The Past and Other Lies (19 page)

‘Left a bit, Cyrus—no, no, left.
Left
. Too far. Right.
Right
.’

‘Make your mind up!’ said Mr Flaxheed, leaning his forehead on the brickwork above the door, a white streamer in each hand high above his head. His face was red, the tendons in his neck taut like cords where they shot out of his very high, very starched collar. It was warm for late March and a bowler hat and frock coat were not the most practical attire for this sort of work. But Mr Flaxheed, who had moved to this area upon his retirement from the post of butler to Lord and Lady Parker-Soames of Leadheath Hall in Sussex some ten years earlier, was not the sort of man to be seen out of doors without a hat or coat on. His brother Alan, who had inherited the family farm, was bareheaded, in shirt sleeves and braces.

‘Left one’s too low,’ he announced and Cyrus Flaxheed tutted crossly.

In the kitchen, Mrs Flaxheed—Alice—was overseeing the baking of the wedding breakfast. Her sister, Nora Lasenby, and Nora’s youngest, Edie, were busy steaming puddings and baking custards and icing cakes and slicing fruit loaves and cutting out gingerbread shapes. Alice stood in the middle of the kitchen tapping a stub of pencil against a long list and pursing her lips.

‘Cider,’ she said. ‘The men will want cider and that brother of Cyrus’s hasn’t been out and fetched it yet even though he said he would. And there’s meant to be someone at the church hall with the curate opening up and if we don’t get those extra trestle tables from the vestry the boy scouts will have them for their goings-on. Now, there’s cream in the ice box for those fruit trifles but Edie, you’ll need to go out to the shop and see if you can’t get some extra currants and some of those glace cherries. And...’

She paused long enough to glance up at the ceiling. ‘What
is
going on? I shall have to go upstairs and see where they’ve got to with that dress.’

At the kitchen table Nora and Edie stirred and baked and cut and sliced with silent urgency.

Upstairs, that dress, a creamy-white muslin affair, cut down, restitched and reseamed, had last seen service at Alice Flaxheed’s own wedding in the tiny chapel at Leadheath Hall, a modest ceremony attended by the housekeeper, two footmen and a scullery maid on a frozen January morning more than a quarter of a century earlier. It was now lying slung across the back of a chair in the girls’ bedroom and was the centre of a spirited discussion.

‘But it’s so dreary!’ complained Jemima, who was perched listlessly on the window sill watching her father as he attempted to string up two rather tatty streamers. Beside her stood a glass vase and ten white roses, delivered that morning from the groom. Ten! Whoever heard of the groom sending ten white roses! She supposed music teachers at grammar schools did not earn much of a wage.

‘Oh, but I think it’s got class!’ exclaimed Elsie Stephens.

Jemima observed her sister’s friend silently. Elsie thought a ride in a tram to Putney was ‘class’.

‘And it’s so wonderfully old! Look at it, all kind of... yellowy.’ Elsie fingered the intricate lace of the bodice reverently. She wore apple-green herself, an unwise choice that made her and anyone standing near her look ill.

‘I’ll bet it’s an heirloom,’ said Janie Lasenby, who was Aunt Nora’s eldest. ‘My mum says your mum wore it at her wedding.’

‘A hand-me-down, then,’ pronounced Muriel Barmby, who worked at Gossup’s tearoom with Jemima.

‘Hardly!’ said Bertha from the doorway, scowling. ‘It was owned by Lady Parker-Soames of Leadheath Hall in Sussex and she wore it to balls and dances and—and all sorts. It’s hardly a hand-me-down.’

‘What is it then? Stolen?’ said Muriel, lighting a cigarette.

‘It’s the colour of rotting teeth, is what it is,’ announced Jemima from the window sill. ‘And it smells musty. And what’s more, it’s so hideously long anyone wearing it will trip up and fall flat on their face at the altar.’

‘It’s a wedding isn’t it?’ giggled Elsie Stephens looking up from her position on the floor. ‘You’re meant to fall over.’

‘I think you’re supposed to get drunk first,’ observed Bertha.

There was a clatter followed by a loud thump in the street below and Jemima leaned out of the window to see her father lying on his back, a streamer in each hand. She turned back to survey the bedroom. Elsie looked downright ridiculous. Who’d invited her, anyway? That dreadful green dress with the scarlet trim that she’d worn to the Palais last autumn, and that hat which looked like a flowerpot. Dreadful. Well, it wasn’t Elsie’s wedding, so who cared?

Muriel, in stark contrast, was all in black, which suited her deathly white complexion and would send Mum and all the family into a frenzy. Black! At a wedding!

As for Cousin Janie, well the Lasenbys were not noted for their sense of style and no one, least of all the Lasenbys themselves, was pretending otherwise. Still, at nearly eighteen Janie ought to be wearing something a little less nursery and a little more cocktail. Polka dots indeed!

She heard footsteps on the stairs, followed by her father’s booming voice.

‘Right, then, are the young ladies decent? We have precisely one and one half hours to get to the church. I expect you all to be dressed. The bride in particular.’

That was his butlering voice, a voice not to be argued with, and all the young women looked at the bride expectantly.

Jemima pushed herself up off the window sill. ‘Nearly ready, Dad!’ she called in her singsong voice, and they waited in silence until they heard his footsteps retreat.

‘For goodness’ sake, Jem, I don’t know why you must leave everything to the last minute,’ complained Bertha from the doorway and she turned and flounced off down the stairs after her father, leaving Jemima to get herself into the dreary bridal dress.

The dress
was
dreary. No one seeing it for the first time as the bride emerged from the family home on the arm of her proud, Sunday-best father could fail to be disappointed by such a dreary dress, thought Jemima peevishly.

Behind her, at a dignified distance, came Bertha and Janie—Janie fidgeting with the back of her dress and Bertha walking stiffly as though she were a pallbearer not a bridesmaid. They were followed by Muriel, who tossed her head at the watching crowd, and Elsie who flushed shyly. Then came Uncle Alan, hitching up his trousers and offering his arm to little Edie. Aunt Nora and Mum stood at the kitchen window waving white handkerchiefs and dabbing their eyes.

Outside a good-sized crowd of neighbours had gathered in their front gardens and in the lane and a small cheer went up and a smattering of applause and someone said, ‘Oooh, look at that hat!’ and someone else agreed, ‘That’s class, that is, a hat like that,’ and Jemima closed her eyes for a moment.

Thank God for Muriel.

Muriel’s elder sister, Evadne, worked at the motion picture studios at Ealing and had borrowed for the bride an elegant black hat with a veil and a rather striking little embroidered jacket of grey silk which was fitted across the shoulders and bust in such a way as to enhance one’s already perfect figure.

She raised her chin a little higher and bestowed a smile on Mr Creely’s head.

Mr Creely—neighbour, retired police constable and Wells Lane’s sole possessor of a brand-new motor car—had gallantly offered his Baby Austin and chauffeuring skills for the wedding. So here they were climbing into the back of the gleaming black car, Mr Creely holding the door open and looking like he wanted to salute them, his hair oiled so that it gleamed as much as the duco. He tried to catch the bride’s eyes as she swept into the back seat but as he had once attempted to kiss her in a dark alley when she was eleven years old, the bride did not catch his eye and, had he not been the sole owner in Wells Lane of a brand new Baby Austin and the only alternative to an undignified hike on foot to the church, the bride would not have deemed to travel in Mr Creely’s motor car at all.

‘All aboard then,’ said Mr Creely, tipping his hat and confusing chauffeuring with bus-conducting. He closed the gleaming door of the Austin after Dad got in and marched around to the front of the car with much ceremony. Finally, and at a pace that would have slowed a funeral procession, they eased away from the kerb and set off up the lane. The family, neighbours and other guests now had about five minutes to dash up the alleyway between numbers thirty-four and thirty-six, turn into Gunnersbury Lane, and get to the church and into their seats before the car got there. The groom, one assumed, was already there.

The groom.

Jemima sat back in the plush leather seat and regarded the rounded bowl of Mr Creely’s hat. They turned into Acton Lane and passed sedately beneath the red-painted wrought-iron archway of the railway bridge. As they turned left, not right, into High Street, she realised that Mr Creely was going to take them the long way round, possibly to allow the guests time to take their seats, but most likely to prolong his self-appointed role as driver of the bride. Beside her on the seat Dad patted her hand reassuringly but stared straight ahead at the Saturday afternoon shoppers and street vendors.

The groom.

If it hadn’t been for that tedious Sunday afternoon at Hyde Park last September she would, she supposed, not now be sitting here in the back of this gleaming black Baby Austin heading towards her own wedding.

They passed the fire station, the town hall and the Globe Cinema, the library and the tram depot and Crown Street market, then they turned right into King Street and ground to a halt outside the King’s Head, where a dray cart blocked the road and barrels were being rolled off. Mr Creely appeared to be giving them a tour of Acton’s Places of Interest. Beside her, Dad pulled out his fob watch and frowned. Mr Creely swung out beside the dray so that two wheels mounted the kerb, scattering a group of elderly ladies and a shop boy on a large bicycle.

Perhaps, she mused, it might even have been Bertha sitting beside Dad in the back of a motor car in this dreadful dress (Bertha would suit it much better than she herself did) and she, Jemima, might be the one hurrying along to the church on foot. But there you were, life was funny like that.

Having exhausted Acton’s sites, Mr Creely finally pulled up outside the church. And there he was, the groom, standing on the steps in a dark grey suit, waving. Was it a new suit, or had he just borrowed it? He was standing beside a man with one leg.

Jemima thought about waving back but in the end she just smiled.

‘There he is! That’s ’im, over there. Behind the palm tree. Second from the left.’

Muriel Barmby, four months earlier, buttoned, laced and pinned into the stuffy black waitress dress, heavy black shoes, spotless white linen apron and starched white linen headpiece that made up the regulation dress code of Gossup and Batch’s tearoom, ducked behind a pillar and nudged Jemima sharply with her elbow.

Jemima looked up distractedly. She was trying for the third time to add up the bill of the elderly couple on table five, who had ordered a plate of cakes and a pot of tea and who might have had cream and jam too, though someone had forgotten to put it on the bill.

She followed Muriel’s gaze, but all she saw was the usual Monday morning tearoom crowd: elderly ladies from Maida Vale and Hampstead and Belgravia in fox furs and boas and elaborate and unbecoming hats who always smelled faintly musty and told you to mind the teapot was warmed before the water was poured. Otherwise, there was a young couple, wealthy by the look of them, her dripping jewels and furs; an elderly gent of the retired-colonel type; a younger, tweed-suited man with his back to her sitting with a slightly older woman in an expensive coat and a very stylish hat and—ah! Now she saw him.

Mr Oklahoma in camel-hair coat, wide-brimmed hat, rings on the fingers of both hands and a fat cigar between his lips and (they had it on good authority) an even fatter wallet in his pocket. As usual he was studying an American newspaper which was spread out on his lap and whose pages he flung over and reshuffled noisily in the manner of someone accustomed to being the centre of attention.

‘Told you,’ hissed Muriel. ‘Monday mornin’, regular as clockwork. Mr Oklahoma.’

Of course his name wasn’t really Mr Oklahoma. It was Mr van den Gelfenhoogen. Or something. He had told Muriel he was in newspapers and that he hailed from Oklahoma City, so he was known as Mr Oklahoma for simplicity’s sake. He had been coming to the tearoom every Monday morning for the last four or five weeks, where he sat and noisily read his newspaper and sipped his black coffee. Occasionally he ate a pastry or a scone (though he called it a biscuit. He called biscuits ‘cookies’). Sometimes he met other gentlemen, suited, often with attache cases, some American like himself, some English. One a German. They talked ‘business’, reported Muriel, who always returned from Mr Oklahoma’s table (table seven) rather breathless and bursting with news. This particular morning, a Monday in late November, Mr Oklahoma was seated alone, which was a good sign because it generally meant he would exchange a few words with whoever was serving him (Muriel, if she got in quick enough) and invariably left a large tip (half a crown last week).