The Witness at the Wedding. Simon Brett

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      ‘Doesn’t Stephen think you should see someone?’

      ‘I haven’t told him it’s hurting. I have to be strong for him.’

      Carole hardly had time to register the strangeness of this remark before Gaby, almost childlike in her pleading dependency, asked, ‘Why? You don’t know a good back person, do you? Because we are going to be down here for a few days.’

      ‘Well . . .’ Carole Seddon couldn’t quite keep the scepticism out of her tone as she replied, ‘I know someone who does some healing.’

Chapter Two

      ‘No, she hasn’t called me,’ said Jude.

      ‘Oh, well, probably the back got better of its own accord. As backs do.’

      Jude instantly picked up the implication of the last words – that all back pain was psychosomatic, and didn’t affect people who had a proper control over their emotions. As Carole had. She smiled. ‘A pain may have its origin in the head, but that doesn’t mean the bit where it manifests itself hurts any the less.’

      There was a predictable, ‘Huh.’

      ‘Don’t worry, Carole. I’m not about to go into a riff on holistic medicine. I’m just saying that the physical and the mental are deeply interconnected.’

      Jude’s neighbour sniffed. It still sounded like mumbo-jumbo to her, and she devoutly hoped she would always continue to think of it as mumbo-jumbo. Carole Seddon had been brought up to consider the physical and the mental as totally separate, and the idea of breaking down the barrier between them she found positively frightening. Unwelcome thoughts and emotions were hard enough to control as it was, without suddenly changing the traditional rules that kept them in their proper place.

      They were sitting in the front room of Jude’s house, Woodside Cottage. The space was cluttered with ‘things’ which their owner had accumulated over many years. Very few of them had any practical use. There were ornaments, shells, bottles, drapes, chains, bangles, faded photographs in frames. Each ‘thing’ represented a memory for Jude, of a time of her life, of a friend or a lover. She could have told visitors the history of each, but that was not why she had them on display. They were private aides-memoires, and in fact she was rarely asked about them. People who came to Woodside Cottage seemed to accept the clutter, as just another manifestation of its owner’s personality. And they were always more interested in telling Jude about their lives than in asking about hers.

      Even Carole had got used to the clutter, and Carole was distrustful of ‘things’ – particularly ‘things’ that brought memories with them. She tried to exclude such ‘things’ completely from High Tor, hoping to keep the lid tightly closed on most of her past life.

      The windows of Woodside Cottage were open that morning, and the warm June air presaged another hot summer. An ‘unnaturally’ hot summer, the Fethering locals would say darkly, before moving on to lugubrious talk of ‘climate change’ and its inevitable corollary of a man-created Armageddon. But that day there was still sufficient movement in the air to set the bamboo wind chimes tinkling. Not for the first time, Carole wondered why, though she’d have despised the sound anywhere else, she didn’t find the wood-chink noise irritating in Woodside Cottage.

      Jude was one of those people who carried with her a unique personal environment. Outwardly, she was a plump woman in her fifties with blonde hair gathered up into a gravity-defying structure on top of her head, but an inward serenity set her apart from other women of her age. Though her personal life had not been without its passions and disappointments, she emanated calm to everyone with whom she came in contact. It was not an effect at which she worked, it was instinctive. When they first met, Carole had felt jealous of this quality in her neighbour, but that jealousy had given way over time to a wistfulness, a recognition of how different their personalities were. For Carole, all emotional responses were hard work, the road to them fraught with misgivings and potential disasters. In low moods, she sometimes feared the only spontaneous instinct she had was for prejudice.

      Evading further well-rehearsed arguments on the subject of holistic medicine, Jude moved the conversation on. ‘How are the wedding plans going?’

      ‘Fine,’ replied Carole, instinctively echoing the conversation in the Crown and Anchor. Then, more dubiously. ‘At least, I think everything’s all right.’

      ‘Nobody getting cold feet, I hope?’

      ‘No, no, they still seem as besotted with each other as ever. It’s just . . .’

      ‘What?’

      ‘After being so positive about the whole thing at the beginning, a kind of apathy seems to have set in.’

      ‘Oh?’

      ‘Well, they still haven’t sorted out a church, or a venue for the reception, or caterers, or any of that stuff.’

      ‘Time enough. What’s the actual date?’

      ‘Fourteenth of September. And we’re into June now.’

      ‘They’ve got three months. Many weddings have been sorted out in a lot less time than that.’

      ‘I know. It’s just . . . Well, it’s unlike Stephen to be so dilatory. He was always terribly punctilious about forward-planning, almost obsessed with details of arrangements.’

      The question crossed Jude’s mind as to where he might have inherited that quality from, but she was too considerate to voice it. ‘Probably just shows that being with Gaby is making him more laid-back.’

      ‘Maybe.’ But Carole wasn’t convinced. ‘I’d believe that, if Gaby herself was being more laid-back. But she isn’t. She seems terribly tense, evasive when the subject of the wedding arrangements comes up.’

      ‘So she’s acting as a brake on Stephen?’

      ‘Seems to be. And she’s also very resistant to the idea of the engagement being announced in the papers.’

      Jude shrugged. ‘Surely that’s up to her. Some people want every detail of their weddings plastered all over Hello! magazine, some just tick the box for “no publicity”. There’s nothing sinister about it.’

      ‘Maybe not,’ said Carole dubiously. ‘But there is a right way of going about things, you know.’

      That was such an archetypal Carole Seddon remark that Jude could not suppress a little smile. Then she asked tentatively, ‘Have you . . . had further contact with David about the wedding?’

      ‘No.’ The reply was almost a snap. Carole had never liked the feeling of being nagged.

      Instantly Jude backed off. ‘Still, it’ll be interesting for you to meet the rest of Gaby’s family. Didn’t you say she’d got some relatives in France?’

      ‘Just her grandmother, I think.’

      ‘Whereabouts?’

      ‘South somewhere.’

      ‘Ah.’ Pleasing nostalgia came into Jude’s brown eyes.

      Carole СКАЧАТЬ