Reader, I Married Him. Tracy Chevalier

       TESSA HADLEY

      IT WAS NEVER GOING to be an ordinary kind of wedding. My mother didn’t do anything ordinary. She would marry Patrick at the summer solstice; it would all take place on the smallholding where we lived, in Pembrokeshire. My parents had bought the place in the seventies from an old couple, Welsh-speaking and chapel-going. Family and friends were coming from all over; all our Pembrokeshire friends would be there, and those of our neighbours who were still our friends: some of them didn’t like the way we lived. My mother had dreamed up a wedding ceremony with plenty of drama. She and Patrick would drink Fen’s home-made mead from a special cup, then smash it; the clinching moment would come when they got to take off all their clothes at sunset and immerse themselves in the pond while everyone sang – Fen would wave myrtle branches over them and pronounce them man and wife. Mum had spent hours puzzling over her notebook, trying to devise the right form of words for her vow. She could whisper to horses (she really could, that wasn’t just hokum, I’ve seen her quieting a berserk half-broken young gelding when grown men wouldn’t go near it), but she struggled sometimes to find the right words for things.

      Patrick wasn’t my father, needless to say. My father was long gone: from the smallholding and from west Wales and from the lifestyle. Dad had short hair now; he worked for an insurance company and voted for Mrs Thatcher. From time to time I went to stay with him and my stepmother, and I thought of those weeks in High Barnet as a tranquil escape, the way other people enjoyed a holiday in the country: with their central heating, and their kitchen with its food processor and waste-disposal unit, and the long empty days while they were both out at work, when I tried on all her trim little dresses and her make-up. I never mentioned Mrs Thatcher when I got back to Wales. I didn’t like her politics any more than the others did, but I loved my dad. I didn’t want to encourage the way everyone gloated, pretending to be shocked and disappointed by how he’d gone over to the dark side.

      Patrick wasn’t the father of my two half-siblings, Eithne and Rowan, either. Their dad was Lawrence, and he was still very much in our lives, lived a mile down the road – only he’d left Mum around the time Rowan was starting school, went off with Nancy Withers. And on the rebound Mum had had a fling with Fen, who was her best friend’s husband. But that was all over now and Patrick was the love of her life and someone new from outside our set; all those people from her past – Lawrence and Nancy and Fen and Sue and all the others, though not my dad or my stepmother – would be at her wedding because that was the kind of party they all liked best, where everyone had a history with everyone else, and anything might happen, and there was opportunity for plenty of pouring out their hearts to one another and dancing and pairing up in the wrong pairs, while the dope and the drink and the mushroom-brew kept everything lubricated and crazy. Meanwhile, the ragged gang of their kids would be running wild around the place in the dark, wilder even than their parents dreamed, stealing Fen’s disgusting mead and spying on what they never should have seen – and one of them would almost inevitably break an arm, or set fire to a tent, or nearly drown. (Once, at a different party, one of the children really did drown, but that’s another story.)

      And I wouldn’t know what to do with myself, because at seventeen I was too old to run with the kids, yet I was still holding back – too wary and angry and sceptical – from joining in with the adults. I was pretty much angry about everything, around that time. My mother came draping herself over my shoulders where I was trying to learn about photosynthesis out of the textbook for my Biology A level. “Janey, precious-heart, help me with this wretched vow thing, I can’t get it right. You’re the one who’s clever with words. What should I say? I’ve put ‘I promise to worship the loving man in you,’ but then I have this picture of Patrick flinging it back at me if ever anything went wrong. Because of course I know what can happen, I know about men, I’m not going into this with my eyes closed.”

      “Mum, get off,” I said, trying to ease myself out from under her. “I can’t possibly make up your wedding vows. It’s inappropriate.”

      “You’re such an old stick-in-the-mud,” she said fondly, squeezing my shoulders tightly and kissing the top of my head, her auburn hair flopping down on to the page. Her hair is like Elizabeth Siddal’s in Rossetti’s paintings and she wears it either loose or in a kind of rope wrapped around her head, and actually her looks are like Elizabeth Siddal’s too, and she wears the same drapey kind of clothes. But I was the one who knew who Elizabeth Siddal was, and that Rossetti buried her with a book of his poems and then dug her up again to get them back; I knew all about the Pre-Raphaelites and Rossetti and Burne-Jones and the rest, and I didn’t even like them all that much. That was the way life was divided up between me and my mother. I knew about things, and she was beautiful.

      I couldn’t imagine Patrick flinging anything back at anyone. Patrick had the sweetest temperament. He was much younger than Mum, only twenty-six, closer to my age than hers, and he was loose-limbed with messy pale hair, and sleepy grey eyes as though everything in his life had been a dream until he woke up and saw my mother – in the wholefood cooperative in the village, as it happened, when they both reached out for a paper sack of muesli base at the same moment. He’d come out to west Wales to stay for free in a friend’s family’s holiday home for a couple of months, to finish his PhD thesis on the theology of Julian of Norwich (I knew who she was too). He’d run out of grant money and told us he’d been living for weeks on end on nothing much but apples and muesli base. “It’s very filling,” he said cheerfully. Mum thought he was otherworldly like the Celtic saints, but I knew he was just an intellectual. All his experience had been in books and he’d never properly come up against life in its full force before: he fell for the first real thing he laid his eyes on, like an innocent in a Shakespeare play. There was a girlfriend back in Oxford – another theologian – but she didn’t stand a chance against that rope of auburn hair. He’d abandoned the thesis, too.

      We loved Patrick, Eithne and Rowan and me. Eithne and Rowan loved rambling with him around our land, finding out how he’d never done anything before: never swung out on a rope over the river or ridden a pony bareback (or ridden any way at all), never seen anything like the dead crows strung up along the fence wire of the neighbouring farmer who hated us. I loved talking with someone who knew things instead of being experienced. Experience was etched into the leathery, tanned faces of all the other adults in my life; experience was like a calculating light in their eyes when they looked at me. Patrick and I sank deep in the sagging old sofa which stank of the dogs, while my mother cooked vats of curry for the freezer, and he told me about Julian of Norwich, and I was happy. This doesn’t mean I was keen on his marrying my mother.

      I kept saying it would rain on the wedding party because it’s always raining in Wales (that’s another nice thing about High Barnet). We ought to make plans for the rain, I said, but my mother just smiled and said she knew it was going to be fine, and then it was: the day dawned cloudless and pure, yellow haze gleaming in the meadows, hills in the distance delicately drawn in blue. I had to hold on very firmly, sometimes, to my conviction that everything could be explained in the light of reason; it really did seem as though Mum had witch powers. She could smell if rain was coming, her dreams seemed to foretell the future, and her hands could find the place where a horse was hurt, or a child. People said her touch was healing – only I didn’t want her touching me, not any more.

      She and I worked together all that morning, defrosting the curries and loaves of wholemeal bread and the dishes of crumble we’d cooked with our own apples and quinces, mixing jugs of home-made lemonade. Fen drove over with plastic buckets of mead and crates of bottles in the back of his flatbed, along with a suspect carrier bag: he was in charge of the stronger stuff. Sue had sent the wedding cake, soaked in brandy and decorated with hearts and flowers cut out in coloured marzipan. “You don’t think it’s poisoned?” I said. “After what you did to her?”

      My mother only laughed. “We’ve forgiven each other everything. Anyway, Sue started it – when she slept with your dad, while I was still breastfeeding you.”