‘They don’t have banks,’ she said, and he was surprised. What kind of people were they? ‘It’s only a little garage,’ she apologised.
He was pleased. He thought the peasant soil might be some kind of equivalent to the proletarian earth that afforded his early nourishment. He flew off to LA over the Pole, first class, and did not even try to date the young woman who sat next to him, who wore sneakers and had a little silver snuff box full of vitamin pills and said she was in hospitals. ‘Administration?’ he asked.
‘I own them,’ she said, and what with East turning West beneath them, and the sun rising where it had only just set, and rather too much champagne, he felt the world was upside-down and longed for Linda’s stolid charm, and her little feet in high strap heels, rather than those serviceable if sexy sneakers. Stolid? He was rather shocked by that particular choice of word. It was not how one usually described the Virgin Mary. Stolid.
In love with the Virgin Mary. But he was. He became almost nauseous when confronted with the ravishing Mary Magdalenas of Malibu Beach: human animals doing their copulatory dance under the Studio Ring Master’s whip: the fantasies of an exhausted film industry, taken such definite flesh. He had no trouble resisting them.
It was not, he saw now, that he had ever been promiscuous. Just that no woman until now had ever succeeded in properly captivating him. ‘Christ!’ said Alec on the telephone, across half the world. But he’d put his commission up to fifteen per cent and since the spring, and the advent of Linda, Brian had been doing well enough and fulfilling his early promise, as money maker if not saviour of society.
Brian came home on December 14. The wedding was on December 15. Linda was already in Devon. The wedding was all organised, she told him when he rang from Heathrow. All that was required was Brian’s appearance, wearing a suit, and with the ring, early the next morning. She’d even arranged the cars, which should have been the groom’s task. The wedding reception was to be in the Women’s Institute Hall, and they were to spend the night with Linda’s parents, the Joneses, in the caravan in the garden. If it was raining, or snowing, they could squeeze into her bedroom.
Women’s Institute? Caravan? In December? After Studio City, Malibu and Sunset Boulevard, it sounded strange. But Brian Smith marrying Linda Jones sounded profoundly, agreeably right.
He was relieved, too, if only by virtue of shortage of time, of the burden of providing friends and family to witness the wedding. He wanted a new life. He did not want the past clouding any issues. In East Devon, down in the South West, he would be born again.
Honest rural folk.
Linda’s father met him at the station. The train was late. Mr Jones paced up and down in an ill-fitting navy suit, and boots with buckled uppers. No more ill-fitting, Brian told himself, than my father’s at prize day at the grammar school. The pale grey suits of the executives of Studio City, their smooth after-shaved jowls, their figures jogged into shape, made an unfair comparison. Linda’s father was narrow like a ferret, sharp-eyed like a fox, untidy as an unpruned hedge in autumn, and had thick red hands with bleak oil beneath the nails. One eye wandered, when he spoke.
‘Best hurry,’ said Mr Jones, ‘Linda’s waiting,’ and they climbed into an old C-registration Mini, with the back seats taken out and piled with plastic fertiliser sacks and ropes, guarded by a snappy, noisy, ugly little dog. Barking prevented them from talking.
The garage had a single petrol pump, and was marked No Petrol, and was outside the last house in an undistinguished row of pre-war houses set back from the main road. Brian was rushed upstairs to change, the dog snapping at his heels, into a tiny room with four different flowered papers on the wall, and two beds and three wardrobes and six trays of sausage rolls on boards placed across the beds. He caught a glimpse of Linda as he fled from the dog; she was in brilliant Terylene white. He thought she blew him a kiss.
What am I doing, he thought, trying to find a place between the plastic beads and greeting cards and Mr Men stickers and the Christmas holly and bells which decked the mirror, so he could fix his tie. He was bronzed by the Californian sun; his face was narrow and handsome and clever. What am I doing? What desperation has landed me here? No, this is jet-lag speaking. I love Linda. Write it in plastic Christmas foam on what remains of the mirror. I love Linda. What has Linda’s family to do with her, any more than mine to do with me? Roots. Aye, there’s the rub. Red Devon soil hardened by winter. What good was that to him? He was used to soot. He was ready. A Rolls-Royce stood outside. Well, he was paying.
Into the first car he stepped, and Linda’s father came with him. Best man. Linda’s father had trodden in the mess left by the dog in the hall. Linda’s father’s shoe smelt. ‘Overexcited,’ said Linda’s mother. She was stout and dressed in green satin but otherwise might have been anyone. Linda’s cross-eyed brother kicked the dog out of the house. Linda’s wall-eyed brother hoovered up the mess, which was largely liquid.
‘Don’t do that!’ cried Linda’s mother. Linda smiled serenely beneath her white white veil. She was a virgin.
‘My wedding day is the happiest day of my life,’ she said, though whether to Brian as he passed, or as a statement of policy to God above, or simply to quell the riot he did not know. Mr Jones nipped upstairs to clean his shoe.
The village church was big and handsome and very cold. A hundred people or so were gathered on the Bride’s side of the church. The acoustics were bad, and there were many small children in the congregation. Brian stood dazed, facing the cross and banks of paper flowers. The Vicar was elderly and dressed in a white gown. Brian heard sound and movement and presently Linda stood beside him, and he felt better, and to the sound of children crying and protesting he and she were married, in God’s sight.
Outside the church, later, there were many photographs taken. He thought he had never seen so many ugly and misshapen people gathered together in one place. He could not be sure whether this was so, and a phenomenon peculiar to this part of Devon, or whether it was just the sudden contrast to the people of Southern California.
Various people young and old, men and women, came up to congratulate him, and in the course of brief conversations let it be known that Linda was not a virgin, had had at least two relationships with married men, one abortion, one miscarriage and had married him for his money. Linda did not seem to be popular. He thought perhaps he was dreaming.
At the reception at the W I Hall, where sherry was served, and also the sausage rolls he had seen on the bed, the Vicar remarked on the cross- and wall-eyes of the Jones boys, and accounted for it by village in-breeding. It’s a genetic weakness, he said. Genetics, he added, bitterly, was a three-syllable word, and words so long were not often heard in these parts.
Jet lag became more pressing. He had to sleep. He remembered making a speech. Linda put on her going-away clothes and the Rolls took them back to the garage. The dog lay vomiting on the path.
‘Now we can,’ said Linda, ‘quick! Before anyone comes home,’ and she pulled him upstairs to the room with the many wallpapers and he removed her clothes except her veil and made love to her. That was what marriage was all about. He thought she probably wasn’t a virgin, but just pretending. He wondered where his silver cuff links were and couldn’t see them. Then he fell asleep. When he woke she was unpacking wedding presents, and singing happily. ‘This is the happiest day of my life! Oh, how I love you!’ said Linda, and gave him a kiss. ‘Look, a toaster, and a lovely casserole with yellow flowers. That’s from Auntie Ann.’
She had not noticed any lack of sexual enthusiasm in him. Was that innocence, or insensitivity, or cunning? His cuff links were decidedly gone. ‘You must have left them in London,’ said Linda. ‘They’ll turn up.’
They