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By Root 277 0

splendid cane-headed bed. And she had noticed precious few children in Montagu Square, and there was no garden, so that her day would have an entirely different pattern when her writing time was over. But then she would not be writing. Perhaps she would never write again. She would have that life that she supposed other women have: shopping, cooking, arranging dinner parties, meeting friends for lunch. All those worldly acquaintances who had been so kind with their invitations to little gatherings and whom she had hitherto repaid only with a desire that they should see her garden. I have not paid my dues, she said to herself, on a day when she had looked with timid pleasure at her new and spacious kitchen. I must have seemed like a foundling to them. That will have to change.

And it had changed. No one had been hurt. On the contrary, everyone was delighted. David had laughed at her new recklessness and had teased her with an unknown lover. ‘You must be in love,’ he had said. And she, not daring to break that unwritten contract between them, had not said what she wanted to say, and had missed her chance for ever. So that when he had taken her hand surreptitiously one day at a private view to which she had gone with Penelope, and she had guided his thumb to her third finger where he had felt the rim of Geoffrey’s mother’s ugly ring, he had stiffened, but had said nothing. What was there to say? There had been no promises. And later that evening, on their last meeting, he had pressed his face into her neck and mumbled, ‘Do you mean it?’ And she had meant it, because sometimes he stayed away too long. And because he had not dissuaded her. But a month later, on her wedding morning, she was still standing in her kitchen, thinking of all the things she had not yet said to him.

The sound of a key in the lock had made her start. Her irregular cleaning lady, Mrs Dempster, pink-cheeked, brilliantly coiffed, generously sober, looked at her with amazement. ‘Not dressed yet?’ she marvelled. ‘I hope you’ve had your bath, at least.’

‘Why?’ asked Edith. ‘What time is it?’

‘It’s ten o’clock,’ articulated Mrs Dempster, slowly, as if to a child. ‘Ten o’clock. You’re getting married at twelve, remember? And in case you’re wondering what I’m doing here, well, there’s the little matter of the caterers to supervise. You remember that, I suppose. You’re coming back here for a buffet lunch, in case it slipped your mind, before you sail off into the blue.’

She breathed hard as she donned her spotless overall, as if the very prospect of a marriage unsettled her nerves, which were notoriously unpredictable. Men were her downfall, she had confided, over many a cup of coffee; very little work was done. Edith suspected that Penelope got more out of her, but then, she conceded, Penelope had more to offer in the way of confidences. Penelope and Mrs Dempster, in fact, had something in common; their entire conversation revolved around the subject of men, whom they seemed to like and to dislike in equal measure. So that when Mrs Dempster said, ‘Come on, love. You have your bath and I’ll make you a nice cup of coffee to have while you’re dressing,’ Edith had turned away, tears pricking her eyes. The kindness of people, she thought. Their unexpected kindness.

Lying in the bath, she could hear the house reverberating to Mrs Dempster’s voice commanding a troop of men. Cases of champagne were dumped, rather heavily, somewhere beneath her. The promised cup of coffee had been postponed, in the greater excitement of supervising the arrangements: the little house shuddered with the inroads of florists and of the team of girls who would now turn the kitchen into their own domain as they manufactured the asparagus rolls and the mushroom vol-au-vents and the tiny cheese beignets and the iced fingers of orange cake, and the Nesselrode pudding. ‘Pudding, Edith? You must be mad,’ said Penelope. ‘My mother loved it,’ countered Edith, and thought, privately, that her mother would have considered this a puny alliance. Girls with high but severe voices could be heard demanding