by David Beaty
‘Why?’
‘That’s trickier to answer.’
‘Could it be,’ she asked, not looking directly at him, but fiddling with her coffee spoon, ‘because you’ve at last guessed I’ve fallen in love with you?’
He didn’t say anything for several seconds. He could feel his own heart beating thickly and wildly. He clenched his hands. He was aware that he wanted her at that moment. More than anything else in the world. He looked at his watch. With difficulty he kept his voice under control.
‘I’ll see you back to the Shelton.’
She stood up obediently. ‘Thank you.’
As he draped her jacket round her shoulders, she said, ‘I’m sorry if I shocked you.’
‘You didn’t.’
But despite that she walked a little apart from him, as though she were in disgrace, as they descended the steps to the street. She didn’t make any comment or indeed seem surprised when he didn’t call a taxi. They walked the intervening streets in a total, profound and momentous silence. Paul, still wrestling with the prospects of delight her remark had opened to him, watched their separate exaggerated shadows, his very tall, broad-shouldered and long-legged, hers slender, small-waisted and vulnerable. Voices of reason told him he was too old, too set in his ways, it was all too much of an illusion.
But just before they reached the Shelton, he put his arm round her shoulders and made their shadows one. At the same time he asked her, in as steady a voice as he could muster, to be his wife.
Chapter Twelve
To his relief, Belinda agreed to a quiet wedding. Under the circumstances, she said, her blue eyes wide and understanding, it was exactly what she would have chosen. She would have quite liked a wedding-breakfast party afterwards at Elmtrees, but if he didn’t want it then she didn’t either, and they could throw a party any time they liked, perhaps in a month or so. A lot of people did that these days. You worded the invitation, A party to celebrate the marriage of, and then you still got your wedding presents, which shouldn’t be sneezed at these days.
Paul agreed vaguely that yes, some time they would give a party. After all, he told himself, he had much to celebrate, he was a very lucky man. The fact that his luck, like everything else that was happening to him, seemed to do so at a distance removed, bothered him slightly. It was as if his emotional and mental eyes couldn’t focus properly, nor his inner intelligence understand. He even had the physical sensation that his feet were an inch or so above the ground.
‘That’s because you’re on Cloud Nine,’ Belinda said when he mentioned this strange phenomenon to her. ‘Floating on air!’
Certainly it was assumed amongst those of the junior crew who knew about it (and there seemed to be quite a few of them) that Captain Harker ought to be on Cloud Nine, having collared the best-looking stewardess of them all, and though Archie, the only senior man to know officially of the wedding, declared that marriage to a young girl put a fearful strain on an older man, his voice was envious rather than sympathetic, a fact not overlooked by Madge.
Of all people, Madge was in the most painful state of ambivalence. She totally rejected the evil rumour whispered to her by Archie that Paul had been on friendly terms with Belinda before Harriet died. Paul was an honourable man and a strong-minded man. But he was lonely. She was quite sure Harriet would have wanted him to marry again. But someone more his own age, like Madge herself if she were free. Yet Belinda did seem a biddable friendly girl, as witness her kindness towards Fandango. And no one could go anywhere with Archie without knowing that the older men got the younger they liked them.
‘Here they come now,’ she said to Archie as they stood outside the doorway of Kingston Registry Office, which was on the ground floor of a Victorian villa which also housed the Department of Health and Social Security. Madge was clutching what she hoped was a suitable wedding present, an Italian porcelain rose bowl, on the card attached to which Madge had written in a burst of sentimentality: May it be roses, roses all the way for both of you.
‘There they are,’ Belinda giggled, spotting the Truscotts, ‘waiting like doom!’ She stretched her slim arm through the half-open car window and waved enthusiastically. It was a hazy May morning. The trees were in their first full green, the lilacs were in blossom, but somehow the sight of Archie, all in grey, almost a morning suit, and Madge in a cream outfit and a matching royalty hat, filled Paul with sudden gloom. He wished they had asked Jane. But no, as Belinda had pointed out, fair was fair. They’d said no one but the Truscotts and that was it. She wasn’t even asking Polly, though a bride was entitled to someone of her own, especially someone of her own age.
‘People will think they’re queuing up for their old age pension books,’ Belinda giggled as Paul parked the car, and they saw there was a big notice behind the Truscotts saying Department of Health and Social Security, second floor.
‘Not dressed like that.’ Paul smiled as if he was amused by Belinda’s remark, but he wasn’t. If they looked old, he looked old. Belinda, on the other hand, in her raspberry-coloured silk dress and wide-brimmed straw hat, looked absolutely stunning. She carried a little bouquet of freesias. Her hair shone, her eyes shone, her skin glowed with youth.
He had picked her up half an hour previously from her flat, because he didn’t want her to arrive alone by taxi. She hadn’t been quite ready and had sent various messages down by her flatmate Polly that he wasn’t to panic. He finally sent back a message that the Registrar adhered to a strict time schedule.
Suddenly she had made her breath-taking appearance, twirled herself round and asked, ‘ Well, was I worth waiting for?’
‘We haven’t kept you waiting have we, I hope?’ Paul walked over and kissed Madge on the cheek. He shook Archie’s hand. Archie held onto his and gave him a long manly look that made him feel he was about to be executed instead of married.
‘No. We’ve only just got here,’ Madge replied. ‘And anyway, we’re early. We’re supposed to go up into the waiting room. Then they come along and tell you when it’s your turn.’
The waiting room was a communal one for the Registrar and the DHSS. A couple of children played on the floor beside a woman who was obviously expecting a third. Jane, he thought again. He should have asked Jane. Beside the mother were two pensioners, and beside them a young, patently bridal couple, the girl wearing a suit with a frilly blouse and carrying a bunch of anemones, the boy sporting a white carnation and smoking furiously. They moved up on the bench to allow the four of them to sit down.
Everyone watched the door. Nobody spoke till the frilly-bloused girl, seeing her husband-to-be’s cigarette about to spill ash down his clean suit, nudged Belinda and jerking her head towards Paul whispered, ‘Tell your Dad to pass the ash-tray, duck.’ Thankfully, the Registrar’s door opened almost immediately and the Harker wedding party was called inside.
The floor was of polished brown linoleum. There was a polished desk behind which sat a neat little man with a polished pink skull. They stood before him like errant schoolchildren before the master, while he came from behind the desk and read through the service with them in precise Civil Service tones.
Paul stared down at the brown floor determinedly dragging his mind back from his first wedding, the stone flags of St Peter’s Church, the organ music, the scent of flowers, Harriet.
He reached out his hand. Archie put the new platinum wedding ring Belinda had chosen into it. Belinda held out her hand.
‘Put on the ring,’ said the Registrar, looking at them bemusedly for a moment, then hurrying on. ‘You are now married. You may kiss the bride. And may I be the first to congratulate you.’
And may the Lord have mercy on your soul. Surely no one said that aloud?
He allowed his hand to be shaken briefly by the Registrar, who clearly thought, as an expert, that he was a very lucky man. Madge pecked Belinda on the cheek, then threw her arms round him, hugging him to her big heaving bosom. ‘Be very happy, Paul. You deserve it.’
Archie
clapped him on the shoulder, kissed the bride on the lips. Then they were hurried out into the cold sunlight to make way for the young couple.
‘Come back to our place and crack a bottle,’ Archie suggested.
‘No, thanks. Sweet of you, but no.’ It was Belinda who answered firmly. ‘We’re just going to drive off into the country.’ She slipped her arm through Paul’s. ‘Just the two of us.’ The Truscotts didn’t argue.
‘I brought you our present,’ Madge said.
‘Sweet of you.’ Belinda smiled and held out her hands for the giftwrapped parcel. Madge, chilled by the wind, and racked by conflicting emotions, was clumsy. The shiny paper of the parcel was slippery, the weight of the thing far greater than Belinda expected. Certainly none of it was Belinda’s fault. But it was from her hands it seemed to fall to the ground with a resounding crump.
‘Oh, clumsy me!’ Madge said, gathering up the deformed parcel. ‘All my fault. So sorry. I’ll get you another. It was only a bowl.’
Ironically, as the Truscotts waved the Citroën away, they were agreed for the first time in months on one thing. The breaking of the rose bowl was an omen and a bad one at that.
That same thought niggled at the back of Paul’s mind as he drove across Berkshire towards Somerset.
Beside him, Belinda went on gaily chattering. Clearly the broken bowl now reposing in its original wrapping on the floor at the back was not important. An old-fashioned bowl, not her sort at all, unlikely even to have been given house-room at Elmtrees of which she was now mistress, had it survived.
On her lap was the open AA book and she was following their track westwards, at the same time looking up hotels ahead. It had been her idea that after the wedding they should simply drive off into the afternoon and stay at some hotel they liked the look of. After all, so early in the season and with the school holidays weeks away, there’d be no trouble getting a room. It was so much more fun, didn’t Paul think, going away like that, like gypsies discovering somewhere all their own where nobody knew them, where they could have what Belinda said she wanted more than anything else, ‘a quiet honeymoon in an English country village’. She was sick of luxury hotels, she said. And flying to foreign countries had been their jobs. ‘What does it matter if it rains?’ she had said. ‘ Won’t worry us.’
It began raining half an hour after Salisbury.
‘Better get settled in fairly soon, darling,’ Paul said. ‘Dark soon.’
But Belinda had chosen her village – Silvercote because she said the name was romantic and its three-star hotel was called Watermeads and she liked the sound of that too. The trouble was, it was off the main road and with the evening had come an unseasonable damp fog. They twisted round winding country lanes, trying to squint up at the darkening signposts.
Belinda kept on saying, ‘ But this is such fun!’ But by the time they had managed to find the long straggling village with its forbidding-looking stone hotel, both of them had slipped into silence.
Inside it was warm, and their room with its big double bed and oak panelling and diamond-latticed windows was just what Belinda said she’d imagined it would be. She said she’d unpack and then join him in the bar. And he was to order her a Martini.
Paul went downstairs and did that, sitting on a stool up at the counter with the two Martinis in front of him. The locals eyed him curiously. They eyed him even more curiously when Belinda made her appearance looking like a fashion model. They kept up a dead silence as they tried to hear what the two of them were murmuring to each other as they drank their Martinis.
‘Another one, darling?’
Belinda shook her head.
‘Then shall we eat?’
The candlelit restaurant was deserted. But the filet mignon steak was perfect and Paul ordered champagne. He raised his glass.
‘To us, darling!’ She leaned over the table to clink glasses.
‘To us!’ She kept up a kind of bird-bright gaiety all through the meal. They had coffee and brandy in the lounge, served by a saturnine waiter, the spitting image, according to Belinda, of Boris Karloff. Outside it was still raining. The waiter shuffled in and out as though he had nothing else to do.
‘Another brandy?’
‘Why are you whispering, Paul? There’s no one to hear us.’
‘You’re whispering now.’
‘It’s the atmosphere.’ She shrugged. ‘ Makes you think you’re in church.’
‘Cold, too. Shall we try the bar again?’
The locals were still in the bar. Two more brandies warmed Paul, but his misgivings had given way to a calamitous certainty. The whole honeymoon should have been carefully booked in a luxury hotel, preferably in London or Paris or some other European capital. To let her try this sort of romantic escapade was asking for it. No Coney Island here. Walking was the only recreation, and Belinda had never struck him as the walking type.
‘What would you like to do tomorrow?’
‘Stay in bed.’ She gave him the ghost of a wicked smile. ‘Isn’t that what all honeymooners are supposed to do?’
He mustered a smile back.
‘Breakfast in bed’s already been ordered.’
‘And lunch? And dinner?’
The smile was still there, but the muscles of his face were beginning to ache. There was a coloured television over the bar that everyone was solemnly watching – The Benny Hill Show, full of convulsive kicking and people hitting each other and throwing things. Eventually their own conversation dried up, and they too were drawn into the television congregation.
‘The news,’ Paul said, as though announcing a new attraction. The flickering changed to the usual catalogue of world horrors.
‘I don’t particularly want to see it,’ she said.
‘Nor do I.’ His eyes looked down at his watch, and registered surprise. ‘Past ten already! Shall we —’
‘Yes, let’s,’ she said, getting up. ‘I just feel like soaking in a really hot bath.’
As they left, Paul could feel the eyes of the locals following them, still trying to figure them out. Hand in hand, they went upstairs and along the winding corridor. The first thing they saw was the Met man on the television screen twinkling through the darkness and promising rain.
Belinda had unpacked before joining him in the bar. The bed had been turned down. His striped pyjamas lay beside an expensive lace nightdress. Scents, powders, talcums, combs and hairbrushes were arranged neatly on the dressing table. A white silk negligee was draped across the stool.
Belinda went through the television-lit darkness and switched on the pink-shaded lamps on the bedside tables.
‘Cosy, isn’t it? I’ve put you on the left side of the bed, Paul. That’s the gentleman’s side.’
Was it the gentleman’s side, he thought. And if it was, why? He had in fact always slept on the right-hand side. Was there something significant about that?
A sudden remembered picture of his first wedding night flashed through his mind – that farmhouse on the Yorkshire Moors, their bedroom, colder than this one, Harriet putting on a red woollen cardigan over her plain high-necked cotton nightgown, and them both doing exercises to keep warm and then toppling on the bed, helpless with laughter.
‘Paul …’
He was suddenly aware of two soft arms round his neck, Belinda’s open mouth pressed hard on his. He put out his hands and held her close.
As he kissed her, she threw back her head with a certain theatrical emphasis, as if she were submitting to the ferocity of his lovemaking. Conscientiously he tried to summon up the ferocity and fire, but instead he felt a numbing tiredness and an overpowering desire to creep chastely beneath the flower-patterned quilt.
His wedding day seemed to stretch out a long way behind him. He had a sudden memory of the awful waiting room, of the chilling ceremony, of poor bewildered old Madge and Archie doing their best as the wedding guests. Like millions of bridegrooms, he ached for his wedding day to be over-and the wedding night to begin. Only, Christ, he
longed for his wedding night in order to sleep.
He felt Belinda pull a little away from him. Two big blue eyes regarded him roguishly.
‘Are you going to undress me?’
‘If you like?’
The blue eyes blinked reproachfully.
‘Don’t you like?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
Smiling up at him, she unfastened the top button of her dress.
‘It’s quite easy. There, I’m helping you. Now you can undo the other eight.’
As he carefully released the little silk-covered buttons from their loops, he could feel her eyes on his face. Though the room was quite chilly, he began to sweat. He suddenly felt terribly unsure of himself and gauche, as if he were the young innocent, and she the older, experienced one.
‘Nine out of nine, Captain Harker! Don’t look so serious. You have passed your button Check, though I know you’re kidding me. You’ve done this dozens of times before.’
‘Scores,’ he said, trying to laugh.
She gave a low excited laugh in return as she helped him slide the dress over her hips till it lay in a soft silky pool round her shoes.
‘There.’ She stood in front of him. ‘I hope you like my lace knickers! They’re Janet Reger. I bought them specially for you.’
‘They’re sweet.’
‘They’re not meant to be sweet, Paul. They’re meant to turn you on. To turn you into a mad, raging, beast.’
He stared at the reflection of the pair of them in the long cheval glass – she standing in front, propped high on elegant heels, he standing behind like a heavy uneasy shadow.
‘I can feel the transformation into Mr Hyde coming over me fast,’ he smiled, struggling for lightness.
She flung her arms round his neck and kissed his mouth wetly.
‘Now my bra.’ She turned her back to him.
He peered down at the thin lace-edged band of shiny silk stuff that seemed to hold the garment in place. Cautiously he took both hands and pulled it. Though Belinda gave a little shiver of pleasure at the light brushing of his fingers over her skin, the bra remained obstinately in place. He peered closer. There must be hooks of some sort, press studs or buttons. The shaded bedside lamp touched the skin of her back with pink, but gave little real illumination. He moved his head for a better look, then reached into his top pocket for his reading glasses.