William Boyd - An Ice-Cream War

Charles scurried self-consciously down the aisle and whispered that the carriage had just rounded the corner up the road. Felix could hear the faint clop of horses’ hooves outside. He nodded to the organist who immediately struck up ‘Here Comes the Bride’ and the congregation rose to its feet. Two minutes later she entered, on the arm of Dr Venables.

Felix peered closely at his future sister-in-law but her face was shrouded in a veil. She was wearing a simple dress with a short train, clutched tenaciously by Hattie and Dora. Dr Venables, tall, pale, his oiled hair gleaming, towered above the bride who, beside him, appeared diminutive and girlish. As she passed Felix, he smelt a faint odour of rose water and saw her hands distinctly trembling as she gripped a bunch of lily-of-the-valley. He heard, he thought, the rattle of the stamens in the tiny waxy bells.

Gabriel stood at the head of the aisle, badly suppressing a broad grin of welcome and relief, splendid in his short red jacket and navy blue trousers.

Felix felt his nausea return. The church seemed suddenly filled with the ancient smells of dust and stone, mingled with the scent of flowers and rose water. He clutched the back of the pew in front of him and stared at his whitening knuckles. He did not raise his eyes again until the vicar invited them all to be seated.

♦

In front of the church door the photographers busily packed away their bulky equipment. Felix stood and watched them. The bride and groom had been carried off in the landaulette to the Manor where a reception was taking place. Most of the other motor cars, traps, carriages and pony carts had left also.

“Are you walking back, Felix?” came a voice.

Felix looked round, it was Dr Venables.

“Yes.” Felix said.

The doctor joined him. “Fascinating contraptions,” he said, indicating the heavy cameras being placed in their velvet-lined boxes. “To think that this day has been captured forever. Preserved on light-sensitive paper through the action of silver oxide. Is that right? I don’t pretend to know how it functions.”

“I think you’re right,” Felix said glumly, vaguely remembering the dreadful embarrassments of the group photograph. His mother almost swooning from tension; the major refusing to smile; Gabriel and Charis’s happiness almost palpable, like being in a warm, fuggy room. He realized now that they had been sharing a joy in each other’s company which he found almost intolerable to witness. He had been close to Gabriel — closer than to any other person — but what he saw happening between Gabriel and Charis was an intimacy of a higher order, and one he was convinced, in his tight frozen heart, that he was unlikely ever to experience.

He had glimpsed them squeezing hands, Gabriel’s knuckles white with effort, almost as his own had been on the pew-back some half an hour earlier. He felt overwhelmed by the passion of his jealousy and resentment. And the virulence of his own emotional upheavals had made him take less notice than normal of the finer details of the scène which usually he would have savoured with cynical relish. The covert jostling for prominence among sisters and in-laws, the Nigel Bathes freely using their elbows to secure their ground and having almost to be physically dislodged from it to allow Dr Venables and Charis’s aunt their rightful position at the front of the group. Even the features of Charis’s face were still indistinct: dark hair brushed forward and secured in a wavy fringe by a satin band; a round face, wide eyes, a firm determined chin, small sharp teeth disclosed by a mouth continually parted in a smile. He shut his eyes and swallowed as he suffered another attack of nausea.

“…charming girl, I think.” Dr Venables was speaking.

“Sorry, Dr Venables?…oh, the bride. I haven’t met her yet.”

“Yes, that’s right, you’ve been away. Lively, intelligent girl…I say, are you all right, Felix? You look a bit washed out.”

“I’m fine. The walk back ‘ll do me good. I think it’s something to do with the atmosphere in churches.”

Dr Venables smiled. “I’ll join you, if I may. There was some talk of sending a trap back to fetch me, but I dare say I’ve been forgotten in all the confusion.”

They walked out of the churchyard and turned up the lane that led from the village to the Manor. It was a bright day with a cool breeze and compact scudding clouds in the sky. Felix exaggeratedly inhaled and exhaled as they strode along.

Dr Venables lived and practised in Sevenoaks, though he had acted as the Cobb family doctor for as long as Felix could remember. He was a large, tall man in his fifties with a curiously smooth and fleshy complexion. He had a good head of hair and it showed no traces of grey. Felix suspected regular dyeing. His clothes were always elegant and well-fitting. His face would have been conventionally handsome had it not been for his corpulence and a certain slackness about his mouth, caused by a full, heavy bottom lip that seemed always to be hanging down from its pair and which was only held in place by a conscious setting of the chin. Felix liked him, and was always pleased to see him, though for no particular reason other than he seemed a sensible man who was prepared and happy to talk to him as an equal.

“So you weren’t too enamoured of the service,” Dr Venables observed.

Felix scoffed. “I think it’s ghastly. Not that I blame Gabriel and Charis,” he added quickly. “It’s just that occasions such as these bring out the worst in my family. I’d vowed that after Eustacia had married Nigel Bathe I’d never go to another wedding.” He paused. “Of course I wasn’t to know Gabriel would be the next,” he added thoughtfully.

“But they’re happy,” Dr Venables said. “You wouldn’t deny them their happiness.”

“No,” Felix said. “Of course not. It’s just that I don’t believe in it, somehow. The ritual, the…the false piety.”

Dr Venables smiled. Felix sensed he was being humoured.

“What do you believe in then, Felix?” he asked.

Felix stopped walking and looked about him. He went to the side of the lane and plucked two dog roses, a clump of elderberry and a stem of cow parsley. He held them out to Dr Venables.

“I believe in these,” he said with grim sincerity.

Dr Venables gave a great shout of laughter. “Why, Felix,” he said. “You…you sensualist you. You’re nothing but — what do they call it? — a neo-pagan. That’s what you are: a neo-pagan.”

Felix dropped the icons of his religion. He had been following Holland’s instructions to the letter. He didn’t believe in dog roses any more than he did the Church of England, but at least it was different.

“Well,” he said, conscious of the ground he had lost and trying to regain it. “At least it’s there . Visible. I can see them and feel them…” He remembered a line from Holland’s favourite, Ibsen. “One must go one’s own way,” he announced strongly, “and make one’s own mistakes.”

“Come on,” Dr Venables said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I think I know what you’re driving at. We’d better get a move on, though, or the party ‘ll be over.” They set off up the road.

“Now tell me,” Dr Venables said, “how are you looking forward to Oxford?”

♦

Felix toyed with his pudding, pushing the meringue and cream around with his spoon for a while before deciding to abandon it. He sipped at the champagne he had left in his glass. He felt mildly calmer, restored in part by a speech of utter fatuity made by Sammy Hinshelwood, without even one good joke in it, and that had lasted ten minutes too long.

Nigel Bathe, sitting opposite him, had been advising him for the last five minutes not to waste his time by going to Oxford, and how he, Nigel Bathe, had never for one instant — not for a split second — regretted never attending that seat of learning.