by Ursula Bloom
‘Hello!’ he said.
‘Hello, Aubrey!’ She was entirely at ease when he was at his most jittery.
‘I haven’t seen you for such a very long time. It’s good to meet you this way.’
‘I’ve been busy. You know I’m coming to your wedding tomorrow?’
‘Oh Lord! They’re putting up a big show. I wanted it to be quiet.’
‘Of course you did. I imagined that. They pushed you into it, I suppose? Still the same old Aubrey.’
‘They were a bit firm.’
‘Let’s sit down and talk.’ She indicated a tree and they sat there side by side. ‘Why didn’t you just elope?’
‘Frances didn’t want it that way very much.’
‘Most girls love a big wedding. It’s their day. I suppose that’s only fair to grant them that much.’
‘Yes, I suppose so, but I have the awful feeling that I shall be sick in church or something.’
‘You won’t be. I hope ‒ I do hope ‒ Aubrey, that you are quite sure of yourself in this?’
‘I’m quite sure, Kay. Really, in my heart, I’m most awfully happy.’
‘Frances is a charming person. I don’t know her well, of course, because we are simple people and the Cousenses are too grand for us. But she looks delightful.’
‘She is, and we’ve got lots in common. Both of us have suffered from too much Mother, the mailed fist in the velvet glove, you know. A fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind.’
‘I know, but I should not have thought it a good thing to marry on. Not really! It’s very difficult to be sure of oneself in marriage. I thought I was sure, but then of course I wasn’t.’
‘How is your husband?’
‘Just being himself. He does too much, becomes exhausted, and then gets annoyed that he is exhausted. I married for security, women are weak and I wanted a prop. It serves me right that I haven’t got it. Edward isn’t a prop.’
‘Men want a prop too, Kay. I do. I sound very disloyal, but it’s been Mother. She sucks all the vitality out of me, and goes on doing it. You saw about my father’s will, that was a pretty frightful thing, and a shame. He left her penniless. I’ve got to let her live on at Thornhill, it’s her home and she has nowhere else to go, but … well, you see …’
‘You had to ask her to stay.’
‘Of course I had. Frances has a possessive mamma too. She’s been through hell with that old cow. Together we shall weather it.’
‘I wonder. Being in love is the only excuse for marriage. The marriage of fondness and reasonableness too often turns out unreasonably.’
‘Now don’t start frightening me. It’s a bit late for that.’
‘It is you who are frightening me, Aubrey. I was scared when you kept on running away from yourself, scared of the man you adopt to suit strangers, with the real man stalking behind it all the time. I like the real you so much, Aubrey; he has immense possibilities.’
‘You’re imagining it.’
‘No, no, I’m not. I think anybody, however many mistakes he makes, is better as himself. A fake can never be as successful as the real thing. Aubrey, learn to be the real thing.’
‘You always were penetrating, weren’t you?’
‘I hope so. How is the poetry these days?’
‘There seems very little time for it. I work hard at the office and there is very little real poetry there, I can assure you.’
‘For a man in love, there is always time for poetry,’ she said tenderly.
‘It isn’t that sort of marriage, we are terribly fond of one another; we’re drawn to one another.’
She said tenderly to herself:
‘Let me not live, if I not love,
Since I as yet did never prove
Where Pleasures met.’
‘You’re an awfully disturbing person, Kay.’
‘Am I? I only want to help.’
‘It’s a bit late in the day when tomorrow I’m to be married.’
She put out a hand and took his firmly; he was surprised at the power in her clasp. ‘Aubrey, this isn’t the right thing to do. I know it isn’t. You’ve made mistakes before, you can’t afford to make more. You could get out of it …’
‘Oh Lord, Kay, talk sense! How could I? I could, of course, do a bunk, and a pretty low line that would be! Besides, it is the right thing to do. I know that.’
‘It isn’t. I know that. You’re not in love with Frances, she’s not in love with you. Mutual unhappiness is no foundation for happy marriage. You’re such a sweet person, you deserve something so much better, and yet haven’t the gumption to reach out and grab it.’
He felt at that moment that he detested her. She was merely voicing doubts that had disturbed his own heart and which he had silenced. He got up.
‘I’ll have to get home, Kay.’
‘Now you’re angry with me.’
‘Oh no, not at all. You’ve a perfect right to your own opinions, I to mine.’ He hardly waited to hear her good-bye, but went back through the wood. He wished she hadn’t said it. Nothing hurts so much as truth, and he knew it.
Hayworth was agog for the wedding.
Thornhill had been considerably altered for the bride, and had taken on an unfortunately Edwardian outlook. Aubrey knew that he preferred it with his mother’s Victorian outlook, for shot silk and absurd little chairs did not fit in with the Regency house. The blue and pink bedroom, the sitting-room in mauve with gold shot silk. The drawing-room which had looked dignified in cream with glazed chintzes, looked absurd in the new colour scheme, the suite upholstered in mauve and considerably tasselled, so that Aubrey could not see himself becoming accustomed to it. But his mother approved of Frances’s taste.
He had re-furnished his own study with a womanish delight. Claret curtains and cream walls, a Regency sofa in striped silk crimson and white, Bokhara rug, some bronzes. He was suddenly attracted by antiques, and spent his lunch-hour prowling round the shops in Mainwaring, collecting old snuff boxes, and books of Elizabethan poetry.
‘Potty as they’re made,’ said Percy Biggins.
The doctor’s son thought so too. It would be a good idea to play up the wedding for him. But as ushers they couldn’t very well do it. Such a pity, said they. A stink bomb under the bridegroom’s kneeler would have been a pleasantry they would have much enjoyed.
On his wedding morning, Aubrey mooched in the garden trying to kill time. He was afraid to go beyond the gate, being the synosure of all eyes, and knowing that if Mr. Biddlecombe caught him that would be the end. He scrutinized the box hedges a dozen times, the dahlias, at home yet hopelessly un-at-home. He felt very uneasy.
He changed too soon into his wedding suit, and felt more gauche than before. Young Keighley, his best man (he had been suggested by his mother as suitable), was over-anxious that everything should go off well, and he fluttered to and from the tantalus, trying to soothe Aubrey down. Aubrey turned dizzy if he took too much to drink, and he particularly did not want to turn dizzy just now. Young Keighley said that it was the only thing; when you got past the dizzy stage, you entered a haven of brave confidence! That was bliss indeed. Aubrey was not so sure about the haven of brave confidence part of the business, and it would be calamitous if too late he found himself drifting out on to a rougher sea of doubt, dizzier than ever.
Time crawled.
The church clock seemed to creep to the chiming quarter and he became increasingly anxious. He tried to read a little, poetry was generally soothing. Not now. He didn’t know what to do. Young Keighley tried to cheer him with stories.
‘The last chap I stood for got hiccups. Pretty devastating, that. Of course everybody thought that he was drunk.’
‘Yes, of course.’
His mother came into the study to say goodbye to him, in black with a spray of white camellias on her shoulder. He could discern nothing of what she was really feeling, as she kissed him without affection, and he and young Keighley watched her as she went alone down the garden. Th
en Mrs. Parkin and Milly and Ethel drove off; now the house was their own.
‘Time for another one?’ said young Keighley, who was himself fast reaching the haven of brave confidence ‒ or not.
‘Here, I say, you’d better not have any more. Look what’s gone already! That was a full bottle.’
‘Well, damn it all, there’s two of us. I’m all right. Fit as a fiddle, and all that! And I have the ring safely. Trust your uncle!’ He patted his waistcoat pocket and clasping the decanter round the neck poured himself out a strong one.
Aubrey wished that young Keighley would leave it alone; it was a shocking situation for the nervous bridegroom to be reduced to doing his utmost to keep the best man sober, whilst he himself longed to be happily drunk, yet dared not.
‘Now, no more,’ said he.
‘Are you suggesting that I’m drunk?’
‘No, no, of course not, but it won’t do. It’s almost time we started. Let’s go out into the garden and get some air.’
‘We’ve done that before,’ rather sulkily, with a lingering glance in the direction of the tantalus.
Aubrey knew that they looked like a couple of fools out in the garden in this silly dress. They went on to the lawn, where only this morning there had been a light rim of frost, the first fingerprint of autumn. They walked down to the flower-beds near the high wall and the wooden gate that led into the lane. The japonica was overgrown, a defiant sow thistle blossomed in the cucumber frame, sticking its yellow head pertly through a broken pane. Aubrey had gone on ahead, and then he saw a curious thing happening. The gate in the wall opened rather slowly, as though afraid, and a head peered round it. It was Alice.
She must have watched the others going off to the wedding, and have guessed that he would be here, and alone. Or perhaps she had been suddenly overcome with the longing to return to the garden where for a short while she had been so happy. She stared at him. Her first girlish loveliness had faded in her adventure with life, her eyes were wiser, and he knew that there was some disappointment in them.
He said, ‘Alice?’ and young Keighley, coming ambling down the path none too straightly, blinked hard and wondered what was going on.
‘I’m sorry, sir. I never thought that nobody would be here.’
‘Come in, if you want to.’
‘Oh no, sir. I can’t. I only wanted to look. I can’t leave Kay, he’s outside in the pram.’
‘Kay?’
‘The baby, sir.’
‘You called him Kay?’
‘Yes, sir, after Mrs. Benson. She was very kind to me. She’s very kind to everybody.’
For a moment they looked at one another, the girl bewildered that he had ceased to love her. He was a man staring at a dead passion, and outside the gate the sufferer for that enchanted moment lay innocently asleep in his sour pram. Then quietly Alice shut the gate, as though aware of her mistake, and the whole thing might never have happened!
Aubrey and young Keighley drove off to the wedding. Young Keighley was comatose, and Aubrey was thankful that he did not talk. The village was en fête, everybody standing at their cottage gates to see what there was to be seen. As they approached the church a crowd of people was collected to watch the ‘quality’ go inside, a lingering horde stampeded by the low wall, and Aubrey knew that he was one of the major exhibits and almost ran to the vestry door to escape. The vicar was awaiting him in a newly-starched surplice, with the choir-boys behind him. An open register lay on the table, whilst from the church he could hear the valiant efforts of Mr. Binns, on the organ, busy with Handel’s Largo.
Aubrey felt quite ghastly.
At this moment in the vestry with the smell of over-varnished woodwork, of incense, of lilies, he knew that if he wasn’t careful, he might faint. Kay had been right. This was a mistake. He oughtn’t to have married. He looked beyond the vicar to Edward Benson, sententiously fingering his white stole. At the sight of Kay’s husband, Aubrey was able to put up the facade again.
‘Anyway, it’s lovely weather for a wedding,’ he said.
They thought he was entirely at ease.
‘If you would just precede us to the top pew on the right, dear boy,’ murmured the vicar.
‘The top pew,’ repeated Edward Benson.
At that moment Aubrey felt that he could exult. This man had no idea that only last Christmas he ‒ today’s bridegroom ‒ had kissed his wife! That was why he smiled as he passed through the dark red curtain into the chancel, too poignantly sweet with lily scent and white roses, and throbbing with the War March of the Priests to which Mr. Binns had changed. He could feel his mother sitting behind him, and Kay. Kay in an unreal hat! Kay with those brilliant eyes that for ever asked questions; he had been a fool to be brusque with her in the wood last night, for she ‒ and she was the only one ‒ understood how he felt now.
He sat down composedly with young Keighley beside him. He wished that young Keighley did not tremble, and sit so over-erectly, for never had a best man been less at ease. He watched the choir precede the prelates down the aisle, and Mr. Binns’ nervous quiff agitatedly peering over the organ curtains to get warning of the moment when he changed from the War March to Lohengrin.
A moment’s silence with the flutter of music sheets, then Aubrey rose mechanically, and stepped out to his place. He had complete command of himself, walking quite coolly. The choir approached, the boys passed, and here were the tenors, then the basses, and finally the clergy. He saw Frances looking most unreal shrouded in white, her veil a mist about a starry diadem of brilliants. He wished that she had worn flowers. Now she shone with the hard glitter of stones, and behind her the bridesmaids trailed into the distance, and Aubrey could smell the sweetness of the white roses that they carried.
It all passed so quickly that he was scarcely aware of anything until he was back in the vestry, signing the open register with a flourish. It was not Aubrey who was getting married; it was the other man. The facade was taking a partner. The curious thing was that, knowing it, he was appalled.
They walked down the aisle, and in the carriage he said the right thing, ashamed that it should be the right thing, and not the disclosure of his dismay, the terror of having made a mistake, all of which was far more real than the composed bridegroom who held the hand of the beloved, and tried to say the right thing.
‘Frances darling, I do love you. I only hope that I can make you truly happy.’
‘You will, Aubrey, of course you will, dear,’ and she smiled under the hard glitter of the tiara.
It was the stereotyped reception, with interminable speeches, and all the time Aubrey felt that he had married a stranger, and yet the girl who drove away with him was Frances. He got into the car, and she beside him; the confetti came, and the overdone good wishes, he let in the clutch too quickly, and the car shot down the village street. Afterwards when they got to the long green lane, with ripe corn on either side, he slowed down a little. They had got away.
‘Dear Frances, did you hate it all as much as I did?’
‘Hate it? Good gracious, no, Aubrey, I loved it! It was a lovely wedding and I felt like a queen. You know, terribly triumphant!’
‘I loathed the whole damned thing,’ and as he said it, he knew that his only triumph had been when Edward Benson had stood aside for him to enter the church, and he had remembered kissing Kay in Switzerland. It had been a victory over Edward Benson to have kissed Kay.
‘What a shocking thing to say of our wedding!’
‘I’m afraid I’m not good at that sort of thing. I’m a bit of a dreamer. I’m a bookworm, and parties and celebrations and making speeches and entertaining half the neighbourhood don’t amuse me.’
‘Dear Aubrey, I’ll teach you to adore parties; like I do.’
‘I very much doubt that.’
‘Perhaps marriage will change you a lot.’ She said it lightly, but he hated the sound of it. He didn’t want to change, he wanted to be himself.
They crossed to France next morn
ing, and spent the day in Paris, for Frances had shopping she had saved up to do there. Aubrey found it quite amusing to be buying this and that, but he was shocked at the way she reproved a little midinette who asked an absurd price for a straw hat. The midinette was gamine with roguery in her eyes. Aubrey liked her twinkles, and was hurt by her gasp of surprise when Frances was so acid to her.
Sitting on a small gilt chair, he said laughingly, ‘Frances, you sound awfully Cheltenham Ladies College,’ and then knew that he had angered her.
‘I call that a beastly thing to say.’
‘I didn’t mean it that way. I’m sorry. I meant that you sounded like a “blue stocking”,’ and all the time the gamine little midinette watched them, with the idiotic straw hat perched on a single finger.
‘You’re a bookworm and I’m a ‘blue stocking’. It doesn’t sound an agreeable partnership to me. All right, I don’t want the horrid hat now!’ and she swept out of the shop.
For a moment Aubrey looked at the midinette.
She was, he supposed, not a day more than eighteen, with enchanting black hair cut like a tassel, and eyes as currants in a paper-white face. She shrugged her shoulders and pursed her provocative mouth.
‘Oh, la, la!’ she said, then suddenly spun the silly hat on her finger like a child with a toy.
They caught the night train to Venice, and all the time for some preposterous reason Aubrey was thinking of the midinette, her ‘Oh, la, la’, and the spinning hat. They made it up. They were bride and groom and quarrels could not last too long. They crossed into Italy at mid-night, and the train slackening speed finally dragged itself like a weary caterpillar the following evening across the Mestre bridge. At last thought Aubrey, but now he was too tired with travelling, and cramped (and Frances was feeling much the same way), to care. He had thought his arrival in Venice would be a dream.
It was very quiet and peaceful on the Grand Canal, the lights were like stars reflected in the water, and the whole place gave the impression of being a backcloth in an enchanted theatre. As they came to the wider part of the canal, they could see Santa Maria della Salute across the water, and hear the disturbingly lovely sound of the serenata.