Felix seldom travelled in the car, preferring to walk, even in winter weather, with his hands in his pockets and his coat swinging open. But he was delighted with Uncle Ambrose, and studied him enthusiastically, this large swarth moist man, with his queasy smile and his tight suits and his aura of talcum powder and pain. On mornings when Mr Kasperl was late, Felix would come down and lean in the window of the car and hector him gaily, with roguish winks and jabs. Uncle Ambrose responded with a befuddled, panic-stricken grin, nodding and mumbling. Felix looked at me wide-eyed, in mock wonder.
— So many relatives you have! he said. Why, they’re everywhere.
Aunt Philomena did not know whether to be jealous of Uncle Ambrose now, or proud of him. Ambrose, at Ashburn! Who would have thought it? Emboldened, she intensified her assaults on Mr Kasperl’s stony solitude, but in vain, he sat alone with his thoughts by the window in the hotel dining room as he had always done, taking no notice of anyone. She turned to Felix then, lying in wait for him in secluded spots about the hotel, sitting up very straight with her neck stretched out and her lips pursed, a cup of coffee at her elbow, a cigarette with an inch of ash on it clipped tightly between two tensed, tremulous fingers. Felix listened to her attentively, with a bland, dreamy smile.
— Oh, Ambrose! she would say, with a dismissive sniff. The things I could tell you about poor Ambrose …
And she would gabble on, in rising tones of vehement sincerity, while a puckered skin formed on her coffee, and the ashtray on the low table before her sprouted a thicket of incarnadined butts, the least damaged of which Felix would save, and store away pensively in his tobacco tin.
The photographic studio, a winter afternoon, the gas fire hissing. I liked it here, the clutter, the quiet, the chemical smell, the grainy light that seemed, at this dead end of the year, to drift down from the ceiling, a strange, dense element, like pale smoke. Another world lay all around me here, a jumble of images. How sharp they were, how clear, these pictures from the land of the dead. I examined them minutely, one by one, as if searching for someone I knew, a known face, with blurred grin and unfamiliar quiff, looking up from that picnic table, in summer, in sunlight, among trees. I would not have been surprised, I think, if that face had been my own, so real did that world seem, and so fleeting, somehow, this one. Sophie, sitting by the fire, turned her gaze towards the door with an expectant smile. I had not heard a sound. Felix came in.
— Hello, Hansel, he said. Why, and Gretel too!
He looked from one of us to the other, grinning. He was carrying a white gown draped voluminously over his arm.
— See what I found, he said.
It was a wedding dress, elaborately embroidered, the heavy silk frayed and rusted with age. Sophie with a joyful yelp rose and took it from him, and held it against herself and laughed, turning this way and that. Felix put a hand to his heart and cried:
— Ah, thou still unravished bride of quietness!
He produced a crumpled white veil and placed it on her head with a flourish. She laughed again, her tongue rolling on her lower lip, and ran from the room. We heard her racing up the stairs and through the bedrooms, searching for a mirror. Felix chuckled, and crossed to the gas fire and rubbed his hands before the flame, his eyes lifted to the window. A fistful of rain swept against the glass with a muffled clatter. Rooks were squabbling outside in the darkening trees. He hummed the Wedding March, and grinned at me over his shoulder and softly sang:
Here comes the bride,
Contemplating a ride …
He chuckled again, and wandered idly about the room, picking up things and tossing them aside. He glanced at me slyly and said:
— What are you thinking about, bird-boy?
— Nothing.
I was thinking that I would always be a little afraid of him.
— Nothing, eh? he said. Well that’s a lie, I know. You’re thinking dirty things, aren’t you?
He made a monkey face and crouched and capered, howling softly. I had to laugh. Sophie came back then, dragging behind her the trunk of fancy-dress costumes from the cupboard under the stairs. She had pulled on the wedding dress over her own skirt, and wore a battered top hat that Felix had found in the attic. The dress was too small for her, and hung askew, hitched on one hip, her wrists and ankles sticking out. She delved in the trunk and brought out a dusty tailcoat and a pair of striped grey trousers, and offered them to me. But Felix had other plans. He made a rapid sign to her, and she laughed, and pulled off the dress and gave it to him. He turned to me.
— Come on, sweetie, he said, you be the bride.
I backed away, but he followed me, laughing, and flung the dress like a net over my head. I shivered at the chill slither of silk. From the pleats and secret folds there rose a smell of camphor and of wax, and something else that was unnameable, a faint, stale, womanly stink. The bodice pinched my armpits, the skirts hung heavy against my knees. Sophie laughed and clapped her hands.
— Salve! Felix cried. Salve, vagina coeli!
He fixed the veil on my head, and Sophie produced a lipstick and painted my mouth, frowning in concentration and biting the tip of her tongue. She rummaged in the trunk again and brought out a dainty pair of white shoes with high heels. She knelt before me and took off my shoes, and smiled up at me, cradling my moist heel in her hand.
— Tarra! Felix trilled. The slipper fits!
I ventured forward unsteadily in the spindly shoes, my calves atremble. I felt hot and giddy. A spasm of excitement rose in me that was part pleasure and part disgust. It was as if inside this gown there was not myself but someone else, some other flesh, pliable, yielding, utterly at my mercy. Each trembling step I took was like the fitful writhing of a captive whom I held pressed tightly to my pitiless heart. I caught my reflection in a cracked bit of mirror on the wall, and for a second someone else looked out at me, dazed and crazily grinning, from behind my own face.
— Radiant, Felix said, clasping his hands to his breast. Just radiant. Why, Miss Havisham herself was never half so fetching.
Sophie put on the clawhammer coat and tipped the top hat at a jaunty angle, linking her arm in mine. Felix bowed before us, blessing the air and mumbling.
— In the name of the wanker, the sod and the holy shoat, I pronounce you bubble and squeak. Alleluia. What dog hath joined together, let no man throw a bucket of water over.
He bowed again solemnly and closed his eyes, moving his lips in silent invocation, then turned his back to us and raised his arms aloft and intoned: