The wedding is enchanted. It is at Babylonstoeren – Tower of Babylon – a wine farm out of town. Nellie and I had lunch there and she said wouldn’t it be the perfect place for a wedding. For whom? I asked. For anybody, she said, smiling. Her smile is like the sun rising over the sea.
I think that one of the purposes of a wedding is to endorse the deeper human values that we rarely talk about. And yet there is always something mysterious, and a little unsettling, about weddings – unspoken doubt among the reams of overstatement: all those failed promises and all those disappointments to come.
Tim the vicar decided to bicycle out here; to him thirty miles is a walk in the park, as he put it. For him the cycling is undoubtedly the main event.
We have booked cottages for all the guests; as they walk from their front doors they merge to form the procession heading in the direction of the parterre at the back of the main house. This parterre is to act as an outdoor cathedral. Tim the vicar is relaxed about our divorces. God, in his opinion, loves us all equally. Nellie and I follow behind Tim who has changed out of his cycling shorts and is wearing a cassock. The parterre is a kind of Garden of Eden, a bee-loud glade. We were assailed by the scent of rosemary and roses and thyme and allium. Guinea fowl screech, bees hum, ring-necked turtle doves burble. It’s a low-level symphony.
Nellie is on Bertil’s arm; she wears a cream dress, and carries a posy of little bell-shaped lily of the valley, peonies, white and pink roses, lavender and cornflowers. I am wearing an ivory suit, with a yellow rose in the buttonhole. I am escorted by Alec. Lucinda has a shorter version of Nellie’s dress, and carries a smaller posy. She and Isaac walk together, each with a yellow rose as a buttonhole. Isaac is dressed in long velvet shorts in a kind of burgundy colour and a floppy antique white shirt, which Lucinda found in a market in Cape Town. In his long shorts, Isaac is dignified, regal, a young Haile Selassie. He appears to know that this is an important occasion and he also appears to understand what is required of him. He carries a present for Nellie, which he can’t wait to open. This present has acquired a sort of symbolic importance, although no one has said what it is. Lindiwe carries a posy too; she wears a dress that she and Nellie chose. Alec is my best man; I have some worries about his medical condition. He is wearing his panama with the band of colours of the Garrick Club around the crown. He says he is fine but I think that another stroke is possible. He has the ring firmly under his control, although he is a little unsteady on his pins, as he puts it. The bridesmaids, including Lindiwe, follow behind us.
For the service, Nellie has chosen a sort of bower under a huge indigenous tree. We have opted for the 1662 version of the Book of Common Prayer:
Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this Congregation, to join together this man and this woman in holy Matrimony; which is an honourable estate, instituted of God in the time of man’s innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church; which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence …
The words are enduring and powerful. They are too grand for the marriage we have in mind. I wonder just what ‘man’s innocency’ might have been. And I also think of Emma Woodhouse writing of the selfsame wedding service ‘the part in which N takes M for her wedded husband, for better for worse’. Nobody now takes the ‘for worse’ option too seriously.
When we are safely married – rings exchanged, vows made, red roses handed over, kisses and hugs, prompted by Tim the vicar, complete – Lucinda reads her sonnet. She is standing under the dense tree, which is inhabited by small, busy green birds. I think they may be white-eyes. These birds provide a light and cheerful accompaniment, a squeaking encouragement to Lucinda’s reading:
‘… love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! It is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken …’
Lucinda’s assured recitation and the words she is speaking are profoundly moving for all of us and for many different reasons. Nellie looks at me from beneath her little jaunty hat of blue silk. I kiss her.
‘I proclaim you husband and wife.’
Our friends clap and whistle.
We move to a courtyard where the lunch is spread out on long tables under a vine. Geese fly, screaming their anxiety above the round hill, which stands inexplicably all on its own – as if in a previous age it was a tumulus.
My best man stands up to speak; he says that not just the women of the New Forest but women all across England are going to be upset when they hear I have married. Then he asks the guests to explain, if they can, how I managed to bewitch such a beautiful and serene woman. There are cries of ‘Hear, hear!’ and more whistling, led by Lucinda; her two-fingers-in-the-mouth whistle is piercing; she mastered it at a very young age.
Both Nellie and I speak. She says that I am a wonderful man, kind, generous and surprisingly knowledgeable. She says that she is astonishingly happy to be married to me. ‘Frank has changed my life for ever,’ she says finally. She kisses me and presses herself to me for a few long moments. Her body is conveying its own complicit message to me.
‘Let her go, you beast,’ Alec shouts.
He may even mean it. There’s a kind of desperation about him, so different from how he was in his pomp when he had the arrogance and the almost visible self-esteem of an emperor of finance.
It’s my turn:
‘To our friends and family gathered, I want just to say how wonderful it is to see you here, in this beautiful place. My life, too, has changed out of all recognition since I first met Nellie. She has brought joy into our lives, and I have been incredibly happy and lucky. To marry her is to have squared the circle. Please drink to Nellie and the life to come.’
We toast Nellie and the life to come.
‘But I also want to say a word or two about Bertil, this upstanding young surfer and apprentice heart-breaker, who has been astonishingly tolerant and charming. Bertil, I want to thank you; I know that I am not your father and that I am not going to replace him in any way, but I just want to tell you, so that there is no misunderstanding, that the closer I come to you, the happier I will be. To Bertil.’
Now Bertil stands up.
‘I want to say that I am like totally happy that my mom and Frank have gotten married. My mom is so happy and that has made me happy. She deserves happiness, believe me. And Frank, I want to thank you for everything. Frank, this place is like totally awesome, bru.’
I give him a knuckle bump to cement our burgeoning relationship.
‘A moment, please,’ I say. ‘I have one more thank-you. Lucinda, I want to tell you that having you here with us has been an utter blessing. I have always loved you, as you know, and these few weeks together have reminded me, if I needed reminding, just how much I love you. Immoderately is the answer. We also adore little Isaac, but that is a story for another time. To my beloved daughter, Lucinda, thank you for reciting so beautifully, and being so innately beautiful yourself. And thank you to Nellie, my wife.’
Nellie hugs me, and Lucinda joins in, sobbing, and Isaac comes to lend succour, his hair more like a nimbus than ever.
The afternoon slows. There is a heavy calm all around. The calls of the turtle doves in the oaks have become subdued. Some of the party take to their cottages to swim or to sleep. The swimming pool is deliberately styled on the traditional round cement farm dams that I remember so clearly: here a deck is raised up all around the dam, with loungers and piles of pristine white towels and tables of wine and juice. A woman, with a little kappie on her head and swathed in a deep green apron, comes around carrying a tray of brightly coloured fruit lollies, home-made. Guinea fowl are taking a dust bath. A tortoise staggers along a path, driven by some prehistoric and half-understood urge.
Nellie, Bertil, Isaac and I walk the length of the astonishing parterre, through walls of espaliered pears and across lawns of thyme and camomile and under trellises of many fruits and vines heavy with red and white grapes. Water is being directed through channels towards the various parts of the garden, each one a small fiefdom. I see, as if it was yesterday, the tongues of water setting off to feed the dry soil of Welgelegen. I can’t fully understand why it affects me so deeply; without warning, the water in the channels has produced a Proustian moment: I see my childhood and my patchy history and my Tannie Marie and my beautiful mother.
We walk on towards the small hill, the ziggurat that gave the place its name – Tower of Babylon.
‘Frank, are you all right?’ Nellie says.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘You are looking a bit, I don’t know, worried for a moment. Preoccupied.’
‘I was thinking of my childhood when I was left with my aunt, Tannie Marie, on the farm miles from home. We have come a long way. My aunt used to read to me from Pinocchio by candlelight; I am sure I told you all this. It’s never left me. It all came back to me, how baffled I was, and how I didn’t understand the reasons why I was dumped there and I remembered my father telling me my mother had died. You probably think I am crazy, but these channels of water running into the garden remind me as if I were there. Nellie, darling, I love you. Never leave me.’
‘I love you, Frank. Med hela mitt hjärta. With all my heart. I will never leave you, darling. Thank you for what you said about Bertil. It was so powerful.’
‘In a nice way?’
‘Yes, it was perfect and so generous. And what you said about Lucinda was wonderful too. You made her cry.’
‘We Boers have a tender side. We cry easily.’
‘Yes, I have noticed.’
Little Isaac and Bertil are crossing a stream and heading towards the hill. Neither of us broaches the question of Isaac’s future. Anyway it will depend on Lucinda.
We set off up the Tower of Babylon from the relative cool of the garden to the baking sun of the climb. The way up is strewn with smooth brown rocks, which contain iron. Two stones knocked together give off a metallic sound. From the top of the hill we see endless vineyards, the old Cape Dutch house and outbuildings and in the distance rows of mountains, baking in the sun, gently out of focus behind a blue haze.
Before dinner we have music to dance to. It is langarm, which means long arm. Under lanterns in the trees, five local musicians play the accordion, a banjo, a trumpet, a saxophone and drums. We all dance; we have been seized by madness under the rising moon. I have the first dance with Nellie, each of us at arm’s length, the traditional langarm. Then I dance with Lucinda. Vanessa and Bertil dance. Vanessa’s parents dance. It’s strangely liberating and carefree and reminds me of my roots. My school friend, Neil, and his Eleanor know all the moves. Neil manoeuvres Eleanor vigorously, as though he is drawing water from a rural hand pump. Nellie says it’s like country dancing in Sweden.
Finally, exhausted, we swim and get ready for dinner. Lamps have been lit to mark the way to the cottages and to the main house. We are in a febrile state. There is too much emotion in the air, too much expectation, too much energy, too many hopes. The moon has now risen directly above the strange, symmetrical, lonely hill. This southern moon is the colour of aged Cheddar and so close that I can see its valleys and mountains.
I feel that we have been born again, that we have shed our too-tight old skins, like puff adders.