off the back of a lorry.’ (There was the kind of laughter people laugh at public events, as if a joke were a charity auction and they want to be seen to be bidding.) ‘But apart from that. I’d like to thank my parents for what they did as soon as they realised Betty and me were getting married. They stopped taking any money from me for my keep. It’s helped us a lot. They decided we needed all the money we could get to set up our own house. We’d both like to thank them for that. Mind you, I think they were beginning to get panicky towards the end there. I think they thought we were gonny have a seven-year engagement. Ah mean. I think they feel they’re not so much losing a son. They’re losing a liability. For the past year or so, if we’d been a Red Indian family . . .’ (titters greeting amazing concept) ‘. . . where they’ve got funny names like Running Bear and Running Water. The only appropriate one for me would’ve been Running Sore.’ (Total surrender to helpless mirth, corpulent uncles having cardiac arrests and aunties squawking like parakeets getting plucked alive.) ‘Anyway, my wife and I . . .’ (Stamping of feet, whistling, applause.)
It had been something like that. That was how Betty remembered it. Apart from having been there at the time (although she sometimes wondered if it was really herself who had been there), she had, the day before, found the piece of paper on which Dan had made the notes for his speech. She had remembered how much he had wanted to get that speech right, his nervous determination. He knew her parents’ disapproval of him and the superciliousness of some of her aunts and uncles. He had felt like the champion of his ‘side’, not about to let them down, ready to demonstrate that he could string a few words together. He had made the best speech of the wedding and then almost undone his success by quarrelling in the lavatory with one of her cousins, who had expressed amazement at how well Dan had spoken. She heard later from an outraged uncle that Dan’s immediate response had been, ‘I’m not amazed at your amazement. The next time you get anything right’ll be your first.’
Betty had been looking for the insurance policy for the house contents the day before when she had come across that folded, scuffed and fading piece of paper. She had opened it out carelessly and it had hit her like a jack-in-the-box with a knife. She had read it slowly, her stomach feeling slightly mushy with guilt, for in the words she sensed a confident assertion that was like a contract they had both failed to keep. She had remembered the moment when those words were said.
She remembered that moment now, as she knelt at her dressing-table mirror: ‘My wife and I . . .’ Staring at herself, she saw that other face, as if her past were a helpless spirit hovering over her present. In retrospect, the brocade wedding-dress and veil seemed somehow preposterous, a grotesquely ornamental, weird costume for a part nobody knew how to play. They gave you a few lines of ritual dialogue that came from God knows what lexicon of antiquated male prejudice and the rest of your life was endless improvisation, entirely up to the two of you.
She saw Dan standing making his speech, confidently belying his nervousness, herself sitting in demure white, the audience looking on, seeing what they wanted to see. As she remembered it, they both seemed to her, in a simple and not very dramatic way, sacrificial. She remembered a joke she had heard somewhere about married people, comparing them to swimmers in freezing water, shouting, ‘Come on in. The water’s great.’ ‘My wife and I . . .’ It didn’t seem to her to be imagination that she could remember a slightly derisive tone to some of the applause.
Watching her face without make-up, she remembered an expression that had fascinated her as a girl. She had always applied it to herself in the third person, making herself in her mind into the woman she imagined she might become. ‘She put on her face.’ The statement now seemed to her utterly apposite, an ambition that had closed around her like a trap. She put on her face. The face she had remembered in its veil was somehow lost, hadn’t merely changed.
These days she built an alternative in front of her mirror, created a role as self-consciously as an actress might with stage make-up: the wife. In some way that threatened the convincingness of her performance, it wasn’t truly her. Staring at herself, she vaguely felt that the accretions of experience she saw there weren’t an expression of her at all. They were a denial of some basic potential in her. Perhaps what we see in older people, she thought, are the complex stances and tics they have developed in response to the reactions to their original selves – not them so much as the camouflage they have had to become.
‘Leave it alone!’ Raymond shouted. ‘Or you’re gettin’ battered.’
As Betty straightened up, she heard a knee crack like a reminder of human frailty, a warning that she had better try to realise herself before it was too late. But the awareness was smothered at birth. She put on her slippers and they might as well have been bindings for her feet, so much they hobbled her to the day’s limitations. By the time she reached the bottom of the stairs, she had become ‘the mother’.
Raymond and young Danny were quarrelling over the pack of cards. Her arrival encouraged them to push their respective attitudes towards caricature. Raymond became innocently preoccupied in laying out the cards, his monkish dedication astonished at her arrival. ‘Oh, hello, Mum.’ Danny’s arms went out in outrage at the cruelty of man’s ways. ‘Mum!’ She felt she couldn’t face their trivial intensity at this time of the day. But Danny jumped up and danced before her eyes like a midge with messianic delusions (Those who are not for me are against me’).
‘Mum! He’s playin’ patience!’
‘Shurrup. So what?’ Raymond said.
‘Two canny play patience. Ya bam!’
‘You said you didn’t want to play.’ Raymond was now using carefully formal English, showing his mother how calm he was, how full of rectitude.
‘Ah said Ah didn’t want to play whist. But there’s other games.’
‘That’s right. Patience.’
‘Ah said Ah would play rummy.’
‘I’m not playin’ rummy. You don’t play right. You don’t even know the rules. You make a run outa clubs and spades and everything. You’re daft.’
Danny kicked away Raymond’s line of cards and Raymond lunged to hit him and Betty screamed, ‘Raymond! The two of you! Shut up! For God’s sake, shut your mouths!’ They both looked at her in a shocked way, as if they had just discovered that their mother was mad. Her own next remark made Betty think they might be right.
‘What’ve you had to eat, the two of you?’ she asked and couldn’t herself see how that related to the problem.
‘We had flakes,’ Danny said in passing. ‘Ye know what he did, Mum? He stopped playin’ because Ah was winnin’. Ye did so!’
‘Did not.’
‘Did sot.’
‘Not.’
‘Sot.’
‘Not, not, not.’
‘Sot, sot, sot, sot, sot. Sot, sot. Sot, sot, sot –’
‘Danny! Stop! Stop, Danny!’
In the silence she gathered up the cards and put them on the mantelpiece.
‘Aw, Mum!’ from Raymond.
She resentfully made them a breakfast of sausage and egg and toast, salving her rebellious conscience by making them lay the table. She tried not to let her affections take sides. But Raymond was so unfairly arrogant, playing his age advantage against Danny. He was thirteen against ten and he used those three years as a brutal birthright. His darkness of hair seemed to her for the moment sinister. Danny, still fair like herself, seemed an aggressed-on innocent, a small boy who sometimes gave the heart-wrenching impression that life was for him like jaywalking at Le Mans. She had a weakness for his passionate desire for justice, even when it was totally misguided.
While she fed them, she remembered an incident last year. She and Dan had been sitting in the house when Danny had rushed in from playing football in the street outside. His cheeks were florid from exertion and his eyes flamed with intensity.
‘Dad!