The Wedding Group by Elizabeth Taylor Read Free Book Online Page B

Nell had been deliberately rude. And she was disappointed. There had been nothing about her courage, or sensitivity, or artistic leanings, or high romance, or her sense of humour. Especially, ‘artistic leanings’ and ‘a sense of humour’ she had hoped for and expected.
    ‘I myself loathe cooking,’ Nell said, leaning back again, and settling her dog in comfort. ‘To me, it’s like having a migraine. And all the fuss and nonsense that’s written about it. I read it on our women’s page. There was one last week about pastry baskets filled with cherries. “Make angelica handles if desired,” it finished up with. Who on earth could desire an angelica handle?’
    ‘I sometimes envy you career women,’ Midge said, looking from Nell to Alexia and back again.
    ‘Anyone can get a job,’ Nell said.
    She had come for this week-end, wondering if she wanted to marry David, and if she could get her way if she did. She had made up her mind that she would not be sad, however it turned out, feeling sure that true love was something gone by: she had not been successful at it, and hesitated to run the risk again. But David or no, she decided she was not taking on Midge.
    At Quayne, that Saturday evening, after beans and bacon, there were stewed windfalls, and a reading from D. H. Lawrence. This was followed by coffee and a monologue. Lawrence had set Harry Bretton off on one of his favourite tacks, and the discourse this evening – with no embarrassment at all to himself – was on the role of woman in the life of man.
    Dabbing his lips with the red and white navvy’s kerchief tucked under his beard, he examined, with an attempted ruefulness, the nature of his own sex.
    He had an extra stimulus to talk this evening – his friend, Leofric Welland, who was staying in the house. Leofric had written one book about Harry’s works, and had another in mind – and some of it on paper – about his life. Harry knew this was in his mind and liked to help build up the picture. He had even offered him a plot on which to build a house in the orchard, so that he could always be at close quarters, but Leofric’s wife had had enough of Quayne from time to time, and would no longer spend even a week-end there. Many different excuses had to be made.
    ‘In spite of all our grand ideas,’ Harry was telling him, ‘we are only perverse children at heart. If we have the intellect, it’s our women who have the wisdom. No one knows that better than one’s wife.’ He smiled at Rachel, and she smiled back. ‘One’s mate,’ he amended. ‘For all our precious ideals, our inventiveness, it’s the essential, instinctive mother-wife we crave at last.We return, after our escapades or great deeds, to
her
, for forgiveness and healing and approval.’
    Rachel tried to look forgiving and healing and admiring, but had an abstracted air.
    He just makes me want to vomit, Cressy thought. Her mother, aunts, cousins were conditioned into acquiescence. Pet went quietly round the table, refilling coffee-cups over people’s shoulders. Mo kept pressing a finger into crumbs on the table and licking them. Joe MacPhail folded his arms across his chest and thought how he had wasted his life.
    ‘It is to that instinct we call and return.’
    Leofric, who had been thinking for some time of leaving his wife, noted the words none the less, and hoped to remember them.
    Unfortunately, Father Daughtry, who disliked this sort of talk, had drunk too much Guinness before supper, and was inclined to chatter about other things, trying to keep himself awake.
    ‘Did you never see that fillum of Ginger Rogers, now? What was the name of it?’ he asked Cressy, who had never heard of Ginger Rogers. He asked Gerald Fines, who glanced nervously at Harry, and then said, in a low tone, that he had no idea.
    ‘Ah, what was the name of it. I have it on the tip of me tongue. That was the best fillum I saw at any time.’
    The cinema was a great pleasure of this last part of his