Ursula stopped drinking almost as suddenly as she had started. She supposed she had had a hollow inside her that had been scooped out in Belgravia. She had tried to fill it with alcohol but now it was being replenished with her feelings for Derek. What were those feelings? Mostly relief that someone wanted to look after her, someone who knew nothing of her shameful past. ‘I’m in love,’ she wrote rather deliriously to Pamela. ‘Hurrah,’ Pamela wrote back.
‘Sometimes,’ Sylvie said, ‘one can mistake gratitude for love.’
Derek’s mother still lived in Barnet but his father was dead, as was a younger sister. ‘A horrible accident,’ Derek said. ‘She fell into the fire when she was four years old.’ Sylvie had always been very particular about fireguards. Derek himself had nearly drowned when he was a boy, he said after Ursula had offered up her own incident in Cornwall. It was one of the few adventures in her life where she felt she had played an almost entirely innocent part. And Derek? A rough tide, an upturned rowing boat, an heroic swim to shore. No Mr Winton necessary. ‘I rescued myself,’ he said.
‘He’s not entirely ordinary then,’ Hilda said, offering Ursula a cigarette. She hesitated but declined, not ready to take on another addiction. She was in the middle of packing up her goods and chattels. She could hardly wait to leave Bayswater behind. Derek was in digs in Holborn but was finalizing the purchase of a house for them.
‘I’ve written to the landlord, by the way,’ Hilda said. ‘Told him we’re both moving out. Ernie’s wife’s giving him a divorce, did I say?’ She yawned. ‘He’s popped the question. Thought I might take him up on it. We’ll both be respectable married women. I can come and visit you in – where is it again?’
‘Wealdstone.’
The wedding party, in a register office, was, according to Derek’s wishes, restricted to his mother and to Hugh and Sylvie. Pamela was disconcerted not to be invited. ‘We didn’t want to wait,’ Ursula said. ‘And Derek didn’t want any fuss.’
‘And don’t you want fuss?’ Pamela asked. ‘Isn’t that the point of a wedding?’
No, she didn’t want a fuss. She was going to belong to someone, safe at last, that was all that counted. Being a bride was nothing, being a wife was everything. ‘We wanted it all to be simple,’ she said resolutely. (‘And cheap, by the looks of it,’ Izzie said. Another set of mundane silver cake forks was dispatched.)
‘He seems like a pleasant enough chap,’ Hugh said at what passed for a reception – a three-course luncheon in a restaurant close to the register office.
‘He is,’ Ursula agreed. ‘Very pleasant.’
‘Still, it’s a bit of a rum do, little bear,’ Hugh said. ‘Not like Pammy’s wedding, is it? Half of the Old Kent Road seemed to turn out for that. And poor Ted was very put out not to be invited today. As long as you’re happy, though,’ he added encouragingly, ‘that’s the main thing.’
Ursula wore a dove-grey suit for the ceremony. Sylvie had provided corsages for everyone made from hothouse roses from a florist. ‘Not my roses, sadly,’ she said to Mrs Oliphant. ‘Gloire des Mousseux, if you’re interested.’
‘Very nice, I’m sure,’ Mrs Oliphant said, in a way that didn’t sound much like a compliment.
‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure,’ Sylvie murmured to no one in particular before a restrained sherry toast to the bride and bridegroom.
‘Have you?’ Hugh asked her mildly. ‘Repented?’ Sylvie pretended not to hear. She was in a particularly discordant mood. ‘Change of life, I believe,’ an embarrassed Hugh whispered to Ursula.
‘Me too,’ she whispered back. Hugh squeezed her hand and said, ‘That’s my girl.’
‘And does Derek know you’re not intact?’ Sylvie asked when she was alone with Ursula in the Ladies’ powder room. They were sitting on little padded stools, repairing their lipstick in the mirror. Mrs Oliphant remained at the table, having no lipstick to repair.
‘Intact?’ Ursula echoed, staring at Sylvie in the mirror. What did that mean, that she was flawed? Or broken?
‘One’s maidenhood,’ Sylvie said. ‘Deflowering,’ she added impatiently when she saw Ursula’s blank expression. ‘For someone who is far from innocent you seem remarkably naïve.’
Sylvie used to love me, Ursula thought. And now she didn’t. ‘Intact,’ Ursula repeated again. She had never even considered this question. ‘How will he tell?’
‘The blood, of course,’ Sylvie said, rather testily.
Ursula thought of the wisteria wallpaper. The deflowering. She hadn’t known there was a connection. She thought the blood was a wound, not the breaching of the arch.
‘Well, he might not realize,’ Sylvie sighed. ‘I’m sure he won’t be the first husband to be deceived on his wedding night.’
‘Fresh warpaint?’ Hugh said easily when they returned to the table. Ted had inherited Hugh’s smile. Derek and Mrs Oliphant shared the same frown. Ursula wondered what Mr Oliphant had been like. He was seldom mentioned.
‘Vanity, thy name is woman,’ Derek said with what seemed like a forced joviality. He was not, Ursula noticed, as comfortable in social situations as she had first thought. She smiled at him, feeling a new bond. She was marrying a stranger, she realized. (‘Everyone marries a stranger,’ Hugh said.)
‘The word is “frailty”, actually,’ Sylvie said pleasantly. ‘Frailty, thy name is woman. Hamlet. Many people misquote it for some reason.’
A shadow passed over Derek’s face but then he laughed it off. ‘I bow to your superior learning, Mrs Todd.’
Their new house in Wealdstone had been chosen for its location, relatively near to the school where Derek taught. He had an inheritance, ‘a very small sum’ from his seldom-mentioned father’s investments. It was a ‘sound’ terrace in Masons Avenue, half-timbered in the Tudor style with leaded lights and a stained-glass panel in the front door depicting a galleon in full sail, although Wealdstone seemed a long way from any ocean. The house had all modern conveniences as well as shops close by, a doctor, a dentist and a park for children to play in, in fact everything a young wife (and mother, ‘one day very soon’, according to Derek) could want.
Ursula could see herself eating breakfast with Derek in the mornings before waving him off to work, could see herself pushing their children in prams then pushchairs then swings, bathing them in the evening and reading bedtime stories in their pretty bedroom. She and Derek would sit quietly in the lounge in the evenings listening to the wireless. He could work on the book he was writing, a school textbook – ‘From Plantagenets to Tudors’. (‘Gosh,’ Hilda said. ‘Sounds thrilling.’) Wealdstone was a long way from Belgravia. Thank goodness.
The rooms this married life was to be carried out in remained in her imagination until after their honeymoon, as Derek had bought and furnished the house without her ever having seen it.
‘That’s a bit odd, don’t you think?’ Pamela said. ‘No,’ Ursula said. ‘It’s like a surprise gift. My wedding present from him.’
When Derek finally carried her awkwardly over the Wealdstone threshold (a red-tiled porch that neither Sylvie nor William Morris would have approved of) Ursula couldn’t help but feel a twinge of disappointment. The house proved to be more sparsely old-fashioned than the one in her imagination and there was a drabness about it that she supposed came from its not having had a woman’s hand in the décor, so she was surprised when Derek said, ‘Mother helped me.’ But then there was, of course, a similar kind of occlusion in Barnet where a certain dinginess adhered to the dowager Mrs Oliphant.