Reader, I Married Him. Tracy Chevalier

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СКАЧАТЬ light in their eyes when they looked at me. Patrick and I sank deep in the sagging old sofa which stank of the dogs, while my mother cooked vats of curry for the freezer, and he told me about Julian of Norwich, and I was happy. This doesn’t mean I was keen on his marrying my mother.

      I kept saying it would rain on the wedding party because it’s always raining in Wales (that’s another nice thing about High Barnet). We ought to make plans for the rain, I said, but my mother just smiled and said she knew it was going to be fine, and then it was: the day dawned cloudless and pure, yellow haze gleaming in the meadows, hills in the distance delicately drawn in blue. I had to hold on very firmly, sometimes, to my conviction that everything could be explained in the light of reason; it really did seem as though Mum had witch powers. She could smell if rain was coming, her dreams seemed to foretell the future, and her hands could find the place where a horse was hurt, or a child. People said her touch was healing – only I didn’t want her touching me, not any more.

      She and I worked together all that morning, defrosting the curries and loaves of wholemeal bread and the dishes of crumble we’d cooked with our own apples and quinces, mixing jugs of home-made lemonade. Fen drove over with plastic buckets of mead and crates of bottles in the back of his flatbed, along with a suspect carrier bag: he was in charge of the stronger stuff. Sue had sent the wedding cake, soaked in brandy and decorated with hearts and flowers cut out in coloured marzipan. “You don’t think it’s poisoned?” I said. “After what you did to her?”

      My mother only laughed. “We’ve forgiven each other everything. Anyway, Sue started it – when she slept with your dad, while I was still breastfeeding you.” I pretended I knew about this, just to prevent her telling me more.

      Then I sorted out sleeping bags and blankets for all the guests who were going to stay over. Patrick helped me haul the old mattresses up into the hayloft in our barn, built of ancient grey stone, older and more spacious than the farmhouse. When we stood at the open loft window with the sweet air blowing around us – it was tall as the loft itself, gracious as a church window, only without any glass – we could see ten miles, all the way to the glinting fine line of the sea.

      “Are you sure you want to go through with this?” I said daringly. “I know Mum’s overwhelming.”

      I expected him to reply with the same dazed absentmindedness I was used to, as if he were under her spell – and was surprised when he looked at me sharply. “I suppose you think she’s too old for me,” he said.

      I made some joke about cradle-snatching.

      “She looks great though, doesn’t she?” Patrick went on uneasily. “For her age.”

      So he wasn’t so otherworldly after all! I didn’t know whether to be triumphant, or disappointed in him.

      Our guests began to arrive in the afternoon. The party grew around the outdoor fireplace Lawrence had built in the meadow years ago, when he still lived with us. Lawrence was handsome, big and ruddy-faced with thick black hair and sideburns and moustache; he made his living as a builder though he’d been to one of the famous public schools. He was in charge of barbecuing as usual, and we brought out all the rest of the food from the kitchen, to keep warm beside his fire. Fen – not handsome in the least but wickedly funny, tall and stooped with a shaved head and huge crooked nose – started doling out the drink. I wouldn’t drink, and they all thought it was because I was a puritan, controlled and disapproving; actually the reason was rather different. A year ago at another party, when no one was looking I’d helped myself to too much mushroom liquor from the bottom of one of Fen’s brews, and since then I’d been accompanied everywhere by a minor hallucination: hearing my own feet scraping on the floor like little trotting hooves. Nothing disastrous, but enough to scare me.

      Patrick had scythed along the top of the meadow that morning and smells of fresh-cut grass and roasting meat mingled together. Swallows came darting and mewing among the clouds of insects in the slanting yellow light. When the Irish band turned up, Mum and Patrick danced the first dance alone, then everyone else joined in; the warmth seemed to thicken as the sun sank lower. The kids had found our old punt in the long grass and taken it out on the pond; it leaked and they had to bail it frantically. The sounds of their distant shouting and laughter and splashing, and the dogs barking at them, all came scudding back to us across the water. I thought that my sister Eithne must be down at the pond with the others, until I caught sight of her at the heart of the dancing – and she looked as if she’d been drinking, too. There was always trouble at our parties (my little hooves didn’t begin to count, in the scale of things), and this time the trouble began with Eithne.

      She was fourteen, and her face was expressive enough when she was sober, with her big twisted mouth and bright auburn hair, and the funny cast in one of her hazel eyes like a black inkblot; she was wearing her pale old stretch-towelling pyjamas to dance in, and had her hair done in several plaits that bounced around her head like snakes. Eithne had all sorts of mystery illnesses; I used to get mad because I thought Mum kept her home from school on the least excuse, or if she just thought the teacher wasn’t being spiritual enough. So Eithne could hardly read or write; she didn’t know basic things like fractions or the date of the French Revolution – probably didn’t know the French Revolution had even happened. But she’d always been able to dance like a dream, the same graceful easy way that she could ride and swim.

      While Mum and Patrick were drinking out of the wedding cup, which Nancy Withers had made specially, Eithne came snuggling up next to me. I felt her shivering. “Have you been at Fen’s mead?” I asked her. “You’ll make yourself sick.”

      “I don’t care if I die,” she said.

      “You won’t die. You’ll just be throwing up all night.”

      Mum promised to love the holy wanderer in Patrick, and Patrick promised, because he could quote poetry, to love the pilgrim soul in Mum. They lifted the wedding cup between them and smashed it down against the stones of Lawrence’s fireplace, then kissed passionately. Eithne said it was disgusting, and that she was going to bed.

      “I told you you’d make yourself sick,” I said.

      Then when she’d gone, Mum and Patrick were smooching together for a while to the sound of the band, until Mum suddenly had one of her intuitions. She pushed Patrick away and went running up towards the house with her skirts pulled up around her knees so she could go faster. And somehow I must have half-shared in the intuition because I went running up after her, and as we left the meadow behind and came round the side of the farmhouse we could see Eithne standing framed against the last of the light, in her pyjamas, in the barn’s hayloft window – which wasn’t really a window at all, just an opening into the air, fifteen feet above the ground.

      “Ethie, take care!” Mum called out. “Step back from the window, my darling.”

      “I love Patrick,” Eithne said. “I don’t want you to marry him.”

      And then she stepped forward out of the window into nothingness, flopping down like a doll and landing with a thud on a heap of rubble overgrown with nettles. Mum ran forward with an awful cry and picked her up, and I really thought my sister must be dead – but by some miracle she wasn’t hurt. (Mum said afterwards it was because she’d fallen with her limbs so floppy and relaxed.) Cradling Eithne in her arms, she told me to go and tell Patrick to wait for her. “I’ve got to deal with this,” she said. And she carried Eithne into the house and lay on the bed upstairs with her, soothing her, making everything all right. This is the kind of thing that happens at our parties.

      Everyone including the band had drifted down the meadow to stand beside the pond. The kids had pulled the punt out into the grass and СКАЧАТЬ