The Wedding Party (15 page)

‘And perch.'

‘Why perch?'

I briefly explained about the perch; I told her about the touch of the wild. She just laughed and said:

‘Well, in that case the sooner we get back and start fishing the better.'

‘You have,' I said, ‘the most charming way of putting things.'

On the way back, as we gathered firewood, I couldn't help thinking that perhaps Aunt Leonora had after all made a mistake, that morning, in her careful arrangement of partners. It was really the shy Mr Benson who should have
been wooding with Valerie, in the idyllic world of wild duck, yellow water-lilies and silver poplar leaves. She, undoubtedly, would have taken him clearly and finally out of himself.

But it was too late for such changes now, as I instantly discovered when we got back to where Aunt Leonora and Peggy were already laying out, in the alder shade, picnic cloth, knives and forks, pepper and salt and glasses.

In that distinctive, high-pitched voice of hers Aunt Leonora was saying:

‘Never fished before? I'll bet a million to one he'll have beginner's luck. He's just that sort. He'll catch an outrageous whopper. You see.'

At these extravagant and prophetic praises of Mr Benson Peggy merely smiled shyly and polished a wine glass with a tea-cloth.

‘You can feel it in some men,' Aunt Leonora said. ‘Aren't you lucky?'

She could hardly have spoken with greater candour if she had suddenly speculated on the actual date of the wedding or something of that sort. She was once again at work as the great end-shaper and suddenly, almost punctually on the stroke of midday, prophecy was fulfilled. I heard a sudden excited shout from Uncle Freddie, thirty yards or so down the lake, where he and Mr Benson were already fishing.

‘Hold it! Take it steady! I'll get the net!'

I promptly dropped a whole armful of wood and ran down to the lakeside. Uncle Freddie had the net in his hands and in the net was a splendid green-gold acrobatic perch, I
judged of nearly a pound and a half in weight, glistening in the sun.

The expression on the pallid Mr Benson's face was one of catastrophe. It might have been the look on the face of a man who, by some ghastly mischance, had just killed a child. It was chalky with fright. His hands were trembling too and his mouth actually fell open, in an extraordinarily fish-like way, as he watched Uncle Freddie take the hook from the perch's mouth and lay the squirming fish on the grass in the sun.

‘Good God!' Aunt Leonora said, rushing forward and peering excitedly through her flashing spectacles. ‘What a beauty. There! Didn't I tell you?'

These last words were addressed to Peggy, who had crept up behind us with the reticence of someone coming to peer at a graveside. Her shyness was now composed completely of disbelief, which Aunt Leonora instantly shattered with another triumphant burst of candour:

‘It's quite obvious you two will never starve!'

Aunt Leonora now looked almost ready to embrace Mr Benson; he might have been on the verge of entering the bosom of the family. Like a shy hero he stood watching Uncle Freddie putting another gluey pink worm on the hook and heard Valerie add still further to his discomfiture by saying, with a luscious laugh:

‘My, my, a positive Isaac Walton.'

Peggy blushed deeply and with unconcealed pain. Uncle Freddie, for once really excited, declared that perch, once they got started, were great feeders. Mr Benson must therefore
get at 'em; we must all get at 'em; in no time at all we'd be pulling them out by the score.

‘
Filets de perche!
' Aunt Leonora exclaimed. ‘Thank God I brought plenty of black pepper and butter.'

Uncle Freddie, Mr Benson and I now began feverishly to fish and soon Mr Benson, blessed by that uncanny luck that so often falls on the shoulders of beginners, was pulling out perch at the rate of one every four minutes or so. Each time he hooked a fresh one the thrill of fright went through him again, completely draining his face of blood.

Soon wood smoke was blowing fragrantly on the air.

‘Somebody start bringing the fish so that I can scale and fillet them,' Aunt Leonora called. ‘How many now?'

I started off towards the fire, carrying half a dozen fair-sized perch in Uncle Freddie's creel. The lunch cloth was now spread out, filled with good things. Like a golden-brown crown, the steak-and-kidney pie, in a big round baking dish, sat in the centre of an array of salads, tomatoes, radishes, brown and white loaves, cheeses, custard tarts and fresh strawberries and cream.

Every now and then Aunt Leonora peered excitedly at the fish, pointedly asking to know what lucky, clever man had caught them all?

‘Mr Benson,' I said. ‘Uncle Freddie and I haven't had a touch.'

‘What a man! What a wizard!'

After this fulsome burst of praise for Mr Benson she turned on me with one of those accusatory thrusts of hers and said she didn't suppose she could rely on me to gut and
fillet the fish? I said no, indeed, she couldn't.

‘If you want anything doing do it yourself,' she said. ‘It's extraordinary what hidden talents
some
men have.'

I murmured that this equally applied to some women too.

‘Eh? What was that?' she said. ‘Mumbling again. Get me some water. There's a washing-up bowl somewhere.'

I picked up a white enamel bowl and went down to the lake's edge to dip water. A young green frog jumped out of a bed of reeds as I filled the bowl and fell into the lake with the merest whisper of a plop. I watched it swim away and then walked back to the picnic fire just in time to hear Aunt Leonora say:

‘Uncle Freddie was another dark horse. You'd never think he had it in him.'

This blatant piece of observation wasn't exactly a lie; it was just plain outrage. What was worse, she said it with an almost innocent lack of shame. It was exactly as if she were now trying to present Mr Benson not merely as the great angler but as the potential great lover, a Casanova, or something of that sort.

It was small wonder Valerie winked at me. This time I didn't wink back. Instead I was taken completely by surprise by seeing Aunt Leonora suddenly slit a perch up the belly with all the deftness of an extremely practised fishmonger. A moment later a cloud of blood filled the bowl and for a moment I thought Peggy would be sick.

By now the morning was growing hot and it seemed to me an appropriate moment to test the temperature of the red-currant wine. I went to fetch a bottle from the lake. It
was already beautifully cool but Aunt Leonora looked at it with a glare of dark disapprobation.

‘And who gave you permission to start on the wine?'

‘Uncle Freddie.'

‘Don't fib.'

I said I liked this. And added: ‘You, I suppose, don't want any?'

‘Good grief, man, don't be dim. And you'd better take a glass to Mr Benson.
He
certainly deserves it.'

The two girls, I noticed, had retreated for a walk. Blood, scales, fins, tails and fish-gut were strewn everywhere. A strange, half-muddy, half-fishy odour hung on the air. I felt my appetite start to drift away.

Farther down the lake Mr Benson's luck, perhaps happily, had started to wane. He too was hot. Sweat was pouring from his brow and nose. Uncle Freddie greeted the sight of the wine with cries of relish and an enthusiastic: ‘Splendid thought, dear boy. Bless you. Absolute salvation.'

Parched with excitement and thirst, Mr Benson sat on the bank and drank the wine in deep draughts, as if it had been mere rose-coloured water.

‘Any more fish?' I said.

Uncle Freddie said only two and not very large at that. They seemed, he thought, to be suddenly off feed. I said I would take them and a moment later started to carry away, in the keep-net, the brace of perch, not much more than tiddlers: so small indeed that half way to the camp fire, as much out of selfish regard for my appetite as a sense of pity, I dropped them quietly back into the lake.

Gold spectacles dancing, her hands bloody as if from some messy sacrifice, Aunt Leonora demanded to know how the miraculous Mr Benson was faring now? His luck, I told her, had left him; the fish were suddenly off feed. This information, far from lowering Mr Benson in her eyes, merely seemed to elevate him further and she gave a half-ecstatic gasp and said:

‘He's been marvellous. He's saved the morning. Isn't she lucky?'

‘Isn't who lucky?'

‘That girl. Valerie.'

‘Good God, not Valerie. Anyway here they are coming back. For Heaven's sake take a good look at them. Valerie's the big golden one—'

She wasn't listening. Instead she was washing her hands of blood. When they were dry and clean again she laid a number of perch fillets, I think twelve or fourteen of them, side by side in the frying pan. They were a queer greenish mud colour, not at all unlike the colour of the frog I had seen jump into the lake, but she dabbed lavish lumps of butter all over them with something like reverent rapture.

‘Put more sticks on the fire. And where is the wine for Heaven's sake? I suppose you men have been fairly slopping it down.'

I put more wood on the fire; I said I would go to fetch the wine; and as I walked away I heard her call in shrill double command:

‘Girls! Start cutting bread. And call Uncle Freddie and
dear Mr Benson. They've five minutes to get their hands washed. I'm cooking.'

When I got back from fetching the wine and instructing Uncle Freddie and Mr Benson to get ready for lunch the strangest of odours filled the air. It floated everywhere with a sickly twang, a noisome compound of wood smoke, burning butter, drying mud and a fishmonger's back-yard on a hot afternoon. There was also a monstrous sizzling to be heard as Aunt Leonora poked and turned the fish with an egg-slice.

Valerie, I noticed, was vigorously making up her face and heavily spattering her bosom with perfume, but whatever scent she was using faded on the air like a delicate moth against a powerful flight of hornets. By contrast Peggy seemed shyer, quieter than ever and, I thought, awfully, ominously pale.

Some minutes later Mr Benson and Uncle Freddie came slowly up the lake path, each carrying two bottles of wine. Ten yards from the fire Uncle Freddie suddenly stopped dead, said ‘Good God' in an alarmingly loud voice and recoiled a good two feet from the pan of perch.

‘And what are you good-Godding about? You've washed your hands I hope? Sit yourselves down-we're nearly ready.'

‘I mean it's awfully hot – I mean the fire—'

‘Mr Benson, sit yourself next to Valerie. You,' she said to me, ‘start pouring the wine. Don't slack about so!'

If I had any idea of doing anything about this shrill rebuke I was saved from the necessity of it by Uncle Freddie. With hands positively tottering and with the eagerness of a
traveller at the end of some parching desert trek he was already pouring a large measure of wine for Mr Benson and an even larger one for himself.

Mr Benson, I noticed, was ominously flushed. His normally pallid face was wreathed in a tipsy pinkish cloud. Aunt Leonora's notions of taking him out of himself had succeeded so well indeed that he now seemed almost a stranger. His eyes had in them a moist groping glow and suddenly I saw him turn them on Peggy in a second, of fleeting, helpless appeal. She for her part could do nothing but appeal as mutely in return.

In the smoky heat of that fishy, sombre midday Aunt Leonora suddenly gave a girlish shriek, said ‘Ready!', brandished the sizzling frying pan and commanded all of us to sit down and fall to.

For one awful moment I thought Mr Benson would fall. His legs seemed momentarily to totter under him. He ended by flopping heavily between Valerie and Peggy, most of his wine spilling on the way.

All the time that monstrous canopy of muddy fishiness hung over us. And soon the fish itself was on our plates, greenish, gluey, glassy with hot butter. Then as we began to toy with it, some of us with politeness, some not, and most of us under heavy cover of bread, Aunt Leonora suddenly glared across at me from behind her dancing gold spectacles and demanded to know:

‘Well, how does it strike you?'

In a low voice, from behind a hunk of bread, I simply said that it struck me.

‘Eh? What was that?' Those charming big teeth of hers almost snapped at me. ‘Don't mutter. I've told you before.'

‘Oh! the fish?' I said. ‘Quite indescribable.'

‘What? How do you mean? Indescribable?'

‘Just indescribable.'

She gave me one of those dark searching glowers of hers, at the same time masticating with blatant richness on a lump of perch, and then said:

‘Well, I won't claim they have quite the
finesse
of those we had at Geneva – the waters are colder there anyway and that makes a difference – but I've had worse. I've had worse.'

I was about to ask where? when she peremptorily accused Uncle Freddie of neglecting the wine.

‘Mr Benson's glass is empty, isn't it, Mr Benson? Disgraceful. If any man's glass should be full it's Mr Benson's. Fill the dear man to the brim.'

Mr Benson, who was in no position to know whether his glass was full or empty, gave a slight retching sound but otherwise made no reply. At the same time Uncle Freddie took an enormous swig of wine, gulped at some impossible lump of fish stuck in his throat, smacked his lips, and involuntarily belched aloud.

‘Freddie!'

Peggy coughed weakly on a fish-bone. I hadn't the heart to look at Valerie, nor she at me, but suddenly I felt the air to be full of desperation.

‘Oh! look at the swans, Aunt. And five cygnets.'

She turned sharply to look at the lake.

‘Swans? What swans? Where? I don't see swans.'

‘Over there. No – not that way – farther up. By the island. You see the quince trees? Just beyond. You mustn't miss them – they look like a bit of ballet.'

Her nature, as well as being that of a schemer, is also an intensely curious one and she abruptly got up and walked over to the lake.