The Virgin in the Garden (46 page)

In the vestry they all nestled and chattered. Alexander approached his charge and said, “A kiss for the bride.” Daniel said, “Me first,” turned back the veil, and kissed her firmly. The vestry was small and stony with one little high window, heavily leaded. Marcus thought he might go out again, to make breathing-space. Winifred wiped up some tears, when Daniel kissed Stephanie.

They signed the register, scratching and spidery. Daniel Thomas Orton. Stephanie Jane Potter. Morley Evans Parker. Alexander Miles Michael Wedderburn.

Stephanie found Daniel’s Mum looking up at her. Mrs Orton hooked a little hand over the white arm and said confidentially, in a chesty whisper, “I do like to hear folk speak up. I suppose our Daniel gets lots of practice. But you spoke up lovely.”

Stephanie stared down. “I get lots of practice too, in my job.”

“Aye, I expect you would. I were that shy at my own wedding, I couldn’t get up more than a whisper, me throat were so dry, and I were all shaky. But you were cool as a cucumber.”

“It doesn’t all seem quite real yet,” said Stephanie, conventionally and truthfully. She didn’t want to be touched: she would have been glad to be able to shake the clutching little fingers off her arm. They were covered with spotted grey transparent nylon, through which the flesh took on strange tinges of brick, and brown, and bluish-purple.

“Aye, well it’ll dawn on you gradual,” said Daniel’s Mum, with a certain grim satisfaction. “You can’t expect to tek it in all at once, like.” She gave a peremptory little tug on Stephanie’s arm, preluding a confidence, and Stephanie bowed her head over her. She had discovered – indeed, it was the only thing she did know about her – that Daniel’s Mum saw life through a stream of endlessly dredgeable, endlessly self-referring anecdotes.

“T’other night I dreamed I were young again, I war young Clarrie Rawlings, and there was Barry Tammadge – a young man as I used to be friendly wi’ – and we were walking out, and he were pressing me, like – and I were saying, well, I don’t know, and, it might be, and, we’ll have to see, won’t we, and all the while I knew there was some reason I couldn’t,
you
know, something I’d gone and forgotten like. And when I woke up I cast about and it were a good five minutes, must have been, before it came to me I were a married woman. And widowed, and Dan’s Dad buried these thirteen years.

“I were married in 1922 and there it was all gone out of my head. Funny, that. It were so natural to be young and courting, as though all
the rest hadn’t gone by, as though I’d never taken me wedding right in, though Brian
is
gone, and has been all these years. Sometimes I look at me own hands and I think, whose are those then, old woman’s? But there it is. E’d have liked to see our Dan married, Dad would. We did have doubts as to whether he’d make it, him being so religious, which is inclined to put people off, and so fat into th’ bargain, which naturally made him shy, like. But he’s a good lad, in his way, I will say for him, and his Dad’d have been right proud to see him so well set up.”

Stephanie continued to lean foolishly over this new mother, unable to think of a word in answer to these confidences. She was rescued by Mr Ellenby who was forming his reverse bridal procession. He coiled the trail of incongruous pairs: bride and groom, Morley Parker and Frederica, Alexander and Winifred, Marcus and Daniel’s Mum, round the vestry table, signalled the organ, and got them going out again.

Daniel smiled around the church. He felt more that it was his, on this one progress as bridegroom, than he did proceeding towards his vicarious handshakes on ordinary days. He felt like a conqueror. He had brought it off. Against odds. His wife paced beside him in her drooping garments. He himself strode out jauntily, almost springing. He turned his head this way and that, surveying the flock, grinning a little with a primitive huge pleasure in the fact that they were there, and as they were, in their Sunday best, all different, portly and willowy, grey and gleaming, greedy and melancholy. They were all right, they were in the right place. He gave them private nods and happy acknowledgments. He saw Mrs Thone, sitting very still, her hands folded in her twilled silk lap, her face set and stony under a brimmed dark hat. He registered this stillness, dropped his smile, gave her a brief, harsh look that showed he had seen her, and went on to smile with unabated delight at the becks and bobs of the school matron behind her.

They came out onto the doorstep where they stood for some time, in twos, threes, groups, for the photographers. During this time Daniel said to Stephanie,

“I heard my Mum telling you what was what.”

“She seemed to think one didn’t believe one was really married until – until one was dead – or something.”

“Depends who you are. I doubt she exactly wanted to know. I reckon it’ll take us a bit of time to know what’s hit us. But not that long, I hope. At any rate, I’m enjoying this so far.”

“Are you?”

“Of course I am. We’re getting on fine. It’s all great fun.”

She took his hand and looked up at him, and all the cameras appropriately clicked.

Daniel included his Mum in his pleasure in the present solidity of the people around him. He had not, oddly, felt either alarmed or embarrassed to hear her discussing his fatness and churchiness with Stephanie. More a great, rash, comic glee. He was here, and married as he chose to be, and she was his mother. His little mother, with her thick humped pad of flesh across her upper back, with her small body now shapelessly squared above her narrow, bowed legs and thickened ankles. He was amused by the structure of her face, tremulous, greying, spattered with brown skin-stains, petulant with vanished prettiness like a ghost in the pout of the mouth and the pleat of the eye-corners. She wore on her head a kind of shiny, squashy bowl of unreal violet straw with a bundle of plaster holly-berries, cloth cornflowers, limp marguerites and bristling emerald feathers. Under this her thinning hair was permed into rigorous little coils; he remembered when she had had soft golden curls, much prized, hair that in her generation had led her to be labelled “a beauty” before she had any choice in the matter. She was hung about in a square crêpe dress with large purple and white flowers on, a modesty front of fluted lace, a rusty black winter coat. He did not like her. But with some quite other part of him he was simply delighted that she was there, just as she was, and that he knew it. He was even delighted that he knew that, and how, the grey coils had been gold.

Alexander found himself alone outside the church, waiting for the white ribboned car to come back for him. He felt happy and English. Bells sounded their clear, limited, recurrent jargon, notes tumbling over each other and caught up. The grass between the graves, thick with daisies, was soft and silent. He was a man who made detours to be alone in such places, green and still and stony, a man who felt reverent in porches, a man moved by stones, mossed over, rain-pitted, sooty, leaning displaced on railings and walls. Churchyards made more of Alexander. He drifted off down a path under dark flowering yews. Tennyson had written that yew trees, the males anyway, standing separate, smoked with pollen if you struck them. Idly, curiously, Alexander gave one of them a random blow and saw that it was indeed so, a living smoke did indeed go up into the still summer air, spin a little, and settle on his sleek morning suit.

Someone, bystander, gardener, delayed wedding-guest, was loitering at the far end of the graveyard. Alexander picked his way delicately, with
long pale grey legs, over two yellowing, newly-turfed hummocks. The air was so thick and slow he could not have called out.

The man wore a crumpled summer suit in an intense colour which Alexander thought of as electric blue, without knowing what kind of blue electricity might truly be. Over this he wore an elderly, deep-crowned panama. He was squatting against a Victorian tombstone-slab, poking with a sharp stick at the encrustations of moss over the lettering. As Alexander came nearer he did not look up. His shoes were muddy brown veldtschoen.

“Bill,” said Alexander, wondering if he should really have tiptoed mutely back the way he had come.

“I trust it is finished,” said Bill, still jabbing at the stone. “It took an unconscionable long time. I take it there was no hitch.”

“No.”

“Flattish strains of jubilation crept by me across the graves from time to time, whilst I was prowling around. I thought this was as near as I should decently get.” He rattled his stick in the holes of an imitation marble flower holder, which contained some browned dahlias and stiffening cornflowers. He read out his handiwork.

Ambiguous, don’t you think, and not totally coherent. I suppose I even hoped someone might rise up mightily and proclaim a cause or just impediment. But I gather no such luck?”

“No,” said Alexander. Bill rocked back squat on his heels and gestured up at him with his implement.

“I suppose you think I’m overdoing it. I suppose you think blood should call. I suppose you think I should have given up my profound beliefs and gone in there. I don’t suppose you see that I
could
not, I simply could not.”

“I haven’t said so.”

“English mollysoft politeness before anything else. Sheep. At least I take it seriously.”

“It was very moving,” said Alexander, leaning gracefully against a newish marble stone, to prevent green staining on his nacreous sleeve. “I was moved.”

“You would be. Anything moves you. I saw you, batting trees. ‘Thy gloom is kindled at the tips And passes into gloom again.’ Remember that, in your clouds of fruitful smoke, or whatever. Gloom, gloom. That’s what I see.”

“Bill, they were very happy.”

“Like sheep, sheep, temporary sheep. I wanted something real for her.”

Alexander could almost hear the hissing and spurt of his wrath. He was reminded of his perpetual image of Bill Potter as a fire smouldering in the inwards of a straw stack. He felt a vague responsibility to douse this one, and did not know how. He said, “I don’t see why you should mind quite so much.”

Bill turned sharply. “You don’t? You think I exaggerate? You think I’m putting it on.”

“No, no,” said Alexander soothingly.

“I wanted something
real
for her.”

Nettled, Alexander said, “Daniel is a real man. By any standards, I’d say.”

“Would you? Now that’s where I doubt, I do genuinely doubt, if it’s possible. In that world. Embalmed zombies. Christ. No one’s interested in that aspect of it, they think I’ve no manners, he’s a nice enough chappie according to his lights, serious and so on. It’s not a question of manners. The English panacea, good form. Good form, dead form. No, no. It’s a question of
life
. And that’s not in there.” He flung a crumpled hot arm in the direction of the church and nearly over-balanced.

“You think I should extend a loving hand and dance at the wedding?”

Alexander was not at all sure what he thought about this. All he could say, however, was, “Yes, of course.”

“I don’t want to.”

Alexander looked at him gravely.

“However, you have persuaded me. I will come with you. You were going there, I take it?”

“Oh yes,” said Alexander.

They got into the car together, and there was another delay whilst Bill instructed the driver to furl and stow away his white ribbons. “
Most
unsuitable,” he said to Alexander, leaning back on the grey cushions and pushing the panama almost down to the bridge of his nose. “We are neither virgins, nor cakes, nor festive. Certainly not
festive
. Lambs to the slaughter, you might say, but we’ll go quietly without bows, I think.”

The Masters’ Garden had elements of the ultimate garden in
Alice
, with its locked door in the high wall. Like everyone else Bill and Alexander made their way down the steep alley from the school and peered in. It was a rectangular walled plot: Alexander was perennially irritated by the limited imagination apparent in its layout. On the far wall was a kind of raised embankment with a paved ridge: at one end of this was a mock orange bush and at the other a waterless weeping willow. Here he had staged
The Lady’s Not for Burning
; from behind
these inadequate bushy brakes he had sprung in scarlet tights and black jerkin. Today trestle-tables, hung with much-laundered school damask, were balanced on the paving stones. On those were a cold buffet, two worn urns of coffee and tea, and a two-tiered, doric-pillared, blue-white cake. Alexander would have planted lavenders and lings, thymes and rosemarys, espalier peaches and pears. There should have been clematis and briar roses tumbling over the gate. But the uniform beds round the plot of grass were laid out in tidy rows of scarlet salvia, blue lobelia, white alyssum, in patriotic streaks, with two or three clumps of crudely brilliant petunias. Alexander disliked puce, and the more clamant purples. Along the margins of the hoed earth trotted school waitresses with foaming bottles and flat glasses.

Bill peered furtively round the door and then made a little dash in. Alexander was at a loss; he enquired if he should find Winifred, or Daniel and Stephanie. Bill said no, no, he was simply putting in an appearance, and an appearance, simply, was all he wanted to put in. He would creep about the peripheries, Alexander need not bother. Alexander did bother. He attracted a waitress, with a tray.

“That’s right,” said Bill. “Have one of my drinks, do. I do foot the bill. They are determined to confine my activities to that useful function. Very wise, no doubt. Which of us is going to make the speech as Bride’s Father or Close Friend of the Family? Have you prepared a few notes? I hoped you’d have gone so far. I shall leave it all in your capable hands. I detest speech-making. I shall enjoy listening to you deputising for me. It will amuse me. Now you go and mingle and I’ll go and wander up and down.
Please
don’t worry about me.” He swallowed a glass of wine, took another, and hurried away, his hat dangling now on the back of his head, looking distinctly tripperish.