The Long Wedding Reception

Here I am, six months short of seventy, putting my newly acquired cottage to rights as in the past I have put to rights – how many ? – five homes, with plaster, screws, paint, cup and picture-hooks, towel rail and whatever else, as though for the two of us – as though the rest of our lives were to be spent here. The impulse is still present to walk into the next room and announce: “Listen, that rotten job, polishing the kitchen’s new copper pipes, washing and drying them, coating them with polyurethane varnish – well, it’s finished.”

Still, I don’t want to write about copper pipes and housekeeping so much as about our marriage. A stream flows through me of ideas and recollections I want to share with you. I must write or, as Corky suggested, l shall go mad. It’s all right for you because you can communicate with me but I can’t reach you by turning myself into a symbol in your dreams. These letters must be pushed out in hope, like messages in a bottle flung into the sea. At least the messages will be formulated, and not ruin my nights like so many oysters. ‘

Do you know, I never bothered to ask what you remember of our first meeting. Sometime during the summer of 1932 I watched you jump off the wooden steps of the tennis pavilion at Parkfield and turn to look up at the rest of us as, shading our eyes against the sun, we crowded the doors and windows trying to sort out fours. I was so moved that I couldn’t bear to follow what you did next but turned away saying “Oh, God!” and someone, Margery Rendell perhaps, told me : “It’s no use George. She’s tied up with a boy in Beckenham.”

So your recollection won’t be the same as mine.

I knew that that moment was a turning-point. I told myself: “That’s it,” and set about the six month business of convincing you that it was it, too. All autumn and winter you held out, and it wasn’t until July of the following year that I was placing the engagement ring on your finger in St. Paul’s Cathedral.

One result of that first meeting was that this morning, over forty-five years later, I woke dreaming that you were in my arms again. Or do you know?