The World is a Wedding by Wendy Jones Read Free Book Online

rolled onto his side, flailing his arm out so that it lay across her, like a lion’s limb, muscular and hairy and full of latent power: it was an undeniable weight.
    This was marriage, she thought. This man here, now, forever, for the rest of her life and, if you believed the Bible, also for eternity. Flora lay back and Wilfred lifted his leg, and pinned down her legs.
    She loved Wilfred, she knew that, but she was now a wife. When she was Flora Edwards, she had what felt like wings. Before she was married, when she had bicycled to Wiseman’s Bridge to meet Wilfred in the cottage at the cove, she had not waited; instead, she had buckled her sandals and left the house in her own time. This morning when they left for the Tabernacle Chapel she had stood while Wilfred combed his hair in the hall mirror.
    â€˜Wallet?’ he’d said. ‘It’s not on the dresser.’ It had taken five minutes to find it—it had been under an egg box. Then Wilfred remembered that he had to tell his da something, while Flora had stood, handbag clasped in both hands, moving from one foot to the other, her stole quivering with her breath.
    â€˜Right, dear!’ Wilfred had said, as they were about to leave. ‘Just one more thing . . .’
    To go alone was to go in your own time; to go with someone else was to wait, Flora Myffanwy thought. Those days of buckling her sandals and walking out of the door when she was ready had passed. That was how the unmarried lived. The married waited.
    When she was engaged to Albert, she had felt unencumbered. She used to fly then—at least, she felt like she was flying. Now she felt heavier than she could ever imagine being—immeasurably heavy, rooted by marriage and the beginnings of motherhood.
    Wilfred shifted and his breath flowed warmly over her. Was this something else women went through—this rootedness to the earth that came with expecting a baby? Flora didn’t fully understand it, but she was beginning to experience it. She was quietly delighted she was expecting.
    She lay back and fell asleep and dreamed a dream which was vivid and stayed with her in the morning when she awoke. It was of a stone angel floating over the cove, with a lightness and freedom Flora no longer felt she had. It was gigantic, many times larger than herself: the image of a woman who had the strength of a man or the strength of a lion. She was standing suspended in the air. Her wings were glorious, ascending like a stairway of feathers, higher and higher—and then she strode forth in the air, across the cove: a goddess, Aphrodite without a head. She was magnificent, pure in purpose, the creamy white drapes folding delicately on her hips and back and over her smooth, enormous limbs and torso. She was only feet and torso and wings—all else was lost. Her head had cracked and fallen away. She was full of purpose, striding forward through the empty air and the pure blue sky, with élan in her winds, élan in the surging of her legs across the silent cove.

4.
‘ I ’M C ERTAIN E VERYTHING I S V ERY P ROPER IN H EAVEN’
    G ood morning, Mrs. Annie Evans,’ said Wilfred, striding into the Conduit Stores on Monday morning and looking around. He, too, would shortly be a shopkeeper. And he hoped his paint and wallpaper shop would have as many customers as the Conduit Stores.
    â€˜Morning, Wilfred. By damn, there’s bad about Emlyn Jacobs.’
    â€˜Indeed.’
    â€˜Your da will be digging the grave, won’t he? I don’t know what we’ll do in Narberth without Emlyn Jacobs cooking—I mean
doing
—the books!
Doing
the books.’ The shopkeeper busied herself under the counter for a moment, before asking, ‘What can I do for you, Wilfred?’
    â€˜Bunch of flowers please, Mrs. Evans.’
    â€˜Flowers, Wilfred? Well, I never! And you a married man. You do know how to behave. By damn, your da has brought you up