The Past and Other Lies (21 page)

Jemima smiled. ‘Why, Mr Booth, what a lovely surprise. It’s Miss Flaxheed. Miss Jemima Flaxheed.’

‘Friends, most of you know me. I am Cyrus Flaxheed, proud father of the bride, and I consider myself well versed in speech-making, having for some fifteen years held the position of butler at Leadheath Hall in Sussex, home of Lord and Lady Parker-Soames. So you’ll forgive me, I hope, if I stand up here and say my piece.’

A chorus of murmurs rippled down the trestle table that ran the length of the church hall. Whether the murmur was of agreement or encouragement or an acknowledgment of Mr Flaxheed’s illustrious career depended on who you were.

The bride and groom were at the centre of the table. Dad stood beside Jemima, Mum on his other side, and as Dad launched into his speech the only murmur Jemima heard was a groan. The last time Dad made a speech had been at Aunt Mary’s funeral in the parlour of Uncle Alan’s farmhouse in Shropshire three years earlier. Some terrible and unmentionable illness had struck Aunt Mary down and whittled her away to nothing and, following her eventual demise, Uncle Alan had been unable or unwilling to say anything at all about his recently deceased wife. So Dad had stepped in and, even though he had seen Aunt Mary perhaps twice in the last quarter-century, he had still managed to talk about her for a full thirty minutes.

And this was a wedding—he had a captive audience and a role to play. Lord knew how long he might go on for.

‘This is an auspicious occasion in the life of any father. Marriage, the holy union of two of God’s children...’

Jemima closed her eyes. The honeymoon was to be in Torquay. She and Ronnie were catching the six o’clock train from Paddington and she began to wonder if they would make it.

‘...happens only once in a person’s lifetime, a state not rashly or injudiciously entered into, but one that, nevertheless, forms the basis for...’

Jemima opened her eyes. She had lost the thread of what Dad was saying. Judging by the glazed expressions around the table they all had.

She caught Muriel’s eye across the room, where her friend sat at the second table, between two of Mum’s distant cousins. Muriel gave her the cross-eyed look she usually reserved for when Gilfroy was being particularly officious.

Mr Gilfroy had been officious a lot lately, not to say downright mean in his insistence on timeliness, cleanliness and courtesy far beyond what duty demanded. His pursuit of these aims had been directed mainly at Jemima, so much so that in the end it had been a relief yesterday evening to triumphantly announce her engagement and to hand in her notice, to tell him exactly what she thought of his ideas of hygiene and to sweep out of there with her head held high before going for a celebratory port and lemon at the Cat and Fiddle over the road.

‘...a foundation, indeed, on which the very pillars of our civilised world stand firm!’

In fact it had become a celebratory four or five port and lemons, not only at the Cat and Fiddle, but at the Pig’s Head too, and the Station Arms, and finally some dingy little basement club called Jellicoe’s, where two middle-aged city gents insisted on buying her and Muriel outlandishly coloured cocktails and had then offered to escort them home. Actually, not home exactly, but to the Tunbridge Hotel over the road. She and Muriel had excused themselves to powder their noses and run giggling up the stairs and onto a passing tram.

Jemima glanced again at Muriel, who made no attempt to stifle a huge yawn, and after all those port and lemons it was a miracle they were here at all. And as for Mr Godfrey Gilfroy and his ‘clean nails are a sign of a clean mind, Miss Flaxheed’, well, he could think himself lucky she hadn’t decided to provide Mrs Gilfroy with some of the details of where exactly those oh-so-clean nails had been and how often.

But the moment had passed. Now she was a free woman. A wife.

‘...that fateful day, more than twenty-five years ago, when my dear wife, Alice, gave me the honour of her hand in matrimony...’

Oh, please!

Monday morning. She pictured Muriel hurrying along the lower-ground floor corridor at Gossup’s, late as usual, smoothing down her uniform, patting her hair into place, furiously scrubbing her nails clean at the tiny enamel sink in the staff lavatory, putting the urn on, rushing out to set up the tables before Mr Gilfroy came out of his office—and all with no one to help her. Jemima’s uniform, her apron and headpiece, would remain hanging on the peg in the changing room. That horrible white lace thing they had to wear on their heads that made them look like ladies’ maids in some big old house! And that awful starchy apron that was like having a piece of cardboard tied round their legs! She wouldn’t miss that or the spilled tea on the white linen tablecloths or the cake crumbs floating in tea dregs or the dried-up old spinsters from Maida Vale who left no tips and quibbled over their bills. No, she wouldn’t miss any of it.

‘...when I held her in my hand—a tiny, red-faced, screaming little thing she was; loud and angry even then—and I said to Alice, “Alice,” I said...’

Good Lord.

Muriel caught her eye again and winked conspiratorially. Her family all lived in Wapping, which was right the other side of London. Jemima returned her smile vaguely and looked away. People’s lives, she realised, went in different directions, and the friends you had today were not the friends you would have tomorrow.

‘...and now, here she is, a grown woman, on her wedding day, and I’ll tell you now, my friends, it makes me a proud father, and I hope—yes, friends, it’s my sincere hope—this lad sitting here beside my little girl appreciates what it is he’s won.’

For heaven’s sake!

Everyone was watching her now, Mum smiling indulgently as though she were reliving her own wedding. Would you smile if all you had to remember was a plain little wedding ceremony a quarter of a century ago in the bleak anteroom of someone else’s house? But time could make you nostalgic about anything. Twenty-five years ago Mum had been a second scullery maid and Dad had been a butler, a man so much older, so much above her in every way, that it must have been like marrying a prince. Here was a man who had taken her out of that life of servitude and drudgery to this: a different life of servitude and drudgery.

Sitting opposite Mum was Uncle Alan, his hair shining wetly and parted precisely down the centre so that you could see his scalp. He was silent, his smile creased with a slight frown. Was he, too, remembering his own wedding to Aunt Mary, who had withered away and was now dead, and whose only son, George, had survived more than four years in the trenches only to be taken by the flu epidemic of 1919? Uncle Alan’s frown deepened in concentration and she saw that his gaze was directed down the far end of the room, where Muriel was touching up her face powder in a little mirror.

Aunt Nora, sitting next to Uncle Alan, had the kind of fixed smile on her face that people had when they weren’t really listening. It was unlikely she was fondly remembering her own wedding, Uncle Harry having run off in 1915 with a VAD from the local hospital. Beside Aunt Nora sat Janie and Edie, both perched on the edge of their chairs. They worked, the two of them now, at the Hoover factory at Perivale. As Jemima watched them Edie slid a furtive hand up to her face to rub a large red pimple in the crease of her nose. Beside her, Janie hissed something and slapped Edie’s hand away.

At the other end of the room was Ronnie’s sister, Rose, and her husband Clive Trent. Rose and Clive were publicans, Ronnie had explained during the introductions after the service.

‘S’right—the Boar’s Head in Camberwell,’ Clive had announced proudly, as though she ought to have heard of this place and would be suitably impressed. Jemima hadn’t and wasn’t.

‘Oh yes, next time you’re down Camberwell way you shall have to pop in,’ gushed Rose, who was older than Ronnie but dressed like a little girl. She talked like one too.

Jemima had smiled demurely. ‘I can’t imagine a single reason why I should be down Camberwell way’, she had replied. As for ‘popping’ into the Boar’s Head, she’d as soon present herself at the doors of Holloway Prison.

There had been a short silence then Ronnie had coughed. ‘Well, my love, now we shall have a reason, shan’t we?’ he said, and Rose had smiled with relief, and Clive had positively beamed and looked as though he might actually slap his thigh. Jemima had waved at someone across the room and walked away. And now here they were, Rose and Clive of the Boar’s Head, Camberwell, grinning down the length of the table at her and actually holding hands as though this was the second-best day of their woeful little lives. As though she were now family. Well, she supposed she was. Dear God.

Bertha sat on the far side of Mum, but as she was leaning back in her chair all Jemima could see of her was her nose. Bertha was not smiling and no doubt this was because she was too busy daydreaming about herself and her own wedding to think about her only sister’s big day. Who Bertha was daydreaming about marrying, one could hardly imagine. Someone dull, that was certain.

Then there was Ronnie.

Ronnie sat beside her, staring straight ahead, the tips of his ears pink, his nose shiny with moisture, chin thrust out. His groom’s attire consisted of a hired slate-grey morning suit that was shiny around the elbows and knees where it had been steam-pressed too often, a cream carnation buttonhole that clashed with the buttercup yellow of the bridesmaids’ dresses, and his everyday, schoolmaster’s shoes that he had polished so highly it merely drew your attention to the fact that they were shop-bought and some years old. His neck squeezed out of the tiny opening afforded him by his too-tight collar so that he resembled a soldier on a parade ground awaiting the sergeant-major’s drill commands. The hand that reached beneath the linen tablecloth and grabbed her fingers was as stiff as a salute.

But instead of turning his gaze on her, he turned and grinned sheepishly at his best man. The best man was a rather sorry-looking chap named Collie Westing whom Jemima had only met for the first time at the church. He was the man with one leg who had been standing beside Ronnie on the church steps. She hadn’t asked—well there hadn’t really been a moment—who this Collie Westing was. She had been under the impression that Mr Cannon from the league was going to be the best man but now it appeared that Mr Cannon wasn’t here, nor indeed was the rather pompous Mrs Grantham-Jones, and the task had fallen to the one-legged Mr Westing. You presumed Mr Westing had been in the War with Ronnie, which was even more reason not to ask too many questions.

‘...sallying forth into the Kingdom of Heaven!’ announced Mr Flaxheed with some relish.

Sallying forth?

Ronnie’s fingers flexed then tightened around hers uncomfortably. Why did he stare straight ahead like that? What was he looking at? Why wasn’t he looking at her?

She looked across the table. Mr Westing had a wooden crutch that he had laid against the front pew at the church, and he had stood on one leg throughout the entire service so that she had kept glancing at him, fascinated, wondering if he would wobble and perhaps fall over, but he hadn’t.

Ronnie swallowed noisily. He would be making his speech next. She felt for the strangeness of the ring on her finger, twisting it round.

‘...and so I give you Mr and Mrs Ronald Booth—health and long life!’

‘
Health and long life!
’ came back the shout as two dozen glasses were raised with dry-throated relief.

Jemima forced a smile. Ronnie turned pink and glared at the tablecloth.

‘Up you get, lad,’ ordered Dad, nodding at his new son-in-law in the way that he would once have commanded the hall boy at Leadheath to empty the master’s chamber-pot.

Ronnie took a hasty swig of his beer, wiped his sleeve across his mouth, then scraped his chair back across the polished floor of the church hall leaving two grooves on its parqueted surface. A silence fell. Ronnie swallowed and said, ‘Ah...’ and his eyes flickered around the room as though he expected someone to hand him a speech. Jemima reached for her glass and raised it to her lips, staring into its gently fizzing amber depths and imagining herself elsewhere.

‘Um. Thank you. Yes, thank you, one and all for your kind toast...er... And to my, er...to Mr Flaxheed, of course—’ he tipped his head in his father-in-law’s direction without actually looking at him, ‘for his kind and, um, generous speech.’

Silence.

‘We—that is, myself and Miss—I mean, Mrs Booth, my new wife. Um. We’d like to thank you all for coming to this, our wedding. So, thank you.’

The bubbles in Jemima’s cider had dissolved and it tasted like ordinary apple juice. She wondered if she ought to have had beer instead but that looked just as flat. What she really wanted was a cocktail, but she might as well have wished for a honeymoon in Paris.

Ronnie, who had confided to her on their first night out that his ambition was to be a public speaker like Mr Cannon, had ground to a halt, but just as it appeared that he had run out of people to thank and might, therefore, have to sit down, he reached into his jacket pocket and fished out a folded scrap of paper, which he hurriedly unfolded and smoothed out.