Free The Wedding Group by Elizabeth Taylor Page B

about for her treat and having it rubbed in all the time. No wonder she looked so furious.
    David shouting at
me
in a pub one day, Midge thought. Taking me for
my
treat, and everyone saying how good and patient he is.
    ‘She’s taken quite a fancy to coming here,’ the indefatigable daughter was saying. Her husband was mute, staring into the smoke-haze.
    Midge listened with interest. They were just as David haddescribed them to her one night on his return from the pub, and now she was trying to remember every word that was said, so that she would have something to tell him when he came home from the Crabbe country.
    ‘Enjoying your drink, Mother? It goes down well, doesn’t it, after a hard day? She had all her washing out before nine,’ she said, turning to her husband. ‘Just look at her ankles, Ken. We could hardly get her shoes laced up.’
    Ken did as he was told, but without much show of interest.
    They were so awful, so very, very awful, Midge thought. But they weren’t funny, after all.
    ‘This is awfully nice,’ Joe said. ‘What I’ve missed, taking you out!’
    In truth, he was finding it rather a strain, being cast together with her on their own. He realised that he had scarcely ever had a conversation with her before, and could think of little to say. He knew nothing about her, in fact, and was much too gauche to know how to find out. ‘But still,’ he added, smiling, ‘after all, you were hardly old enough.’
    ‘Not old enough? Oh, really! When you think what any other girl of my age would have done.’ But he wouldn’t have any idea, she decided.
    ‘I dare say. But girls grow up slowly at Quayne. Not a bad thing, you know.’ He added the last sentence from loyalty to Rose. Poor Rose – so stunned these days from the threat that what she thought of as her ‘whole’ vision of life, was really incomplete, as Joe had guessed all such visions must be.
    ‘Have you been away at all?’ the barmaid asked Midge. It was her stock question at this time of the year.
    ‘Nothing exciting. I went to stay with my father in Buxton. Lovely country all round, of course.’
    ‘So I hear,’ the young woman said vaguely, as she lifted ashtrays and glasses, wiping underneath them.
    The visit to Buxton had been while David was in Rome with Jack Ballard. Her father, a widower now, had taken her round his haunts, driving the second-hand Bentley. A tour of the constituency, he said. Even she had found the pace fast and the routine boring. And she disdained to be seen with his entourage, those hard drinkers he had gathered round him in his retirement – men in belted, camel-hair coats, with trilby hats pulled forward over purple faces. They entered pubs in a gang, her father, Good Old Bertie, going ahead to buy the first round of doubles. Bertie Reynolds and his Outriders, Midge had once overheard them called. Each year, on her visit, the Outriders were fewer. There were so many funerals amongst them, wonderful send-offs, by all accounts, with the drinking-sessions immediately following them beginning in an air of exalted grief and then, through reminiscence – ‘Poor old Jack would have wished it this way’ – becoming more boisterous than usual.
    ‘And you?’ Midge asked the barmaid in her turn. ‘Have you been away?’
    The sunburned cleavage had been acquired in Spain, it seemed.
    Cressy, feeling rather muzzy, looked at Midge with great admiration. She wondered how much just such a soft, pale coat would cost. And such soft, pale shoes to match. She would have liked her to join them, but guessed that she was probably the very sort of woman her father could not bear.
    ‘I think we must be off,’ Joe said. ‘Your mother will wonder what has happened.’
    Rose, he knew, would not wonder for one moment. but he had only a shilling left. Two sixpences. No mistake about them, hiding in the corner of his pocket.
    ‘Drink up, Mother.’
    Mother took a gulp of brown ale, leaving a pale froth onher upper lip.