Free Magnolia Square by Margaret Pemberton

young couple standing before him it was full of deep, abiding joy.
    ‘Dearly beloved,’ he said, lifting his eyes from their radiant faces, looking out over his abnormally large congregation, ‘we are gathered together here in the sight of God, to
join together this Man and this Woman in holy Matrimony . . .’
    Ellen Pierce clasped her net-gloved hands tightly together. Kate looked beautiful. With her long, heavy braid of wheat-gold hair coiled into an elegant knot in the nape of her neck, she looked
more than beautiful. She looked regal. A spasm almost of pain flared through Ellen’s eyes. Kate’s looks hadn’t been inherited from Carl who, with his thinning hair and rimless
spectacles, was pleasingly intellectual-looking but far from handsome, but from her mother. Was that why Carl had still not asked her to marry him? Because he couldn’t bear the thought of
settling, in middle age, for a plain, socially awkward woman, when he had once been married to a woman who, if her photograph was anything to go by, had looked like a happy Greta Garbo?
    ‘Thirdly,’ Bob Giles was saying, ‘it was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity. Into
which holy estate these two persons present come now to be joined. Therefore if any man can show any just cause, why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak, or else hereafter
for ever hold his peace.’
    There was a silence in which a pin could have been heard dropping. It was broken by Wilfred Sharkey clearing his throat in what was interpreted, by many people, to be a disapproving manner.
Ellen was oblivious of Wilfred’s contribution to the proceedings. ‘Mutual society, help, and comfort.’ The words rang in her head. That was what she wanted to share with Carl. He
had been on his own for a long time and he wasn’t a gregarious man. If he had been, she would never have had the temerity to offer him her friendship in the first place.
    ‘I require and charge you both,’ Bob Giles was now saying solemnly to both Kate and Leon, ‘as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgement when the secrets of all hearts
shall be disclosed, that if either of you know any impediment, why ye may not be lawfully joined together in Matrimony, ye do now confess it . . .’
    Of course, offering Carl friendship way back in early 1940 had been an easy thing to do. Kate had been a secretary at Harvey’s Builders where she, Ellen, was Personnel Manageress. When
Kate had disclosed to her that her father had been interned, she had shyly begun a correspondence with him to help him combat the loneliness and boredom she was sure he was experiencing. There had
been many times since his release from internment when she had wondered if their pen-pal friendship hadn’t been easier, and more rewarding, than the personal relationship which had succeeded
it.
    ‘Wilt thou have this Woman to thy wedded wife,’ Bob Giles was now saying to Leon, ‘to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of Matrimony? Wilt thou love
her, comfort her, honour, and keep her in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all other, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?’
    Christina sat in one of the left-hand pews. It was the first time she had listened to the words of the Anglican wedding service since they had been spoken at her own wedding. After the ceremony,
and the obligatory reception held in the church hall, she and Jack had driven into Kent. Their wedding night had been spent in a small, lattice-windowed room above the White Bear Inn, in Brasted.
That was all the time they had had together. The next morning he had returned to his unit and he had had no leave since. And at the end of the month, according to Mavis, he was going to be home
again. Soon he would be coming home for good, and their married life together could truly start.
    Leon had made his response in his