The World is a Wedding (17 page)

‘Told her not to go walking with your wife again—don't want her causing any more trouble between us,' Probert said, referring to what had happened in the paint and wallpaper shop. ‘You agree with that, Wilfred Price?' he asked, making it sound like a question when Wilfred knew it wasn't. Wilfred stared into his mottled beer glass with its layer of dying froth. His fists were digging into his thighs. He moved away.

Wilfred finished the dregs of his pint, which tasted bitter in his mouth, and looked across the small, beery room. It was a Bacchanalian
 
public house, he thought to himself, remembering the
B
word he had read in the dictionary that morning, and was packed with hoary men with moustaches wearing thick tweed jackets, bellowing like bulls. There was no divide between the labouring and the professional classes in the Dragon Inn. Here, the solicitor and the lighthouse engineer, the coalminer from Wiseman's Bridge and the brewer from James Williams's Bottling Factory mixed together. There was another roar of laughter as a young farmer slapped his thigh and mimed riding a horse.

‘There's that ruddy pig again. Get that pig out of my way!' Handel Evans shouted at the pig, who was now snuffling about outside, next to the door. The church organist attempted to climb over the low gate across the door. ‘Move, damn pig, move!' The gathering of men jeered mercilessly at Handel Evans as he lifted his short, stiff leg to straddle the gate.

‘Up she goes!' the blacksmith bawled.

‘Been some time since Handel Evans got his leg over something,' Lloyd the Butcher quipped.

‘He doesn't have much chance; he's always playing with his organ!'

‘I'll be having the lot of you!' Handel Evans rejoined, now standing upright on the other side of the gate, pulling his jacket down from the hem with both hands, his face puce from the exertion.

‘Lads, listen you,' announced Lloyd the Butcher, stepping up onto a wooden crate. The men who had crowded into the pub gathered round, looking up at Lloyd, who was pink as a pork chop, his starched white apron stained with blood. ‘If you want to be in this year's Narberth versus Carmarthen tug-of-war tournament,' he announced, pink and proud, ‘and beat those salty buggers from Carmarthen who only fart to frighten themselves, shout out your good name now.' He took a notepad and a pencil from his apron pocket. ‘Don't be a sitter and a looker,' he encouraged. ‘Live as though you would die tomorrow!'

 

‘Da, I was thinking . . .' Wilfred said late that night, standing bare-chested in the kitchen and cutting a thick slice of bread, ‘do you think I'm a good person?'

‘What are you doing asking me that for?' Wilfred's da sliced the top off his boiled egg, revealing the circle of wet yellow within.

‘Well, it's not living that matters, but living rightly,' Wilfred quoted, slathering soft butter on the bread with the bread-knife. ‘Socrates says that not life, but the good life, is to be valued. But how do I live a good life?' Wilfred sat down at the clean table, not bothering with a plate. ‘Become a vicar?'

‘They'd never have you.'

Give my money away
, Wilfred nearly said, but he had already done that. ‘Help old ladies across the road? Or try not to knock people over?'

‘I would say, Wilfred
bach
, that not running people over is very important.'

‘Not even if it was an accident, mind you? Would I be a good man if I knocked someone over by accident in the hearse? So that I had to bury them?'

There was the gentle chaff of the spoon on the eggshell. ‘What did Socrates says about accidents on the road?' his da asked.

‘Didn't have a motor car,' Wilfred replied. ‘I'm in puzzles about it. It's difficult, isn't it?'

‘It's not if no one has a motor car.' Wilfred's da scraped out the bottom of his boiled egg with a chalky sound.

You're good, Da
, Wilfred said silently, reaching out and putting his hand over his da's weathered hands.

‘Right. Time for bed,' Wilfred announced. ‘Can't find my toothbrush for the life of me. I want to polish my pegs.'

‘Flora Myffanwy had it,' his da replied, turning his cap around in his hand. ‘She was cleaning with it.'

‘Cleaning her teeth?' Wilfred asked, puzzled.

‘No.'

‘No?'

‘Cleaning the wall,' said Wilfred's da reticently. ‘In the scullery.'

Wilfred looked bewildered.

‘Clearing the dust from the ledges on the wall,' his da admitted.

‘When was this?'

‘Last night.'

‘But last night she went to bed at eight o'clock.'

‘This was three in the morning.'

Wilfred collapsed onto the kitchen chair. She's gone mad, he thought. Flora Myffanwy had gone mad. He dropped the newspaper onto the scrubbed, gritless, dustless flagstones of the kitchen floor. I am Wilfred Price, he said to himself, trying to orientate himself, to remind himself who he was and what he was. I am an undertaker. A purveyor of superior funerals. And I have read the whole of the
A
words and some of the
B
words in the dictionary, he thought, struggling to define himself with certainty. I am in the kitchen in Narberth with my da. And I was going to be a father.

 

Flora Myffanwy swept the hearthstone in the bedroom again. It was clean, but the cleaning of it gave her something to do with her frantic, restless hands and somewhere to put her thoughts. Each day, as she cleaned the house, she took each utensil, each ornament, each crevice and corner, and—carefully and concentratedly—in the washing and the rubbing and the polishing of the contours of each object, she made the house her own.

Flora brushed the fallen leaves and twigs from the chimneypiece onto the rusted dustpan. The child had meant so much more to her than she had realised. And she was missing her father acutely, as well. He'd been buried the day she met Wilfred and her grief for him had been suspended—locked away—by shock, courtship, marriage and pregnancy. But her sadness for her father had been joined by her grief for her child and all the grief came tumbling out, like a swollen stream in spring full of melted ice water. And somewhere in her mind, too, was the memory of the loss of Albert.

She lit a small fire in the hearth. Wilfred was collecting the body of a farmer's wife who had died in the night, and Wilfred's da had taken an early-morning walk to forage in the hedgerows around Chamomile Bank. Flora had been waiting to have the house to herself. She looked around surreptitiously and scrunched up the newspaper into a ball, tearing stories of other people's lives in half, crushing the paper and placing it in the fire. It burned quickly and easily, almost with panache.

She took the small cardigan from the chest-of-drawers. It was peach-coloured wool and she had knitted it herself, counted each stitch one by one, in a gentle exactness so that the cardigan would fit the small chest of the child when it was born. She did up the buttons, simple bone buttons, four of them. She folded the sleeves inwards and laid the cardigan on the fire. It smoked blackly. She took the white wool bootees for feet that couldn't walk and the delicate cotton bonnet for a fragile head and put them in the fire, too. She found the nightdress that was caked thickly with blood and she placed it on the fire, that second skin of hers, and she watched it, mesmerised by her own blood burning. She sat there on her knees in the cold morning light, burning her clothes and her daughter's clothes, until they were no more.

She would not have her daughter with her: that small dignified child with her brown plaits and her brown dress and her flat chest. The child who had come to her in a dream of knowing and said to her, before she went, forever: ‘My name is Martha.' The baby had grown beneath her heart and would stay in her heart.

The fire flickered confidently and with energy, growing straight and tall and licking the chimney with exuberance. It cackled and the buttons on the tiny cardigan cracked and then smoked and the cotton smouldered. Flora shifted on her knees, the hearthrug leaving its impression on the bare skin of her calves. The newspaper turned to black carbon and kept its shape. She sat watching the fire, feeling it warm and colour her cheeks, and holding her thin white hands against it, letting its heat flow through her.

This house, here, that she had stayed in like a guest, in which her daughter had lived her brief, unlived life, Flora would make her home. Her daughter had left, but Flora would stay. Wilfred was kind to her, and during these painful days when she had been cleaning and hurting, she had come to understand the quiet value and immense consolation of Wilfred's kindness. Now, she felt married to Wilfred. There was nowhere else she wanted to run to, no other man—including Albert, as vital as he had been to her—that she wanted to marry. This surprised her, but it comforted her too. It was a gentle and quiet choice; she had come to it gradually, and it gave her peace. Albert she had loved, but Wilfred was the man she was with now, wanted to be with now.

Once the minute specks of scarlet fire had chased themselves around the cardigan, the cotton and the paper, and Flora had prodded the fire until it had died into black, she swept the hearth of the fine, clean ashes and flung open the window in the bedroom. She put her winter coat over her nightdress and bicycled along Water Street, then down the grassy hill to the tree-lined lane where she placed the ashes in the stream and watched the black bits of broken buttons bob away in the clear, icy water.

 

‘I am delighted to welcome,' announced the Master of Ceremonies, ‘our very own Narberth undertaker, Mr. Wilfred Price, known to all and sundry as Wilfred, and his beautiful wife, Flora Myffanwy Price, who will be awarding the prizes in the dog competition this afternoon.'

The Queen's Hall was jam-packed, and well-meaning people strained to glimpse Wilfred and Flora standing at the front with the judges. Wilfred doffed his hat and felt a certain embarrassment; although the crowd looked kindly at them, there were a few whispers. It was stuffy in the Queen's Hall and it smelled of dog.

‘Are you well, my dear?' he asked Flora quietly.

‘Yes,' she replied, removing a dog hair that had floated on the air and stuck to her lip. Ruddy dogs, Wilfred thought to himself. There were hairs all over his best work trousers and if that ruddy Jack Russell didn't stop yapping soon . . .

‘Ladies and gentlemen—and you, Willie the Post!' the Master of Ceremonies called. ‘This first category is The Most Obedient Dog in Narberth Competition. Narberth's most sensible dog, ladies and gentlemen.'

A cluster of owners and their dogs began eagerly jogging in a circle in front of the judges. One small boy, not much taller than his Scottie dog, was being dragged by his pet, not that the dog appeared to know where it was supposed to be going. A poodle, highly-strung, flew at an Alsatian, which barked ferociously.

‘Mrs. Morgan going past the judges now, with some off-lead heelwork,' the Master of Ceremonies commentated.

‘And, Mr. Peters, not really a dog, but a very loved member of the family, isn't he?' the Master of Ceremonies continued.

‘Indeed,' Mr. Peters admitted gravely.

The judges watched, imbued with a sense of importance at the civic duties bestowed upon them. Wilfred smiled. He would attempt to enjoy the afternoon. He would follow Mr. Auden's advice. ‘Hold all things lightly,' his apprentice-master had said to him once, offhandedly, in the earliest and most innocent days of his apprenticeship. ‘It is the only way we can be undertakers, the only way we can live amongst all this death. Because nothing is deathless.' Then Mr. Auden had clapped his hands and rubbed them together, as if he was a man who had just got up from his knees and finished praying.

Wilfred, trying to look enthusiastic, watched the dogs walk in obedient circles. Then a thought occurred to him: perhaps he was being punished.

‘Now, ladies and gentlemen,' the Master of Ceremonies called, attempting to bring order, ‘The Dog with the Waggiest Tail. Not you, Handel Evans!' The crowd laughed.

‘I'll have your guts for garters!' Handel Evans retorted and punched the air jovially. There was a kerfuffle of chairs and barks, and purposeful people bustling in front of Wilfred. Another procession of owners paraded onto the floor, proud as punch of their pets. The Scottie terrier came along again with an even smaller boy—the younger brother, Wilfred presumed—and the small child kept tickling and patting the dog to make its white tail swing, while the judges consulted back and forth, writing notes intently on clipboards and scrutinising the dogs' tails.

Wilfred watched the dogs walk in obedient circles. Then the thought occurred to him again. Maybe he was being punished. Had this loss happened to him because he had done something wrong: not been good enough, not prayed hard enough, not read the Bible and disobeyed God without even noticing? Perhaps he should have stayed married to Grace, obeyed his holy vows, not had a pint in the Conduit while Grace went alone, abandoned, onto a train and to goodness knows where. Maybe he should have thought more about Grace and less about his overwhelming love for Flora Myffanwy.

He realised that his guilt over his carelessness towards Grace had become a very heavy weight on his mind, one which he couldn't ignore, couldn't move aside or bury away, a guilt that sat rigidly in the centre of his thoughts, rotting and leaking shame. He wanted, as it were, to bury his guilt in a nice coffin, lower it into the ground and leave it be. But now it was too late: Grace had gone and his guilt had stayed.

Wilfred nodded absentmindedly at a dog-owner walking past with a Corgi. Yes, maybe he was being punished. He had had his chance to be good, to love and honour Grace and her child, to sacrifice himself to care for an honest, kind woman with a burden. He could have helped her, stayed with her, at least tried to love her, instead of lying in their marriage bed hating her. But he hadn't, he had wanted his own way and the wife he yearned for, Flora Myffanwy. He sighed. And though he had had his heart's desire in marrying Flora, he thought that perhaps she hadn't truly opened up her heart to him. So he couldn't make love, not really, to Flora, and he felt so ashamed of himself. No, he thought, with a sinking, shrinking feeling, he had not been a good man; he had not lived a good life. And now, he thought to himself, God had punished him.