she said, grabbing a shimmery Flapper dress abandoned over an armchair, ‘has the whole suite next door for her clothes. Can you imagine? Just her glad rags: as if they were a group of people. We’ll clean that suite next. At least we don’t have to change the beds because no one sleeps in them—so you’ll be all right there.’ The girl nudged Grace. ‘Hilda,’ she said. ‘Hilda Bell.’

  ‘Grace. Gracie . . .’ replied Grace, fumbling to find a new name for herself.

  ‘Where are you from?’ Hilda asked. ‘You sound like you’re from America.’

  ‘Wales,’ Grace answered, immediately regretting it.

  ‘Is that a Welsh accent?’

  Grace didn’t know she had an accent. She spoke how everyone spoke in Narberth. But if she had a Welsh accent then she couldn’t pretend she came
from somewhere else. Where would she pretend she came from? She only knew her tiny corner of Wales, and the countries she had read about in books.

  ‘What’s Wales like? Is it like London?’

  ‘No,’ Grace admitted, straightening the tangled fringe on a silk lampshade.

  ‘You don’t talk much, do you?’

  Not any more, Grace thought to herself. ‘I’m shy,’ she said by way of an answer.

  ‘Me, now, I come from Battersea. That’s over the river. Me mum, she’s never even been across the Thames, not in forty-two years. But not me, I want to be a chambermaid on a cruise liner.’ Hilda twirled around, duster in her hand, white ostrich feathers waving. ‘But not on the Titanic!’ She smiled guiltlessly at her own joke, but Grace felt embarrassed by the girl’s affectation. Hilda seemed suddenly self-conscious, aware of showing off.

  ‘Well, it’s better than living in Battersea all me life,’ she whacked a lilac cushion roughly with the feather duster, ‘being born and dying in the same place, like me mum and her mum before her. You got any brothers and sisters?’

  ‘A brother,’ Grace replied.

  ‘They’re the worst. Right: you and me, next door.’

  Grace followed Hilda to the next room, their footsteps muffled. She had never seen so much carpet before, nor experienced the softness and silence it created. It wasn’t slate, it wasn’t grass, it wasn’t wood; it was thick, sumptuous, almost-bouncy carpet. Grace thought of her parents’ house, which was large alongside the crouching cottages that encircled Narberth, cheek by jowl, and which were painted in hopeful pastels. The framed print of The Prodigal Son in Misery that hung in her childhood home and the heavy sideboards seemed burdensome compared to this glassy, modern lightness. Her parents’ house was less sophisticated than she thought; less refined than her mother’s pretensions had ever led her to believe.