The World is a Wedding

by Wendy Jones

  ‘That Banana Boat was most satisfying,’ Wilfred declared.

  ‘Wilfred . . .’ Flora asked.

  ‘Yes, dear?’ he replied, putting his spoon down.

  ‘Now that we’re married, is it still the same?’

  ‘No,’ said Wilfred. ‘It’s not the same, it’s completely different.’ He straightened his tie, adding, ‘And now there is something special to look forward to.’

  ‘It’s only that,’ she ate some cream sprinkled with hundreds and thousands and thought back to their wedding day—her posy of lilies and ivy, the daub of lipstick on her lips, ‘it’s as if we don’t know how to be together, now we are married.’

  ‘We are very polite,’ Wilfred agreed. ‘Do you think that we will always be this polite to each other, Mrs. Price?’

  Flora laughed. ‘I don’t think so at all, Mr. Price.’ She watched as Wilfred picked up his long spoon, scooped up some Knickerbocker Glory and offered it to her. Their eyes met.

  ‘It is funny, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘We are married and we don’t know how to talk to each other.’ They had been more at ease together before their wedding. It seemed that marriage, living in the same house, along with the news that she was expecting, had made them shy with each other. Her life was intimately woven with a man she knew so little about.

  ‘Have you had an ice cream before?’ she asked.

  ‘Once. My Auntie Blodwen bought me a tub for my sixth birthday from the ice-cream tricycle at Cold Blow. I was sick in the charabanc on the way home.’

  There was so much, Flora realised, that they didn’t know about each other, years when they hadn’t known the other even existed, years which had been filled with other people and experiences. Wilfred was twenty-nine and Flora twenty-seven; between them they had fifty-six years of life to tell each other about.

  ‘We could go on drives,’ she suggested, ‘and walks on Saturday mornings and tell each other about ourselves, so that I know you and you know me.’

  Wilfred considered her suggestion solemnly, then nodded in agreement. He summoned the waitress, who handed him the bill. He looked at it calmly, pulled a note from his pocket, placed it in the leather wallet that the bill came in and looked at Flora.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘My pleasure, dear. Shall we go?’ he said, adding, ‘It’s your turn to tell me something now.’

  ‘I am reading, dear,’ Wilfred announced to Flora Myffanwy. He rested back in the armchair in their small bedroom; it was the end of a very enjoyable day in Tenby but he didn’t like to waste a moment. ‘Preparing for fatherhood.’

  Flora was sitting up in bed in her nightdress, smocking a baby’s gown. Wilfred would rather be in bed with his beautiful wife, his bathykolpian wife, but he did not want to let Flora Myffanwy or their son down by his ignorance of philosophy.

  ‘It’s The Last Days of Socrates. I’ve borrowed it from the Narberth Mechanics’ Institute Library.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘Chap called Socrates. He dies. It’s very learned,’ said Wilfred, hoping his wife was impressed. ‘I thought I had better know about right and wrong and things like that, you know . . . now that I’m going to be a father.’

  ‘I see,’ said Flora, smiling and threading a needle with green silk. Her smile had a lot of woman in it.

  ‘I imagine it might have a bit about the funeral trade, which would be of particular relevance to me.’

  ‘Indeed,’ replied Flora.

  ‘And I will endeavour to read it before the spring, but right now I’m feeling somewhat tired and I think I may put the book down.’ He was, after all, in a bedroom and not a library. And with that thought he put the book next to his red dictionary on the chest-of-drawers and got into bed with his wife.

  Stanley Baldwin. Stanley Baldwin. Stanley. Baldwin! It was imperative that Wilfred think about Stanley Baldwin. He screwed up his eyes and tried to see a picture of the leader of the Conservative Party, and Prime Minster of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Stan. Ley. Bald. Win.

  Wilfred was hot and covered in sweat. He shifted his weight to the other arm and lay very still. The irony of the situation was not lost on him. As a bachelor he had spent so long, far too long, thinking about this—and now, in the very moment when he was almost doing it, he had to force himself to think about something else entirely. Stanley Baldwin flashed into his mind—his upright stance, his neat centre parting, his purposeful demeanour.

  He rolled onto his side and pulled Flora to him. On his wedding night he had thought about the Royal Family and the fusty old Queen, but even with the image of the late Queen Victoria he had fallen apart and let go. And it had all been over in a moment or two, perhaps less. He was disappointed with himself. He had yearned for this occasion since the moment he had first set eyes on Flora Myffanwy. And had waited months, when waiting hours had felt like a long time. Even seconds felt like a long time when confronted with the physicality of Flora Myffanwy. Now he had a new frustration—this time with himself.

  He reached down, put his hand on Flora’s nightdress and began to pull it up. On the second Saturday night of his married life he had tried thinking of cricket, but had found it too abstract—that was an A word from the dictionary—and so cricket had also failed him in the performance of the duties of his married life. It was hard to think of something specific about cricket, and this had made his mind wander from the task at hand, so to speak, and that had been that.

  If he moved his hand any higher up Flora’s thigh, he would need to think about Stanley Baldwin again. He paused. It was a mystery to Wilfred how long these things were supposed to last—but he felt certain it should be more than a couple of seconds. He thought perhaps around two minutes. That was a long time and would demand an exceptional level of control, and political thought.

  He stroked and kissed Flora’s hair. He didn’t know if Flora enjoyed the conjugal act. He could ask, but that would be very ungentlemanly. She appeared to like it because she smiled afterwards. He wasn’t sure if ladies liked these sorts of things. Perhaps ladies didn’t think about these matters as much as men—otherwise they would need to go, like men, to the Narberth Rugby Club to get things off their chest. And he had never heard a lady make mention of marital relations, so perhaps they didn’t think about it at all. Although Flora Myffanwy had once said something: ‘You’re on my hair,’ and when Wilfred had looked he saw that his forearm was leaning on her long thick curls so that her head was being pulled to the side at an odd angle.

  Wilfred shifted and arranged himself in the bed. What he hadn’t understood was how much geometry there was in the conjugal act—it was not unlike trying to get a corpse in a coffin at the right angle. Things had to go in the right place in the right way, so to speak, and he was glad of his training in undertaking. It had unexpected benefits because he was experienced in attempting to get bits of other people’s bodies to do what he wanted and needed them to do.

  He lay still and paused in the proceedings for a moment. Wilfred had thought about his predicament a great deal while making coffins. What was the least exciting thing he could think of? Tax. But he was prone to getting hot and bothered when doing his bookkeeping and getting in a fix about the figures. Politics? The Liberal Party? But then he might think about David Lloyd George, that Titan of a Welshman—though he was born in Manchester. Now there was a man to rile the blood. Stanley Baldwin? Very nice chap, no doubt commanded respect, what with him being prime minister, of course. Couldn’t argue with that. Stanley Baldwin was a good choice—an apposite choice—and Stanley Baldwin cut the mustard.

  By the eighth Saturday night of his married life, Wilfred Price was happy to acknowledge to himself that he had performed his matrimonial duties with the requisite level of control demanded by a husband for the satisfaction of his wife. With the help of the prime minister.

  6.

  THE APPLE NEVER FA
LLS VERY FAR FROM THE TREE

  There were so many women in the Conway Hall. Grace glanced down at the leaflet the guest at the Ritz had given her: Mass Meeting on the Representation of the People Act. Grace had not seen this many women together before. She didn’t know if she was unnerved or reassured. There were women swarming towards each other, greeting each other, turning this way and that, and friends in small circles. A huddle of Indian women, draped in bright saris, stood talking animatedly, and another gathering of women in coats as threadbare as her own looked at a pamphlet. There was hair in Eton crops, confident voices, fox-fur stoles, and embroidered handbags hanging from delicate forearms. Grace waited in this mêlée, alone and uncertain, yet something within her wouldn’t let her leave, even though she sensed that, with a spark, the excited chatter could burst into hysteria. But Grace noticed she wasn’t frightened; she merely stood in the middle of this strange, foreign scene in her strange, foreign life.

  She thought back to how she came to be here, in London, and the beginning of her journey several months ago. She remembered the station in Narberth: the two well-kept platforms with hanging baskets and ironwork that was regularly repainted white. When the steam train came round the corner, curling through the grassy hills, the platform was laid out like a well-considered tea-table, carefully set and waiting, a place where one might disembark and find repose. But that day she hadn’t been arriving; she had been fleeing Narberth. Her train had passed through the green ancient fields of Narberth: there was Whitland, Carmarthen and then Neath, like a whisper of what was to come. Then Port Talbot: a valley of coiled pipes and thin chimneys puffing smoke that seeped into the train carriage. And dark clouds that cut out the sky. She hadn’t known Wales was like that: the earnest mining and smelting by people who lived close to the soil, toiling within the earth, dwarfed by the mountains. She had only known Narberth, and it had been safer and more beautiful than she had been aware of. She was frightened—and she hadn’t yet left Wales.

  Grace looked around the Conway Hall and wondered if she should talk to someone. She had come to the meeting today because it was her afternoon off and, as usual, she had nowhere to go, nothing to do and no one to see, which was too much space for her mind to fill. She wished she’d brought some books with her to London—she had been reading Silas Marner—but had packed so hurriedly she hadn’t thought to, taking only necessities—although reading kept her mind occupied, which was a necessity.

  A woman approached, her Wellington boots unbuckled and flapping.

  ‘Come on!’ She commandeered Grace by the arm, chaperoning her into the auditorium, her bobbed hair swaying. ‘You’ll want to sit near the front, won’t you?’

  It was loud inside the auditorium, with voices and the clack of shapely heels on the parquet floor. A banner worked in purple and green above the podium read:

  Mrs. Pankhust, Founder/Champion of Womankind

  Famed for Deeds of Daring Rectitude

  ‘Take your coat off: you’ll be blistering.’

  ‘I’d rather not.’

  ‘Whatever suits. Sit here. I’m Mary—Mary Richardson.’ The woman whitened the large maroon birthmark on her cheek with face powder from a compact. ‘If they extend the Reform Act I’m going to stand as a parliamentary candidate for Bury St. Edmunds. Isn’t it just ripping?’ She snapped shut her compact and it closed with a clean click.

  Grace smiled politely. All these woman, what would it lead to? The only times she had been within a group of girls—and some of these women resembled girls to her—was at school when clusters of girls formed to skip with one long skipping rope, chanting:

  ‘Bronwen and Llywellyn sitting in the tree,

  K-I-S-S-I-N-G

  First comes the love,

  Then comes the marriage,

  Then comes the baby in the baby carriage.’

  And, as a small child, she had been taken to the Mothers’ Union where she had played at the feet of matronly ladies with elaborate hair, dressed in milky-white cotton. To her child’s eye, they looked like a circle of wedding cakes: sculptured, moral, firm and ornate. But this, here, was almost a rabble of femininity.

  ‘Mary Richardson? The Window Smasher? I simply don’t believe it!’ a woman exclaimed. ‘I haven’t seen you since Holloway Prison.’

  ‘Daphne Brimble!’ the woman Grace had been speaking to replied excitedly.

  Grace glanced around. She had seen what large groups of people—of men—did during the war. And what had been done to them: how they returned—her brother Madoc included—with a disturbed sanity. And a destructive arrogance. She had seen the stupidity of groups and the fantasies they could concoct. Were these women aping men, being called to arms for yet more violence, triumphant and expanded on the fantasy of victory? She had read in the newspaper that Christabel Pankhurst had said the Great War was God’s vengeance upon the people who held women in subjugation. But, as in the War, Grace had no passion for this fight. She didn’t understand what the Suffragettes wanted. What was the Representation of the People Act? And what did ‘universal suffrage’ mean? It sounded like universal suffering and rage.

  ‘Look, there’s Mrs. Garrud.’ The woman with the birthmark tapped Grace. ‘If you’re going to join the Cause, it’s simply essential to learn Suffragettes’ self-defence from Mrs. Garrud. You can’t imagine what brutes the police constabulary can be. Do join us for a lesson. Be at Highbury Corner at three o’clock on a Wednesday . . .’ The woman suddenly leaped up. ‘Sit here. I’ll be back.’

  The hall was filling and Grace was squashed in her seat; the rows of chairs were cramped together and three Alexandra Nurses in uniform, who looked like sisters, were sitting to the other side of her. They were jolly, buoyed by hope and moral purpose.

  ‘Have you read A Doll’s House? It’s a play by Henrik Ibsen,’ one piped up.

  ‘Christabel is pregnant,’ another whispered.

  ‘No, she isn’t,’ the other replied conspiratorially. ‘She only thought she was. Wished she were. It was a phantom.’

  Grace stopped listening, entering into that state of awake sleepiness she existed in since she had come to London. London—this meeting—didn’t disturb her. It was the backdrop to her somnolence, like a fantastical bedroom in which she was sleeping. What I do to forget myself, she thought, and closed her eyes.

  ‘You came; you read the pamphlet. I’m glad I’ve recruited at least one girl for the Cause,’ said a young woman with auburn hair, walking elegantly in front of the stage. It was Lady Lytton from the Ritz. She squeezed politely along the line of chairs towards Grace and the three sisters attempted to make space for her.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Grace replied. Did she have to play subservient, served and server, now they were no longer in the Ritz? Yes, she decided. Grace couldn’t talk to Lady Lytton in the way that Lady Lytton would be free to talk to her.

  ‘Haven’t been anywhere this cramped since I went camping in Sissinghurst with Lord Baden-Powell’s Girl Guides. Eleven of us in a four-man tent.’ She straightened an unusual silver ring on her finger. Grace looked down at her own hands, once fair and fine, but already reddening and becoming chapped. Before, when the nearest she had come to work was collecting honey, she had worn her brother’s protective leather gloves; now there were no barriers between her skin and her work. Her hands were changing her and putting her into a lower class.

  ‘That’s Mary “Slasher” Richardson, the lady with the birthmark standing by the pillar,’ Lady Lytton said conspiratorially. ‘It was she who attacked the Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery, with a meat chopper just before the war. That must have taken some doing.’ She took a rosette from her pocket and pinned it to her velvet lapel. ‘It is a rather lovely painting—or was.’ She straightened the long green, white and purple ribbons hanging from the rosette, then took a small sketchpad from her coat pocket and began quickly sketching the outline of the stage.

&nb
sp; ‘Don’t the banners on the stage look colourful?’ she remarked. ‘I know what you think—that this is only for rich women. So we may occupy ourselves with more than needlepoint or watercolours.’

  Grace smiled non-committally. There was a pause. They sat quietly, side by side, as the pause became more charged until suddenly the young woman said, ‘You remind me of her. My elder sister. She was quiet and fair, like you. And had blue eyes. Oh, the peculiar things grief does. I am even talking to you, speaking with you as if you were her, with the same ease,’ she said, seemingly embarrassed by her sudden self-revelation. ‘Really, I shouldn’t talk to anyone about it.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Grace.

  ‘I had a sister,’ the lady explained. ‘She died. Sometimes women do—in the most awful circumstances. It’s all very hush-hush—the circumstances, that is.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  Lady Lytton put her hands to the row of pearls at her neck. ‘If my fiancé’s mother knew, I doubt she would allow him to marry me. They’re Catholic, too. It’s so utterly dreadful at home these days, I escape to the Ritz to get away.’ She sighed and batted her hand, as if to clear her mind of painful thoughts. ‘Are you going to become a Suffragette?’ she asked Grace abruptly.

  ‘I don’t know, ma’am.’

  ‘I’ve been coming to the meetings since my sister died,’ Lady Lytton said, resuming her sketching. ‘I expect the vote is incidental, but something useful might come of it one day.’

  A dignified woman in a huge hat walked determinedly onto the stage, hit a gavel on the lectern and stood square on, waiting for the room to hush. A frisson ran through the crowd. Lady Lytton began sketching with purpose. Without introduction or any to-do, the woman began to speak: