Jane Gardam - The Man in the Wooden Hat

“I’ll be there, Edward.”

“All set, then?”

“All set, Edward. Edward, are you O.K.? Are you happy?”

“Don’t forget your passport. Tell them to throw your suitcase in the back. Oh, and don’t forget. .”

“What?”

A long silence and he watched the seabirds leaning this way and that over the harbour.

“Don’t forget. . Elisabeth. Dear Betty. Even now — are you sure?”

There was the longest pause perhaps in the whole of Edward Feathers’s professional life.

And then he heard her voice in mid-sentence, saying, “It could be cold in the evenings. Have you packed a jersey?”

“My breakfast hasn’t arrived yet. Then I have to pay the bill here. Are you dressed? I mean in all your finery?”

“No. I’ve a baby on my knee and Amy and everyone are shouting. But, Eddie, if you like we can still forget it.”

“I’ll be there,” he said. Silence again for an aeon. “I love you, Betty. Don’t leave me.”

“Well, mind you turn up,” she said briskly. Too brightly. And put down the phone.

He had no recollection in the Donhead lanes after Betty’s death of any of this except his own immaculate figure standing at the window.

“I am not going,” said Bets, hand still on the phone. “It’s off.”

Amy planted a glass of brandy beside the bride’s cornflakes. “Come on. Get dressed. I’ve done the children. What’s the matter?”

“What in hell am I doing?”

“The best thing you ever did in your life. Looking ahead at last. Here, I’ll do your hair.”

Edward’s luggage had already gone ahead to the airport. He paid his bill at the desk, the management far from effusive, since they’d expected him there for another two months. But they knew he would be back, and he tipped everyone correctly and shook hands all round. They walked with him to the glass doors and bowed and smiled, nobody saying a thing about his stiff collar and tailcoat so early in the morning. “You don’t need a car, sir? For the airport?” “No, no. I’m going across to church first.” “Ah — church. Ah.” The gardenia in his buttonhole could have been laminated plastic.

He set out to his wedding alone.

Briefly he thought of Albert Ross. Ross had vanished. Eddie had no best man.

Oh, well, you can marry without a best man. No one else he’d want. It was a glorious morning. He remembered his prep-school headmaster, Sir, reading Dickens aloud, and the effete Lord Verisoft walking sadly to his death in a duel on Wimbledon Common with all the birds singing and the sunlight in the trees.

“I am alone, too,” he said in his mind to Sir. “I haven’t even a Second to chat to on the way.”

He thought of the old friends missing. War. Distance. Amnesia. Family demands. “I have married a wife and therefore I cannot come.” Oxford friends. Army friends. Pupils in his Chambers. Not one. Not one. Oh my God !

Walking towards the exquisite figure of Edward Feathers — well, not so much walking as shambling — was Fiscal-Smith.

From Paper Buildings, London EC4!

They both stopped walking.

Then Fiscal-Smith came rambling up, talking while still out of earshot. “Good heavens! Old Filth! This hour in the morning! Gardenia! Haven’t you been to bed? I’m just off the plane. Great Scot — what a surprise! Where are you going?”

“Just going to church.”

“Case settled, I hear. Bad luck. I’m here for the Reclamation North-east Mining Co. It hasn’t a hope. Oh, well, excellent! Thought you’d be on the way Home.”

“No, not — not just at once.”

“ Church you said? I’d no idea it was Sunday. Jet lag. I’ll walk there with you.”

“No, that’s all right, Fiscal-Smith.”

“Glad to. Nothing to do. Need to walk after the plane. Should really have shaved and changed. I always travel now in these new T-shirt things. Feathers, you do look particularly smart.”

“Oh, I don’t know. .”

“Ah. Oh, yes. Of course. You’ve just got Silk. All-night party. Well done. You look pretty spry, though.”

“Thank you.”

“Well, very spry. Good God, Feathers, you look like The Importance of Being Earnest . Nine o’clock in the morning. What’s going on?”

Eddie stopped and turned his back on St. James’s church. At that moment, from the belfry a merry bell began to ring. “Private matter,” he said and held out his hand. “Goodbye, old chap. See you again.”

“There’s a clergyman waving at you,” said Fiscal-Smith. “Several people in bright dresses are round the church door. Smart hats. The padré—he’s coming over. He looks anxious—”

“ Goodbye , Fiscal-Smith.”

“ Hello !” cried out the parson. “We were getting worried. Organist’s on “Sheep May Safely” third time. You are looking very fine, my dear fellow, if I may say so. Now then — best man? Delighted. At the risk of sounding less than original I have to ask if you have the ring?”

“Ring?”

“Wedding ring? Let me see it. Best man — by the way my name is Yo. Yo Kong. I am to officiate. And you are?”

“Well, I’m called Fiscal-Smith. I’ve just arrived.”

“Well done, well done. Right on time. The ring.”

Fiscal-Smith stood in unaccustomed reverence, and Feathers gave one of his nervous roars and took a small box from his pocket.

“Very good. Splendid. Very good indeed. Now if you will accompany me, both of you, to the front pew on the right. The bride should be here in five minutes.”

“Bride?” said Fiscal-Smith out of a tight mouth.

“Yes,” said Eddie, staring up at the east window.

“Who the hell is she?”

“Betty Macintosh.”

“ Who ?”

“Decided to get on with it. Case settled. No time to contact a friend.”

“Friend?”

“Best man. Quite in order to go it alone.”

“Oh, I don’t mind. If you’d told me I’d have shaved. And I dare say you’ll be giving me a present. Usual thing.”

“Of course. And you won’t mind giving presents to the bridesmaids?”

“ What ?”

“I take it they all want the same. A string of pearls,” and Eddie was suddenly transported with boyish joy and began to boom with laughter, just as the organ left off safely grazing sheep and thundered out “The Wedding March.”

The two men were hustled to their feet and arranged alongside the front pew. Fiscal-Smith was handed the ring box and dropped it, and began to crawl about looking down gratings. Edward’s old headmaster, Sir, used to say, “You don’t find many things funny, Feathers. The sense of humour in some boys needs nourishment.” But this, on the wedding day that he had greeted as if going to his death, Eddie suddenly saw as deliriously dotty. He guffawed.

A rustle and a flurry and a gasp, and the bride stood alongside the groom who looked down with a cheerful face maybe to wink at good old Betty and say, “Hello — so you’re here.” Instead his face froze in wonder. A girl he had never seen stood beside him in a cloud of lace and smelling of orchids. She carried lilies. She did not turn to look at him. The face, invisible under the veil, was in shadow.

He could sense the delight of the small congregation — must be Amy and her husband, and Mrs. Baxter and some children and, oh yes, of course, Judge Pastry Willy and his wife Dulcie. Willy was “giving Betty away.” How they were all singing! Singing their heads off: From Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strand . (A paean to the Empire, he had always thought. Whoever had chosen it?)

Someone had put hymn books into the hands of the bride and groom and the best man in his coloured T-shirt, who was singing louder than anyone with the book upside down. (You wouldn’t have expected Fiscal-Smith to know any hymns by heart.) The bride was trilling away, too, reading the hymn book through the veil.