The rest of the term passed quickly. The other staff members gave her a leaving party, where she felt awkward and uncomfortable at their jokes. She did not hear from Mark during this time, neither by telephone, which she did not expect, nor by mail. She wrote and told him the train she would be taking but had no reply.
On the day before she left there was an envelope in her pigeonhole and her heart rose, only to fall when she found it was a letter from Marjorie, inviting her to join her on a trip to Rome. She wrote back at once, explaining and inviting Marjorie to the wedding “which will be in Oxford next week, I’ll let you know the details if there’s any chance you can come.”
It took all day to travel between Penzance and Oxford. There was a fine damp mist as she set off, and as the train rattled its way the length of Cornwall and then through Devon, she came to watery sunshine, and then once past Newton Abbott it unfolded into a beautiful day. She alternated between panic and exhilaration. She was to be married to Mark, and the clatter of the train seemed to sing this as a refrain “married to Mark, married to Mark.”
She changed in Bristol Temple Meads and bought a pallid sausage roll at the station buffet which she could hardly eat despite her hunger. She was afraid—of Mark, who had been so strange on the telephone and so silent since, of the new life she was plunging into, of marriage, and most of all of her wedding night. Everything she knew about sex came from literature and now came back to her—Shakespeare’s bawdy, Roderick Random, D. H. Lawrence, Brave New World. She wondered whether Malthusian belts existed in real life and where they could be obtained. Sex seemed to have an aura of the eighteenth century and the nineteen-twenties, of beauty patches and the Charleston. She stared out of the window at hay stooks in meadows as the train drew closer to Oxford, and thought of Andrew Marvell, painfully aware that she didn’t know what to do in bed. “A hundred years would go to praise thy lips and on thy forehead gaze. A hundred thousand for each breast…” Her own breasts were small. Would Mark be disappointed? “Let us roll all our strength and all our sweetness up into one ball…” But what did it mean, literally? She would have shrunk from any conversation with her mother on the subject, but she wished she had a married friend who might have advised her. What would Mark expect? She took one of his old letters from her handbag and re-read it and was comforted. His tone was so confident, so definite, and after all it was to her that he chose to address these intimate reflections.
It was late afternoon by the time she disembarked at Oxford. Mark wasn’t on the platform, and her heart sank. She telephoned him in his lodgings. He still sounded strange and distraught. “You came, then,” he said. “I wasn’t sure.”
“You can trust me to do what I say I will do,” she said.
He turned up at the station in half an hour, in a car borrowed from friends. He did not kiss her or embrace her as she had half hoped and half feared. He barely seemed to look her in the eye. She wondered if she had made a terrible mistake. “You’re going to stay with the Burchells for the next few days until we can be married on Wednesday. It’s extremely good of them and I hope you’ll be grateful.”
For a moment Patty resented his assumption that she needed to be told how to behave. Then she forgave him. He was under a strain, of course.
“Wednesday? I’ll write to my mother.”
“I suppose you have to.”
“What church?”
“St. Thomas the Martyr, in Osney.”
Elizabeth Burchell treated the entire thing as a joke. The only thing she took seriously was Mark’s Third, which she saw as tragic. “We’ll have to try to do something with him,” she said briskly. She was several years older than Mark and Patty, a philosopher with published books. Patty knew her only slightly. Her husband, Clifford, was a Classicist at Magdalen. They had a small daughter who seemed perpetually grubby and tearful.
Over gray sausages and watery cabbage she returned to the theme of Mark’s failure and future. Clifford had apparently found Mark a teaching job at a boys’ school in Grantham. “Until we can find something better,” he said.
“You know how much I appreciate it,” Mark said.
Patty would have appreciated being consulted as to where she would live, but she supposed there had hardly been time. The three of them clearly knew each other well and were well into making plans. Patty felt like a child, with her future being decided for her. This feeling intensified when after dinner Elizabeth, who had declined help, served watery coffee and stared at her over the cup. “You’re not a bad little thing, but I positively can’t call you Patty,” she said. “It makes you sound like a little pie.”
Patty looked to Mark for help, but he was laughing with the others and did not see it. “My full name is Patricia if you prefer that,” Patty said, with what dignity she could manage.
“That sounds like a girl who rides to hounds,” Elizabeth said.