Before lunch Edwin had sat for a long time with Deborah’s father in the summer-house, drinking. This was something Deborah’s father enjoyed on Sunday mornings, permitting himself a degree of dozy inebriation which only became noticeable when two bottles of claret were consumed at lunch. Today Edwin had followed his example, twice getting to his feet to refill their glasses and during the course of lunch managing to slip out to the summer house for a fairly heavy tot of whisky, which mixed nicely with the claret. He could think of no other condition in which to present himself – with a teddy-bear Deborah’s mother had pressed upon him – in the Ainley-Foxletons’ garden. ‘Rather you than me, old chap,’ Deborah’s father had said after lunch, subsiding into an armchair with a gurgle. At the last moment Edwin had quickly returned to the summer-house and had helped himself to a further intake of whisky, drinking from the cap of the Teacher’s bottle because the glasses had been collected up. He reckoned that when Mrs Ainley-Foxleton had kissed him he must have smelt like a distillery, and he was glad of that.
‘Well, here we are,’ Jeremy said in the glade where the picnic had first taken place in 1957. He sat at the head of the tablecloth, cross-legged on a tartan rug. He had glasses and was stout. Peter at the other end of the tablecloth didn’t seem to have grown much in the intervening years, but Angela had shot up like a hollyhock and in fact resembled one. Enid was dumpy, Pansy almost beautiful; Harriet had protruding teeth, Holly was bouncy. Jeremy’s wife and Peter’s wife, and Pansy’s husband – a man in Shell – all entered into the spirit of the occasion. So did Angela’s husband, who came from Czechoslovakia and must have found the proceedings peculiar, everyone sitting there with a teddy-bear that had a name. Angela put a record on Mrs Ainley-Foxleton’s old wind-up gramophone. ‘Oh, don’t go down to the woods today,’ a voice screeched, ‘without consulting me.’ Mr and Mrs Ainley-Foxleton were due to arrive at the scene later, as was the tradition. They came with chocolates apparently, and bunches of buttercups for the teddy-bears.
‘Thank you, Edwin,’ Deborah whispered while the music and the song continued. She wanted him to remember the quarrel they’d had about the picnic; she wanted him to know that she now truly forgave him, and appreciated that in the end he’d seen the fun of it all.
‘Listen, I have to go to the lav,’ Edwin said. ‘Excuse me for a minute.’ Nobody except Deborah seemed to notice when he ambled off because everyone was talking so, exchanging news.
The anger which had hung about Edwin after the quarrel had never evaporated. It was in anger that he had telephoned his mother, and further anger had smacked at him when she’d said she hoped he would have a lovely time. What she had meant was that she’d told him so: marry a pretty little thing and before you can blink you’re sitting down to tea with teddy-bears. You’re a fool to put up with rubbish like this was what Deborah’s father had meant when he’d said rather you than me.
Edwin did not lack brains and he had always been aware of it. It was his cleverness that was still offended by what he considered to be an embarrassment, a kind of gooey awfulness in an elderly couple’s garden. At school he had always hated anything to do with dressing up, he’d even felt awkward when he’d had to read poetry aloud. What Edwin admired was solidity: he liked Westminster and the City, he liked trains moving smoothly, suits and clean shirts. When he’d married Deborah he’d known-without having to be told by his mother – that she was not a clever person, but in Edwin’s view a clever wife was far from necessary. He had seen a future in which children were born and educated, in which Deborah developed various cooking and housekeeping skills, in which together they gave small dinner-parties. Yet instead of that, after only six months, there was this grotesque absurdity. Getting drunk wasn’t a regular occurrence with Edwin: he drank when he was angry, as he had on the night of the quarrel.
Mr Ainley-Foxleton was pottering about with his stick on the raised lawn, but Edwin took no notice of him. The old man appeared to be looking for something, his head poked forward on his scrawny neck, bespectacled eyes examining the grass. Edwin passed into the house. From behind a closed door he could hear the voices of Mrs Ainley-Foxleton and Mrs Bright, talking about buttercups. He opened another door and entered the Ainley-Foxletons’ dining-room. On the sideboard there was a row of decanters.
Edwin discovered that it wasn’t easy to drink from a decanter, but he managed it none the less. Anger spurted in him all over again. It seemed incredible that he had married a girl who hadn’t properly grown up. None of them had grown up, none of them desired to belong in the adult world, not even the husbands and wives who hadn’t been involved in the first place. If Deborah had told him about any of it on that Sunday afternoon when they’d visited this house he wondered, even, if he would have married her.
Yet replacing the stopper of the decanter between mouthfuls in case anyone came in, Edwin found it impossible to admit that he had made a mistake in marrying Deborah: he loved her, he had never loved anyone else, and he doubted if he would ever love anyone else in the future. Often in an idle moment, between selling and buying in the office, he thought of her, seeing her in her different clothes and sometimes without any clothes at all. When he returned to 23 The Zodiac he sometimes put his arms around her and would not let her go until he had laid her gently down on their bed. Deborah thought the world of him, which was something she often said.
In spite of all that it was extremely annoying that the quarrel had caused him to feel out of his depth. He should have been able to sort out such nonsense within a few minutes; he deserved his mother’s gibe and his father-in-law’s as well. Even though they’d only been married six months, it was absurd that since Deborah loved him so he hadn’t been able to make her see how foolish she was being. It was absurd to be standing here drunk.
The Ainley-Foxletons’ dining-room, full of silver and polished furniture and dim oil paintings, shifted out of focus. The row of decanters became two rows and then one again. The heavily carpeted floor tilted beneath him, falling away to the left and then to the right. Deborah had let him down. She had brought him here so that he could be displayed in front of Angela and Jeremy and Pansy, Harriet, Holly, Enid, Peter, and the husbands and the wives. She was making the point that she had only to lift her little finger, that his cleverness was nothing compared with his love for her. The anger hammered at him now, hurting him almost. He wanted to walk away, to drive the Saab back to London and when Deborah followed him to state quite categorically that if she intended to be a fool there would have to be a divorce. But some part of Edwin’s anger insisted that such a course of action would be an admission of failure and defeat. It was absurd that the marriage he had chosen to make should end before it had properly begun, due to silliness.
Edwin took a last mouthful of whisky and replaced the glass stopper. He remembered another social occasion, years ago, and he was struck by certain similarities with the present one. People had given a garden party in aid of some charity or other which his mother liked to support, to which he and his brother and sister, and his father, had been dragged along. It had been an excruciatingly boring afternoon, in the middle of a heatwave. He’d had to wear his floppy cotton hat, which he hated, and an awful tan-coloured summer suit, made of cotton also. There had been hours and hours of just standing while his mother talked to people, sometimes slowly giving them recipes, which they wrote down. Edwin’s brother and sister didn’t seem to mind that; his father did as he was told. So Edwin had wandered off, into a house that was larger and more handsome than the Ainley-Foxletons’. He’d strolled about in the downstairs rooms, eaten some jam he found in the kitchen, and then gone upstairs to the bedrooms. He’d rooted around for a while, opening drawers and wardrobes, and then he’d climbed a flight of uncarpeted stairs to a loft. From here he’d made his way out on to the roof. Edwin had almost forgotten this incident and certainly never dwelt on it, but with a vividness that surprised him it now returned.