different sort of man in Brendan’s own position might have said the same thing. But Brendan was eighteen months away from St. John Andrew Townley-Young’s decision as to which of the solicitors would handle his affairs and his fortune when the current senior partner retired from the fi rm, and the perquisites that went with that decision were of the sort that Brendan could not turn from lightly: an introduction to society, the promise of other clients from Townley-Young’s class, and stellar advancement in his career.
The opportunities promised by TownleyYoung’s patronage had prompted Brendan to involve himself with the man’s twenty-eightyear-old daughter in the first place. He’d been with the firm just short of a year. He was eager to make his place in the world. Thus, when through the senior partner, St. John Andrew Townley-Young had extended an invitation to Brendan to escort Miss Townley-Young to the horse and pony sales of the Cowper Day Fair, it had seemed too much a stroke of good fortune for Brendan to demur.
At the time, the idea hadn’t been repellent. While it was true that even under the best of conditions — after a good night’s sleep and an hour and a half with her make-up and her hair curlers and her very best clothes — Rebecca still tended to resemble Queen Victoria in her declining years, Brendan had felt he could tolerate one or two mutual encounters with good grace and the guise of camaraderie. He counted heavily on his ability to dissemble, knowing that every decent lawyer had at least several drops of dissimulation in his blood. What he did not count on was Rebecca’s ability to decide, dominate, and direct the course of their relationship from its very inception. The second time he was with her, she took him to bed and rode him like the master of the hunt with a fox in sight. The third time he was with her, she rubbed him, fondled him, skewered herself on him and came up pregnant.
He wanted to blame her. But he couldn’t avoid the fact that as she panted and bobbed and bounced against him with her odd skinny breasts hanging down in his face, he had closed his eyes and smiled and called her Godwhat-a-woman-you-are-Becky and all the time thought of his future career.
So they would indeed be married today. Not even the failure of the Reverend Mr. Sage to appear at the church was going to stop the tide of Brendan Power’s future from fl ooding
right in.
“How late is he?” he asked Hogarth.
His brother glanced at his watch. “It’s gone half an hour now.”
“No one’s left the church?”
Hogarth shook his head. “But there’s a whisper and a titter that
“Stow it, Hogie,” Tyrone said. “And put out the fag. This is a church, for God’s sake.”
Brendan walked to the vestry’s single window, a lancet set deeply into the wall. Its panes were as dusty as was the room itself, and he cleared a small patch to look out at the day. What he saw was the graveyard, its cluster of stones like malformed slate thumbprints against the snow, and in the distance, the looming slopes of Cotes Fell that rose cone-shaped against a grey sky.
“It’s snowing again.” Absently, he counted how many graves were topped by seasonal sprays of holly, their red berries glistening against the spiked, green leaves. Seven of them that he could see. The greenery would have been brought this morning by wedding guests, for even now the wreaths and sprays were only lightly sprinkled with snow. He said, “The vicar must have gone out earlier this morning. That’s what’s happened. And he’s caught somewhere.”
Tyrone joined him at the window. Behind them, Hogarth ground his cigarette into the floor. Brendan shivered. Despite the fact that the church’s heating system was busily grinding away, the vestry was still unbearably cold. He put his hand to the wall. It felt icy and damp.
“How are Mum and Dad doing?” he asked.
“Oh, Mum’s a bit nervous but as far as I can tell, she still thinks it’s a match made in heaven. Her first child to get married and glory-to-God he’s hopping into the arms of the landed gentry, if only the vicar’ll show his face. But Dad’s watching the door like he’s had enough.”
“He hasn’t been this far from Liverpool in years,” Tyrone noted. “He’s just feeling nervous.”
“No. He’s feeling who he is.” Brendan turned from the window and looked at his brothers. They were mirrors of him and he knew it. Sloped shoulders, beaked noses, and everything else about them undecided. Hair that was neither brown nor blond. Eyes that were neither blue nor green. Jaws that were neither strong nor weak. They were all of them perfectly cast for potential serial killers, with faces that faded into a crowd. And that’s how the Townley-Youngs reacted when they’d met the whole family, as if they’d come face to face with their worst expectations and their most dreaded dreams. It was no wonder to Brendan that his father was watching the door and counting the moments till he could escape. His sisters were probably feeling the same. He even felt some envy for them. An hour or two and it would be over. For him, it was a lifetime proposition.
Cecily Townley-Young had accepted the role of her cousin’s chief bridesmaid because her father had instructed her to do so. She hadn’t wanted to be part of the wedding. She hadn’t even wanted to come to the wedding. She and Rebecca had never shared anything other than their relative positions as the daughters of sons on a scrawny family tree, and as far as Cecily was concerned, things could have pretty much stayed that way.
She didn’t like Rebecca. First, she had nothing in common with her. Rebecca’s idea of an afternoon of bliss was to crawl round four or five pony sales, talking about withers and lifting rubbery equine lips to have a sharp look at those ghastly yellow teeth. She carried apples and carrots like loose change in her pockets, and she examined hooves, scrotums, and eyeballs with the sort of interest most women give to clothes. Second, Cecily was tired of Rebecca. Twenty-two years of enduring birthdays, Easter, Christmas, and New Year’s on her uncle’s estate — all in the name of a spurious family unity that absolutely no one felt — had ground to gravel whatever affection she might have harboured for an older cousin. A few exposures to Rebecca’s incomprehensible extremes of behaviour had kept Cecily at a safe distance from her whenever they occupied the same house for more than a quarter of an hour. And third, she found her intolerably stupid. Rebecca had never boiled an egg, written a cheque, or made a bed. Her answer for every little problem in life was, “Daddy’ll see to it,” just the sort of lazy, parental dependence that Cecily loathed.
Even today Daddy was seeing to it in fi nest form. They’d done their part, obediently waiting for the vicar in the ice-floored, snow-speckled north porch of the church, stomping their feet, with their lips turning blue, while the guests rustled and murmured inside among the holly and the ivy, wondering why the candles weren’t being lit and why the wedding march hadn’t begun. They’d waited for an entire quarter of an hour, the snow making its own lazy bridal veils in the air, before Daddy had stormed across the street and pounded furiously on the vicarage door. He’d returned, his usual ruddy skin gone white with rage, in less than two minutes.
“He’s not even home,” St. John Andrew Townley-Young had snapped. “That mindless cow”—this was his manner of identifying the vicar’s housekeeper, Cecily decided—“said he’d already gone out when she arrived this morning, if you can believe it. That incompetent, foul little…” His hands formed fi sts in their dove-coloured gloves. His top hat trembled. “Get inside the church. All of you. Get out of this weather. I’ll handle the situation.”
“But Brendan’s here, isn’t he?” Rebecca had asked anxiously. “Daddy, Brendan’s not missing as well!”
“We should be so lucky,” her father replied. “The whole family’s here. Like rats who won’t leave a sinking ship.”
“St. John,” his wife murmured.
“Get inside!”
“But people will see me,” Rebecca wailed. “They’ll see the bride.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Rebecca.” Townley-Young disappeared into the church for another, utterly freezing two minutes, and came back with the announcement, “You can wait in the bell tower,” before he set off again to locate the vicar.
So at the base of the bell tower they were waiting still, hidden from the wedding guests by a gate of walnut balusters that was covered by a dusty, foul-smelling red velvet curtain whose nap was so worn that they could see the lights from the church chandeliers shining through. They could hear the rising ripple of concern as it fl owed through the crowd. They could hear the restless shuffling of feet. Hymnals opened and shut. The organist played. Beneath their feet in the crypt of the church, the heating system groaned like a mother giving birth.
At the thought, Cecily gazed speculatively at her cousin. She’d never believed Rebecca would find any man
