The Wedding Party Read Online Free PDF Page B

hungry you were. And do be sensible.’
    â€˜I am very, very, sensible.’
    Below them lights ringed the lake in a series of irregularnecklaces. The air had cleared itself of cloud. On the summit of the sugar-cone mountain a light burned like a crimson-yellow star.
    â€˜I wish now we’d brought two bottles of wine,’ he said. ‘It’s so good.’
    Again she gave that high crow of laughter.
    â€˜There you go again. One bottle takes us to Venice,’ she said and once again she laughed, ‘and where do we go with two? Heavens, how right my governess was—’
    He was about to say that he liked to hear her laugh when suddenly, for some reason, it struck him that she was laughing too much and that the laughter, perhaps, wasn’t as joyful as it seemed.
    â€˜Oh! there are plenty of places – Good God!’ He suddenly leapt to his feet. ‘Look! – your steamer’s sailing. It’s going without you. Now what do you do?’
    â€˜Oh! yes, I know.’ She was quite unmoved. ‘It’s going home to bed. There will be cars to pick us up in the morning.’
    He sat down again, watching the lights of the steamer as she drifted down the lake and remembering at the same time that impossible, gargantuan feast of food.
    â€˜I suppose the day has been a little expensive for your father.’
    Immediately she became very quiet. It was too dark in the hut to see the expression on her face but suddenly he sensed some new and deeper disturbance in the air. It was fully a minute before she said simply:
    â€˜My father is dead.’
    For an awkward moment or two he could think of nothing to say. Below, the steamer seemed abruptly to be cut in half, partially concealed by some promontory of rock on the shore, and then disappeared altogether.
    â€˜Would you have gone to the party if your father had been here?’
    â€˜Oh! that would have been quite different.’ The tone of her words, not merely sad but aching, made him sense that his guess about the laughter had been right after all. ‘But then if my father had been here there wouldn’t have been any wedding.’
    He said quietly that he didn’t understand her. She laid the remaining half of her sandwich on the bench, clearly not wanting it, and simply sat with her glass in her hands.
    â€˜You saw Heinrich?’ Yes, he remembered Heinrich, of the coarse stentorian brotherhood. ‘One of the other men is his brother. Hermann. He is married to my elder sister.’
    He sipped slowly at his wine, merely listening, and then was abruptly shocked to hear her say in a low voice entirely without vehemence but infinitely more startling than if she had yelled the words:
    â€˜They killed my father, the two of them.’
    And then as if this statement were not brutal enough in itself she added, with the same devastating quietness:
    â€˜And yesterday I was all prepared to kill Heinrich.’
    Her laughter and all his gay thoughts of Venice seemed suddenly an ashen mockery. He was gripped by two sudden fears: first that she was unbalanced, then that she was the victim of some monstrous delusion that would trap her,before she was aware of it, into some irretrievable ghastly folly.
    â€˜You shouldn’t talk like that. I don’t believe it anyway.’
    â€˜I don’t care if you don’t believe it. It happens to be true.’
    In that moment he had half a mind to insist that she pulled herself together, stopped talking outrageous stupidities and went straight back to the party. But in his mind it all sounded like some fatuous piece of preaching and instead he put one arm round her, his hand on the cool bare rim of her upper shoulder.
    At once he felt the gentle tension in himself build up again. Suddenly he wanted to kiss her but he knew it was no moment to kiss her and she startled him again by the most bewildering of statements:
    â€˜My mother and my sister are weak. My father