The wedding reception took place in the Hogarth Arms, although the Gregarys suggested the Bower House Hotel, twelve miles away, because there was more room there. They wanted to pay for everything, but my mother wouldn’t agree to that. I suppose, in a way, it was all a bit awkward. You could feel the Gregarys thinking that my stepfather worked in a shop, that it was ridiculous of Ralphie to imagine he could take a girl from a farmyard and put her into Challacombe Manor.
Miss Pritchard came to the service and to the Hogarth Arms afterwards. Betty and Belle Frye were my matrons of honour and someone I’d never seen before was best man. I asked all sorts of people, the Fryes of course and Mrs Laze and Roger, and other people I’d been at school with, and Mrs Latham from Burrow Farm. I asked people from the shops in the town, and the people from the Hare and Hounds at Bennett’s Cross, and the man from the artificial insemination centre, and Joe and Maudie, and Arthur, The Gregarys asked lots of people also, people like themselves.
I kept wanting to close my eyes as I stood in the lounge of the Hogarth Arms. I wanted to float away on the bubbles of the champagne I’d drunk. I couldn’t understand why Miss Pritchard didn’t see that everything was all right, that strictly speaking everything was perfect: I was there in my wedding-dress, married to Ralphie, who wasn’t unkind; Challacombe Manor was as it used to be in its heyday, it was as Mrs Ashburton had known it as a bride also. Going to live there and watching over it seemed to make up for everything, for all the bad things that had happened, my father’s death, and Dick’s, and the arm that Mr Frye had had blown off, and Roger Laze’s foot. The Fryes had sold their land to Ralphie because farming hadn’t been easy since the losing of the arm. They’d be tenants in their farmhouse now for the rest of their lives, with a couple of acres they rented back from Ralphie: the arrangement suited them because there was no son to leave the farm to and they could enter old age in comfort. With the passing of time our own farm would revert to being the home-farm again, when it became too much for my mother. I couldn’t help feeling that Ralphie knew it was what I wanted, and in his thoughtful kindliness had quietly brought it all about.
‘Bless you, child,’ my stepfather said.
I smiled at him because it was the thing to do on my wedding-day, but when he drew away his narrow face from mine after he’d kissed me I could see in it a reflection of what Miss Pritchard had said: he believed I shouldn’t have married a man I didn’t love, not even Ralphie, who was good and kind. It was in my mother’s face too when she kissed me, and in my sister’s and Belle Frye’s, but not in the Gregarys’ because none of them knew me.
‘I’m happy,’ I kept saying, smiling.
We went away to a hotel and then we came back to Challacombe. I’d almost imagined there’d be servants waiting, but of course there weren’t. Instead there were the people called Stritch, a man and his wife. I’d always known the Stritches. I remembered Belle Frye and myself singing as we went by their cottage, raising our voices in a song about a bad-tempered woman because that was what Mrs Stritch was. I didn’t like finding them there when we came back from our honeymoon.
There were small, silly misunderstandings between Ralphie and myself. They didn’t matter because Ralphie’s goodness lapped over them, and when I think about them I can’t even remember very clearly what some of them were. All I can remember was that Ralphie always listened to me: I think he believed he needed to be gentle with me because I was still almost a child. I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t married someone before. I asked him, but he only smiled and shook his head. I had the feeling that in his mind there was the house, and the estate, and me; that I was part of the whole; that he had fallen in love with everything. All that, of course, should have been a bond between us, because the house and the estate formed the island of common ground where both of us were happy. Our marriage had Challacombe at its heart, and I was only alarmed when Ralphie spoke about our children because I didn’t see that there was a need for them. Children, it seemed to me, would be all wrong. They would distort the pattern I could so precisely sense. They felt particularly alien.
Ralphie was patient with me. ‘Yes, I understand,’ he had said on the evening of our marriage, standing in front of me in the bedroom of the hotel he’d brought me to. The walls of the room were papered with a pinkish paper; Ralphie was wearing a flannel suit. In the hotel restaurant, called the Elizabethan Room, we had had dinner and wine. I’d had a coupe Jacques and Ralphie some kind of apricot soufflé. ‘Yes,’ he said again in the pinkish bedroom, and I talked to him for ages, making him sit beside me on one of the two beds in the room, holding his hand and stroking it. ‘Yes, I understand,’ he said, and I really think he did; I really think he understood that there was no question of children at Challacombe. He kept saying he loved me; he would never not love me, he said.
On the evening when we returned from our honeymoon I brought up the subject of the Stritches straight away. I explained it all to Ralphie when we were having supper, but he replied that he’d told me ages ago the Stritches were going to be at Challacombe. The arrangement apparently was that Mrs Stritch would come to the house every day except Sunday, and her husband would work in the garden. Ralphie repeated most earnestly that he’d told me this before, that he’d quite often mentioned the Stritches, and had asked my opinion of them. I knew he was mistaken, but I didn’t want to say so. Ralphie had a lot on his mind, buying the Fryes’ land and negotiating to buy Mrs Laze’s, and wondering how to go about buying my mother’s. He didn’t know much about farming, but he was keenly endeavouring to learn. All of it took time: he couldn’t be blamed if he made little mistakes about what he’d said to me and what he hadn’t.
‘You see, it’s awkward, Ralphie,’ I explained again one night at supper, smiling at him. ‘Belle Frye and I said terrible things to her.’
‘Oh, Mrs Stritch’ll have forgotten’. Darling, it’s donkeys’ years ago.’
For some reason I didn’t like him using that endearment, especially when he put the word at the beginning of a sentence, as he often for some reason did. I don’t know why I objected so much to that. It was how it sounded, I think, a sort of casualness that seemed out of place in the house. There was another thing: he had a way of turning the pages of a newspaper, one page and then another, until finally he pored over the obituaries and the little advertisements. I didn’t like the way he did that. And I didn’t like the way he sometimes drummed the surface of a table with one hand when he was thinking, as if playing the piano. Another thing was, he wore leather gaiters.
‘It’s just that it’s embarrassing for me,’ I said, still smiling. ‘Having her around.’
He ate beetroot and a sardine salad I had prepared because he’d told me he liked sardines. I’d made him wait that morning in the car while I went into a shop and bought several tins. I wouldn’t let him see what they were, wanting it to be a surprise. He said:
‘Actually, Mrs Stritch is very nice. And he’s doing wonders with the garden.’
‘We called her terrible names. She’ be hanging out her washing or something and we’d deliberately raise our voices. “Worst temper in Dorset,” Belle would say and then we’d giggle. “Driven her husband to drink,” I’d say. “Mrs Stritch is a – very nice lady,” we used to call out in singsong voices.’
‘All children call people names.’