The teacups rattled in response. ‘Look what you’ve made me do, Grace Amelia. There’s tea spilled everywhere!’
Grace placed the now neatly folded tea towel back over the stove rail.
‘Is it … might it be to do …’ her father enquired ponderously. ‘We thought it could be to do with Wilfred.’
Wilfred. Grace knew they would know, that they were only pretending to guess. Wilfred, her now ex-fiancé, who was supposed to have been besotted with her, marry her and then provide order and respectability.
‘Wilfred hasn’t set foot in this house five weeks on Saturday,’ her mother pronounced indignantly. Her father removed his gold-framed spectacles and began polishing them with a clean white handkerchief.
‘It is not what is to be expected by a young man of sensibilities who has declared his affections,’ he offered.
‘Madoc would never behave like this,’ Mrs Reece declared, sawing a slice from the loaf, ‘and that’s because I’ve brought him up properly.’ She wiped the blade of the bread-knife with the dishcloth. ‘I’ve taught my son right from wrong. He knows how to behave.’
Her father, pointing at the fruitcake, said to his wife, ‘Now, Mrs Reece, pull yourself together. Madoc will be back before you know it. And best cover this fruitcake with a net, or there’ll be flies landing on it. We wouldn’t want it to spoil.’
Grace lowered her head and stared at her shoes, trying to focus. Her father was a highly educated man, but also a practical one. Doctors had to be practical. She knew that he would make a suggestion – a realistic, workable one that would hold within it a path forward. That was what he did for his patients; he gave them a way of coping.
‘Have you actually seen Wilfred?’ her mother called accusingly from within the pantry where she was selecting a cake-dome. Grace inwardly winced at her mother’s directness and also cringed at her last meeting with Wilfred. Narberth was a small town; someone would have seen her shaken and tearful at the bottom of Sheep Street or walking desolately to the castle where she had sat forlornly on the hefty broken wall of the keep, swinging her legs and crying. Someone would have noticed and told her mother.
Grace was quiet, waiting for her father to speak, knowing he would.
‘I have a suggestion,’ he said, leaning back. ‘I shall invite Wilfred to come here for lunch this week, on Thursday. I shall use the telephone and ask him myself. What do you think to a shoulder of Welsh lamb with mint sauce and some mashed potatoes, Mrs Reece? Or perhaps a rabbit pie? Grace, perhaps you can make one of your Madeira cakes. Then at least you young people will see each other.’
‘Oh!’ said Grace’s mother, her eyes sharp and shining. ‘Now there’s good.’
‘I expect he’s overcome with sheepishness,’ her father surmised, ‘being an undertaker and all, and more used to funerals than weddings.’
Wilfred was leaning on the kitchen table reading his notice in this week’s Narberth & Whitland Observer:
Mister Wilfred Price.
PURVEYOR OF SUPERIOR FUNERALS
Motorized Hearse (with glass sides and wood panelling)
11 Market Street, NARBERTH
Telephone for all inquiries: Narberth 103
Superior sounded honourable, although he could hardly advertise himself as Purveyor of Inferior Funerals. What would that mean? Burying the living? Dropping the body? That had happened. Trying to break a stiff corpse with rigor mortis so as to lay it flat in its coffin? No. Superior Funerals were the right words, the apposite words, for W. Price, Funeral Director, Narberth. And with a motorized hearse, despite the cost, all the polishing and the occasional temperamental behaviour from the engine, Wilfred was on to a winner. Adamantine, Wilfred said to himself: his motorized hearse was adamantine in the sun from all that polishing. He’d learned that word this morning.
Wilfred went to the shelf and looked for something to eat. He grabbed the end of a loaf and the tin of Griddles Old-Fashioned Black Treacle, dipped a spoon into the treacle and spread it on the bread. Mind, a bit more custom wouldn’t go amiss. Not that there was much he could do about that; business was in the hands of the Lord.
He took a bite off the corner of the bread and moved his dictionary to one side. Mr Ogmore Auden had said, ‘Everyone in Narberth is a potential customer, Wilfred. Treat them well. A corpse has yet to come through the front door and ask for a funeral.’ Wilfred tried always to be polite and was mindful of his pleases