At two-fifteen next day, people were coming into St Margaret’s, Westminster, kneeling dutifully on their hassocks, sitting up, looking round to see someone they recognised or to spot a well-known face. It was something like an occasion in the theatre. In fact, someone in front of Humphrey, who was sitting in the inconspicuous dark of the back row, said in a firm knowledgeable voice, ‘I must say, I don’t think this is much of a house.’
The church was about half-full, nothing like so well attended, Humphrey thought, as it would once have been for a fashionable wedding. It was Saturday, and maybe Tom Thirkill’s tactics had been successful; it was also, after a lull the day before, raining steadily again outside. Not many men that Humphrey could see had put on morning dress, though there were a number of women in smart frocks. Celia Hawthorne, whom Humphrey hadn’t cast eyes on since the Thirkill dinner, was there, alone, clothes a model of how to achieve simplicity.
Nearly all of those who visited Lady Ashbrook had come, and Frank Briers, at Humphrey’s side, was noticing them. It was because Briers and Humphrey had met outside the church that they were sitting in obscurity. Briers had said that he didn’t want to be too obviously in attendance. He didn’t resist adding: ‘After all, I’m not one of the family, am I?’
The bridegroom and best man, in dress uniform, walked up the aisle. Loseby’s hair shone, fair, what was called golden, though not accurately, burnished, under the central chandeliers. Male beauty usually passed Humphrey by, but this man seemed to have it. He looked rather like a saccharine nineteenth-century picture of Sir Galahad, or of one of the Frankish knights who fought at Roncesvalles.
As Susan and her party arrived a punctilious ten minutes late, the organ was playing the chorale, ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’. That sounded like a nice piece of irony, Humphrey thought, but it couldn’t have been. Tom Thirkill, stately, too much of an actor not to be dressed for the part, walking with an actor’s command of his body, watched his daughter as a public figure should watch his daughter at her wedding. She was veiled, face so far as it could be observed solemn, demure and pretty, dress all in immaculate white, virginal white.
Briers muttered something out of the side of his mouth, Humphrey didn’t catch it; it might have been ‘What a nerve’ or ‘What a girl’. Four tiny children were carrying her train. Either her will had turned out stronger than her father’s, or else he had accepted that there was nothing for it, to hell with the enemy, they might as well do it in style.
Humphrey settled down to enjoy the service. Like other unbelievers of his period, he had a fondness for the liturgy in which he had been brought up.
However, the marriage service was not one of his favourites. Cranmer was a great master of sixteenth-century English. On the other hand, he was not a great master of suspense. In Briers’ company, or in Humphrey’s own mind, there was enough suspense around; but still, as the reverberating words rolled on, in this marriage service the deed was done much too soon. Within ten minutes, Loseby, in a tone emollient, subdued but audible, was saying his I Will, and Susan, in a tone meek and almost inaudible, hers. Then the vicar pronounced them man and wife. That was it. The rest was anticlimax. Not too long, for fashionable weddings were not drawn out. Nevertheless, another half-hour, spirited short address, English not so lingering as Cranmer’s, hymns, prayers, Vidor’s Toccata: all over, all out.
Outside the church, the rain descended, not stormily, not in torrents, but with persistence. The ushers, who all seemed to be officers from Loseby’s regiment, some present at White’s the night before, rushed about with enormous part-coloured umbrellas, getting guests into a fleet of cars, ready to take them to Thirkill’s reception in Eaton Square.
Humphrey and Briers retreated into the porch out of the way.
‘They didn’t ask me to the reception,’ said Briers, with his policeman’s grin. ‘I’ve got a girl keeping her eyes open there. If there’s anything to pick up.’
Briers was being confidential. He said: ‘Look here, I don’t think you and I ought to be seen too much together. One or two may clam up when they talk to you, and we don’t want that. So I shan’t come to your house so much. Are you free tomorrow night?’
Humphrey said yes.
‘Come and have supper at home. Out in the sticks. My car and driver will pick you up.’
With staccato abruptness, Briers walked off through the rain up Victoria Street in the direction of New Scotland Yard.
In the drawing-room at Eaton Square, guests jostling around when Humphrey arrived, waiters carrying trays with glasses of champagne, he had an impression which excluded all the rest. This was the sight of Susan. She had changed from her wedding dress, but Humphrey couldn’t see anything but her face. It was transformed. It had become more than pretty, as though lit up from inside, seraphic. At first sight he responded to sheer joy. Then he was wondering. He had seen girls after their wedding night – innocent girls maybe, and certainly lucky ones, who had been transformed something like this. But Susan hadn’t had her wedding night, and it wouldn’t have come as a revelation if she had. How long was it since she had first been taken by the Adamic surprise? Why did one say Adamic, as though only men were totally astonished by their first knowledge of sex? Was it assumed that Adam was more innocent than Eve, before either knew anything?
Here Susan was, joyous and triumphant. It was startling. Humphrey didn’t understand and soon knew that he didn’t like it. Perhaps this was what Kate’s ear had detected over the telephone. This wasn’t the girl he had once thought easy to understand. He would have been more at ease if he hadn’t come to the reception, seeing people whom he had heard talked about with suspicion and of whom he would hear again next day. Less easy-mannered than usual, he said no to champagne. He didn’t like it, but at any other time he would have drunk out of politeness. He felt, as he had scarcely felt since he was a boy, like an intruder, an outsider, or even more like someone with agoraphobia.
Humphrey moved among the crowd. There was no chance of talking to Kate, who was with a group of young officers, such as she might have met in her girlhood. He did encounter Loseby in the throng, who said, open-faced, as though appealing for reassurance which he didn’t need: ‘All going according to protocol, isn’t it, Humphrey?’
Just afterwards, Celia touched Humphrey’s sleeve. No trouble showed in her expression; she looked beautiful and tranquil. She asked: ‘Have you heard anything of Alec Luria recently?’
Humphrey said no, he assumed Luria was back at New Haven. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Oh, nothing. He called me a week or two ago. I was just curious.’
Humphrey allowed himself a surreptitious twitch of the mouth. Alec was prospecting for another wife. Celia was responding to his flicker of amusement.
‘Paul used to say that with Alec one had to forget the verbiage. Underneath he was one of the wiser men.’
‘Paul is a good judge,’ Humphrey said. On his own, he imagined what Celia and Alec Luria would be like together.
It was Tom Thirkill who dominated the reception. He was preyed on by many kinds of anxiety: not only Humphrey but others there must have known. His political future was on the quiver. Police enquiries, even tentative ones, were not calculated to help. Prime ministers had their own channels of information, with which Humphrey was much more familiar than anyone in that drawing-room. Nevertheless, Thirkill, driven in private by worries, private phantoms, hopes, dreads less articulated than those, in public could behave like a film star coming down the aircraft steps, greeted by admiring faces, radiating his own energy and goodwill. Some temperaments one could enter into just a little, one had an element of them oneself, Humphrey thought again, but he couldn’t enter into this.
The best man proposed the health of bride and husband, making a limp little speech. Loseby made another little speech, not so limp but for once self-conscious, not fluent on his feet. Thirkill made a speaker’s speech, easy, sometimes funny, not afraid to be sentimental.
‘I’m losing a daughter, of course. If Lancelot Loseby is what I believe him to be, of course I am. And I wouldn’t have it otherwise. But it is a loss to lose an only daughter. Any marriage is a loss to someone. Never mind. It is a marvellous loss. And they will make up for it for the rest of my life by their own happiness.’
Kate was touched. Humphrey, who didn’t like wedding cake any more than champagne, patiently ate a scrap of almond paste. Then he could, unnoticed, get out of the crowd, down on to the pavement, on his way home. The rain didn’t clear his head. He was nothing but confused.