Three
She might not have made Deb of the Year (and now she was ‘respectable’ no one discussed why that might have been) but there were few observers of society who doubted that the nuptials of Athene Forster, variously described as so-called Last Deb, It Girl, or, among some of the less forgiving society matrons, something rather less complimentary, and Douglas Fairley-Hulme, son of the Suffolk farming Fairley-Hulmes, could be hailed as the Wedding of the Year.
The guest list sported enough old money and double-barrelled names to grant it a prominent position in all the society pages, along with some rather grainy black-and-white pictures. The reception was held at one of the better gentlemen’s clubs in Piccadilly, its customary air of tobacco-scented pomp and bluster temporarily smothered by spring blooms, and swathed drapes of white silk. The bride’s father, as a result of his oft-stated belief since Mr Profumo resigned, that society was falling apart, had decided that his best line of defence against moral anarchy was to gather a rampart of respectable fellows to assert that it wasn’t. This might have made for a rather elderly and sober reception, with its scattering of statesmen, old war comrades, the odd bishop and enough references in his speech to the ‘firm upholding of standards’ to make some of the younger guests giggle. But the young people, it was agreed, had made it look rather gay. And the bride, whom some might have hoped would take this as a direct challenge and behave outrageously, merely smiled vaguely from the top table and gazed adoringly at her new husband.
There was the groom, universally decreed to be ‘a catch’, whose serious manner, clean-cut good looks, and family fortune had left heartbroken potential mothers-in-law across several counties. Even as he stood, formal and stiff in his morning suit, the occasion weighty upon his broad shoulders, his obvious happiness kept breaking through, evident in the way he kept glancing across to locate his bride, his eyes softening as he saw her. It was also apparent in the way that, despite the presence of his family, his best friends and a hundred others, all of whom wanted to pass on their warmest wishes and congratulations, it was patently obvious that he would rather they had been alone.
And then there was the bride, whose dewy eyes and bias-cut silk dress, which skimmed a figure that might easily have seemed too thin, had led even her more fervent detractors to note that whatever else she was (and there was no shortage of opinions in that department), she was certainly a great beauty. Her hair, more usually seen cascading down her back in a kind of wilderness, had been glossed and tamed, and sat regally on the crown of her head, pinned down by a tiara of real diamonds. Other girls’ skin might have been greyed by the white of the silk, but hers reflected its marble smoothness. Her eyes, a pale aquamarine, had been professionally outlined and shimmered under a layer of silver. Her mouth formed a small, secretive smile that revealed none of her teeth, except when she turned to her husband and it broke into a wide, uninhibited grin, or occasionally locked surreptitiously on to his in a suggestion of some private, desperate passion, making those around them laugh nervously and look away.
If her mother’s face, when guests remarked that it really was ‘a lovely day, a wonderful occasion’, expressed a little more than the usual level of relief, then nobody said anything. It would have been unseemly to remember on such a day that several months previously her daughter had been widely considered ‘unmarriageable’. And if anyone wondered why such a huge wedding had been planned in such haste – just four months after the couple’s first meeting – when the bride was evidently not suffering from the kind of condition that usually prompted such things, then most of the men chose to nudge each other and remark that if the only way to get certain pleasures legitimately was to marry, and the bride appeared a more than delightful prospect, then why bother to wait?
Justine Forster now sat smiling out gamely from the top table. Having tried to ignore that her already habitually choleric husband was still cross that the date of the wedding had interrupted his annual veteran-soldiers’ trip to Ypres (as if this were her fault!) and had mentioned it on no fewer than three occasions already (once during the speech!), she was now trying to ignore her daughter, who, two seats away, appeared to be giving her own husband a verbatim account of the ‘girl-to-girl’ chat she had unwisely embarked upon the previous evening.
‘She thinks the Pill is immoral, darling,’ Athene was whispering, snorting with laughter. ‘Says that if we head off to old Dr Harcourt to get a prescription, there’ll be a shrieking hot line to the new Pope before we know it, and we’ll be cast into flaming damnation.’
Douglas, who was still unused to such frank discussion of bedroom matters, was doing his best to appear composed while fighting off a now familiar wave of longing for the woman beside him.
‘I told her I thought the Pope might be a bit busy to worry about little old me swallowing birth-control bonbons but, apparently, no. Like God, Paul VI – or VIII or whatever he is – knows everything, if we’re thinking impure thoughts, if we’re considering copulation purely for pleasure, if we’re not putting enough in the collection plate.’ She leant towards her husband and said, in a whisper just loud enough for her mother to hear: ‘Douglas, darling, he probably even knows where you’ve got your hand right now.’
There was a sudden spluttering from Douglas’s left, and he tried, but failed, to silence his wife, then asked his new mother-in-law whether he might get her some water, both hands clearly visible.
As it was not terribly heartfelt, Douglas’s embarrassment did not last long: he had swiftly decided that he loved Athene’s irrepressibility, her lack of concern for the social mores and confines that had so far dictated their lives. Athene shared his embryonic views that society was increasingly unimportant, that they could be pioneers, expressing themselves as they liked, doing what they liked, heedless of convention. He had to fit it all round his job on his father’s estate, but Athene was happy doing her own thing. She wasn’t terribly interested in doing up their new house – ‘The mothers are so good at that kind of thing’ – but she liked riding out on her new horse (his pre-wedding present to her), lying in front of the fire reading and, when he wasn’t working, going up to London for dances, to the cinema and, most of all, spending as much time as they could in bed.
Douglas had not known it was possible to feel like this: he spent his days in a state of distracted tumescence, for the first time in his life unable to focus on work, the duties of family and career inheritance. Instead his antennae were tuned to a frequency of soft curves, flimsy fabrics and salty smells. Try as he might, he couldn’t seem to get inflamed by the things that had inspired him or fed his growing preoccupation with the wrongs of the ruling classes, and the vexed question of whether wealth redistribution meant that he should give up some of his land. Nothing was as relevant, as interesting as it had been. Not when it was compared to the carnal delights of his bride. Douglas, who had once confessed to his friends that he had never become more involved with a woman than he would with a new car (both, he had said, with the shallow confidence of youth, were best replaced within a year by a new model) now found himself sucked into a vortex of feeling in which there was no substitute for one particular person. The young man who had always maintained a sceptical distance from the messy doings of the full-blown love affair and prided himself on his skills as an impartial observer now found himself dragged into a vacuum of – well, what was it? Lust? Obsession? The words seemed somehow inadequate for the blind unthinkingness of it, the skin-upon-skin neediness of it, the gloriously greedy voluptuousness of it. The hard, thrusting—