The Wedding Group Read Online Free PDF Page B

ill with anger, with waiting to tell him what she thought of him. She was obsessed by the thought of the scene she had been denied, and for weeks would pace about the house, or stand rigid, with closed eyes and moving lips. Several letters came, with business-like instructions about money. But he himself never came again. It was all over.
    Since then, having taken up the old ways with Aunt Sylvie, he had not been happy. He had really been nothing and was glad of it – becoming a little more eccentric every year, a little more at peace, growing old fast. He had retired from business life but had by no means retired from work. Aunt Sylvie was difficult. She treated servants as she had treated them when shewas young, so was usually without any; and both she and Archie had high standards to live by.
    The house was on the outskirts of a town which had become a suburb of London, and traffic droned past it on the main road, and planes shrieked overhead. It stood in a ferny, dusty garden, full of old iris roots and broken terracotta path edgings.
Fernlea
it was called. The name was in curly gilt letters on the fanlight. Inside was a great darkness of mahogany. The sound of clocks ticking was softened by thick carpets and velvet hangings.
    On this evening of David’s visit, Archie had been in the kitchen, cleaning silver, and he led his son back along the passage, and sat down again at the table and went on with his job, wearing an apron over his velvet smoking-jacket. It was his evening for the finger-bowls and candelabra.
    David sat down near by and watched him, knowing that it was no use offering to help, thinking that he would have sold the lot if it were his – the dreadful drudgery of it, and all so ugly.
    ‘How is Aunt Sylvie?’ he asked.
    ‘Frail, very frail. Every day there seems to be less of her. One morning, I’ll look in, and she’ll have gone – nothing left.’
    ‘Can’t you get a nurse?’
    ‘What on earth for? A nurse would be quite unnecessary. And, anyhow, she wouldn’t hear of it. She gets about up there. She can take a bath. I fetch a chair and sit outside the bathroom door and chat to her, and she chats back, and then I know that she’s all right.’
    ‘It’s not much of a life for you.’
    ‘There’s one’s duty. One must do as much of it as one can. Apart from that, I’m fond of her. She brought me up from six years old. One has been cared for when one was helpless oneself, and now it is time for one to repay the debt.’
    David thought of having to repay such a debt himself and was appalled. In the natural order of things, it would have beenhis mother’s task to look after the poor old chap, when the time came. As this would not be, it seemed to him that he himself was in a bad position.
    ‘Have you heard from Geoffrey or Edward?’ he asked, thinking that it was just his brothers’ luck to live so far away.
    ‘I had a nice long letter from Edward. They took a trip to Melbourne. And very hot it was. A hundred and something.’
    But David had heard of that letter before. It was way back – Christmas-time.
    ‘And nothing from Geoffrey?’
    ‘Nothing from Geoffrey,’ his father said unwillingly. ‘Not for some little time… let me see… oh, quite a little while it must be.’
    Months and months, no doubt, David thought indignantly.
    ‘How is your mother?’ Archie asked, in a tone of great politeness.
    ‘She is very lonely,’ David said, staring accusingly at his father’s busy hands.
    Archie sighed, as if there were nothing to be done about Midge’s loneliness. He looked resigned. ‘She seems to have been in another life,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I don’t often think about her. Sometimes dream of her. It was all a sorry business. Aunt Sylvie was right. Don’t you ever marry a woman so much younger than yourself. You’ll only live to rue the day if you do.’
    ‘I don’t know any young girls nowadays – only ageing spinsters.’
    ‘Well, take my word for it. She