child from her second marriage.’
‘What?’
‘Well, you know we don’t go in for divorce. It may be – and I’m not sure, it may be that I’m erring on the side of caution – that the Church would not recognise your mother’s second marriage. In which case, Jamie—’
‘You can’t mean it! That’s absurd!’
‘Father Leonard doesn’t need to know that he’s your half-brother. You can simply give his name. After all, it’s different from yours.’
‘But isn’t that terribly hypocritical? And what about “Suffer little children to come unto me”? It’s not very Christian, is it, to declare Jamie a … well, illegitimate? It’s not his fault, after all.’ Ruth had flushed with anger. ‘He’s innocent. He’s a child.’ It was the first time she had ever been short with Verity.
‘Nobody said anything like that, Ruth. It’s a question of whether or not he was born in sin. And after all, we all are. That’s why we are baptised, as you will no doubt have learned. I could very well be wrong about this question. It could very well be that there is no reason why he shouldn’t participate in the wedding Mass. But Father Leonard’s rather a stickler. I just wouldn’t want there to be any unpleasantness.’
But it was too late. The question over Jamie lodged in Ruth’s upper chest painfully, like hiccups that have gone on too long. At first she was determined to bring it up with Harry, but she thought better of it. If he did not disagree with his sister, Ruth knew she would struggle to forgive him.
Ruth had other worries. She feared embarrassment: Iris was practically a pagan, went about with bare legs, seldom did her hair. ‘You will wear a hat, won’t you, Mummy? Only, all the Longdens are,’ Ruth dared at last to ask her on the telephone.
‘Of course I will! What do you take me for?’ said Iris hotly.
‘Of course. I didn’t … it’s only that—’
‘Just because one isn’t absolutely hidebound with formality doesn’t mean that one doesn’t know how to behave,’ Iris interrupted. ‘I am a doctor’s wife, you may recall. One may live in the North, but that doesn’t make one an absolute Eskimo.’
Ruth thought that Eskimos generally did wear hats, but judged it wiser to say nothing. Getting married seemed to necessitate a lot of not saying things.
At least Iris was not intending to come south in advance of the wedding. And the thought that the reception might take place at her house seemed never to have crossed her mind: there were advantages in her failure to observe convention. It was tacitly accepted that Ruth would marry from Edward’s house. After the service at the Catholic church in Cheltenham (Father Leonard would officiate, by special arrangement with the diocese) they would repair there. There would be champagne in the dining room and then the guests would go into a marquee in the garden for the wedding breakfast.
Ruth could hardly wait for the day to be over. She and Harry so seldom had time on their own; that was the only snag of his being Verity’s brother. Harry had been sharing a flat in Bayswater with two friends, one who worked at the Treasury and one who, like Harry, was in the City. Ruth’s room in South Kensington was too small to sit about in; anyway, Verity always seemed to be at home when her brother called. Their courtship had been conducted in crowded coffee shops, concert halls and museums. It would be the greatest luxury to spend ten whole days together, just them.
Parts of the wedding day passed slowly and Ruth felt oddly disconnected at those times, as if she were a ghost, watching.
She saw smiling faces turn towards her as she processed up the aisle, a blur of goodwill like a ripple propelling her towards the altar. After the service she and Harry stood in the dining room to greet the guests; several of the women told Ruth she was radiant, which she knew was their way of saying she looked happy, if not ravishingly pretty. She hardly minded. Harry’s face became pink from the exertion of shaking every guest’s hand, his hair somehow tousled. To his bride he looked like an adorable little boy, come downstairs after being put to bed with a slight fever.
Every time she thought about anything, it seemed to have a bed in it. In her suitcase was a small round tin, housing a dome of thick dark rubber the colour of a flypaper. Absurdly, this would prevent her from having babies, at least for the time being – she had a final year at the Royal College to see out. Her father had suggested she quit now that she was to be a wife, with wifely things to do, but Harry saw no reason why she should not carry on and Ruth wanted to. The gynaecologist in Portland Place had instructed her to practise inserting and removing the device before the honeymoon. She must first lie down. Get the thing in. Then after use – a prescribed amount of hours later – she was to remove the thing, wash it in tepid water; never hot, for very hot water could cause the rubber to perish. At last she must dry it carefully before sprinkling the barest coating of talcum powder over the dome, like dusting icing sugar onto a fairy cake.
In her room she had blushed, alone, as she removed it from its tin. The bed felt too high, too exposed, so she lay on the narrow rug beside it. First she tried lying on her back, then on her side. The base of the dome was a sprung ring; the trick was to narrow it between two fingers, while probing with the other hand. Once in place you could let go, and the ring would resume its circular form, fitting over what the doctor had told her was called the cervix, like a tiny brimless hat. There was a knack to it apparently. Evidently it was a knack she did not possess. The device kept springing out of her hand and across the rug. On one attempt it jumped several feet, as far as the door. Ruth began to laugh. But laughing alone was ridiculous and made it harder to concentrate, which made it more difficult to get the wretched thing into place, which only made her laugh more, with the helplessness of it all. It was quite impossible. It would never fit. It would leap out at Harry, on her wedding night, startling as a frog, and she would be too ashamed ever to face him again.
For several days she made no further attempts. The tin sat undisturbed, a shameful secret in the drawer among her under-garments. Then, intrepid after a day of studying, she strode home and went straight up to her room, unlaced her shoes, unfastened her suspender belt and pulled down her woollen stockings and knickers and tried again, in broad daylight; not lying down as the doctor had told her, but standing up in her bare feet, one foot raised on the chair at the end of her bed. This was the way a Valkyrie would put in her Dutch cap, she thought, and it brought victory. Getting it out – which had worried her: what if it got stuck? – turned out to be much easier than putting it in. There was a way of hooking your finger under its rim, and yanking. It was rather like gutting a fish.
None of this augured well for the honeymoon. There was nothing pleasurable in the probing necessitated by the contraceptive device. How could actual lovemaking be any different? Ruth didn’t mean to keep thinking about how it would turn out in that department, but somehow her thoughts always came back to settle on it, like a bee returning again and again to the same plant. She liked kissing – she and Harry had done plenty of that – but she did feel anxious about the next bit.
Their room at the hotel by Lake Garda had long wooden shutters and a paper of big orange-ish flowers. The candlewick bed cover was an anaemic tangerine: not the bright colour of a tangerine’s skin, but the colour of the tight, pithy inside of an under-ripe fruit. At first Ruth disliked the room’s decor – it embarrassed her somehow – and she gravitated towards the window, which framed a view of blue water, distant villas and air. But by the second morning she loved it all: the ugly tufted bedspread, the coyness of the spindly chairs, even the stiff bath taps. No wonder people spoke of married bliss! It turned out that what happened in bed was perfectly lovely. You could kiss all the way through, which had surprised her: she had imagined that kissing was only a preliminary, a first course. Nor did you have to keep your eyes shut. You could look, you could kiss, you could kiss any part of each other, you could take as long as you liked. It seemed there was nothing you couldn’t do, there were no forbidden zones, and all of it was just the best feeling ever.
Their time in bed made her love Harry more than ever, in a slightly dotty way, at once hypnotised and ravenous. It also had the strange effect of making her fall rather in love with herself.