keep them off it. And lavender makes good honey,’ Wilfred’s da added, smiling and looking round at the others.
Grace felt her face slightly flush with withheld tears. These were the first genuinely kind words she had heard all day. Wilfred, of course, had vowed to cherish her – worship her even – but his words had failed to move her. They were words without feeling – words he said but didn’t mean. Her mother, as well, had smiled and almost gushed since the marriage – she had even offered everyone a Meltis Duchess of York Assorted Chocolate. She was smiling because she was the mother of the bride and that was what social correctness expected. Grace knew she was privately enraged. The register office was not St Andrew’s Church. A yellow dress was not a bridal gown and she, her parents and Wilfred’s father did not constitute a wedding party. No, Grace knew that for her mother, it had all gone far, far too wrong.
But Wilfred’s father – that quite watchful gravedigger – spoke gently. He had the humility of the broken. And he knew, surely, that his son was an unwilling groom. Whatever he knew, Grace thought to herself, he understood that she was hurting; he saw that and he reached out with kindness. It had been a small gesture but a powerful one to Grace after these recent loveless, hopeless months.
Grace stood outside what was now their bedroom. She had chosen to wear her favourite white nightdress. It reached almost to her toes and the cotton was fluffy. She had had it several years now and imagined it would last almost her lifetime. And it was demure. She knocked on the door very lightly and waited. There was no answer from inside the room.
She knocked on the door again then pushed it open and entered quickly. She stood by the door and wondered why Wilfred had married her earlier in the day. She knew why. He had been her fiancée – everyone in Narberth knew that. So everybody knew, or would know by now, he had to be the reason why she was in the condition she was in. If he hadn’t married her, had refused, he would have had absolutely nothing – they both knew that. No one would have used his funeral business again: to use the services of a man like that when there was a death in the family, people just wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be respectable. He would no longer be a man around town and that was what Wilfred wanted to be. He would be ruined. And the gossip would last for generations, definitely three, at least four. It would probably take five generations before people in Narberth no longer talked about Wilfred Price.
Grace unclasped her pearl necklace and took off her dressing-gown, hung it on the hook behind the door and sat nervously on the bed. It had been a long day, too intense, and now this, her wedding bed, the honeymoon, such as it was. The first night. She smoothed her nightie down over her arms then lay down self-consciously and pulled the blankets over herself. This was the first time she had slept in the attic. Madoc’s room with its bigger bed had been allotted to them because her mother decreed it was more suitable than Grace’s childhood bedroom.
Grace was now on the left side of the bed, Wilfred on the right, nearest the door. The blankets fell into the gap between them. It was very strange to be in bed with another person. Grace didn’t know what to do. She knew what was supposed to happen on a wedding night, but that was the wedding night of a wedding that the bride and groom had wanted to be at. This is what the first night is like, she thought, of a married person who doesn’t want to be married. Suddenly she saw the brown wallpaper but she quickly cut the memory from her mind.
Grace lay awake. She knew Wilfred was awake too, both of them staring at the white ceiling. And out of the corner of her eye, she saw Wilfred wipe a tear from his face.
Wilfred had never been in bed with a woman before. He had thought about it, imagined that it would be very cosy. Not only cosy; he had hoped it might be something more than that. Perhaps that is what a loved and wanted wife gave to a man: sanctuary from the harshness of