On the day of the party she was in her liveliest mood, and it was she who answered the door to Mr Poo-Poo. Seeing them together in the hall I was at once struck by the strange similarity between the two of them. They were, to within a centimetre or so, of a height, both squat and swarthy, both with pronounced features that were rather too big for their faces. This vision of the pair stayed with me, but it was only later that it acquired a sinister aspect.
I began to feel rather nervous about Mr Poo-Poo’s performance, knowing that if it fell below a certain standard Anne (and Isobel) would hold me responsible, but I was reassured by the efficiency with which Nicky set up his props in the drawing room. When the children filed in after tea, they were in a good frame of mind because they had been fed extremely well.
Mr Poo-Poo acquitted himself capably. His size was a distinct advantage because the children regarded him almost as one of them. He began with a magic act which was colourful and competent. Once or twice during the games that followed, he was in danger of losing control, but Magda always stepped in at exactly the right moment to restore order. There might have been some restlessness during the slightly antiquated cartoon show that rounded off the entertainment but, by this time, all the children were too exhausted to contrive serious disruption.
When it was over I congratulated Nicky on his performance. He smiled and shook my hand, but I could tell that his mind was on other things. His eyes kept straying towards Magda, who was helping him to pack up his equipment. I had noticed that she had watched his performance with great concentration, and now, while they tidied things away, they began chatting together as if they had been performing the same task for years. She helped carry his paraphernalia down to his car. On her return I commented that they seemed to have got on.
Magda said: ‘Maybe I go out with Poo-Poo.’ When I reported this remark to Anne she pursed her lips but made no comment.
It soon became clear that Nicky’s intentions towards Magda were very formal and traditional. I cannot say that I had serious misgivings at first about the courtship, but certain aspects of it struck me as odd. When an arrangement had been made for Nicky to ‘take her out’ he would arrive in his car and wait in it outside our house. Unless Magda had already joined him at the exact time appointed for their meeting he would hoot twice on his horn — ‘that’s why he’s called Mr Poo-Poo,’ remarked Isobel astutely — but he would never, despite several invitations, come inside the house and wait for Magda there. The hooting business irritated me perhaps more than it should have done. I became absurdly worried about what the neighbours might think, but at the back of my mind was the sense that this peremptory summons of his fiancée signified a taste for power.
Further evidence of this emerged in the following weeks when I began to notice that, at odd moments of repose, Magda could be observed reading something called a Good News Bible, and that certain passages had been highlighted in brilliant orange or green. Knowing Magda to have come from a Catholic family, I enquired about this. Her reply was characteristically short and to the point.
‘I join Mr Nicky Poo-Poo’s church,’ she said.
It made sense. His questioning of me about my faith when we had first met suggested that his own was of an intense and Evangelical kind. He therefore ‘belonged to a church’ with all that that implied in terms of allegiance. It was necessary that anyone proposing to become one flesh with Mr Poo-Poo should also become one flesh with his church. I suspected that conversion, being ‘born again’, and the lustral properties of the Blood of Jesus were going to play their part. Still, I did not worry unduly. Each to his own, I thought, and this attitude might have been appropriate in other circumstances; but I had reckoned without the very peculiar qualities of Mr Poo-Poo.
In due course, as I had rather expected, Magda told us that she intended to marry Mr Poo-Poo, as we all now called him without even thinking of his real name, Nicky Beale. My wife Anne was a great deal more surprised than I by this turn of events, and a great deal more anxious. It had nothing to do with losing an au pair, the luxury of which we were beginning to regard as something of an extravagance. She thought that Magda was entering into the marriage for the wrong reasons, and had several serious talks with her on the subject, from which she came away baffled.
‘She absolutely refutes the idea that she’s marrying him to stay in England,’ said Anne, ‘and I think I sort of believe her. She says he’s a good man. She says: “I will live with him very well”, a typical Magda remark. She says his church is good and full of good people who take care of each other, and I have no doubt that it is, but what I don’t get is the impression that she is in love with Mr Poo-Poo, or, for that matter, that she is a fully fledged convert to his religion.’
‘What about her family in Romania?’ I asked.
‘I don’t think she cares much for any of them. She’s a bit vague on the subject, but I gather her father is several kinds of bastard. Oh, she’s absolutely determined to go through with this, and there is nothing I can do to stop her.’
My daughters, Kitty and Isobel, were thrilled by the idea of the marriage. For several weeks after the news was broken to them their favourite game was called ‘Mr and Mrs Poo-Poo’ which, out of a strange childish delicacy, they never played or discussed in Magda’s presence. In it Isobel took the role of the husband. Kitty, as Mrs Poo-Poo, would find herself in need of a cake, or a kitten, or a coloured handkerchief, and was just on the point of going out to the shops when Isobel in the role of Mr Poo-Poo would inform her that there was no need. He would then wave his magic wand and produce the required object from a hat or a sleeve. Needless to say they were delighted to hear that they were going to be bridesmaids. I, in the inevitable absence of Magda’s family, had been asked to give the bride away.
As the day approached both Anne and I noticed an appreciable lowering of Magda’s spirits. She would not explain her change of mood, and indignantly resisted the suggestion that she was having doubts about the marriage. I don’t think, anyway, that the explanation was as simple as that. On her evenings out she was fetched by her fiancé less frequently than before, but she never left the house without her Good News Bible. Suspicion that she was undergoing some kind of programme of instruction was confirmed by the sight of a pile of books in her bedroom. They were paperbacks with luridly coloured covers and bore titles such as
Challenge to the Ungodly
,
Weapons of Spiritual Warfare
,
Armageddon and Antichrist
, and
End Time Prophecies
. Once I overheard her talking to Nicky on the phone.
‘No, Nicky,’ she was saying, ‘I miss this Bible Study because my bus is late, not because I do not want to come.’ Then, with a burst of defiance, she said: ‘But how do you know? You were not there!’ A long silence followed in which she was obviously listening to his instructions. She began to say: ‘Yes, Nicky . . . Yes, Nicky’ in a dull monotone. I did not like the note of submissiveness in her voice. Anne and I had always appreciated her lack of servility, her simple, forthright views, her strong sense of self-worth. I had the feeling that this last was being deliberately and systematically eroded, but whether by Mr Poo-Poo or his Church, I could not say. Perhaps they were acting in concert.
By this time the marriage was only a week away, and all thoughts of dissuading her from going through with it had to be set aside. When the day came we did our best to be cheerful about it. The costs of the nuptial celebrations were to be defrayed by the church, but I paid for a car to take myself and Anne, Magda, and her bridesmaids, my daughters, all the way from Queen’s Park to the Peniel Gospel Church in Stoke Newington. Magda was all in white, which did not suit her. There was something grotesque about this dark, stocky little woman, veiled and puffed in muslin and tulle with her bouquet of orange blossom. She looked like a chimpanzee in a tutu.
The Peniel Gospel Church in Stoke Newington was a large Victorian Gothic church which had been taken over by Mr Poo-Poo’s sect when it proved to be surplus to Anglican requirements. Inside, pews had been torn out, carpets laid, and sound systems installed. The entrance of the bride was greeted by a lively number played on guitars, fiddles, electric keyboards, and several tambourines banged by a number of children, who were enthusiastic, uncoordinated, and overweight. This was evidently a church event, rather than a family one. Conducting the ceremony was the leader of Mr Poo-Poo’s church. His name was Jim Rundle, and he was known to all as Pastor Jim. He was a big man with a face that might have been solidly handsome before corpulence took its toll, and he wore a shiny suit over a pink vest and dog collar. After joining the couple with a fairly conventional form of words, Pastor Jim delivered a sermon, eloquent in parts but over-long and repetitive. I was interested to hear what he would say about the bride and groom.
‘Nicky here,’ he said, ‘has been a faithful labourer in our vineyard for over three years. He really loves the Lord and his Word, and we really praise you, Lord, that he has brought our sister Magda here out of the darkness into new birth through the Blood of Jesus.’
At this there were loud murmurs from all around us of ‘Amen’ and ‘Praise the Lord’. Anne and I looked at one another. We took the implication that Magda’s life before her conversion had been one of ‘darkness’ rather amiss. Perhaps we shouldn’t have done, but in the long run I was more disconcerted by the curiously impersonal terms in which he referred to the couple, as if their whole identity were tied up in their salvation.
After the service there was a reception in the large, naked church hall next to the church. There were mounds of sandwiches and cakes. To drink there was orange juice and tea; alcohol had no role to play. I was approached by Pastor Jim, who greeted me warmly and thanked me for my small part in the ceremony. I could see that he was anxious to communicate to me that I would not be called upon to make a speech on behalf of the bride, and that there would be nothing so pagan as a toast. I indicated my relief that this was the case, though I had prepared something.
I asked why Nicky’s parents were not present at the wedding, and Pastor Jim explained that they had fallen out with their son when he had joined the Peniel Gospel Church. He did not explain further except to say: ‘They’re very worldly people.’
What he meant by this I could not say, but his description made me feel immense sympathy towards them. I had a vision, almost certainly inaccurate, of cheerful, champagne-sipping sophisticates: I was worldly myself; perhaps they were like me. There was a little pause while Pastor Jim and I both thought our own thoughts, and when he spoke again it was almost as if he were making a confession.
He said: ‘This is a day of great rejoicing for us here, you know. The fact is, we were beginning to be a little worried about Nicky. He’s a good lad, and very close to Christ, but he was extremely anxious to marry. Perhaps a little too anxious, if you understand my meaning, but then I think that text of Paul’s — “It is better to marry than to burn” — was very much one that spoke to his heart. I think some of the young women in the congregation found his attentions a little needy, if you know what I mean. So Magda here is a real gift from God. They seem well suited, don’t they? And, of course, he helped to bring her to Christ, so it’s a double blessing, isn’t it?’
Very soon Anne, the children, and I wanted to leave the celebrations. When we said goodbye to Magda, still in wedding cake white, there were tears in her eyes.
For over a month we heard nothing from the Poo-Poos, not even a postcard from wherever they had honeymooned. Magda became an inhabitant of the past, and not even Isobel and Kitty mentioned her after a couple of weeks. Then, at about eleven one sultry August evening, someone was ringing our doorbell, repeatedly, violently. It woke the children. I answered the door, taking care to keep the chain on. Through the gap in the door I looked down on a pair of dark frightened eyes in a dead-white face. It was Magda.
‘I come in, please?’ she said. She came in. She was wearing a flimsy mackintosh and carried a large plastic bag full of her belongings. As soon as she saw Anne she started to cry. I elected to put the children back to bed — they had crept to the top of the stairs to witness this dramatic scene — while my wife handled Magda.
I got Isobel and Kitty back into their room, but they were full of wonder and excitement. When it comes to the lives of others, children do not differentiate between tragedy and comedy: it is all drama and excitement to them.
‘Why was Magda crying?’ asked Isobel.
‘I think she was just very tired,’ I said.
Having pondered this, Isobel said: ‘We want ask her what it’s like being married to Mr Poo-Poo.’
‘We want ask her,’ said Kitty, who was at the stage when she toed her elder sister’s party line religiously.