The Wedding Group Read Free

themselves of handmade bricks, was thinly white-washed, with windows of greenish wavery glass. In the farm cottages lived the daughters with their husbands.
    The husbands were in no case of much account. As they had been acquired after the conversion, they were of the proper faith. Cressy’s father was the Irish one. Gerald Fines, Kate’s husband, worked at the B.B.C., and had to drive off to London very early most mornings, and returned home only just in time for eight o’clock supper in the evening – the great rallying point of the day, when they were entertained, over coffee, by a passage from Thomas Aquinas read by Harry who, even more than most people, loved the sound of his own voice. There was not, and never had been, any question of Gerald and Kate living somewhere nearer to London and more convenient to him.
    Jane had married a Frenchman, Yves Brisson, who was a potter, and had a workshop in a clearing beyond the orchard, where he worked rather short hours. There was no proselyte amongst the husbands, who appeared at Quayne – sometimes a little too easy about religious matters. Joe especially, who would serve at the altar in slacks pulled over his pyjama trousers, for he found it difficult to get up in the mornings, and was always behind-hand.
    There was also – from the husbands – a lack of reverence towards Father Daughtry, the Chaplain, who was ending his boozy days at Quayne. The two compatriots – he and Joe –would sit in the village pub and, hazy with stout, talk of their Irish days. They were a great deal too much at the pub, thought Harry Bretton, who, at the end of a day’s work, liked talk and music at home, where there was mead to drink, or cider, or his wife Rachel’s elderflower wine.
    The Father and Joe were both writing books, but neither of these works was likely to emerge for a long time, as their authors detested being alone in a room, without talk, for more than ten minutes, so that the necessary conditions for getting on with the job were seldom achieved.
    Cressy loved and despised her father, and wondered how it could be possible to do both. Lolling against the wall in the sun, chewing the fig, she waited, as if doomed, for the others to come out of the chapel. I have a lot of my father in me, she thought. I only wish he had more of me in him. He had seeds of rebellion, but they came to nothing, choked by Quayne.
    Here, at Quayne, everything was all of a piece; everyone, everything, fitted into the Master’s scheme; for Harry Bretton had views on every aspect of life, and had, with what seemed to be the greatest luck, found that all formed part of the whole vision. Here, there was nothing he thought of as spurious, nothing meretricious, nothing counterfeit. All was wholesome, necessary, simple; therefore good and beautiful, too.
    The outside world had jerry-built houses, plastic flowers, chemical fertilisers, materialism, and devitalised food. Beech woods on four sides protected Quayne.
    It was to that world beyond the beech woods that Cressy was looking. She dreamed of Wimpy Bars and a young man with a sports car, of cheap and fashionable clothes that would fall apart before she tired of them. In that world she might find a place for herself. It was worth trying; for there was none here. She knew that she was about to become – if it had not happened already – the one flaw in the Way of Life – the first blemish uponQuayne. Something which did not hold good, which ruined the argument.
    Not only because of religion. One thing leads to another. Especially did so at Quayne. If one part of the concept was by the outside world seen to have railed, were not the others suspect? (Quayne, though cut off from the outside world, seemed curiously sensitive to its reactions.) So might not – for the sake of argument, not likelihood – Mo and Pet follow her own deviation? Coming to supper in shop dresses and plastic sandals, sighing for synthetic custards and tinned spaghetti. Then the