The Wedding Group Read Free Page B

the spelling faults. ‘It was very wrong about me, and I feel I should explain this. To begin with, the photograph of me and the pig was really my cousin Petronella and the pig. Also, I am eighteen, not seventeen. And I have never called my grandfather the Master in all my life, and never would. Or call him anything.’ (The last sentence had been scratched out.)
    ‘It is unfair of you to accuse me of being religous without even asking me. As it happens, I make a point of not being, and at great cost to myself, if I may say so. And I only wear those sack-like dresses, as you so rudely call them, because I have no others, and I hate and curse them with all my heart every minute of the day.
    ‘It is not our fault that we do not earn our livings and are oblidged to be maids-in-waiting –
your
description!!! But it is untrue to say that it is because we have never been educated, because we have, and can speak French for a start.
    ‘More than anything in the world I would like to earn my living, and not remain here untill I am old. If you could ever find me a job, so that I could escape from this place it would ensure my everlasting grattitude, and my forgiveness for the injuries you have done me. This is a cry from the wilderness.
‘With kind regards,
‘Yours sincerely,
‘Cressida MacPhail
    ‘PS. I would do
anything
. Perferably something in your own line of country.’
    Having remembered her husband’s making his remark about the grass being brown, had silenced Midge for a minute or two, and David had been able to finish the letter in peace.
    ‘You’d never believe it,’ he said, and began to read it again, aloud.
    When he had finished, he explained, ‘It was that article I wrote about the loony-bin on Quayne Hill.’
    ‘Those dreadful women,’ his mother said.
    ‘There’s nothing like giving a good ticking-off before asking a favour. I like that. Poor little girl. She sounds at war with all the world.’
    He went to find that coloured supplement to the paper he worked on, and when he brought it back, turned over the pages until he came to Petronella and the pig. Those girls had all looked much the same to him, and he had never been sure which one he had been talking to. All had pale faces and long, pale hair. Their brown feet, in clumsy, home-made sandals, were rough and scuffed. All bit their fingernails he noticed, and had thought ‘no wonder’.
    Communal luncheon was the subject of another photograph – all taken by his friend, Jack Ballard. The Master, sitting in a more impressive chair than the rest, had come out well, although his eyes and smock were a rather blurred and exaggerated blue. In fact, none of the colours was quite true, and the girls’ hair had a greenish tinge. On the bare boards were loaves of dark bread, a casserole of beans, home-made cheese and flagons of cider. The faces were as plain as the food; but the young girls had a touching quality suggestive of another time in history – the turn of the century, or earlier. Girls were no longer like that, no longer even looked like that. On the white-washed brick wall behind the Master hung one of his paintings. It was of Christ, wearing an open-necked shirt and flannel trousers, carrying the cross, and followed bymen on bicycles. In the background were factory chimneys and an English sky. The painting had come out quite clearly in the photograph.
    ‘I wondered at the time,’ Midge said. ‘If that job wasn’t rather too much on your own doorstep.’
    She had just come back from the kitchen, and a delicious, steamy smell of mint followed her.
    ‘Meeting them in the pub and so on,’ she added.
    She slopped some gin into her glass, adding vermouth in the same unheeding way. ‘It will be another quarter of an hour,’ she said, referring to dinner.
    ‘It’s only the Irish one – Joe MacPhail – of course, this one’s father – that I meet in the pub, and only to pass the time of day. He kept well out of the way when I did the