Chapter TWO: Lilac (3)

The wedding took place on the 25th of April at Holy Trinity, Sloane Square. Aunt Elizabeth did not attend. The date coincided with some mysterious anniversary in her own life which she always kept in prayer and fasting. Neither Lilac nor Gillian could ever be quite sure when this penitential festival would fall, for it came round, not as a day in the month, but as the third or fourth Monday in April, which might be any day between the 15th and the 27th. She had presented Lilac with travelling trunks and cases and a dressing-bag of the finest quality and a length of black satin brocade which would stand by itself. To Toby she sent two copies of what she called “The Scriptures,” one in the Authorized the other in the Revised Version, replete with Notes, Maps, References, Concordances and Subject-Indexes printed in large type on India paper and bound in the limpest, most velvety purple leather. She had also given Lilac a purse containing a five-pound note, four sovereigns, two half-sovereigns, six half-crowns and ten shillings in shillings and sixpences, all new coins of that year.

“No need for you to go to your husband for pocket-money till you’ve got used to him, my girl,” said Aunt Elizabeth as she gave her youngest great-niece a dry and single good-bye kiss.

* * * * *

Gillian was glad that the old lady did not appear on the day of the wedding. Nothing about it would have pleased her mind. The great, green, Burne-Jones window lighting the white-and-silver bride with her sheaf of Madonna lilies, followed by the six powdered and panniered bridesmaids with their gilded crooks and jaunty flowered-baskets, would have seemed to her equally sacrilegious with the operatic music sung by an exotic soprano and a dusky tenor in place of a sound Britannic anthem while the register was being signed. And the huge wedding-bell, composed of white roses and plaster Cupids, under which Lilac and Toby stood to receive congratulations in the drawing-room of the Grosvenor Hotel afterwards, a surprise planned and executed by old Winona, would have pleased Mrs. Mortimer as ill as the champagne and the confetti (silver hearts and horse-shoes these), which flowed and floated through the afternoon.

Gillian took Lilac up to the hard, unfamiliar hotel bedroom strewn with dressmakers’ boxes and tissue-paper where the bride had dressed that morning and now was to change into her travelling-clothes. The room was crowded with people. There was Lilac’s new maid, a rather awful being, who had packed everything so thoroughly that there had been nothing left for Gillian to help with the night before, and there was Sophie, of course, and the awkward other bridesmaid who had to come up too, and Mrs. Barraclough whom they couldn’t very well keep out, and odds and ends of people who tapped at the door and said, “May I come in just for one second?” and Winnie Roehampton who dashed in very slim and cool in a leaf-green sheath frock of the most miraculous cut, and said, “Well, my dear, I was Lady Bottomley once and I hope you’ll make a better job of it than I did,” and skimmed out again before Lilac had time to thank her for the benediction.

But Sophie cleared the room for the sisters for a final moment, and Lilac cried a little in Gillian’s arms before she went down to Toby and the confetti.

“Jilly,” said Lilac, “promise me one thing. When I come back, when you see me again for the first time, you won’t open your eyes and stare at me, will you?”

“No,” said Gillian; “but why should I stare?—and why should you mind if I did?”

“Oh, Jilly, Jilly,” said Lilac, “I don’t believe you know.”

IX

Gillian had a dazed, deafening headache. She couldn’t stay on and chatter to the wedding-guests. She couldn’t go on and dine at Claridge’s before the theatre-party with which the day was to end.

Old Winona had another Macfarlane to look after her now. Gillian was absolved from her duties and was going to take a proper secretarial course in order to fit her for real life, a business for which life at 99 was no sort of preparation. So Gillian was free to go home to the Club by herself; Mrs. Barraclough was making a complete orgy of it with the Roehamptons and the Glyndes.

She took off her preposterous hat, shook the powder out of her hair, put on a hooded cloak and slipped out of the busy, indifferent hotel into the April twilight and walked down to the river.

It was a soft, dim evening, heavy with spring. The plane-trees on the Embankment were shaking the fine splinters of their stamens out of the little tasselled bracts that opened with soft popping noises in the still leafless boughs. The air was as clouded and green-grey as the water; the figures hurrying to get out of the Park before the gate closed for the night moved on the other side of the river as if behind glass in an aquarium.

Gillian leaned across the parapet and let the breeze that blew down-stream cool her aching flushed face. The tide was low. A few desultory gulls, the stragglers of the main fleet which had put to sea with the onset of mild weather some weeks earlier, scavenged quietly in the mud at the water’s edge. A police-boat prowled up from Vauxhall; two barges keeping to mid-channel travelled with the ebb, their sails set to catch what airs might stir to aid them. The evening was not so much peaceful as indifferent. Gillian lingered on, and an increasing desolation preyed within her. What was it that Lilac had done?

“Lilac will always know that she is paying for a fake.” That was what her father had said. Was Toby a fake? Lilac had wanted him. She had wanted him so much that she had at last stretched out her soft arm and taken him by guile with her rosy, tapping fingers. Gillian never remembered that hand, creeping into the lamplight and shaking all poor Toby’s unhappy resistance, without a shock of wonder. What exactly was it that Lilac had done to him? How did she know she could do it? It was predatory, her gesture, yet it gave away something that could never be taken back again. Lilac had been paying, paying deliberately, for Toby. But was it Toby, the essential Toby, that dim, kind, gentle Toby who loved horses and fine engravings and had such clumsy hands and such vague, beseeching eyes that Lilac had bought with the lilt of a song from a fairy-tale? Or was it what Toby stood for? Was it only the power to buy everything, to go everywhere, to make, if she chose, such a crammed and monotonous wilderness of any house as Old Winona had made of 99, that Lilac really wanted in Toby? wanted it so much that she had confused Toby, who was not in the least magnificent with the magnificence she could reach through him? Gillian thought with a slow gust of remorse of that far-off, unconsidered Millicent who too, in her day, had wanted Toby, and who was now—neither she nor Lilac had ever stopped to ask if she were dead—at least she had never spoken of Toby’s first wife to Lilac. What Toby had said to Lilac about her was their own affair; but Gillian might have spared her a thought.

Lower and lower in her own esteem she plunged, down into the dark undergrowth where motives lie tangled in egoism and vanity. Jealousy of her sister; envy of Lilac’s freedom; feeble self-pity for her own loneliness—as if she didn’t want to be alone—assailed her as she groped in the shadows of her heart. What an aftermath of a wedding! Why couldn’t she be happy because Lilac was free, because she had both hands full of what she most wanted? Gillian wanted freedom too. But it wasn’t, after all, freedom that someone else’s money could give her. Lilac had freed herself with one hand by fettering the other. In a way she was more bound than Gillian, who could never hope to be freer than she was now.

Gillian’s headache was gone; it had faded out with the daylight. The sky was quite black above the Embankment lights now, and the tide was rising and taking fresh reflections, long swords of light from the lamps on the bridges, as the waters broadened beneath them. Gillian turned her face to go home, her self-reviling over. But there was still an ache of disappointment in her thoughts. What was it she had asked of this day, that thing for herself, that secret and peculiar enjoyment which had not been given to her? Long ago, when she was a child, she had known this unsatisfied ache. “I’m not hungry, but I know there’s something very delicious I’ve not eaten,” she had explained to her father. Now the ache was there, but she knew what she had missed. It was the climax of the wedding-service which had never come; the moment when, in her prayer for Lilac, she had hoped, had meant to reach out and touch her father’s spirit if it could be possible that that spirit remained aware of her. She had promised herself to wait with closed eyes for the words:

“... whose daughters ye are so long as ye do well and are not
afraid with any amazement.”

and they had never been spoken.

Lilac and Old Winona together had had the service thoroughly pruned. The Bishop had tweetled an inaudible little sermon over the married pair, the murmurs of which were drowned to the congregation in the creaking of the bridesmaids’ gilded flower-baskets as they stood separated from the bride and fidgeting in the aisle for the end of the performance. There had been little need for consecrated phrases at the Pantomime Wedding.