The Wedding Party (7 page)

‘Even money-lenders might at least be given the chance of understanding.'

‘Oh! very well,' Mrs Daly said, ‘if you must know it's to buy a budgerigar.'

‘A
what?
Don't tell me you're going to start keeping those damn things now?'

‘No, I'm not. As a matter of fact it's going to be a companion for the other budgerigar.'

‘I'm mad,' Mr Daly said, actually grasping the kitchen table to support himself. ‘I'm clean crackers—'

‘They pine,' Mrs Daly said. ‘When they're alone, I mean. That's why they're called love-birds.'

‘Don't tell me. Don't tell me.'

‘It's rather strange when you come to think of it, isn't it, that a bird can pine for love? Just like a human being.'

‘Why like a human being? Why can't they just be themselves?'

Mrs Daly left the kitchen without providing an answer. Mr Daly sat down heavily at the kitchen table and stared hard at the front page of the morning paper. Everything was worse than awful. If he didn't get breakfast soon he'd miss the morning train. Even if he didn't miss it he wouldn't get a decent seat. He'd have to sit with a lot of bounders he didn't know. They'd try to strike up conversations on politics or football or the Common Market or something and he'd never be able to do the cross-word, which he reckoned to finish every morning in thirty-six minutes flat. If that happened anything could happen. Once you got a day started like that it was hell.

‘One egg or two?'

Mrs Daly, wearing red slippers now, tripped into the kitchen in a still higher mood of elation, half-singing, half-laughing.

‘What on earth you can find to sing and laugh about God only knows,' Mr Daly said. ‘I'm blessed if I can. It's going to be one of those days. I can feel it. It's going to be ruddy awful.'

Mrs Daly, laughing again, broke an egg into a cup. Already it seemed to her that half the day had evaporated like a dream.

‘You think so?' she said. ‘I think it's going to be an absolutely marvellous day. I'm perfectly, perfectly happy.'

He had always been a drifter. He moved from place to place as the fancy took him, working mostly as a kitchen porter or cellerman or handyman in hotels, along the coast in summertime and then back inland for winter.

He was a trustworthy, stocky little man, not exactly stunted but perhaps what some people would have called a runt: rather simple-looking in a taciturn sort of way but with what were normally good, capable, steady hands. He hardly ever drank and was one of the few of his kind who did no gambling: probably because he had never learned to read or write, so that he could never be quite sure what the names of the horses were.

Somehow or other he had picked up his odd nick-name: Squiff. Nothing could have suited him less. Instead it seemed to mock him. It seemed really to belong to someone else, to a jocular sprightly man with a beery squint in his eye who took life gaily and made easy friends. He on the other hand never made many friends, nor enemies for that matter, and he was hardly ever jocular.

When he was a little over forty he got himself a job as handyman at a country hotel called
The Montague Arms
. It was a big fake-baronial style house heavily panelled in oak
and decorated with gleaming battle-axes, suits of armour, coats-of-arms and portraits in oils of obscure Tudor gentlemen. The large chilly rooms lacked intimacy. Most of the guests found themselves talking in half-whispers and when anyone raised a voice the effect seemed aggressive, even coarse. Perhaps because of this, or perhaps because the food itself was merely indifferent, not a lot of people came to eat there. As a consequence the staff were bored and restless and, like Squiff, always drifting on.

Soon after he got there, on a warm Saturday night in July, it happened that the hotel wine-waiter was careless enough to slip on the stone flagstones of a passage while carrying a tray of glasses. In falling he put out an arm, jabbed it flat on a broken glass and severed an artery.

Probably because the night was so exceptionally warm and fine there were an unusual number of guests in the dining-room. One of the waitresses was sick at the sight of blood and sat outside for the rest of the evening, trembling in a chair, and there was no one to serve wine at the tables until suddenly someone remembered Squiff. The suit of tails they put on him was a little on the large side and the wing collar, over-large too, merely heightened his look of simplicity. He looked altogether clumsy, lost and undignified.

As soon as he went into the dining-room a rending shout of ‘Waiter!' hit him like a growl from a raging boar. When he answered it he found himself facing a broad, heavy-faced man named Lubbock who was dining at a corner table with a blonde-haired girl of remarkably cool and distinguished
appearance, in a low-cut dress of silver blue, who seemed altogether out of place in the company of a second-hand car dealer notorious for loudness of mouth, brutish habits and too much money.

‘Where's the bloody
Liebfraumilch
I ordered twenty minutes ago?' Lubbock shouted. His lips, coarse as the crêpe soles of a shoe, champed out the words viciously enough to make Squiff recoil. ‘And anyway where's the wine-waiter? You're not the bloody wine-waiter, are you?'

‘Yessir. I am now.'

‘What do you mean you am now?'

Squiff, who always talked with a good deal of hesitation, started to explain about the accident but Lubbock, furiously stubbing out one cigarette and in another second lighting another, shouted that he didn't want to hear a lot of crap like that. He wanted the wine – and bloody fast too.

All this time the girl was watching Squiff. Her thick fair hair fell over her bare shoulders like a mane. Her very light blue eyes were as cool and fresh as spring water and the way she looked at him was full of stillness.

He went away, pondered for a few minutes, decided he hadn't a notion which wine had been ordered and then went back into the dining-room with the wine-list. Would the gentleman mind telling him again which wine he wanted?

‘The
Liebfraumilch
, you flapping wet! How many more times? I have it every time I come here. They keep it specially for me.'

‘Perhaps you wouldn't mind just pointing it out on the list for me, sir?'

‘It isn't on the bloody list, you damn fool. I tell you they keep it specially for me. Are you going to bring the damn stuff or do I have to fetch it myself?'

‘I'm bringing it, sir.'

Again, all this time, the girl sat watching him, never moving an eyelid. Again her eyes had that great penetrative stillness in them. She seemed to be looking completely through him and it was almost as if she had already discovered what his great trouble was: the fact that he couldn't read or write and that therefore, for him, the names of wines, like those of horses, were for ever locked in mystery.

He finally got over the trouble with the help of the barman, who also gave him some brief advice. ‘Better ask which number on the list people want, Squiff. The bins are all numbered in the cellar and I'll show you which is which.'

Several minutes later he was on his way back to the dining-room with the bottle of
Liebfraumilch
when, half way down the broad baronial corridor, he found himself face to face with the girl. It didn't strike him for a long time afterwards that she might have intentionally made an excuse to come out there simply for the purpose of helping him. He could only stand there, at that moment, looking as stiff and vacuous as one of the faceless suits of armour stuck up against the wall.

‘Did you manage to find it?' she said.

‘Think so, miss. Is this the one?'

‘That's the one.' She laid her hand on the bottle and the way he felt himself start suddenly she might have been
laying it on his arm. ‘Yes, the temperature's about right. You'd better get another one up too. Mr Lubbock's sure to want another.'

She smiled and for what seemed to be about half a minute he stood utterly transfixed. He had nothing at all to say; but already the greatest of all possible wonders had started to grow in his mind: how it could come about that a girl of her sort, clothed with that beautiful, well-mannered stillness, could have mixed herself up with a man like Lubbock? It was all completely beyond him.

‘And don't forget that Mr Lubbock likes me to taste the wine first. He says my palate's good. You'll remember that, won't you?'

‘Yes, miss.'

She smiled and then, for the first time, his hands started trembling. They were to suffer these bouts of acute trembling for several months afterwards. Sometimes they lasted for only a minute or so, sometimes for half an hour, but that first evening he was still shaking when he started to pour the wine at Lubbock's table.

As the first drops went into the girl's glass Lubbock gave a pugnacious sort of growl.

‘How the hell did you know Miss Howard liked to taste the wine?'

‘Ladies first, sir.'

‘You'll do.' Lubbock gave a half-belch that might almost have been a note of praise. ‘I shall want another bottle of this, do you hear?'

‘Yessir. Ready whenever you want it.'

‘It'd better be. And watch what you're up to. You're all of a bloody shake.'

The girl had been watching his trembling hands and now she looked straight up at him. Immediately something in the very fullness of the stare calmed him down completely. And then as if she wanted to put him finally at rest she said: ‘Your face seems familiar. Didn't you used to work at
The Dolphin
at Brighton?'

‘No, miss. Never worked there.'

‘Funny. I seem to have seen you somewhere before.'

‘Don't think so, miss.'

‘Ah! well, we shall be seeing you again I expect.'

‘Expect so, miss.'

He was about to move away when Lubbock growled ‘What's your name, anyway? What do they call you?'

‘Squiff.'

‘By God, you look it.' Lubbock gave a short crackling laugh that was more like an amused snarl. ‘Hear that, Stella? Squiff. How's that for a name?'

Lubbock laughed a second time but by the time the sound had echoed round the high-pitched dining-room Squiff had gone.

He had hardly left the table before Lubbock drained his glass and then, sloshing more wine into it, gave another insolent boar-like growl from the lips that were so like lumps of crêpe rubber, telling the entire dining-room:

‘This place gets worse and worse. It's going down the bloody drain. You can tell that. It'd better pick up or I'll be hanged if we come here.'

‘I like it here.'

‘All right, if you like it that's all right then. If it's good enough for you—'

She accepted this rough compliment as if it were a gem. An extraordinary look of entrancement, almost adoration, came over her face, precisely as if she could see behind the brutish crêpe-like lips some engaging quality in Lubbock that was lost on the rest of the world.

‘Just like you to say that,' she said. ‘Having a nice time?'

‘All right. You?'

‘Lovely. The wine's just right on an evening like this. Somehow it never tastes the same anywhere else as it does here.'

What exactly prompted Squiff to begin to send her flowers every week was something he could probably have never been able to explain. It might have been the only way he knew of saying thank you for the help she had given him; it was something he couldn't possibly have expressed in words. It might equally have been that he was trying to express, in silence and from far off, an otherwise inexpressible adoration.

It might also have been something of both these things but it wasn't long before he heard that she was living with Lubbock in a farmhouse seven or eight miles away and there, every Saturday morning, bunches of red roses arrived, always without a card.

Lubbock had called her Miss Howard, but in reality she
was still married to a man of Quaker sympathies named Bailey who kept a small stationery and fancy goods shop of an old fashioned sort in the nearest market town. Bailey was the sort of man who, rather than draw ten cheques to pay ten bills, would draw one cheque and walk round the town paying each bill by cash, thus saving nine cheque stamps. When he bought her a new coat or dress – and it hadn't been very often – he gave her cash too and then insisted on having the few shillings, or even few pennies, change. It didn't need much coaxing on Lubbock's part to make her see that life could offer more than this kind of parsimony. She stepped in a few months from ready made coats and chain store dresses to mink wraps, hats from Mayfair, a car of her own and frequent trips across to the French coast to gamble and drink champagne on Sundays.

‘A girl like you's got to see the sights,' Lubbock said.

There are certain women who, though having refinements of their own, appear to relish a quality of brashness in a man. Lubbock loved her harshly, rudely and even brutally and in a strange way it excited her. The greatest of her qualities was not that she was very good looking but that she was gifted with curious powers of penetration. She saw behind all the barking insolence of Lubbock's exterior a man desperately aware of his own deficiencies; the outer animal concealed a baby groping.

In the same way she had been able to detect, or at least guess at, the deficiencies in Squiff. She was quick to sense something more than a nervous upheaval of incompetence behind the trembling hands.

But when the roses began to arrive she failed to put the fact of them and Squiff together; it never once crossed her mind that the two might have a connection. At first she felt inclined to treat them as a joke but after two or three weeks they started to affect her in quite another way. She felt herself making something intensely secretive of them and when Lubbock teased her about them in his coarsest fashion she merely lied in rather a clumsy way.