The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred P

8

The Wedding


‘Grace, a carnation.’

‘Thank you, Mother,’ answered Grace.

‘Wilfred, a carnation,’ said Mrs Reece with barely concealed dislike. Wilfred accepted without thanks the delicate flower with its fluted petals. Her mother, in a spasm of last-minute enthusiasm, and finally stirred by the occasion of her daughter’s wedding, had cut carnations from the garden and she, Dr Reece and Grace were wearing white corsages. Wilfred had sternly accepted the carnation when Mrs Reece had given it to him and had pinned it to his lapel with what had looked like solemnity, but Grace wasn’t fooled. As she watched him pierce the flower stem and pin it into the heavy serge of his suit, she thought that perhaps he felt like that green stem, stabbed by something sharp and unnatural, until it died. And Wilfred was wearing what looked very much like his funeral director’s suit.

‘A corsage is a pleasant addition for the occasion, Mrs Reece,’ commented Dr Reece.

Grace adjusted the shoulder of her dress. Her yellow dress – bright and optimistic, sunny even – had been deemed appropriate by her mother. Nor did her mother consider the occasion of Grace’s shotgun wedding a reason for a new dress, not under these circumstances; all she needed was a cheap, homemade veil. Her mother would have liked to have seen her married in a sackcloth and ashes and crawl penitently along the aisle on her knees. Only it wasn’t an aisle, it was an office in which she was getting married to Wilfred, with few guests, no gifts and no celebration because there was precious little to celebrate. And Wilfred was intimidating as he stood ramrod straight: it was clear that his will had brought him here and not his heart

‘If the guests could come through in half a moment,’ announced the office clerk cheerily, popping her head round the door of the register office.

‘Stand up properly,’ her mother hissed. Grace stood up and pulled her stomach in.

Wilfred’s da patted his son’s arm. Grace, standing next to Wilfred in his top hat and tails, pondered on how upright they must look as a couple. We are not upright, she thought to herself, but it matters that we look as if we are.

The clerk, Mrs Pritchard of Sheep Street, doing the job of master of ceremonies, announced, ‘Doctor and Mrs Reece, Mr Price Senior, please enter the register office now.’

‘All right, son?’ Wilfred’s da said as the guests moved forward.

Wilfred and Grace were alone in the wood-panelled auditorium. Wilfred stood as if all the hope in the world had deserted him. A strange sound came from his stomach. Grace smiled apologetically but Wilfred looked thunderous. She unclipped her bracelet, dropping it in her bag; she felt overdressed as if she was making too much of the occasion by wearing it. Wilfred was perspiring and looked as if there was a violent struggle taking place within him, something unspoken and unformed fighting for consciousness and voice. She smoothed the pleats of her dress and noticed that the thin laces of Wilfred shoes were knotted very tightly.

‘It won’t take long,’ she said brightly. She wondered if she might vomit everywhere, all down his suit and splatter his shoes. She swallowed hard. From behind the door, some music played.

‘It’s hot for a suit,’ she said, feeling stupid the moment she said it.

‘The groom, please, in you come!’ said the registrar chirpily, popping her head round the door.



The room, when she entered, was small, crowded with chairs and a table, but there was still an emptiness within it. Her father turned back and smiled formally to see her come in. Wilfred was standing by the table, waiting for Grace. Grace walked towards him with as little aplomb as possible, passing her parents, her father standing with his hands behind his back, like a sentinel of righteous living. Wilfred looked enraged in his top hat and tails, and like a Greek god with a hidden thunderbolt who wanted to destroy the world. Grace smiled appeasingly and breathed in.

‘Move in a little,’ the registrar told Grace, who stepped sideways lightly, almost skipping, her dress flaring as she moved. Wilfred looked down at his hands while Grace waited politely for the registrar to speak. She had her answers ready.

‘Do you take this man, Wilfred Aubrey Price …’ The registrar began reciting, finishing with ‘… until death us do part?’ Grace agreed, said yes; it was easy to promise, she liked Wilfred. This would do. Wilfred said his vows gruffly. Though she stood next to him she did not feel close to him: he had – she could tell – armoured himself with rage and hate and unwillingness.

‘You may kiss the bride!’ said the registrar with a levity. The clerk looked up, watching everything, her eyes glittering with excitement. Grace’s pearls clacked as she removed her veil. Wilfred kissed her dryly with a stern face, as one might kiss the dead, as if kissing her was against life and possibly dangerous to one’s health.

‘Just a few papers to sign and it’s all written in stone,’ said the clerk, and she lifted the needle of the gramophone arm and placed it on the disc. ‘Shall I play the gramophone music?’ she mouthed to Mrs Reece.

‘That’s enough,’ said Mrs Reece, putting her hand to her diaphragm.

To Grace the wedding ceremony felt like a stiff ballet, a slow dance without music, in which their fates were sealed. She gave Wilfred a relieved smile and breathed out. She was a married woman. It was done.

‘Mr Price, if you would like to come back to the house to join us, we have some refreshments,’ offered Dr Reece.

‘Oh, that would be lovely,’ Wilfred’s da replied, his voice catching with feeling.

Grace smiled encouragingly at Wilfred, but doubted he would feel encouraged. She knew him to be hurt. Wilfred was like a stone monument who wouldn’t dance in this pas de deux, wouldn’t move but stood lifeless, like a prop. But at least some of it was all right now. And some violence, something dark she had once experienced, that she would never let herself think of again, would soon be glossed over, forgotten and ignored for ever. Relief flooded and opened her face.



The wedding breakfast that afternoon was the first time in a week her mother hadn’t slammed the crockery on the table; propriety in front of guests wouldn’t let her, and the welcome confusion of tea and cake had conferred a certain decency on the day.

During the wedding breakfast, Grace was complimented by Wilfred’s father on the quality of the honey.

‘Is this the honey from your bees? It’s very sweet, now. And rich.’ He was wearing what was clearly his best suit. ‘Do you have a lot of lavender in your garden?’ he asked. ‘Is that the reason why?’

Grace replied that they had, that they were mature plants now.

‘Bees like lavender, can’t keep them off it. And lavender makes good honey,’ Wilfred’s da added, smiling and looking round at the others.

Grace felt her face slightly flush with withheld tears. These were the first genuinely kind words she had heard all day. Wilfred, of course, had vowed to cherish her – worship her even – but his words had failed to move her. They were words without feeling – words he said but didn’t mean. Her mother, as well, had smiled and almost gushed since the marriage – she had even offered everyone a Meltis Duchess of York Assorted Chocolate. She was smiling because she was the mother of the bride and that was what social correctness expected. Grace knew she was privately enraged. The register office was not St Andrew’s Church. A yellow dress was not a bridal gown and she, her parents and Wilfred’s father did not constitute a wedding party. No, Grace knew that for her mother, it had all gone far, far too wrong.

But Wilfred’s father – that quite watchful gravedigger – spoke gently. He had the humility of the broken. And he knew, surely, that his son was an unwilling groom. Whatever he knew, Grace thought to herself, he understood that she was hurting; he saw that and he reached out with kindness. It had been a small gesture but a powerful one to Grace after these recent loveless, hopeless months.



Grace stood outside what was now their bedroom. She had chosen to wear her favourite white nightdress. It reached almost to her toes and the cotton was fluffy. She had had it several years now and imagined it would last almost her lifetime. And it was demure. She knocked on the door very lightly and waited. There was no answer from inside the room.

She knocked on the door again then pushed it open and entered quickly. She stood by the door and wondered why Wilfred had married her earlier in the day. She knew why. He had been her fiancée – everyone in Narberth knew that. So everybody knew, or would know by now, he had to be the reason why she was in the condition she was in. If he hadn’t married her, had refused, he would have had absolutely nothing – they both knew that. No one would have used his funeral business again: to use the services of a man like that when there was a death in the family, people just wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be respectable. He would no longer be a man around town and that was what Wilfred wanted to be. He would be ruined. And the gossip would last for generations, definitely three, at least four. It would probably take five generations before people in Narberth no longer talked about Wilfred Price.

Grace unclasped her pearl necklace and took off her dressing-gown, hung it on the hook behind the door and sat nervously on the bed. It had been a long day, too intense, and now this, her wedding bed, the honeymoon, such as it was. The first night. She smoothed her nightie down over her arms then lay down self-consciously and pulled the blankets over herself. This was the first time she had slept in the attic. Madoc’s room with its bigger bed had been allotted to them because her mother decreed it was more suitable than Grace’s childhood bedroom.

Grace was now on the left side of the bed, Wilfred on the right, nearest the door. The blankets fell into the gap between them. It was very strange to be in bed with another person. Grace didn’t know what to do. She knew what was supposed to happen on a wedding night, but that was the wedding night of a wedding that the bride and groom had wanted to be at. This is what the first night is like, she thought, of a married person who doesn’t want to be married. Suddenly she saw the brown wallpaper but she quickly cut the memory from her mind.

Grace lay awake. She knew Wilfred was awake too, both of them staring at the white ceiling. And out of the corner of her eye, she saw Wilfred wipe a tear from his face.



Wilfred had never been in bed with a woman before. He had thought about it, imagined that it would be very cosy. Not only cosy; he had hoped it might be something more than that. Perhaps that is what a loved and wanted wife gave to a man: sanctuary from the harshness of being male – but this iron bed wasn’t a sanctuary. People who were sleeping in the desert in Arabia with a stone for a pillow were right now more comfortable than he was. And getting a better night’s sleep. The bed was an altercation of a wedding bed in an austere room. Did he have an acrimonious marriage? There were many A words that applied to his marriage.

Wilfred lay stock-still. To take his mind off things he began thinking about his work. He was surprised when he began to tot up how many funerals he must have been to – at least a hundred – and in each and every one of them he had maintained what Mr Ogmore Auden had called ‘a composed and serious demeanour’. Even when he was only fourteen, when he began his apprenticeship and was very excited by his prospects, he’d still just about behaved in a sober manner around the departed.

Sometimes it had been hard – what young man doesn’t want to fool around sometimes? Nevertheless he’d managed to stay solemn, even in 1922 when Narberth won the Rugby Cup, or when they’d done a funeral the day before Narberth carnival, even when the lisping vicar from Princes Gate gave the peroration and stroked the lectern with his hand the whole time; Wilfred had still maintained the proper demeanour, though he had been desperate to laugh. But today he had felt more desolate and more burdened than he had ever done in any funeral he had attended, and this, his own wedding day. His one and only wedding day. Wilfred’s heart was full of misery.

That morning he had barely been able to get out of bed; his legs had felt like lead. He almost couldn’t be bothered to shave. He didn’t eat breakfast. But he’d been at the register office at five to two as Dr Reece had told him to be – commanded him to be, more like. Dr Reece was a bully, Wilfred thought. He had married Grace because her father was a horrible, hectoring, browbeating bully. If he hadn’t been so intimidating Wilfred might have been able to explain. Why didn’t people listen to one another? Wilfred thought hotly. Why didn’t they just listen! If people could explain themselves, then there could be understanding. But no, some people – quite a lot of people even, Wilfred thought – were bullies. They wanted other people to do what they wanted them to do, and if they had the power, like Dr Reece did, then sometimes they used that power, bossed people around and messed up their lives. It was appalling. It was audacious. It was an abomination. Wilfred struggled to find the words, big, powerful words that would express the big, powerful feelings he had now that he felt so small and powerless over his own life. Marry Grace! Marry Grace. He had. Now they were in bed together. What had Dr Reece said? ‘You’ve made your bed. Now you lie in it.’



The kitchen was smoky and smelled of fried food. Wilfred had come home for breakfast every day of his married life so far, and today Wilfred’s father had cooked his son’s favourite meal: fried eggs and cockles, with bacon and sausages, and slices of fried potato they called Specials. Wilfred had loved Specials since he was a tiny boy and his Auntie Blodwen had taught his father how to cook them: ‘Peel the new tyatas, slice them into thick circles,’ Auntie Blodwen instructed, ‘then fry them in a lump of lard till they’re golden brown. That’ll put some fat on the boy. He’s got legs on him like a flamingo.’ His father eventually mastered the recipe and, ever since, Wilfred and his da had eaten Specials every Sunday morning, on their birthdays, after a night at the graveyard or whenever they needed strengthening.

‘Eat up, Wilfred, lad,’ his da encouraged, but Wilfred was pushing the black pudding around his plate, his body slumped, his head resting in his hands. He wasn’t even reading the Undertaker’s Journal in front of him.

‘Wilf, you’ll be a bag of bones if you don’t eat. And no good to anyone. You’ll make yourself ill, now.’ Wilfred’s da could have added, ‘Think of your wife,’ but he knew well enough that thinking about his wife was the reason Wilfred couldn’t eat.

‘Don’t you want to eat breakfast at the Reeces’?’ his da asked gently. ‘Mrs Reece is a tidy cook.’ Wilfred pushed the leftover Specials to the side of his plate.

This was the first time Wilfred’s da had ever known his son not to speak. Wilfred liked to talk, always about his work. He could talk for Narberth, could Wilfred. If it wasn’t making chitchat about his funerals he was wanting a conversation about the wallpaper shop and paper-hanging. Wilfred was even more of a talker since he’d been reading the dictionary every day, had even more to say for himself. What was that he’d said to him now the other day? He wanted to ‘augment’ the funeral business with a wallpaper shop. Augment, by damn. Well, there wasn’t much augmenting going on for Wilfred now, his da thought, whatever augmenting was.

Wilfred would have to say something soon, it was his way. Wilfred’s da knew his son was a thoughtful young man who was eager for his life to happen; no, he wouldn’t be able to keep quiet for long.

‘Eat up, boyo,’ his da said again. ‘There’s a good lad.’



Wilfred had been in his workshop for the last four days. He’d started making the coffin the day after the wedding even though it was the Sabbath and the day of rest. It was a standard size of 28-inch width and 84-inch length for a large man, around 6 foot and 12 stone, about the same size as himself. Not that there was anyone specific he could think of who might die soon, but he would keep the casket ready and waiting for one of the whiskery old men of Narberth to kick the bucket. It would save him making one in a rush.

‘You’ve been in that workshop for days, Wilfred,’ his da had said. ‘What are you doing in there? Anyone would think you were making a coffin for Tutankhamun.’

He was filling time, staying in his workshop because it was familiar, safe, the place where he had spent the last seven years working. He looked around him – the sawing had created a lot of sawdust, which lay like a thick yellow blanket on the tins of varnish, over the boxes of coffin handles, his dictionary and in the furrow of his workbench where he kept his tools. He should sweep, but what was the point of making the workshop spick and span when he felt so dejected and old, as if life itself was over? The tin dustpan and brush in the corner remained unused. He remembered that Mr Ogmore Auden had been clear:

‘Sweep up, boyo. Sweep as if your life depends on it.’

‘Yes, Mr Auden,’ Wilfred would reply immediately and dutifully. Indeed, sweeping the workshop floorboards had been his very first task on that first awe-inspiring day of his apprenticeship.

‘Brush up that sawdust,’ Mr Auden had said on that first morning. ‘And you’ll be sweeping up too, every day, at least three times a day, for the next four years.’

Mr Auden hadn’t been kidding. In the first year Wilfred thought all he was ever going to learn was how to use a dustpan and brush, and that the nearest he’d ever get to an actual corpse was getting down on his hands and knees and sweeping up the shavings beneath a coffin. But as Wilfred proved himself capable and assiduous at keeping the floorboards spotless, Mr Auden responded by giving him more challenging tasks until Wilfred came to understand that the more thoroughly he swept, the more real work Mr Auden would give him. With time, Wilfred began what he thought of as his proper apprenticeship, beginning with how to identify wood by colour, from white and pale yellow to red, purple and black, and by open or closed grain, and also by pattern – the stripes, the circles, the waves and the curls, ripples and eyes. He learned that the preparation he needed to be a funeral director depended on how enthusiastically and humbly he swept the floor.

‘One spark on all that sawdust and we’ll be up in flames – indeed, in-double-deed. We purvey other people’s funerals, Wilfred, not arrange our own. You sweep up those wood chippings, there’s a good lad, and mind you do it properly now. No cheating or we’ll all be down the crematorium and it won’t be me who’ll be driving the hearse.’

‘Yes, Mr Auden,’ Wilfred had said. ‘Yes, Mr Auden,’ were the words he said most frequently over those four years of his apprenticeship, and as Wilfred’s respect for and obedience to Mr Ogmore Auden grew, the more he meant it when he said, ‘Yes, Mr Auden.’

Wilfred looked around his workshop. There was at least an inch of sawdust and chippings on the pile of old copies of the Weekly News and he knew that Mr Auden would be appalled.

‘What are you doing here!’ Wilfred imagined him exclaiming. ‘Are you trying to kill us all? Hell’s bells, Wilfred. This’ll go up in a puff of smoke, just like that.’ Wilfred could hear Mr Auden click his fingers.

Wilfred didn’t care. A quick fire, hot flames, death from the smoke; it wouldn’t matter to him now. He’d sweep up the dust, perhaps tomorrow.

He heard Mr Ogmore Auden again: ‘A man needs something to look forward to.’ Mr Auden had always been clear on that. ‘Whatever happens, Wilfred, have a plan. Might not work out – poor bugger in the back there had a plan’ – they had been on their way to a funeral when his apprentice-master had delivered the homily – ‘but you’ve got to have something to aim for, especially when things turn out unexpectedly, as they do.’

Wilfred knew he would keep going. Perhaps he’d keep reading the dictionary, though the last definition he’d read was Apillera: a pictorial Peruvian wall decoration stitched on to sacking backcloth – that wasn’t a very useful word. Maybe one day he would even finish turning the parlour into a wallpaper shop. But he couldn’t imagine ever feeling happy again. Would he ever adjust, get used to his new life? He brushed the dust off a wooden chair with the side of his hand and sat down. He’d spend his days in the workshop, and eat at home with his da as he had always done. At night he’d sleep at Dr Reece’s house. Life would go on, he’d go on, and then one day he, too, would be laid out here in his own workshop, in a coffin no doubt of his own making, and then this dreadful mess would be over



For two weeks now Wilfred had clung to the very edge of the bed on what had become his side, the side by the door. He slept curled up. Grace hadn’t imagined he would be so unhappy that he would stay hunched up all night long; his legs tucked together, his hands held close to his broad chest. She had always thought of Wilfred as a confident young man about Narberth, able to ask for what he wanted. After all, he had asked her to marry him – he’d been confident and robust then. And he’d been almost brutal when he’d stated – or more like blurted out – that he didn’t want to marry her, that day when they’d been standing in the rain outside the Angel Inn. Grace had thought Wilfred was strong and quite unafraid to speak his mind. But in the dark, here, now, he lay tight, making himself smaller than he was.

Lying in bed, awake and sleepless, she thought back to a vague memory of Wilfred as a young boy, running around the town moor, playing cricket on the cricket field with a band of boys, including Madoc and Sidney. That was a long time ago. She’d forgotten about the young Wilfred. But glancing at him, clasped, restrained, locked in his own world, she was reminded of him when he was much younger.

He was, she thought, resolute, granite-like in his determination to sleep alone and untouched in this double bed under the eaves of the attic. He acted as if she wasn’t there. And day-by-day, as she got almost imperceptibly larger, he seemed to be getting smaller and tighter, almost as if he was diminishing. He was thinner than he’d been a fortnight ago, his neck was smaller and his face less square. Grace hadn’t seen him smile or heard him laugh, nor had he spoken to her since he’d pronounced his wedding vows, promising to stay with her until he died. It looked as if he was beginning to die already.

Did people die, rather than stay married, Grace wondered, actually let themselves fade away rather than live in wedlock? She had got married for the opposite reason: to stay alive. But Wilfred hadn’t fought, hadn’t said, ‘No, I do not take this woman, Grace Amelia Reece, as my lawful, wedded wife. I do not love her. I will not cherish her until death us do part.’ Wilfred had not spoken the truth at their wedding. He had lied, Grace realized. All his vows were a lie. He didn’t fight the vows and he didn’t fight the wedding because he knew he wouldn’t win, and now, here in their marriage bed, he was lying down as if some part of him was dying. Grace didn’t want him to die. Grace had wanted to live, but she didn’t want Wilfred to die in her place.

She reached out her hand across the bed, across the gap between them that had been maintained each and every night for the fourteen nights of the marriage, and touched his arm, leaving her hand there for a few seconds; it was a touch devoid of sexuality or passion, desire or wanting. It was the touch of one broken person reaching out, in recognition, to another.



Wilfred was curled up on his side, looking at the bedroom door. Neither of them had moved into the middle of the bed. This is what they must mean by a no man’s land, Wilfred thought, a land no man wants to go into. In a normal marriage, the centre of the bed was where the coupling – the marriage – would take place, the space into which the man would invite the woman. Eventually, over years, the weight of both of their bodies caused the bed, its springs and lattices, to squeak and sigh as if it were aching along with the couple’s bodies. In the middle of the bed the marriage was made. But not in this bed. This was Dr and Mrs Reece’s old bed in Grace’s brother’s old room in Dr and Mrs Reece’s house at 32 High Street, Narberth, Pembrokeshire. That’s whose bed it was. Wilfred didn’t think of it as his wedding bed.

Wilfred had once kissed Grace under the jasmine in the wood, before it flowered and when it was still in bud, and he had put his hand up her skirt and on to the velvety, fleshy pad of her thigh – and that had been the extent of it, that Good Friday, a few months back. He knew she would never let him touch her breasts, so, with some courage he had stooped to put his hand under her petticoat and along the ridge of her thigh. There she’d stopped him, put her fingers over his; her hand was over the cotton, and his hand was under it. Wilfred had understood, pulled his hand away and concentrated on touching her lip with his tongue. The embrace had taken minutes and it felt to Wilfred now as if in those minutes he had spent the whole of the rest of his life.

But I didn’t do anything, Wilfred wanted to say. He hadn’t done anything, had he? He had thought about it, he remembered that quite clearly. But that wasn’t the same as actually doing anything. Had he? He had touched her leg, that time. Perhaps Grace had sat on a toilet seat. But everything was spotless in Mrs Reece’s house. Wilfred was at a loss. He didn’t know about these things, no one spoke plainly about them and there were no books that he knew of, not in Narberth. There were rumours that contradicted and left him confused and unclear. He’d kissed her, once, when they went for a walk – had that been it? No. You couldn’t make a girl pregnant from kissing her – that was a load of old nonsense, surely? I’m innocent, he thought. But, he realized, Grace wasn’t.

But he hadn’t done that, hadn’t put himself there. Good God! If women got pregnant that easily, from men merely touching their legs, well, there would be babies everywhere and there would be millions, billions, of people in the world. Wilfred didn’t know much about these things but he guessed that what he used to hear in the Narberth Rugby Football Club bar was just about right, if a bit exaggerated. The rugby lads liked to exaggerate, especially when they had had a few pints, but he suspected they spoke something near the truth. A man could learn all he needed to know about women if he went to the Narberth Rugby Football Club bar for a drink and listened.

Wilfred felt hot, almost fetid, between the flannelette sheets and beneath the weight of the heavy, woollen blankets. There was even an eiderdown on top. It looked like Mrs Reece had sewn it from exact triangles cut from her family’s old clothes. Wilfred felt smothered. He wanted to kick away the bedding and the blankets.

It was as Wilfred was lying there perspiring, worrying, that he felt Grace’s hand rest on his forearm. It shocked him. He had never expected her to touch him; he didn’t want it, crimped himself up to the edge of the mattress every night to avoid it. It had been unthinkable that Grace would touch him. Now her touch felt like a taboo being broken. Didn’t she know that they weren’t married, not really? That he didn’t even want to be married? Didn’t they both know – and they were the only two people who did – that it wasn’t him? Well, another man knew, whoever he was. And everyone else had assumed it was him because he was married to her, but Wilfred and Grace alone knew. Between them, they knew.

Grace, Wilfred had seen out of the corner of his eye, was wearing a long white nightdress. She had worn that bloody yellow dress on their wedding day. Both the nightdress and the dress left Wilfred cold. She had to wear something though, he supposed. Not that she’d worn any clothes with somebody! Wilfred was still shocked. She’d taken off all her clothes with someone. That was certain. But what Wilfred didn’t like to think about, couldn’t think about, lying in the double bed in the stuffy attic of Dr and Mrs Reece’s house, what he couldn’t even contemplate, because he knew it would cause him more pain than he could bear, was the thought of Flora.