The World is a Wedding

by Wendy Jones

  ‘Pardon?’ Flora couldn’t hear her words above the wind, but understood that the woman was pulled taut with violence and poverty. She and Wilfred had a smoother life: it seemed they had enough money—certainly every Wednesday when she bicycled to visit White Hook, he gave her a one-pound note to give to her mother. Although Wilfred didn’t tell her the details, she didn’t think they were poor, but if they were, she imagined Wilfred would keep it from her to spare her the worry.

  ‘I walk around Narberth every day,’ Mrs. Probert repeated, ‘when Mr. Probert is at the Dragon Inn.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful walk, even in the winter,’ Flora stated. They walked silently together, unable to talk easily above the blustering of the wind, until they reached the further field.

  ‘I’m going to stay here and take a photograph of the valley,’ Flora said.

  ‘I’m going to keep walking,’ Mrs. Probert replied quietly, but with determination. ‘I want to be strong enough to walk around Narberth three times: I have a plan.’ She didn’t explain any further.

  Flora smiled, intrigued, saying, ‘Then perhaps we will meet around Narberth again.’

  ‘I expect we will.’

  ‘If you would like to come for a cup of tea one afternoon at 11, Market Street?’ Flora Myffanwy offered. She had been lonely in Narberth and wanted for female company. This woman’s life was different in some ways from her own, since Mr. Probert worked in a public house, while Wilfred had his own business, and that might mean it would be unusual for Mrs. Probert to pay a visit. But they had shared confidences, and that was the essence of female friendship: trust in which one could reveal oneself. She liked this birdlike woman with her bad nerves and her flintiness. And the house would soon be looking clean enough to receive visitors.

  Mrs. Probert thanked her, pulling her thin, loose coat around her.

  ‘Wait,’ Flora said on an impulse. ‘Would you like this?’ She put her hand in her handbag and brought out a small gold-coloured tube.

  ‘Lipstick?’ Mrs. Probert asked. ‘I have no need of lipstick.’ Flora saw she was ashamed of her face.

  ‘Take it; I want you to have it.’

  Mrs. Probert blushed, accepting the gift.

  The trees along the dawn-lit lanes were leafless and the air pristine with cold as Wilfred drove them to Wiseman’s Bridge. They had taken to going for a drive every Saturday morning of their married life. That morning, Flora had woken before first light, unable to sleep. Wilfred had asked if she would rouse him, and she waited until twenty past six to put her hand on the strong, relaxed muscles of his upper arm and whisper his name. He woke quickly—like a man who had much to live for—and they had both washed by splashing cold water from the bowl they filled from the jug. Flora put on her dark green wool dress, on which she had let out the waist, her cardigan and wool coat, Wilfred wore his Oxford bags, a red tie, his tweed jacket and an overcoat, and they left before breakfasting so as to return in time for Wilfred to open the wallpaper shop at ten o’clock, though customers were few and far between.

  Flora looked out of the automobile window and put her hands further into her muff. The bare shells of cow parsley, large as a child’s head, swept against the side of the hearse. She remembered how green the land had been in the summer. Now the hedgerows were lined with fractured sticks of bracken, but the lane still held its beauty despite the change of season. There was something she should tell Wilfred, but she didn’t yet know how to say it.

  ‘You’re looking fetching today, and very fresh-faced, my dear,’ Wilfred commented, taking her hand. ‘You’re not wearing your lipstick.’

  ‘I gave it to Mrs. Probert.’

  ‘There’s kind of you. That Mr. Probert—ach-y-fi. He’s too spifflicated on beer for my liking.’

  ‘You’re not wearing your undertaker’s suit,’ Flora replied, attempting to make the conversation more comfortable.

  ‘Indeed I’m not. But I’m still an undertaker,’ he stated. Wilfred rubbed the black stubble on his chin the way he did when he was thinking. She glanced at Wilfred as he drove, wondering about him. Being married to Wilfred meant watching him do that several times a day for the rest of her life. As well as seeing that resigned, slightly sad and wistful smile he had when he didn’t know the answer. And falling asleep to the smell of his hair oil. It meant dead bodies in the workshop waiting to be buried. And it meant new life. It meant that too, she hoped. He was becoming more familiar to her, much less of a stranger, though she had still only known him less than a year. She felt curious about him.

  ‘I watch you about at your work, but I still don’t know very much about what you do,’ she admitted. Wilfred was so alive, with his flushed face, purposeful movements, strong body and striding walk, she didn’t think of him surrounded by the dead. He had buried her father—that was how they had met, after all—but she had only seen him driving the hearse and directing the funeral. Wilfred, she now realised, had made her father’s death elegant and ordered, and it had occurred to her recently that death—what the undertaker saw—wasn’t necessarily always neat.

  ‘People in Narberth die,’ Wilfred answered, changing gear. ‘I make their coffin. Sometimes I bring them to my workshop where I look after them. Then I drive them to chapel, carry them to their grave and I speak kindly to their devastated loved ones. And then, my dear, the bald fact of the matter is I charge them five pounds.’

  Silvery seagulls flew above them in the empty sky.

  ‘I’m grateful for the business,’ he added. ‘And for the decorating work from Mrs. Newton-Lewis.’

  Flora Myffanwy touched her wedding ring. She understood. When her father had died, Flora and her mother had little income to speak of. A man needed a job so his family would have enough money, especially in times such as these. A man did what he needed to do to care for his family.

  ‘I must consider my da, and now you, of course, my dear,’ Wilfred said, echoing her thoughts and placing his hand over hers, ‘before I can think of whether I want to have a dead person sitting on a mahogany chair in the boiling heat under the glass roof of the workshop.’

  Flora nodded: the unspoken had been spoken.

  ‘Before I met you,’ she said, her voice slightly tinged with anxiety, ‘all I knew about death was the shiny hearse, the black clothes and the devastation.’

  ‘That’s enough for any human being,’ Wilfred replied.

  Fear came over Flora. She was holding something to herself that she didn’t understand but couldn’t ignore. She looked out of the window towards the dark, striated cliff-faces that framed Wiseman’s Bridge, wanting to distract herself from her thoughts.

  ‘Wilfred, would you like me to help in the business?’

  ‘No, Flora Myffanwy,’ Wilfred said with certainty. ‘It’s not a business for a woman. When one is an undertaker, such as I am, one is surrounded by people who feel anything but joy and happiness. That is not for you, Flora. Take photographs with your camera. Be as you are, and be my wife.’

  They drove in silence down the hill past the cottage in the cove where they had first met. Flora remembered how she had tidied and cleaned the derelict house, putting a vase of flowers on the chair with three legs, and waiting in anticipation for Wilfred to arrive on Saturday afternoons.

  In the distance the mumbling waves made white curves along the bay and the air was full of the freshness of the sea.

  ‘Right, my dear,’ declared Wilfred, pulling over on the road. ‘Let me give you a driving lesson. You’ll only need the one. I know you told me you wanted to learn to drive, and you won’t be able to bicycle to your mother’s for much longer.’

  Flora wanted to drive, although she realised she had come to like her place in the motor car, in the front, next to Wilfred; it was rather like her place in his life—going forward together. But she liked to be independent, too.

  Wilfred stepped out of the hearse and opened t
he passenger door for Flora.

  ‘Come and sit in the driver’s seat. Is there enough space between you and the steering wheel?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Flora, smoothing her coat over her rounded stomach, glad to have something to do and focus on.

  ‘There’s no need for you to look anxious, dear. Being bimanous makes driving much easier. The controls are the accelerator, brakes, clutch, or A. B. C., as I like to think of it. It is alphabetised. The engine’s ticking so press your foot down on the accelerator pedal and, that’s right, move away from the hedgerow—well done, my dear,’ encouraged Wilfred, one hand guiding the steering wheel. ‘The whole point of driving is not to hit anything,’ he stated. ‘Mr. Auden told me that and it seems true enough.’

  ‘How do I change gear?’ Flora asked, looking down at the gear-stick.

  ‘Don’t worry about that, I’ll do it for you.’

  The car edged forward then began to pick up speed. Driving was easier than Flora expected and she liked the feeling of power and speed she sensed the motor car could give her.

  ‘Well done. The hearse is nifty,’ Wilfred explained as Flora drove carefully along the road, ‘not that it ever needs to be, of course. But in the unlikely event of my being late for a funeral,’ he continued, ‘the Super Ford hearse is capable of speeds of thirty miles per hour—a great pace. Of course, I have never gone thirty miles per hour. Fifteen for when there is a body in the back, twenty miles per hour without a corpse. But did you know the Packard Eight Coupé automobile goes at almost aircraft speed in the open? I read it in an advertisement in The Light Car and Cyclecar Magazine.’

  Flora felt a sense of exhilaration as the car gathered momentum: she liked driving and was taking to it immediately. It was like cycling, only freer.

  ‘Now, let’s do a spot of reversing,’ Wilfred suggested. ‘Then you can pass your driving test. Police Constable Jones will watch you drive forward and backwards six yards so he knows you’re safe on the roads and will give you a driving licence.’

  Flora reversed backwards confidently, looking over her shoulder.

  ‘Wonderful! The eel’s eyebrows,’ Wilfred remarked. ‘I’ll ask Constable Jones to watch you drive tomorrow’—Wilfred bibbed the horn—‘then the world will be your oyster!’

  After the driving lesson, Flora, under Wilfred’s instructions, parked the car and they clambered down the smooth brown boulders into the cove. He surveyed the cove and was exact in his search.

  ‘I’m looking for a rock that is at the right slant.’ He took a large step across the gap between two boulders, looked down, and hummed. Then he remembered his wife standing behind him.

  ‘Oh, my dear.’ He walked back and offered his hand. ‘This rock is the ideal angle.’ He unbuckled the Welsh blanket from its leather holder, spread it out and lay down, despite the cold.

  ‘This is the life, dear. I’m just watching those bilateral seagulls,’ he announced, keen to use his new B word. After a moment, he sat up again. ‘I think I’ll put my bathers on,’ he said, picking up a small towel. Then followed what he felt was an enormously inelegant palaver involving the small towel, trousers and eventually a sleeveless woollen one-piece his Auntie Blodwen had knitted for him.

  ‘I’ll be over there, having a swim.’

  Flora smiled, wrapped the red blanket around her and then took out her Box Brownie camera, the ball bearings in the shutter rattling.

  ‘I’ll take care,’ he reassured her, remembering how, before they were married, he’d taken Flora out at low tide to see the petrified forest and how she had nearly drowned when the tide had come in unexpectedly.

  Wilfred jumped athletically from the rocks onto the hard sand, running confidently—and self-consciously—towards the murmuring sea. If he was going to brave the water, he’d better look comfortable about it. It would be cold. He could still go back and sit on the rock. But he didn’t want to appear so lily-livered that Flora might think he couldn’t fart in a colander. He turned to see the figure of Flora on the rocks. He waved. His wife would want an athlete, a man in fine fettle, fit as a fiddle, a man who could master the elements. He sprinted towards the sea in the hope that, at such a distance, Flora wouldn’t notice the slight wobble of his stomach.

  Wilfred bounded over a band of razor shells and seaweed that crushed and prickled against his feet, then through the shallowest waves. Honey hell, it was cold! White spray frothed up about him and he breathed in sharply. A wave lolled and slapped his chest. It was astonishingly cold. There were no words in the A and B section of the dictionary to describe it.

  He glanced back to see if Flora was watching. She was. She was taking a photograph. He dived into the sea and swam a brisk breaststroke in the direction of Laugharne, many miles away. He bobbed over the waves as they came towards him like rolling hills of water, then he broke into a crawl and very much hoped Flora was watching him now. It was important to prove oneself to be a man of vigour and energy—and to be noticed as such by one’s own wife. He flipped into a backstroke. Perhaps he was reminding his wife of that chap, Johnny Weissmuller, who’d won three Gold Medals in the Olympic Games in Paris last year.

  Well, he thought, as he cut the water with the fingers of his right hand in an elegant over-arm motion, Flora Myffanwy must surely be impressed by this. The water was agonisingly cold and there was no one else in the sea, only a few Jack-the-lads at the sea’s edge, skimming stones. And Wilfred needed her to be impressed, especially as he struggled so much during the intimate moments of their marriage to keep his thoughts on the prime minister, something that deeply dented his sense of himself as a man. True it was that his wife was beautiful, and such womanliness would test even the willpower of a prophet. But Wilfred had to do better on a Saturday night: it wasn’t good enough to spend the whole time thinking about Stanley Baldwin. Good grief! He probably thought about Stanley Baldwin more than the most ardent Conservative supporter. What with him picturing the prime minister, and Flora lying there calmly, as was her wont—perhaps a little more calmly and more disengaged than he would like, a spot of rugged swimming in the wild Welsh winter sea—indeed, the sea that had almost killed them on that fateful day before they were married—was bound to be impressive.

  He was married to Flora, but he wanted to be more to her than he was. He wanted to take away the sadness that pulled at her—the grief for her father was what he knew it to be—the longing in her eyes for a fuller, more promising world. Wilfred began swimming towards the shore. He must be within himself more of a man for this woman—his wife—in order to be worthy of her.

  Once back on the rock, dressed, shivering and chilled to the bone, he ate a thick piece of cold omelette that Flora had made at home and waited while she photographed some scallop shells she had found and arranged on the sand. He hoped it was the time for her to say what she always said on a Saturday morning.

  ‘Shall you tell me to tell you something?’ Wilfred prompted Flora, waiting for her gentle invitation. He knew what to expect now, and this week, for the first time, he had thought about it in the workshop while sawing through beechwood and throwing golden dust into the air that rose as if it were full of yeast. He could explain how he had been wondering if he had been dead for thousands of years before he was born, or talk about when Mrs. Christabel Pankhurst had spoken in Narberth High Street. Should he say more about his marriage to Grace? They had spoken about it only once and there were things he should perhaps reveal to her that were weighing on his mind, but he didn’t want to spoil their outing. Instead he would tell her the story of when he was a schoolboy and a travelling harpist who had won the Eisteddfod played Johann Sebastian Bach in Market Square and—

  ‘Can I tell you something?’ Flora asked. ‘Shall I be the one to tell you something?’

  ‘Oh. Yes, my dear. Certainly.’

  ‘Something is wrong.’ Flora said unexpectedly, and as quietly as if she was praying. Wilfred looked at h
er. She had that unbridled look in her brown eyes. Her eyes saw deeply and clearly and there was no lie in her. This is what made Wilfred love her and made him almost—despite her being his wife—frightened by her. So much truth held enormous power. Sometimes he looked at her and felt like a puppy looking at a cathedral.

  ‘My dear?’

  ‘I feel as if I’m dying.’

  ‘But you can’t be dying, dear. You are only twenty-eight. And you’re expecting. You look the picture of health.’ Wilfred put his hand to her cheek. ‘Red cheeks, shiny brown hair: bright-eyed and bushy-tailed you are, Flora, my dear. No, no, no. Now, there’s nothing for you to worry about. You’re in the pink. And the wind has given you a colour today.’ Wilfred put his hand to his collar and moved his tie knot from left to right, and a fear colder than the sea rippled up inside him. ‘No, dear. I know what the dying look like from those who come to see me in their last days to pay their funeral bill in advance, and you don’t look like one of them.’

  8.

  NEWFANGLED THINGS

  Malcolm,’ announced Wilfred.

  ‘Malcolm?’ asked Flora.

  ‘Yes, dear. I was thinking of Malcolm. For a name.’ He helped Flora onto her bicycle so that she could cycle to visit her mother. ‘One more quick lesson in the hearse,’ he added, ‘and then you’ll be able to motor to your mother’s.’

  ‘What made you think of Malcolm?’

  ‘Well, it’s such a modern name, so very dynamic. It reminds me of all these newfangled things like the bread-toaster machine, Wembley Stadium, vitamin pills, even televisual transmissions. I could imagine a boy called Malcolm making his own motor car from a kit, or a wireless,’ Wilfred put his hands on his hips, ‘or even his own aeroplane, like Bill Frost, the fly-boy from Saundersfoot. Malcolm is a name for a man living in modern times, one born in 1926, don’t you think, dear?’ He lifted Flora’s bag for her, slipped a folded pound note into it for her mother and put the bag in the basket on the handlebars.