Their Finest Hour and a Half (38 page)

There were no mats or rugs, either, as his father had tended to trip on them. The guests' footsteps clattered on the bare floorboards.

‘You'll hear any burglars coming,' said Dolly, ‘and that's a blessing. I knew a man, once, he had a big win on the dogs, and his wife had the whole house done out in Turkish carpeting – she'd always dreamed of it – and it was as thick as
this
,' she held out a finger and thumb, an inch apart, ‘and the very next night they were robbed while they were asleep. Four men with sacks, trampling all over the place, and they didn't hear a thing!'

‘Just through here,' said Edith.

The dining-room smelled of floor-polish and bay leaves, for she had collected every jug and vase she could find, and filled them with evergreen cuttings from the garden. She had draped the makeshift table with a starched cloth and tied the curtains back with ribbon and just before leaving for the town hall she and Arthur had brought in the food from the kitchen and covered the dishes with tea-towels. There was salad and spam, and rolls and new potatoes and jellied chicken, and a fruit-cream for dessert, and a wedding cake that was a plain sponge but with real chocolate icing, made from their pooled ration, and decorated with crystallized violets, and even Verna looked faintly pleased by the largesse on offer, though she refused a glass of madeira with the expression of someone offered arsenic.

It was Dolly who proposed a toast to the happy couple, which was kind, given that the shelter warden she'd been seeing since Christmas had recently turned out to have a wife in Swindon, but it was also Dolly who rapped on the top of the table with her knuckles, and then lifted the cloth to reveal the subterfuge beneath.

‘Ooh, it's a Morrison shelter,' she said.

‘It's Mr De Groot's,' said Arthur. ‘He loaned it to us because I don't have a dining-room table.'

‘Why don't you?' asked Myrtle, her mouth full of chicken.

‘Because this was my father's bedroom,' said Arthur. ‘He was very ill for the last few years of his life and he couldn't climb the stairs.'

For a minute or so, the breath of the sick-room seemed to thicken the air, and the only sound was the clink of cutlery on plate. It was Dolly who broke the silence.

‘A man I know who's in the fire service says he wouldn't get into a Morrison if you paid him a thousand pounds, he says if the house came down and then there was a fire, you'd be trapped in there like a roast in an oven, there'd be nothing but charred bones the morning after and he says he'd rather take his chances and die in his own bed.'

Edith risked a glance at Mr De Groot. He had stopped eating.

‘Did I mention that we'll be starting in studio on Monday?' she said, hurriedly, to no one in particular. ‘In fact, I've been asked to go in tomorrow, the wardrobe mistress is measuring the London extras.'

‘I didn't realize that you'd be going out to
work
,' said Verna, managing to imply, in a single word, that Arthur was unable to provide for his new wife and was therefore forcing her to take employment, possibly of a dubious nature.

‘I did say,' said Edith, mildly. ‘It's only for five weeks and then I'm sure Arthur and I will have a talk about what to do next.'

‘Everyone works now,' said Dolly. ‘Tussaud's never used to employ married women, but even they're thinking about changing their mind.'

‘You work, Mum,' said Myrtle.

‘I work inside the home,' replied Verna, with a modest lowering of the eyes. ‘It's more in the nature of a little hobby. I certainly don't have to go out in the blackout. Or on a
Sunday
,' she added, pointedly.

‘Well, I think it's smashing,' said Dolly. ‘Husband and wife going off to work together. After all, Arthur'll go back to war when the film's finished, won't he, and who knows if they'll see each other again?' There was a tiny silence. ‘
When
they'll see each other again, I mean. Obviously.'

‘Cake, anyone?' asked Edith. It was several months since she had had a headache, but she was getting one now.

Her cousins were the first to leave, the long train journey back to Norfolk ahead of them.

On the doorstep, Verna took Edith's hand. ‘Of course, I hope that you'll be happy,' she said. ‘Those whom God hath joined let no man put asunder, not that it was a religious ceremony. And I won't say “marry in haste, repent in leisure”, but if you
do
find that you're . . .' she paused, significantly.

‘Repenting?' suggested Edith.

Verna nodded. ‘. . . then remember that we're your family and there's always a place for you with us.'

Edith squeezed her cousin's hand, touched in spite of herself.

‘Mum still can't find anybody else for the shop,' said Myrtle, trampling the moment. ‘I want you to come back, as well. I miss you.'

‘And I miss you, too.' She kissed Myrtle's round cheek and wished she could have designed the child's outfit herself; the burgundy dress and coat made her look middle-aged – a dumpy, plain version of her mother. A sugar-almond colour would have been prettier, and a full skirt with a swing to it . . .

‘Is this
really
London?' whispered Myrtle, suddenly, desperately.

‘It's a suburb of London.'

‘But it's just houses.'

‘I know.'

‘Just house after house after house. I thought there'd be things to look at. I thought it would be exciting. I told everybody at school I was going to see film-stars. I even brought my autograph book, but it just looks like
anywhere
.'

‘I know,' said Edith, ‘I'm sorry.'

Dolly was the next to go, giving Arthur a great smacker of a kiss, and hissing ‘enjoy the honeymoon!' in Edith's ear, and then Mr De Groot shook hands with them both, and said that they could keep the Morrison shelter as a wedding gift. He disappeared along the side alley, and Arthur closed the front door.

‘Well . . .' he said, taking off his spectacles and giving them a polish. ‘My goodness. Goodness me.' When he replaced them, he could still see Edith standing in the hall with a wedding ring on her finger, so it seemed likely, now, that this was all real and that he wouldn't wake up in hospital with a lump on his head. ‘Well, I thought it went very . . .' He paused to consider how it had gone. Everything had been eaten, which was always reassuring.

‘Dolly's good-hearted,' said Edith. ‘She means well, even if she sometimes puts her foot in it.'

‘Yes.'

‘And I'm very fond of Myrtle.'

‘Yes. Do you think we should start clearing up?'

‘We could have a cup of tea first,' said Edith. She felt exhausted, as if she'd spent the afternoon digging trenches instead of handing out cake.

‘I think,' said Arthur, ‘I ought to begin on the blackouts. It'll be dark soon.'

Edith waited for the kettle to boil, and listened to Arthur's footsteps as they moved through the house, from the bare boards of the ground floor to the carpeted rooms upstairs – the box-room where he slept, the sunny spare room overlooking the back garden that he used for his hobbies, the square bedroom at the front that had been his parents'. There were twin beds in the latter, and pretty, faded, old-fashioned decor – matching rose-pink quilts, a dressing-table runner with cross-stitched flowers and tatted edging, a rag rug in shades of blue. She'd seen it for the first time only this morning, when Arthur had carried her suitcase up the stairs. ‘I expect you have things to do,' he'd said vaguely, edging out of the room again, and she had hung her clothes in the empty wardrobe, and changed into her wedding outfit, and tilted the cheval glass, so that she could see herself, head to toe. Smart, she'd thought, with a slight feeling of disappointment. Not bridal, nor blushing, nor a heart-stopping vision of nuptial loveliness, but Edith Beadmore in a smart dress, and wearing lipstick. Dolly had offered her a choice between Crimson Dawn and Sunset Glow and she was glad that she had chosen the paler shade.

Arthur had been standing in the hall when, self-consciously, she'd walked down the stairs, and he'd said, ‘You look very nice,' and then diffidently asked whether she'd like to wear his mother's pearls, and of course, she'd accepted, and whilst he was getting them she had braced herself for salmon-pink misshapes, or a rope that hung down to her navel, and when she'd opened the mauve quilted box, and pulled aside the tissue to reveal a double strand of ivory perfection, she'd been speechless. The necklace felt warm against her skin; she'd never owned anything as beautiful.

He was taking an awfully long time over the blackouts. She went into the dining-room and started to stack the plates. There was a crystallized violet left and since it was, after all, her wedding day, she placed it on her tongue and let it dissolve, and it was bliss, and on the way back to the kitchen she called a cheerful, ‘Tea's brewed, Arthur', up the stairs, but there was no response.

In the hobbies room, Arthur had been snared by the Christmas copy of
The Woodworker
lying open on the workbench. He'd forgotten to cancel his subscription when he joined the army, and every time he came home on leave there was another pile of magazines waiting for him, and he hadn't nearly caught up to date. The contents had acquired a wartime slant and he was rather taken with the short, squat standard lamp that cast its light across the floor, and could therefore be used without the curtains first being drawn. He heard Edith call, and it took a moment for him to move into the present, to understand that the voice belonged to his wife who was in the kitchen.

Ridiculously, he still found himself thinking of her as ‘Miss Beadmore'. ‘Edith,' he said, quietly, testing the word on his tongue. ‘Dear.' What else did people call their wives? There was ‘darling', of course, and ‘My Old Dutch', and ‘the wife', and other, much uglier terms that he'd heard in the army. He had a very dim memory of his father calling his mother ‘Sally-girl' before the Great War. After it, of course, there hadn't been very much in the way of husband-wife conversation – his father curled in the clumsy wheeled chair he'd been issued, roaring for something to take away the pain. ‘Woman,' he'd called her, sometimes. ‘For God's sake, woman, don't measure it in those bloody little spoonfuls.' Later, when his mother died and Arthur was in charge of the medicines, he'd had to hide them before he went to school, each day in a different place.

‘Would you like me to bring a cup up to you?' It was Edith again.

‘No, I'll come down very shortly. Dear. Thank you.'

Perhaps when he went downstairs, they could sit together in the lounge. Edith could sew and he could read – except that he wasn't much of a reader – so perhaps Edith could sew and he could look through back copies of
The Woodworker
. Or they could sit either side of the wireless, and listen to a play or a concert and then discuss it afterwards, like a couple in an advertisement for cocoa. And then they'd switch off the lights, and he would check the back-door bolts and they'd go upstairs together, and Edith would use the bathroom first, and then . . . and then . . . his imagination seemed to judder to a halt. He had, he realized, been viewing the wedding as an end in itself, but now there was this whole new set of difficulties to consider. He took off his spectacles in order to clean them, and noticed that one of the arms was a little loose, and it was quite a hunt to find the tiny jeweller's screwdriver that he used for such emergencies, and then it seemed expedient to tighten the screws on the other side as well. After that, of course, the lenses needed cleaning again.

Downstairs, Edith drank her own tea, and then Arthur's as well. She re-filled the kettle, and pondered whether to start the washing-up, and it seemed silly to wait, so that before she knew it she had finished it all, and was hanging up the dish-towels, and there was still no sign of Arthur, and the slight headache she had noted earlier was back again. She turned off the light in the kitchen, and stood in the hall and listened for any noise from upstairs.

‘Arthur,' she called, tentatively.

‘Yes, I'll be with you very shortly.'

She put a hand to her head, recognizing a sensation within it, and went over to the convex mirror that hung beside the front door, and looked at herself. She could see only the right hand side of her face. The left had disappeared, its place taken by a jagged black line that flexed and extended like a caterpillar. Behind her invisible left eye she could feel a balloon beginning to inflate, each caterpillar extension adding a little more air.

‘Arthur . . .'

He must have heard something different in her voice, for he came to the top of the stairs with a chisel in his hand, and looked down at her, his spectacles catching the light so that they flashed unbearably.

‘I'm getting a migraine,' she said. ‘The sugar violet that I ate. Stupid of me,' and she started to climb the stairs because very soon the cleaver would fall, and lying down would become imperative.

‘Can I fetch you something?' he asked. ‘A drink . . .'

‘No.'

‘I think I might have some Beecham's powders.'

‘They don't help, I'm afraid.'

‘A cold compress?'

‘Yes. Yes, thank you. I'm going to have to go to bed.'

As they passed on the stairs she caught a whiff of fresh sawdust and wondered what on earth he had been doing, but the thought slipped away and she undressed hurriedly, tugging at the tiny buttons, each one covered with the same champagne crêpe she'd used for the bodice, the material so pale that she had carefully washed and dried her hands each time that she'd sat down to sew.