Читать книгу My Mother’s Wedding: A Short Story from the collection, Reader, I Married Him - Tessa Hadley - Страница 7

MY MOTHER’S WEDDING

TESSA HADLEY

IT WAS NEVER GOING to be an ordinary kind of wedding. My mother didn’t do anything ordinary. She would marry Patrick at the summer solstice; it would all take place on the smallholding where we lived, in Pembrokeshire. My parents had bought the place in the seventies from an old couple, Welsh-speaking and chapel-going. Family and friends were coming from all over; all our Pembrokeshire friends would be there, and those of our neighbours who were still our friends: some of them didn’t like the way we lived. My mother had dreamed up a wedding ceremony with plenty of drama. She and Patrick would drink Fen’s home-made mead from a special cup, then smash it; the clinching moment would come when they got to take off all their clothes at sunset and immerse themselves in the pond while everyone sang – Fen would wave myrtle branches over them and pronounce them man and wife. Mum had spent hours puzzling over her notebook, trying to devise the right form of words for her vow. She could whisper to horses (she really could, that wasn’t just hokum, I’ve seen her quieting a berserk half-broken young gelding when grown men wouldn’t go near it), but she struggled sometimes to find the right words for things.

Patrick wasn’t my father, needless to say. My father was long gone: from the smallholding and from west Wales and from the lifestyle. Dad had short hair now; he worked for an insurance company and voted for Mrs Thatcher. From time to time I went to stay with him and my stepmother, and I thought of those weeks in High Barnet as a tranquil escape, the way other people enjoyed a holiday in the country: with their central heating, and their kitchen with its food processor and waste-disposal unit, and the long empty days while they were both out at work, when I tried on all her trim little dresses and her make-up. I never mentioned Mrs Thatcher when I got back to Wales. I didn’t like her politics any more than the others did, but I loved my dad. I didn’t want to encourage the way everyone gloated, pretending to be shocked and disappointed by how he’d gone over to the dark side.

Patrick wasn’t the father of my two half-siblings, Eithne and Rowan, either. Their dad was Lawrence, and he was still very much in our lives, lived a mile down the road – only he’d left Mum around the time Rowan was starting school, went off with Nancy Withers. And on the rebound Mum had had a fling with Fen, who was her best friend’s husband. But that was all over now and Patrick was the love of her life and someone new from outside our set; all those people from her past – Lawrence and Nancy and Fen and Sue and all the others, though not my dad or my stepmother – would be at her wedding because that was the kind of party they all liked best, where everyone had a history with everyone else, and anything might happen, and there was opportunity for plenty of pouring out their hearts to one another and dancing and pairing up in the wrong pairs, while the dope and the drink and the mushroom-brew kept everything lubricated and crazy. Meanwhile, the ragged gang of their kids would be running wild around the place in the dark, wilder even than their parents dreamed, stealing Fen’s disgusting mead and spying on what they never should have seen – and one of them would almost inevitably break an arm, or set fire to a tent, or nearly drown. (Once, at a different party, one of the children really did drown, but that’s another story.)