Free The Man in the Wooden Hat by Jane Gardam Page B

himself only just taken silk (QC), at all of eight a.m., ready dressed in European “morning dress” and a shirt so white that it mocked its surroundings by looking blue.
    All these years later, he saw himself. He had been standing gravely at the window wondering whether or not to telephone her.
    Breakfast?
    He had not ordered a cooked breakfast. It would seem hearty. Others no doubt would be sitting down in their suites to bacon and eggs on the round black glass table, napkin startlingly white. But for Edward—well. Perhaps a cup of coffee?
    Should he ring his wife-to-be? Amy’s number? His—his Elisabeth? But then the telephone shouted all over his room.
    “Hello?”
    “It’s me,” said Elisabeth.
    “I was going to telephone you.”
    “It’s supposed to be bad luck,” she said.
    “No, it’s bad luck for me to see you before the church. I was thinking of—er—saying, well—well, how to get there—well, don’t get the time wrong. Will those missionaries get you there? Willy could fetch you.”
    “I’ll be there, Edward.”
    “All set, then?”
    “All set, Edward. Edward, are you O.K.? Are you happy?”
    “Don’t forget your passport. Tell them to throw your suitcase in the back. Oh, and don’t forget . . .”
    “What?”
    A long silence and he watched the seabirds leaning this way and that over the harbour.
    “Don’t forget . . . Elisabeth. Dear Betty. Even now—are you sure?”
    There was the longest pause perhaps in the whole of Edward Feathers’s professional life.
    And then he heard her voice in mid-sentence, saying, “It could be cold in the evenings. Have you packed a jersey?”
    “My breakfast hasn’t arrived yet. Then I have to pay the bill here. Are you dressed? I mean in all your finery?”
    “No. I’ve a baby on my knee and Amy and everyone are shouting. But, Eddie, if you like we can still forget it.”
    “I’ll be there,” he said. Silence again for an aeon. “I love you, Betty. Don’t leave me.”
    “Well, mind you turn up,” she said briskly. Too brightly. And put down the phone.
    He had no recollection in the Donhead lanes after Betty’s death of any of this except his own immaculate figure standing at the window.
     
    “I am not going,” said Bets, hand still on the phone. “It’s off.”
    Amy planted a glass of brandy beside the bride’s cornflakes. “Come on. Get dressed. I’ve done the children. What’s the matter?”
    “What in hell am I doing?”
    “The best thing you ever did in your life. Looking ahead at last. Here, I’ll do your hair.”
     
    Edward’s luggage had already gone ahead to the airport. He paid his bill at the desk, the management far from effusive, since they’d expected him there for another two months. But they knew he would be back, and he tipped everyone correctly and shook hands all round. They walked with him to the glass doors and bowed and smiled, nobody saying a thing about his stiff collar and tailcoat so early in the morning. “You don’t need a car, sir? For the airport?” “No, no. I’m going across to church first.” “Ah—church. Ah.” The gardenia in his buttonhole could have been laminated plastic.
    He set out to his wedding alone.
    Briefly he thought of Albert Ross. Ross had vanished. Eddie had no best man.
    Oh, well, you can marry without a best man. No one else he’d want. It was a glorious morning. He remembered his prep-school headmaster, Sir, reading Dickens aloud, and the effete Lord Verisoft walking sadly to his death in a duel on Wimbledon Common with all the birds singing and the sunlight in the trees.
    “I am alone, too,” he said in his mind to Sir. “I haven’t even a Second to chat to on the way.”
    He thought of the old friends missing. War. Distance. Amnesia. Family demands. “I have married a wife and therefore I cannot come.” Oxford friends. Army friends. Pupils in his Chambers. Not one. Not one. Oh my God !
    Walking towards the exquisite figure of Edward Feathers—well, not so