The Facts of Life (12 page)

Rosa’s expression, as she turned back, was hostile as a suddenly drawn knife. ‘Why did you make him do it?’ she demanded. ‘Are you so very Christian?’

Sally gasped.

‘I’d happily not have got married in church at all,’ she stammered, ‘My mother –’

‘So,’ the old woman cut in. ‘You could have gone to a synagogue. You could have respected his dead family – may their memory be blessed. Our wedding ceremony is so beautiful but you chose this … this humiliation.’

‘Now Rosa, really,’ Edward protested. ‘I haven’t set foot in a synagogue since you last took me when I was a boy.’

‘And you expect me to be
impressed
by that? Look at you. With a name like Edward. That’s what you call yourself still? Edward? Edward
Pepper
?’

As her voice rose in mockery of an English accent, other guests – Sally’s mother, Dr Pertwee, Thomas – turned to see what was happening. Rosa glowered back at them all.

‘His name is Eli,’ she told them, succinctly. ‘Eli Pfefferberg.’

Sally’s mother flinched as at an obscenity and turned quickly away. Rosa’s voice dropped. ‘No good can come of it,’ she pronounced, thrusting her empty teacup into Sally’s protesting hands with a rattle.

‘So, you’re a doctor, my dear?’ she mocked, looking Sally up and down. ‘Your mother must be proud. But even
you
can’t raise the dead.’

She turned on her heel.

‘Rosa!’ Edward said, raising his voice. ‘Rosa, please!’

More heads turned as she stalked from the room. The cup began to shake in Sally’s hands. Edward took it from her and led her to a window recess as nervous conversation burst out all around them.

‘Ssh,’ he told her. ‘She’s not herself. Don’t worry. She’s still not over Isaac’s death. He was all she had. I’ll make sure people realise. God Sally, I’m sorry! I should never have invited her. The stupid crone.’

The distress in his face was not entirely compassionate however.

‘She cursed us,’ Sally said, managing to laugh. ‘She came in here like the uninvited fairy at the christening, and she
cursed
us!’

For their honeymoon they took Thomas’s car – it would always be ‘Thomas’s car’ – and drove east. They spent their wedding night in a profoundly uncomfortable bed and breakfast on the outskirts of Ipswich. This was not in their plan but night was falling and they found they could wait no longer, so they stopped at the first place they saw, only to find a creaking bed, paper-thin walls and a landlord whose expression alone would have pickled onions. Every time they tried to do more than hold hands, the bed’s clattering betrayal sent them off into lust-stifling giggles. They finally managed to make love as man and wife, some time after midnight, leaning against a chest of drawers in the one corner of the room with trustworthy floorboards.

‘Funny,’ Sally said over breakfast, as they devoured the limp bacon and glistening eggs set before them by the landlord – whose face implied he had stayed awake as long as they had – ‘funny. We’ve done this so many times before and yet, simply because of that little ceremony yesterday, we’re now above disapproval.’ She held out her hand to admire her simple ring. ‘He probably thinks this is just another curtain ring, but now, I don’t care.’

They drove on to the Suffolk coast and spent two nights in a hotel on the Aldeburgh sea-front. Their room overlooked a stretch of shingle beach where the fishermen hauled their boats clear of the water on old motorised winches. Catches were sold on the spot, out of ramshackle huts black with creosote and patched with roofing felt and squares of tin. Edward left the windows open so they could roll around on their wonderfully silent bed and hear the waves break and drag through the shingle. For hour upon hour they rejoiced in their new, sanctioned rights to one another. They ventured out once or twice, to walk by the sea or visit the hotel restaurant, but they felt vulnerable in their new status, soft and newly hatched, and they soon slipped back to their room out of the public eye.

At night they sat entwined in darkness on the window seat with the quilt around them. His torso hot against her back, his breath on her neck, they watched as the beach was taken over by the scavenging, lovemaking and territorial disputes of countless cats that seemed to melt away with the return of daylight.

They had to return home cruelly soon for Edward to return to the last weeks of his duties in the bookshop and Sally to oversee as much redecoration of The Roundel as her parents were able to pay for. They had been driven out to their daughter’s new home just once, when Sally could persuade them into Thomas’s car. Her father thought it was a ruin, and her mother declared it creepy but, after a lifetime of paying rent, they were impressed that she had become a property owner through a simple act of generosity. Behind their eagerness to have the place decorated and furnished lay a discreetly conveyed fear that a fairy godmother so plainly capricious in her dealings with the material world might suddenly change her mind.

In fact, the fairy godmother was relieved to have one less thing to tidy up before her departure from society. As The Roundel filled with the eye-watering smells of paint and putty, the date approached for Dr Pertwee’s installation on Corry and her rooms became a turmoil of book and paper. Miss Murphy, the bookseller, was summoned to make a bid for a small landscape of volumes, and was deeply impressed that such a distinguished authoress counted her young employee as one of her friends. Just three Sundays after their wedding, Edward and Sally rose at dawn and drove Dr Pertwee to Dorset, along with the small trunk of possessions to which she had miraculously managed to reduce the clutter of a long and fruitful life. Men being forbidden on the island outside Visitor’s Day and the harvest celebration, Edward helped a fisherman load the trunk on to his boat, took the liberty of planting a formal kiss on the old woman’s cheek, gave Sally’s arm a squeeze, then stood on the quay to wave them off.

The two monastic islands, Corry and Whelm, female and male, loomed up out of a dazzling, millpond sea. Sitting beside Sally in the bows of the little boat, Dr Pertwee patted her hand and sighed with mock homesickness.

‘Oh well. If push comes to shove, at least it’s not too far for me to swim,’ she joked. ‘Or I could always steal a boat.’

Corry had a grove of pine trees reaching almost to its sandy shore, which was protected by great boulders, their undersides greeny-purple with weed, their tops mussel-crusted. By the time the boat pulled in, a deputation of women had gathered on the sands to greet them. Sally was astonished to see two of the stronger ones stride, fully dressed, into the water to seize the painter and tug the craft through the surf, their skirts swirling, blackened, about them in the brine. Not all were nuns. At least, not all were dressed in habits. Several contented themselves with stout brogues and serviceable tweeds that would not have raised a second glance at a point-to-point. Dr Pertwee had fallen silent. Sally wondered if she were nervous. A tall, thin nun, benefiting from all the flattering elegance of the wimple, stepped forward.

‘Welcome, Alice. Welcome to Corry,’ she said and kissed the new arrival’s cheek before hugging her warmly. Sally suddenly realised she had never before heard Dr Pertwee addressed by her girlish Christian name.

The others drew, smiling, around, touched Dr Pertwee’s back or shoulder, then briefly clasped her hand. There was a sudden, tremendous sense of transition, of, quite literally, passing over to the other side. Introductions were briefly made. The two women with wet skirts took the trunk from the fisherman, who remained respectfully in his boat, and the crowd began to wind up through the wood towards the abbey.

Dr Pertwee broke away from the Mother Superior, to clasp Sally’s hand again and murmur wryly, ‘My
dear
! With all these pine trees and soft-spoken, shady women, I feel quite as though we’d crossed the Styx!’ She dropped her voice to a satirical whisper, ‘Though I suspect they keep cats instead of a three-headed dog.’

Sally was not to know that the same thought had occurred to Edward. Waiting on the quay among sunburned holiday-makers who were taking photographs of each other with the crowded harbour as backdrop, he watched his new bride borne inexorably out to sea and felt the sense of her loss as a wrenching in the pit of his stomach. She looked back over her shoulder and smiled at him a few times, then she seemed intent on a conversation with Dr Pertwee and did not turn again. Her face became indistinct as the boat grew ever smaller. When he could stand it no longer, he tore himself away from the sight to explore the sea-front until her return.

He had a cup of strong, milky tea in a drab café, where the air was thick with cigarette smoke and bacon fumes, then walked by gift shops encrusted with vivid clusters of buckets and spades and little patriotic flags for sandcastles. Even outside, the air was unpleasantly sweetened with smells of toffee, candy-floss, frying onions and hot children. He sought refuge in a second-hand bookshop. He was casting a half-hearted professional eye over their stock when he was delighted to find a first edition of
A Husband’s Love
by one Alice Pertwee. Smiling, he leaned against the dusty shelves and read the contentious opening page:

If the husbands of our nation were less inclined to take the pleasures of the marriage bed for granted and their wives were less afraid of a little instruction in the god-given pleasures of the flesh, there would be a substantial drop in the number of sour faces encountered across the nation’s breakfast tables and a concomitant fall in incidences of prostitution, adultery, divorce and syphilis.

Then he fainted. For the second time since his introduction to The Roundel, he sensed Miriam’s presence. Again he felt her anguish, but this time it was joined with stabs of real, physical pain as though a small, feminine boot were treading on his outstretched neck. He smelled an indescribable human foetor – a stench of unwashed bodies, excrement, putrefaction. Then, unmistakably, he heard his sister’s voice turned against him in anger.

‘Here! Sir?’

‘Are you all right young man?’

‘He’s coming round.’

‘Open that window, Cyril!’

He regained consciousness to a trio of worried faces.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, fighting off a wave of nausea. ‘I must have fainted.’

‘Shouldn’t read such strong stuff at your age,’ the proprietor laughed, retrieving Dr Pertwee’s book from where Edward had let it fall. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

‘Yes. I think I just need air.’

‘Well there’s no shortage of
that
here,’ the second man told him.

‘You were shouting the place down,’ said the woman. ‘Screaming and moaning! We thought someone was being attacked, didn’t we, Cyril? Then we found you on the floor here having a turn. You should be more careful.’

His cheeks hot with embarrassment, Edward thanked them all profusely and paid for
A Husband’s Love
. He pressed it into Sally’s hands when she returned, a little tearful, from Corry. She was overjoyed and began to read it immediately in the car, turning pages, rapt, beginning conversations she allowed to wither as the text stole her attention. He told her nothing of what had happened. He did not see how he could even begin to explain, and feared where his words might lead.

Having paid for basic redecoration and repairs, the Bankses’ generosity understandably petered out after buying the young couple a bed, sofa, table and chairs. Edward had a few sticks of furniture picked up in junk shops and Rexbridge market over the years, but there was certainly not enough to furnish every room. Much of what they discovered under Dr Pertwee’s dustsheets was mouldy beyond redemption. One of the new things they learned on moving in together, however, was their shared loathing of the clutter that had filled the houses of their childhoods. So, to Mrs Banks’s horror, they happily
emphasised
the strange house’s emptiness. There was one room with nothing in it but a bed, the next just contained a wardrobe, while another had nothing in it at all. Edward claimed he sometimes lay on its floor ‘to think’. ‘All it needs is a straitjacket,’ Mrs Banks quipped.

The only room Edward avoided was the sad little bedroom with the barred window and iron bedstead. He said nothing of this to Sally, but he could not forget the strange sensation that had overcome him the first time he had entered it. The room spoke to him of Miriam. It unsettled him to wake in the night and remember that it waited for him through a low door only feet away from his marriage bed, a small, chill cell of doubt.

When they found that Edward’s piano would not fit through any of the internal doors, they emptied the high-domed central hall to leave it there in glorious isolation with only a small sofa and standard lamp for company. The furnishing was completed with mirrors and abundant sunlight.

‘I love the light,’ Sally exclaimed on one of their first mornings, walking from room to room in her dressing gown. ‘I love the way it bounces around here with nothing to get in its way. It gets everywhere!’

After the torture of spending the first weeks of wedlock in the Bankses’ cottage – which was almost worse than not being married at all, they were afforded so little privacy – there were pleasures in the simple fact of their sharing an isolated house. There were obvious ones, touched on during their honeymoon, like uninterrupted, unlimited intimacy and being able to walk around stark naked. Then there were other, less obvious pleasures, ones unlooked-for. They found themselves together at times of day – breakfast, teatime, the dead of night – that they had rarely shared. Edward found Sally’s culinary skills stretched no further than grilling chops and scrambling eggs but, for a man whose life had always been run by women of the nurturing-nourishing kind, this was oddly reassuring. It confirmed Sally’s otherness from his family in his mind. After a few brave disasters in the kitchen, she abandoned the struggle and they started to learn together, working their way, recipe by recipe, through a cookery book given as a wedding present. That this meant starting on soups and progressing through eggs and cheese to poultry via fish was no bad thing since the earlier recipes were also among the cheapest in the book to make.