1. INVITATIONTO A WEDDING
THE INVITATION, THOUGH EMBOSSED on the stiffest 100 percent rag-content paper Gribbley’s, Stationers to Her Majesty, could produce, nonetheless had more than a whiff of the prepackaged Marks & Sparks sales offering about it. Ruthven could not remember ever having seen a missive so entirely festooned with angels, or, given his background, decorated with anything more festive than black engraving on woven cream.
Yet here, naked seraphim and cherubim peeked coyly from the pink lining of the envelope, and from every corner of the thick pink card itself, grinning lasciviously as they held aloft a lavender banner announcing what appeared to be an upcoming event, perhaps the end of the world. Their sly expressions duplicated that which normally appeared on Ruthven’s own somewhat round features, which tended to hold a smirk, even in repose. He first scanned the card, then studied it more closely, then groaned aloud.
“The old fool’s gone and done it. He’s really gone and done it.” He threw the invitation across the breakfast table in the general direction of his wife. It missed (for it was a very large table), ricocheted off the silver toast rack, and skidded off onto the highly polished wooden floor.
“Done what, dear?” Lillian, her gaze held by a large display advertisement for precious gemstones, and herself inured, by long years of marriage, to her husband’s tantrums, ignored the card, which now lay face downward on the floor.
“He’s actually marrying one of his little tarts, that’s what.”
Lowering the paper, she peered at him over the headlines relating the latest brawl in Parliament. Lillian, skimming the front page on her way to the advertisements, had noted it seemed to have something to do with child care. If they couldn’t take care of the little brats, why did they keep having them, she wondered? The accompanying photo showed the Prime Minister emerging with a preoccupied scowl from 10 Downing Street, in conscious imitation of Churchill during the darkest days of the war.
She also had taken a glance in passing at the obituaries. She found it interesting that the unimportant people always seemed to die in alphabetical order. She was about to comment on this observable fact when the full import of Ruthven’s words took hold.
“Marrying?” Her voice caught on the last syllable. “Which one? Not the one with the enormous-”
“Probably.” Even with his wife, or especially with his wife, Ruthven could not bring himself to use the vulgarities that were the bedrock of his vocabulary in all-male company.
“-dachshund?” she finished faintly. “Has he lost his mind, do you think?” Her tone, although devoid of pity, suggested she thought it was a real possibility. On the last phrase, her voice rose on an ending squeak of hysteria.
“Far from it. Cunning and diabolical as ever, I’d say.”
She roughly folded the paper into a heap on the table, the sale on emeralds forgotten. Lowering her voice conspiratorially, remembering Alice in the kitchen, she stage-whispered.
“What is he going to do, do you think? To you, I mean?”
Ruthven was not so blind to his wife’s many faults as not to know what she really meant was, To Me.
“I haven’t a clue,” said Ruthven. “It could be his way of trying to cut me out of my inheritance entirely. But surely even he-”
“Try not to upset yourself, dear. Remember your heart…”
“Yes, yes.”
Another thought struck her as she bent to retrieve the gaudy missive from the floor. She straightened.
“Your poor mother.” This time the pity might have been sincere, a woman on the cusp of middle age viewing the fate of one many years past its vicissitudes. She looked at her balding, stout husband, so like his father (who looked more like a greengrocer than a famous author), and so unlike his mother, who was going to seed in a rather determined, yet fatalistic, way.
A fear seized Lillian, not for the first time in the twenty-odd years of her marriage. Although she had long ago rejected her religious upbringing as being inconveniently at odds with her avaricious nature, a prayer went through her mind:
“Yes, I had better ring her. Preferably before it gets too late in the day. You know how she-”
“Yes, I know. Good God, this is a disaster. Quite apart from it making the family the laughingstock of the world. A disaster. Ruthven, we must do something.”
Meaning: Ruthven, you must do something. He sighed, stalling while he stacked the rest of the now-forgotten mail and put it to one side. One would have said his face held the expression of a man preparing to make a clean conscience of it, except that Ruthven had no conscience.
“My dear.” He cleared his throat. “My dear, I think it’s time we had a little chat.”
There remain rental flats in the greater London area that, were estate agents given to truth in advertising, would be fairly listed as dark, grotty, unwholesome bedsits with living space too small in which to swing a cat. Maida Vale, although having enjoyed huge victories in the ever-escalating real estate price war that had driven the average population farther and farther afield in search of shelter, still at the time of this story retained unsavory pockets that the most visionary of entrepreneurs had rejected as not holding the remotest potential for renovation. These sagging Victorians, too run down after decades of neglect to be resurrected to desirable states of tweeness, had been divided up by landlords in the middle part of the twentieth century into mean little flats designed to extract the maximum rent from the minimum square footage.
It was in such a flat that Sarah Beauclerk-Fisk received her issue of the invitation to her father’s wedding. Despite the hyphenated name, and despite the fact that the rent was far less than she could have afforded, Sarah had settled into her gloomy surroundings the way an animal will burrow into the smallest available space when it wants to hide from the world in general, and people in particular.
Everything in the place reflected darkly back on Sarah’s personality: The carelessly chosen second-hand furniture included two overstuffed chairs covered in faded roses that clashed with faded wallpaper that might once have been green but was now an indecipherable muddish gray. While bookshelves lining the walls might have offset the gloom with brightly covered novels, instead the dozens of worn books on the shelves blended into the mud like rocks, their covers, mostly black or gray, announcing obscure religious tracts of long-dead martyrs and other assorted lunatics.
It was in one of the overstuffed chairs that an overstuffed Sarah, herself upholstered in brown, had subsided to contemplate the pink leers of the cherubs on the unwelcome invitation she clutched now in her pudgy hands. To her eye, there was something faintly sacrilegious about the ostensibly religious figures, apart from their evident delight in their flagrant nakedness. She wondered if her father or-that woman-had picked out the cards. Her father, Sarah recognized, could be a vulgarian at times but this particular choice was-she searched for the word- common. Common. Just, she imagined, like (she scanned the card again; what was the woman’s name?)-Violet Mildenhall. So difficult keeping the names of her father’s girlfriends straight. Violet. An old-fashioned, pretty name-
The telephone rang. That had to be Albert, if he’d received a card as well. And why wouldn’t he? It wasn’t like her father to play favorites; no, he treated all his children abominably. With an effort she hoisted herself to her feet; the telephone was in the kitchen, where Sarah spent most of her time.
“Sarah?”
“You’ve got one as well, then.”
“Yes. Oh, God, yes. It’s appalling, just appalling. He kept threatening to do it but I didn’t believe him. You know how he just likes to create a fuss. I thought he was just playing with us, hoping for a fight. Bloody old tyrant.”
“Well, letting him know we’re unhappy about it will only feed his happiness,” she said mechanically. At least he sounds sober, she thought, absentmindedly stirring the simmering pot on the cooker. Her love of food had after many years paid unexpected bonuses in the form of a book of baking recipes just out from her father’s publishers, Gregson’s. The book was called
