The Marrying Game (32 page)

SUNLIGHT SHIFTED AND
gleamed on the surface of the moat, newly cleaned in honour of Rufa’s wedding. It was nine o’clock. Gnats and dragonflies were assembling above the glassy water, like the first guests. Rufa wandered out of the front door on to the terrace. She was in her dressing gown, holding a cup of tea. Smiling, she breathed the golden, hay-scented air. A perfect June morning. This was her last chance to savour its loveliness, and the miracle of Melismate Regained, before the bustle indoors escalated into pandemonium.

Lydia was leaning against the lichened stone balustrade, gazing out across the gardens. She smiled as Rufa joined her. They stood in companionable silence, listening to the peckings and splashings of the two swans in the moat. These graceful but evil-tempered creatures were a wedding gift from the Bickerstaff twins, who had also kindly cleared away evidence of the ongoing building work for the great day. One wing of the house was swathed in scaffolding and tarpaulin. Rose had insisted on moving back the moment the water and electricity had been restored. The Great Hall, drawing room and kitchen were finished. One room upstairs had been cleaned for the
putting
-on of bridal finery. The family were camping in the attics under the good part of the roof.

Lydia softly asked, ‘Well, are you nervous, then?’

‘Yes. Is that normal?’

‘I was incredibly nervous,’ Lydia said.

‘You were incredibly young.’

‘It all seemed so momentous and emotional. Ran was even worse – don’t you remember how he kept dashing into hedges to pee? But I remember it as wonderful. Magical.’ She turned mournful blue eyes towards her sister. ‘I hate it when people say marriage is just a worthless bit of paper. It’s so much more.’

On her own wedding day, Rufa found Lydia’s failed marriage wrenchingly sad. She wondered if all failed marriages carried this air of unfinished business. Was a marriage ever truly over, when one partner refused to admit it?

‘You give a part of yourself when you get married,’ Lydia said. ‘And it never grows back.’

‘Oh, Liddy,’ Rufa said gently, ‘I’m so sorry, but I think walking away from Ran was the best thing you ever did.’

‘I didn’t want to.’

‘You were miserable!’

The stubborn blue eyes turned back to the sunlit landscape. ‘I hung on as long as I could. In the end, Ran made me leave.’

‘That’s not the version we all heard. Are you saying he threw you out?’

‘Oh, no. But you know Ran. He always has to be the innocent party. So he pretended I wasn’t there. Until I actually wasn’t.’ She smiled painfully. ‘I thought I’d better take the hint, before I disappeared.’

Rufa watched one of the swans, patrolling the moat below in a menacing manner. ‘I do wish you’d get over Ran.’

‘So does he, but it’s no good. I can’t. None of you understand. He’s the only man I’ve ever loved.’

The historic coming together of Lydia and Ran was part of family legend. Lydia had lost her heart and her virginity to Ran at the age of fourteen, when he returned from India to live at Semple Farm. Rufa had a clear memory of Lydia that summer, drifting home in the warm dusk with her hair full of dried grass. She was happy with a barefoot existence; she had never been materialistic. Just as Ran did, she lived contentedly in the bubble of the present, with only the sketchiest notion that there was such a thing as a future.

On her own wedding morning, another clear memory came to Rufa, of Lydia as a bride. Her sheer loveliness had transcended the silliness of the event. They had all trooped off to the registry office first, and the Man had kept them in agonies of giggles – he had always mocked everything to do with officialdom.

At the main part of the ceremony, however, when Ran and Lydia had exchanged their home-made vows in the meadow, the Man had been inconsolable. Lydia had stood barefoot in the long grass, wild flowers winding through her hair, as ethereally beautiful as an Edwardian dream-child. The Man’s loud sobs had nearly drowned her hesitant voice, as she promised to love Ran until the stars turned cold.

Lydia had certainly kept her side of the bargain. She had never looked at another man. She had been convinced that marriage would fix Ran permanently, and was still astonished that it had not. She clung to the
belief
that he would come back, and nothing her mother or sisters said made any difference.

Very secretly, Rufa envied Lydia for embarking on marriage in such a state of certainty. She wished she could be as sure that she was truly loved. The idea of Edward’s love was no longer blush-making. She longed for a sign that he truly loved her. Since his return from Paris, all those weeks ago, Edward had been distant and preoccupied, preparing for the wedding with a kind of grim resignation that did not fit Jonathan’s intriguing description of a man in the grip of wild passion. All he would say about Prudence was that their meeting had been ‘difficult’. He had looked thunderous, and Rufa did not dare to press him for the details she longed for. The headline was that Prudence and her son – Edward’s only family – were not coming to the wedding.

It might have been a sign of disapproval. And it might have been because Prudence could not bear to see a stranger in her dead sister’s place. Rufa tried to imagine how she would feel if she were Prudence – for instance, if Lydia had died, and Ran had married someone else. She wanted to give the woman the benefit of the doubt, and to find non-sexual reasons for Edward’s black-browed silences.

He had explained that he was anxious about some business connected with his time in the army. Upon his return from Paris, he had immediately disappeared to London. Once again, though his face and voice had expressed pain and fury, he had refused to go into detail. Edward was bad at explaining. He had only made his business sound more mysterious. Rufa sensed something heavy on his mind, and worried that it was the prospect of marrying her. She wished Edward
trusted
her enough to confide in her. He had saved her home, but this was not enough. She was oppressed by the enormous leap of faith that was needed, when you put your whole heart into the hands of a virtual stranger.

Rufa, feeling it was only proper, had asked Clare Seal to design and make her wedding dress. Left to herself, she would have chosen something more conventional, perhaps from Liberty’s. She had to admit, however, that Clare had been inspired. Seeing the elegance Rufa had given to the yellow crêpe, she had made another slender column, cut on the bias with a nod to the 1930s, in heavy white silk. It left Rufa’s arms and shoulders bare, and was of a ruthless simplicity. The veil was of stiff, filmy white silk, which lay around her in crests and billows. It was held in place by old Mrs Reculver’s diamond tiara, which Edward had unexpectedly disinterred from a bank vault.

Rufa stood rigidly in the gleaming Melismate kitchen, displaying her bridal finery. Her mothers and sisters stared at her, almost afraid of her white perfection. Rose was trying not to cry.

Linnet said, ‘You look just like a princess.’

‘What’s that round your mouth?’ Rose made a dive at Linnet and grabbed her chin. ‘You’ve been at the chocolate! For the love of heaven, don’t eat anything else till it’s over, do you hear?’

Linnet was offended. ‘What if I’m starving?’

‘I’ll put you on a drip.’

Until twenty minutes ago, Linnet had been wearing pyjamas crusted with Weetabix. She was now as exquisite as a china fairy in a Kate Greenaway dress of
pale
yellow silk and white kid slippers. To her deep, serious joy, Linnet was Rufa’s only bridesmaid. Edward, a stickler for tradition, had given her the heart-shaped gold locket round her neck. He had also (advised by Rufa) given her two toy cradles, of a size to fit the Ressany Brothers. Even without the presents, however, Linnet approved of Edward. In her eyes, he was the man who had brought order into her home, and she liked order. She had enjoyed staying in the clean cottage beside Chloe’s field. Though she still slept in Lydia’s bed, she was pestering the Bickerstaffs to finish her new, pink-painted boudoir.

Rufa touched the chaplet of yellow rosebuds on the small dark head. ‘You look like a princess yourself. Doesn’t she?’

‘Better,’ Nancy said. ‘Real princesses would be jealous. I’m quite jealous myself.’

Nancy wore a clinging but essentially sober dress of dark gold silk, and a black cartwheel of a hat. Selena – down for two days between photoshoots – had appeared in a short skirt and skimpy silk cardigan of pale blue. Her cropped hair was now silver-white, and Rose could not get over her elegant otherness. Selena revealed very little about her mysterious new life, but it appeared to suit her. She had sat through a whole dinner the previous night without once opening a book. She had a new coolness and detachment, and regarded them all with distant amiability, as if through the wrong end of a telescope.

Lydia was a hedge-creature who cared not what raiment she put on. Rufa had bought her a trailing purple dress from Ghost. It made her look absurdly juvenile. She refused a hat, and wore her long curls
loose
. Rose was unrecognizable, and surprisingly pretty, in a dress and broad-brimmed hat of spotted navy silk. For the first time in years, she had put on make-up.

‘OK, girls. Time to scramble.’ Roger, in a hired grey morning suit, appeared at the door. ‘The cars are here, and I swore to Edward we wouldn’t be late.’ He was to give Rufa away. To honour the occasion, he had cut off his ponytail.

The hour was at hand. Rose and her daughters stared at each other, trying to take in the reality of the transformation. They were new women, in new lives and a new setting. The kitchen had only been finished three days before, and they were still coming to terms with the amazing lack of squalor. The sagging, nicotined walls had been freshly plastered and painted white. The rotten wooden cupboards had been replaced. The range, a museum piece, had been lovingly cleaned and restored. A regiment of wine bottles was drawn up on the kitchen table, and there were huge sprays of roses and lilies exploding out of unexpected places. In the Great Hall, the caterers were setting four long, flower-decked tables.

‘It’s incredible,’ Nancy said. ‘You did it. You said you’d marry money, and you did it.’

Rufa smiled uncertainly. ‘Not in the way I thought. It was silly of me to think I could go through all this with any old rich man. Thank God it’s Edward.’

‘I don’t know,’ Rose said. ‘I quite fancied having Tiger Durward as a son-in-law.’

This relaxed them all into brittle, edgy laughter. Tiger Durward had become the new family joke. After weeks of bombarding Roshan with flowers, he had booked himself into the Priory. He had emerged clean and sober, to carry on the pursuit with renewed
intensity
. After checking with Nancy that she did not mind, Roshan had twice been out to dinner with the reformed rake, and was bringing him to the wedding as a semi-official partner. It was only a matter of time before Tiger burst out of the closet like a June morning and gave the tabloids a field day.

They were all grateful to him, because they needed a family joke. The anniversary loomed – the Man had died on a still, warm, sunny day, very like this one. The last time they had all gathered in the village church, with its memorials to past Hastys and Reculvers, the Man’s coffin had lain in the aisle. The last time the table had been covered with bottles of wine, they had all been in a state of shock bordering on insanity. They were all praying, though nobody had said anything, that this wedding signified the end of mourning.

‘Rose, Nancy, Liddy and Selena in the first car,’ Roger said. ‘Ru, Linnet and I will follow exactly ten minutes later. Get a move on – Edward’s timing me with a stopwatch.’

Rose stared again at Rufa, then leaned forward to give her a delicate kiss. Finding her daughter did not feel as changed as she looked, Rose followed it with a fierce hug. ‘You look stunning. The Man would have been so proud of you.’

Rufa asked, ‘Would this have pleased him?’

‘Yes, when he’d had time to think about it,’ Rose said. ‘He loved Edward. He wouldn’t have let anyone else catch you.’

Forgive me, Rufus, Edward thought. Forgive me for loving her so much that I dared to marry her.