Although she knows she must – and will – make her decision alone, Caroline is waiting for a sign. She does not know where it will come from or how it will manifest itself but it is more likely to appear here, in what is still her home, than in the city.
She rests her cold hand on the wall and the moss seems a little less icy than her skin. She rubs it beneath her fingers; it’s like some strange fabric, velvety but rough. For a few minutes she hears and sees nothing; she is lost. Then a sound calls her back. The cattle have noticed her. Hopeful and curious, they have moved across the field. They are in a row by the fence behind the wall, right in front of her, jostling each other as if to get the best view. She might be a film star on a red carpet and they the eager fans, so wholly do they concentrate their attention on her. She can smell the grass on their breath and the warm aroma they carry of milk and dung.
Caroline returns their gaze and for a moment they are all held in the suspended unreality of a communication neither could explain. Suddenly, she raises her hands and spreads them wide as if in greeting. The cows begin to back off, stumbling into each other so that she cannot help but laugh, they are so comical. It’s too much: one panicky beast starts to lumber away, breaking into a run, the others following so that now they are all running, hooves thumping on the turf.
The spell is broken, but she has had her sign.
It’s too cold to stay out here. She has to go indoors and change her shoes and tell them what she has decided to do.
IV
Good Wives
1971–1991
There was no bridal procession, but a sudden silence fell upon the room as Mr March and the young pair took their places under the green arch. Mother and sisters gathered close, as if loath to give Meg up; the fatherly voice broke more than once, which only seemed to make the service more beautiful and solemn; the bridegroom’s hand trembled visibly, and no one heard his replies; but Meg looked straight up in her husband’s eyes, and said, “I will!” with such tender trust in her own face and voice that her mother’s heart rejoiced.
Good Wives, Louise May Alcott
Weddings
1971–73
i
The photograph of Louise’s first wedding sat next to Esther’s on the sideboard in Harrowden Place.
It was because of this poor show, as her mother called it, that Esther had the dress, the flowers, three bridesmaids, a four course meal, 150 guests and 50 additional cake boxes sent out afterwards with a few crumbs of cake and a dry corner of icing. Esther had what Janet called ‘The Works’: a proper wedding to make up for Louise’s duplicity, not a Big Day in her case but a missed one, never to be recovered. However much Louise wanted to splash out on her second wedding, it seemed that was no substitute. A second marriage was not the same at all.
At her own wedding Janet had worn a grey costume with a rakishly tilted hat decorated by two sharp feathers, her only flowers a large corsage on her lapel. No bridesmaids, no big reception. Wartime, she said. War made things different.
There was just one photograph of Louise’s secret wedding. She looked uncharacteristically demure but smiling and pretty, her thin legs half hidden in knee-high silver boots, the flowers in her hair trailing carelessly over her shoulder and the ragged bunch clasped in her hands reaching further than the hem of her mini dress. Next to her Peter was eclipsed by his shaggy hair and beard, his awful flared trousers and patterned shirt. Peter who was completely eclipsed now, no longer part of their family, if he ever really had been.
Next to this photograph on the sideboard in the dining room in Harrowden Place was the representation of the much grander wedding that had Esther and Jack shyly at its centre, dressed up and self-conscious, framed in silver.
Louise had gone to London to get married.
‘I’ve got a summer job,’ she announced in May. She was in the middle of first year exams and had picked her moment carefully. They were having breakfast and everyone was in a hurry.
‘Have you?’ Esther was startled. ‘I’ve not even thought about that yet.’
‘It’s in London.’
‘London? ’ her mother exclaimed. ‘How on earth will you manage there on your own? What sort of job is it?’
‘I won’t be on my own – three of us have found jobs in the same hotel. Live in, so we’ve got our accommodation sorted out.’
‘I think we’ll need to know a bit more about it than this,’ Janet said, ‘before we let you go trailing off to London with your friends. Who else is going?’
‘Lesley and Peter. You don’t know them.’
‘You should have told us this last night, while your father was here. He’ll not be back now till Thursday. I don’t know what he’ll say.’
‘I’m going,’ Louise said. ‘You can’t stop me anyhow.’
‘Just a minute – ’
Louise pushed her chair away from the table.
‘I’ve got an exam,’ she cried. ‘You always do this – upset me when I need to stay calm.’
Mindful of the exam, and the apparently scant work Louise had done for it, Janet sighed and gave in.
‘We’ll talk about it when Dad’s home. You need to get ready now.’
‘That’s what I’m saying. Honestly, I don’t know why I couldn’t go away to university like other people. How on earth am I supposed to broaden my horizons, the way you’re meant to when you’re a student? Especially if you won’t even let me go to London.’
On this exit line she went out, banging the kitchen door behind her. Janet sat down.
‘What do you think – do you know these friends of hers?’
Esther had been trying to keep out of it. ‘Not really. She goes about with quite a big crowd.’
‘Lesley I think I’ve heard of. But Peter – Peter who?’
‘Munro. He’s doing sociology.’
Janet raised her eyes. ‘For goodness sake.’
It was bad enough that Louise had chosen Psychology instead of a real subject like French or History, or a career like teaching.
‘So he’s her boyfriend?’
‘Yes.’ Esther hesitated, torn between loyalty to Louise and duty to her mother. ‘I think they’ve been going out for about six weeks.’
‘Well,’ Janet said, rising from the table and gathering plates together, ‘it’s news to me.’
It would be, thought Esther with a flash of irritation. There were things you did not confide in your mother. No one did. She went hot, thinking of Jack and his room in Halls.
As she went out, her mother said, ‘What do you think about this holiday job, Esther?’
Esther had no wish to go to London herself, but for a moment was jealous of Louise’s adventure there, for she was sure it would be an adventure. ‘Well, she’s managed to sort out a job on her own – and if they’re living in, you won’t have to worry about where she’s going to stay. It might . . . oh, I don’t know, it might have been better if we’d both gone somewhere else to get degrees.’
‘What on earth for? Aberdeen’s a perfectly good University – and on your doorstep. No need to pay for expensive halls of residence or flats.’
‘I was thinking of looking for a holiday job somewhere else too.’
‘Were you?’ Janet looked startled, but at once turned away to conceal her surprise. ‘With Jack?’
‘Yes.’
Janet began washing up the breakfast dishes, and as she did not immediately protest, or indeed say anything else, Esther left her and went upstairs to collect her essay for the seminar at ten o’clock.
In the kitchen, Janet was weighing up greater and lesser evils, and reasons to be anxious or not. They’re grown up, Harry told her when she worried about them. You need to let them make their own mistakes. But Janet went on worrying about these very mistakes. It did not occur to her that marriage might be among them – at any rate, not yet. Inevitably, she started to think about Daniel again, and Caroline so estranged from them since his death. They had to keep their girls close, after
all that, she thought, had said so often to Harry. It was easier said than done, with Louise. Nothing, Janet found, had prepared her for the row which erupted over Louise’s wedding.
‘You’ve what?’
Louise, waving her hand with its shiny gold ring, so broad it seemed to take up half her finger, still had a dazzling smile on her face. She just doesn’t see what she’s done. Esther thought.
‘I got married. Pete and me – in London in Marylebone Register Office. Loads of famous people get married there. We were lucky the hotel was near so we were in the district. You have to live in the district for – ’
‘You got married.’
Louise stopped waving her hand. ‘Yes.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘You don’t mind, do you? We can have a party if you want a proper wedding do for me, I wouldn’t mind that. It was just, we didn’t want the fuss about a dress and bridesmaids and things. We thought,’ she added with an air of conscious virtue, ‘that it would save you loads of money and we just wanted to be together.’
‘You just – ’
Esther had not often seen her mother speechless. Harry, who until now had not moved from his arm chair, got up. His height, his frown over the top of his glasses, caused Louise to step back, suddenly tremulous.
‘Louise,’ he said, ‘are you seriously telling your mother and me that you got married in London to this lad – Pete? – a boy we met once at the station before you headed off to your hotel job?’
‘Yes.’ She would brazen it out. ‘We’re both over eighteen, so we didn’t need anybody’s permission and we got copies of our birth certificates from that place where they keep them – Somerset House or something. It was easy.’
‘Easy?’ Janet burst out. ‘Easy doesn’t make it right!’
‘And Pete – has he told his parents?’
‘Not yet.’
Louise looked sullen now. It was as if she was trying out suitable expressions to withstand the onslaught that Esther was afraid had only just begun.
‘Lou,’ she said, ‘why didn’t you tell us?’
‘Och, it was just the way we wanted to do it. Make it special. But I keep saying, we can still have a wedding party.’
Harry removed his glasses and looked at her without a smile or change of expression. ‘If that’s what you want, you go right ahead. I just hope you can pay for it.’
Louise went scarlet. ‘I thought you wanted it.’
‘We,’ Harry said, ‘have not been consulted, so I don’t see what it’s got to do with us.’
‘I don’t know why you’re being so horrible,’ Louise yelled, red and furious. ‘Honestly, most people are really pleased when their daughters get married.’
‘I dare say,’ Harry said dryly, ‘if we’d had a bit of notice we’d have been over the moon.’
Janet had rallied by this time. ‘You’ve been very silly indeed. But if you’re married, it’s done, and can’t be undone. You’d better bring Peter, or whatever his name is, over to meet us properly.’
Louise, crying now, started searching in her bag for a handkerchief, gave up and rubbed her face on her sleeve. ‘I’m leaving,’ she said. ‘I’m going to Pete’s, I only came back to tell you and collect my stuff.’
She waited for a few seconds, poised, but nobody stopped her, nobody said a word. She flung herself out of the room, slamming the door. They heard her thudding upstairs.
‘Well,’ Janet said, rounding on Esther, ‘you needn’t think you and Jack are going to go off and have a hole in the corner wedding like that.’
‘Mum!’ Esther cried. ‘That’s really unfair – I didn’t know anything about this.’
‘No?’
‘No! ’
Harry put a hand on Janet’s arm. ‘Maybe you should speak to Louise,’ he said to Esther. ‘You’ll be able to get her to calm down. As your mother says – it’s done now.’
Janet sighed. ‘Och, I’m sorry, Esther. I’m upset.’ She sat down on the nearest chair, looking all at once smaller and older. ‘This boy – Pete – did you say you know him?’
‘Not really.’
‘Is he – ?’
What was the question she wanted to ask? Was he respectable, sensible, clever, did he have a future, what were his parents like, what kind of background did he have – all those things. Too late, though, whatever the answers were.
Esther looked at her father, who nodded.
‘Off you go,’ he said.
As she went upstairs, Esther could hear drawers being banged shut and Louise cursing as she dragged her suitcase across the room. She was still hurt by her mother’s outburst. I want a proper wedding, she thought. But that’s it now – we’ll not be able to do it until we graduate. I wouldn’t dare ask.
She and Jack knew it was something they would do one day. An assumption had been made, a potential future appearing in both their minds, that they did not talk about, as if talking would make one or other of them shy away and deny it was going to happen. Her main feeling right now was that Louise had somehow spoiled all this, the lovely future they were both going to have one day, white weddings and being each other’s bridesmaid. She felt betrayed.
Pushing open Louise’s bedroom door, she had again that sensation of being temporarily in a different world. When Caroline disappeared, when the accident happened, when Daniel left and did not tell them where he was and then, worst of all, when he was killed: she had had this feeling then, of being disconnected from her own life. Where had it gone? She wanted it back, wanted back the life she had often thought boring and pedestrian. Now, as at those times, it had all the poignant desirability of something beloved that has been lost.
The front door opened. Margaret called ‘Hello, I’m home,’ and her school bag landed with a thud beside the hallstand. She must have seen Louise’s presents from London, the bags printed with ‘Biba’ and ‘Habitat’ – those magical names – abandoned in the hall, and as her mother came out to meet her, she said, pleased and expectant – ’Is Louise home?’
ii
By the time Esther married Jack in 1973, Pete was back in Dundee and Louise, while still legally his wife, had begun to behave like a single girl again. When her mother referred to her as Esther’s ‘Matron of Honour’ she exploded with laughter.
‘You’re joking! I’m not a matron.’
‘You’re married,’ Janet said, offended. ‘That’s what it’s called, when a bridesmaid is married.’
Louise stopped laughing and bit her lip. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I see what you mean.’
They did not talk about Louise’s marriage. Since it could not simply be wished away, Janet was torn between wanting her to be divorced, so that she could at least look forward to a more sensible match, and anger that she was not trying harder to revive and mend her existing one. ‘No one in my family,’ she said to Harry when they were on their own, ‘has ever been divorced.’
‘Except Diana. Do your mother and father – did Gordon ever tell them she’d been married before?’
‘They’ve never mentioned it.’
‘Ah.’
‘Anyway, she was Gordon’s wife, not my family. And it wasn’t Gordon she divorced, it was her first husband.’
‘Am I not your family?’ he asked, teasing.
‘I’m sure there are no divorces in your family either!’ she snapped.
To this, there was no answer, since it was true, so he did not attempt one. He knew her opinion of Diana. All things considered, he did not think it was a good idea to rake that up.
The invitations were out and the cake had been made by Janet (one tier at a time, over several weeks) and taken to the baker for icing. The bride and bridesmaids all had dresses hanging in what had once been Caroline’s bedroom. It was a spare room now, redecorated and with a new plain carpet, startlingly different from the carpet with green swirls and the pink rose-patterned wallpaper it had had all the time she lived with them.
‘It doesn’t look like Caroline’s room any more,’ Margaret said, as she
took out her blue lace-trimmed dress yet again, just to gaze at it.
‘That’s what I was thinking. Ironic, really,’ Esther said. ‘She’d like this much better.’
‘How do you get divorced?’ Louise asked, sitting on the bed with a thump.
‘What?’
‘I said – ’
‘Yes, I know.’ Esther hesitated. ‘Are you and Pete – ?’
‘Don’t go on about it. Mum’s bad enough.’
‘He has to be unfaithful,’ Margaret said. ‘Or you have to.’ She blushed as the other two turned to stare at her. ‘Or it could be desertion,’ she ploughed on. ‘Or one of you has to be incredibly cruel. It’s usually the man.’
‘I thought you were planning to be a primary teacher, not a matrimonial lawyer?’ Louise said.
‘There’s no need to make fun of me.’
‘Look, the point is – ’’ Esther began, but Louise spoke across her, impatient.
‘The point is I want to get divorced. I can’t keep on like this, it’s stupid. My life’s completely stuck.’
Even here, the air seemed thick with the unspoken words ‘I told you so’, or worse, ‘You’ve made your bed . . .’ It was impossible to be in the same room as their mother for more than five minutes without being aware of these rebukes. Janet did not need to utter them for Louise to know exactly what she was thinking. What they were all thinking.
She left Esther and Margaret to yet another discussion about how well the shoes matched and what their bouquets were going to look like. In her own room, she went back to the story she was writing about a marriage that had gone wrong. By now it bored her, so she had allowed it to veer from kitchen sink drama to romance, with the heroine confiding in a sympathetic but mysterious older man who also happened to be extremely good-looking.
The Treacle Well Page 17