Clifford snorted with laughter. “And it means a female member of the Roman upper classes. I can hardly imagine how it came to be a name at all.”
“Tricia isn’t so bad,” Mark said, seeing her distress. “I think I’ll call you Tricia. Would you like that?”
“Oh yes, much better,” Elizabeth said, cutting off Patty. “And tomorrow we must find you something to wear. Do you have any coupons?”
Patty made herself a dress on Elizabeth’s sewing machine, white cotton, short and very simple. She intended to dye it a more serviceable color later and wear it for a summer dress, but she resisted Elizabeth’s suggestions of buying colored fabric. If there was white fabric available she intended to get married in white. It was the only part of the whole process where she managed to make her own decision stick. Mark, Clifford and Elizabeth had decided everything else. She spent most of her time in the Burchell house looking after the little girl, Rosemary.
“Children are a bore,” Elizabeth said frankly, after she and Patty had bathed Rosemary and put her to bed one night. “You’re not in the family way, are you?”
“No,” Patty said, indignantly. She gathered her courage together. “I wanted to ask you about that.”
“Oh yes, I am, about four months along and due in November if I’ve counted right,” Elizabeth said. “You are a funny girl, making a mystery about that. I hope it’s a boy this time.”
Then she opened the door to the sitting room, where Clifford was reading, and Patty could not explain what she had really wanted to ask.
On her wedding morning she felt awkward in her wedding dress. She looked at herself critically in Elizabeth’s huge Victorian mirror. There was something about the shape of the neck that didn’t flatter her. But what did it matter anyway? She carried pink roses from the Burchells’ garden bound together with a ribbon Rosemary had given her. She wore her tiny gold confirmation cross and remembered her father giving it to her.
Her mother came up from Twickenham for the occasion, wearing an enormous hat that Patty remembered from before the war. She looked ridiculous, but it made Patty feel terribly fond of her. She looked sharply at Patty’s waistline but did not ask, as Elizabeth had, whether she was expecting. Patty tried not to mind the look. What was anyone to think, with them getting married at such speed? Clifford gave Patty away and Cledwyn Jones was best man. Mark’s family did not attend. Marjorie, surprisingly, did.
St. Thomas the Martyr was High Church, and there was incense, as well as candles and splendid vestments. Patty did not mind them on that occasion and in the medieval building. She did find herself resenting the words of the marriage service, St. Paul’s admonitions and her requirement to obey Mark. She promised meekly, and Mark Timothy Anston took Patricia Anne Cowan and they were pronounced man and wife in the sight of God and of the congregation.
Marjorie was the first to kiss Patty afterwards. “I’m on my way to Rome, but I’ve waited to wish you joy,” she said. “I hope you’ll be very happy.” She didn’t sound confident of it.
“Congratulations, Mrs. Anston,” Elizabeth said.
“You congratulate the groom and felicitate the bride,” Patty’s mother said sharply. “Felicitations, Mrs. Anston, congratulations, Mark.”
“Oh, of course, felicitations, Tricia,” Elizabeth said.
Mark was looking over her head. Patty had been thinking that everything would be all right once they were actually married, that it would change everything. Once the ring was on her finger, she realized how idiotic that assumption had been, how it was magical thinking, and how Mark would despise her for it.
They had very little money, but the Burchells had insisted they spend their first night in a hotel—and from what Mark said, Patty assumed that they had paid for it. The Oriel Guest House was right in the middle of Oxford but had little else to be said in its favor. It had threadbare carpets and a pervasive smell of overcooked vegetables. They ate dinner together, awkwardly, talking about the wedding. She felt disloyal laughing with Mark at her mother’s hat, but it had been so absurd. “Mothers are supposed to dream about their daughters’ weddings.”
“This one can’t have been what she dreamed.”
“She would have dreamed my father and my brother there,” Patty said.