The Beginning of Spring. Penelope Fitzgerald

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СКАЧАТЬ going to be got the better of by Norbury.’

      ‘They wouldn’t dare,’ Frank said. ‘Which of them would?’

      ‘You don’t think I’m marrying you, Frank Reid, just to get out of Norbury?’

      ‘I don’t put myself as low as that,’ he said, ‘or you either.’

      ‘I don’t just mean the people here,’ she went on earnestly, ‘I mean all the people we’ve invited, those cousins of yours from Salford, and those aunts.’

      ‘They’re not so bad.’

      ‘People always say that about their aunts,’ said Nellie. ‘The wedding will bring out the worst in them, you’ll see. I’m not a dreamer. I have to look at things quite squarely, as they really are. That’s one of the things you like about me. I know it is.’

      She had no doubts. Even her curling hair seemed to spring up from her forehead with determination. Frank kissed her, but not in such a way as to interrupt her. She asked him whether he’d given any thought as to what the wedding would be like.

      ‘It’s best to take things as they come,’ he said.

      ‘Well, I’ll tell you what it’s going to be like. I’m not talking about the church service. I mean afterwards, when we’re back here. We’re going to have ham and tongue, cucumber sandwiches, vanilla shape and honeycomb mould, nuts, port wine and Madeira. The port wine will be a bit much for Charlie and after a bit it’ll be too much for the lot of them, and they’ll all take some, because teetotallers always say that port doesn’t count, and the older ones, they’ll draw together a bit and lower their voices and say to each other, she doesn’t know what she’s in for. She’s twenty-six and he’s the first boy she’s ever been out with seriously. He’s a decent sort, you can see that, so they won’t have been up to anything yet, and she hasn’t any idea what she’s in for.’

      ‘I was hoping they’d have confidence in me,’ said Frank, ‘they’ve no reason not to.’

      ‘Oh, they won’t have anything against you personally. But they have to make out that it’s a tremendous thing – the only thing that ever happens to a woman, really, bar having children, and change of life, and dying. That’s how they see things in Norbury. There’s a certain expression they have, I’ve noticed it so often. They’ll say that if they’d known what it was going to be like nothing would have dragged them to the altar.’

      Frank felt rather at a loss. He kissed her again and said, ‘Don’t be discouraged.’ She remained rigid.

      ‘What does it matter what all these people think, Nellie? If you’re really right, we ought to pity them.’

      Nellie shook her head like a terrier.

      ‘I’m not going to be got the better of. They may not know it, they won’t know it, but I’m not going to.’

      It was a brilliant day, a moment when a Norbury’s dampness justified itself in bright green grass, clipped green hedges, alert sparrows, stained glass washed to the brilliance of jewels, barometers waiting to be tapped. They were alone in the house. Nellie said: ‘Would you like to see my things? I mean the things I’m going to wear for the wedding. Not the dress, they’ll bring that later. It’s not lucky to have it in the house for too long.’

      ‘Yes, of course I would, if you feel like showing them to me.’

      ‘Do you believe in luck?’

      ‘You’ve asked me that before, Nellie. I told you, I used to believe it was for other people.’

      They went up past the half-landing and into a bedroom almost entirely filled by the wardrobe and various pieces of furniture which looked as though they’d come to rest there from other rooms in the house. The morning sunlight, streaming through the one window caught the wardrobe’s bright bevelled glass. On the white bed some white draper’s goods were laid out, turning out to be a petticoat, a chemise, drawers and corsets. These last Nellie picked up and threw on the ground.

      ‘I’m not wearing these. I’ve given up wearing them. From now on I’m going to go unbraced, like Arts and Crafts women.’

      ‘Well, it’s always beaten me how women can stand them,’ said Frank.

      ‘Don’t think I’m going to pay for them, though. They can go back to Gage’s.’

      ‘Why not?’

      ‘They make ridges on your flesh, you know, even with a patent fastener. You’ll find I don’t have any ridges.’

      She began to undress. ‘I’m twenty-six.’

      ‘You keep telling me that, Nellie.’

      ‘All the same, even at my age, when I’ve got these things off I’m not sure what to do next.’

      It was a moment’s loss of confidence, which Frank knew he mustn’t allow. Under his hands her solid partly naked body was damp with effort. She was recklessly dragging off something or other whose fastenings seemed to defy her. Her voice was muffled. ‘Go on Frank. I’m not going to let them stand about knowing more than I do. I won’t be got the better of.’

       4

      The young Reids did not go straight to Moscow. One of the things that Frank’s father had told him at the Norbury wedding was that he’d better have a look at what they were doing in Germany, and so for three years he worked with Hirschfeld’s printing machinery in Frankfurt. Dolly was born there, and so was Ben. Then came the miscarriage. It was summertime, the hot, landlocked German summer. They were living in the suburbs, and in those days there were still barrel organs playing in the streets. From the pavement below their room an organ repeated the same tune Schön wie ein engel. Again and again it tore into the sentimental music with steel teeth. Nellie lay flat on her back, losing blood, hoping to save the baby. She told Frank to throw some money out of the window to the organ-man to bring them luck, but they had no luck that day.

      In the winter of 1905 Bert Reid died in Moscow – not in the uprisings, although that was a year of strikes and violence, almost a revolution against the Russian war with Japan. The German and English papers showed pictures of the streets barricaded with wrecked trams. The electricity had been cut off and the snowy, tomb-like barricades were lit by kerosene flares. Five batteries of artillery arrived to shell the factories in the Presnya and the Rogoznkaya where the men held out. Then they pumped in water through the gaps with equipment borrowed from Moscow’s fire services. The water turned to ice on impact. When the strikers came out to try to escape back to their villages, the soldiers overturned their sledges and scattered their possessions in the snow. The assembly plant was taken over and the Reids moved to the nearest hotel, Sovastyanov’s. There, after a week during which he had no occupation, since the army wouldn’t let him on to his own site, Bert complained of heart pains. These pains were the symptoms of bacterial endocarditis. Pieces of inflamed tissue were making their way from the walls of the heart into the bloodstream. The Greek doctor who was called in – their usual doctor, a German, had left for Berlin when the light and water in his surgery was cut off – had nothing to prescribe except rest and valerian drops and warm water. He told Mrs Reid that in his opinion her husband’s heart had given way from grief at the sad happenings in St Petersburg СКАЧАТЬ