Beside him Muriel suddenly opened her mouth as wide as possible consistent with keeping her lips stretched over her teeth, perhaps in unspoken comment but more likely so as to get those parts of her face lined up for the application of the tissue she had now managed to wrest from its box. She still said nothing.
'Oh, er, what line would you have taken if we had discussed the marriage before today?'
'Nothing very much,' she said, going on peering, 'and after all there's no sense arguing about it now.'
Well no, no more than five minutes ago, and he had not really expected to hear how much she felt like killing him at the idea of a son of hers and her only child marrying the daughter of a woman her own husband would rather have married, and that just for a start. But he realized· that asking the question had been the latest spurt of the dangerous euphoria that had again possessed him. Take it _easy__, for God's sake. _Watch__ it.
After doing something undetectable to her mouth she put the tissue away and said, 'You've got quite saucy these last months. You know, cheeky.' She spoke in a tone of measured approbation more suitable to telling him he had shown signs of becoming well read or kind to animals.
And interfering with the body after death more than cursorily to pay him out for being pleased at something that displeased her. 'Yes, I probably have been a bit full of beans seeing William looking so happy.'
'It's not just that. It started before that. It was in full swing by Christmas.'
'Was it really? I can't think of anything to explain it,' he said without trying to at all.
If Muriel could think of something she kept it bottled up. They drove in silence over the old bridge, repaired now, past the rootless smelt-houses, through St Advent, past Victoria Station, up the Strand, past the Trevor Knudsen Fine Arts Museum, Marks & Spencer, the Glendower, the Royal Foundation of Wales, the cricket and rugby ground and the university and round by the hospital towards Holland.
'Peter,' said Muriel when they were a couple of minutes from the church: 'I'm selling the house.'
'What?'
'This time I mean it. Now William's settled, that's my last reason or excuse gone for banging on any longer round here. Yes, it's back to Middlesbrough for me, and if you care to come along too there'll be a bed for you at the end of the road. Now it could so be, sooner than shift to sunny Yorkshire or Cleveland or whatever it's called these days you'd prefer to go it alone here, under your own steam as it were. Well, I dare say that can be arranged. Entirely up to you.'
So much for the parade of cosy domesticity. Muriel had spoken with all her usual matter-of-factness, even perhaps a little more. It occurred to Peter that the presence of William and his best man-as first arranged would have made no real difference; she would have seen to it that he got the lot, or enough, some time or other before entering the church. This was now just round the corner and the early guests were on their way to it. He caught sight of old Owen Thomas and his family getting out of their car.
'There's no more to say,' she began again. 'These people may be good, they may be bad, and I'll not say I'm not fond of one or two of them, but they're not _my__ people, and I mean to do something about that while I've still time. So I'm checking out. The house goes on the market first thing Monday morning. And that's that. Okay? Understood? No appeals, no conditions, no stays of execution, no compromises, no practical alternatives. Final. Now I may be completely wrong again and you've been bursting to get shut of the place since whenever, but if I'm not wrong I'll give you one piece of advice. Start getting used to the idea right away. If I were you I'd go left here and park in the Holland Court car-park.'
'Go and...'
'Nobody uses it much this time of day.'
So it turned out, but Muriel had barely had time to take up groom's-mother station at Peter's side before they were fairly among old Tudor Whittingham and his wife and son and daughter and son-m-law and two grandchildren and married sister and niece whom he hoped it was all right for him to have brought along only they were staying with them. There was more, much more, all the way to the church and on the broad asphalted walk surrounding it. Some, like Percy and Dorothy, Malcolm and Gwen, old Vaughan Mowbray and his arthritic lady-friend, a few dimly remembered figures from university, industry, Golf Club, various youngsters identifiably or presumably connected with William, came and went; others, like Garth, Sian Smith, Arnold and toffee-nose Eirwen Spurling and two quite independent funereally-dressed couples, unknown, silent and demoralizing, came and stayed around. No family of either parent were to be seen. Muriel's of course were all in England, and evidently staying there; Peter had two brothers living, but these days he hardly knew as much as where.
Grimly, with an air of putting down any nonsense about celebration, an attendant removed the two of them and escorted them inside - at the last moment Peter spotted Rhiannon coming in at the churchyard gate and waved, but was not sure if she saw. The small delay provoked the man into an impatient jerk of the head, a bit of a risk in view of the glossy pudding-basin wig he wore on it. His general bearing suggested that he thought he had come to a funeral. If he did he was not deviating all that far from the spirit of a good slice of the congregation, who stared pessimistically at the groom's parents as they passed, on full alert for hiccup or tell-tale stumble. They reached the front pew without offence, though, shuffling in beside Charlie and Sophie.
As far as he could remember, Peter had never been in here before. Enough sun came through the unstained parts of the stained glass to make the place look bright and very clean, like new, in fact. The light- coloured woodwork seemed familiar, personal to him in some way, and presently he realized that it reminded him of the kind of furniture, said to have been Scandinavian in inspiration, that had been fashionable when he and Muriel got married.
Having reached him by a side route, thoughts of that time and what had followed it, up to and including today, proved impossible to drive off. They were not so much thoughts as a confusion of memories and feelings. The memories were powerful but misty and spread over, with Angharad and Rhiannon in them as well as Muriel and a mass of all-but-forgotten faces and places he could not have named. Of his feelings the two foremost ones were remorse and self-pity. Well as he knew them both, he had never learnt how to deal with them, and he stood and sat in his place now vainly trying to see past them to his son's marriage ceremony, which he had been looking forward to a dozen times a day since first hearing it was to come about, and which he had determined to take in and value minute by minute. Instead, what was happening in front of him took the short cut and went straight into the past to blend in with everything else. As usual in these last years.
He went through most of the service in a state similar in important respects to boredom. At the same time, screened off as he was from the centre of the picture he still managed to catch on to details at the edges. So he heard the congregation singing - no choir, naturally, because somebody was on holiday or had just thought of something better to do and found it puny, thickened by men singing the air, some of them an octave low half the time, the whole performance to be defended only as far as it showed any English present how wrong they would have been to expect anything out of the ordinary from singing Welshmen in the flesh as opposed to on television. Or
