four proud parents took up their positions, Simcocks together, Rodenhursts together.
‘Anything you ever want in the ironmongery line, Laurence,’ said Ted. ‘Custom-built door knockers, personalized coal scuttles, you name it, I’ll give it at cost price.’
‘Well well!’ said Laurence. ‘It seems that this union can be of great benefit to our family, Liz!’
Liz and Ted both gave Laurence sharp looks. Rita gave Ted a furious look. Laurence’s smooth face remained innocent of expression.
‘OK,’ said Nigel Thick. ‘Big smiles. Happiest day of your life.’
They all smiled, with varying degrees of artificiality and success.
‘Terrific,’ lied Nigel Thick.
‘In fact, Ted,’ said Liz, ‘we already have one of your companion sets in our drawing room.’
‘Oh! In your “drawing room”! Well well!’ said Ted. He added, somewhat archly: ‘I trust it’s giving satisfactory service.’
‘Actually the tongs have buckled,’ said Laurence.
‘OK,’ said Nigel Thick. ‘Nice dignified one. Nice and solemn. Four pillars of local society, linked by wedlock.’
They found being dignified and solemn easier than smiling.
‘Great! Tremendous! Magnificent!’
‘I’ll bring you a replacement,’ said Ted. ‘Gratis. Have no fear.’
‘Ted!’ hissed Rita. ‘Don’t talk business at functions. Mr Rodenhurst doesn’t talk about dental appointments at functions.’
‘OK,’ said the future Barry Precious classlessly. ‘Now change partners. Symbolize that you’re all one big happy family.’
The two couples changed places.
‘Actually, I think you’re both due for a check-up,’ said Laurence smoothly, his face a mask. ‘I’ll get my girl to send you one of our cards.’
‘OK,’ said Nigel Thick. ‘Arms round each other. Nice and friendly. No inhibitions.’
Liz’s arm went round Ted, and he felt his bottom being stroked. Had he imagined it? No! There it was again, and a quick playful nip. He was terrified. Of course his bottom, by its very nature, was round the back, out of sight of people he was facing, but still …! Liz’s arm was round his waist now. One finger stroked him very gently. It was too small a gesture to be seen by the assembled guests. But still …! He could feel the sweat running down his back.
Laurence put his arm round Rita with fastidious distaste. He looked like the leader of a nation embracing the wife of a hated rival at the end of a conference at which only a meaningless, bland communiqué had been issued.
‘Relax!’ said Nigel Thick. ‘Let it all hang out.’
Laurence regarded this phrase with extreme distaste. He found it impossible to comply but, for the sake of Jenny and social decorum, he did manage to make a bit of it almost hang out. Rita smiled like the Queen being offered sheeps’ eyes at a Bedouin banquet. Ted and Liz were more successful.
‘Great! Terrific! Fantabulous! Marvellous! OK. Happy couple back in, with the two brothers.’
A robin watched beadily from its vantage point on a nearby gravestone as the four proud parents moved away. Ted gave Liz a warning look. Laurence noticed it, but Rita didn’t. She was too busy indicating to Elvis that he was to smile. He made a wry face at her.
Elvis Simcock was twenty-four. He was taller, more self-possessed and wilder than his brother, and he was the only man at the wedding not wearing a suit, though he could have looked quite smart in his red cord jacket and tight brown trousers if he’d wanted to.
Simon Rodenhurst, Jenny’s older brother, who was twenty-three, was well dressed in a rather anonymous way, a provincial professional young man who had never felt any urge to rebel. He worked for the estate agents, Trellis, Trellis, Openshaw and Finch. His face had an immature, unformed look, as if it were waiting for his personality to be delivered.
‘Elvis?’ said Jenny. ‘Have you met my brother Simon?’
‘No. That’s one of the many pleasures I’ve missed out on so far,’ said Elvis Simcock, and his ‘hello’ to Simon Rodenhurst was barely more than a grunt.
‘OK. Big smiles. Bags of brotherly love,’ said Nigel Thick.
Paul’s and Jenny’s smiles were a bit strained. Simon’s was perfectly judged. The cynical Elvis’s was grotesque, way over the top, a grinning fiend.
‘Amazing!’ said Nigel Thick, with more than his customary accuracy. He took pictures of the four proud parents with the happy couple, of the happy couple with the two bridesmaids, of the two bridesmaids together, of the very young bridesmaid on her own and therefore also inevitably of the very fat bridesmaid on her own, of the bride on her own and therefore also inevitably of the groom on his own, of the proud parents and the happy couple with Rita’s parents. Ted’s parents and Laurence’s parents were dead, and Liz’s widowed mother had remarried, lived in South Africa, and had been advised by her doctor not to travel.
Finally, Nigel Thick took pictures of all the guests, clustered round the great doorway in an amorphous throng. This picture offended his artistic sensibilities, but pleased his commercial instincts. It was ghastly, but everyone in it would buy a copy.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Say cheese.’
‘Cheese,’ said everybody except Laurence and Ted. Laurence said nothing. Ted said ‘fromage’. There was a little laughter, but not enough.
‘Great!’ said the carefully classless Nigel Thick. ‘Tremendous. Terrific. Marvellous. Fantastic. Fantabulous.’
The less-favoured guests began to move away, through narrow, unlovely streets of domestic brick, municipal stone and financial concrete, towards the drizzle-stained multistorey car park, which sat on the town like a stranded, truncated liner. On their left, in the bus station, laden shoppers clambered onto local buses bound for Bradeley Bottom, Upper Mill and Knapperley. Servicemen and girls with green hair sat in half-empty buses bound for York, Leeds, Wakefield, Goole, Doncaster, Wetherby, Selby and Hull. Beyond the bus station, in the cattle market, the last few cattle were waiting to be sold, like unattractive boy evacuees left till last in church halls. Old chip bags and empty packets of salt and vinegar-flavoured crisps bowled along the pavements in the fresh breeze. The town smelt of salt and vinegar and stale beer. The wedding guests felt out of place, and hurried to their cars.
The close relatives drifted slowly along the broad path between the graves, towards Tannergate, where shoppers gawped, and the beribboned limousines waited.
‘Made an assignation with him yet?’ said Laurence Rodenhurst under his breath.
‘What?’ said his wife Liz. ‘With whom?’
‘“With whom?” she says, grammatical even under attack. With the toasting fork tycoon. The knight of the companion set. Well, he’s your type, isn’t he? He has that rough, coarse quality that you regularly
