The World is a Wedding (25 page)

‘There is something wrong with his brain and he can't control himself when it comes to drink. He sees red so quickly these days,' she explained.

‘But I wouldn't want you to make too many excuses for him,' Flora said, then added quickly, ‘I'm sorry, I have been too forward.'

Mrs. Probert shook her head. ‘Dr. Reece said there is a growth in his brain. The rages are because of it.' She looked down and said quietly, ‘So I came to ask if Wilfred would be willing to bury him when the time comes.'

Flora nodded, taken aback. She didn't know what to say.

‘Dr. Reece said there is no cure because it is the brain.'

Flora expected Mrs. Probert to cry, but she didn't.

‘I can endure it because I understand, and because Dr. Reece said it won't be very long. But I have had enough. I hope, one day, I can marry again.'

‘I understand.'

‘I'd rather nobody knows, Mrs. Price. And Mr. Probert would be humiliated to think that Wilfred knew his difficulties. He doesn't like pity.'

‘Certainly, Mrs. Probert.'

‘I don't want to wash my dirty linen in public.'

‘Of course.'

‘Only it would be reassuring to know that Wilfred will be able to provide his services when they are needed. Before he was ill, Mr. Probert always spoke very highly of Wilfred.'

 

‘You cannot imagine the state it is in,' Mrs. Estella Newton-Lewis said, leading Wilfred through her elegant hall into the parlour, where a five-foot strip of wallpaper was hanging from the ceiling and swinging loosely. ‘I'm confident you will be able to sort it out, Wilfred.'

Wilfred didn't know what he was doing; he had unthinkingly embarked upon a paint and wallpaper shop without any knowledge or particular skill. Him and his fancy ideas. He had been impulsive again. And now he was having a baptism of fire in the art of wallpapering.

‘My sisters Eugenie and Cecilia are here again from Llanddewi Velfrey, and Mrs. Prout is reading our tea leaves,' exclaimed Mrs. Estella Newton-Lewis.

Wilfred saw the three women gathered eagerly at the tea table, which was laid with starched, embroidered linen and set with a porcelain china tea set. Mrs. Prout, like an old tortoise, was hunched with a teacup in her hand, contemplating the tea leaves.

‘Good afternoon, ladies. I hope I won't be in your way,' declared Wilfred, putting down his stepladder.

‘Things aren't sticking together for you, I see,' sneered Mrs. Prout, narrowing her eyes. She pulled her paisley shawl around her shoulders.

‘There's dreadful,' confessed Wilfred, examining the large flap of wallpaper that was hanging from the ceiling almost to the floor. He spread out a piece of white canvas and put a pot of glue and his toolbox onto it. It had been difficult decorating Mrs. Newton-Lewis's parlour in the first place, trying to work among so many lamp-stands, chairs, antique cut-glass decanters and Chinese vases. It was even more difficult to decorate during a tea party.

‘Mmm,' muttered Mrs. Prout. ‘I see your mother . . .' The three sisters gasped, grasping each other.

‘She is well.'

They sighed.

‘And there is a birthday coming.'

‘That will be mine!' cried Mrs. Newton-Lewis delightedly. ‘What do the tea leaves say about me buying a copper warming-pan with a fruitwood handle from the Golden Sheaf Antiques? Perhaps for my birthday?'

Mrs. Prout examined the teacup, drawing back her head to squint into it. ‘I see a shop.'

‘Oh!' the sisters cried in unison.

‘With . . . with . . . with . . .' Mrs. Prout slumped as if asleep.

‘Is she all right?' Mrs. Newton-Lewis mouthed to her sisters.

‘. . . furniture, small ornaments and oil paintings,' Mrs. Prout continued.

‘Oh, yes!' said Mrs. Newton-Lewis. ‘I have always longed to have a shop like that.'

‘Selling wallpaper and paint,' stated Mrs. Prout.

‘And where is this shop?'

Mrs. Prout indicated that more tea was to be poured into Mrs. Newton-Lewis's teacup. It was, and Mrs. Newton-Lewis drank quickly and delicately from it.

‘In Narberth.'

The sisters gasped. ‘Oh, how exciting! I always knew you should have a shop selling beautiful objects for the home,' said the older sister. ‘Then there would be two wallpaper shops in Narberth!'

‘And you'd be so very good at it,' encouraged the younger sister.

Wilfred was listening, all the while spreading paste on the underside of the hanging wallpaper. He set out his wooden stepladder, climbed up, then carefully pressed the wallpaper against the ceiling. A paint and wallpaper shop in Narberth—owned by Mrs. Newton-Lewis. Wilfred knew Mrs. Newton-Lewis would have a wonderful wallpaper shop, the eel's hips—he only had to look around her beautiful, considered parlour to see how stylish she was. Whereas Wilfred didn't know anything about style. He was a man; his favourite colour was blue. He only knew that red and green should never be seen except with a colour in between. And he didn't know much about decorating either.

Wilfred patted the wallpaper—it was barely sticking to the ceiling and was full of bumps. He had spent four hard years as an apprentice learning to become an undertaker, but had only ever glimpsed at
Home Decorative Interior Suggestions
on how to decorate. Even so, perhaps he should advertise.
Narberth's very best wallpaper shop.
That was a good sentence to put in the
Narberth & Whitland Observer.
All tastes catered for.
Although, on reflection, he didn't think there were many tastes in Narberth. Everybody liked their houses the same—indeed, everybody copied Mrs. Newton-Lewis and did what she advised them to do.

Wilfred examined the crumpled wallpaper stuck wonkily on the ceiling. He took a small hammer and a tack from his dungaree pocket, placed the tack discreetly on the edge of the wallpaper and knocked it in as quietly as he could. The sisters stopped their excited chatter.

‘Are you knocking nails into my plasterwork, Wilfred?' Mrs. Newton-Lewis asked, with a note of surprise.

‘Well, you see, Mrs. Newton-Lewis, it helps it stay on the ceiling.'

‘Is that usual? I have never seen
that
in my French magazines.'

‘It is the Welsh way, Mrs. Newton-Lewis.'

‘Wilfred, come and have your tea leaves read,' enjoined Mrs. Newton-Lewis's younger sister. She poured a cup of tea for him.

‘I have just had a cup of tea,' said Wilfred.

‘Oh, come on, Wilfred,' said Mrs. Newton-Lewis, strolling over to the ladder and putting her hand on his leg flirtatiously. Wilfred climbed down, drank the cup of Japanese tea and handed the remains to Mrs. Prout.

‘I see a tall tower,' stated Mrs. Prout.

‘I can't think of a tower anywhere in Narberth,' the younger sister said.

‘No, this is not in Narberth.'

‘Perhaps you mean the church-tower—a funeral,' said Mrs. Newton-Lewis helpfully.

‘This is the tallest tower in the world.'

The four tea drinkers looked puzzled. The tallest tower in the world wasn't in Wales.

‘It is in America.'

Wilfred wondered how he, an undertaker in Narberth, could drink a cup of tea and create a tower made of tea leaves that was in America. He didn't know he was capable of it.

‘I expect you're going to receive a postcard of a tower from America,' suggested the eldest sister.

‘Wilfred is
in
the tower in America,' declared Mrs. Prout.

‘Well, I can't see that,' Wilfred rejoined.

‘Well, I can,' snapped Mrs. Prout.

‘I had better get on with the wallpapering then, before I cross the Atlantic!' said Wilfred and the sisters laughed.

‘I told you Mrs. Prout was wonderful,' said Mrs. Newton-Lewis. ‘She knows everything.'

‘And there is death around you, Wilfred Price,' Mrs. Prout murmured into the teacup. ‘Much closer than you know.'

W
hat can we do for you?' Wilfred asked Grace with some despair. He was standing next to the bed, Flora beside him.

For three days, she'd lain in a stew of blankets with lurid dreams seducing her away from the world. She woke on her side from dreams where she had been trying to run, the blankets kicked off. Where could she run
to
? She knew what she was running
from
—a meeting with her parents, or rather her mother, in which any semblance of hope she had of her mother forgiving her would be crushed. And away from the devastation of her life.

Flora pulled the curtains and opened the window. Grace was aware that the room was fetid and the air was thick. She breathed in the acidic odour of smelling salts and the milkiness of the baby, who had slept and fed throughout all of this.

Wilfred looked down at her gravely. Grace noticed he looked like an undertaker even in his paint-splattered dungarees. If she was going to die, she would feel safe at the thought of him burying her. Grace thought how her mother wouldn't forgive her and how Wilfred understood a little—not that his mother had rejected him, she had died—but it was an experience of living without a mother and Wilfred knew, too, how hard that was.

Grace stared glassily up at the tapestry on the wall at the end of Wilfred's father's bed. She had spent hours, days, looking at it: the careful stitches, the gentle lilac flowers, the pink lettering:
Cleanliness is next to Godliness
. It had been created with great patience and an eye for detail. It was the opposite to the wall she saw in her mind's eye when she remembered Madoc at his most violent towards her. All of which was held in the memory of the wallpaper. The tapestry was the only thing on the wall. She thought Wilfred's mother must have sewn it.

‘Take some more medicine,' Flora encouraged, pouring a glass of fresh water and tapping some of the powder into it. There was only a little left in the medicine bottle now; Grace had taken most of it.

‘There's not much left in that bottle,' Wilfred commented. He asked again. ‘Grace, what can we do for you?'

The sound of Wilfred's voice pulled her away from her thoughts. Wilfred was being considerate. This is what Grace had needed she realised, kindness. Kindness healed the spirit and the spirit came first.

‘Although I understand—we understand—it might be difficult, what with your parents so close,' Wilfred wrung his hands, ‘but you can stay here with us as long as you need to.'

Lady Lytton had said it was foolish to reject friendship. For months Grace had been unable to take any gifts from anybody. She had been forced to receive from her brother what she hadn't wanted and she had responded by closing, receiving nothing from anyone. For the first time, in a long time, she felt able to accept the love offered to her. Grace felt able to open herself up and willing to receive what Wilfred—and Flora—offered. Grace reached out a hand and both Flora and Wilfred put their hands forward and there was a muddle of fingers and wedding rings and hands held tightly in response to the words that were so clearly felt.

 

Flora Myffanwy turned the steering wheel to the right with effort and drove through the archway and down the winding lane towards Pleasant Valley. She wasn't very practised at driving but Wilfred had been certain she should take the hearse this morning, insisting it was too cold for her to bicycle to her mother's. The vehicle felt elephantine, many times more powerful than her bicycle. It was a quiet lane, and she doubted she would meet another motorist.

The lane was frosty and icy. Winter had bitten in a while back and the ground was hard and the landscape stark. The trees looked dead, like jaggedy black lines against the white, winter light.

When she had driven a mile or so she pulled over, folded down the top part of the window and took from the wicker basket next to her a round ball of mud the size of an apple, and gently threw it out of the window into an empty part of the verge. The ball of mud disappeared in the foliage and she heard it land with a gentle thud. She drove forward a few more yards, took another ball and threw it out of the window, then kept driving and stopping until all five balls were thrown. She pressed the accelerator down with more confidence than before and drove towards Wiseman's Bridge.

Flora had made the mud balls that morning in the kitchen. She'd collected handfuls of earth from the vegetable border in the yard and then rolled the muddy balls in seeds taken from packets she'd bought in the hardware shop: forget-me-not seeds, foxglove, honesty, baby's breath, pansies, love-in-the-mist and daisy seeds and poppy seeds, small as full stops.

She wanted to make more of these globes full of seeds and scatter them, when she visited her mother, in the green hedgerows of the road to Pleasant Valley. In the spring she would bring Wilfred along the pleached lane and the hedgerows would be full of flowers: lilac foxgloves, dark blue love-in-the-mist, white baby's breath, scarlet poppies and the pearly flowers of honesty. There would be colour and scent among the green horse-chestnut trees and hawthorn hedgerows, where now there was only bracken and sparse grass.

She shifted from first gear into second, and drove bumpily over a small bridge crossing a lively stream. For dark, unsatisfying days she had cleaned and cleaned, but as the bleak winter days had begun to lighten, the thought had dawned on her that it wasn't enough for the world to be clean, it must be beautiful too. It might not be the world she wanted it to be, but she knew, for her own sanity, she must find her world beautiful. These seed globes were hope for the spring; that the winter would pass and there would be flowers and birds singing again.

The hearse rolled down the hill and she saw the vista of Wiseman's Bridge, the great cove spread in front of her, the gulls larking in the air, and was unexpectedly reminded of the dream she'd had when she was very newly married, of a stone angel, or archangel, striding across the sea, armless, legless, her body delicately draped. The angel had been moving forward, parts of herself missing, striding alone and across the sea on faith. Flora understood. The dream had been prescient. She felt as if part of herself was missing now, had been lost and died prematurely, but that now she could move forward, in the place she loved, to what lay ahead of her in her life. She had lost her child and she had lost a freedom in marrying. Flora gazed at the great cathedral space of the cove. Now she would find something for herself. She looked up at the serene sky. She would become a photographer.