A Rather English Marriage (4 page)

‘Well done, Dad. You OK? Reminds me of my wedding, this car,' whispered Vera, squeezing his hand. Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder, Roy remembered. No man ever had. Death had them parted. And Death shall have no dominion, the funeral words came back to mind. In the midst of life we are in death. He rooted in his pocket for a handkerchief, and the driver, whose ears had been expecting those very rustlings, said deferentially, ‘We have some organ music … I could play the tape, sir, madam, if that might be a comfort.'

‘No, thank you', ‘Thanks, no', said Roy and his daughter simultaneously.

By seven o'clock the last aunt and neighbour had left, and by nine the washing-up was finished, and the kitchen shipshape again. Let him help me move the furniture back, Vera thought; it'll tire him out and then maybe he'll sleep. Together they carried the table into the kitchen and replaced its flowered plastic cover; then they arranged the dining table in its usual place down the centre of the front room and replaced the lace doilies that decorated its shining surface. Kitchen chairs were carried through to the kitchen; bedroom chairs upstairs to bedrooms, and the garden seat returned to the garden shed. Two plastic bags of rubbish were stacked against the side of the house ready for the dustmen. Roy Southgate locked the shed and the back door, and put the chain on the front door.

Vera was sitting at the kitchen table, her palms swishing
across the plastic tablecloth. She's a good girl, he thought, always been a good daughter to us both, and I don't know what to say to her.

‘Well,' said her father, ‘I think I'll turn in. Been a long day.'

‘Cup of tea before you go upstairs?' said Vera, thinking, This is it; this is the worst moment. The first of all those lonely nights.

‘Bless you, pet, no thanks.'

‘Think I'll watch the telly for a bit. Won't keep you awake, will it?'

‘No, no, you go ahead. You've been a big help. She'd have been proud of you.'

‘And you, Dad, and you. Night-night, sleep tight.'

Awkwardly he bent over and pecked a kiss at her forehead. They'd never gone in for hugging and kissing as a family – apart from him and Grace, of course, in private, never when the children could see - and he felt ill at ease alone with his grown-up daughter. But she'd been a good girl, a comfort to him today, as far as anyone could.

‘You've been ever so good to me, love. Don't be too long going to bed, will you? It's been a long day.'

After he had cleaned his teeth and combed his hair, Roy Southgate put on his pyjamas and pulled the cord into a bow round his waist. He dropped his vest and socks and underpants and white shirt into the laundry bag that hung on the back of the door and put a set of neatly folded clean clothes across his chair, ready for the morning. Thank God for the Army. Taught you discipline. Kept you going. He took one of his wife's sleeping pills from the tiny plastic bottle in her bedside drawer. He got into bed, folded his glasses on the bedside table, lens side uppermost so as not to scratch them, and buried his face in her last pillow. He'd have to change it soon, but not yet … not just yet. He still fancied he could catch the scent of her face-cream and the dry, brittle smell of her hair. It could comfort him a while longer. His young wife, his best girl, his little lady.
O for the touch of a vanished hand/And the sound of a voice that is still!

‘Sleep well, lovey,' he whispered into the darkness, feeling the drowsiness roll in like fog. Sorry, Gracie, but I think the pill's taking over. You don't need me to cry. You know it all.

An hour later, Vera lay awake in her narrow schoolgirl bed. And now it's me, she thought. I'm the older generation now. Wonder if he wants to come and live with us? Not that he'd ever say. He'd think it was too much trouble. Long way to uproot him at his age, away from here and the allotment and everything. What would the boys say? Stan wouldn't care for it, but then he never does care for much except his beer.

Weighing up the possibilities, Vera fell asleep.

How
small
the working classes are, reflected Reginald Conynghame-Jervis as he lay drowsily next morning on Mary's side of the bed. Those two, absurd pair, side by side in the back of the funeral director's Daimler.
He
can hardly be five foot six: size of your average prep school prefect, and as for that skinny daughter with her strident Ozzie voice, I doubt if she's as much as five foot. Couldn't tell with the wife, by the time I saw her she'd shrunk, anyway. Beastly thing this cancer. Even Mary was half her normal self by the end. Poor old girl. Miss her. House is too damn quiet. He snivelled to himself and then stopped at the sound of a key in the front door.

‘Squadron Leader …? You still here?' called Mary's cleaning lady.

‘Be with you in two shakes of a duck's tail!' he said, and struggled into his striped towelling dressing-gown.

‘What's that?'

‘I
said
, I won't be a tick!' And, wrapping the cord round his paunch, Reginald went to the top of the carpeted stairs and looked down into the hall. Elsie O'Murphy stood looking up at him.

‘I'm ever so sorry, sir. I didn't realize you was still in bed. Shall I bring you up a nice cuppa char?'

‘You do that.' And he walked into the bathroom, yawned into the mirror, scratched his stubble, scratched his belly, and flexed his knees once or twice. They creaked. He pissed into the basin, then swirled cold water round after it. Mary hated him doing that.

Back in the bedroom he looked in his chest of drawers: no luck. Just in case, he swung open the wardrobe, but there were no clean shirts except for a couple of checked Viyella jobs, or short-sleeved ones for holidays.

‘Where are all my clean shirts, Elsie?' he shouted down the stairs.

She emerged from the basement kitchen and craned her head up to see him through the banisters. ‘You what?'

‘I can't find any clean shirts.'

‘Where did you put them after the wash? I didn't iron none, not last week.'

‘Wash? What wash? Mary does that no, you do …'

‘I ain't done none, not since Mrs C-J, God rest her soul, went into hospital.'

‘Where's the washing machine? Go and have a look. Perhaps there are some in there.'

Elsie O'Murphy walked out of his sight and went down the stairs into the kitchen, then into the back scullery where the washing machine stood, and opened its fish-eyed door. Inside were several shirts, mould creeping over their dampness, turning the edges a pale, lichened green. She tightened her lips in exasperation, pulled the shirts out - they smelled rotten - and ran cold water and bleach into the sink.

She knocked at the bedroom door with his cup of tea on a tray.

‘Come in!' he called out irritably, and, as she entered the acrid, musty room, he turned towards her helplessly, belly straining against his vest and spilling over his fawn trousers.

‘I can't wear
these.'
He pointed indignantly at some Viyella shirts.

‘And why not?' she asked.

‘But, good heavens, woman, it's a
Monday
not a
weekend,'
he expostulated.

‘Well, sir, they're all you've got clean, so put one on and drink your tea, and when you're ready I'll show you how to work the washing machine,' she said. ‘If you strip the bed and bring those sheets down we can start with those. I've already done Madam's room.'

Bugger that for a lark, he fumed to himself. Strip the
bed
, work the
washing
machine?! Who does the woman think I am? What's more, I don't like her tone. Insolent. Now Mary's
gone, she thinks she can talk to me like that? Bloody nerve. But he shrugged into the clean checked shirt, twitched the faintly greasy sheets from the bed and carried them and the pillowcases downstairs.

Before Mrs O'Murphy left three hours later, the beds aired and freshly made, the house sweet-smelling, the sheets blowing on the line, she stopped and looked into the study, where Reginald sat replying to letters of condolence.

There was a very good turn-out for the funeral
, he wrote,
old Watters was there, and ‘Bullfrog' Hamilton …

He looked up.

‘Yes, Elsie? Off now, are you? When will we see you again?'

‘Wednesday,' she said. ‘As usual. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I've done for the last three years.' And hardly a day off sick. Not that
he'd
notice.

‘Begging your pardon,' she said, ‘and I know things haven't been easy, and I couldn't be more upset for poor Madam, such a lovely lady she was, ever so kind, and always regular…'

‘Wednesday, then,' said Reginald, and turned pointedly back to his letter.

‘… but I haven't been paid these last two weeks,' Elsie concluded.

‘Ah.' He looked up. ‘Haven't you? I see. And do you normally get paid monthly, or what?' ‘Weekly, in cash.'

‘Cash, eh? How much would you want?'

‘I do two hours, three mornings a week - I done nearly four hours today, but that was on account of all the washing having to be done again and I won't charge you nothing for that, though I'll have to if it happens again - but in a normal week that's six hours. Madam paid me four pounds an hour, six fours is twenty-four and she give me one for luck, that makes twenty-five pounds a week, cash, on time, and a week's bonus at Christmas, sir.'

‘You mean I already owe you
fifty pounds?'
said Reginald, thinking, And I'm supposed to make my own bed and do my own washing for that? Woman's grossly overpaid.

‘When it's convenient.'

‘Well, it's not convenient now, Elsie. Have to go to the bank. Friday suit you?'

‘Seventy-five pounds on Friday will suit quite nicely, thank you, Squadron Leader. I'll iron those shirts Wednesday, those that come up all right, some'll be spoilt, bound to be. If you'd be sure to bring them in off the line. And the sheets. They go in the airing cupboard.
If
you know where that is. I've made your bed up fresh. And Madam's sickbed as well. Silly, isn't it? Well, must be getting along.'

‘Yes. All right. Very well,' he said in a series of irritable bursts, but as she stood in the doorway elbowing her arms into the sleeves of her coat, he suddenly thought, Fine figure of a woman, and felt the big bad boy stirring in his trousers.

It would be Wednesday afternoon before he could see his solicitor, or the bank manager, since he could hardly turn up in a fraying soft shirt good only for fishing holidays in Scotland. It switched on in his mind like a light: Roxburghshire, those last unclouded days when Nanny and Mother kept the world safe for good boys. Reggie sat at his desk overwhelmed by images from the past.

Fishing was something he and his older brother, Gerald, had both been good at. He remembered the pair of them, very serious and frightfully knowledgeable, under the eye of a ghillie with red hair and mutton-chop whiskers (who used to get drunk once a year at Hogmanay and utter the most appalling obscenities). They had both started off with a second-hand greenheart fly rod, with which they had practised casting until they could feel the whip at the moment of the turn, and only when they had mastered that were they allowed to stand at the river's edge and try to catch a fish. The skill and delicacy, the patience, required for the mysterious grown-up art of fishing had enthralled them both. In those days it had been their own river they fished; but death duties had put an end to all that. Poor old Gerald had died first, even before the war started, in a flying accident in 1939. But Gerald and Julia had bred early and there'd been a little son, Vivian, to secure the line.

Their father, laconic and grim, having survived four years of the First World War - not that ‘survived' gave any clue to the lifelong damage those years had wreaked - died in 1949 aged fifty-seven; still a comparatively young man (thought Reginald, from the perspective of seventy-one). His death left Reggie, as the second son, with few responsibilities but a decent sum of money. Along with Mary's legacy, they could afford to buy The Cedars, a substantial Georgian house set in three acres of grounds and commanding a green view across the valley. It was nothing compared to his childhood home, but it was a very handsome residence in the most sought-after private road in Tunbridge Wells. Mary had fallen for it at first sight. ‘The perfect house in which to bring up children,' she had enthused. ‘Lovely big garden, no noise, and miles away from the traffic.' Some hope! Reggie thought to himself.

His nephew, Vivian, the old man's grandson, had been just thirteen and newly arrived at Eton when he inherited the title.
Lord
Blythgowrie, 3rd Baron, he'd become:
there
was a name to catch the eye on the school list! Might as well have something to make up for the tangle of debts and estate problems he'd inherit in due course. Reggie, as his nearest male relative, had been the boy's official guardian. Time enough to worry about that when his education was over, he had thought and scarcely saw the boy: a neglect of duty he now bitterly regretted. Vivian had sailed through Eton, whose following wind had swept him effortlessly on to Christ Church. There, to everyone's surprise - for it was a couple of generations since the family had been noted for possessing any brains - he turned out to be a brilliant scholar and a prominent figure among the young bloods of the House. He got a First in PPE just as he reached his majority, and by then it was too late for Reggie to exert any influence.

Family business (Jervis & Co., Importers) going to pot, had been for years, said young Vivian. Get rid of the dead wood, doddery old men who've lunched and fallen asleep in their clubs after looking in at the office for a couple of hours; put in some capable new managers who know what they're doing,
understand trends and know how to read a balance sheet. Don't worry, Uncle Reginald, we'll write you in for a sinecure. Your name on the firm's letterhead shows continuity, reassures people, all that. Just keep on doing as you always did: up to the City a couple of times a week, seat on the main board, appear on the platform for the shareholder's AGM; no loss of face, Uncle, wouldn't do that to you.