The Wedding Group by Elizabeth Taylor Page A

won’t you, and cheer me up, for the long dark days I can’t abide.’
    ‘Oh, I will,’ Cressy said. She felt vindicated now in the steps she had taken. Life was beginning to open up as she had promised herself it would. Sometimes, lately, during the day’s routine of cleaning and customers, and the evening’s loneliness, she had almost despaired. But she had held on, and now was rewarded.
    ‘Your mother’s marvellous,’ she told David, as they drove away.
    ‘I think so.’
    ‘She seems so young. To be able to have clothes like that…’ she sighed, but more in wonderment than envy.
    ‘I hardly ever go in a car,’ she said. ‘It’s so enjoyable.’ Harry Bretton had a very old Rolls-Royce, and she and her cousins had always been driven to the station in it to catch the train for school. Otherwise, it was rarely taken out of its barn. It was consequently very damp and smelled of fungus.
    ‘I always wanted to ask you,’ Cressy began. ‘I heard what you said about me that day in the shop, when you came in with that friend of yours with the dog. Why did you call me “bothersome”? I’ve never been to you. It was the other way round. That thing you wrote bothered me dreadfully.’
    David felt that he was always making amends to her. ‘You shouldn’t listen to other people’s conversations,’ he said feebly.
    ‘But
am
I bothersome?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ he said, after a pause. ‘But don’t keep putting me in the wrong, or we’ll never be friends.’
    As they reached the valley, she became quiet again.
    ‘If you’re sure you think I needn’t say anything…’
    ‘Now, forget it,’ he said sternly. ‘Stop making mountains out of mole-hills. You must know by now that Toby and Alexia loathe a fuss.’
    ‘All right,’ she said contentedly. ‘It’s been such a wonderful evening – the nicest of my life, I think.’
    David could not help being pleased at the idea of having given someone the nicest evening of her life. Most of the girls he knew would not have dreamed of saying so, if it were true.
    Cressy was a little disappointed that he did not suggest a date for their next meeting; but, all the same, she went happily to bed.
    David was back home in no time, before Midge had finished clearing up. Usually when he took girls home, she would go to bed and to sleep, and not see him again until morning.
    ‘You go out into the highways and by-ways and bring me back some delightful entertainment,’ Midge said.
    ‘Yes, but we could soon have that one round our necks.’
    ‘“I hear your husband left you.” Didn’t you adore that? No one’s ever said it to me before. They do sound such a rum lot up there, at Quayne. It’s practically medieval.’
    ‘They’re a rum lot all right. Well, I think I’ll go up now. I must make an early start tomorrow. For I’m off to Little Gidding in the morning,’ he began to sing, but then stopped, and looked anxiously at her. ‘Only two days. You’ll be all right, will you?’
    ‘Of course,’ she said brightly. It would be got over, she thought.
    For the rest of her life, this responsibility, he was thinking. Of all things, responsibility he seemed to resent the most. It should be her husband’s concern, he told himself crossly, going upstairs to bed.

CHAPTER EIGHT
     
    ‘I have always wanted to get into a fast set,’ Cressy said. She was breathless from her Charleston lesson with Midge. David was sorting out records for them. At his age, he thought he should give up dancing. Too self-conscious now to shake and shudder with the teenagers, he felt that he belonged to a bygone age of dances in which the sexes were clasped together, cheeks touching – and even conversation, however banal, was carried on. ‘Do you come here often?’ and all those jokes of long ago; but one had to say something. The memories were sobering and ageing.
    Midge, however, had risen above these considerations: nor was she now the least bit breathless. Still under the spell