The Wedding Group by Elizabeth Taylor Page B

of the rhythm, she flung her little heels out sideways, and her elbows, she crossed and re-crossed her hands on her pink-trousered knees, all angles, like a puppet.
    ‘I haven’t enjoyed myself so much with my clothes on,’ she declared, recalling the old times, when she had often said that and raised a smile – those days when everyone had been scared of her, and Archie had come courting, with his talk of poetry and romance, and winning her, she now most furiously realised, with quotations from Rupert Brooke – and, of course, by beinga cut above car salesmen and brewers’ representatives; better educated; better off. To have been taken in by Rupert Brooke annoyed her most of all. ‘If you look like that, you don’t have to be a good poet,’ she said nowadays, for she was very sensitive to what was currently admired.
    David was a little put out by the change in his mother. Cressy seemed to have gone to her head, and he wished she had not used the last phrase in front of her.
    ‘Now what?’ she asked, and said to Cressy, ‘You’re doing very well.’
    Archie had been no good as a dancer. He had trundled her about. She ought to have been warned by that; for dancing and sex were linked, she knew, not only in her mind, but in the minds of far cleverer people – she had leafed a bit through Freud, looking for other things – and Archie, she had soon discovered trundled through sex.
    Cressy was wearing trousers, too – pale yellow ones, the colour of her hair. Midge had given them to her, saying she had outgrown them, and Cressy, in her endeavours to get them on, had cast buttons all over the place – so that Midge had the pleasure of her gratitude and the pleasure of the scattered buttons as well.
    To David and Midge, having Cressy about was like having a marvellous child to care for. They were perpetually under the excitement of giving treats. Sometimes, he felt that they were almost like grandparents, with a world to bestow and not too much responsibility. Very
young
grandparents. Dancing grandmother.
    He put on a tango and then wished that he had not. Once Midge had done a burlesque tango with Jack Ballard. They had all thought it amusing at the time – apache stuff, rose clenched in teeth, back bends, snarling, stamping. But they had been drunk at the time; now he was not.
    His mother was transformed by being admired. She, who had always looked quite young, looked five or ten years younger.
    ‘I can’t… I can’t… keep up,’ gasped Cressy, flinging herself on to the sofa. The tango had not got very far.
    ‘Oh, this is the nadir of life,’ she said, reaching for her drink.
    ‘The nadir?’
    ‘Yes, don’t you know, the nadir of the gods. I’ve heard my father talk of it.’
    Midge smiled at David more warmly than he at her.
    The drinks he gave Cressy were more grenadine than anything, and they always seemed to suffice; but he was not sure of his mother’s mixtures, and this evening Cressy had been there before he arrived. She very often was.
    He wondered if she ought to be discouraged from coming so often. If his mother tired of her, it would be a sudden thing, and there would be no going back on it, and only heartbreak or deep bewilderment for the girl. At present she seemed so happy – equally happy with his mother or himself. Sometimes, he had taken her out alone, calling for her when the shop closed on Saturdays, and he had found himself, to his amusement, in all kinds of strange places he would never have dreamed of going to without her – sitting in coffee-bars, for instance, among bamboo, plastic vines and fishing-nets, while the juke-box never let up and the coffee-machine gasped and gurgled, and all round him was the younger generation. Her pleasure in such places was unbelievable. She looked about her with shining eyes. And there were all the other places, where they ate hamburgers and there was much the same din and an overpowering smell of onions frying; or where there were fruit