A Bit of a Do Read Free

firm’s sales list, and smiling excessively.
    ‘Oh no! No!’ said Neville Badger too vehemently. He gave Laurence an uneasy, apologetic glance. ‘No. I’m with Badger, Badger, Fox and Badger.’
    ‘Taxidermists?’ asked Ted.
    ‘Solicitors!’ said Rita frantically. She flashed him an angry glare, then switched on another nervously ingratiating smile for Neville. The sky was dotted with small white clouds, and in another remarkable meteorological coincidence … or celestial joke … the sun was popping in and out in ironical counterpoint to Rita’s expressions. The sun shone when she frowned. The skies darkened when she smiled.
    ‘I love a good wedding, don’t you, Mr Badger?’ she said.
    ‘Yes, I … I do … I … excuse me.’
    Neville Badger moved off abruptly. Rita stared after him in horrified astonishment, and the sun came out.
    ‘His wife died six weeks ago,’ explained Liz.
    Two bright pink spots appeared on Rita’s cheeks, and Ted gave her a look which said, ‘You’ve done it again.’
    Rodney and Betty Sillitoe were approaching. Rodney was forty-eight, Betty fifty-one, but she looked the younger. Rodney Sillitoe was wearing a very good suit, but it looked as if he had fallen asleep in a chicken coop while wearing it. Betty Sillitoe was so enthusiastically overdressed that she almost carried it off. Her dyed blonde hair peeped cheerfully out at the world round the edges of a yellow hat which wouldn’t have been out of place in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. Betty was always the first to drawattention to her dark roots. She dyed her hair to sparkle, not deceive.
    ‘Well, that all went off splendidly;’ she said.
    Ted made the introductions. Rita wished he’d tried to hide the pride in his voice when he added, ‘Rodney’s the big wheel behind Cock-A-Doodle Chickens,’ as if he were a prize salmon Ted had caught, and she knew that Liz had picked this up. Why else should she have exclaimed, as she shook hands with Rodney and gazed into his grizzled, lined face, ‘Ah! A man of power!’
    ‘Your girl looks a picture,’ the big wheel behind Cock-A-Doodle Chickens told her. ‘A picture.’
    Rita tried to hide her irritation at all this praise of Jenny, and then found that she had a far greater irritation to hide. Her parents were hobbling painfully towards them.
    Percy Spragg was a bow-legged, barrel-chested old man who appeared to be wearing a demob suit. Clarrie Spragg was a bowlegged, barrel-chested old woman whose face had set over the years into a fearsome and entirely misleading hardness in repose. She looked as if she had bought her clothes at a 1940s jumble sale at which she had arrived late. They looked to Rita as they bore down upon her like two pill boxes left over from our wartime coastal defences.
    ‘Well, that were grand,’ said Clarrie Spragg.
    ‘Grand,’ echoed Percy Spragg.
    Ted effected the introductions reluctantly.
    ‘By ’eck, your daughter’s a belter,’ Percy Spragg told the Rodenhursts, who flinched and smiled at the same time. Rita glared at her father, and Clarrie Spragg wasn’t too pleased either.
    Clarrie managed to force herself in between Percy and the group. She whispered grimly, ‘Just you mind your Ps and Qs, Percy Spragg.’ Her expression softened. ‘All right?’ she whispered.
    ‘Oh aye,’ said Percy Spragg much too loudly, and a playful gust sent his words streaming out over the gravestones which surrounded the abbey church. ‘I’ve only been once since breakfast.’
    Rita glared, and Ted hurried over to remove a Co-op carrier bag which was being drummed against one of the gravestones by the wind. As he bent to pick it up, another gust lifted Liz’s dress and revealed an achingly tempting knee. He looked away hastily.
    ‘Right, everybody,’ said Nigel Thick, the carefully classlessyoung photographer from Marwoods of Moor Street. ‘We’re all set. Let’s have the happy couple.’
    There was a murmur of conversation and excitement, a