Arthur’s mother brought the wedding cake in a tin which had to be carried level. She gave the instruction twice before crossing the threshold and once afterwards, when Mr Leach offered to put it on the sideboard.
“There is fruit in it,” she said.
Mr Leach looked at the tin as if it might begin to ripen. I took it from him and asked Mrs Pike into the sitting room.
She was a small woman with Arthur’s narrow face and a habit of pulling her cuffs straight before speaking. Her husband was still working, though not steadily, and she had made a cake larger than I expected. She lifted the lid and showed me the paper lining.
“It wants feeding.”
“I can do that.”
“Only a little.”
“Yes.”
She shut the tin. For a moment we were two women who had met to discuss a cake and found the arrangement insufficient to cover what we felt about the marriage.
“June the seventeenth,” she said.
“So Nell tells me.”
“They’ve chosen a fine time of year.”
“Let’s hope the weather knows.”
She laughed, unexpectedly, and I saw why her son might have learnt to wait for a joke before deciding whether a room was safe.
Nell and Arthur were upstairs taking the last measurements of the little chair. They came down together. Mrs Pike looked first at my daughter, then at the space between them.
“I hear you’ve been very busy at the shop.”
Nell set the measurements beside the cake. “I have.”
“And afterwards, of course, there will be the rooms.”
Arthur stood behind her chair. I saw him draw a breath.
“Nell’s keeping the work, Mother.”
Mrs Pike looked at him. “I wasn’t suggesting—”
“I know. But she is.”
It was not grandly done. His hand had closed on the back of the chair and he looked younger than twenty-eight. Nell reached up and laid her hand over his for a moment, then offered Mrs Pike tea.
After that we spoke about the wedding as if it were a collection of things we could agree. There would be no hired carriage if it could be avoided, no row of flowers Nell did not like, and no invitations issued to people simply because one of the mothers had once received an invitation from them. Mrs Pike looked at me on the last point. I looked back, complicit and annoyed to be discovered.
“Only a few,” I said.
“Then we shall have a little room to breathe,” Nell replied.
She had left the drawing of the house on the table, where Mrs Pike could see it. The older woman picked it up, read the wording, and asked whether the talks were likely to be crowded.
“I hope so,” I said.
“The week before the wedding?”
“Two of them. The eighth and fifteenth. Then a break until after the Coronation.”
Mrs Pike put the paper down. I knew the criticism she was trying not to make and supplied it for her: a mother ought to keep herself free when her daughter was to be married. I had done a great many things for Nell without ever hearing the word ought. Now something I wanted had a date, and that date stood too near another woman’s expectation of me.
“The dress will be finished,” Nell said. “The cake has already arrived. I think we shall manage.”
She looked at me. It was a kindness, and a confidence. I promised myself I would earn both.
They stayed to supper. Arthur helped Mr Leach carry the little chair down, and the two men argued amiably about the best way to protect the legs. Mrs Pike came into the kitchen and stood beside me while I cut bread. For a moment I thought she would ask about the work again. Instead she said her son’s father had not wanted him to marry so soon after the period without work.
“He thought it unwise to begin with so little.”
“They are both steady.”
“Yes.” She wiped a spot of water off the table with her hand. “That was what I told him.”
There was more of Arthur in her then than the face. I gave her the clean cloth and asked whether she would cut the butter. She took it and stood with me, and we made a supper together without either needing to be in charge of all of it.
When the Pikes had gone Nell came downstairs carrying a small tin and the envelope Ada had given her. She put them on the table and sat opposite me.
“May I use your box for a few weeks?”
“For what?”
She opened the tin. There were coins wrapped in paper, a few notes and a little book in which she had recorded the sums. I recognised the book as one Thomas had given her when she was about fifteen, expecting perhaps that she would put pressed flowers in it. Instead she had ruled columns.
“Twelve pounds ten. Including Aunt’s five.”
“Nell.”
“Some is what Father left me. Some is what I’ve put away. Not from the house. From the sewing and the little copying I used to do for Miss Pym. And the shop now.”
“I wasn’t asking.”
“You looked as if you were.”
I was looking at an amount I had not known she possessed. The money had lived upstairs while we worried about coal and curtains and whether the milk bill could wait until the end of the week. It was hers. I had to say that quietly inside myself before I could hear what she wanted.
“The room deposit and the furniture are due on the fifth of June. I have the bill. I’d rather not keep so much in that little tin while people are coming and going, and I don’t want to carry it about.”
“Certainly. We’ll put it away now.”
We counted it together. Nell followed the money with her finger, checking against the little book. Thomas had left her a small sum which she had kept while we used most of what came to me. I could remember, suddenly, the day I told her she must not offer it for the rent. She had been twenty and grieving, ready to make any sacrifice which looked useful. I had been proud of refusing it. I still was.
We put the money back into Ada’s envelope, which was large enough, and Nell wrote on it in her own hand: For the new room. £12 10s. She folded the bill for the deposit and furniture round it. I put both into the cash box in my bedroom.
There was a little space beside the papers where I kept the subscription money until it could be entered and put with the other house funds. I moved those papers to one side so the envelope would lie flat.
“You could have the spare key,” I said.
“Will you need it?”
“I have the other.”
She took it. At the door she stopped and looked back.
“I don’t want you to think I was keeping it secret.”
“You weren’t obliged to tell me.”
“I know. But I wasn’t.”
I went to her and smoothed a place on her shoulder which did not need smoothing. “It will buy a lovely beginning.”
She smiled. Then she went downstairs to finish a letter to Arthur, and I heard her call to Grace as she passed the front room.
I remained beside the box for a moment before turning the key. On the dressing table lay the programme proof with my name beneath the open door. I put it in the drawer, away from the sun, and took the box to its usual place under the folded winter things.
That night, after the house was quiet, I reread the first chapter of our old copy of Pride and Prejudice. I had to begin twice because my thoughts wandered to the room, the chairs, Nell’s wedding and the cake which wanted feeding. Then the voice on the page caught me. I forgot the clock until it struck twelve.
I went to blow out the lamp and stopped. There was a sentence I wanted to find again in the morning. I took the little exercise book, wrote down the page number and put it beside the bed. In the next room Nell was sleeping. A carriage passed in the street below and went on, its sound narrowing into the distance.
I lay awake for a while, not anxious, simply full of things which were beginning.