The World is a Wedding

by Wendy Jones

  ‘He butchers kittens!’ a voice shouted.

  ‘I’m fit as a flea,’ Jeffrey retorted.

  ‘Are you ready for the off?’ Tiny Evans continued. ‘On the count of three. Stand back, boys and girls. I’m going to blow my whistle and—’

  ‘Get on with it, man! If it doesn’t happen quick, it won’t happen at all.’

  The referee flushed. He blew the whistle urgently. There was a moment’s silence and then the children erupted, jumping up and down, and the women talked animatedly among themselves, the brims of their hats bobbing. Soon the men were at a slant to the rope, the muscles of their forearms rippling, their teeth clenched, pulling hard against each other and roaring like heated bulls.

  ‘Go on! Keep belting,’ the excited crowd called. ‘Put your backs into it!’

  For several minutes, the tag slipped to the left then slightly to the right, the referee bouncing up and down on tiptoes in front of it, shouting, ‘It’s even-stevens!’ There was intense strain in the faces of the men. With the sudden release of the rope, the Carmarthen team catapulted forward, tumbling and scrambling, arms swinging, while the triumphant red team from Narberth collapsed on top of each other in a bundle. In the celebration the children surged forward, finding their fathers, uncles and older brothers, and some running to Mr. Jones, the schoolmaster.

  ‘Well, what with you carrying those coffins and me chopping meat, we’ve got a bit of muscle between us,’ said Jeffrey exuberantly, dropping the rope and slapping Wilfred on the back. ‘Serves them right for coming from Carmarthen.’

  Wilfred smiled, wiped his brow and looked around for Flora.

  Flora left the tug-of-war on the town moor and ran along Moorfield Road, past Narberth School, slowing down into a brisk walk as she reached the corner. Her long, brown hair was flying from its bun and her cheeks were flushed. She didn’t want to cause a comment or for people to notice. She would quickly warn Mrs. Probert that she had heard Mr. Probert was drunk, let her know, so she could leave the house, go for a walk and keep herself safe. Then Flora would return to the tug-of-war. It would only take her a moment, and it was the kind thing to do.

  She nodded at Mrs. Cadwallader.

  ‘Aren’t you watching the tug-of-war?’ the other woman asked. ‘Mind those eggs in your shopping basket, rushing like that.’

  ‘Good morning, Mrs. Cadwallader.’ Flora Myffanwy smiled politely and kept walking to reach Mrs. Probert’s before Mr. Probert came home.

  At the big house she turned right into the row of small cottages on Spring Gardens. It was a dark street, made dank by the springs under the road. The houses were close to each other so that sun and light rarely penetrated the lane, and the brickwork was dirty, splattered with mud from the horses and the odd car that passed close to the walls.

  When she reached Mrs. Probert’s house she had sudden doubts, hoped she wasn’t being too forward or interfering, because she hadn’t seen Mrs. Probert for a while. But surely the woman would want to know, and there would be no harm in telling her. She knocked on the door, its red paint chipped and worn.

  ‘Mrs. Probert!’ she called in a loud whisper. ‘Come quickly.’ She waited for the door to open and knocked again urgently, louder and more boldly. ‘There’s something I would like to tell you.’ She heard the latch being lifted slowly on the other side and the door opened.

  ‘Well, well, well, what have we here?’ Mr. Probert stood filling the doorframe with his stout body. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows. ‘Good day, Mrs. Price. And what can we do for you?’ he said, looking her up and down. He leaned against the doorframe. ‘Something to tell the wife? Spit it out.’

  Flora could feel him looking at her. She put her hands across her chest. She had her shopping basket with her; the eggs had broken with all her rushing and were seeping through the wicker.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr. Probert.’ She tried to think of something to say, but in her panic could think of nothing but difficult truths.

  ‘Got more lipstick for my wife, have you?’

  ‘No, Mr. Probert.’

  ‘I told her to have nothing more to do with you. Told that husband of yours too.’

  Flora Myffanwy was too scared to move, to walk away, to say, ‘I’d better be going now.’

  ‘Well?’ Mr. Probert said eventually. ‘Is there something I need to go and see that undertaker husband of yours about?’

  ‘No, Mr. Probert.’ Their eyes met. Flora Myffanwy looked down quickly at the ground. She must go.

  ‘I’ll . . .’ she said.

  ‘You get going, Mrs. Price. And don’t you be coming back here . . .’ The rest of the sentence hung in the air as an unsaid threat. ‘Good day to you, Mrs. Price.’

  ‘Good day to you, Mr. Probert.’ The door closed firmly, almost slamming.

  ‘Phyllis,’ she heard Mr. Probert shout through the closed door. ‘Come here.’

  Flora and Wilfred stared down at Grace, who was a livid red colour and appeared to be sleeping deeply. It was evening and the streets outside were empty after the bustle of the tug-of-war. Grace had been in bed all day.

  ‘I bought some milk with the money in the tea caddy,’ Wilfred whispered to Flora, noticing how tense she looked. He summoned up his courage and said, ‘Would you mind me asking if this is perhaps a strain for you, my dear?’

  ‘No,’ replied Flora, but the usual tone of serenity in her voice was absent. ‘I saw Mr. Probert today,’ she admitted quietly.

  ‘At the tug-of-war?’

  ‘No, outside his house. I don’t like to see him.’

  ‘I understand.’ Wilfred put his arm around Flora. ‘He’s an idiot to a multitude of people.’

  The baby wiggled on the bed. ‘We can put some milk in the teacup and feed him with the silver spoon again,’ Wilfred suggested.

  Flora picked up the baby and took it to their bedroom and, with Wilfred standing by, she changed the baby’s sodden clothes, wrapping him in a blanket. Wilfred watched and thought, This is how it would have been if we had had a baby. We would have stood together, hushed, while Flora gently cared for our child. He wondered what Flora was feeling. He wanted to talk to her about Grace arriving with a baby, but he didn’t know how to broach the subject. He didn’t want to cause her pain or for her to move away from him, inside herself. He wondered if or when they would talk about what was happening.

  ‘I will wash it out,’ Flora said, taking the tiny white vest, ‘and dry it by the fire. He needs a change of clothes.’ Then she added quietly, ‘This is the cleaning and tidying I wanted to be doing.’

  Wilfred understood: she wanted to be caring for a child. He was grateful for her honesty, for the insight into her feelings. It reassured him more than those weeks of endless, silent cleaning. She was cooking more now, and eating again too. Cooking seemed to give her a sense of peace and comfort her—and it comforted Wilfred to watch her.

  Together they stepped back into his da’s room to check on Grace. Wilfred knew death could be sudden, happen quickly, that an adult in rude health could be fine at breakfast and dead by supper. And here was a woman with all the warning signs of death: the flushed red face, she had recently given birth, and her spirit was broken. He rubbed his jaw firmly. It was easy to see how her spirit was broken. He had read in the Daily Express that when healthy young African men, savages who lived by their instincts on the Serengeti in Tanganyika, were captured by the white plantation owners and locked overnight in one-roomed prisons, the next morning they were found dead, when, the day before, they had been perfectly healthy. That’s what happened when you imprisoned a human being: they died—and Grace was in a prison, of sorts.

  There was the sound of careful footsteps coming slowly up the stairs.

  ‘Your da,’ Flora whispered. Grace was lying in Wilfred’s da’s bed. ‘Did you tell him?’

  ‘I haven’t told him—I haven�
��t seen him. I hoped he would stay a few more days at Auntie Blodwen’s.’

  The door creaked open and Wilfred’s da looked startled to see so many people in his simple cell-like room.

  ‘Wilfred?’ he said. Then he looked at the woman in the bed. ‘Is that Grace Reece, Wilfred, in my bed?’ The blankets lifted up as the baby kicked. ‘And . . .?’ he uttered, dumbfounded.

  ‘Yes, Da, yes, it’s Grace. And a baby,’ Wilfred admitted in a whisper. Wilfred’s da looked uncomprehendingly around his tiny, crowded room.

  ‘I think we’d better talk in the scullery,’ Wilfred suggested.

  By the time they had reached the scullery Wilfred’s da was holding the back of the chair to steady himself from the surprise.

  ‘Well, Da. It’s Grace. She came back. We don’t know why. She hasn’t said.’

  ‘She must be in trouble,’ Wilfred’s da stated in his bewilderment, then added, ‘The child is the spit of Dr. Reece.’

  ‘She’s ill,’ Flora said. ‘She has a fever.’

  Wilfred’s da looked frightened. ‘We must get Dr. Reece. Straight away!’

  Then it occurred to Wilfred: it was suddenly obvious what his da meant. His own mother had died four days after he was born. Wilfred grasped the full enormity and reality of what he was doing: hiding a sick woman and a new baby in his home.

  ‘She could die, Wilfred, like your mother.’

  ‘I don’t think she will die,’ Flora said quietly. ‘She has her child to live for.’

  ‘But we don’t know,’ said Wilfred’s da. ‘We must help her.’

  Flora began to wipe the draining board and to clean. Wilfred didn’t know what to do. He wanted to do what was right, what was good, but he didn’t know what that was. He had been like that child: a helpless human being with a mother who was very ill. He tried to remember something of his mother, anything of those four days they spent together, but he couldn’t: it was only blackness or fantasies, not even a shell of the sensation of her. The infant lying helpless on the bed upstairs was on the precipice of his life changing irreversibly, and embarking on life without a mother. Would he let that child—a boy—help that small child lose his mother? And this child only had a mother, he could not be said to have a father he could count on.

  Wilfred’s da slowly, as befitted his age, began to take his coat from the back of the chair to prepare to leave for Dr. Reece’s.

  ‘Wait, Da, wait. No one knows she’s here. Her father doesn’t know she’s here.’

  They stood silently for a moment until Wilfred’s da said, ‘A family feud is not important at a time like this.’

  ‘No,’ Wilfred replied. ‘But—’

  ‘There is something else, isn’t there?’ said Flora.

  ‘Yes,’ admitted Wilfred.

  ‘Tell us, Wilfred.’

  ‘No,’ he said, honestly.

  ‘But it isn’t as it seems?’ Flora asked. There was a pause. ‘Could we get another doctor to give Grace a prescription?’ she suggested.

  ‘Dr. Williams in Carmarthen. But he drinks,’ Wilfred said. ‘So he’ll talk. What about Jeffrey?’

  ‘Jeffrey’s a butcher!’ his da exclaimed. ‘There’s a retired doctor in Stepaside.’

  ‘He died.’

  ‘Could we get some medicine from the apothecary?’ Flora said.

  ‘We don’t have a prescription,’ Wilfred replied.

  ‘Is there no one we could get a prescription from?’ his da asked. ‘Are you sure about not going to see Dr. Reece, Wilfred?’

  ‘Would you wait the night, and see how Grace is tomorrow?’ asked Wilfred.

  Each of them stood there, each with an answer, but Wilfred wrestled with himself, not knowing what to do or who to ask or whose experience to trust: his da, who had lost his wife, his wife, who had lost her child, or himself, who knew what it was to lose a mother as an infant.

  14.

  STILL LIFE

  So you say you have been feeling unwell?’ Dr. Reece put his hands behind his back and rocked on his feet. ‘And this has been since the birth?’

  ‘Yes, Dr. Reece.’

  ‘And you said you feel hot? Fevered?’ Dr. Reece looked at the stuccoed ceiling as if it was a repository of all answers. ‘The symptoms you described to me sound very much like those of infection.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But I have examined you, Mrs. Price, and you seem to be in good health and don’t have a temperature. The baby was born, or rather arrived, a while ago. And I feel that if you were going to have poor health, you would have experienced these symptoms in the first few days. That is the common time for an infection to appear.’ Dr. Reece put a hand to the stethoscope around his neck. ‘Mrs. Price,’ he turned and faced the large bay window, ‘what happened was a very unfortunate act of God.’

  Flora nodded.

  ‘And these things happen.’ The doctor looked out of the window, his face silhouetted in profile. ‘Events happen for which science has no explanation.’

  Flora Myffanwy shifted uncomfortably on the upright chair. She had described Grace’s symptoms as Grace had described them to her, though Dr. Reece was too experienced and knowledgeable to hold any concerns when he had been unable to find any evidence for the symptoms.

  ‘My dear, you are a healthy young woman whose nerves are strained. I can think of no other explanation. Although it does happen—and it is peculiar to the female sex and the hysterical—that there are those women who can believe they are pregnant or indeed suffer the symptoms of pregnancy although they’re medically unproven to be pregnant. It is rightly called a phantom pregnancy. As if the woman is pregnant with a ghost. Do you understand my meaning?’ Dr. Reece stood with his back against the surgery wall that was wallpapered a confident peacock blue.

  Flora had hoped it would be simple to describe Grace’s symptoms, receive advice and expert opinion and, most importantly, a prescription for some medicine. Wilfred had had the idea early this morning that she should visit Dr. Reece as a way to get a prescription for the correct medicine for Grace. She watched the doctor slowly pacing his surgery. She didn’t know who the child’s father was, but she saw the strong resemblance to Grace’s child in the eyes and the shape of the brow.

  Dr. Reece glanced at Flora quizzically and sceptically. She could see him thinking, perhaps putting two and two together.

  ‘Dr. Reece, if I was unwell, what medicine would you recommend?’

  ‘I recommend none at all, Mrs. Price. You are a nervous, perhaps neurotic woman.’

  ‘Yes, but if I was, you would recommend perhaps that I . . .’ Flora held out the sentence for him to finish it. She attempted to look hopeful and expectant so as to encourage the doctor to say the name of a medicine, any medicine that might help Grace, his own daughter.

  ‘Well, had you had an infection, I would prescribe Ovedoxs three times a day, although it’s rarely efficacious, and complete bed rest and very skilled medical supervision. Infections can be extremely serious, most notably in postpartum women—that is, women who have recently given birth, Mrs. Price.’

  ‘Ovedoxs?’ Flora repeated the name.

  ‘Yes, but I don’t recommend those things to you. Grief can disturb the mind, Mrs. Price, and make us think what is not there is there, if you comprehend my meaning.’ He sighed. ‘You are to go home and put your feet up, smoke—modern science is showing that smoking cigarettes is beneficial for health—do your housewifely chores and care for your husband. And in the fullness of time you will have another child; children invariably come to a young and healthy married couple. Because an unfortunate experience happened to you once doesn’t mean it will happen again.’

  Flora could feel the thin cover of her pretence slipping and tears rise in her eyes. The grandmother clock on the mantelpiece chimed half past three. Dr. Reece looked pointedly at the imposing clock to signify the appointment
was over.

  ‘Now, Mrs. Price, if you will excuse me. If there is any situation of medical concern, I trust you will not hesitate to telephone me immediately,’ he said sternly. He sat back down in his chair. ‘It won’t be necessary to charge you for the consultation.’

  ‘Thank you, Dr. Reece.’

  When Wilfred arrived that same morning at the Owens’ farm on Providence Hill, he was expecting Mr. Owen to be heavy, but when he saw how much weight the man had lost in the days since he’d turned yellow—and he was truly yellow—he knew he would be able to lift him in the coffin easily.

  ‘I have a clean bedsheet here,’ Mrs. Owen said. ‘I ironed and starched it four days ago in preparation. It’s for a winding sheet.’

  ‘Very well done, Mrs. Owen.’ Only two weeks ago, Wilfred had seen Mr. Owen in the Salutation Inn, leaning on the piano, drinking stout. He was right as rain and certainly not this extraordinary colour. It had been a quick death.

  One of Mr. Owen’s sons came forward. He had a stunned look as if he’d been slapped in the face by a plank. Wilfred could have cradled Mr. Owen alone and lifted him into the coffin, but didn’t want to do anything ungainly with the corpse in front of the next-of-kin, so it was best if the sons helped.

  ‘You take the feet.’ Wilfred guided and put the young man’s hands under the wasted body. ‘That’s right,’ he encouraged, although Mr. Owen’s arms flopped against the side of the coffin with a bang. One son gasped.

  ‘My sons are shocked,’ Mrs. Owen said simply. She stepped forward and arranged the winding sheet. Then the pine coffin with the body in it was placed on the parlour table.

  ‘We have visitors coming this afternoon,’ she explained.