“Madge, we should be getting into church.” Its owner prodded the new widow gently. With a feeling of escape, I hurried back to Ben. Several of the mourners stared.
“Are you all right, Ellie?” Ben asked.
“Yes.” I was watching the widow mount the steps.
“We’re going to miss the reception.”
We made for the lich-gate and had just reached it when the wind swooped up my veil and swirled it around my face. Laughing, Ben spun me around to unwind it.
The mourners had entered the church and the pallbearers were coming around the side of the building. Slowly they made their way up the steps. A flash of sun broke through the clouds. The girl with sandy plaits stepped forward and gently placed my bouquet on the coffin lid.
It began to rain again.
5
… “The widow’s handkerchief”-Hyacinth’s lips curved into a smile and her eyes became hooded-“was it wringing wet with tears? Ah! I thought so-dry as a bone.”…
The sky darkened and the rain changed from a drizzle to a downpour. I was doomed to enter the drawing room at Merlin’s Court looking like a corpse fished from the briny deep. Ben and I would wile away our honeymoon sipping cough syrup instead of champagne. Never would I recline in my foamy pearl-pink nightgown upon the four-poster at the Royal Derbyshire Hotel, idly turning those last few pages of Myths of the Bridal Bed: A Novice’s Guide. What idiot said, “Love is blind”? If Ben found me entrancing with a reddened nose and chapped lips, I would lose all respect for him.
“Nothing for it, Ellie, we have to take cover.”
My bridegroom opened a random car door, and I made a token protest as we settled ourselves on the front seat.
Ben rolled his window one-third of the way down and the wind burst in upon us. It yanked at my veil and crawled icily inside my thin bodice.
“This is cosy,” I said. A good wife understands all about male pride. Ben was extremely self-conscious about the claustrophobia which had plagued him since an early childhood trauma. He had been trapped inside a potato bin while playing hide-and-seek in his father’s greengrocer’s shop.
“If you aren’t one hundred percent satisfied with this accommodation, I am sure I can find you something nicer further down the line.” Ben nuzzled my neck.
“This is ch-charming.”
“You mean it’s musty and we’re sitting on a hairbrush.”
Rain does have that nasty habit of ripening fusty odours, and the car interior did smell rather pungently of spilt milk, cigarette butts, old newspapers, and dog hair. The hairbrush wasn’t the only object making the seat less than comfortable, but I was not about to subject our port in a storm to the white-glove test. Any more than I would dwell on that moment when I had seen my bouquet reverently laid on a coffin lid.
All things considered, this was wickedly snug. And, after a life of deplorable virtue, it was thrilling to be in a stranger’s car with Ben’s lips on mine and the warmth of his body closing in. How should I comport myself if he suggested our climbing over to the back seat?
The car doors vibrated. The wind had deepened to an anguished lowing; the windows were awash with rain. But for all that, Ben and I were as blissful as Mr. and Mrs. Noah when the wicked drowned, the earth sank, and the ark went bobbing on its merry way.
What cared I if the Aunts Astrid and Lulu were enlivening the reception by throwing wedding cake at each other? Or if Uncle Maurice were assiduously attempting to seduce the most sexually repressed woman in the room? Ben and I needed these moments alone to gird ourselves for the fray.
Ben’s hands moved under my veil. He was loosening my knot of hair. I felt the weight of it tumble heavily, wantonly, about my shoulders. I closed my eyes. My mother’s idea of informing me of the facts of life had been to hand me a brandy and say dreamily, “People who make love at night in bed are past it.” Ben’s breathing became possessed of a wondrously ominous rasp. His jacket buttons were embedding themselves into my flesh, but I felt no pain. I was having trouble breathing, and my temperature kept going up and down like a department store lift. Perhaps I had already caught pneumonia. I was turning limp, utterly unable to resist as, his hand cradling the back of my head, I was borne backward by his body. I could see only his eyes, brilliant as emeralds-no, sapphires-their colour changing, blazing from one to the other until I had to close my own for fear of being scorched.
Time fell away, as the earth had done in Noah’s day. Then it came, a strident, almost explosive rattling of the car doors. Who? What? Oh, my heavens! Blood pounded through my veins. Perhaps nighttime and bedtime and privacy were not totally to be despised. In one movement I was upright, ripping my tablecloth veil and hurling Ben backward across the seat.
“What happened? Weren’t we enjoying ourselves?” His voice was peevish but his eyes were laughing.
The rattling had stopped. Perhaps only the wind… I bundled up my hair and stabbed it back to respectability.
“My darling,” I said, “let us vow never to let this happen again until tonight. Is it fair, is it decent, to create the possibility of some bereaved person entering his or her car to be met by the appalling vista of entwined lovers in a state of lascivious disarray?”
“If you will excuse me a moment, my dear.” Reaching for the handle, Ben battled the door open. He climbed out and seconds later climbed back in.
“A cold shower always helps,” he said with a grin.
I refrained from saying he had given the inside of the car one too. A good wife never nags. Drying his face with my veil, I asked, “You don’t think I am being frightfully spinsterish, do you?”
“Darling, I think you are being breathtakingly-right.” Ben realigned my tiara. “My mother wouldn’t want to live if word went up and down Crown Street that I had been had up for lewd conduct in a Vauxhall.”
“Mm.” Never having met Mrs. Haskell, I could be no judge of her feelings on any subject. Save one. Her belief that to set foot inside a Church of England was to be turned into a pillar of salt. But the loving wife keeps such thoughts to herself.
“What about you?” I said. “Haven’t you had enough catastrophe for one day?”
Ben smiled. “I’m hardened. As boys, Sid and I got routinely marched down to the police station by the wicked landlord of Crown Street whenever he caught us watching stag films in whichever of his houses happened to be vacant at the time. Ellie, I think we should try and swim for it.”
Aptly put. The rain was now battering the car and spurting through the partially open window, but we had to get home. Failure to do so would not endear us to the unknown neighbours who had responded so enthusiastically to the announcement in The Daily Spokesman.
“What are you doing?” Ben asked, as I rummaged about on the seat. “Checking for an umbrella to steal?”
“Good idea, but my object was to straighten and remove all signs of our illicit occupancy.” A prickly stab and I triumphantly grasped the hairbrush which had wormed its way down the back of the seat. And what was this? Ah ha! A bulky cardigan with a woolly hat tucked up one sleeve. And here? A glove, a wad of newspapers, and a crushed box of tissues that would now fit through a letter box. Had the pretty pink and gold cardboard been this compact before our intrusion?
I attempted to plump it up. “Ben, dear, we should have climbed in the back.”
He gave a pained sigh. “I do wish you would stop toying with me like this.”
The tissue box came down on his head. “I meant that the owner of this car is a front seat dumper and we’ve squashed his-”