nicest type, and he and I had quite a talk about Paris, and he told me about his new girl. He said he was going to France himself next month and I thought I would give him Martin’s address. And while we all talked and sipped our Cointreau and rejoiced in our smugness, Louise sat on the rose tapestry chair in the corner and wrote thank-you letters in her wild enormous handwriting at my mother’s desk.
It was when I went to bed that I felt the biggest pull of the comfort thing. There is something so alluring about my own room that—after French beds and cigarette ends all over and wine on the counterpane—is utterly demoralizing. After undressing in front of an unnecessary gas fire, I wandered round opening drawers and looking at clothes I had forgotten and old letters, and myself in the large subservient mirrors. Then I got into bed, and as I lay there reading in the clean tight sheets in a spinsterish delight, I wondered why on earth I disliked being at home so much.
2
The Wedding
I FOUND OUT, of course, in the morning. After the first glow of welcome came the usual nags, complaints, demands and grudges: my mother complained to me unendingly about Louise, about the guests she invited who never replied, about the way she left packing straw all over the hall, and about our Swedish girl Kristin: my father told me my mother was run down and that my place was at home and what did I mean by arriving only two days before the wedding: Daphne peered and chatted at me and told me heart-breaking, pathetic stories about the classics master at the Boys’ Grammar School who apparently took her to the cinema from time to time. Louise ignored me and everyone else completely. Aunt Betty was as quiet and mournful as ever, uncomplaining and forbearing and worn to a shadow by her widowhood. She was everybody’s stooge: everybody took it out of her. The whole set-up seemed so fossilized and gloomy that I decided that the gleams of goodwill had as ever been pure hallucination, and that I had better get out as soon after Louise had departed as possible. The only consolation was Michael, who walked with me round our rather Elizabethan garden, full of camomile and gillyflowers and pease-blossom, pulling flowers off plants in a way that drives Mama mad, and telling me what he thought of Stephen. What he thought wasn’t much, as I had expected, but he said with enviable cynicism, ‘Oh, she probably knows which side her bread is buttered.’ Michael and I used to amuse ourselves by a little mild flirtation: although he was such an old acquaintance we were both well aware that we were more than relations and that the prayer-book said we could get married if we wanted. We didn’t want, but it added a little incestuous spice to family life to think about the possibility. The year before he had even tried to kiss me, but I think we were both rather disgusted by the event, and had since confined ourselves to innuendo and accidentally brushing hands and provocative chat about other girls of his or men of mine.
With everybody else being in such a bad temper about one thing and another, I managed to hit the right note of irritation by getting really annoyed about my bridesmaid’s dress. It was very smart, and it fitted perfectly, but I thought it was rather tarty, and was surprised at Louise until I remembered that she wasn’t wearing it herself. Her dress was quite lovely, or seemed to be through its plastic bag in the cupboard; it was made of wild silk and was simple and floating. I knew she would look so extraordinary that I wished I could be generous and admire her just for a couple of days without grudging it. But she was so ungenerous herself that I couldn’t. Until I went up to Oxford I always believed that the defensive, almost whining position that she invariably pushed me into was entirely the fault of my own miserable nature, as I admired her fanatically: it was only at university that I realized that it was she that forced me into
Corey Andrew, Kathleen Madigan, Jimmy Valentine, Kevin Duncan, Joe Anders, Dave Kirk