He went quiet and felt awkward in his old suit. He had taken it for granted that Vic’s people would be like his own, or Mac’s or Doug’s. That was the impression he had given. Now this! ‘All that time,’ he thought, ‘he was making mugs of us.’ He felt himself flush with indignation, though there was shame in it too.
He tried to hide it. He had told Iris a good deal about Vic and of the tie between them. He did not want her to see now how shaken up he was. When Douggy raised his eyebrows and cast a look around the room where they were to leave their things that said, ‘Well now, what do you make of this?’ he played dumb, and only Douggy’s extreme good nature prevented him from taking offence.
A marquee had been set up on the lawn behind the house. It was of a transparent blue stuff, very light and airy, and all round the edges of it alcoves had been created as at a proper ball, each one hung with loops of cornflowers and pink roses and with a medallion above on which the couple’s initials, V and E, were very prettily entwined. Iris, who had been at a good many marriages, had never seen anything like it.
There were waiters in Eton jackets with burgundy cummerbunds, stacks of champagne in dry ice, whisky, beer, soft drinks for the children. Waxed planking had been laid to make a dance floor, and there was a three-piece band to play foxtrots, quicksteps, slow waltzes, gypsy taps. They shared their alcove with Doug and his new wife Janet and some younger friends of the bride.
Meanwhile Vic, sometimes with Ellie at his side, sometimes alone, was moving through all this as if he had never known anything else. Not the least sign now, Digger thought, of the close-cropped, half-crazy character who had come to him at the Crossing. When was that — two months ago? No sign in fact of anything Digger had known of him, or of any of the things they had been through. The ease with which he wore his wedding suit, which sat very smooth and square across his shoulders, the big carnation in his lapel, the freshness and youth he suggested as he clapped older men on the back and called them Gus or Jack or Horrie, and made himself agreeable to their wives — all this appeared to make nothing of what he had been, what they had both been, just a year ago. It denied that as if it had never been.
Digger felt injured, and not just on his own part, but strangely enough on Vic’s part too, the Vic he had once been close to. And on Douggy’s and Mac’s. He didn’t know where to look.
The Warrenders, you could see, doted on him, no doubt of that, and he plumped himself up with it; you could see that too. He glowed. And the assurance of it gave him the power to submit others, the whole world maybe, to his charm.
‘What does it mean?’ Digger asked himself miserably. ‘Is he so shallow? Or is it just that he knows as well how to hide himself among this lot as he did with us?’ Either way he didn’t want to have anything to do with it. He felt empty and hurt, but sorry too, and if it wasn’t for Iris, who had been looking forward to all this, would have gone straight back to the station.
She felt the tightness in him. ‘What is it, love?’ she whispered. ‘Aren’t you enjoying yourself?’
She was. The Warrenders were generous people, there was no mistaking that, and some of the warmth of the occasion, and some aspects of the ceremony too, she took as extending to her and Digger: the vows, which she was always moved by, the confetti, the three-tiered wedding cake with its little columned tabernacle on top, and under it a bride and groom, which would be cut up and passed around in slices soon, and eaten, just a mouthful each, by the guests, or sent off in flat tins stamped with wedding-bells to other parts of the country or overseas. When Mr Warrender got to his feet, and instead of making a speech recited a poem he had written, she took Digger’s hand, feeling that the words, in a way she had not expected, spoke for her own emotions, which were so full that only poetry perhaps — and she knew nothing about poetry — might contain them.
Some people, she saw, thought it rather queer that what this big man, who looked like an alderman or a Rotarian, should have embarked on was a poem.
The occasion till now had been a mixture of formality and a suppressed but growing rowdiness. Some of the male guests, skylarking about in their restraining collars, and restrained as well, but only with glances, by their wives, had been making rough jokes, hinting broadly at the cruder side of things. The groom had taken this in good part, as he was bound to do, and unmarried girls, caught in a position where they could not help but overhear (which in a good many cases they were meant to), let it appear that they had not caught on; or they drew their mouths down in a disapproving but half-amused and indulgent manner and turned away. Even one or two of the formal speeches had taken advantage of what is allowable and struck a ribald note. So when Mr Warrender started, a group of the noisier fellows took it as a spoof. Only after a good many hard looks were they shamed into silence. They put on expressions of honest bemusement and let themselves be stilled. But others, Iris saw, were, as she was, moved.
As for Mr Warrender, he gave no indication that there was anything out of the way in what he was doing. He spoke as if poetry was his normal manner of address, and after a moment or two it was accepted as such.
He wasn’t solemn. There was often a little kick to what he had to say that was quite humorous, and this surprised Iris; she didn’t understand it. She had to get Digger, later, who had a gift in that direction, to repeat some of Mr Warrender’s lines (he could too, word for word) before she got hold of what she had been so moved by:
‘Eternal.’ On our lips the extravagant promise
That spirit makes. The animal in us knows
The truth, but lowers its dumb head and permits itself for this
One day to be garlanded and led
Beyond never-death into ever after, being
In love with what is always out of reach:
The all, the ever-immortal and undying
Word beyond word that breathes through mortal speech.
That was one bit of it.
When Digger spoke these lines they lacked some of the ordinariness Mr Warrender had given them. Even under the circumstances of the tent and its decorations, which were unusual enough, and the guests all subdued and with their hands held back a moment from the clatter of knives and forks, and from glasses even, gravely or politely listening, there had been something very natural and straightforward about it; as if, at the moment of his getting up and looking around at them all, the words the occasion demanded had simply come to him of their own accord. It all seemed so fitting to Iris, and so easy too, because the words Mr Warrender came up with might have been her own, even if some of them were a puzzle to her.
But when Digger repeated the lines, they seemed fixed and formal. He might have been reading them off a printed page. And now that it was long past, it was not simply the one occasion they referred to but all such occasions, and this too, Iris thought, she had understood, if only vaguely, at the moment itself. As if there were more of them present, many more, than the guest-list would have shown:
Noon here in this garden, and the daystar
Shakes out instant fire to call up earth, water, air,
Grass, flowers, limbs and the still invisible presences
That hold their breath and stand in awe about us.
We are all of us guests at a unique, once only
Occasion — this one, this, the precarious gift