The Wedding Party (11 page)

The sherry in fact was rather sweet; but before I could answer he said:

‘Women never like it dry. I know Mrs Arkwright doesn't.'

‘Mrs Arkwright?'

‘She'll be coming to lunch,' he said. ‘She's a near neighbour of mine.'

I hadn't really been invited to lunch; I had simply dropped in with a few pots of things that I knew he wanted, a fuchsia or two, a house-plant in silver-green that I thought would charm his window.

‘I must be going,' I said.

‘Oh! Good God, no,' he said. ‘Dammit. You're staying to lunch. You don't come all this way simply to have a glass of sherry and then rush back again.'

‘Yes, but—'

‘I won't hear of it,' he said. ‘What about this houseplant, this trailing thing you brought me? How does it do?'

I said it was probably the easiest thing in the world, especially for a gardener like him, and he said:

‘There's a marvellous thing I want to show you down in the peat-garden before you go. See if you know it. I won't tell you what it is.'

He breathed deeply at the air. The day was utterly unwintry, delicate and soft-breathed, without a touch of malice. Geraniums were still blooming, pale crimson, along the house wall. Below us there were bushes of late yellow roses; a thrush was singing in the woodland.

‘Hark at that thrush. By this time last year we'd had snow,' he said. ‘In November. I remember pulling back the curtains when I went to bed and there it was like cotton wool on all the trees.'

He leaned forward to pour another glass of sherry but at
that moment there was a fluffy sort of cry, fluffy then cracked, from along the terrace. I looked up to see a vision in what at first I thought was a rosy nightgown trimmed with bird-like edges of swansdown. Across the shoulders of it was a fur wrap of vole-brown with a fox-head clasped by a silver chain.

‘Wolfie, Wolfie,' she said. ‘Dear Wolfie.'

I thought he looked excessively pained when she called him Wolfie. There was a thickish scent of clove carnations in the air. Her umbrella was mauve, with a long black handle, and she was wearing a bunch of violets in the way I remember women wearing them when I was a boy: at the waist and a little to one side.

She kissed him several times on both cheeks, calling him Wolfie again. With great difficulty he had managed to get to his feet and now stood, arthritic, crabbed, and as erect as he could get himself, balancing between the table and the chair.

When he introduced us she seemed so surprised at my being there at all that she could not even smile. She giggled uncertainly instead and said several times:

‘What a heavenly day. What a heavenly day to come up here.'

I poured sherry. She sipped it with eagerness, spilling some of it down the uppermost of her three powdery chins. Then when we were all sitting down again she touched the marbled frontal waves of her silver-grey hatless hair. Nothing, I thought, could possibly have disturbed those metallic corrugations but the preening movements of her
hand made me aware, for the first time, of her eyes.

They, too, like his own, were very blue.

‘Well, don't you notice?' she said to him. ‘Don't you notice? Wolfie! – You're a gardener and you don't see the very most important thing about me.'

It was some seconds before he noticed; and then he smiled with apologetic charm.

‘Violets,' he said.

‘Yes, and
from my garden
,' she said. ‘Note that.
From my garden
. In December.'

She bent to touch them, croaking again with cracked and fluffy exclamations.

‘Oh! my dear. They've gone already. I got them at ten this morning and they've gone. All flabby and floppy – look at them. No, don't say it, don't say – I know what you're thinking.' She giggled erratically. ‘I know what you're thinking – they fade, they fade!'

‘Only because,' I said, and the words were out before I could think about them, ‘you're wearing them wrong side up.'

‘Oh! Wrong what?'

‘If you wear them head downwards,' I said, ‘the moisture from the stalks runs down to the flowers and they never fade.'

‘Well, you learn something every day, don't you?'

If there had been a breath of ice from the sea it could not have chilled me more.

‘Mrs Arkwright has a wonderful garden,' he said. ‘She is lower down the hill. They're more sheltered there.'

‘Oh! Wolfie. You know it's just a mess. You know I haven't got the touch. Things never do for me. They never respond. I haven't got the touch. Not like you. You've only got to
look
at things—'

‘I rather think we ought to go in to lunch,' he said.

‘What about that
thing
you were going to show me? – you talked about it the other day – something in the peat-garden? I want to see it – I want you to take me down.'

‘I ought just to go in and see about the wine,' he said. ‘I tell you what – let Mr Richardson take you down. He's a great gardener. You two go down together.'

‘Oh! no,' she said. ‘It will do after lunch. The sun doesn't go down till four.'

I felt, in fact, that it had gone down at that moment, off the terrace, off the bright buds of the yellow roses and from across the limpid surface of the sea.

We had sweet white wine for lunch. It was too sweet for me and I thought it too sweet, also, for him, but it seemed perfect for Mrs Arkwright, who said:

‘Delicious wine. You always find the most delicious wine, Wolfie. We never have wine like this. Never like this – I don't know where you find these things.'

Her face, fired by the wine, began to come out in a series of blotches, especially under the eyes, almost as bright a red as her lipstick.

‘And the lamb-chops. I've never had a lamb-chop like this since before the war. I can't think where you get them. We've got a butcher who kills nothing but dogs, and here you get meat like butter.'

I thought his occasional smile at these things, from the old vivid blue eyes, was nothing like as fresh and positive as it had been when he and I, alone on the terrace, had little to talk of but the spring-like air, the singing thrush and the sea.

‘Shall we have coffee inside?' he said, ‘or shall we brave the terrace?'

‘We don't want you to get cold,' she said.

‘Dammit,' he said, ‘I've been sitting there all morning.'

‘Well, anyway, first you have to show me the flower in the peat-garden.'

‘Let's have coffee first,' he said. ‘Coffee first.'

It was decided, after all, to have coffee on the terrace, and again we sat in the incredible, golden, soft-aired afternoon. A few moments before this Mrs Arkwright left us for the cloakroom, so that for five minutes the two of us were alone again on the terrace, he sitting down, I looking at the gold-grey bay of sea.

‘Immense energy,' he kept saying. ‘Immense energy. How old would you think she was? She's been married twice. She lost the second about a year ago.'

‘Hard to say.'

‘Seventy-four. She wouldn't admit it. But I know.'

He kept looking arthritically over his shoulder, with stiff difficulty, as if half-terrified she would hear.

Some moments later I looked at my watch. It was already nearly three o'clock and I said:

‘I ought to run along. It's later than—'

‘Good God, man, dammit,' he said. ‘I don't want you to
go yet. You must stay to tea. You've not been over for months and now you rush away.'

When she joined us again there was a smell of new powder in the air. I noticed now that she had pinned her violets upside down and that their dark heads were wet with water. She didn't look at me very much, but the fox's head did and the lion-brown pupils seemed almost to snarl, I thought, whenever they caught the sun.

‘Now the peat-garden,' she said, when we had finished coffee. ‘Come on. What
is
this flower?'

It had been a cruel business to get his twisted stiffened back into a chair at all, and now she hardly seemed to notice that it was an even crueller business to get it out again.

‘My dear Lilah,' he said to her at last, ‘I can't make it.' He sank back. ‘I'm just a damn miserable bone-bag. I can hop like a two year old if I can get on my feet but I can't get on my feet. Dammit, you'll have to let Richardson take you down. I want you both to see it anyway.'

‘Oh! Wolfie, you mustn't talk like that.'

‘Like what?' he said. ‘They're going to put me in a damn wheelchair.'

‘Oh! Wolfie – rubbish. Not for a million years. I wouldn't let them.'

‘There's damn little you can do about it.'

‘Oh! Wolfie,' she said. ‘You're not ready for a wheelchair. You don't look a day older than you did when we first came here two years ago.' She turned to me for one of her rare, bright-eyed, smiling questions. ‘You don't think he does, do you?'

‘Not a day older.'

‘I sometimes feel a hell of a sight older,' he said, ‘that's all.'

‘What, with eyes like that? With those blue eyes?' she said. ‘Oh! Wolfie.'

I finished my coffee and stood up.

‘I must say good-bye,' I said.

‘Oh! no, but must you?' he said. ‘You were going to see that thing in the peat-garden. Don't run off. I've got to take you down.'

‘Look,' I said. ‘Sit still. I'll go out that way and find it myself.'

‘That's a good idea,' she said.

‘Tea will only be an hour,' he said. ‘It's always at four. Dammit. Surely you can stay for tea?'

‘I really ought to go,' I said.

She smiled at me with unexpected ease and sweetness.

‘Have you far to go?'

‘Ten miles.'

‘Oh! quite a way.'

‘Well, all I can say is I'm disappointed,' he said. ‘I'm disappointed.'

The merest breath of wind, a moment later, blew up from the sea, not cold, but a mere opening and unfolding of a pocket of air that closed almost immediately again, leaving the afternoon as soft as ever.

‘Wolfie, it's turning colder,' she said. ‘I don't think it's wise for you to be out here on the terrace. I'll tell you what—'

She turned, to my great surprise, to me.

‘I'll just run down to the peat-garden with Mr Richardson and see this thing. You get yourself inside.'

‘Well, if you must go, good-bye,' he said. ‘Come over again soon. Don't let it be so long. Remember I'll have a cyclamen for your wife at Christmas. One of those big frilled white ones that she likes so much—'

‘Ah! like the one you promised me?' she said.

In a cloud of carnation scent I followed her down to the peat-garden. The air was beautiful. The sea startled the entire valley with a flash of vivid brassy light. She chatted in a high voice about the day, the garden, the altogether remarkable weather and the fact that it was so nice that I was a gardener too.

‘Have you any idea what this thing could be?' she said. ‘Because I haven't the faintest.'

It turned out to be a little rhododendron, pinkish, wintry, delicate in the dying sun. She looked at it for a second or two indifferently and then said to me, with eagerness, with the brightest of eyes and a prancing scarlet smile:

‘Oh! it's been
so
nice to see you. I can't tell you how nice it's been. That's one of the things about Wolfie – his marvellous friends.'

She turned to go back up the path to the terrace. Then she hesitated, remembering something.

‘And that was a nice touch about the violets. I never knew. You see, they're already fresh again.'

She gave me a final flash, a little coy, very blue and half-cajoling, of her bright blue eyes.

‘You know the way down to the bottom gate, don't you?' she said.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘I know the way.'

In the second before I turned to go I saw him still standing on the terrace. The spring-soft sunlight of the winter afternoon was bright on his face. He did not lift his hand.

Seeing her turn too, he fled like someone doomed.

I ran into him on one of those moonless, muggy evenings, a couple of days before Christmas, when the air is like lukewarm stew – or rather, to be truthful, he ran into me. He was pushing a sizeable hand-truck loaded with flowers: all sorts of them, mostly in pots, azaleas, hyacinths, narcissi, cyclamen, tulips, and several bunches of yellow mimosa, all fresh and fluffy.

It was not merely that the street was exceptionally dark there or that the truck was exceptionally heavy. He himself seemed almost sightless, unaware of where he was going. The truck seemed to lurch at me as I was about to step off the pavement and I just saved myself in time by clutching the side of it.

The damp winter air was full of half a dozen fragrances as he stood there panting, absent-eyed, muttering something about being sorry. He seemed, I thought, about sixty and he coughed heavily several times, struggling to get his breath.

I couldn't give him a pound, he supposed, could I? – and for a moment I thought he was talking of money. Then I realised that we were on a sharp incline and that he was talking of pushing the truck.

‘Going far?' I said.

It was three or four streets away, he said, not more than half a mile. His voice was husky. Phlegm seemed to be choking his throat, so that whenever he opened his mouth the words came out all broken up, even the syllables severed apart. His eyes groped in the damp lamp-lit distances in the same broken way and he seemed to be trying to focus, in the stony darkness, some object far beyond them.

‘Got to take 'em just past
The King's Arms
in Victoria Road,' he said. ‘Know where I mean?'

I said I did. A moment later my hand was on the truck and presently, side by side, we were pushing it away.