Coronation (13 page)

It was only then they realised that all through the long day their ear-drums had unceasingly been assaulted by noise and clamour.

There had been the sounds of the shuffling feet of spectators and the marching feet of men, the rolling thunder of military hardware, the roar of aircraft, blare of bands, shrill of fifes and keening of pipes. There had been train sounds, bus sounds, traffic sounds, the great roars of cheering, the clash of dishes from the jammed, packed restaurants they had tried to enter. Now the quiet was shocking in its intensity. To Will Clagg it sounded louder somehow than any of the uproar through which they had wandered that day, and to his surprise he found himself leading his family into their living-room almost on tiptoes.

They came in and sat down around the table, for it was also necessary for them to become re-acquainted with their own home, to relax in the security of its walls, to reopen themselves to its contours and its possessions. It seemed as though they had been away journeying through vast distances of space and time. They had been subjected to buffets and shocks of the mind as well as the body. They had suffered in spirit and had lived through a day more strange, and in a sense exciting too, than any dozen holidays at the sea could provide.

The little house in Imperial Road was the same as it had been when they left it – the worn carpet, the chair with the damaged leg, the Toby jug that Johnny had won at a fair, the photographs on the wall, the mantel clock and their own Coronation decorations, the red, white and blue paper ribbon criss-crossing the room from its four corners to the chandelier with the colour print of the Queen hanging over the fireplace. All was indeed the same, only they were not. They were changed drastically by what they had been through, and this was why they now found themselves sitting so uneasily and silently, a part of that great and surrounding quiet, trying to adjust themselves from the persons they had been to those they now were.

Violet Clagg was the first to re-enter the safe, snug cocoon of her home, the first to yield to the embrace of familiar things. She sighed and said, ‘We’d better be getting the children to bed. Goodness knows how I’ll ever be getting Johnny up and off to school in the morning.’

The boy cried, ‘Oh, Mummy, do I
have
to go to school tomorrow?’ His new and miraculous possession would be taking up so much of his time, giving him such a great deal to think about.

Before Granny could put her oar in, Clagg said, ‘It’s back to work for us all, m’lad.’

There was no appeal from his father, Johnny knew, and now the thought of school suddenly opened up heretofore unconsidered possibilities. He might let his best friends have just a glimpse of it. How envied he would be!

Granny said, ‘I’ll go and make us all a cup of tea.’

‘See if there’s a drop of gin left in the bottom of the bottle while you’re at it, Granny,’ Clagg suggested. ‘You’ll want something warming so you won’t be catching your death of cold.’ Granny went off quickly so that they wouldn’t see her smile of satisfaction.

There had been no heat in the house for twenty-four hours of almost incessant rain, and it was chill, damp and clammy. Violet plugged in a small electric fire, set Gwenny before it and began to peel clothing from her, saying ‘Get Gwenny’s dressing-gown for her, Johnny, there’s a good boy, and get yourself warm and snug as well.’ Gwenny was dry enough; nevertheless her mother rubbed the little chest vigorously with her hand. Johnny returned, ready for bed, with his sister’s wool robe.

Will Clagg said with a kind of studied casualness, ‘Well now, Gwenny, you haven’t told us yet what it was like seeing the Queen.’ The fact was, he hadn’t dared really to ask her up to that point. It had been nip and tuck as to whether she had got up on to the top of the barrier in time. He remembered the passage of the wave of cheering that accompanied what must have been her appearance, the sound of the coach horses with their outriders, and the rumble of the heavy coach. Had he lingered too long in surprise and bewilderment when the stranger, the little man, had told him to boost him up onto his shoulders? And once Gwenny was up, how quickly had she been able to grasp what she saw? There would have been a vast, confusing plain of heads and faces with the procession threading its way through like a river far away. Would the Queen already have passed by and entered the Park? Would all their endeavours thus have been totally in vain and the child disappointed? She had not mentioned the subject from the time she had come down from the wall.

Gwenny said, ‘I saw her, Mummy, didn’t I?’

‘Yes, dear. That’s what you said. But you never told us what she was like.’

With no change of expression whatsoever, Gwendoline retired instantly into that inner chamber to which children flee when cross-questioned what the party was like, and locked the door. Safe with her Queen no one could get at her. Her
alter ego
, which had to live with, put up with and get along with grown-ups, replied, ‘She was lovely.’

Mrs. Clagg massaged the cold and clammy little feet. ‘Of course. But what was she doing?’

The outside Gwenny said, ‘She was riding in a golden coach, like Cinderella, drawn by eight white horses.’

Will Clagg’s head came up. With one enormous inspiration he drew into his mighty chest almost all of the air in the room and exhaled it in one great sigh of relief. Perhaps, then, they really had been in time and had hoisted her to the barrier’s top before the royal coach had passed from her view. He had managed to keep his promise to her.

Mrs. Clagg said, ‘That’s it, Gwenny, and what did she have on?’

Gwenny replied, ‘A gold dress and a gold crown. And on the top of the gold crown was a gold butterfly. Its eyes were real diamonds and its wings were made of pearls.’

Her mother said, ‘But, Gwenny, that’s what the picture of the Butterfly Princess looks like in your fairy-tale book.’

Gwenny nodded in grave acquiescence. ‘That’s right,’ she said.

Will Clagg’s heart sank again. He asked, ‘What else did you see, Gwenny?’

‘The Prince was sitting next to her. He was dressed all in white. He blew me a kiss–’

Will and Violet Clagg exchanged glances and in them was recognition that comes to all parents that in the secret chambers of the minds of their children fact and fancy stand adjacent, and when questioned there was no telling over which threshold they would step before replying. Had she or had she not seen the Queen that day as she had so greatly desired? And if not, what then was it that she had seen? The conviction came to Will and Violet Clagg that they would probably never really know and that there was no use questioning her further.

Granny came in with the tea-tray, on which was also half a bottle of gin with three glasses and a few biscuits. Johnny’s eyes brightened at the sight of the tea and biscuits and they all sat themselves down again around the table. The comfort of home was taking over and the discomforts and frustrations were already beginning to fade.

*

Each of them was cherishing the most extraordinary souvenirs that he or she had brought back from this day, which all the time it had been going on had appeared to be so disastrous, but now no longer seemed so. They had with their sacrifices made a gift to their young Queen and it was as if in return she had made an offering to each of them, one that none of them had expected.

Perhaps the strangest of all these benefactions was that which came to Granny as she sat there with her family. She was an old lady of seventy-three who had been through a day that was not only harrowing mentally, but trying and fatiguing physically. She had been rained on, trampled, jostled; she had been standing up hour upon hour and she felt extraordinarily well; as a matter of fact, had never felt better in her life.

Old people think about death. They are subject to ills and frailties and are reminded continually by their bodies that their days are numbered. Never, never would Granny, of course, let the family know what had been made manifest that day, namely the knowledge that she was a well preserved, healthy and sturdy person who would be around for a long time yet to keep an eye on things. It was as though she had received a doctor’s verdict after a check-up: ‘You’re absolutely sound, Mrs Bonner, you’ll live to be a hundred.’

She didn’t want to live to be a hundred and be a burden, of course; she just wanted to live, to go on badgering Will, bossing her daughter, helping to bring up the children, watching them grow and develop. She wanted to go on eating, drinking, breathing and putting in her two pennies’ worth until she grew tired. Somehow this day had told her that she would. It had soothed the secret and unspoken fears that had beset her. The grim mouth relaxed for a moment, almost into a smile, and the sharp eyes behind the spectacle lenses once more took in the familiar surroundings of the room. She would be there yet for quite a while.

As for Gwendoline, one would never know except that she was happy and satisfied. She hugged her secret to herself, whatever it was she had felt the need of and had found that day, as she would hug it to her heart for many months and years to come. Even when she was grown and her life and needs and desires changed there would still remain the residue of it all to warm her and to which she could return. Upon such small and hidden triumphs are sunny natures built.

Three weirdly assorted physical objects had been brought back from that journey of apparent fiasco: a newspaper cutting, a champagne cork and a polished military badge. Their intrinsic value was nil, and if you came upon them in an attic box, gathering dust, you would never guess or even begin to assess the meaning they had had in terms of human emotion, or suspect what symbols they were for ambition, love, pride, vanity and those hungers and yearnings of the soul which make us what we are.

Not until this total anonymity had been breached by those two lines of black type had Will Clagg ever dreamed that in his innermost person he had craved the sweets of celebrity. It had never dawned upon him to be worried over who he was or what he was, and much less what he was not. He awakened every morning and went through those rituals of washing and clothing himself and stoking his personal furnace with food to give him energy. He moved through space and time to his place of work where he was greeted with respect by those both beneath and above him. He did those things, gave those orders, took those precautions without which his unit would not operate properly. It was known as ‘doing his job’ and it was almost as automatic to him as breathing. His work done, his life then continued in its private train and he was himself, Will Clagg, friend or companion to other men of his station, husband and father and relation to his family, citizen and subject to his country and his Queen.

Still and all, it was a kind of oblivion, a facelessness. Now he had suddenly been plucked therefrom and existed as an entity outside of and far beyond the confines of Little Pudney.

He had become something apart, a person living upon another plane, entering and impinging upon, if even for an instant, the lives of all those who had read about him and his misadventure. It was as though he had been born again and therein he had found a joy and a sweetness undreamed of, and no less fulfilling because up to that point he had been unaware of its existence. If he had sacrificed with a full and generous heart, if he had suffered, he had indeed been well repaid.

In one hand Violet held her tea-cup, in the other she fondled the champagne cork she had carried away with her in her bag.

One might tie a tag to it: ‘Souvenir of the Coronation’, or ‘Souvenir of one’s first drink of champagne’, or even ‘Souvenir of something good happening’. For in a sense the cork represented the breaking of the pattern of disappointment in her life, things looked forward to which had not come off. True, she had not sat in the window and had wine poured by a butler, but instead it had been on a railway train in a restaurant car, something she had likewise never experienced before. But the bottle had been properly iced and napkin-wrapped, the waiter had worn a uniform, and had been kind and cheery and said, ‘To your good health, madam’; and she had tasted and drunk champagne as she had craved to do.

But really the phrase with which Violet had tagged the little cork she was turning over and over in her hand was quite a different one and she didn’t know just how she had come upon it, but it sounded good to her and in her mind she wrote the ticket and tied it to the stopper: ‘Souvenir of my husband’s heart’.

For love was something of which Violet Clagg had not thought for a long time. Will, of course, had once told her he loved her when they were young. They had married and had children. They were not of that breed habituated to interminable reiteration of passion and affection; neither would have dreamed of asking of the other: ‘Do you love me?’ It would have embarrassed them to death. They still came together occasionally out of necessity or desire, or a moment’s flare-up of passion, and Clagg sometimes looked upon her fondly or patted her hand and called her ‘old girl’. But, of course, of those evidences of the ‘love’ of poets, or the more visual one of the cinema, – the moonlight walks with arms about waists, the whispered avowals and protestations, the sighs and glances and stammerings – there were no more, nor was it to be expected. Where then was this love? What had become of that which once had been whispered between them! Why, it was in that champagne cork, now so warm and moist from the contact of her hand.

It spoke, it shouted, it sang to her all the words and songs that her husband could never utter. He thought about her. Her place in his heart was secure. Her happiness, the fulfilment of a wish or dream of hers that lay within his power was of importance to him. He had remembered! He loved her! She would never forget this Coronation day.