The Wedding Party (12 page)

As we moved into lighter parts of the street the thing that struck me most about him was not his eyes or his hands or that huskily broken voice of his. It was his nose. It was exactly like an old potato.

Not just a plain old potato, either, but one that had been baked in its jacket, pinched about a bit, left to get cold and consequently looked terribly rough, misshapen and sad. His hair was equally unbeautiful. It was matted, stiff and grey, looking more than anything else like an old wire-haired terrier's ear that at some time or other had been rudely mangled in a fight. Sometimes he lifted a hand as if to ruffle the hair but the gesture always ended abruptly and in the same way: he gave a sudden jab with his thumb at the side of the old potato.

I don't want to give the impression here that what he subsequently had to tell me presented itself in an easy, fluent rush. It came out in a typically broken way, in bits and pieces. It was for me almost entirely a matter of picking up echoes and half clues, muttered and difficult snaps of memory falling in the darkness.

‘Bill Browning,' he said and then, half a minute later, as if he had entirely forgotten it, said it again. ‘Bill Browning. That's me.'

He was living, it seemed, all alone, in one room, with a bed, a gas-fire and a meter. The bed – I saw it later – looked as if it had been built from old bicycle frames and he had slept in it for thirty years.

That was some time, I gathered, before he met a girl named Edna. It seemed that he was forty, perhaps more, before he began to court her. She was over forty too but he thought of her then, and for ever afterwards, as a girl. She worked in a wholesale clothing factory and later, when he showed me a picture of her, I could see that, like Bill, she wasn't very much to look at. She was smallish and rather mild looking, with pale, indeterminate eyes, nondescript hair and a face whose complexion, I guessed, could have been of a kind of parsnip shade. Somehow I could see her wearing hats five or six years out of date, old fashioned corsets of the sort that creak and plain black lace-up shoes that probably pinched her.

Without doubt Bill thought her very beautiful and equally without doubt, I fancied, she thought him beautiful too. The pair of them were locked in mutual devotion and
they met on regular nights, every Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. I seemed to see them meeting on some secluded corner somewhere, she with a springy walk in the tight black shoes and Bill, as he waited, rubbing his thumb in nervous anticipation against the old potato.

All this time he was working as an odd-job man for a firm of grocer's and when he was just over forty they gave him a raise. It wasn't very much of a raise but the extra four shillings prompted him to ask if Edna, perhaps, would marry him. Edna said she was thrilled and would love to but it couldn't very well be, anyway not just yet.

‘Why?' Bill wanted to know.

It was because of her mother, Edna explained. Her mother had a poorish heart, was seventy and couldn't do much for herself. Edna conceived it not only her duty to look after her; she had actually promised her father as much before he died. She was a cautious girl to whom conscience meant a great deal. She wanted to be true to her word.

‘She could come and live with us,' Bill said. ‘That wouldn't worry me. I wouldn't mind.'

No. Edna was quite firm about that. That sort of thing never worked out. She knew two other girls who had gone to live with their in-laws and yet another who had her husband's mother living in one room with her and sharing the kitchen. It was just a cat-and-dog life. It never worked out.

Bill, disappointed, even upset – I seemed to see him begin to rub his rough potato nose with his thumb, as he always seemed to do in moments of emotion or uncertainty – said
something about the future didn't seem to hold very much for them, did it, like that?

‘I don't want to seem cruel,' Edna said, ‘but I don't somehow think she'll live all that long. She has terrible bad turns every so often. I don't want to lose her but really I don't think we'd have to wait all that long while.'

Bill, to whom Edna was obviously his first consideration always, was too good-natured to say that he hoped not. He supposed they'd just have to wait, was all he said, but apparently a note of such disappointment as to be almost sepulchral must have been so sharply marked in his voice that Edna actually stopped suddenly in the street where they were walking, clasped him hard with both hands and said with what I gathered was quite uncharacteristic vehemence, almost passion, that it would be the same for both of them. They'd still have each other.

‘I don't mind waiting,' she said. ‘I'll wait for ever.'

The four shillings raise had seemed so much part of his plan for Edna and his future that presently Bill began, in a curious way, to be troubled about it. He actually began to feel selfish. He felt that he wanted to confer on Edna the benefit of his raise, or part of it, without positively thrusting the money into her hands. Somehow he wanted to make a gesture of some sort that would compensate her for waiting.

But finally, on a cold November Saturday night, he actually did thrust the money into her hands: all four shillings of it, saying at the same time, while probably rubbing his potato nose hard with his thumb, that he sort
of wanted her to treat herself. Perhaps there was some little thing—

‘I don't want anything,' Edna said. ‘Not a thing. You save your money. We'll need it one day.'

‘No,' Bill said and again I guessed he was too considerate, altogether too good-natured, to say what he was thinking – that one day might never come. ‘I want you to have a treat. Now.'

‘What sort of treat? What could I buy?'

It suddenly came to Bill as an almost desperate thought that she might, perhaps, buy herself some fish-and-chips.

‘At Albert's,' he said. Albert's was five or six doors beyond the terrace house where Edna lived with her mother. Its windows steamed with strong fishy clouds until late into the night. ‘They'd be nice and hot if you took them straight in.'

‘Well, I don't really—'

‘Please,' Bill said and again I seemed to see him rubbing his old potato nose hard, in complexity. ‘I want you to. It would sort of even things up.'

‘Even things up?' Edna said. She didn't know what he meant.

Nor, in fact, did Bill. Apparently he could only blurt out, in his great eagerness to please, that he would even go into the shop and get the fish-and-chips for her himself.

‘No,' Edna said. ‘It's very sweet of you but I'll get them.' I seemed to see them at the corner of the street now, fifty or sixty yards from the steaming fish-shop windows. I could imagine a light cold fog coming down and that perhaps
Edna was clutching at her coat collar, tilting her face. ‘Let's say good night here, shall we?'

‘I always come as far as the house—'

‘Let's say good night here,' Edna said. ‘Old mother Parker was having a good look at us the other night. I saw the curtains move. I don't like being spied on when I kiss you.'

After that, every Saturday night, winter, spring, autumn and summer, Bill gave Edna his four shillings, kissed her good night at the street corner and then watched her, with tender consideration, depart for fish-shop and home.

This simple act of generosity not only became a habit as satisfying in itself as an evening prayer might have been to another person; it became a means of fortifying him in courtship, in what were to be the long years of waiting for Edna.

As a result it seemed hardly any time at all before he and Edna were fifty. He himself didn't feel much older at fifty, I gathered, than he had done at forty and I rather suspected that the only change in his appearance was probably that his hair, greyer by this time, looked rather more dog-eared and his nose slightly enlarged, rougher skinned and more sadly misshapen than ever. Edna, I fancied, looked hardly any older herself and in another photograph the only change I could detect in her appearance was that she was obviously rather plumper about the chin, hips and bust. I could only guess that this extra weight might have caused her shoes to
pinch a little more, so that she perhaps walked a little more springily.

Now whenever he went to meet her Bill was filled with the remotely uncharitable hope that one evening he would see a change in her. There would come an evening when she would be walking droopily, perhaps even in tears, or perhaps even running towards him with outstretched arms, and it would mean that her mother was dead.

But as the years went by – and in the strange way that time seems to have they probably appeared to go by much faster – there was never any change in her step. She continued to meet him always in the same way and to depart, every Saturday evening, towards distant clouds of fishy steam.

And soon, as they progressed from their early fifties into middle fifties, it seemed that the subject of marriage was hardly ever mentioned. It hardly seemed to matter. The mere habit of meeting, being with each other, drinking a glass of stout together in
The King's Arms
, holding each other's hands in a cinema, walking home and finally kissing good night became a pattern that was not only satisfactory in itself. It was consolatory.

So much so that I gathered that Bill sometimes found himself thinking with foreboding of what might happen if Edna's mother did die. You never knew, he hinted, with marriage: it was a funny thing. Not only that, he'd probably have to do something about his one room and its gas fire. That would hardly do for Edna. He would have to change all that. And most of all, I gathered, he had a strange idea
that marriage might change Edna. She would sort of grow up. She wouldn't be his girl any more.

And then, one late October evening, at the time when darkness had started to close in early, she wasn't there at the corner when he went to meet her. It was the first time it had happened, I gathered, in more than fifteen years.

For a time he paced up and down a bit and then, presently, began to worry. After nearly an hour he started to be really troubled and he set out to walk to the little terrace house where Edna and her mother lived, between the fried fish-shop and
The King's Arms
.

It took him some time to grasp, I think, that the blinds of the house were drawn. Even when he did so he still paced nervously up and down for some time longer outside, confessedly as agitated at the idea of Edna's mother dying at long last as he would have been at the reality of leading Edna to the altar.

Finally he rapped the knocker of the door. It was some time before the door opened and when at last it did open Edna's mother was there.

‘She'd gone,' Bill said to me. His voice broke completely now. ‘Edna, I mean. That morning. She was bad just two or three hours, that's all, and then—'

He followed her mother into the house. She kept crying all the time, apologising over and over again that she hadn't sent him a message. She would have come down herself to tell him, she kept saying, but she didn't like to leave the girl alone.

Bill, too stunned to say much, presently managed to
mutter that he thought he'd walk home. He'd perhaps get over it a bit if he started walking. Then, just as he reached the street door, she called him back, weeping again that she was a forgetful fool.

‘She wanted you to have this,' she said. He found himself with a large black handbag in his hands. He remembered it as one Edna had had ten years before.

‘This? What's this?'

‘I never asked her. I never looked inside. She said you was to have it, that's all.'

In a complete daze he walked back to his room with the bag. He sat down on the bed and gazed at the bag for some time before opening it and looking inside.

‘It was all in a big envelope,' he told me. ‘Every penny.' Edna had written a little note of explanation about it. She was sorry she hadn't spent it and she hoped he wouldn't mind. ‘All the fish-and-chip money. About a hundred and eighty quid.'

‘She always hated wreaths.' After he had unloaded all the flowers and taken them through the front door of the little terrace house – the blinds at the windows were still drawn – we sat for an hour or two in the bar of
The King's Arms
, Bill steadfastly taking meagre sips of whisky. Now and then he made that abrupt and troubled gesture of rubbing his thumb against his old potato, confessing two or three times that he'd been sleeping bad. ‘Terrible bad. Perhaps I'll be better now I've got her the flowers.'

He sat for some time longer, over more whisky, explaining about the flowers. He said again how he wanted to even things up – did I understand? He'd given her that raise of his all that long time ago and she'd put it all away. There'd been no pleasure for her. She'd got nothing out of it. Nothing. Not even a bag of chips.

‘I bought about twenty quids' worth,' he said. His eyes, perhaps because of the whisky, were covered with a gentle film. ‘The young lady at the flower shop said I'd need a truck. They couldn't deliver – bit difficult at Christmas time. No trouble about that, I told her. I could borrow one from work.'

He was silent for some moments after that and then he fumbled in his pockets and brought out the first of the pictures of Edna.

‘Nice looking girl,' he said. ‘Very pretty. Don't you think she's pretty?'

I looked at Edna's mild-looking face, with its nondescript hair and the complexion that I thought must be of a parsnip shade, and said yes, she was very pretty.

‘Come in for a minute?' Bill said. We were home now. ‘I got half a bottle of whisky inside. Had to get it. Helped me on a bit.'

I went inside with him, into the one room with the gas-fire, the meter and the bed that looked so much as if it had been built from ancient bicycle frames. Another picture of Edna, the one when she was plumper, hung on one wall and
below it, on a shelf above the bed, stood a single white hyacinth in a pot. It glowed wonderfully waxy in the light of the gas-lamp Bill had lit and the room was full of the scent of it.