In the big Bury kitchen Cook lowered her newspaper to stare hard at the gardener over the top of her reading specs. ‘Come in if ye’r comin’ an’ set yer dratted greens down, Zacky Cheal, or push off. One or t’other, ’cos there’s some of us as wants t’ear ’bout Master Ned, even if ye don’t.’ She waited while he placed his box of spinach on the table and stood back respectfully with cap in hand to listen to the reading.
‘Right, start again then, shall I?’ Bridget and the new ’tween-maid both nodded eagerly and Cook cleared her throat.
‘At the Church of the ’Oly Trin’ty, Sloane Street, Lunnon, on Tuesday thirteenth inst., the weddin’ took place of Mr Edwin Charles Ashby, B.Sc., only son of Mr Walter Ashby of The Bury, Sell’ton, Sussex, to Miss Meriel Alexandra Llewellen, younger daughter of Mr Robert Llewellen of Colombia, South America. The bride wus charmin’ly dressed in a robe of ivory Liberty satin with a corsige of ol’ lace, the skirt bein’ looped up with orange blossoms, an’ wore a wreath of myrtle an’ orange blossom an’ a Brussels net veil. She wus met at the door of the church by the clergy an’ surpliced choir singin’ the ’im ‘Come Gracious Spirit ’Eavenly Dove’. In the absence of ’er farver, ’oo wus detained abroad, the bride wus given away by ’er brother, Mr Gareth Llewellen.
Mister an’ Missus Edwin Ashby left the reception in a Victoria kerridge soon after five o’clock for the Langham ’Otel. The bride travelled in an ’Arris linen coat an’ skirt of a becomin’ shade of saxe blue. The ’oneymoon is to be spent bicyclin’ in Kent. Weddin’ presents comprised a gold bracelet an’ case of silver brushes from the bridegroom to the bride, a gold signet ring an’ carbuncle scarf pin from the bride to the bridegroom, a canteen of silver from Mrs Margaret Ashby, cheques from Mr Ashby an’ Mr Llewellen, an’ a variety of very ’andsome an’ useful articles from relatives an’ friends of all ranks – includin’ an ’andsome salad bowl an’ servers from the Ashby staff in Sussex, an’ a gentleman’s freewheel bicycle from Miss Beatrice Sims, a friend of both families…’
‘There then!’ said Cook, removing her spectacles with a flourish and beaming all around her kitchen.
‘There’s nothing in all this world like an English spring,’ Ned thought joyously. The past six months had made an explorer of him in more ways than one. But now he was back with the cuckoo calling and all the springtime flags flying, pacing and racing his energetic young wife through the green lanes of Kent. Cycling honeymoons were all the rage just now and with good reason, for there was surely no nicer place to be alone in than in the English countryside. You could cheerfully bump along for miles without meeting anything beyond a chicken or two or a white tilted baker’s van. Outside the towns, he and Meriel had seen no more than half a dozen motors in as many days – most of them stationary, and one with its metal innards out all over the grass verge. The railways had finished country roads for traffic it was said. ‘And a good thing too,’ thought Ned.
Against the normal convention of advance booking and railway freighting for baggage, he and Meriel had chosen to travel light. They cycled where they pleased and when it pleased them; each with a small suitcase strapped to the back-stay pillion of their bike and a mackintosh cape in the basket at the front. Some days they rode for miles and miles, on others, when they found a village or an inn that took their fancy, no distances at all. When it rained, they scrambled for their capes and dashed for shelter in a barn or a church – and didn’t care especially if they got wet; for afterwards there’d very likely be a rainbow, with everything beneath it brighter, greener and more perfect than before. And through it all, through every hour of every day, Ned studied his new wife with a secret sense of disbelief.
HAVE PASSED STOP MAY I COME OUT TO VISIT AND MAYBE BRING YOU HOME STOP ECA
CONGRATS AND YES YES TO BOTH YOU OWL, ML
Even when he held her reply in his hand, even when she hauled him from his horse on the river bank at Anaime, he hadn’t quite believed it. She still seemed to him too impossibly wild and glamorous ever to be his! But now that she was, undoubtedly, Ned felt as he’d felt catching his first butterfly in the net his father had given him for his eighth birthday. At first he thought he’d lost the creature and looked up to see it flying free. But then looked down again to find it held within the meshes of his wonderful new net – a tiny, perfect Chalkhill Blue. It felt as if he’d caught himself a fragment of the wild blue sky!
For some reason he’d never got around to telling Meriel where his ticket to Colombia had come from, or what finally precipitated his proposal. The time had never seemed quite right for that confession, and here in Kent springtime and on honeymoon seemed even less so.
In Sussex there were so many sleepy little places, like Sellington, that could barely recall the great days of agricultural prosperity in Sussex. But here in Kent there was a comfortable, established feeling about villages whose people could expect to find employment in the orchards, coppices and hopfields that surrounded them. Their houses crested the hilltops shoulder to shoulder, white-faced with neat, ridge-bone boarding and honeysuckle round the doors. Sheep grazed between the trees under white quilts of cherry blossom, and hop bines twisted clockwise in the gardens up a network of taut strings.
‘Its… gosh, it’s wonderful!’ Ned couldn’t find the words say how wonderful he thought it. ‘It’s wonderful, it’s glorious!’ he shouted as they whistled down the hill from Brenchley. ‘We couldn’t possibly have picked a better time of year!’
She laughed at him for his hopeless Englishness, then called for him to listen to a cuckoo. ‘And turn a penny in your pocket Ned while it’s still doing it, to be a rich man all your life!’
‘I am, I’m rich already,’ he called back – thinking not of money but of where he planned to stay the night; thinking of another oak-beamed ceiling, more clean white sheets, and of another bed to creak and groan and bear them on its back into a world where all the landmarks were of sight, of touch, of wonderful, of glorious sensation!
Ned’s front wheel wobbled dangerously, refused to answer to the helm.
‘We’ll try the Star and Eagle at Goudhurst, shall we for tonight? The fellow at the White Lion thought it pretty good.’
It’s never easy to make your voice sound casual when you have to shout, and Ned failed at it completely. After all the time they’d spent together in Colombia, on boats and trains and in hotels, he knew that it was stupid of him to feel constrained with Meriel in any way. He hadn’t when the cuckoo called. He didn’t when they touched; when he could burrow in her neck and taste the salt on her smooth skin. But caught unawares, in daylight on a bicycle, with ‘I WANT YOU!’ written in bright pink letters across his trouser flies, he felt suddenly and horribly exposed.
‘Stop!’ She’d braked so sharply, that Meriel’s straw boater jerked forward on its elastic to tilt over one eye at a crazy angle.
‘What is it, darling – what’s the matter? Has the chain come off your bike?’
‘Come here, you,’ she commanded, straightening the hat – and when he did, reached up to take his face between her hands. ‘Listen, you great noggin. You know I already love you more than any woman in her senses, or out of them for that matter, has ever loved a man. You are my world. I can’t make sense of life without you…’
‘Oh Meri.’
‘Don’t interrupt, this is important.’ Her brown eyes, inches from his own, seemed huge. ‘Look Ned, if you were to ask me to lie down for you, right here in this roadway. Or in the ditch, or in that orchard over there – well I would, that’s all! Do you hear me? Is that plain enough? I’d do it willingly and wouldn’t care if the whole universe was looking on! Because we’re made for one another, you and I. Anyone with eyes can see it; and I just won’t have you looking at me like someone else’s maiden aunt!’ She stood back a little then and smiled. ‘Now then?’
He felt the end of her handlebar press hard against him as he kissed her, and that wasn’t all. ‘Over there then in the orchard?’
The gate was padlocked; and while he lifted her bike over to stow it with his own behind the hedge, Meriel unpinned her hair and shook it down. Then she reached up to pull him down as well amongst the dandelions and cuckoo-flowers; and in a little while he saw the gleam of her white skin and felt the earth beneath his knees.
The first time they made love, in a stuffy bedroom of the Langham Hotel in London, they’d almost fought with each other in the violence of their need to possess and be possessed; and Meriel had cried out, as much in surprise at the nature of her victory as from pain. Later, in the old coaching inns of the Weald and the Romney Marshes – in Maidstone, Canterbury and elsewhere – they’d learned to give and take much more and with more patience. Each time they came together it was different, altered in some way, as they were altered passing through the flame. And this first time for them in sunlight and fresh air, Ned had been less aware of the separate needs of their two bodies than the common life-force that they shared. As Meriel stirred and sighed beneath him, he felt a sense of perfect fitness – no longer sure of where he stopped, where she and the orchard started. He smelt the scent of blossom and of Meriel’s warm hair. He felt the pulse of earth, of air, of blood – his, hers, he couldn’t tell – a sound outside, inside his body rising steadily to deafen, deafen, DEAFEN, DEAFEN him!!
Then gradually divide into the separate sounds of heavy breathing, thudding heartbeats and the songs of individual birds.
In Goudhurst that night at the Star and Eagle, they slept quietly in each other’s arms while the locals in the bar-parlour below nudged one another, trotted out old honeymooning stories and listened vainly for the sound of creaking boards. Mrs Noakes, the publican’s wife, had told them roundly that they ought to be ashamed, so they ought; although at a little after seven in the morning, when she came through to open up the parlour for her visitors’ breakfast, she’d been unable to ignore a sound like a busy garden swing above her head, or the drift of fine dust that was shaking down between the crossbeams on the ceiling.
‘Geemeny; at it ’ell fer leather already,’ she exclaimed, but not without some satisfaction. ‘An’ ’im lookin’ as if butter wouldn’t melt, bless ’is ’eart.’
For a moment she stood at the open window smiling, while she remembered her own honeymoon in Hastings, when her Bert had yelped so loud one morning that a group of fishermen had called up from the street to ask if he’d been took ill; the great chouse!
When they came down eventually for breakfast, looking like a pair of spring lambs kitted out in their smart new knickerbocker suits, Mrs Noakes took great delight in stoking them with triple helpings of bacon and eggs – and with tea so dark and strong that you could trot a mouse on it, or so she said. Each time she left the room she heard them whispering and laughing. Each time she brought them new supplies of tea or toast or questions on the likelihood of rain, she saw them spring apart like guilty children..
‘Did you know that Sussex is only about an hour away from here, dear heart?’ The young man’s brave attempt at casual conversation.
‘You don’t say? Is it really, Noggin?’
‘Indeed it is, old thing.’
‘But we’re not due back until Sunday, are we darling one?’
‘Well I thought perhaps that if we asked her nicely, Mrs Noakes might put us up a picnic lunch to eat at Bodiam while we take a squint at Lord Anscombe’s old castle; it’s really very fine. Then we could spend the night at the George in Battle and see the Abbey, if you’d like to – and then wire Gran to expect us home for lunch on Saturday? How would that suit you, Meri-ellie-issima, my dear?’
‘Pshh-shsssh! Oh Ned, you idiot! Look what you’ve made me do!’ (He’d caught her with a mouthful of tea, which when she laughed, exploded over Mrs Noakes’s apron.) ‘Oh crikey, I’m so sorry Mrs Noakes,’ she apologised. ‘But it wasn’t really my fault, was it – it was his, the pig!’
‘’Oneymooners!’ the landlady remarked while she made the best part of a coburg loaf into fat sandwiches in her scullery behind the bar. ‘Think they invented it, eh Bert?’
And so they did, and their memory of the orchard confirmed it, reverberating through the air between them to the whirring music of their free-wheel bikes. They crossed the Rother river by a stone hump-back bridge, and pushed their trusty steeds up through the buttercups to the romantic old ruins.
‘Oh yes! That’s what I call a castle,’ Meriel exclaimed as she caught sight of the wide moat and the battlemented towers that it reflected; leaving Ned to juggle with both bicycles while she ran on ahead for a better view.
They were to return to Bodiam, these two, a number of times in the years that followed. But whenever he imagined the old castle, Ned saw it always as he saw it now, with buttercups and grazing cattle and a radiant Meriel unpacking sandwiches at the edge of its broad moat.
‘If I lived in there, Sir Nednog, you’d have to swim across to win my favours, and climb the ivy to my window at the top of that tall tower.’
‘Or you could do the swim, and sweep me off into the nearest orchard.’
‘Vile beast!’ She buzzed a piece of bread and hit him just where she intended. ‘They’d spot us from the battlements, bound to. Then my noble father would have you drawn and quartered and nail the best bits above the gate for all the ladies to gloat over!’
She chattered happily about the castle over lunch – and while he told her what he knew of its history, Ned lay in the grass beside her, watching her squander her sandwiches on a family of downy moorchicks and wondering how he’d feel tomorrow, taking her home at last? Through all of the excitements of Colombia and shipboard, of Kingston and New York, that thought had been his most constant beacon; the thought of bringing Meriel back to The Bury, to take possession of her in the house where he was born!
‘Can’t wait to get her back there, can you?’ her father had observed on one of the few occasions she’d dared to leave them on their own together at the hacienda. ‘You think that it will all drop into place the moment she commits herself to that cosy English inheritance of yours. Well, don’t you? You think my Meriel will be content to bear your children and run around behind your grandmother collecting tips on domesticity.’
‘Not necessarily. What I expect is to love her and to be loved back, that’s all, and let the rest come in its own good time.’
‘Ah love! We’re back to love, are we? But how very curious, Ned – I may call you that, now we’re to be related? Forgive me if I have this wrong, but as I recollect, the last time we discussed that interesting and variable emotion, you were professing an undying affection for an entirely different lady.’
Meriel’s father had no faith in love, perhaps because he’d never known it. Ned’s Grannie, who perhaps knew less about him than she imagined, thought Meriel was wrong for him. But at Bodiam that afternoon, a day away from home, her grandson had no doubts about their future life.
‘Do you know what I think when I look at that castle, Meri?’
‘Me without my chastity belt?’
He smiled, sucking at the pink stalk of a sorrel. ‘I think of life and civilisation stretching in both directions, with us in the middle – so that I can sit here with you by this moat and look back five hundred years to the feudal knight who built those walls and towers, to the lady who brought him this land as her patrimony and the child who inherited it. Then I can look into your eyes like this and look forward five hundred years to our descendants, caring about each other and about the timelessness of places like this, just as I do. Love, reproduction, continuity, that’s what this place is about – and The Bury, and you and me and all the rest of it. Do you see? It’s the only kind of permanence there is.’
But she saw only the eyes that looked down into hers; soft as butter, unfocused, distant dreamy blue. In one way they made her want to shock him, shake him back into reality – but in another to protect him, to stand between Ned and all the ugliness and violence that the world was capable of throwing at him – to support him in his lovely dream of life, however impractical it might turn out to be. ‘God, but he’s beautiful,’ she thought. ‘I love him more than anything, and he’s all mine!’
To lie like this and look into her husband’s handsome face; to wait like this for him to come back from his ramblings, and kiss her, damn it! – was all (once she’d explored the castle, obviously) that Meriel could ask of life.