‘So if we could it would be lovely,’ Deborah said on her office telephone. She’d told her mother there was to be another teddy-bears’ picnic, Angela and Jeremy had arranged it mainly, and the Ainley-Foxletons would love it of course, possibly the last they’d see.
‘My dear, you’re always welcome, as you know.’ The voice of Deborah’s mother came all the way from South Bucks, from the village where the Ainley-Foxletons’ house and garden were, where Deborah and Angela, Jeremy, Pansy, Harriet, Enid, Peter and Holly had been children together. The plan was that Edwin and Deborah should spend the weekend of June 17th with Deborah’s parents, and Deborah’s mother had even promised to lay on some tennis for Edwin on the Saturday. Deborah herself wasn’t much good at tennis.
‘Thanks, Mummy,’ she managed to say just as Mr Harridance returned from lunch.
‘No, spending the whole weekend actually,’ Edwin informed his mother. ‘There’s this teddy-bear thing Deborah has to go to.’
‘What teddy-bear thing?’
Edwin went into details, explaining how the children who’d been friends in a South Bucks village nearly twenty years ago met from time to time to have a teddy-bears’ picnic because that was what they’d done then.
‘But they’re adults surely now,’ Mrs Chalm pointed out.
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Well, I hope you have a lovely time, dear.’
‘Delightful, I’m sure.’
‘It’s odd when they’re adults, I’d have thought.’
Between themselves, Edwin and Deborah did not again discuss the subject of the teddy-bears’ picnic. During the quarrel Edwin had felt bewildered, never quite knowing how to proceed, and he hoped that on some future occasion he would be better able to cope. It made him angry when he wasn’t able to cope, and the anger still hung about him. On the other hand, six months wasn’t long in a marriage which he hoped would go on for ever: the marriage hadn’t had a chance to settle into the shape that suited it, any more than he and Deborah had had time to develop their own taste in furniture and decoration. It was only to be expected that there should be problems and uncertainty.
As for Deborah, she knew nothing about marriages settling into shape: she wasn’t aware that rules and tacit understandings, arrangements of give and take, were what made marriage possible when the first gloss had worn off. Marriage for Deborah was the continuation of a love affair, and as yet she had few complaints. She knew that of course they had to have quarrels.
They had met at a party. Edwin had left a group of people he was listening to and had crossed to the corner where, she was being bored by a man in computers. ‘Hullo,’ Edwin just said. All three of them were eating plates of paella.
Finding a consideration of the past pleasanter than speculation about the future, Deborah often recalled that moment: Edwin’s eager face smiling at her, the computer man discomfited, a sour taste in the paella. ‘You’re not Fiona’s sister?’ Edwin said, and when ages afterwards she’d asked him who Fiona was he confessed he’d made her up. ‘I shouldn’t eat much more of this stuff,’ he said, taking the paella away from her. Deborah had been impressed by that: she and the computer man had been fiddling at the paella with their forks, both of them too polite to say that there was something the matter with it, ‘What do you do?’ Edwin said a few minutes later, which was more than the computer man had asked.
In the weeks that followed they told one another all about themselves, about their parents and the houses they’d lived in as children, the schools they’d gone to, the friends they’d made. Edwin was a daring person, he was successful, he liked to be in charge of things. Without in any way sounding boastful, he told her of episodes in his childhood, of risks taken at school. Once he’d dismantled the elderly music master’s bed, causing it to collapse when the music master later lay down on it. He’d removed the carburettor from some other master’s car, he’d stolen an egg-beater from an ironmonger’s shop. All of them were dares, and by the end of his schooldays he had acquired the reputation of being fearless: there was nothing, people said, he wouldn’t do.
It was easy for Deborah to love him, and everything he told her, self-deprecatingly couched, was clearly the truth. But Deborah in love naturally didn’t wonder how this side of Edwin would seem in marriage, nor how it might develop as Edwin moved into middle age. She couldn’t think of anything nicer than having him there every day, and in no way did she feel let down on their honeymoon in Greece or by the couple of false starts they made with flats before they eventually ended up in 23 The Zodiac. Edwin went to his office every day and Deborah went to hers. That he told her more about share prices than she told him about the letters she typed for Mr Harridance was because share prices were more important. It was true that she would often have quite liked to pass on details of this or that, for instance of the correspondence with Flitts, Hay and Co. concerning nearly eighteen thousand defective chair castors. The correspondence was interesting because it had continued for two years and had become vituperative. But when she mentioned it Edwin just agreeably nodded. There was also the business about Miss Royal’s scratches, which everyone in the office had been conjecturing about: how on earth had a woman like Miss Royal acquired four long scratches on her face and neck between five-thirty one Monday evening and nine-thirty the following morning? ‘Oh yes?’ Edwin had said, and gone on to talk about the Mercantile Investment Trust.
Deborah did not recognize these telltale signs. She did not remember that when first she and Edwin exchanged information about one another’s childhoods Edwin had sometimes just smiled, as if his mind had drifted away. It was only a slight disappointment that he didn’t wish to hear about Flitts, Hay and Co., and Miss Royal’s scratches: no one could possibly get into a state about things like that. Deborah saw little significance in the silly quarrel they’d had about the teddy-bears’ picnic, which was silly itself of course. She didn’t see that it had had to do with friends who were hers and not Edwin’s; nor did it occur to her that when they really began to think about the decoration of 23 The Zodiac it would be Edwin who would make the decisions. They shared things, Deborah would have said: after all, in spite of the quarrel they were going to go to the teddy-bears’ picnic. Edwin loved her and was kind and really rather marvellous. It was purely for her sake that he’d agreed to give up a whole weekend.
So on a warm Friday afternoon, as they drove from London in their Saab, Deborah was feeling happy. She listened while Edwin talked about a killing a man called Dupree had made by selling out his International Asphalt holding. ‘James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree,’ she said.
‘What on earth’s that?’
‘It’s by A.A. Milne, the man who wrote about Pooh Bear. Poor Pooh!’
Edwin didn’t say anything.
‘Jeremy’s is called Pooh.’
‘I see.’
In the back of the car, propped up in a corner, was the blue teddy-bear called Binky which Deborah had had since she was one.
The rhododendrons were in bloom in the Ainley-Foxletons’ garden, late that year because of the bad winter. So was the laburnum Edwin remembered, and the broom, and some yellow azaleas. ‘My dear, we’re so awfully glad,’ old Mrs Ainley-Foxleton said, kissing him because she imagined he must be one of the children in her past. Her husband, tottering about on the raised lawn which Edwin also remembered from his previous visit, had developed the shakes. ‘Darlings, Mrs Bright has ironed our tablecloth for us!’ Mrs Ainley-Foxleton announced with a flourish.
She imparted this fact because Mrs Bright, the Ainley-Foxletons’ charwoman, was emerging at that moment from the house, with the ironed tablecloth over one arm. She carried a tray on which there were glass jugs of orange squash and lemon squash, a jug of milk, mugs with Beatrix Potter characters on them, and two plates of sandwiches that weren’t much larger than postage stamps. She made her way down stone steps from the raised lawn, crossed a more extensive lawn and disappeared into a shrubbery. While everyone remained chatting to the Ainley-Foxletons – nobody helping to lay the picnic out because that had never been part of the proceedings – Mrs Bright reappeared from the shrubbery, returned to the house and then made a second journey, her tray laden this time with cake and biscuits.