She offered us a plate of biscuits, arranged in a semi-circle. As we crunched with dry mouths, she asked Johnny to invite his mother to tea so they could meet. She asked Johnny whether his younger brother Thomas might be serving as best man and what church he thought his family would be most happy with. She asked us if we wanted a summer or an autumn wedding and whether she should make sandwiches for the wedding breakfast.
When Johnny had answered as best he could, she offered me her mother’s wedding dress. It would need cleaning, but it would fit me quite well, she said. I would have said yes to getting married in a paper bag if it had got her to smile.
‘I could make you some lace gloves.’ She took my hand in hers. I’d forgotten what it felt like to have my mother’s hand in mine. How soft her skin was and how cool her touch.
She turned her hand in mine and ran her finger across the gold band of my engagement ring. It had a small square emerald set in the centre. It felt odd on my finger.
‘Such a pretty ring,’ she said. I looked down at my hand and tried to imagine a second ring there. A permanent one.
‘It’s my mother’s,’ Johnny said. Then, as though he’d made a mistake, he said, ‘Well. I mean, it was my mother’s. It’s Margot’s now.’
‘Well,’ my mother said, ‘how kind of your mother to give it to Margot.’
Johnny smiled at me. Sometimes, my breath would catch at the thought that one day soon this young man would see me naked.
‘Well,’ my mother said, ‘shall we have some tea?’
She picked up the pot and successfully communicated some tea into her best china teacups. They were the ones she put out when she wanted to impress someone. I was wary of the cups, associating them as I did with doctors’ visits, with unpleasant and non-biologically related ‘aunts’ and my least favourite grandmother, who, unable to continue searching for her son within my father, had moved back to her house by the sea.
My mother sipped her tea and I felt a wave of guilt wash over me. I was doing this to her. I was leaving her alone with only my father for company. But that was what people did. They met someone and they got married. That was what we were taught to do. Mine and Johnny’s courtship was long for the time. As we sat at my mother’s kitchen table, Christabel was almost a year into her marriage and living in Australia with a soldier she’d tripped over at a tea dance. So, it turned out that her future husband hadn’t died in France. Or, at the very least, she’d taken someone else’s.
‘Perhaps, once we’re married, we could live here?’ I said to my mother.
Even that didn’t work.
‘No, pet.’ She patted my hand and the emerald winked in the light. ‘A married couple need a home of their own.’
I nodded, knowing there’d be no hope of a smile now.
She half stood to take the tea tray to the sink when the creak on the fifth stair announced a fourth presence among us.
My mother stopped, glanced to the hallway and sat back down. Johnny gave my leg a squeeze.
My father, topless, tired, came into the kitchen, his stomach hanging over the waistband of his stained striped pyjama bottoms.
‘Margot’s getting married,’ my mother said, looking to my father for eye contact, but finding that he didn’t have any to spare.
He took a dirty glass from inside the sink and filled it with water.
‘I know,’ he said.
‘You do?’ my mother asked.
‘The boy asked for her hand.’ He waved his own hand in the general direction of Johnny, but he didn’t turn to look at us.
My mother smiled weakly at us. ‘Oh, of course,’ she said. ‘How sweet of you to ask for her hand in marriage. Traditional. I wasn’t thinking.’
The thousand-yard stare was one of the things I’d read about in the book on what they called ‘combat stress reaction’。 My father would sit and stare for hours. He was doing it then. Staring down to the garden, to the patch of brown earth where the Anderson shelter used to be. Where my mother and I and my least favourite grandmother had sat and waited for death or morning.
Watching him at the kitchen window, I marvelled at the idea that this man whose pyjamas we were not allowed to wash, this man who hadn’t left the house in weeks and who had been sleeping on the sofa since the bomb came through the window, was responsible for giving away my hand in marriage. And now that hand wore a ring.
Father Arthur and the Sandwich
FATHER ARTHUR WAS sitting at his desk eating an egg and cress sandwich in complete silence.