The World is a Wedding (16 page)

L
etter from the Tenby Gas Company, Wilfred. That will be the bill,' said Willie the Post, poking his head round the workshop door. Wilfred was measuring a plank of elm with a ruler. He jotted down its length. ‘Hear you's reading
Hamlet
,' Willie the Post commented. ‘We did that at school. What is it he says? “Shall I do myself in or not, I don't know”.'

‘I'm reading this.' Wilfred put down his ruler amidst the jumble of tools on his workbench and held up
The Last Days of Socrates.

‘Who's that by?'

‘Plato.'

‘Never heard of him. Oh—who's dead?' asked Willie, indicating the half-finished coffin resting on A-frames.

‘No one yet. It's a spare,' said Wilfred, resting the elm plank against the wall.

‘Now seeing you's an important man around Narberth,' Willie began, ‘and I's don't like to ask, but will you judge the dog competition at the Winter Carnival? We don't want any old bugger judging it, see.'

‘What's wrong with the mayor?'

‘He can't see a hole through a ladder.'

‘But Willie—'

‘Say yes or I'll be the arse of the world with the Winter Carnival Committee. You's only have to give the rosette to the winner. No one's going to mind.'

‘Mr. Gerard Henry might set that ruddy Alsatian on me if I don't let him win,' Wilfred retorted, putting his pencil behind his ear.

‘Well, you's better let him win, then. We were thinking that you'd give a very proper air to the dog competition. We can't have some farmer from Carmarthen judging, who'd laugh if his arse was on fire. And the Reverend Waldo Williams is on a pilgrimage to St. David's to atone for his sins.'

‘Aye, I suppose so,' Wilfred said resignedly, folding up the ruler and dropping it in the bib pocket of his dungarees.

‘This Saturday, two o'clock at the Queen's Hall, wearing your best suit. No one will argue with you when you're dressed as an undertaker—they'd be scared you'd bury them as punishment.' Willie put the gas bill on the spare coffin. ‘And how's your wife, now, these days since she lost . . .' He looked down at his Post Office regulation shoes.

‘Well enough,' Wilfred replied, hearing how tinny his answer sounded, even to himself.

 

Wilfred came into the kitchen and dropped the
Narberth & Whitland Observer
on the kitchen table.

‘Raining today. Is the type of rain that gets you wet,' he remarked to Flora Myffanwy, who was cleaning the floor. Every day Flora woke, cleaned one thing after another, then slept early, exhausted. And then she rose the following morning and cleaned again. Number 11, Market Street was reaching hitherto unheard-of heights of cleanliness. The kitchen table, which had had a greasiness that made one's hand stick to it slightly, was now bleached wood, the grooves in the tabletop empty of detritus. The kitchen window, with its smears, splatters and fingerprints, was crystal clear, and the blue teacup squeaked in his fingers when he held it.

‘Flora,' he said to his wife, who was on the floor of the kitchen, a butter-knife in her hand, frantically bevelling the grime out of the gap between the floor and the wall. Wilfred watched his wife clean the flagstones while biting, in her grief-stricken anguish with herself, on the pad of her thumb. Flora hadn't talked about the baby. Wilfred knew enough to know that when someone didn't speak about something, it was because it hurt them deeply. She was in shock—he'd seen that look in the faces of the bereaved standing at gravesides, and recognised it for the otherworldly state that it was.

‘Flora?' he asked, as if he was asking the universe, as if he was looking for her in the spaces between the planets in which she was lost and floating. She hung her head.

‘It is clean now, dear.'

Flora rested on her knees and put her hands on her lap. Her complexion was pale and she was skin and bone. And the floor was scrubbed so you could eat your dinner off it. Wilfred thought if dirt was something in the wrong place, then cleaning was putting things in the right place. But Flora looked at him as if she thought the whole world would never be clean, would never be bright and new again, and so she must keep on scrubbing and digging and bevelling into every nook and cranny of their small wattle and daub house until the end of her days.

 

‘You'll be surprised to hear this,' Wilfred announced jovially, coming into the kitchen at dinner time after a long morning in the workshop. ‘I'm judging the dog competition at the Winter Carnival. Willie the Post asked me earlier, and I said yes. It's important to help people if they ask, isn't it? What's this, dear, on the lettuce?' Wilfred sat down and looked at his lunch plate.

‘Heinz Salad Cream. It's new,' Flora Myffanwy replied.

‘Very nice it is and all. I don't think we've had this before, have we, Da?'

‘No,' said his da, looking at the frilly lettuce with a serving of salad cream sitting primly next to it.

‘We used to have so many fried breakfasts; I'm surprised I don't look like slices of black pudding. It's wonderful to eat something new, isn't it, Da, like lettuce?'

‘Yes,' his da agreed.

Wilfred sat back, his knife and fork in his hand and beamed. ‘We've never eaten so well, have we, Da? Been reading that book,
The Last Days of Socrates
,' he continued, wanting to break Flora's subdued silence, trying to make more conversation but unable to think of anything else to say. ‘Very difficult, indeed. I've only read nine pages. Can't understand a word of it. That chap Socrates and his questions—enough to drive a saint mad. I bet they were relieved when he died.'

‘Well, it doesn't matter, son. I'm very proud of you for giving it a go.'

‘Thank you, Da,' said Wilfred, soothed by the affection in his da's voice. ‘I don't think I'm going to read as far as the chapter where they bury him. It would confound a brighter man than me. But never mind. I'm a very happy undertaker from Narberth,' he said awkwardly, and beamed at his wife, attempting to show her how happy he was. ‘Even old Napoleon never felt so good!' He would be happy so Flora could be happy too: happy enough to stop cleaning. Perhaps even take photographs again.

Wilfred squished the lettuce on his fork, but it kept jumping back off. This lettuce had a life of its own.

‘Remarkably good lettuce. The cat's meow. The tastiest vegetable I've ever had. Isn't it delicious, Da?'

‘Delicious.'

‘If there's better food in Heaven, I'm in a hurry to get there.' Wilfred put a small mouthful of green leaf in his mouth. ‘And you do know how to cook peas.' Wilfred smiled at his da, who was carefully lifting up his fork with a triangle of lettuce balanced precariously on it.

‘I'm full to bursting—we're eating for the winter to come.'

‘More salad cream?' Flora asked.

‘Most definitely,' Wilfred replied, and Flora handed him the dish with the salad cream in it—Wilfred thought it might be called a salad boat. That was one of the things he loved most about Flora: she brought to his life such dignified and extraordinary things as a salad boat. And he was sure it was because he was married that he'd been asked to judge the dog competition. He couldn't imagine an unmarried undertaker being asked to take part in such an important civic event.

Out of the corner of his eye Wilfred watched his da discreetly struggling to cut a lettuce leaf, his liver-spotted hands trembling. A rim of long hairs grew from his ears—his
barbate
ears. And there was a deep cleft in the back of his neck from holding up his head all these decades. Wisps of hair on his crown, fine and gentle, like his thoughts, surrounded his head. Perhaps his da had been grieving without Wilfred noticing and had emerged even more kind and thoughtful than before, because he soothed them both with his gentle courtesy.

More than everything is family, Wilfred thought to himself. Some people had large families. Death had kept his family small. And they seemed so fragile, the three of them, in their feelings and in their bodies, gathered at the table scrubbed clean because of pain, the humble jar of salad cream sitting between them, an offering of hope for a better life, a small gesture to buoy their fragility.

Around him, Flora tidied the kitchen table and his da sat resting after the meal.

‘Wonderful dinner, dear.' It was important to be a good husband, he thought to himself, to be appreciative and say nice things. ‘No life without a wife! Not according to Mr. Auden,' Wilfred said, folding his napkin and patting his stomach. Wilfred had thought Mr. Auden meant if a man didn't get married then he had little to live for. That was true. But now he understood that it was through having a wife that life came into the world: a wife, a woman was the conduit for new life. Their child had come into the world through Flora Myffanwy. Mr. Auden's advice had been deeper and wiser than he had understood it to be only a year and a half ago. But he was much younger and more inexperienced then.

 

‘Bag of sawdust for you,' Wilfred said to Jeffrey. He ducked under the hanging carcass of a gutted cow, swung the sack of sawdust from his shoulder and put it down on the flagstones in Lloyd the Butcher.

‘Thank you, Wilfred,' Jeffrey called. ‘That'll be handy for the floor. Be with you now in a minute.' He turned back to the chopping board and brought the cleaver down on a piece of lamb. There were three clean, quick cracks. Jeffrey turned the cleaver on its side and slammed it flat along the meat. Then he took a piece of the
Narberth & Whitland Observer,
enfolded the chops into a neat square package, slapped it between his two hands and gave it to Mrs. Prout.

‘Right you are. Let's head off to the Dragon Inn and put our names down first on the list,' Jeffery said to Wilfred, walking out from behind the counter, sawdust spilling from his turn-ups. ‘We mustn't miss out on the tug-of-war this year. I want to see those chaps from Carmarthen flat on their backs in the mud—crying. That'll do me.' He patted his biceps.

‘You've grown quite a moustache there,' Wilfred remarked, looking down on his friend who was a head shorter than him, as they wove their way around the muddy carts standing in the busy High Street.

‘Aye,' Jeffrey replied, stroking the edges of his tremendously bushy red moustache and stretching upwards on the balls of his feet. ‘Ladies like them.'

Wilfred wasn't sure if ladies liked moustaches. But perhaps men didn't like to be short as much as ladies didn't want to be fat.

‘I spent the morning delivering pork to Mrs. Coles; she will die talking.'

It was market day and the High Street was bursting with people who had come from the villages around Narberth. Market Square was heaving with sheep and lowing cattle, and a crowd had gathered around a pen where pigs were being auctioned. Jeffrey walked round a horse drinking barley water from a bucket.

‘How's the wife?' he asked.

‘Well enough,' Wilfred replied.

And there it was: Wilfred was having an experience with Flora that was too profound to explain to his unmarried childhood friend. These days there was a small distance between the two of them, and they both knew it. It would be easier if Jeffrey was married as well, but he enjoyed the company of ladies too much to settle down in a hurry.

‘How's Clementine?' Wilfred asked, shooing a chicken from under his feet.

‘Clementine?'

‘I though you were courting Clementine.'

‘The mind plays tricks.'

They entered the Dragon Inn. The air was muggy, smoke hung in a flat layer at head-height and the limewashed walls were stained a mustardy-brown. Wilfred had not been into the inn since Mr. Probert had appeared, drunk and angry, in the wallpaper shop. A big pink pig with black trotters and a ring in his nose trotted in behind them.

‘Get that ruddy pig out of here, Probert!' Jeffrey called. Probert staggered round from behind the bar, slapped the panicking, squealing pig on the rump and bullied it out of the public house.

‘Put the ruddy gate on the door!' Handel Evans shouted from the table by the fireplace where he was playing Whist with the Reverend Waldo Williams. ‘That pig nearly knocked the card table over and I'm all set to win five bob against the reverend here. Not that he'll pay me!' There was loud laughing and guffawing from the crowd of men gathering in the pub.

Probert dragged from the back yard a barred gate, which he locked onto the circles on the doorpost. Then Wilfred watched as Probert clumsily hauled a wooden barrel up from the cellar, through the trapdoor, dropping the barrel on the flagstones where it landed heavily and bounced heftily a few times, threatening to injure any feet or fingertips that got in its way. Probert rolled the beer barrel across the floor, the rings cracking loudly, then kicked it with his hobnailed boot towards the bar. He then went behind the bar.

‘Pint of beer,' Wilfred ordered above the noise.

Mr. Probert soon plonked the beer onto the stained counter, and the reddish-brown liquid slopped down the bevelled glass. Then he rubbed his hands down his hessian apron and swigged a mouthful of what smelled like parsnip wine from a tankard under the counter.

‘Two shillings, Price,' he said. ‘How's married life?'

‘Good.'

‘Nice wife you've got there.'

‘Indeed.'

‘Bit of a Sheba. Wouldn't mind her being my wife,' he goaded.

‘Bit late now,' Wilfred replied.

‘My wife walked into a table yesterday, Price,' Mr. Probert said, locking eyes with Wilfred and laughing confidently. Wilfred looked at Probert and could counter it no other way: men were crueller than women.