It was easy for Deborah to love him, and everything he told her, self-deprecatingly couched, was clearly the truth. But Deborah in love naturally didn’t wonder how this side of Edwin would seem in marriage, nor how it might develop as Edwin moved into middle age. She couldn’t think of anything nicer than having him there every day, and in no way did she feel let down on their honeymoon in Greece or by the couple of false starts they made with flats before they eventually ended up in 23 The Zodiac. Edwin went to his office every day and Deborah went to hers. That he told her more about share prices than she told him about the letters she typed for Mr Harridance was because share prices were more important. It was true that she would often have quite liked to pass on details of this or that, for instance of the correspondence with Flitts, Hay and Co. concerning nearly eighteen thousand defective chair castors. The correspondence was interesting because it had continued for two years and had become vituperative. But when she mentioned it Edwin just agreeably nodded. There was also the business about Miss Royal’s scratches, which everyone in the office had been conjecturing about: how on earth had a woman like Miss Royal acquired four long scratches on her face and neck between five-thirty one Monday evening and nine- thirty the following morning? ‘Oh yes?’ Edwin had said, and gone on to talk about the Mercantile Investment Trust.
Deborah did not recognize these telltale signs. She did not remember that when first she and Edwin exchanged information about one another’s childhoods Edwin had sometimes just smiled, as if his mind had drifted away. It was only a slight disappointment that he didn’t wish to hear about Flitts, Hay and Co., and Miss Royal’s scratches: no one could possibly get into a state about things like that. Deborah saw little significance in the silly quarrel they’d had about the teddy-bears’ picnic, which was silly itself of course. She didn’t see that it had had to do with friends who were hers and not Edwin’s; nor did it occur to her that when they really began to think about the decoration of 23 The Zodiac it would be Edwin who would make the decisions. They shared things, Deborah would have said: after all, in spite of the quarrel they were going to go to the teddy-bears’ picnic. Edwin loved her and was kind and really rather marvellous. It was purely for her sake that he’d agreed to give up a whole weekend.
So on a warm Friday afternoon, as they drove from London in their Saab, Deborah was feeling happy. She listened while Edwin talked about a killing a man called Dupree had made by selling out his International Asphalt holding. ‘James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree,’ she said.
‘What on earth’s that?’
‘It’s by A.A. Milne, the man who wrote about Pooh Bear. Poor Pooh!’
Edwin didn’t say anything.
‘Jeremy’s is called Pooh.’
‘I see.’
In the back of the car, propped up in a corner, was the blue teddy-bear called Binky which Deborah had had since she was one.
The rhododendrons were in bloom in the Ainley-Foxletons’ garden, late that year because of the bad winter. So was the laburnum Edwin remembered, and the broom, and some yellow azaleas. ‘My dear, we’re so awfully glad,’ old Mrs Ainley-Foxleton said, kissing him because she imagined he must be one of the children in her past. Her husband, tottering about on the raised lawn which Edwin also remembered from his previous visit, had developed the shakes. ‘Darlings, Mrs Bright has ironed our tablecloth for us!’ Mrs Ainley-Foxleton announced with a flourish.
She imparted this fact because Mrs Bright, the Ainley-Foxletons’ charwoman, was emerging at that moment from the house, with the ironed tablecloth over one arm. She carried a tray on which there were glass jugs of orange squash and lemon squash, a jug of milk, mugs with Beatrix Potter characters on them, and two plates of sandwiches that weren’t much larger than postage stamps. She made her way down stone steps from the raised lawn, crossed a more extensive lawn and disappeared into a shrubbery. While everyone remained chatting to the Ainley-Foxletons – nobody helping to lay the picnic out because that had never been part of the proceedings – Mrs Bright reappeared from the shrubbery, returned to the house and then made a second journey, her tray laden this time with cake and biscuits.
Before lunch Edwin had sat for a long time with Deborah’s father in the summer-house, drinking. This was something Deborah’s father enjoyed on Sunday mornings, permitting himself a degree of dozy inebriation which only became noticeable when two bottles of claret were consumed at lunch. Today Edwin had followed his example, twice getting to his feet to refill their glasses and during the course of lunch managing to slip out to the summer house for a fairly heavy tot of whisky, which mixed nicely with the claret. He could think of no other condition in which to present himself – with a teddy-bear Deborah’s mother had pressed upon him – in the Ainley-Foxletons’ garden. ‘Rather you than me, old chap,’ Deborah’s father had said after lunch, subsiding into an armchair with a gurgle. At the last moment Edwin had quickly returned to the summer-house and had helped himself to a further intake of whisky, drinking from the cap of the Teacher’s bottle because the glasses had been collected up. He reckoned that when Mrs Ainley-Foxleton had kissed him he must have smelt like a distillery, and he was glad of that.
‘Well, here we are,’ Jeremy said in the glade where the picnic had first taken place in 1957. He sat at the head of the tablecloth, cross-legged on a tartan rug. He had glasses and was stout. Peter at the other end of the tablecloth didn’t seem to have grown much in the intervening years, but Angela had shot up like a hollyhock and in fact resembled one. Enid was dumpy, Pansy almost beautiful; Harriet had protruding teeth, Holly was bouncy. Jeremy’s wife and Peter’s wife, and Pansy’s husband – a man in Shell – all entered into the spirit of the occasion. So did Angela’s husband, who came from Czechoslovakia and must have found the proceedings peculiar, everyone sitting there with a teddy-bear that had a name. Angela put a record on Mrs Ainley-Foxleton’s old wind-up gramophone. ‘Oh, don’t go down to the woods today,’ a voice screeched, ‘without consulting me.’ Mr and Mrs Ainley-Foxleton were due to arrive at the scene later, as was the tradition. They came with chocolates apparently, and bunches of buttercups for the teddy-bears.
‘Thank you, Edwin,’ Deborah whispered while the music and the song continued. She wanted him to remember the quarrel they’d had about the picnic; she wanted him to know that she now truly forgave him, and appreciated that in the end he’d seen the fun of it all.
‘Listen, I have to go to the lav,’ Edwin said. ‘Excuse me for a minute.’ Nobody except Deborah seemed to notice when he ambled off because everyone was talking so, exchanging news.
The anger which had hung about Edwin after the quarrel had never evaporated. It was in anger that he had telephoned his mother, and further anger had smacked at him when she’d said she hoped he would have a lovely time. What she had meant was that she’d told him so: marry a pretty little thing and before you can blink you’re sitting down to tea with teddy-bears. You’re a fool to put up with rubbish like this was what Deborah’s father had meant when he’d said rather you than me.
Edwin did not lack brains and he had always been aware of it. It was his cleverness that was still offended by what he considered to be an embarrassment, a kind of gooey awfulness in an elderly couple’s garden. At school he had always hated anything to do with dressing up, he’d even felt awkward when he’d had to read poetry aloud. What Edwin admired was solidity: he liked Westminster and the City, he liked trains moving smoothly, suits and clean shirts. When he’d married Deborah he’d known-without having to be told by his mother – that she was not a clever person, but in Edwin’s view a clever wife was far from necessary. He had seen a future in which children
