The Dust That Falls From Dreams Page 32

  Daniel, in the full dress uniform of the RAF, a sword buckled at his side, strolled down Court Road, past the solid mansions of the new bourgeoisie, to St John’s. At his side was Fairhead, dressed in the number ones of the chaplaincy. They had little to say to each other, but enjoyed the quiet reassurance of masculine company. They felt as if they were walking towards the gates of the Garden of Eden, their minds whirling both with nervousness and vague, sweet optimism. They fell into step. They had decided to swap being best man, and carried the other man’s ring in their pocket. In Daniel’s case Archie had declined the job, quite brusquely – ‘Out of the question, old boy, couldn’t possibly’ – and Fluke had merely said, ‘Sorry, old fellow, I’ve got other plans. I’m afraid I can’t even turn up until the reception, much as it pains me to say so.’ Strangely enough, the other members of his squadron had told him the same thing. As for Fairhead, it seemed perfectly obvious to him that Daniel should be his best man, since he really had become his best friend in the last few months. Like many clergymen, he really preferred the company of sceptics.

  ‘I’ve got one more medal than you,’ teased Daniel, as they passed the palace.

  ‘No one will notice,’ replied Fairhead. ‘We both have quite a chestful, and for all anyone knows, mine might be better than yours. Yours might be for peeling potatoes in the face of the enemy. And you don’t have a silver crucifix.’

  ‘No, I’m not that kind of sky pilot.’

  Ten minutes after the grooms were settled in church, the brides and bridesmaids arrived in an open carriage drawn by a pair of plumed greys. The maids were Ottilie and Christabel, carrying bouquets, and dressed in blue silk that Gaskell and Christabel had designed and made between them, so that they looked like heroines from a medieval legend or a fantasy by William Morris. About their heads they wore garlands of small white carnations and both wore their hair straight, brushed to a deep shine. They had tossed a coin to decide which was to be bridesmaid to which bride, and Ottilie had been assigned to Rosie, and Christabel to Sophie. Rosie and Sophie were dressed very like the maids, except in white silk, with a simple headdress, also reminiscent of medieval times, and also made by Gaskell and Christabel during many long companionable evenings in the Chelsea atelier. Neither Rosie nor Sophie had wanted to wear a veil, and Mrs McCosh would therefore, very grumpily and resentfully, have to forgo that moment in the ceremony when the bride reveals her face to the groom in time for the kiss.

  Sophie had been so well made up that she looked beautiful for the first time in her life. Her stiff frizzy hair had been tamed into a bunch behind, and her dress evened out the lines of her small breasts and wide hips. Rosie’s long chestnut hair had been plaited and arranged about her head like a chaplet, exposing the fair skin of her neck and the fine line of her jaw. Both carried a small bouquet of white flowers. They had borrowed a set of pearls from each other, and wore sapphire and topaz earrings inherited from their grandmother. They had each tied a blue ribbon around their leg, just above the knee, where it would not slip.

  These young women were handed down by their father, and took up their station at the church door, until such time as the organist would strike up the Wedding March. Sophie stood clutching her bouquet, almost quivering with delight and anticipation, and Rosie stood motionless, feeling that she had been caught up in a strange dream. She looked at the edifice of the church and reflected that this was where she would have married Ash, had he lived. How strange that life was unfolding without him. Her hands were stinging terribly from their burns of the evening before, with agonising flushes of heat coming and going in waves. She now felt ashamed and embarrassed by what she had done, but helpless in its aftermath.

  Mr McCosh felt familiar pangs of pain in his chest and left arm, and thought that he really must ask Dr Scott to call round again. Mrs McCosh, conscious of her role, and magnificent in an enormous floral hat that entirely blocked the view of those behind, fretted inwardly about the success of the reception. Now that there were no servants to speak of, one had to rely on people who were hired in, and results were so much more unpredictable.

  When the organ struck up and the brides entered on their father’s arms, neither Daniel nor Fairhead turned round to look; they wanted to delay the surprise and pleasure.

  The service, as it turned out, was slightly muddled, since, although the plans had been carefully laid, the rector became confused under the pressure of the event. He addressed Fairhead as Daniel Pitt, and had to be corrected, and seemed startled when Hamilton McCosh stepped forward to give away each of the brides, and equally startled when each groom presented the other with the ring for his bride.

  The greatest difficulty occurred when Daniel had to put the ring on Rosie’s finger. It had occurred to no one, not even to Rosie, that the moment would come when she would need an unbandaged ring finger. Daniel took her hand, perceived the problem, was momentarily appalled and perplexed, and then put the ring to the tip of the finger. He held it there for a few seconds, and then palmed it, and was only able to transfer it to his pocket when they all they left to sign the register.

  Sophie’s infectious joy gave lift to the whole occasion, and when she went up on tiptoe to kiss Fairhead she put her arm round his neck and drew his head down to receive her lips. Rosie surprised herself by kissing Daniel with real tenderness. How strange but delightful it was to be Mrs Pitt.

  When the time came to leave, the organist pulled out all the stops, and played Widor, causing the whole church to reverberate. The two couples emerged arm in arm into the sunlight and passed beneath the glittering arch of swords provided by the grooms’ military friends, all of them beautifully got up in the bright uniforms of their regiments. The happy crowd of friends and family threw rice over them, clapping and cheering. Some of the women wiped tears from their eyes, and the men necessarily restrained their own.

  As the open carriage departed, this time bearing the couples, Sophie threw her bouquet to Ottilie, who skipped a little as she caught it. Rosie’s bouquet flew quite accidentally towards Gaskell, who caught it, looked at it with puzzlement, as if it were an inexplicably large and exotic insect, and then tossed it on to Ottilie. ‘I can’t have two!’ she protested, and Gaskell said, ‘Of course you can. It’ll double your chances!’

  At the reception Mr McCosh made a speech in which he declared his regret that he could not have married all his daughters off in one go, and that it would seem terribly dull marrying off the other two in separate ceremonies, but he feared that they might never get married anyway, because there were only two men in the world good enough for his daughters to marry, and they had been snaffled by Sophie and Rosie already. Christabel felt a little peculiar as she listened to this, given that Gaskell was by her side. Ottilie looked over at Archie, who was making a point of standing on his own, grimly enduring the loss to his brother of the woman he had always loved. Ottilie felt very sorry for him, and wished he would notice her, but she knew that he never would, and that one day she would probably find someone else.

  Daniel and Fairhead managed to combine their speeches as both grooms and best men, under strict instruction from Hamilton McCosh to keep it brief. Fairhead quoted the Song of Solomon in honour of his bride, looking at her directly, and reciting: ‘ “Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck. How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! how much better is thy love than wine! and the smell of thine ointments than all spices! Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue…” ’

  Sophie glowed with pleasure and clapped at the end, jumping up and down like a schoolgirl. Mrs McCosh found herself crying unexpectedly. The speech had caused her to remember her husband’s early passion.

  Daniel’s speech had only just got under way when a droning sound from the south began to get louder and louder. Those who had experienced the Zeppelin and Gotha raids began to feel distinctly uneasy. Daniel was drowned out, as
the racket grew suddenly deafening and it grew clear what was happening.

  Daniel’s entire squadron of Snipes came over at roof level, led by Fluke’s diminutive and impertinent Sopwith triplane, with his Squadron Leader’s streamers trailing and flapping from the struts. The three flights peeled apart and began to put on a display of synchronised formation flying, looping, banking, flying upside down, missing head-on collisions at the last moment, and diving on the house. At the end they dived together, shot up into the air, hung there for a second, stalled, sideslipped, and fell into a collective falling leaf that had Daniel’s heart in his mouth. He was possibly the only one there who knew how dangerous it could be, but it did look wonderful. At the last minute the engines roared back into life, the planes pulled out of their fall, and rose back up into the clouds to perform one more loop with a roll on top. They then set off in the direction of the golf course, whose fairways on this day were to contain an unusual number of fighters. The club’s members turned out to watch them coming in to land, asking each other rhetorically whether one really would have to play the ball where it lay, even if an aeroplane happened to be obscuring one’s shot.

  A few minutes after the squadron had gone, Fluke’s little triplane reappeared, trailing behind it a banner that read ‘Hallelujah!’

  Rosie suddenly remembered the day when they had had their coronation celebration for King Edward VII, and the garden seemed to fill with ghosts. Ash and his brothers, little boys back then, had grown into men and marched away, to vanish into the insatiable stomach of war.

  Mme Pitt appeared at her side, dressed in the Parisian style, in a hat with a curved brim trimmed with artificial roses. On her chest she wore a silver-mounted tiger-claw brooch that Rosie had always hated, because she did not think that any animal should be made into jewellery.

  ‘You are remembering, I think,’ said Mme Pitt, ‘when my boys came over the wall.’

  ‘It was quite a stunt,’ said Rosie, a little feebly. Mme Pitt smelled very powerfully of lavender.

  She looked Rosie straight in the eye, as if to imply a threat, and said, ‘You must look after my son.’ Then she kissed her on the cheek, patted her on the shoulder, and left her to herself.

  After the traditional reading of the telegrams, just as Rosie was laying her injured right hand lightly on top of Daniel’s for the cutting of the cake with his sword, the pilots of his squadron appeared en masse, full of high spirits, to organise leap-frog competitions and wheelbarrow races, and perform treetop fights and handstands. They took Daniel and Fairhead on their shoulders and bore them round the garden in triumph. The level of general happiness and rejoicing seemed to ratchet up several notches, and the level of decorum plummeted. All the champagne and food disappeared. Mrs McCosh became tipsy, and had to totter indoors and lie down.

  In her wedding photograph Rosie’s bandaged hands are mainly concealed by the long lacy cuffs of her dress, and the monochrome does not reveal the deep yellow stains in it. The split in her lip is discernible but not distracting. The brides’ and grooms’ friends and relatives look grim, as they always do in pictures where one has had to pose in perfect stillness for too long a time. Sophie and Fairhead are looking at each other. Daniel is smiling, the sole one there who believes that Rosie had an accident with a brazier in the kitchen. He looks handsome, vigorous and happy in his RAF uniform with its double row of medals, and his sword hanging from the Sam Browne. His brother Archie looks magnificent and dignified in the uniform of a major of Rattray’s Sikhs. His face reveals nothing of the fact that he is irretrievably in love with the woman who has become his brother’s wife. Mme Pitt, his mother, looks as if she is waiting to do something mischievous. Rosie looks subdued and wistful. She is niggled by the promise she once made to Ash, that she would love him and him alone for all eternity. Hamilton McCosh is supporting his wife on his arm, and worrying that Rosie might have done the wrong thing by this young man that he likes and admires. Mrs McCosh is thinking about whether or not there is any cachet in being mother-in-law to someone who is half French. Ottilie and Christabel are wondering what the wedding nights will be like.

  That night, having borrowed the AC Six, Daniel took Rosie on honeymoon to a hotel in Henley-on-Thames, and had to feed her himself. She declined champagne, and later on Daniel felt that he could not possibly expect anything of her in her injured condition. Moreover she had, perhaps wilfully, not taken account of certain physiological inevitabilities when planning the date of the wedding. It was very difficult to change the clouts with her damaged hands, as it was to do anything for herself at all.

  The couple lay face-to-face, kissing and talking, he in striped pyjamas and she in a copious nightdress. Her kisses were tentative and reluctant, and he construed this as modesty. After she fell asleep at last, he got up, went downstairs, lifted a sash, carefully made a note of which one it was, and went for a long nocturnal walk along the river. As dawn broke he sat on the stump of an oak, took out his cigarette case, removed a cigarette, tapped the end of it on the case, and lit it. He smoked and breathed in the chilly air all at once. In spite of everything, he was brimming with happiness and optimism. He had almost made up his mind to leave the RAF and get a job in civil aviation. Everyone said there were tremendous opportunities just round the corner. If that did not work out, he would go into motorcycles.

  Daniel fell into a reverie about a house somewhere nice, such as here in Henley, and he envisaged himself playing cricket in the garden with his children, a pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth even though he did not smoke one, or going fishing on the Thames, when he had never been fishing in his life. In the driveway of the house, on the other side where you can’t see it, there would be a beautiful Hispano-Suiza, its engine ticking as it cooled down after a run to Oxford and back. In his mind’s eye Rosie was wearing a summer dress and a wide floppy hat. She was smiling at him and the children, and over her arm was a basket of flowers.

  74

  Nuptials

  Sophie lay flat on her back in bed, freshly washed and in a new nightdress with a decorative blue ribbon at the neck, waiting for her husband to come in from the bathroom. They had chosen a small hotel in Dover for the first night of their honeymoon and had come down by train, sending their luggage in advance. It was the kind of hotel where the plumbing groaned and rattled, and light draughts of fresh salty air seeped in through the ill-fitting window frames. They had dined on Dover sole, as seemed only appropriate, and had become very slightly tipsy on white wine that should have been a little bit more chilled, the kind of sour generic wine that the French used to palm off on the British, in the secure knowledge that the British didn’t know any better. Because Sophie and Captain Fairhead did not know any better, they had enjoyed it very much.

  Captain Fairhead came in at last, and slipped under the sheets. He did not touch her, but turned on his side to face her. She rolled and faced him, so close that they could smell each other’s winey hot breath.

  ‘You face looks completely different from so close up,’ said Sophie.

  ‘From this close you’ve got four eyes,’ said Captain Fairhead. He planted a small kiss on her lips, and she put her arms around him.

  ‘Do you know what?’

  ‘No. What?’

  ‘Mama asked me if I knew what was going to happen tonight. I said, “We’re going to Dover.” And she said, “Don’t be obtuse, darling.” Then she said, “What will happen will be deeply unpleasant, humiliating and degrading, but you must do your duty, and in the end it is worth it for the children that result.” ’

  ‘What do you think we ought to do?’ asked Fairhead. ‘I confess, I do feel quite apprehensive. I haven’t been so nervous in a long time. Like the feeling when you know there’s going to be a barrage.’

  ‘Didn’t you go to borledos in France?’

  ‘Borledos? What on earth do you mean?’

  ‘You know, places for jiggajig and hozirontal recreation?’

  ‘Hozirontal recreation? You mean
bordellos?

  ‘Ah, that must be it.’

  ‘There was at least one for officers in Amiens,’ he said. ‘The queues at the licensed ones for other ranks were quite unbelievable.’

  ‘Didn’t you go and brandish your Bible at them?’

  ‘Certainly not. A military chaplain in time of war is solely concerned with consolation, encouragement and death. The men never took us very seriously in any case. They called us “sky pilots”. Even the airmen called us sky pilots. Anyway, I never was one for the “borledos”. You can call it fastidiousness, or moral principle, or lack of courage. I’m still not sure what it was, and now I’ll never know. I’m as pure as the driven snow, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I had some good advice,’ said Sophie. ‘I got it from someone who married last year.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘She said not to try and do it until you both feel comfortable, ’specially not on the first night. That’s what someone told her, and it worked out very well, she said.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘She said just to stick to talking and kissing, and things like that.’

  ‘Are you ticklish?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t tickle me, kiss me.’