The World is a Wedding by Wendy Jones Page B

will be more than I deserve to have a clean scullery, but don’t exert yourself now, not at all. You have to lie down the very moment you feel tired. You are not to be straining yourself. Nor to be lifting tins of paint or serving customers in the paint and wallpaper shop. Nothing is more important than you resting.’
    Flora smiled. No, Wilfred thought, nothing was more important than Flora Myffanwy resting.
    â€˜Now Da, let me share this hot pastie with—that’s the doorbell! Could be a customer—touch wood.’
    Wilfred jumped up and walked purposefully through the hall and into the front room, which had been changed, with high hopes, into a somewhat sparse but proudly arranged paint and wallpaper shop.
    â€˜Mrs. Newton-Lewis, good day to you.’ Mrs. Newton-Lewis had the cleanest doorstep in Narberth and subscribed to French magazines about house decoration. And Wilfred knew for a fact that she liked paisley wallpaper.
    â€˜There’s tidy you’ve made the front room. What did you do with your mother’s best furniture?’ Mrs. Newton-Lewis asked.
    â€˜It’s in the back room.’
    â€˜There’s crowded it must be.’ Wilfred’s da had also pointed this out.
    â€˜Well, Wilfred, let me see . . .’ Mrs. Newton-Lewis looked around the almost-bare shop with purpose. Mrs. Estella Newton-Lewis was his first customer in five days: many curious people had bustled through in the last few months, but so far he had only sold the odd pot of paint. There was a poverty creeping throughout Pembrokeshire. He had heard that the miners at Stepaside were paid so meagrely these days, they had to scavenge for coal in the cliffs to heat their cottages. As yet, no one had bought very much but, as Mr. Auden had taught him, life was one quarter enjoyable and three quarters difficult. Perhaps a paint and wallpaper business worked on similar proportions.
    â€˜I’d like my withdrawing room wallpapered,’ Mrs. Newton-Lewis declared. This was very encouraging. She browsed through the enormous Arthur Sanderson & Sons wallpaper book which the travelling wallpaper salesman had given Wilfred.
    â€˜I want to decorate the walls and the ceiling,’ she continued. ‘Can you do that for me?’ Wilfred didn’t have a clue how to wallpaper a ceiling; surely the wallpaper just fell off?
    â€˜Certainly, Mrs. Newton-Lewis,’ he replied hopefully. Wallpaper was always peeling off walls, never mind ceilings. Perhaps there was some way he could nail it on.
    â€˜I knew as much,’ Mrs. Newton-Lewis declared. ‘I said to Mrs. Annie Evans, “That Wilfred Price has no end of skills up his sleeve: undertaker,” I said, “decorator.” I said, “I’ll buy my wallpaper here in Narberth instead of going to Ocky White’s in Haverfordwest and Wilfred will be able to do the decorating as well”.’
    â€˜Thank you very much, Mrs. Newton-Lewis.’ When Wilfred opened the shop he’d put up a shelf for paint on the back wall, built a counter and bought a till. He’d expected he might occasionally be asked to paint the odd door or wall, but he hadn’t thought of himself as a decorator.
    â€˜You’ll need to somehow move my antique Welsh dresser to paper behind it. And I’d like it done by the day after tomorrow as my two sisters are coming from Llanddewi Velfrey. Can you finish it by then?’
    â€˜Oh, yes, indeed,’ said Wilfred, praying that no one would die in the next few days.
    â€˜I considered having a paisley in a fuchsia and yellow, but I have changed my mind. I am thinking of the
Tulip and Willow
by William Morris.’ She turned a large page in the wallpaper book. ‘Or perhaps the
Cornucopia
?’
    â€˜We have plenty of rolls in stock of this one in bice-blue and biliverdin,’ said Wilfred, unsure if he’d used his new
B
words correctly, and showing Mrs. Newton-Lewis a large