The Banker's Niece 25: The interim

Summer 1978

‘Look after each other,’ said Reverend Watson, the vicar of Black Dog, as he said goodbye to Jane and Rick on his doorstep.

    Of course, thought Jane. That’s what marriage is all about. How simple.

    She and Rick had spent the last half hour with the vicar in his book-lined study, talking about marriage and making arrangements with him for their own.

    After her parents’ reaction and that of her housemates to the relationship between her and Rick, she’d been astonished to find that the vicar supported them in their plans. She and Rick had touched on the fact that neither of them wanted children, as well as the disapproval, not to say hostility, of Jane’s parents, but he had been unphased. And though he was obviously well educated, probably at private school and Oxbridge to judge by his accent, and a good thirty years older than her and Rick, so of her parents’ class and generation, he took them seriously and didn’t appear even to notice the disparity in their backgrounds.

    Jane left his house glowing. Was this how you told good people from bad ones, she wondered: people who made you feel better were good, and people who made you feel worse were bad.
    In that case, what were her parents?

    Although neither Jane nor Rick was particularly religious, certainly not the organised kind anyway, they both wanted to marry in church rather than a register office as it would give their promises more depth. And their meeting with the reverend more than confirmed that decision.

    They’d discovered their attitudes to children by accident.

    ‘Did you mean what you said to your father about not wanting children?’ asked Rick in a neutral tone the evening of the day her father’s letter arrived.

    ‘I did mean it, yes,’ said Jane warily.

    However vague her visions for the future, they had never included children, and just the thought of having children made her weary. Charlie her housemate was the only other man to whom she’d confided this and he had accused her of being unnatural.

    ‘That’s lucky,’ said Rick, ‘because I don’t want children either.’

    They’d laughed and kissed. It was another sign that they were meant to be together. While on the outside they were different in every possible way, deep down they were the same.

    As they walked hand in hand back through the village to Rick’s parents’ house where they were invited to lunch, it was a perfect June morning. Flowers of every colour spilled from the front gardens of thatched cottages. At the end of the street vibrant green hills touched a deep blue sky. Jane’s toes were warm for the first time in months. She’d almost stopped feeling afraid.

In April she and her mother had gone back to exchanging letters full of news that didn’t matter, neither of them mentioning Rick again. With any luck her parents thought that the subject was now closed.

    She'd read in newspapers about ‘poor bereaved’ parents who paid to have their children snatched from ‘cults’ in which they’d been caught up, and then had them ‘reverse brainwashed’. She wondered how she’d cope if her parents did the same to her, and wasn’t her father’s suggestion that she and Rick should separate in order to ‘commend’ to him ‘as to the seriousness’ of their intentions the same sort of thing in disguise?
    Thank goodness she was over twenty-one and hadn’t been born a hundred years earlier and that the law was now on her side rather than that of her parents, or at least she thought it was, and even more so she hoped when she was married.
    She still kept looking over her shoulder though whenever she was out and about on her own.

    At the end of term the lease on her Exeter house would expire and next week she and Rick were moving. It occurred to her that she didn’t have to give her parents her new address. She could instead arrange for the Post Office to forward their letters (or not).

By some miracle, she’d survived her finals.

    Normally she enjoyed exams. She liked drawing up revision timetables with their neat boxes and the subjects evenly distributed around the days and the hours. She liked working through old exam papers and listing the answering points on index cards and then committing the shapes of the lists to her photographic memory. She liked the sense of control the preparations gave her and the sense of achievement when all that work came together in the exams themselves.

    This year however, with all the interruptions and the way her mind kept slewing back to her parents’ letters, she’d had to make do with scraps of paper and scribbled notes, subjects revised as and when – usually the night before their exams. Nightmares and tears.

    She would never have abandoned her degree as that would have wasted the last two and a half years and she knew too well from her time in London what the alternative was. But the last few weeks had felt harmful, as if she were squeezing herself into something that didn’t fit any more.

    She didn’t think she’d actually fail since she’d usually found something to say, but she certainly wouldn’t have done as well as she was expected to. After all, at the beginning of her course one of her tutors on reading an essay of hers had told her to expect a first.

    So what. She didn’t care any more what grade she got so long as she passed. She was simply relieved that it was all over and that she could now concentrate on what really mattered – her life with Rick.

She found a job waitressing at a café in the city. It was a relief to do something practical for a change, to connect with people rather than books, and to be able to leave work at the end of the day and forget about it.

Late in June she treated herself to a train trip to London and visited Laura Ashley.

    It was hard to pick a wedding outfit from the packed rows of gorgeous romantic clothes but eventually she settled on a pink-and-white striped dress with a high frilled collar and long gathered sleeves. Fitted over the bust and then floating out like maypole ribbons, it would she hoped accommodate her whatever her size at the time. Her eating habits had calmed down a lot since Rick had started living with her but she still didn’t trust them.

    As she came home on the train later in the day nursing the bag on her lap, she hoped that Rick would approve of her choice.

    Peggy went into Dingles department store in Exeter and bought herself a pale-green suit. She modelled it for Jane one Sunday when she and Rick went over for tea.

    ‘You look beautiful,’ said Jane, hugging her. ‘It matches your eyes perfectly.’

    The next Saturday Peggy dragged Rick into Austin Reed and bought him a navy-blue suit.

    ‘It’s a waste of money,’ he protested. ‘I’ll never wear it again.’

    Jane wasn’t at all sure herself about seeing Rick in a suit but what else would he wear to the wedding – the hooded black cloak with the red-silk lining which had been his garment of choice when she first met him back in November the year before?

    Rick’s brother Martin had promised to come down from London for the occasion and Rick’s parents had written to the last-known address of Rick’s sister Sheila. Where her tepee was pitched, or even if she still lived in Wales, no one knew, but they hoped the letter would reach her somehow.

    What must it be like to disappear like that, Jane wondered. She envied her.

    Rick was in discussion with a silversmith they’d met at a craft market on Exeter’s Cathedral Green, planning a ring for each of them.

    Dougie, an old schoolfriend of Rick's whom Jane hadn't yet met as he was away working in Bristol, was coming back to act as best man. Whether it was essential for Jane to be ‘given away’ by some man, she had yet to find out, but anyone would do if it was.

    After the wedding, which was at eleven, they were all going to Black Dog’s Agricultural Inn for lunch.

At the beginning of July, Jane celebrated her twenty-third birthday, and at the end Rick his twenty-fourth. They were getting on.

   

Also in July, she received her exam results. Not only had she passed but she’d been awarded an ‘upper second’, not a bad mark at all. She couldn’t believe it. She didn’t feel she deserved it. She decided the examiners must have been kind to her because of her work earlier in the course. She decided to write to her parents to tell them the good news.

    ‘I could tell them about the wedding at the same time,’ she said to Rick.

    ‘I wouldn’t,’ he said.

    She thought about it. She so wanted to give them one last chance. Surely they could understand. They were the same flesh and blood as her. They had been young once. They had married in their mid-twenties, like her and Rick, and as far as she knew having met less than a year earlier, again like her and Rick, and she, Jane, had been born barely nine months later. So they too obviously didn’t want to wait.

    If she didn’t tell them she might have to lie to them for the rest of her life, or cut herself off from them completely and she didn’t think she could bear that. It would be like deliberately hacking off one of her own legs.

    ‘I’ve passed my finals,’ she wrote, ‘and Rick and I are getting married in Devon on Saturday the 19th of August.’

    She didn’t invite them to the wedding, but she didn’t say they couldn’t attend either, as she couldn’t work out which scenario was least bad.

    As she dropped the envelope into the letterbox the sky gave a rumble of thunder.

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