She didn’t know, she couldn’t be expected to understand. Mrs Ashburton would have known at once what was in my mind.
‘He says he loves me,’ I said.
‘That isn’t the same.’
‘Mrs Ashburton –’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake forget her!’
I shook my head. ‘It’ll be all right, Miss Pritchard.’ He wasn’t like his parents, I tried to explain to her; he was thoughtful and much quieter than either his father or his mother. In all sorts of ways he had been kind to me; he considered me beautiful even though I was not; there was a goodness about him.
‘You’re doing something wrong,’ Miss Pritchard said.
I shook my head again and smiled at her. Already I had persuaded Ralphie to have the drawing-room of Challacombe Manor redecorated as it had been in Mrs Ashburton’s time, with the same striped red wallpaper, and brass lamps on the walls, connected now to the electricity he’d had put in. A lot of the furniture from the drawing- room was still there, stored in the cellars, locked in after Mrs Ashburton’s death so that it wouldn’t be stolen. It was the kind of thing that had happened in the war, a temporary measure until everyone had time to think again. No one knew who’d put it there, and some of it had suffered so much from damp that it had to be abandoned. But there were four upright armchairs, delicately inlaid, which needed only to be re-upholstered. I had them done as I remembered them, in crimson and pink stripes that matched the walls. There were the two small round mahogany tables I’d admired, and the pictures of local landscapes in heavy gilt frames, and the brass fire-irons, and Mrs Ashburton’s writing-desk and the writing-desk that had been her husband’s. The pale patterned carpet came from Persia, she had told me. A corner of it had been nibbled by rats, but Ralphie said we could put a piece of furniture over the damage.
He told me he’d loved me the moment he’d seen me in our farmyard. He had closed his eyes in that moment; he had thought he was going to faint. There was no girl in England who was loved as much as I was, he said shyly, and I wondered if it would sound any different if Roger Laze had said it, or the counter-hand in Blow’s. When I’d handed him the biscuits, I said, I’d felt the same; because there didn’t seem any harm in saying that, in telling a minor lie in order to be kind. His parents didn’t like what was happening, and my mother and stepfather didn’t either. But none of that mattered because Ralphie and I were both grown-up, because Ralphie was getting on for forty and had a right to make a choice. And I intended to be good to him, to cook nice food for him and listen to his worries.
The wedding reception took place in the Hogarth Arms, although the Gregarys suggested the Bower House Hotel, twelve miles away, because there was more room there. They wanted to pay for everything, but my mother wouldn’t agree to that. I suppose, in a way, it was all a bit awkward. You could feel the Gregarys thinking that my stepfather worked in a shop, that it was ridiculous of Ralphie to imagine he could take a girl from a farmyard and put her into Challacombe Manor.
Miss Pritchard came to the service and to the Hogarth Arms afterwards. Betty and Belle Frye were my matrons of honour and someone I’d never seen before was best man. I asked all sorts of people, the Fryes of course and Mrs Laze and Roger, and other people I’d been at school with, and Mrs Latham from Burrow Farm. I asked people from the shops in the town, and the people from the Hare and Hounds at Bennett’s Cross, and the man from the artificial insemination centre, and Joe and Maudie, and Arthur, The Gregarys asked lots of people also, people like themselves.
I kept wanting to close my eyes as I stood in the lounge of the Hogarth Arms. I wanted to float away on the bubbles of the champagne I’d drunk. I couldn’t understand why Miss Pritchard didn’t see that everything was all right, that strictly speaking everything was perfect: I was there in my wedding-dress, married to Ralphie, who wasn’t unkind; Challacombe Manor was as it used to be in its heyday, it was as Mrs Ashburton had known it as a bride also. Going to live there and watching over it seemed to make up for everything, for all the bad things that had happened, my father’s death, and Dick’s, and the arm that Mr Frye had had blown off, and Roger Laze’s foot. The Fryes had sold their land to Ralphie because farming hadn’t been easy since the losing of the arm. They’d be tenants in their farmhouse now for the rest of their lives, with a couple of acres they rented back from Ralphie: the arrangement suited them because there was no son to leave the farm to and they could enter old age in comfort. With the passing of time our own farm would revert to being the home-farm again, when it became too much for my mother. I couldn’t help feeling that Ralphie knew it was what I wanted, and in his thoughtful kindliness had quietly brought it all about.
‘Bless you, child,’ my stepfather said.
I smiled at him because it was the thing to do on my wedding-day, but when he drew away his narrow face from mine after he’d kissed me I could see in it a reflection of what Miss Pritchard had said: he believed I shouldn’t have married a man I didn’t love, not even Ralphie, who was good and kind. It was in my mother’s face too when she kissed me, and in my sister’s and Belle Frye’s, but not in the Gregarys’ because none of them knew me.
‘I’m happy,’ I kept saying, smiling.
We went away to a hotel and then we came back to Challacombe. I’d almost imagined there’d be servants waiting, but of course there weren’t. Instead there were the people called Stritch, a man and his wife. I’d always known the Stritches. I remembered Belle Frye and myself singing as we went by their cottage, raising our voices in a song about a bad-tempered woman because that was what Mrs Stritch was. I didn’t like finding them there when we came back from our honeymoon.
There were small, silly misunderstandings between Ralphie and myself. They didn’t matter because Ralphie’s goodness lapped over them, and when I think about them I can’t even remember very clearly what some of them were. All I can remember was that Ralphie always listened to me: I think he believed he needed to be gentle with me because I was still almost a child. I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t married someone before. I asked him, but he only smiled and shook his head. I had the feeling that in his mind there was the house, and the estate, and me; that I was part of the whole; that he had fallen in love with everything. All that, of course, should have been a bond between us, because the house and the estate formed the island of common ground where both of us were happy. Our marriage had Challacombe at its heart, and I was only alarmed when Ralphie spoke about our children because I didn’t see that there was a need for them. Children, it seemed to me, would be all wrong. They would distort the pattern I could so precisely sense. They felt particularly alien.
Ralphie was patient with me. ‘Yes, I understand,’ he had said on the evening of our marriage, standing in front of me in the bedroom of the hotel he’d brought me to. The walls of the room were papered with a pinkish paper; Ralphie was wearing a flannel suit. In the hotel restaurant, called the Elizabethan Room, we had had dinner and wine. I’d had a coupe Jacques and Ralphie some kind of apricot souffle. ‘Yes,’ he said again in the pinkish bedroom, and I talked to him for ages, making him sit beside me on one of the two beds in the room, holding his hand and stroking it. ‘Yes, I understand,’ he said, and I really think he did; I really think he understood that there was no question of children at Challacombe. He kept saying he loved me; he would never not love me, he said.
On the evening when we returned from our honeymoon I brought up the subject of the Stritches straight away. I explained it all to Ralphie when we were having supper, but he replied that he’d told me ages ago the Stritches were going to be at Challacombe. The arrangement apparently was that Mrs Stritch would come to the
