Blue Bedroom and Other Stories (6 page)

Happy the bride the sun shines on.
She listened and from far beneath her, in the depth of the old house, she heard a door open and shut and one of the dogs start to bark. She knew that her mother was already up and about, probably making an early morning cup of tea and sitting at the kitchen table, composing what must surely be the last of her hundreds of lists of things to do.

Fetch Aunt Blanche from station.

Hairdresser. Will she need lunch?

Robert to florist for carnations.

Dogs' dinner. DON'T FORGET.

Happy the bride the sun shines on.
Across the upstairs landing, in the other little attic bedroom, Jane presumably slumbered. Jane had never been an early riser, and the fact that this was her wedding morning was unlikely to break the lifelong habit of twenty-five years. Laurie pictured her, blonde and rosy, her hair tangled and the old eyeless teddy bear jammed under her chin. The teddy bear was a source of mild annoyance to their mother, who did not think that he should accompany Jane on her honeymoon. Laurie agreed that he did not go with pristine negligées and romance, but Jane had a way of sweetly agreeing with whatever was demanded of her and then doing the very opposite, so Laurie was fairly sure that this evening the bear would be right there, in the bridal suite of some expensive hotel.

Her imagination wandered on down through the house. To the double guest room where her elder brother and his wife slept. To the old nurseries where their children were tucked into inherited cots. She thought of her father, perhaps beginning to stir; to open his eyes, to give thanks for the fine weather, and then to start worrying. About the car park arrangements, the quality of the champagne, the fact that his morning suit trousers had had to be let out. The bills.

“We can't afford a big wedding,” he had stated firmly the moment the engagement was announced. And the others had chimed in in much the same vein, but perhaps for different reasons. “We don't want a big wedding,” Jane had said. “Perhaps a registry office and a little lunch afterwards.”

“We don't want a big wedding,” her mother had agreed weakly, “but the village will expect it. I suppose we could have something very simple…”

Which left Laurie and Grandfa to make their contributions to the discussion. Laurie made no contribution at all, being at Oxford at the time of the engagement, and totally involved with tutorials and lectures, but Grandfa came down solidly on the side of what he called a bit of a splash. “Only got two daughters,” he told Laurie's parents. “What's the point of some hole-in-the-corner ceremony? No need to have a marquee. Clear the furniture out of the drawing room, and if it's a nice day, the guests can move out onto the lawn…”

*   *   *

She could hear him saying it. She turned over in bed and buried her face in the pillow and fought against the great surge of tearless grief that threatened to engulf her, because he had been, all her life, her favourite person, her wisest counsellor, her very best friend. Jane and Robert were close in age, but Laurie had come along six years later and had always been something of a loner, almost an only child. “What a funny little thing she is,” her mother's friends would observe, thinking that Laurie was not listening. “So self-contained. Doesn't she ever want another child to play with?” But Laurie did not need other children, because she had Grandfa.

Grandfa had been in the Navy all his life. After his retirement and the death of his wife, more than twenty years ago, he had bought a piece of land off his son, built himself a little house, and moved to Cornwall, leaving Portsmouth behind forever. It was a wooden house, a cedar house with a shingle roof and a wide verandah that jutted out over the old sea wall. At high tide the water lapped against the stones and reminded Grandfa of his days at sea. He had a telescope fixed to his verandah rail and this afforded him much pleasure. There were no boats to watch, because although there were a few ramshackle crabbers pulled up on the shingle below his house, nothing nowadays came in or out of the estuary except the sea, but he enjoyed watching the birds and counting the cars on the causeway that ran along the far side of the sands. In winter they were few and far between, but once the summer tourists started, they crowded bumper to bumper, the sun flashing on their windscreens and the endless drone of traffic steady as a distant hum of bees.

He had died on his verandah, on a warm evening, with his ritual pink gin in his hand and his gramophone playing in the room behind him. He was very fond of his gramophone. He never owned a television, but he had a great love of music.
Night of love, O lovely night, O, Night that's all divine. The Barcarolle.
He had been playing “The Barcarolle” when he died, because they had found it still on the gramophone, the finished disc still spinning, the needle grinding in the final groove.

He had an old upright piano, too, which he played with gusto but not a great deal of finesse. When Laurie was small he taught her songs and they had sung them together, with Grandfa providing the accompaniment. Mostly sturdy sea shanties with no-nonsense tunes. “Whisky Johnny” and “Rio Grande” and “Shenandoah.” But his favourite was “Spanish Ladies”:

Goodbye and farewell to you, fair Spanish ladies,

Goodbye and farewell to you, ladies of Spain,

For we have received orders for to sail for old England …

He would play it in slow march time, with great crashing chords, and Laurie would have to hold the long notes and she frequently ran out of breath.

“Wonderful slow march,” Grandfa would say, remembering Colours at Whale Island, with the Royal Marine band playing “Spanish Ladies” while the Captain inspected the Guard, and the White Ensign fluttered high in the morning sky.

His stories were legion, of Hong Kong and Simonstown and Malta. He had fought the war in the Mediterranean and then moved to the Far East and Ceylon. He had survived bombings and sinkings and shattered ships, only to bob up again, joking, indestructible, surviving to become one of the best loved flag officers in the Service.

Indestructible. But he wasn't indestructible. No person was indestructible. At the end of it all he had keeled over in his chair, listening to “The Barcarolle,” and the glass of pink gin had fallen to the floor and shattered into a thousand pieces. There was no saying how long he might have sat there, with nobody knowing that he had gone, but one of the local fishermen, working on his boat, had looked up and seen him and realised something was wrong, and had walked up to the house, his cap in his hand, to break the news.

Goodbye and farewell to you, fair Spanish ladies …

At the funeral service they had sung “Holy, Holy, Holy!” and then “Eternal Father Strong to Save.” And Laurie had looked at the simple coffin draped in the White Ensign, and had broken into noisy, unstoppable tears and had to be discreetly ushered out of some side door by her mother. She had not been back into the church since the funeral; had made a lot of excuses for missing the wedding rehearsal yesterday. “I'm the only bridesmaid, and I know what I have to do. There's no point in my coming, and there's so much to do here. I'll help move furniture, and vacuum the drawing-room carpet.”

But today—today was the wedding and there could be no excuse.

And no excuse to stay in bed. Laurie got up, dressed, and brushed her hair, then went along to see Jane. Jane had been given breakfast in bed which, being lazy, she loved. Laurie hated breakfast in bed because she always ended up sitting on crumbs.

She said, “Good morning, how are you feeling?” and went to give Jane a kiss, and Jane said, “I don't know. How should I be feeling?”

“Nervous?”

“Not nervous at all. Just cosy and comfortable and cossetted.”

“It's a super day,” said Laurie, and pulled Teddy out from under the pillow. “Hi, Teddy,” she said to him. “Your days are numbered.”

“Not at all,” said Jane, snatching him back. “There's life in him yet. He's got to survive to be mauled by all our children. Have a bit of toast.”

“No, you eat it. You've got to keep your strength up.”

“You've got to keep your strength up, too. You've got to do all the right things, like catching the bouquet when I hurl it in your direction, and being charming to the best man.”

“Oh,
Jane.
”

“Well, come on, it's William Boscawan. Surely it isn't impossible to be charming to William? I know you usually snarl like a wounded animal if he so much as walks into the room, but that's your fault. He's never been anything but civil to you.”

“He's always treated me like a ten-year-old.”

William Boscawan was an old bone of contention. His father was the family lawyer and William had joined the firm some five years ago, and so had returned to live and work in the neighbourhood. And not only to live and work, but also to break the heart of every girl in the county. He had even had a small fling with Jane until he had lost her affections, permanently, to Andrew Latham, but this had made no difference to his friendship with Andrew, and when the wedding arrangements were made, nobody was surprised when Andrew announced that William was to be his best man.

“I can't think why you don't like him.”

“I like him all right. There's nothing wrong with him. It's just that he's so smooth.”

“He's not a bit smooth. He's sweet.”

“I mean … oh, you know what I mean. That car, and that boat, and all those girls batting their eyelashes every time his glance swivels their way.”

“You're being very mean. He can't help it if girls fall in love with him.”

“I'd like him better if he wasn't quite so successful.”

“That's just a sort of inverted sour-grapery. Just because other people like him, there's no reason why you shouldn't like him too.”

“I've told you, I don't dislike him. I mean, there's nothing about him to dislike. I just wish sometimes he'd get spots on his face, or have a blow-out in that fast car of his, or fall in the water when he's sailing.”

“You're impossible. You'll end up with some old academic bore with glasses like the bottoms of bottles.”

“Yes, those are the sort of men I go round with all the time.”

They glared at each other, and then started to laugh. Jane said, “I give up. Your aggressions have defeated me.”

“Just as well,” said Laurie. “Now, I'm going down to have some breakfast.” She made for the door, but as she opened it, Jane said “Laurie” in quite a different tone of voice, and Laurie turned with her hand on the knob.

“Laurie … you're going to be all right?”

Laurie stared at her. They had never been very close, had never exchanged confidences or shared secrets, and Laurie knew that for this reason, it had taken some effort for Jane to say that. She knew that, in return, she should let down her own barrier of reserve, but it was her only protection against the emptiness, the sense of aching loss. Without it, she would be lost, would probably burst into tears and be unable to stop crying for the rest of the day.

She could feel every nerve in her body drawing in on itself, like a sea anemone suddenly touched. She said, “What do you mean?” and even to herself she sounded cold.

“You know what I mean.” Poor Jane looked agonised. “Grandfa…” Laurie said nothing. “We … we all know it's worse for you than for any of us,” Jane floundered on. “You were always his special person. And now, today … I wouldn't have minded the wedding being put off. I wouldn't have minded being married in a registry office. Andrew feels the same way as I do. But Mother and Father … well, it simply wouldn't have been fair to them…”

“It's not your fault,” said Laurie.

“I don't want you to be unhappy. I don't want to feel we're making you more unhappy than you are.”

She said again, “It's not your fault.” And after that there didn't seem to be anything else to say, so she went out of the room and closed the door behind her.

The morning progressed. The house, unfamiliar and stripped of furniture, was slowly taken over by strangers. The caterers arrived, vans appeared at the door, tables were erected, glasses set out, looking as the sun struck them like hundreds of soap bubbles. The florist's lady turned up in a little truck to put the finishing touches to the arrangements that she had spent most of yesterday concocting. Robert drove to the station to fetch Aunt Blanche. One of the children was sick. Laurie's father couldn't find his braces, and her mother all at once threw a fit of temperament and announced that she couldn't possibly wear the hat which had been made to go with her bride's mother's outfit. She came downstairs wearing it, to prove her point. It was a sort of baker's boy beret made of azalea pink silk. “I look like nothing on earth in it,” she wailed, and Laurie knew that she was near to tears, but they all told her she looked smashing, and once she'd had her hair done and was wearing the bride's mother's outfit, she'd knock the rest of them into a cocked hat. She was still unpersuaded when the hairdresser arrived, but this new turn of events mercifully diverted her, and she allowed herself to be led upstairs.

“Good,” said Laurie's father. “Nothing like a new hairdo for calming down the nerves. She'll be all right now.” He looked at Laurie as he ran a hand over his thinning hair. “You all right?” he asked her. His voice was casual, but she knew that he was thinking about Grandfa, and she couldn't bear it. She said, deliberately misunderstanding, “I haven't got a hat, I've only got a flower.” She saw her father's expression and hated herself, but before she could say anything more, he had made some excuse and taken himself off, and then it was too late.

*   *   *

The caterers provided a lunch for them all in the kitchen, and the entire family sat around the familiar table and ate unfamiliar food, like chicken in aspic and potato salad and trifle, when they usually had soup and bread and cheese. After lunch, they all went up to change, and Laurie brushed her silken hair, wound it up into a coronet on the top of her head, and fixed the single camellia into the coils. Then she dressed herself, finally slipping the long, pale dress over her petticoat and doing up the row of tiny buttons on the front. She fastened a rope of pearls around her neck, picked up her bridesmaid's posy, and went to stand in front of the long mirror that hung on the back of the door. She saw a girl, pale and unfamiliar, her neck exposed by the upswept hair, dark eyes shadowed, face empty of expression. She thought,
This is how I have looked ever since Grandfa died. Untouchable, unreachable. I want to talk about him, but I can't. Not yet. Once I get through today and it's all over, perhaps then I shall be able to talk. But not yet.