25
Wedding Bells
Michaela had been overcome at being asked to Tom and Jemima’s wedding. June looked limply at their old friend sitting on their sofa with her large hands dangling between her large knees and said: “But why not, Michaela? I mean, you’ve known them for ages and—and... Well, of course they’d ask you!”
“I told Sean I’d help him with the crazy paving round the steps at Willow Grove.”
As they’d both been at Art School with Sean Stacey June was able to reply with an incredulous laugh: “Sean won’t mind, Michaela! He wouldn’t want you to miss out on the wedding breakfast!”
“Um, no,” Michaela admitted. She stopped, so June just waited, and after a bit she said: “I’m no good at talking to people. –They’ve asked Hugh,” she added abruptly.
June’s knees went all funny and she sank back in her chair. Feebly she managed: “Surely he won’t—won’t try to make you talk to people?”
Michaela licked her lips nervously. “He’ll make me be with him and—and then he’ll start talking to people.”
“Uh—oh,” said June limply. “I get it.”
“It’s awful!” she burst out. “They ask me things and I never know what to say!”
“Look,” cried June, forgetting herself entirely: “if he’s got a single decent feeling in him he won’t just leave you at their mercy, Michaela! He’ll protect you!” Michaela was goggling at her. “I mean, he’ll answer for you: you know! Help you!”
“Oh. No, you don’t understand.” She wrinkled her brow. This time June waited in utter foreboding. “He does it on purpose,” said Michaela finally. “I think he thinks I can do it if I try.”
“What is he, a ruddy sadist?” shouted June angrily.
“No. He just doesn’t understand. I have sort of tried to explain.”
“Explain! You don’t need to explain, he must be blind if he can’t see it for himself!”
“Um—no-o... I think he wants me to be one of those ladies that can talk to people.”
June stared at her blankly for a moment. “Good grief, you mean he’s—he’s sort of not admitting to himself that you can’t be?”
Michaela nodded.
June gulped. “Help,” she muttered.
After a while Michaela said: “I think he really likes Roberta much better than me.”
“Michaela!” she gasped in horror.
“He always talks to her when he comes round to the flat. She knows about books and stuff.”
“Then it’s just as well she’s going down the Austins’ farm for Christmas!” said June angrily.
“She’s coming back straight after.”
June just looked at her limply.
Michaela didn’t say anything for a while. Then she said: “I can’t do it.”
“Yes, you can,” said June grimly. “You can stick with me and Bob and just eat. And if blimmin’ Hugh Morton tries to drag you off to socialize with that poncy Sir Ralph and Co.,” she added grimly, “you can count on me to stop him!”
“Um—no, I didn’t mean that. Um—thanks, June. Um... no.” She added something in such a low voice that June didn’t catch it.
“What?” she asked feebly.
“Be Hugh’s girlfriend,” said Michaela. “I don’t think I can.”
“Michaela, he’s just left his wife and everything! Of course you can! Look, he’ll—he’ll get used to— Well, I mean he’ll realize you can’t do the social stuff, once he’s able to see a bit more of you.”
Michaela’s large hands twisted together.
“Well, you know,” said June, going rather pink. “The odd weekend and so on. You haven’t really been able to see much of him under normal conditions, have you?”
Michaela considered this seriously. June watched her nervously. “The weekends are normal for me,” she said at last.
“That isn’t what I— Look, you haven’t been able to go out together or anything, really, have you?”
“No.” She frowned over it. “I can see why you think that’d be normal, June, and I can see that it would be normal for Hugh. Only it isn’t for me.”
June bit her lip. She got up hurriedly. “I’ll make a pot of tea,” she said in a stifled voice. “Bob’ll be home soon.”
“Don’t be upset,” said Michaela anxiously.
“I’m not!” lied June crossly, blowing her nose.
“Even if I tried I couldn’t do it.”
“I know,” said June, clattering at the bench. When the tea was brewing she said weakly: “I think you have to give him a chance, Michaela. Let him sort himself out. Once he’s in his flat things may be different.”
“I don’t think he’ll change. He likes ladies that can talk. Him and Roberta make lots of jokes and that.”
“And leave you out of it?” cried June furiously.
“They don’t do it deliberately. Anyway, that isn’t the point. I’m the wrong sort of person for him. –I know I’m driving him mad,” she said in a low voice, “only I can’t be any different.”
“No, and why should you? Stuck-up pig!” said June angrily.
“No, he isn’t, June. He’s nice. And I do like him.”
June could see her hands were shaking: she bit her lip fiercely and managed to say: “Men don’t just—just want a lady that can be social, Michaela. I mean, they may admire that in some women, but—um—well, there’s more to a relationship than that.”
“Yes. Pots are like that,” she said seriously.
Used though she was to her, June’s jaw sagged.
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot. When you sort of add up all the factors, the composition of the clay, and the way you work it, and the glazes and the firing... There’s a lot to it,” she ended in a vague voice.
“If you mean,” cried June fiercely, her eyes filling with angry tears, “that not being able to talk to stupid people at stupid social gatherings is the fatal flaw that’s gonna break up the relationship between you and Hugh, that’s just—just ridiculous!”
“I don’t think so,” said Bob mildly.
June gasped and swung round. “Where did you come from?” she cried fiercely.
“School. –I live here, remember? Starksy’s gonna be late, he’s been dragooned into being fourteenth man for the ruddy Fourteenth Eleven, or something.” Bob wandered over to the table. “I think Michaela’s right: relationships are like pots. But it’s not a question of a fatal flaw, exactly, that’s putting it too strongly—eh?” he said to Michaela. She nodded. “Yeah. It’s a question,” said Bob, screwing up his eyes frightfully, “of the incredible complexity of the ingredients. Get one wrong, and the whole thing’s a bit skew-whiff—eh?”—Michaela nodded again.—“You might not even be able to put your finger on it, but you can just feel the whole bloody thing’s wrong,” he finished, pouring himself a cup of tea. “Anybody else want a cuppa?”
“Bob, we’re not talking in the blimmin’ abstract!” shouted June, near tears again.
“I know that,” he said calmly.
Michaela looked at him gratefully. “I’d like a cup of tea.”
“Righto.” Bob poured for them both. “No, talking about Hugh. Well, it could still work out. Dare say he’s been in a state, wondering whether to walk out on that wife of his these last few months. He may calm down, once he’s in his own place.”
“That’s what I was trying to say!” said June eagerly.
“That won’t stop him trying to make me talk to people,” said Michaela.
June closed her eyes and sighed heavily.
“I’d change if I could,” she said on an apologetic note.
June opened her eyes. “Mm. But surely if he loves you enough, Michaela, he’ll—he’ll see that—well, that you’re just you!”
“Vicki says he ought to love me for myself alone,” she said dubiously.
“Vicki’s got a brain the size of a pea,” said Bob definitively.
“I think she must just trot out the latest cliché from the last women’s magazine she’s picked up,” said June weakly.
“Yeah,” Bob agreed. “Reminds me,” he added. “OY!” he bellowed. “BRING THAT LOT IN!”
After a moment there was a strange panting, shuffling sound and two enormous piles of magazines appeared with Ivan’s and Mason’s grimy socks and sneakers under them.
“What on earth?” said June limply.
“School Bring and Buy. Said I’d store ’em.”
“What Bring and Buy?” she said limply.
“School!” gasped Mason, as Michaela liberated him of his burden. “Hullo, Michaela! There’s loads an’ loads of Supermans. And Batmans!”
“Yeah, so there are,” said Michaela with interest. “The colour quality’s pretty poor.”
“What BRING AND BUY?” shouted June.
“Puriri Primary,” said Bob. “Put those down somewhere, Ivan.”
Ivan tottered round in a groggy circle and Michaela hurriedly grabbed his pile of magazines—and, as they had all now perceived—comics.
“Ta!” he gasped. “Not that heavy!”
“Liar,” said Bob automatically.
“BOB!” shouted June.
“Eh? Well, apparently we did get a notice about it,” he said, grinning. “Or so Dick White claims.”
“Neither of them are even in his class!” cried June indignantly.
“No. Nevertheless he claims every child got a notice. His class is running the mags stall this year. That’s why he asked me if we could store this lot. There’s some more in the car.”
June glared at her two offspring. “When is it?”
“Next Saturday,” said Bob.
“WHAT?” she screeched.
“Yeah. –GO AND WASH YOUR HANDS FIRST!” he thundered.
Ivan and Mason, even though they’d been told innumerable times that the sink was not for washing hands at, shot over to it.
When they were all more or less sorted out and Mason had been forced to go to the toilet—and wash his hands again—before consuming afternoon tea, and Bob had disinterred the cake that June had been saving for supper, and they were all sitting down drinking tea, or Raro, and eating Vegemite sandwiches and eyeing the cake, Bob said simply to their guest: “Had a row with him, have ya?”
“No.”
Hurriedly June explained: “She’s just a bit nervous because she thinks he’ll make her, um, socialize and stuff at the wedding reception.”
“Wedding receptions aren’t for socializing at, they’re for eating at!” said Bob with a laugh.
“I tried to tell her that,” said June limply.
“Tom and Jemima would be awfully hurt if you didn’t go,” said Bob simply.
Michaela crimsoned. “Oh.”
“Yes, they would!” agreed June eagerly.
“Okay, I will, then. And maybe if Hugh sees I can’t do it, he’ll stop trying to make me,” she added glumly.
“What the fuck’s up with you?” demanded Tom’s Headmaster without ceremony. “Cold feet?”
“No, you cretin. There’s some more tea in the pot, if ya want some,” he added, nodding at the large brown Maungakiekie Street Primary staffroom teapot.
“How old is it?” replied Bill suspiciously.
Tom waved an airy hand. “Mmm… sufficiently.”
Bill perceived his Senior Master was drinking it. “I’ll risk it.” He poured, took the remaining dribble of milk, and having sugared the mug lavishly, sat down, stirring. Perforce in a broken-down armchair, Tom’s thin form was occupying the entirety of the broken-down sofa. “Why are you still here?” he asked suspiciously.
Tom glanced at his watch. Three-twenty: fair question. “Why are you?” he returned mildly.
“Some of us have got—”
“Piles of ruddy admin, yeah, yeah.”
“I was gonna say cretinous PTA committees to deal with, not to mention a cretinous staff that never gets its flaming attendance registers in on time—but, yeah. That’d do.”
“My attendance—”
“NOT YOU!” howled Bill. “Ma Swayne and ruddy John Giles and them!”
“Oh,” said Tom, mollified.
“Anyway,” said Bill grumpily: “what the fuck are ya doing here?”
“Mm? Oh,” said Tom with an odd look on his face: “Jemima’s gone over to Helen Weintraub’s for the afternoon, so I thought we’d have tea in town. And in the meantime, I thought I might get on with preparing a few lesson plans and so on for the unfortunate that has to take Three-Oh while I’m on me honeymoon.”
Since Bill was the said unfortunate, he grinned sheepishly. “Aw—right.”
“You could get in a relief teacher, ya know,” said Tom mildly.
“Not worth it, so near the end of term. Anyway,” said Bill airily, “since we’re on this new lump-sum business now, I thought I’d spend it on books.”
Tom choked.
“It’s not that funny!” said Bill huffily.
“No,” he said weakly. “Well, good show. Um, you have worked out, have you, old mate, that the financial year doesn’t end in December like the calendar year?”
“YES!” shouted Bill angrily.
“Sorry, sorry,” whispered Tom.
“Um—well, I’ve put you down for leave, ya see, and—”
Tom winced. “Don’t tell me, then I can plead ignorance when the cops come to cart you away.”
Bill drank tea. “All right, I won’t. What is up, if it’s not cold feet about the wedding?”
“Mm? Oh. Well, Jemima going over to Helen’s was a clue, Bill,” he said wryly.
Bill frowned at him above the cup. Slowly the jaw began to sag and he put the cup down. “You’ve invited ’em, haven’t you?” he whispered.
Tom swallowed. “Jemima— Um, yeah.”
“YOU CRETIN!” shouted his Headmaster.
Tom gulped. “Puts it rather well,” he admitted wanly.
“Bloody Ralphy and Weintraub on top of Phoebe and Sol?” he croaked.
“Weintraub may not come, he—”
“Of course he’ll come, ya nong! He may not want to, but he’ll come, because she’ll drag ’im!” he shouted.
“Um, well, she is that sort, yeah. But he may be tied up at work, Bill.”
“Rats.”
Tom grimaced. “They’re all adult people, we’ll just have to trust that they’ll behave like—uh—adults,” he ended weakly.
“Thought that was the trouble in the first place?” retorted the Coggins brain swiftly.
“Uh—yeah.”
“God!” said Bill with feeling. He picked up his tea and drank it off, shuddering. “Who knows about who?” he demanded.
“Um—dunno. Well, bloody Ralph knows the lot, of course.”
“Him and his ruddy golf club, yeah. What about Weintraub?”
“Well, obviously he must know about Sol, Bill—”
“NO!”
“Dunno,” admitted Tom, grimacing.
Bill glared. He ticked points off on his fingers, muttering under his breath. Finally he said: “Well, which of ’em does Winkelmann know about?”
“The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” acknowledged Tom, grimacing.
Bill sighed, got up and went heavily over to the door, where he paused. “Oy.”
“Now what?” sighed Tom.
“Jemima was burbling something about you being mixed up with this ruddy student play this summer.”
“Mm? Oh, the University Drama Club summer show! Doesn’t start till March. Why?”
“Are you or are you not—”
“Yeah. The E.M.S. is doing the music. Why?”
“Christ, Tom!”
“What?” said Tom, staring at him.
“Look, whaddaya marrying the poor girl for? To ignore ’er all summer hols?”
“I’m not gonna—”
“Not flaming half! What with your flaming vege garden and polyurethaning and crap; and now you’ll be rehearsing with the E.M.S. all ruddy summer as well!”
“I won’t!”
“Not flaming half!”
“Look, stop saying not flaming half! Jemima agreed, she wants me to do it—”
“BULLSHIT, TOM!” shouted his Headmaster, stomping out.
Tom pouted. She did, too, want him to do it. Well, she hadn’t said not to. In fact she’d seemed quite keen. Well, keenish. ...Maybe he’d leave the dining-room till next year, after all. Didn’t have that many ideas about what to do with it, anyway. And he could leave the garage until next Easter. No, he couldn’t: what if they had one of those sudden bloody storms in March? That tarp on the M.G. wasn’t much use. Um... well, maybe just put up a temporary garage. He could always put up a decent one when he had a bit more time. Tom sighed. Yeah, okay. Get a shed or something from Mitre 10. Which reminded him, the garden shed really needed— Uh, no. Not urgent. The spare bedrooms could wait, too. Especially the one he’d had thoughts of turning into a study for himself. Didn’t need a study: he could do his marking on the kitchen table. ...Yeah.
After some time he grimaced and dragged himself along to his Headmaster’s office. “You’re right,” he said, poking his head round Bill’s door.
“Yeah, ’course I am! –What about?”
Tom made a face. “Taking on too much this summer. Didn’t think.”
“Clot,” he noted.
“Yeah. Well, I can’t let the E.M.S. down now I’ve promised to do it. Only I’ll forget about the house and stuff for a bit.”
“And the flaming vege garden?”
“N— Well, we have to eat, Bill! I can’t let the garden go to pot!”
Bill sighed heavily. “Evidently not; no.”
“She quite enjoys pottering around in it, you know.”
“True.” Bill sniffed slightly. “A bloke could spend his whole time rushing round unnecessarily like a cut cat and then wake up one fine morning to find she’s—”
“YES!” shouted Tom. “I KNOW!”
Bill just looked at him mildly.
He gulped. “Sorry. Um—I will watch it. And thanks, Bill.”
“That’s all right. No point in getting married if you’re not going to take any notice of ’er.”
“I am doing it for her, too.” He met Bill’s fishy eye. “Uh—yeah. I’ll be sure and spend some time with her, Bill. Just, um, well, pottering, I think is what she likes best!” He laughed sheepishly.
“Yeah. –Oh, and I can pass on this advice from an expert.”
Tom eyed him uneasily. “What?”
“She came out with this just the other day,” said Bill dreamily.
Tom began to relax. His eyes twinkled behind his specs.
“It’s one of them male crimes that we’re all guilty of, mate: ignorance of the law is no excuse, either. I’ve apparently been hung, drawn and quartered umpteen times over. She never thought to mention it before, apparently. Hadn’t struck ’er that I couldn’t know if I didn’t know.’
“Uh—doing it with the socks on?”
“No!” choked Bill. “No, this is, uh, Grate Male Crime Number... Three or Four, I think,” he said, scratching the matted pepper-and-salt curls. “Getting in the car and going straight to point B.”
“Eh?”
“Not A: B. Women like to wander, old mate. Though she did say Jemima reckoned you were an exception, but on mature reflection I decided she’d got it wrong.”
Tom was grinning. “You mean you don’t screech to a stop, reverse, change gear and grind up a one-in-four gradient when Meg spots what might possibly be the remains of a cute little country church that fell down during the Maori Wars or a sign saying ‘Fresh Eggs For Sale Three Years Since’, Bill?”
Bill glared.
“I had that aspect of female psychology sussed out years back! Don’t worry: me and Mima Puddle-Duck’ll just wander!” he said, laughing. He went out on this.
Bill muttered: “See ya do. ...Lucky sod,” he concluded.
Tom and Jemima’s wedding day dawned fine and sunny. As it would turn out, this was not an augury of how the day would proceed.
The guest list had sort of grown—inevitably, the groom now felt. A horrible resemblance to the Harding-Shapiro reception was discernible—Susan remarked on it immediately. It wasn’t entirely Tom’s fault: at least, he hadn’t remembered when he’d invited his friend Peter Riabouchinsky that his wife was Helen Weintraub’s sister— Yeah. The presence of a number of innocents such as Isabel from School, Jemima’s pleasant uncle and aunt, Greg and Pam Anderson, and their huge sons, or the Austin twins (it having been felt impossible to leave them out when they were living with Darryl, John and Adrian), was not discernibly much of a counterirritant to—well, Jemima’s blasted mother, for a start. The fact that Sol and Phoebe had arrived separately only meant they’d both been at work. However, although they both appeared perfectly cheerful, they were socialising separately. Ditto for Michaela and Hugh. Helen Weintraub appeared happily unconscious of anything and one could only hope she’d remain that way. So did Ralph, but then, he would. On second thoughts it had probably been a mistake to let the Austin twins come. One could only hope bloody Ralph wouldn’t—well, not more lecherous, no; scarcely possible. React badly to their presence out of sheer frustration, what with Phoebe also being present? Not that Tom, frankly, cared if he suffered the tortures of the damned throughout, so long as he didn’t deliberately say something to get up Weintraub’s and/or Winkelmann’s noses.
“I think she looks ace,” said Vicki definitely.
“Yes,” agreed Meg gloomily. Having just spent a small fortune on curtains for the sitting-room, there was no way she’d been able to justify anything new for herself for the wedding. She looked gloomily at Jemima’s scarlet linen-look suit. It had a narrow skirt to mid-calf and Tom had bought her a pair of terrifically high-heeled, strappy scarlet sandals to match, which had cost far more than the suit itself. (Which Tom had made.) The jacket was very tight in the body, with a short flared skirt to it. It had long sleeves, and shoulders that were just square enough to look really smart. It was a severe style, with three self-covered buttons and plain lapels, but very low-cut, the top button being about a hand’s span above Jemima’s tiny waist. In the opening of the jacket heavy white lace showed. Above that were the pearls that Ralph had given her. That was all. Jemima wasn’t wearing anything on her lapel and nothing ornamented her thick, shiny black hair except the hair itself and in her ears she had nothing but her tiny gold keepers.
Her cow of a mother—as bad as Meg’s, yes, though before this she wouldn’t have believed it—had already expressed to Meg the opinion that a girl shouldn’t wear red on her wedding day, the opinion that Jemima should have worn a hat, the opinion that red had never suited Jemima... Meg at that point had decided the woman must be blind as well as mad.
“You look okay, Meg,” said Vicki consolingly. “Blue really suits you.”
Meg sighed. Her outfit was also a summer suit, but its skirt was pleated, which was really Out, it came to just below her knees, which was really Out, the jacket was cut like a blazer, which was really Out, and it wouldn’t even have had any shoulder pads if she hadn’t inserted a pair of minute ones herself after it came back from the dry-cleaners and she’d decided that horrible as it was she’d better wear it because she didn’t have anything else and that stain where Connie had spilled the orange juice on the skirt had come out, after all. Added to which the dry-cleaning had cost a fortune and needed to be justified.
“The new blouse looks really ace with it,” added Vicki kindly.
“Yes, it turned out okay,” admitted Meg, smiling at her. She and the Austin twins had found the piece of figured silk on a shopping expedition. Vicki had been on a quest for white stretch material to make a spangled bathing-suit for her rôle as a non-speaking fairy in next March’s University Drama Club production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Meg’s blouse was sleeveless and collarless and had been made out of less than half a metre of the blue silk but it certainly had turned out very well and toned nicely with the suit.
Vicki began to tell her about the fab dresses the real actress who was going to play Titania was going to wear in the play, but Meg just smiled and drank champagne and ate some delicious little thingies on toast that Adrian had whipped up and wished silently (a) that the soft-hearted Jemima hadn’t let Damian bring The Fiend over today; (b) that Connie wouldn’t give The Fiend milk—Damian wouldn’t be furious like Alec Overdale in similar circumstances, but it was quite on the cards the brute would chuck it up as he had done quite recently on Meg’s new fawn rug that was Tom’s old rug from his old flat; and (c) that Connie wouldn’t eat too much. There was no point in hoping this last about the twins, Michael always did but he had the capacity of a hippopotamus and the digestion of an ostrich, and Andrew always started out as if he was going to eat too much and then lost interest in a haze of Sopwith Camel-y daydreams. She didn’t worry about Roger eating too much, his digestion resembled Michael’s, but she did worry about him drinking too much. There wasn’t any point in worrying about Bill drinking too much, at a wedding reception approximately thirty yards from their front door. None whatsoever.
“Um—what, dear?” she said, coming to with a start.
“I said Connie looks really cute in her flowergirl’s dress!” the deluded child beamed.
“Oh. Yes,” said Meg dully. “There was a frightful scene because it isn’t P,I,N,K.”
“Not with Jemima’s scarlet!” gasped Vicki in horror.
“You try explaining that to a pig-headed five-year-old,” replied Meg grimly.
Vicki just grinned. “Well, she looks cute. –Hey, you reckon I better give Adrian and Ginny a hand with the trays and stuff?”
“Yes, it might be a good idea, Ginny appears to have gone to sleep,” agreed Meg.
Vicki glanced at her twin. Her pretty little oval face went very red and her mouth tightened. “It’s that rotten Latin man,” she said grimly. “She moons over him all the time. She even found out where he lives and she’s spending all her cash on stupid bus rides past his house!”
“Oh, dear,” said Meg faintly.
“Well, I mean, it’s her money, she’s paying her share of the rent, but she didn’t even have anything left to buy a new pair of earrings or anything!”
“No. Oh, I see! For this do. Well, she looks very pretty.”
Vicki glared. “She looks like an idiot, ya mean!”
Meg had been silently wondering why Ginny on a warmish but not particularly tropical day in early December was wearing an off-the-shoulder black robe sort of tied with bits of ribbon, or something, under the bust, criss-crossed over the midriff, and tied in a bow at the waist, over a much longer straight black skirt that came to two inches above her pretty little ankles. With brown Roman sandals. Ginny was so pretty that it didn’t matter what she wore, but...
“She reckons it’s the Classical look or something,” added Vicki grimly.
“Classical... I see,” said Meg weakly. After a moment or two she added weakly: “Couldn’t Roberta say something to her, Vicki? She seems a sensible—”
“Her! She’s madder on him than Ginny is!” gasped Vicki. “I reckon that’s why she wanted to do Latin this year in the first place!”
Meg swallowed. Vicki might not be the intellectual brain of the century but she was sharp enough. Plenty of common sense, too. “Oh, dear. I had no idea,” she said feebly.
“He’s ancient!” said Vicki in despair. “Twin’s wasting her life!”
“Um—yuh—um—”
“Oh, well. At least I talked her into being a fairy in the play, maybe that’ll be a distraction. And I made her go for that job at Puriri Library, did I tell you?”
Meg agreed she had.
Vicki sighed. “I better go and wake her up. See ya!” She trotted off and could be further observed shaking her twin’s arm briskly, dispatching her twin kitchen-wards briskly, and then briskly collecting up empty trays and plates.
Meg looked round for Connie. With Isabel: that was all right! She headed for the tray of caviar canapés before Ralph could guzzle the lot.
Isabel Blakely, apart from Bill, of course, was the only colleague from Maungakiekie Street Primary that Tom and Jemima had invited to the wedding, and had duly rubbed everybody’s noses in it and would do doubt continue to do so until the end of the scholastic year. She had already assured Connie that her white broderie Anglaise dress with the little scarlet bows was “Really lovely, dear! One of the prettiest little dresses I’ve ever seen!” and this had gone a long way towards mollifying Connie on the subject of P,I,N,K.
“I got new shoes,” she said to Isabel, reaching for an oyster vol-au-vent.
“Not that, dear, they’ve got nasty fishy stuff in them,” said Isabel quickly. “Have a little boat; look, isn’t it sweet?” She gave Connie a small barquette which she imagined was filled with minced chicken as hers had been. It was actually filled with minced crayfish and Connie’s face took on a vaguely puzzled expression as she began to eat it.
“Yes, your new shoes are lovely!” Isabel then cooed.
Connie nodded fervently with her mouth full. They were Shirley-Temple-type shoes, scarlet patent with ankle straps, and as Bill had pointed out, unless Meg let her wear them to school (which Connie was quite prepared to do) there was no way she’d get an ounce more wear out of ’em before her fat feet grew out of them.
When she’d finished the barquette she suggested: “Feed Doggy now.”
“No, this sort of food wouldn’t be right for Doggy’s tummy,” said Isabel firmly: Bill hadn’t failed to regale Maungakiekie Street Primary’s staffroom with the story of The Fiend and the rug. “We could go and say hullo to Doggy, though.”
“Righto.”
Connie and Isabel went and said hullo to Doggy. The Fiend was stretched out in the only patch of sun that at this relatively early hour reached the sitting-room: bang in front of the French doors. Thus preventing anyone from stepping out onto Tom’s nice new patio, should they have wished to do so. He was not a small dog and most of his acquaintance had come to the conclusion that he must be mainly Irish wolfhound. At the moment he was also a very full dog, since on top of his official breakfast at Number 9 he’d nipped down to Number 3 and eaten the more interesting parts of their rubbish, to wit, a newspaper package of crayfish shells, another newspaper package of tongue skin, chicken fat and chicken skin, and a very old ham bone that had already done duty in some solid pea soup. Burying the remains of the latter in John’s celery bed. Which according to Darryl had served John right for trying that Pommy blanching nonsense in the first place. Perhaps needless to state, Number 3’s goat had tried to join in this beanfeast but luckily the Fiend was a rapid eater.
Now he raised his noble, weary head and condescendingly allowed these female admirers to pat him.
“Isn’t he good?” cooed Isabel admiringly. “With all this food around!”
“Nah, he’s a bad dog, he ate Darryl’s rubbidge,” said Connie earnestly.
“Ate Darryl’s rubbish?” gasped Isabel, looking at him doubtfully. The Fiend gave her a mournful, suffering look out of one melting brown eye.
“Yeah, an’ he buried a bone in John’s garden!”
At this Isabel decided little Connie was getting mixed up, because there had been an episode—with which Bill had regaled Maungakiekie Street Primary’s staffroom—of The Fiend burying a bone in Bill’s just-planted sweetcorn.
“Oh, no, dear: that was a long time ago, when he buried his bone in your Daddy’s garden! But he knows better now, don’t you, poor boy?” she cooed.
The Fiend gave her a noble, suffering look.
“Nah, he was bad,” grunted Connie, bent over patting him earnestly nonetheless.
Isabel smiled tolerantly…
“Why is it,” said Tom thoughtfully, “that Susan and Alan’s wedding was a Helluva lot more fun than mine?”
“Ralph wasn’t at it?” suggested Bob Overdale meanly.
“Must be. Something like that,” agreed Sol before Tom could.
They all sniggered rudely.
Tom then said heavily: “Did you enjoy yours, Bob?”
“Hell, no! Crikey Dick, you were there!” he reminded him.
“Uh… That wasn’t the one where Prunella and I had been smoking pot all night beforehand and never got to bed and were so stoned that we didn’t know if it was day or night or a wedding or a funeral, was it?”
“No,” said Bob definitely. “That was... Forget. –No! Don’tcha remember: it poured all day, we had it at the bloody Cathedral in the evening and they had to have the umbrellas up for the photos on the steps, and the roof in that poncy reception place sprang a leak?”
“Oh, yeah!” said Tom with a grin. “A dozen mixed bridesmaids and flowergirls shivering in soaking frilled peach nylon: yeah, it was good.”
“We went to Surfers Paradise for the bloody honeymoon,” Bob informed Sol gloomily.
“Did it pour there, too?”
“No, but it might as well’ve, Morag came down with a streaming cold from getting soaked on the Cathedral steps and I got a shocking dose of sunburn on the first day and could hardly move for the rest of the week.”
Sol sniggered delightedly. “I hope you aren’t going to this Surfers Paradise joint,” he said to Tom.
“No, we’re going down to old Alec’s for a few days: we’ll look after Rover, and he’ll keep an eye on this place.”
“Drink ya cellar dry, more like,” warned his brother.
“Tit for tat: he’s just made a new batch of home-brew,” said Tom, grinning.
“Hey! Bring us some back?” asked Bob eagerly.
“You’re joking! There won’t be any left to bring back!”
Grinning, Sol said: “Say, now, just what is this ‘home-brew’?”
The Overdale brothers looked at him in tremendous astonishment and huge pity.
“Oh, dear,” said Bob. “Oh, deary, deary, dear. What a sad case.”
“Pity the poor ignorant Yank,” sighed Tom, shaking his head.
Grinning, Sol said: “Now, I did get it was alcohol.”
They groaned.
“And if it’s brewed, I guess it’s some kind of beer? Huh?”
They groaned again.
“Come on, give!” urged Sol, grinning.
“Yes, Sol, it’s home-brewed beer,” said Bob kindly.
“Except that Alec’s is to beer as the Koh-i-Noor diamond is to mere grains of sand,” explained Tom kindly.
“Nectar,” said Bob.
“Say, ya rackon I could learn to make it?”
They just looked at him and shook their heads very, very sadly.
“Delicious,” said Helen Weintraub judiciously.
Jemima had been holding her breath. Now she let it out stealthily. “Yes, Adrian really can cook!” she agreed eagerly.
Helen swallowed another mouthful of Elizabeth David’s cold Canard en daube, and smiled. “Have some, Jemima,” she urged.
Jemima blushed and shook her head. “No; it’s silly, but I can’t eat at all, I feel all fizzy inside!”
Helen gave a little laugh. “I felt just the same on my wedding day!” She looked round the room. “This is much nicer, though... Mine was pretty awful, to tell you the truth. Mum insisted on the synagogue—Nat didn’t have a clue, his family never went, of course—and then we had an enormous reception in one of those awful impersonal places... I was the eldest, you see, the first to get married, and I think Mum and Dad must’ve invited everyone they’d ever known, not to mention all the relations—but it made it feel sort of unreal.” She smiled rather sheepishly. “As if it wasn’t really me and Nat. It certainly had nothing to do with”—her large, slab-like cheeks pinkened slightly under the carefully applied make-up—“well, the way Nat and I felt about each other!”
“No,” agreed Jemima, smiling at her with affection and unable to stop herself wondering whether people had slept with each other before marriage in those days and if so whether Helen had been the sort of girl who did.
“Oh, dear,” said Helen with a little sigh. “Sometimes I look back on that girl and it’s like looking down the wrong end of a telescope—you know, all tiny and far away and unreal. And at other times I feel as if we’d only met yesterday!” She gave a rueful smile. “I suppose that sounds like utter tripe to you.”
“No,” said Jemima softly, her eyes very shiny. “It sounds very sweet.”
Helen sighed again and ate some of Adrian’s delicious duck without much enthusiasm. “Now, here I am, a grandmother,” she murmured.
“I wouldn’t mind being a grandmother, if the grandchild was as nice as Baby Belinda!” said Jemima stoutly.
“She yelled ‘Stop it, Gramma’ at me the other day when I was tickling her, I was so surprized I nearly fell over!” revealed Helen with a laugh.
“Ooh, really?” gasped Jemima. “Gosh, she’s learning to talk so fast, isn’t she?”
“Mm; Pauline was just the same,” said Helen with a reminiscent smile. “And I believe Erik talked very early—well, he’s very bright, you know. But our Melanie— Oh, dear! She was two-and-a-half before she’d say more than ‘No’, and ‘Da-Da’ and ‘Mum-Mum.’”
“I think you could get along quite well with that for a vocabulary!” squeaked Jemima, giggling.
“Melanie certainly could!” conceded Helen with her rich chuckle.
“She loves the nanny course, she was telling me all about it the other day.”
“Yes; I’m eternally grateful you put me onto that, Jemima!” beamed Helen. “Mrs Prior’s definitely helping her get over that awful hobbledehoy stage: she gave me a speech the other day on ladylikeness and whether it was inborn or acquired!”
“Help, what did you say?” asked Jemima in some horror.
Helen ate a piece of duck and grinned. “I lied in my teeth and said it was acquired and that I was sure Melanie could learn it off Mrs Prior if she tried hard!”
Jemima gave a delighted squeak.
“Mothers get like that. Total hypocrites,” said Helen with a twinkle.
“It’s acquired, is it?” gurgled Jemima.
“Mm. Takes about ten years. Then you find it comes naturally.”
Jemima broke down and giggled helplessly, and Helen chuckled her rich bass chuckle, looking at her very kindly indeed.
“Does this remind you of anything?” drawled Ralph.
Hugh replied nastily: “What, the mixture of shades of raw liver and Karitane yellow in that thing Ma Anderson’s wearing? Yes, it does, rather: that bloody rug in your study that you tried to tell me was—”
“It is, oh ignorant one. Nor is it anything like that rag. I was referring to this shindig as a whole.”
“It reminds me of five thousand other boring wedding receptions I’ve been to, if that’s what you’re getting at,” said Hugh resignedly. “Not Mitsy’s, though: I can’t feel a piercing draught in my wallet.”
Ralph sipped champagne. “Remember ours?”
“Ooh, yes, Ralph darling!” squeaked Hugh nastily.
“Mine and Aud’s, you fool. Blue, wasn’t it?”
“God, yes, so it was. Weren’t those bridesmaids large?”
Ralph nodded. “Large and blue. But then they were all Aud’s sisters and cousins, it’s in the genes.”
Hugh drained his champagne and held out his glass.
Obligingly Ralph refilled it from the bottle he was holding. “Royal blue,” he said reminiscently. “With a plethora of satin sashes, wasn’t it? With—correct me if I’m extrapolating, here—trailing sprays of artificial delphiniums down their backs.”
“Oh, yeah! Actually,” admitted Hugh, “I only remember the trailing sprays because the bloody sermon went on so long that I managed to recite the whole of that A.A. Milne thing about the dormouse in my head accurately, though when the old boy started all I could remember was ‘delphiniums blue and geraniums red.’ –Who was he? The Dean?”
“No, the Bish,” said Ralph, shuddering.
“Oh, yes: friend of the brayde’s family,” Hugh recalled nastily.
Ralph made a face at him and refilled his own glass without offering him any.
“It’s odd,” remembered Hugh dreamily: “yours was all blue but mine wasn’t. Must have been shortly before Caroline went into her blue period, everything she’s laid a hand on since has been blue.”
“Cause and effect,” noted Ralph airily.
“Very witty.”
“Yours was yellow, wasn’t it?” frowned Ralph.
“No!” he retorted with scorn. “Uh—no, I think you must be thinking of poor old Steve Mayberry’s: that was about two months after ours.”
“Good God, old Steve, haven’t given him a thought in years. What in God’s name happened to him?”
“Um… G.P.; um… Havelock North,” Hugh recalled with an effort. He drank champagne reflectively. “No, ours was frightfully Mod, don’t you remember?”
Ralph shuddered, so it was obvious it had come back to him.
“The Mary Quant look had just come in—well, just hit EnZed, could have been in for years overseas, for all I know. Whitish lipstick, and—”
“White boots. Courrèges, not Mary Quant,” said Ralph in a hollow voice.
“You could well be right. Caroline’s dress was absolutely straight up and down, with keyholes cut out of the chest and the back, remember? It came to about the middle of her thighs.”
“Of course! How could I have forgotten? In white satin: Monsieur Courrèges would have shot her on the spot, had he but been privileged to get a glimpse. With white lace tights.”
“Stockings, I definitely remember that,” corrected Hugh. “She threw a temper tantrum because Sir Bertie refused to write to the States and order a pair of tights—she’d read in some blasted rag they were all the rage there.”
Ralph refilled his glass. “Am I misremembering, dear lad,” he said with a smile in his voice, “or were there thirty bridesmaids all clad in dark maroon satin minidresses with white boots?”
Hugh winced and closed his eyes for a moment. “Six. Three big ones and three miniature ones. There was another temper tantrum because she couldn’t get miniature boots in the awful EnZed shops.”
“Gone are the days,” said Ralph with a twinkle. “Courrèges… God, I’d forgotten all about the man. He must have been mad. Well, gay, obviously.”
“Eh?”
Ralph sighed. “Never mind, Hugh. –Remember the Mondrian dresses?”
“Eh?”
“Never mind,” he said sadly.
“I remember that fat old aunt of yours that made me dance a waltz with her at your reception!” said Hugh with feeling.
“Aunty Ethel,” moaned Ralph. “Six-foot-two, fifteen stone if she was an ounce, and covered from head to toe in lilac lace—no?”
“Something like that!” gasped Hugh.
“The younger generation does not have relatives of that calibre,” he sighed. “Aunty Ethel was a collector’s item... Remember the scent?”
Hugh shook his head, eyes twinkling.
“Evening in Paris... Drenched in it,” sighed Ralph.
“That’s apocryphal!” he choked.
“Rubbish. –Hang on. OY!” He grabbed the groom’s arm.
“What?” said Tom mildly.
“Aunty Ethel. Name the scent,” said Ralph tersely.
“Evening in Paris. Where’s me prize?” replied Tom instantly.
“See?” he crowed.
Hugh grinned. “All right, I, concede.”
“What is all this Evening in Paris stuff?” asked Tom.
“Oh—classic relatives,” explained Hugh. “Ralph and I were just agreeing the younger generation doesn’t have ’em.”
Tom goggled at them. “Of course we do! Ralph’s it!”
June had found the duck. “What is it?” she asked Meg. “More tongue?”
Meg looked round cautiously but Connie was way over the other side of the room. “No.—Those wee tongue thingies weren’t bad.—No, this is one of our D,U,C,K,S!” she hissed. “Geraldine!” she hissed.
June gulped. “Are you sure?”
“It could be Ermyntrude, but I think she’s the one at the other end of the table, she was scrawnier then Geraldine: I think this has got to be Geraldine.”
They looked at Geraldine en daube.
“I am hungry,” said June.
“So am I,” admitted Meg. “Those huge cousins of Jemima’s got down on most of those little savouries.”
“Yes. And that tall, blonde lady with the Russian husband.”
“Veronica Riabouchinsky,” explained Meg. “She’s one of Helen Weintraub’s sisters. Tom’s known her husband for ages.”
There was a short pause. The ladies eyed the duck.
“Tom says it’s delicious,” murmured Meg. “Cold. That jelly stuff’s got wine in it.”
June swallowed. “I will if you will.”
Meg looked greedily at Geraldine. “Give me your plate.”
The two ladies ate Geraldine en daube with guilty relish.
Tom tottered over to Bill’s side. “Jesus,” he said limply. He hauled out a large clean handkerchief and mopped his forehead with it.
“Why not collect Mima Puddle-Duck and push off now?” Bill suggested kindly.
Tom sighed. “They’ve only been stuffing their fat faces for twenty minutes or so, I can’t possibly.”
Bill chewed reflectively. “Have something to eat, then. This quiche isn’t bad.”
“I’m not hungry,” admitted Tom on a sheepish note.
“Not surprized,” he replied calmly.
Tom sighed. “I suppose it’ll be all right,” he said dully.
“Well, nothing’s happened so far,” agreed Bill cautiously.
Nothing had happened so far in that Helen Weintraub had greeted Phoebe with great cordiality, so obviously she didn’t suspect a thing. Phoebe had greeted her and Nat with complete composure, which proved only that she was used to it. Sol had also greeted the Weintraubs with complete composure but, as Tom had noted on an earlier occasion, he was the complete poker-face anyway. Likewise when greeting Ralph. However, Phoebe’s composure had veered definitely towards the cold side, at that point. Ralphy had greeted everyone with extreme cordiality, which proved only that he was the sod his brother had always known he was.
“My nerves are jangling,” Tom decided glumly.
“Yeah,” said Bill in a strange voice, stopping with another slice of quiche halfway to his gob.
Tom followed his gaze. “Omigod, what was that?”
When Tom had delivered his bon mot and hurriedly departed, Ralph, possibly because he didn’t care for being thought of as a classic relative, had suggested sourly that Hugh open it wide and stuff the other foot in it.
Hugh returned on a dry note: “I’ve already done that. Your Uncle Alec asked me if I liked wild pig and I told him you’d have to hogtie me to get me anywhere near it.”
“Hugh!” he gasped. “Darling boy! One does not—not—address Alec in such terms! Not even if wild pig were not a sacred Kiwi macho icon, which of course it is.”
“Aw, shucks,” said an American voice from behind them. “Now I’da said it was a shibboleth.”
“Certainly not, one brings it into the home and reveres it, one cannot do that with a shibboleth,” replied Ralph severely.
“That so? I get it.”—They eyed him warily.—“Yup,” said Sol slowly, “I guess you sure ’nuff couldn’t call it a sacred cow, at that.”
Hugh gulped, failed to control himself and let out a howl of laughter.
Ralph winced ostentatiously but his bright brown eyes were twinkling.
“Now, say,” said Sol, looking slowly round the room: “would you folks say this was a typical Kiwi wedding reception?”
“We were just wondering that,” said Hugh.
“Were we?” said Ralph blankly.
“Well, I was. I think ours were more typical.”
“Yards of blue tulle—or in his case, a yard of satin mini-dresses—endless speeches, both vulgar and unfunny, popping flashbulbs and endless cake-cutting,” clarified Ralph.
“You forgot the telegrams,” Hugh pointed out.
“Say, do you have them, too?”—They nodded warily.—“Say, ain’t it jest the global village, now!”
Both Hugh and Ralph had to swallow very hard. Naturally Ralph recovered first. “Were you thinking of your own, Sol?” he murmured.
“Nup, I ain’t never been inty-grated into the middle-American dream,” he said sadly. “No, I guess I was thinking of Junior’s and Ruthie’s, mostly. –My nephew’s,” he explained to Hugh.
“Abe’s son?” murmured Ralph.
“Yeah. We had Momma Winkelmann at that. –Gaga. Spiteful with it,” he explained.
“Alzheimer’s?” suggested Hugh.
“Uh-huh. Leastways, you might call it that if you were bein’ real polite,” he amended dubiously.—Hugh bit his lip.—“She won’t remember Abe,” he explained.—“That’s her son,” he added.
“Ye-es...” said Hugh.
“He means she refuses to remember him,” drawled Ralph.
“God, really?” he said to Sol.
“Ye-ah...” He rubbed his ugly nose. “Wal, far as anyone can make out, yeah.”
“Abe was the groom’s father, is that right?”
“Yup.”
“So who did she conceive the groom to be?” asked Hugh, lips twitching.
“Ah! Well, now! You got it, Hugh!” He began to explain. Hugh eyed him a trifle uneasily but in spite of the mode of expression Sol didn’t bash him on the back and he decided that he could forget any faint doubts, Sol Winkelmann was definitely taking the Mick. Out of him and Ralph for effete, Anglocentric, upper-middle products of a British-based education system? Out of the redneck Yankee thing? Both? Oh, Hell, yes: both, definitely both!
“Henry Who?” Ralph was asking in a puzzled way.
“Wal, now,” he drawled: “that’s just it, Ralph. No-one’s ever been able to find that out, not even Momma Winkelmann’s special nurse, and boy, is she a determined lady. That wasn’t bad. But the best bit was— Now, you’d have to know the Jewish ceremony to appreciate it.”
“Hell, you mean she stood up and screamed all that about this Henry in the synagogue?” croaked Hugh, eyes bulging.
“Sure! The rabbi, he was a broad-minded man, but—”
His audience broke down and sniggered helplessly.
“What was the best bit?” asked Hugh eagerly, recovering.
“Wal, Abe don’t agree, but I’ve always reckoned the best bit was where the groom smashed the glass and she upped and screamed: ‘Not my best crystal, Henry, not for that slut, you’re breaking my heart!’” said Sol, grinning all over his thin face.
“This—tot’ly—’pocryphal—beginning—end!” gasped Ralph, eyes streaming.
“No! We warned Junior and Ruthie something like that ’ud be sure to happen if they let Momma Winkelmann anywheres near Temple, but Ruthie’s got a very sentimental heart.”
Susan and Alan had come up just in time to catch this last exchange. “Is this Ruthie and Junior’s wedding?” she asked.
They nodded and she said to Ralph with a twinkle: “No, it isn’t apocryphal, she really is like that. We went to see her the Christmas Alan and I were over there and she pretended not to see her presents—her bed was covered with them—and kept calling Sol ‘Henry.’ Oh, and complaining that Abe never came to see her.”
“He’d have been standing right beside her at the time,” Ralph acknowledged.
“Yeah!” she gasped.
“Be thankful you only had an Aunty Ethel at yours, Ralph,” recommended Hugh.
“Hugh! Old cousin Nick, you’ve forgotten old cousin Nick!”
“He like Momma Winkelmann?” asked Sol, grinning.
Ralph shuddered. “Worse. A bum-pincher. Any age from fifteen to eighty-five, he wasn’t particular.”
“I’ve got an old Uncle Aaron that thinks he’s Moshe Dayan,” said Susan detachedly, eating quiche.
“Beat that!” grinned Hugh.
Ralph shook his head. “Not possible, old cousin Nick pales into insignificance.”
“Yeah, even Momma Winkelmann’s albedo seems diminished,” drawled Sol. “Say, why haven’t I heard of him before, Susan? He wasn’t at your wedding, was he?”
“Hell, no: big gatherings set him off, he starts reviewing his troops. I think you haven’t heard of him because Grandma’s ashamed of him.”
“The Queen Mother?” asked Sol and Ralph in chorus.
There was a sticky silence.
“I dunno what it was,” admitted Bill, gulping—not quiche, it was still in his paralysed hand—“only it musta been a right bloody clanger, by the looks of it. Winkelmann looks like a ten-ton truck’s dropped on him.”
“Mm. Susan and Alan don’t seem to have noticed,” said Tom feebly.
“No. I’d say Hugh Morton has, though.”
Tom winced. “Mm.”
“Go,” urged Bill kindly. “Scarper. No-one’ll notice.”
“Uh—no, I really can’t, Bill, not yet. I mean, we haven’t cut the sodding cake, or anything.”
Bill resumed eating quiche. “No. Oh, well, go and find your wife.”
“Bill, after seeing that little scene between Ralph and Sol, I just don’t have the guts to join Jemima and Helen Weintraub,” he said limply.
“Don’t have to. Helen’s taken over with Ma Anderson”
“Oh,” he said limply. “Um—yeah; righto, I will.” He tottered over and slung his arm heavily round his wife’s slender shoulders.
“Hullo,” said Jemima mildly.
“Hullo,” replied Tom weakly. He drew her over by the wall. Away from the madding—no, make that sodding—crowd. “Are you enjoying this do?”
“Um—well, it’s nice seeing everybody here,” said Jemima cautiously. She inadvertently caught sight of her mother. “Most of them,” she amended weakly.
“I enjoyed Susan and Alan’s wedding more,” he said glumly.
“So did I,” admitted Jemima. “It was awful, but— Well, it was splendid in its way. Splendidly awful.”
“Yes.”
The bride and groom stood there in glum silence.
Finally Tom offered feebly: “Well, it’s giving Michaela a good tuck-in, if nothing else.”
“Yes…”
“What?” he said, looking at the frown.
“I don’t think she’s very happy... I don’t think it’s working out terribly well between her and Hugh.”
“Oh, well, she can have Ralph instead: he’s footloose and fancy-free,” said Tom on a sour note.
“What do you mean?”
“Eh? Oh—shit!” He went very red and removed his specs.
“You don’t just mean— You know.” Jemima glanced cautiously at Phoebe.
Tom polished his specs assiduously. “No. He’s busting up with Audrey. Well—busted, really. They’re not advertising it yet: wanted to get the wedding over first.”
“Oh, no!” she said in dismay.
“It was never exactly a match made in Heaven, you know,” he said drily.
“No, but— Well, they seemed so settled!”
“Or set in their ways. Well, yeah, they did.”
“What happened?”
Tom shrugged. “We miss a lot not having the idiot-box. Ought to borrow that one from school more often—you know, the one that snows like crazy.”
“Mm, the good one,” agreed Jemima with a little smile. The smile faded quickly and she said: “What’s that got to do with it?”
Tom made a face. He explained about the loquacious and sozzled Sylvia. Not expecting Mima Puddle-Duck to have heard of her, which indeed she hadn’t. She hadn’t heard of the awful local soap Sylvia was in, either: that was a bonus. Isabel loved it, and regularly reported to Tom at morning tea in Maungakiekie Street Primary’s staffroom every single bloody thing that had happened in it.
“Oh, dear,” Jemima murmured.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart, I didn’t mean it to spoil your day.”
Jemima looked up at him and smiled. “It’s all right, I don’t really feel it is my day—or our day. I love my new suit, though.”
Tom swallowed. “Good.”
“Do you know what I really think of as our day?”
“Uh—what?” He knew what he did.
Jemima smiled reminiscently. “That first day when I was in your flat, and you came home after work and took me to that lovely coffee shop in Remuera, and we had strawberry tarts!”
Tom smiled shakily. “Always knew those strawberry tarts meant more to you than the sacrifice of me fair young body the night before.”
“Silly!” she said with a giggle. “That was nice, too. Only…” She frowned and thought it over.
Tom found he was holding his breath.
“I wasn’t exactly used to it, at that stage,” decided Jemima.
“Used to—” Tom swallowed. “Used to me in your bed. No, well, sex does take a bit of getting used to, they tell me.”
“Yes,” she said serenely. “I always love it, now.”
“Good.” He took his specs off, looked at them blindly, and put them back on. “That’ll always be our day, eh? Our secret day.”
“Yes,” said Jemima, slipping her hand into his and squeezing it. “I’ll remember it when I’m a very, very old lady.”
“Mm,” said Tom, sniffing.
“Could we go?” she said wistfully.
He sniffed hard, and swallowed. “Better not. They haven’t put the puds out yet. And we haven’t cut the bloody cake.”
“Oh, no,” remembered Jemima dully. “Is that before or after the puddings?”
“After,” said Tom glumly.
“Couldn’t we really go, Tom?” she said in a very small voice.
Tom sighed. “No. Not unless you want to mortally offend your mother—oh, I dunno, though!” he said, rallying.
“I wouldn’t care. I felt like hitting her when she said red didn’t suit me and a girl shouldn’t wear red on her wedding day.”
“Shoulda told her it represented the status of your virginity,” he murmured.
“I felt like it!” said Jemima vigorously. “No, but I wouldn’t want to offend people like Mrs Morton, or Aunty Pam.”
“No.” Tom looked round the room. “There is old Mrs M. Come on, shall we go and talk to her?”
“Yes, lovely. –I wish we could just have had her, and Bill and Meg, and Alec.”
Tom squeezed her hand very hard. “Me, too.”
Bill looked warily round the room. Things seemed to have calmed down a bit; well, poor old Tom didn’t look so tense, he was talking to old Mrs Morton and the old dame was even managing to get a bit of nosh into him! Bill gave a sigh of relief. He hadn’t fancied the thought of Tom driving Mima Puddle-Duck down to old Alec’s in that tin-can of his with nothing inside him but half a glass of fizz.
He looked warily over at Sol. He looked all right. Well, he’d stopped looking as if a ten-ton truck had fallen on him. –Hang on, where the fuck was Phoebe?
Bill sagged. Not talking to Ralphy, thank Christ! Hang on, hang on… Oof! Not talking to Weintraub, either: he was with Erik and Pauline and Baby Belinda, showing off his granddaughter to assorted admirers. Well, mainly Meg and June.
On the strength of it Bill poured a large Cognac into the remains of the champagne in his glass. Two seconds later Isabel came up and remarked approvingly on his ginger ale but by that time Bill was more than capable of receiving this remark without even a flicker. Not a flicker.
Sol had indeed felt as if a ten-ton truck had dropped on him. There was no way it could be a coincidence: Ralph Overdale must have gotten the “Queen Mother” bit from Phoebe. Jesus, how close had they been, then?
He managed, he thought, to conceal his emotions from them all and make his escape in good order. Was he just imagining things? Could there be some other— Well, true, Ralph Overdale was the type that picked up other people’s catchphrases and appropriated them: he didn’t necessarily need to have gotten that from Phoebe in bed. But how close were they? He’d been under the impression that she’d hardly laid eyes on him since coming back from the mountain last year. Had she even mentioned him at all...? Sol couldn’t recall his name ever having passed her lips. Which you could take either way. No, Jesus, he must have been imagining things! ...Had he? Had Ralph actually appeared shaken for a moment? Or had he only imagined that? ...Jesus!
“Ooh, dear,” Ralph had said in a squeaky voice once he and Hugh were alone. “That was one of Phoebe’s.”
Hugh replied drily: “I think I might have noticed that. Talking of feet in mouths.”
Ralph screwed up his mouth wryly and shrugged.
Hugh frowned slowly. “Does Sol know about you and her?”
Ralph screwed up his mouth wryly and shrugged.
“Well, if he didn’t before, he certainly does now,” Hugh concluded.
Ralph shrugged again. “One could go out to the front porch and have a gorilla?”
“No, we couldn’t, they haven’t even started putting out the desserts. Anyway, I don’t fancy one,” said Hugh in a grumpy voice.
Ralph’s eyes bulged. “Rejecting all the macho icons? Why, Hugh, why?”
“Fed up,” said Hugh simply.
“Er—your master potter is over there eating, dear boy. Couldn’t you find solace there?”
“That or another brush-off.”
Ralph raised his eyebrows. “Have you been trying to foist more woolly jumpers on her?”
Hugh reddened. “No.”
“Well, what?” he murmured.
“If you must have it, I bought her some decent panties and she’s never— Stop laughing, bugger it!”
Ralph shook, wheezing.
“Anyway, it isn’t that, she says they’re too good for every day.”
Ralph shook, wheezing.
“Look, did I laugh when you were down in the dumps because you’d got the push?”
Ralph goggled at him. “As I recall, you took no interest whatsoever in the matter. None whatsoever.”
Hugh scowled. “No, well, I had my own problems... Damn it, I will go and talk to Michaela, all she can do is trample on my tenderest feelings with those great boots of hers.” He went off.
Ralph looked after him dubiously. Was the master potter going to? She didn’t appear to. But then she didn’t display any marked enthusiasm, either. It crossed Ralph’s mind fleetingly that the master potter was in some ways not unlike Miss Fothergill, and he winced slightly and felt a fleeting moment’s pity for poor old Hugh.
Then he shrugged and wandered off to smoke a cigar. He wouldn’t have been averse to chatting up a luscious twin on the way, but unfortunately he didn’t find one.
“Huh?” said Bill, jumping.
Isabel repeated that she thought John and Darryl looked so happy together!
“Uh?” he said groggily. “Oh—yeah. They’re all right.”
She blahed on about them but Bill stopped listening. Things seemed to have calmed down, he decided. Well, Sol Winkelmann wasn’t the type to make a scene in public. Only for a moment, there, it had looked like… Well, it looked all right now. Well, Weintraub looked as if he was getting pissed, but who could blame him, with the combination of his wife, Phoebe, Sol and bloody Ralph in the same room?
John eyed Jemima’s tiny waist in its scarlet suit. “There’s certainly no sign of it.”
“Well, there wouldn’t be,” agreed Darryl. “This chicken thing’s good, is it one of Adrian’s?”
“Ah... No: one of Mrs Weintraub’s, I think.”
“Yeah. –Funny, that.”
John understood she was referring to the friendship between Jemima and Helen Weintraub so he merely looked hard at Mrs Anderson, and said: “Is it?”
Darryl followed his gaze. “Well, no, not all that,” she conceded.
He finished his chicken and put his plate down. “Shall we see if we can beat Tom and Jemima to it?”
Darryl gulped.
He pointed out calmly: “The academic year is over. We have finished our marking. Well, I’ve almost finished mine.”
“Yeah: if you don’t get those results in by Friday morning, you’ll be for it,” she reminded him calmly.
“True. –Well?”
“Might as well be sick all over the bloody long vacation if I’m gonna spew me heart out for three months, yeah.”
“Good,” said John, putting his arm round her wide shoulders and squeezing very hard. “Let’s go home and get started,” he said into the blue-black curls.
“We can’t,” she said in a strangled voice. “We can’t just walk out.”
“Why not?”
Darryl swallowed hard. “Um—well, for one thing, Ginny and Vicki are shifting most of their gear over to Michaela’s this arvo, had you forgotten?”
John had. “Damn.”
“Using Pam Anderson’s son’s Bedford van, forget which one it is that owns it,” she added heavily.
“Never mind. Let’s compensate madly by getting down on Adrian’s canard en daube. Didn’t it smell wonderful when he was cooking it?”
“Ye-ah... Not that foul tonguey muck?”
“No, the du— D,U,C,K!” said John with a gasp, looking round for Connie.
“It’s all right, she’s over there sitting on The Fiend.”
“By the way,” he murmured, not asking why she hadn’t picked up the French for duck while she was in France, “shouldn’t we think about getting married before we embark on this nuclear family?
Darryl’s jaw sagged slightly. “Uh—I’d forgotten about that.”
“It doesn’t have to be literally before,” conceded John, eyes twinkling.
“No,” she agreed with a grin.
“Shall we?” he murmured.
“You are sure that divorce of yours—um—went through?”
“It must have done, she’s married that Warwick creep.”
“Oh, yeah.” Darryl had found the carcase of a duck. She looked at it in huge disappointment.
“Well?” he murmured, putting an arm round her again.
“Did Adrian do two?”
“Three, there’ll be a spare in the kitchen.”
“Ooh, good!”
“Well?”
“Mum’ll go totally berserk,” predicted Darryl.
This was evidently consent. “Are you really sure you want to?”
“Yeah. –Come on, let’s see if there is some more out there!”
John allowed himself to be tugged as far as the passage. “Hold on.”
“What?”
“Do you want a do like this?”
“Eh? Hell, no!” She eyed him warily. “Do you?”
“No. Shall we just ask—um—well, Tom and Jemima, and Bill and Meg, perhaps, to be our witnesses, and go off to the Registry Office quietly?”
“Yeah, that’d be okay, though I s’pose Mum and Dad could be the witnesses.”
“Technically, they probably could. But I think Alistair might like to give the bride away.”
“Gawd!” replied Darryl with feeling.
They went into the kitchen. “Thank God!” she said as she opened the fridge and discovered another pinkish corpse. “They’ll go potty, ya know: Dad’s been making noises about a flaming bedroom suite as it is.”
John took the platter out of her hands. “Good. It’s about time you had a decent dressing-table,” he said calmly, walking out with it.
Darryl’s mouth opened slightly but for a while no sound came out of it. Finally she said: “Gone over to the other side. Thought ’e was going that way.” Then she marched out with a determined look on her face, ignoring the fact that her heart was pounding wildly and her blood felt as if it had gone all fizzy.
“Have you tried those lovely chicken things, Bill?” said Isabel brightly.
“Don’t think so. Had some—” he glanced warily over at Connie—“D,U,C,K.”
“Yes, that was nice, wasn’t it! No, the chicken vol-au-vents.”
Bill gave in, he was obviously never gonna get any peace until he’d sampled a chicken how’s-ya-father, and let her tug him in the direction of the—
“Ooh!” gasped Isabel as he stopped dead, his bulk perforce halting her slight frame in mid step.
Bill had turned a very strange colour.
“What is it, Bill? Oh, dear, not a tooth—”
“No. I’ve just remembered,” said Bill in a hollow voice, “that Meg’s warned me to watch me cholesterol intake. Do those chicken things have cholesterol in ’em, Isabel?”
“Yes, I’m afraid… Of course, lean chicken is— But then, the pastry would have—”
Bill let her blather on, meanwhile turning her firmly in the direction of the bar. When’d she’d run down he said faintly: “Think I might have another ginger ale.”
Bob Butler and Bob Overdale were now both on duty behind the bar. Or, you could have said, in cahoots behind it. Bill held out his glass limply. “Shove some more ginger ale in that, wouldja?” he croaked.
Bob Butler just gawped at him. But Bob Overdale, who’d just seen what he’d just seen, not to mention having observed his earlier routine with the Cognac bottle, obligingly resupplied him. “You’ll need this,” he noted neutrally, handing it to him.
Bill sank half of it, shuddering. Jesus, his nerves were jangling!
Nat Weintraub had just taken a small hot chicken vol-au-vent.
Simultaneously Phoebe had reached for a small hot chicken vol-au-vent.
“Seems to be going okay,” he said with something less than his usual cheery ebullience.
Phoebe tasted her vol-au-vent. “Mm.”
“Never expected to see you here,” he said awkwardly.
Phoebe drank some champagne. “That makes two of us.”
Nat chewed vol-au-vent fiercely without tasting it. “Why the Hell are you here?” he said angrily.
“Sol and I were invited. I couldn’t think of any way to get out of it,” she replied calmly.
“Jesus, couldn’t you have had a bloody headache or something?”
Phoebe replied in a voice that was only slightly apologetic: “I wasn’t sure you’d be here. I thought Helen might be, but not necessarily you.”
Nat drank champagne angrily. Phoebe sipped hers and slowly ate chicken vol-au-vent. “These are very good,” she murmured.
“Helen made ’em. Always are,” he said grumpily.
“Oh,” said Phoebe. Her wide mouth twitched.
“She’s a damn good cook,” he muttered.
She gave him a look in which a certain degree of amusement was mingled with a good deal of affection. “Yes.”
Nat slammed his glass down. “That bloody brother of his is here too, ya know!”
“Well, you can hardly claim to be surprized at that.”
“I’m not surprized,” he said nastily: “I’m just standing here wondering how the fuck you can be so cool about it!”
“What else can I do? Throw a maidenly swoon?”
Nat gave his baffled-bull glare.
Phoebe was suddenly swept by a wave of fondness for him. He was a decent creature in his way, and they’d had some good times together—damn good, he’d been just what she’d needed, at a time when frankly she hadn’t thought she had much hope of getting it. Something robust, and straightforward—and totally unlike all the Dougals and Owens and Westbys of her life.
“Does the Yank know?” he asked with an effort.
“Only about you.”
Nat went very red. “Look, what’s the poor joker gonna feel if— Oh, forget it.”
Phoebe sipped her champagne and eyed him cautiously over the rim of the glass. “Who do you imagine’s going to tell him? Ralph?”
“Why the fuck not? He told me!” he said angrily.
Phoebe’s colour rose. “What?” she said in a very quiet but very steely voice.
“You heard,” he muttered.
“Look, is this true?”
Nat’s generous mouth tightened for an instant. “Yeah: think he thought it’d put me off. Give him a clear field.”
“Did he, indeed?” she said grimly.
“Yeah,” he said. He picked up his glass and, not looking at her, strode off.
Tom tottered over to Bill’s side. “Did you see that?” he croaked.
Bill bared his gums in a pale and mirthless rictus, nodding.
Tom shuddered. “What the Hell can Weintraub have said to her?”
“Dunno, but from the way she’s looking at ole Ralphy, my bet is he let on who put the story all round their bloody golf club.”
Tom nodded numbly.
“Uh—well, cheer up, can’t get any worse!” said Bill hurriedly. “No-one’ll make a scene in front of this lot.”
Tom gave him a bitter look, but conceded: “No, I suppose they won’t, really.”
Bill managed to nod kindly, even though he’d just spotted Ralphy standing in a corner knocking back the grog and looking sour as Hell. If the bastard got pissed enough... Well, maybe try and hurry up the proceedings? Get them to wheel the bloody cake out, at least? “Who’s in charge of the cake?” he asked.
“Eh? Uh—Helen, I suppose. She made it,” said Tom dully. “Why?”
Bill gulped. “Nothing,” he muttered.
For a while things went along smoothly enough. Well, Mrs Anderson complained about the richness of the desserts in general and the funny taste of the trifle in particular, but that was par for the course.
Bill was pretty sure that Sol was now deliberately avoiding Phoebe. On the up-side, however, Phoebe was pretty clearly deliberately avoiding Ralph.
He ate his way stolidly through helpings of all the puds on offer, fingers mentally crossed.
“You’ll burst,” warned a grim voice from out of nowhere.
Jumping, he retorted crossly: “Don’t do that! –And I won’t burst, it’s therapeutic.”
“What?” said Meg weakly.
“Never mind. Look, Meg,” he said, taking her confidentially by the arm—Meg squirmed: “for once in ya life couldja do us a favour without asking questions?”
“What?”
“Old Tom’s Hell of an edgy. Do ya reckon you could kind of hurry Helen Weintraub up with the cake? Get all the palaver over with?”
Meg was about to wither him but caught sight of Tom’s face and said weakly: “Righto. –Why on earth didn’t you say so before?” she added, rallying.
Bill sagged, as she hurried off. If she could do it, he might just live to see tomorrow. Once the bridal couple had gone it wouldn’t much matter if the sky fell in.
“Where on earth has Jemima got to?” wondered her mother aggrievedly.
“No idea,” muttered Pam Anderson mendaciously, staring at her feet.
Old Alec Overdale was passing. “Her and Tom snuck out ten minutes or so ago.”
“WHAT?” Mrs Anderson carried on at length.
Alec just walked on past.
“Admiring the view of the Maureen Mitchell Memorial Reserve?” drawled Ralph, wandering into the unused room behind Jemima’s study.
Phoebe had been staring out of the window at the view over the wild turnip fields to the low blue hills. She jumped, and gasped.
“No, wondering what they’re going to do with this room,” she said, rallying.
“Torn: family-room, TV room, or breakfast room,” Ralph explained briefly in a very bored voice.
“They’ve got a perfectly good kitchen to have breakfast in.”
“And they haven’t got a TV—quite. The breakfast room was Tom’s idea—ideas above his station, been associating with the Carranos. I think the family-room was Meg Coggins’s contribution.”
“O’Connell, they’re not actually married,” said Phoebe automatically. “What about the TV room suggestion?”
Ralph bowed modestly.
“You would,” she said grimly.
“I might have given them a television set to put into it,” he offered.
“That was the thought that prompted the suggestion, of course,” said Phoebe, very acid.
“Well, no. –What’s up?”
Phoebe’s nostrils flared. “What did you say about us to poor old Nat?”
“The truth, dear soul, only the truth.”
Her bosom heaved. “May I ask why you took it upon yourself to do so, Ralph?”
Ralph shrugged.
“Why, Ralph?” said Phoebe, rather loud.
He shrugged again. “Very well, dear heart, since you must have it: I attempted to hint to the charming Weintraub that—er—your turning to me as—er—a solace between your regular Wednesday evening tumbles in the hay with him—forgive the hackneyed image, but he always strikes me as such a bucolic type, one wonders what the attraction was. Er, where was I?” Phoebe’s mouth continued tightly compressed and her nostrils retained their slight flare, so he continued with a tiny chuckle in his voice: “Oh, yes: that your turning to me in between the regular Wednesdays with Weintraub was an indication that he was failing to satisfy your needs, and that he might as well resign the reins to me—er—definitively.”
“You shit, Ralph!” said Phoebe between her teeth.
Ralph bowed again.
In the front passage Helen Weintraub, who had been on her way to the kitchen to see if Susan and Darryl needed any help with the washing up, turned first very white and then very red. She had never imagined that her Nat was an angel, but—
All those Wednesdays when he’d said Dad needed him to work late at CohenCorp, she’d never even dreamed! Nat’s Wednesdays working late had been going on for almost as long as… Helen couldn’t remember when they’d started, but they’d been going on for ages. Since Melanie was a baby, anyway. Surely he couldn’t—no, Phoebe Fothergill hadn’t even been at St Ursie’s then, had she?
Helen felt very dizzy and tottered into the little back passage and leaned against the wall. After quite some time she felt recovered enough to get herself as far as the sitting-room door and look in. Quite a few people had gone but to her huge relief she saw her sister Veronica Riabouchinsky was still there, sitting on the large leather couch with her husband. Veronica looked distinctly flushed and was drinking out of a brandy glass but Peter looked his normal neat, composed self. Helen took a deep breath and went over to them. “Peter—”
Peter Riabouchinsky took one look at her, got up, took her arm, and said to his wife in a steely voice: “Come, Veronica, I think Helen is not feelink very well, we go now.”
In the front seat of Peter’s big car the storm broke and Helen sobbed and sobbed.
“What in God’s name’s happened?” demanded Veronica fiercely from the back seat.
“Nat!” she sobbed.
“Is he all right?” asked Veronica in alarm.
“All right? He’s a beast!” cried Helen. –Renewed sobs.
“Oh, God,” said Veronica on a heavily resigned note.
At this Helen gulped, stopped sobbing, and cried: “Did you KNOW?” She twisted to stare at her sister.
Guilty knowledge was written all over Veronica’s large, blonde face.
“You DID know!” she cried. “So did you, so don’t put on that blank face of yours!” she added fiercely to her Russian brother-in-law.
“Helen, there was nothink in it; and in any case it is all over now,” he said gently, patting her hand.
“Yeah, Phoebe Fothergill’s going round with that Sol type,” agreed Veronica glumly. “Given ole Ralph Overdale the push, too, by the looks of it.”
“Shut up, Veronica,” Peter said tiredly.
“How could he? The woman’s a—a monster!” cried Helen fiercely. ”I won’t stand for it! Setting herself up holier than thou, telling all the girls’ mothers where they’ve gone wrong—” She burst into tears again.
“She’s never done that. Pretty good headmistress, really,” said Veronica uneasily.
Helen gulped, and sniffed. “They were talking about it!” she burst out.
“Who were?” asked Veronica.
“Her. Phoebe Fothergill. And that horrible Ralph Overdale; did Pauline tell you how he chased poor little Jemima up that ladder that time? I thought she was exaggerating, only now I realize she was right: he’s a beast! All men are beasts!” declared Helen, bursting into tears again.
“Ssh, Helen, moy dear. Of course it is upsettink, to hear people talk about Nat. But let us not pretend that you never suspected anything: after all it is not the first episode,” said Peter gently.
Helen sobbed for a while. “It’s different when you know,” she said at last. She sniffed, and blew her nose. “I think I’d like to go home, now, Peter.”
“Of course. Véronique, please nip over and disable Nat’s car,” he said calmly.
Helen gasped, but Veronica said cheerfully: “Righto. Got ya keys?”
Limply Helen gave her her car keys. She watched limply as Veronica strolled over to Nat’s Jaguar. And as her sister slammed the bonnet down and threw something casually into the ditch at the side of the road.
“Was that the distributor arm you throw into the ditch?” asked Peter somewhat weakly as she got back into the car, grinning.
“Yeah, that’ll settle his hash, eh? Don’t think he’s gonna find one of them at a moment’s notice on a Wednesday arvo!” she said cheerfully.
This was the wrong reference entirely. Helen wailed: “Wednesday!” and burst into tears again.
Her brother-in-law had already started the car. Hurriedly he drove off.
During the next twenty minutes the guests began to go but unfortunately not enough not to make it obvious if Bill escaped early. He leaned back in the big armchair with his eyes closed but he thought a few Thorts as he did so. Like: if poor Helen Weintraub hadn’t found out about Phoebe and her ruddy husband he was a Dutchman in his clogs, and thank God Tom and Jemima had gone! Not to say, thank Him again, in fact thank Him in Hebrew, that that fat little Peter bloke had had the sense to get Helen out of it. And: one ray of hope: Phoebe and Sol seemed to have gone off somewhere together. Well, so long as Sol wasn’t asking questions about her, Weintraub, and Ralph, of course. And: Ralphy had been smirking to himself, so if any cats had been let out of bags Guess Who had been right in there opening the fucking bag and calling “Puss, puss?”
He took a cautious look at where Meg and June were now ensconced on the flat-armed sofa that Tom hadn’t yet got shot of, cooing over Baby Belinda. If there was a snowflake’s hope in Hell of wrenching Meg away he’d do so, and go, but there wasn’t. Could nip off anyway? If he had the guts: yeah.
… Funny, eh? When ya thought how much him and Meg had been looking forward to Tom and Jemima’s wedding. Oh, well. Such was life, or something.
Next chapter:
https://theamericanrefugeeanovel.blogspot.com/2022/10/relationships-like-pots.html
No comments:
Post a Comment