Blaming (Virago Modern Classics) (15 page)

She had never been to a wedding before, and was sadly disappointed by this one. Mrs Francis, wearing an old fur coat was the only one with a hat, let alone a veil. She had pinned a small bunch of violets to her collar for the occasion. Ernie had put on his corduroy jacket and patterned waistcoat, but Amy had just slipped on the first coat that came to hand – her shopping coat – and tied a scarf over her head.

Mrs. Francis had accepted the invitation from curiosity about Amy’s house, not from any regard for bride or bridegroom, whom she had refused permission to share the room in her house. Those were not the
terms under which she had let it to Martha, and, in any case, she argued with herself, they were so soon to go back to America, and plenty of sharing had gone on already. But no moving in. Nor was Simon’s landlady any more accommodating.

After the short ceremony, Ernie left the church quickly to unwrap the sandwiches and arrange and garnish them. He went briskly against the wind, his stomach concave as he buttoned his jacket.

They all – including the vicar – crossed the road from the church, and entered the courtyard by the back door. Mrs. Francis looked about her critically, at worn carpets, rugs whose fringes had not been combed, blotchy old mirrors and faded curtains. She was disgusted by the scene of river mud from the sitting-room windows, and thought it all looked most unhealthy and full of typhoid or cholera. But the sandwiches were dainty, and there was champagne.

“I sometimes wonder,” the vicar said to her, “if such a marriage as we had this morning isn’t in many ways more meaningful than the big society do’s. Those often seem to serve merely as a social occasion.” Very few society weddings came to St. Barnabas’s. In this district, in the hinterland of Laurel Walk, there was usually, after the ceremony, cold meats and beetroot in the Scouts’ hut, or a bit of knees-up in the private backroom of a local pub. He always left as soon as he could, not, after all, being paid to stay, or to go at all, for that matter.

Dora, on her best behaviour, as she usually was with grown-ups, handed round sandwiches, with a little curtsey to each guest, and Ernie refilled the glasses.

Only she and he were trying to improve the party.

Simon said very little, especially after his colleague had proposed his and Martha’s health, and then gone back to work.

“It’s my much-needed afternoon off,” the vicar explained. “I have to go and watch my boys play soccer.”

“Not a nice day for it, I’m afraid,” Ernie said in a deferential voice. Although he stood more in awe of doctors, the clergy necessarily commanded some respect.

He saw the vicar out, and returned to add to Mrs. Francis’s glass. She was becoming a little tipsy. From old practice, he easily recognised the signs.

Martha had mislaid her glass. He fetched another and gave it to her. “It was nice of you to come to the church,” she said. “How’s your wife? Have you heard anything?”

“My wife. Ah, my wife. My wife I’ve no doubt is in her usual rude health. In any case, I shouldn’t hear anything to the contrary.” He lowered his brow, like a defensive ape. “And should pay no credence to anything I was told.”

“And that lady wrestler you told me about?”

“Well, funny enough you should ask, but only last week she turned up at the jazz club again, with a gentleman friend, this time. Afterwards, we all went Dutch at the Chinese. Well, that sounds Irish, if you like.”

Martha said to Simon, “Ernie used to work in a pub along Laurel Walk, and then Nick persuaded him to come here.”

Simon would have liked to know if this had made him financially better off, decided probably not.

Ernie said, “He was really the first person who ever treated me properly. Even in the bar. I was the one he said ‘good-evening’ to first, no matter how full the place was with his cronies. No one likes to be ignored, and yet I was expected to doff my forelock to all and sundry – even if I met a customer on neutral ground on my day off. The master wouldn’t have any of that. “If I call you ‘Ernie’, you call me ‘Nick’ “, he said once. It was funny, but I never could. All the same, I don’t forget him saying it. Excuse me, while I just top up Mrs. Francis.”

“I feel as if I’ve majored in Ernie Pounce,” Martha whispered to Simon, who was put out by the total atmosphere of Amy’s house, Ernie’s ‘madaming’, his mixture of servility and familiarity, like a human-being lost to his own place in the world. He had always, from what he had heard of her, disapproved of Amy. Memsahib, he thought of her. He had had enough of England, where there were such relics. One day – he had not discussed this with Martha – he had an idea of getting a job in Australia, where he thought he might feel at home.

Dora, bored after several refusals of sandwiches, wandered about the room. She paused before a small cabinet of drawers, and asked Amy, “May I look at your shells?”

“Yes, if you are careful with them. Handle each one very gently, and the little ones not at all.”

Dora frowned as she slid open a drawer. Her grandmother’s words did not seem to make sense.

Mrs. Francis began to make hazy and rather hopeless enquiries about buses, and Martha and Simon offered to see her on her way in a taxi. The taxi was a great extravagance in honour of the day. They were to spend two days in Brighton, which Martha would find a delightful place, and Simon would find exorbitantly expensive. And Martha, almost as soon as she got there, would buy more and more picture-postcards, and an old necklace of ivory beads as well.

When they had gone, Dora took the largest, strongest, beautifully freckled shell, and sat down on Amy’s lap. “It wasn’t a proper wedding, was it?” she asked.

“Yes, it was a proper wedding, but not the kind a little girl would like, I do agree.”

“I like being here,” Dora said.

“And I love having you. Tell me more about Auntie Dot’s,” Amy said, spying rather.

She had gone down to Worthing with James to fetch Dora, who, dressed in her best, had waved to them from the first floor window of the block of flats, The Conifers.

“You shouldn’t have walked on the grass,” she had told them in a proprietorial manner, opening the door of the sitting-room where Auntie Dot was up – and also dressed in her best – but coughing badly. She had done Dora’s hair in a different way, and chosen a pink dress for her. She liked pink, and was wearing it herself, and the moment they had left she would get into a pink nightgown and go to bed.

“Look, my nails are silver,” Dora had said. Aunt Dot’s nails were silver, too.

Dora showed Amy her bedroom, which was like a
princess’s, she said. Rosebuds were everywhere, pink nylon frilling, with quilted plastic, rosebud–covered cupboard doors and bedhead to match. She showed Amy round the small flat as if it were her own. Even the telephone and the electric toaster in the kitchen had quilted covers.

“I was a help,” Dora now said peacefully, holding the shell to her ear. Indeed, Auntie Dot had said so at the time. “She’s been such a little help,” she had told James and Amy, “laying the tray for breakfast, and tidying up.”

Going back over her stay, Dora’s voice became demure. She spoke of new friends she had made.

“Does Auntie Dot know a lot of children, then?”

“Oh, no. She doesn’t know any. They were all grown-up friends. They came for coffee and I handed round things. That’s how I knew how to do it today. Of course, Auntie Dot’s husband died, you know.” (A rather affected sigh.) “And now she’s not well-off any more. It’s so sad. One of her friends has had to give up going to the Club, because she’s even poorer, and Auntie says she hopes that won’t happen to her. She says it would kill her.”

Amy was fascinated by this life in Worthing. “But what did you do all day?” she asked, hoping to get some ideas.

“We walked to the shops, and we did our nails, and we played cards, and then the people came for coffee. And I used to stroke her arms. She loves her arms to be stroked. I had to do it every day. Shall I lay your breakfast tray for tomorrow?”

“But I get up for breakfast.”

“A rest would do you good, especially at your age. Do you mind being old? Auntie Dot doesn’t like it very much.”

“Yes, I do mind some things about it. For instance, I can’t any longer dash about like you. But on the other hand, I don’t much want to. Anyway, one has no choice.”

“Would you rather be my age?”

“No, I’ve been that already. And I don’t like the same thing all the time.” Didn’t I once, though? she wondered.

Ernie came in on some excuse. “It’s tipping down now,” he said.

“Not very nice weather for Brighton.”

“Never mind, madam. Worse things happen at sea,” he tactlessly replied.

Amy, arriving back home one afternoon from the hairdresser’s, was nearly into the sitting-room when Ernie ran up the stairs to detain her. “I didn’t know how to stop her.” he whispered, just as Amy was opening the door.

Martha was sitting on the rug by the fire with papers strewn about her, and the fire was low, too, laden with papers in charred layers.

“Here go my notes on Faulkner,” Martha said.

Amy, disconcerted, said coolly, “Won’t you need them again?”

“No, in America I shall be asked to lecture on English writers. That might be the only good thing about going there.”

“It’s not much of a fire.”

“Well, there was nowhere at Mrs. Francis’s where I could burn them, and I knew you wouldn’t mind. I can’t take all this stuff back to the States. There are even love letters. I’ve been re-reading some of them. Very few letters stand up to that.”

“Couldn’t you have just put them in a dust-bin?”

“I prefer to see them disappear in smoke.”

One by one, she laid papers on the fire, and the rustling layers shifted and lifted tinnily, flaking and floating up the chimney.

Amy, not taking off her coat, leaned forward with a poker, trying to create a little draught and some flame.

“Sometimes,” Martha said, “I have thought that
there might be quite pleasant and peaceful ways of becoming insane. This could be one – just slowly burning things. It’s hypnotic almost. Another thing would be a big colouring book and some crayons, and quietly fill in the pictures. Remember that. A large colouring book for me if it should happen.”

“Do give the fire a little rest, or it will quite go out.”

“A rest? I’m feeding it all the
time.”

“On the contrary.”

While Amy tried to restore the fire, Martha sat back on her heels, reading a letter. Glancing up from it, she asked, “How is your raging grand-daughter?”

“I’ve no idea. As you heard last night, she made the usual scene about the baby-sitter.”

The evening before, Amy had asked Maggie and James to supper, so that Martha could meet them before she left England. She needed, she had said, to be able to picture them when they were mentioned in the letters Amy had promised to write. It had been a difficult evening, with Simon, who was, of course, invited too, saying very little, because he so disapproved of Ernie waiting at table; and Martha had asked too many questions.

She began again now. “Why does James stammer like that?”

“Most people find it rather endearing.”

“Is that meant to be an answer?”

Ernie had gone to a great deal of trouble over the meal; but Simon, it turned out, suffered from dyspepsia and could not digest roast duck, and Martha was still asking questions and eating from a cold plate long after the others had finished, except for Amy,
who as a good hostess had left a piece of potato to toy with while she waited. She had Ernie open another bottle of wine to pass the time, and Maggie had become a little aggressive – though not towards Amy, in fact rather ganging up with her — as she drank more than she was used to. It was in confused relief that Amy had at long last gone to bed.

Now Martha, having quietly finished reading her letter, leaned forward and put it on the fire. “Am I doing the right thing, I wonder,” she said. “Have I done the right thing? I still don’t
have
to go. Being married hasn’t altered my life, hasn’t yet altered a thing. There is only this to show for it.” She held out the hand with the silver wedding-ring, the silverness of which had so shocked Ernie. “Maybe, I shan’t be able to live with him, poor man; or he with me. Maybe I shall pine for
here
when I’m in that place back home, knowing no one there, shut up in a little apartment with just Simon, not able to find my way around.”

“You will soon learn. Only recall how quickly you mastered London.”

“All wasted now.”

“You seem so depressed.”

“Yes, for sure.”

She was coming to the end of the letter-burning; and not reading any more of them, as if the last had been too much for her.

“I shall think of you going to the hairdresser’s, walking by the river, not-talking to Ernie, struggling to cope with Isobel, being a widow. But you won’t be able to imagine
me
, or my life. That makes me feel unreal.”

Amy now took off her coat, noticed a large, flat parcel on a chair, and hoped it was not more papers to be disposed of.

Following her glance, Martha said, “It’s my good-bye present to you.”