The World is a Wedding

by Wendy Jones

  Around him, Flora tidied the kitchen table and his da sat resting after the meal.

  ‘Wonderful dinner, dear.’ It was important to be a good husband, he thought to himself, to be appreciative and say nice things. ‘No life without a wife! Not according to Mr. Auden,’ Wilfred said, folding his napkin and patting his stomach. Wilfred had thought Mr. Auden meant if a man didn’t get married then he had little to live for. That was true. But now he understood that it was through having a wife that life came into the world: a wife, a woman was the conduit for new life. Their child had come into the world through Flora Myffanwy. Mr. Auden’s advice had been deeper and wiser than he had understood it to be only a year and a half ago. But he was much younger and more inexperienced then.

  ‘Bag of sawdust for you,’ Wilfred said to Jeffrey. He ducked under the hanging carcass of a gutted cow, swung the sack of sawdust from his shoulder and put it down on the flagstones in Lloyd the Butcher.

  ‘Thank you, Wilfred,’ Jeffrey called. ‘That’ll be handy for the floor. Be with you now in a minute.’ He turned back to the chopping board and brought the cleaver down on a piece of lamb. There were three clean, quick cracks. Jeffrey turned the cleaver on its side and slammed it flat along the meat. Then he took a piece of the Narberth & Whitland Observer, enfolded the chops into a neat square package, slapped it between his two hands and gave it to Mrs. Prout.

  ‘Right you are. Let’s head off to the Dragon Inn and put our names down first on the list,’ Jeffery said to Wilfred, walking out from behind the counter, sawdust spilling from his turn-ups. ‘We mustn’t miss out on the tug-of-war this year. I want to see those chaps from Carmarthen flat on their backs in the mud—crying. That’ll do me.’ He patted his biceps.

  ‘You’ve grown quite a moustache there,’ Wilfred remarked, looking down on his friend who was a head shorter than him, as they wove their way around the muddy carts standing in the busy High Street.

  ‘Aye,’ Jeffrey replied, stroking the edges of his tremendously bushy red moustache and stretching upwards on the balls of his feet. ‘Ladies like them.’

  Wilfred wasn’t sure if ladies liked moustaches. But perhaps men didn’t like to be short as much as ladies didn’t want to be fat.

  ‘I spent the morning delivering pork to Mrs. Coles; she will die talking.’

  It was market day and the High Street was bursting with people who had come from the villages around Narberth. Market Square was heaving with sheep and lowing cattle, and a crowd had gathered around a pen where pigs were being auctioned. Jeffrey walked round a horse drinking barley water from a bucket.

  ‘How’s the wife?’ he asked.

  ‘Well enough,’ Wilfred replied.

  And there it was: Wilfred was having an experience with Flora that was too profound to explain to his unmarried childhood friend. These days there was a small distance between the two of them, and they both knew it. It would be easier if Jeffrey was married as well, but he enjoyed the company of ladies too much to settle down in a hurry.

  ‘How’s Clementine?’ Wilfred asked, shooing a chicken from under his feet.

  ‘Clementine?’

  ‘I though you were courting Clementine.’

  ‘The mind plays tricks.’

  They entered the Dragon Inn. The air was muggy, smoke hung in a flat layer at head-height and the limewashed walls were stained a mustardy-brown. Wilfred had not been into the inn since Mr. Probert had appeared, drunk and angry, in the wallpaper shop. A big pink pig with black trotters and a ring in his nose trotted in behind them.

  ‘Get that ruddy pig out of here, Probert!’ Jeffrey called. Probert staggered round from behind the bar, slapped the panicking, squealing pig on the rump and bullied it out of the public house.

  ‘Put the ruddy gate on the door!’ Handel Evans shouted from the table by the fireplace where he was playing Whist with the Reverend Waldo Williams. ‘That pig nearly knocked the card table over and I’m all set to win five bob against the reverend here. Not that he’ll pay me!’ There was loud laughing and guffawing from the crowd of men gathering in the pub.

  Probert dragged from the back yard a barred gate, which he locked onto the circles on the doorpost. Then Wilfred watched as Probert clumsily hauled a wooden barrel up from the cellar, through the trapdoor, dropping the barrel on the flagstones where it landed heavily and bounced heftily a few times, threatening to injure any feet or fingertips that got in its way. Probert rolled the beer barrel across the floor, the rings cracking loudly, then kicked it with his hobnailed boot towards the bar. He then went behind the bar.

  ‘Pint of beer,’ Wilfred ordered above the noise.

  Mr. Probert soon plonked the beer onto the stained counter, and the reddish-brown liquid slopped down the bevelled glass. Then he rubbed his hands down his hessian apron and swigged a mouthful of what smelled like parsnip wine from a tankard under the counter.

  ‘Two shillings, Price,’ he said. ‘How’s married life?’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Nice wife you’ve got there.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Bit of a Sheba. Wouldn’t mind her being my wife,’ he goaded.

  ‘Bit late now,’ Wilfred replied.

  ‘My wife walked into a table yesterday, Price,’ Mr. Probert said, locking eyes with Wilfred and laughing confidently. Wilfred looked at Probert and could counter it no other way: men were crueller than women.

  ‘Told her not to go walking with your wife again—don’t want her causing any more trouble between us,’ Probert said, referring to what had happened in the paint and wallpaper shop. ‘You agree with that, Wilfred Price?’ he asked, making it sound like a question when Wilfred knew it wasn’t. Wilfred stared into his mottled beer glass with its layer of dying froth. His fists were digging into his thighs. He moved away.

  Wilfred finished the dregs of his pint, which tasted bitter in his mouth, and looked across the small, beery room. It was a Bacchanalian public house, he thought to himself, remembering the B word he had read in the dictionary that morning, and was packed with hoary men with moustaches wearing thick tweed jackets, bellowing like bulls. There was no divide between the labouring and the professional classes in the Dragon Inn. Here, the solicitor and the lighthouse engineer, the coalminer from Wiseman’s Bridge and the brewer from James Williams’s Bottling Factory mixed together. There was another roar of laughter as a young farmer slapped his thigh and mimed riding a horse.

  ‘There’s that ruddy pig again. Get that pig out of my way!’ Handel Evans shouted at the pig, who was now snuffling about outside, next to the door. The church organist attempted to climb over the low gate across the door. ‘Move, damn pig, move!’ The gathering of men jeered mercilessly at Handel Evans as he lifted his short, stiff leg to straddle the gate.

  ‘Up she goes!’ the blacksmith bawled.

  ‘Been some time since Handel Evans got his leg over something,’ Lloyd the Butcher quipped.

  ‘He doesn’t have much chance; he’s always playing with his organ!’

  ‘I’ll be having the lot of you!’ Handel Evans rejoined, now standing upright on the other side of the gate, pulling his jacket down from the hem with both hands, his face puce from the exertion.

  ‘Lads, listen you,’ announced Lloyd the Butcher, stepping up onto a wooden crate. The men who had crowded into the pub gathered round, looking up at Lloyd, who was pink as a pork chop, his starched white apron stained with blood. ‘If you want to be in this year’s Narberth versus Carmarthen tug-of-war tournament,’ he announced, pink and proud, ‘and beat those salty buggers from Carmarthen who only fart to frighten themselves, shout out your good name now.’ He took a notepad and a pencil from his apron pocket. ‘Don’t be a sitter and a looker,’ he encouraged. ‘Live as though you would die tomorrow!’

  ‘Da, I was thinking . . .’ Wilfred said late that night, standing bare-chested in the kitchen and cutting
a thick slice of bread, ‘do you think I’m a good person?’

  ‘What are you doing asking me that for?’ Wilfred’s da sliced the top off his boiled egg, revealing the circle of wet yellow within.

  ‘Well, it’s not living that matters, but living rightly,’ Wilfred quoted, slathering soft butter on the bread with the bread-knife. ‘Socrates says that not life, but the good life, is to be valued. But how do I live a good life?’ Wilfred sat down at the clean table, not bothering with a plate. ‘Become a vicar?’

  ‘They’d never have you.’

  Give my money away, Wilfred nearly said, but he had already done that. ‘Help old ladies across the road? Or try not to knock people over?’

  ‘I would say, Wilfred bach, that not running people over is very important.’

  ‘Not even if it was an accident, mind you? Would I be a good man if I knocked someone over by accident in the hearse? So that I had to bury them?’

  There was the gentle chaff of the spoon on the eggshell. ‘What did Socrates says about accidents on the road?’ his da asked.

  ‘Didn’t have a motor car,’ Wilfred replied. ‘I’m in puzzles about it. It’s difficult, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s not if no one has a motor car.’ Wilfred’s da scraped out the bottom of his boiled egg with a chalky sound.

  You’re good, Da, Wilfred said silently, reaching out and putting his hand over his da’s weathered hands.

  ‘Right. Time for bed,’ Wilfred announced. ‘Can’t find my toothbrush for the life of me. I want to polish my pegs.’

  ‘Flora Myffanwy had it,’ his da replied, turning his cap around in his hand. ‘She was cleaning with it.’

  ‘Cleaning her teeth?’ Wilfred asked, puzzled.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Cleaning the wall,’ said Wilfred’s da reticently. ‘In the scullery.’

  Wilfred looked bewildered.

  ‘Clearing the dust from the ledges on the wall,’ his da admitted.

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Last night.’

  ‘But last night she went to bed at eight o’clock.’

  ‘This was three in the morning.’

  Wilfred collapsed onto the kitchen chair. She’s gone mad, he thought. Flora Myffanwy had gone mad. He dropped the newspaper onto the scrubbed, gritless, dustless flagstones of the kitchen floor. I am Wilfred Price, he said to himself, trying to orientate himself, to remind himself who he was and what he was. I am an undertaker. A purveyor of superior funerals. And I have read the whole of the A words and some of the B words in the dictionary, he thought, struggling to define himself with certainty. I am in the kitchen in Narberth with my da. And I was going to be a father.

  Flora Myffanwy swept the hearthstone in the bedroom again. It was clean, but the cleaning of it gave her something to do with her frantic, restless hands and somewhere to put her thoughts. Each day, as she cleaned the house, she took each utensil, each ornament, each crevice and corner, and—carefully and concentratedly—in the washing and the rubbing and the polishing of the contours of each object, she made the house her own.

  Flora brushed the fallen leaves and twigs from the chimneypiece onto the rusted dustpan. The child had meant so much more to her than she had realised. And she was missing her father acutely, as well. He’d been buried the day she met Wilfred and her grief for him had been suspended—locked away—by shock, courtship, marriage and pregnancy. But her sadness for her father had been joined by her grief for her child and all the grief came tumbling out, like a swollen stream in spring full of melted ice water. And somewhere in her mind, too, was the memory of the loss of Albert.

  She lit a small fire in the hearth. Wilfred was collecting the body of a farmer’s wife who had died in the night, and Wilfred’s da had taken an early-morning walk to forage in the hedgerows around Chamomile Bank. Flora had been waiting to have the house to herself. She looked around surreptitiously and scrunched up the newspaper into a ball, tearing stories of other people’s lives in half, crushing the paper and placing it in the fire. It burned quickly and easily, almost with panache.

  She took the small cardigan from the chest-of-drawers. It was peach-coloured wool and she had knitted it herself, counted each stitch one by one, in a gentle exactness so that the cardigan would fit the small chest of the child when it was born. She did up the buttons, simple bone buttons, four of them. She folded the sleeves inwards and laid the cardigan on the fire. It smoked blackly. She took the white wool bootees for feet that couldn’t walk and the delicate cotton bonnet for a fragile head and put them in the fire, too. She found the nightdress that was caked thickly with blood and she placed it on the fire, that second skin of hers, and she watched it, mesmerised by her own blood burning. She sat there on her knees in the cold morning light, burning her clothes and her daughter’s clothes, until they were no more.

  She would not have her daughter with her: that small dignified child with her brown plaits and her brown dress and her flat chest. The child who had come to her in a dream of knowing and said to her, before she went, forever: ‘My name is Martha.’ The baby had grown beneath her heart and would stay in her heart.

  The fire flickered confidently and with energy, growing straight and tall and licking the chimney with exuberance. It cackled and the buttons on the tiny cardigan cracked and then smoked and the cotton smouldered. Flora shifted on her knees, the hearthrug leaving its impression on the bare skin of her calves. The newspaper turned to black carbon and kept its shape. She sat watching the fire, feeling it warm and colour her cheeks, and holding her thin white hands against it, letting its heat flow through her.

  This house, here, that she had stayed in like a guest, in which her daughter had lived her brief, unlived life, Flora would make her home. Her daughter had left, but Flora would stay. Wilfred was kind to her, and during these painful days when she had been cleaning and hurting, she had come to understand the quiet value and immense consolation of Wilfred’s kindness. Now, she felt married to Wilfred. There was nowhere else she wanted to run to, no other man—including Albert, as vital as he had been to her—that she wanted to marry. This surprised her, but it comforted her too. It was a gentle and quiet choice; she had come to it gradually, and it gave her peace. Albert she had loved, but Wilfred was the man she was with now, wanted to be with now.

  Once the minute specks of scarlet fire had chased themselves around the cardigan, the cotton and the paper, and Flora had prodded the fire until it had died into black, she swept the hearth of the fine, clean ashes and flung open the window in the bedroom. She put her winter coat over her nightdress and bicycled along Water Street, then down the grassy hill to the tree-lined lane where she placed the ashes in the stream and watched the black bits of broken buttons bob away in the clear, icy water.

  ‘I am delighted to welcome,’ announced the Master of Ceremonies, ‘our very own Narberth undertaker, Mr. Wilfred Price, known to all and sundry as Wilfred, and his beautiful wife, Flora Myffanwy Price, who will be awarding the prizes in the dog competition this afternoon.’

  The Queen’s Hall was jam-packed, and well-meaning people strained to glimpse Wilfred and Flora standing at the front with the judges. Wilfred doffed his hat and felt a certain embarrassment; although the crowd looked kindly at them, there were a few whispers. It was stuffy in the Queen’s Hall and it smelled of dog.

  ‘Are you well, my dear?’ he asked Flora quietly.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, removing a dog hair that had floated on the air and stuck to her lip. Ruddy dogs, Wilfred thought to himself. There were hairs all over his best work trousers and if that ruddy Jack Russell didn’t stop yapping soon . . .

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen—and you, Willie the Post!’ the Master of Ceremonies called. ‘This first category is The Most Obedient Dog in Narberth Competition. Narberth’s most sensible dog, ladies and gentlemen.’

  A cluster of
owners and their dogs began eagerly jogging in a circle in front of the judges. One small boy, not much taller than his Scottie dog, was being dragged by his pet, not that the dog appeared to know where it was supposed to be going. A poodle, highly-strung, flew at an Alsatian, which barked ferociously.

  ‘Mrs. Morgan going past the judges now, with some off-lead heelwork,’ the Master of Ceremonies commentated.

  ‘And, Mr. Peters, not really a dog, but a very loved member of the family, isn’t he?’ the Master of Ceremonies continued.

  ‘Indeed,’ Mr. Peters admitted gravely.

  The judges watched, imbued with a sense of importance at the civic duties bestowed upon them. Wilfred smiled. He would attempt to enjoy the afternoon. He would follow Mr. Auden’s advice. ‘Hold all things lightly,’ his apprentice-master had said to him once, offhandedly, in the earliest and most innocent days of his apprenticeship. ‘It is the only way we can be undertakers, the only way we can live amongst all this death. Because nothing is deathless.’ Then Mr. Auden had clapped his hands and rubbed them together, as if he was a man who had just got up from his knees and finished praying.

  Wilfred, trying to look enthusiastic, watched the dogs walk in obedient circles. Then a thought occurred to him: perhaps he was being punished.

  ‘Now, ladies and gentlemen,’ the Master of Ceremonies called, attempting to bring order, ‘The Dog with the Waggiest Tail. Not you, Handel Evans!’ The crowd laughed.

  ‘I’ll have your guts for garters!’ Handel Evans retorted and punched the air jovially. There was a kerfuffle of chairs and barks, and purposeful people bustling in front of Wilfred. Another procession of owners paraded onto the floor, proud as punch of their pets. The Scottie terrier came along again with an even smaller boy—the younger brother, Wilfred presumed—and the small child kept tickling and patting the dog to make its white tail swing, while the judges consulted back and forth, writing notes intently on clipboards and scrutinising the dogs’ tails.