the veneer of respectability, pretence and snobbery crack and fall away like carefully applied, generations-old varnish. It wasn’t me; it was your son. I would like to inform you … how would he say it? How did you inform people of the most devastating and unacceptable fact that they would ever hear?
Wilfred considered speaking. He looked at Dr Reece sitting at the head of the table, with his power and his title, who had immediately assumed it was Wilfred and judged him harshly. Yet Wilfred knew that somewhere inside that formal façade there was a man who watched over the people of Narberth, who rubbed his hands together to warm them before placing them on the tissue-thin skin of elderly people with arthritic joints, who cared that the people of their small town were rosy-cheeked and sturdy, were born alive, lived robustly and died without too much pain. A man who drove as fast as he could, but also carefully, to patients who were sick at night in nearby farms. A good man, with Madoc for a son.
The dishes clacked as Mrs Reece scoured them in a fever. Wilfred looked at Mrs Reece, deliberating what he would say. She had an empty life of housewifery with nothing to peg herself on but her husband’s position and her son’s rank. But now there was the agony of her daughter’s fall. Madoc. Five letters: Madoc – that’s all he need say. Suddenly he understood Grace’s trust and courage in telling him the raw, skinless truth. And Grace’s dignity in not telling anyone else.
Madoc. The name was on the tip of his tongue. No. And he walked out of the door.
If Grace had been surprised that Wilfred had stayed for dinner, she was even more astonished later that evening when she heard the stiff latch on the attic door lift and realized it was Wilfred coming in. He had not come back the other night and there was no need for him to pretend – he could go home to his father’s again tonight, to his kind da who loved him so much and to whom Wilfred was the world. Grace, in not speaking the whole truth, had deprived Wilfred’s da of his son and of his son’s happiness. Grace winced at her cruelty, more cruelty again. It went on and on; intentionally, unintentionally, it didn’t matter. The end was the same: broken people left in pieces, lives fractured, love bludgeoned.
She saw Wilfred undressing out of the corner of her eye. Wilfred’s father would be pleased – over the moon – to have his son back with him, though Grace doubted he would say anything but instead would keep his counsel, as wise people often did. And even if Wilfred did one day marry, he would be wounded from this failed marriage. He deserves a wife, Grace thought, who loves him and does not use him for her own ends.
She glanced at him as he undid his cufflinks. It occurred to Grace that she didn’t know much about Wilfred, not really, despite being married to him. She knew he liked trifle with whipped cream. That he had liked her yellow dress. Perhaps he liked yellow dresses. Perhaps he liked yellow. She knew that at night he put his socks in his shoes, one in each, but Grace suspected all men did that with their socks at nighttime, in the bedroom, ready for the morning. Grace didn’t know much that was personal or intimate about Wilfred: he had told her nothing, she hadn’t asked anything.
Though she felt as though she was married to a stranger, it would also be true that once their marriage was annulled – when the court had ratified it – she would always have once been married to Wilfred. He would always be her first, probably only, husband. Even in twenty years’ time, in 1944, which was unimaginably distant in the future, when this all might possibly – possibly – not be the end of the world any more, it would still be true that she, Grace Amelia Reece of 32 High Street, Narberth, had once been married to Wilfred Aubrey Price, undertaker.
So she felt calm and kindly, resigned even, when Wilfred, her once and soon not to be husband got into their marriage bed – the bed that had once belonged to her brother. And when Wilfred moved into the centre of their bed, that no man’s land where neither of them had dared to lie for the whole