A Rather English Marriage (3 page)

‘Decent of you to make it, old boy,' Reggie called out after him, and Harry lifted a hand from the metal arm of the chair to parody a feeble salute, but without turning round.

The hushed groan of recorded organ music inside the chapel was switched off and attendants moved about soft-footedly, preparing for the next service and avoiding his eye. Reggie, glancing in, realized there was still someone sitting there. Good God! It was that chap from the hospital - little bloke - what was his name?

‘Care for a snifter?' said Reggie Conynghame-Jervis.

‘Best wife a chap ever had,' Reginald was saying, for the third or fourth time that evening. This was a new audience.

‘Never had a crossword. Cross word.' The barmaid pulled a sentimental face at his companion, a man in a toupée accompanied by a blurred blonde.
Buried today
, she mouthed at them elaborately, not that Reginald would have noticed.

‘Marriagizza wonderful instution,' he went on. ‘Thoroughly recommend it. Man needs a wife. “Love an marriage love an marriage/Goto getherlika norsan carridge.” What was that show? West End. Not long ago. What
was
it called?'

‘Dunno love,' said the blonde. ‘Never mind. Know the song. “Can't have one wivout the o-o-other.” Try telling
him
that.'

‘Buy you a drink?' asked Reggie.

‘You got any kiddies, mate?' asked the toupéed man, generous over his double Scotch. ‘Need a family, time like this, know what I mean?'

‘Gotta boy, bigbadboy,' Reggie told him.

‘Well, that's nice. Is he a good boy? Looks after ‘is old Dad?' the blonde asked cosily.

‘Bad lad. Always poking into places he shouldn't go.' Reginald smirked. ‘Always after the girls. Pretty girls,' mind you. Doesn't go for trollops.'

The blonde looked uncertain, but the barmaid said, ‘Go on. Getaway with you.'

‘He does,' Reginald insisted. ‘Gets away with it timenagain.
Don't know how he does it. Must be because he's such a big lad.'

‘How old is he, then, your boy?' the blonde asked with interest.

‘Ooh, now, that'd be telling, wouldn't it?' said Reggie in retreat. ‘Not too old for you, I wouldn't say. He likes blondes. You wanta meet him?'

‘Time now, gentlemen please,' said the pub manager; and then, seeing Reginald, ‘You gonna keep an eye on him?'

‘Never seen him before in me life,' said the toupéed man. ‘He a regular?'

‘No,' said the barmaid. ‘Poor old sod. Wife just died. Families today,
I
don't know. Here!' she said, leaning close to Reggie. ‘You OK to get home? You live far? Where's your son? Give ‘im a ring, should I, get ‘im to pick you up?'

‘No idea,' said Reggie, leering at her briefly. ‘Take me home with you. Call us a cab. Home, James … and twice round Hyde Park, if you please.'

‘
Time
now, gentlemen,
please
! called the manager more loudly, and the blonde and her companion drained their glasses.

‘Got a pretty decent vehicle outside,' Reggie was telling the barmaid. ‘Mercedes. F-reg. Not half bad, not at all, at all, at all.'

‘You're not driving anywhere,' said the barmaid. ‘Just you leave it to Maggie. Not
her
, pet. Me. I'll look after you. There's a good boy.'

She slipped over to a corner of the room where the landlord was loading a tray with empty glasses smudged with froth. ‘He was here at opening time, him and a little bloke. Never seen either of 'em before,' she said, gesturing towards Reggie, who leaned, red-faced, along the bar as though confiding in someone behind it. ‘Other bloke went hours ago, and this one's in a shocking state. Not safe on the road.'

The man sighed. ‘Get him a taxi. Let's hope he remembers his address.'

‘I don't like to let him go home alone. He's been telling everyone it was his wife's funeral today.'

‘Don't be daft, Maggie. You'd be wasting your time. That one'll never make you a rich widow. And the glasses need fetching. Taxi'll be here any minute now, squire,' he said, raising his voice, and then looked away as he saw that Reginald was crying.

He was crying for his youth, and Mary's. For the exciting days when life had been worth living and death worth dying. He couldn't remember the names of his wife's best friends, but he remembered every detail of those days.

It was the winter of 1940/41, when Reginald was flying Spits over Europe. The officers' mess was a fug of masculine noise and laughter, redolent of hot sweaty uniforms, beer, pipe smoke and Capstans. Pearls of perspiration crept down the mirror behind the bar, the stuffy emanations of several rowdy young airmen. The barman was shiny with effort as he pulled pints of beer or pushed up the nozzles of inverted bottles to squirt large whiskies or gins. Young men in Air Force blue crowded along the bar's puddled length, while others lounged in deep leather chairs or shouted across low tables. At one end of the room hung a large portrait of the King and below that, scattered over a long table, were several magazines, including
Country Life, Illustrated London News, Lilliput's
and
Picture Post
. Dog-eared copies of
Men Only
were all in use. On the opposite wall were arranged a number of proficient caricatures of Air Force types, several formal group photographs of the squadron (some joker thumbing his nose and grinning from the right-hand end of the back row) and a number of aerial shots of aeroplanes: a formation of Spitfires flying just above the cloud level, a row of aircraft on the ground, each flanked by its crew, and a single Hurricane in flight photographed from above, a grid pattern of fields and coastline just visible thousands of feet below. These pictures, like the mirror, were fogged behind a beading of moisture.

From one table rose the deep sound of singing:

‘My bomber came down in the ocean,
My bomber was lost in the sea,
Where it lies I just haven't a notion:
Oh bring back my bomber to me ...'

More voices joined in, roaring:

‘Bring back, bring back,
Oh bring back my bomber to me, to me …'

The voices were those of a bomber crew holding their own among the fighter boys after having made an emergency landing. They were now being treated to the hospitality, and general mockery, of a very different variety of Air Force types. The mess steward wove between tables collecting empty glasses and passing a damp rag across their glass-covered surfaces.

‘Bring us another round, there's a good chap,' called one of the young men, and, looking up at the new arrival, he added, ‘What's yours, old man?'

‘Pint of booze-wine'll do to start with,' said Reggie Conynghame-Jervis.

‘Sir,' said the mess steward.

‘Tiger piss,' said the man who was buying. ‘What kept you?'

‘Better be the late arrived than the dear departed,' said Reginald. ‘Been going over the Met reports with Tuppy. Tomorrow's rained off. Official.'

‘Close the hangar door, C-J,' one of the others ordered cheerfully as Reggie settled his narrow blue-trousered buttocks on to the wide leather arm of his chair. ‘What's the bogle outlook for Saturday night?'

From the next table came snatches of conversation: ‘I gave him a squirt and he broke up. Straight in the drink.' And from the other side, the end of a story: ‘So I said, “Built for comfort, lady, not for speed, but if it's speed you're after …” And then by crikey I speeded her up, tinkered with the top hamper and ground her down carbobloodyrundum!'

A shout of laughter surrounded the mess steward as he bent over the table to set down fresh glasses. They lifted their drinks.

‘Bung ho all,' said Reginald.

‘Here's to yours, Reggie, old boy,' said Lionel ‘Long Gone' Manners. ‘May it never grow shorter.'

She rang her parents without fail on the first Sunday of every month, but even so, Roy Southgate was surprised all over again by his daughter's Australian accent. Vera (after Dame Vera Lynn) looked older than when they had visited her in Sydney three years ago; but it was her strong, twangy voice, louder than either his or Grace's, and unfamiliar vowel sounds that came as a shock.

He had waited for her in the eager crowd of people craning across the barrier of Terminal Three at Heathrow Airport. Strangers flung themselves at one another, laughing and hugging; small children in their best clothes were picked up, exclaimed over, kissed and put down again; and suddenly his daughter was there: a small, tanned woman in a flowered sundress with a smart little jacket. He was glad she hadn't worn black.

‘Vera, dear,' he said, but she didn't hear him amid the hubbub, and he left his place at the barrier and walked round to where the channel disgorged a stream of passengers with laden trolleys. She was looking above his head and didn't see him until he stood directly in her path.

‘Oh Dad!' she said. ‘Oh Mum!'

In the thirty-six hours before the funeral, Vera took over arrangements for the party, buying food and baking cakes and pies until exhaustion drove her to sleep. She had sorted through Grace's linen cupboard, exclaiming at the fresh piles of sheets and tablecloths interleaved with muslin bags of lavender. ‘She learned that from her Mum,' Roy explained, although Vera had heard the history before. ‘When Mrs Reynolds - that's your Gran that was - was in service, before she was married, it was always done like that. Lovely linen, they used to have.'

On the day of the funeral they set out the front room,
pushing the dining and kitchen tables together to make one long table and putting chairs around the edge of the room. Grace's seldom-used starched table napkins were unfolded, shaken out and refolded. Roy went up to the allotment and stripped it of flowers to set around the house in great banks of midsummer colour.

‘Dad, that's marvellous!' said Vera admiringly. ‘It looks more like a wedding than a wake! Mum'd be proud of us. I wish the kids could see it. Never mind, I'll take some piccies.'

They smiled at each other.

‘Hey, that's an idea. Where's your wedding photo? And the one of Mum with me when I was little? And her and me and Alan when he was a schoolboy?'

‘She put them away in her memory box. I'll have to sort it out, now. It seems wrong, somehow. Those were her private things. I think she kept my letters from the war, and all your school reports, and Alan's.'

‘Well, you go and fetch them, Dad, and we'll put some pictures of her on the table. Wouldn't that be nice? Here, where's your hanky? Sit down now, you've done wonders. That's enough for the time being. Look for them later. I'll make us a nice cup of tea.'

She got a lovely turn-out, people were saying to each other in soft voices as they left St John's Church, and so she should, poor soul. Several of her ladies from Meals on Wheels came, and the three with whom she'd done the hospital's mobile shop rota for years; all her friends from the bowling club, besides people she and Roy had known way back when they were young marrieds just before the war. Vera recognized some of her former schoolfriends' mothers, and one or two schoolfriends themselves, now middle-aged women older than their parents had been when they were all little girls together. There was no one from Alan's school, nor any of his former friends. They thought it more tactful to stay away, she supposed, though it would have been good to have them there: evidence that Mum had also had a son. Oh Alan, she thought
for an instant, oh my wicked, worshipped brother, Alan!

A few old men came along as well, men who'd worked with him at the Unigate, right back to the old days when it was still called John Brown's Dairy. They came to show solidarity and to personify the times they had shared, to clasp her Dad's shoulder wordlessly outside the church, gripping it with gnarled, arthritic fists.

‘How's your missus?' Vera would ask; and sometimes they'd bring their heads close to hers and, with proper respect, confide in a whisper,
'She died
,' so that Vera breathed, ‘So sorry,' and smiled a crooked smile.

‘See you down at the Social?' they asked Roy, who nodded and said, ‘I'll be there. I hope you're coming back for a cuppa tea after? You're all welcome. Everyone's very welcome.'

At the side of the grave he had wept, and Vera, her arm tightly round his shaking back, wept too. The gleaming spades shovelled in giant clods of dark earth, which fell with dull thumps on to the pristine coffin until it disappeared. Goodbye, love, God bless. You're with Him now, Roy thought numbly, my dear wife Grace.

The young vicar smiled a sad smile, shook him by the hand, and turned with practised expertise to lead the mourners away from the graveside. As they walked side by side at the head of the procession along the neatly raked path of the cemetery, Vera nudged her father.

‘You all right, Dad? You going to be all right, later on, back home? You could go and lie down. They'd understand.'

‘I'm all right, pet. I'll see it through. Everyone's been so good, turning out for her.'

‘There were people I've never seen before. Like, who was that man, tall chap, who stood at the back? Kind of military-looking geezer.'

‘I don't know who you mean. Don't point, dear, it's rude.'

They had nearly reached the sleek black funeral cars, whose uniformed drivers stood with eyes professionally downcast outside the cemetery gates. Vera turned and looked back up the
gravelled path along which mourners walked in low-voiced groups of two and three.

‘Can you see the very last feller?' she asked. ‘Him.'

Her father shook his head. ‘Can't make him out from here,' he said. ‘Should have brought my glasses.'

‘They'd only have got all misted up,' said Vera. ‘There you go, Dad, sit in.'

They sat on the wide back seat of the huge car. It smelled sickeningly of leather and a synthetic flower air-freshener.