Page 35 of The Secrets of Dragonfly Lodge
With determination and the assistance of Mrs Armitage, their mother had sewed Helen a beautiful full-length, full-skirted white wedding dress with lace overlay and sleeves and matched by a gauze veil. The budget ran out after that and Nancy was to make do with a modest garment cleverly fashioned from a cheap remnant in a pattern that made her feel like a garden ornament.
‘It isn’t your big day, it’s Helen’s,’ was all Mrs Foster said to her complaints.
Helen had stood quietly for her own fittings, perhaps subdued by Mrs Armitage’s presence, and her finished dress now hung from the spare room picture rail, protected by a cover made from an old white sheet. From time to time, she took it out and tried it on, anxious that she was losing weight from wedding nerves.
Nancy’s problem was the opposite. The bodice of her dress had to be resewn after her second-year exams because the weeks of revision had involved sitting at her desk and eating too many biscuits. However, by the eve of the wedding, her weight had dropped back to normal so there were further arguments when the dress had to be altered for a second time.
Nancy did not envy Helen’s version of ‘happy ever after’. She was pleased that her sister seemed elated, but puzzled by the object of her love. Bobby was admittedly a good-looking young man with cropped fair curls and an athletic physique.His sharp blue eyes fixed upon his pretty fiancée’s every movement, but all the Fosters except Helen herself thought him terribly silly.
‘What do you make of Mr Atlee’s government?’ her father asked Bobby one Sunday lunchtime.
Bobby had dismissed the question, saying, ‘I don’t have time to read the newspapers much,’ before renewing his enthusiastic attack on the roast chicken. Aunt Rhoda he spoke to with awe because her fabrics were popular at Peter Jones.
Nancy thought that getting married generated a very anxious type of happiness. Sometimes Helen would trip about the house humming to herself, her expression radiant, but she was also prone to tantrums as sudden and short-lived as summer storms at the tiniest disappointment. Once she burst into tears because Mrs Foster pronounced that the red roses she wanted in the wedding bouquet would ‘look vulgar’.
The question of where the couple would live caused the greatest distress. Bobby wanted Helen to give up work after they married, but if she did then they wouldn’t be able to afford a place of their own. The different possibilities were discussed endlessly at the supper table and on one occasion Helen sobbed that her dreams were ‘in ruins’.
Nancy privately thought that the arrangement eventually agreed – the couple living with Bobby’s parents while they saved for a deposit to buy a home – sounded awful. Mr and Mrs Norris themselves were awful. They had come round for a celebratory dinner after the engagement was announced and the Fosters found them to be terrible snobs. At one pointbetween courses, Mrs Norris had turned a side plate over and murmured to her husband, ‘Look, it’s Wedgwood, Larry, very nice.’
Mr Norris complained about their new neighbour in South London, who was a plumber and was ‘letting down the tone of the neighbourhood’ by keeping his company van outside the house. The Fosters listened politely, but after the three Norrises had driven away in the Coupé Cabriolet that was Mr Norris’ pride and joy, Nancy’s mother said, ‘I’m glad that’s over’ in a brittle voice. The girls were helping her clear the table, but Helen threw down a table mat and fled upstairs in tears.
‘I don’t think she likes them, either,’ Nancy observed.
‘That’s the trouble, you marry your husband’s family.’ Mr Foster’s elderly parents were stiff and old-fashioned but safely far away in a leafy part of Bristol.
‘You’ve been lucky with Aunt Rhoda,’ Nancy pointed out.
‘Rhoda’s been very kind,’ her mother conceded.
The wedding itself was spoiled for Nancy by the best man, a cousin of Bobby’s, who sat next to her at the top table and regaled her with endless tales of silly horseplay on holidays with the Norrises at Broadstairs. He boasted about his promotion at the advertising company where he worked, and never once asked her anything about herself. All the time, she was wondering whether he meant his leg to be brushing against hers under the table. After she accidentally on purpose knocked her wine into his lap, he kept his distance.
Later, Helen tossed her the wedding bouquet – Mrs Foster’s choice of pink roses, cornflowers and Queen Anne’sLace. Nancy caught it and stared down at it in alarm, before passing it to Helen’s schoolfriend Audrey, who’d recently become engaged, saying, ‘Here. Your turn, I think.’
Marriage might seem a long way in the misty distance, but Nancy’s life was not without romantic interest. After the field trip in the New Forest, any remaining awkwardness between the girls and the boys among the group of students melted away and during their second year they mostly became friends, lunching together, borrowing notes for missed lectures and laughing at practical jokes.
Nancy’s special friends remained Peggy and the Annes, but this foursome being a lively and welcoming group they were often joined by others. In particular, there was a good-natured boy with a northern accent and an infectious laugh named Theo and a thin, studious, bespectacled lad named George, who fixed himself like a little dog on Peggy, to her surprise, but was too shy to take things further. And then there was James, who circled the group like a lone wolf and would only sometimes consent to sit among them.
He and Nancy hit sparks off one another, arguing ferociously while the others listened, hardly daring to intervene.
A particularly fierce disagreement was about which animals felt pain. Six of them were sitting in the men’s bar at the end of the afternoon before going out to the cinema. James had started it by inexpertly squishing a spider. Nancy accused him of cruelty, James defended himself and the argument broadened.
‘Obviously amoebae can’t feel anything,’ Nancy put in. ‘They don’t have a nervous system, just sense receptors. But shellfish do. If you nudge simple shellfish like limpets, they respond by clinging tightly to their rock.’
‘That’s not pain. You’ll be saying next that a plant feels pain. That sensitive plant whose leaves curl up when you touch it.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Yes, and then you’ll be saying we shouldn’t eat vegetables because we’re hurting them.’
‘You know I’m not saying that. You’re just being annoying.’
The argument jumped on to the use of live mice in experiments. Nancy expressed pity for them. Even if they were killed humanely, she thought their use should be restricted. James argued strongly for unfettered use for the betterment of the human race. As ever, it was difficult to discern what his real opinions were. He simply liked being controversial. Then, as often happened, he suddenly lost interest in the argument altogether. Nancy, her face flushed with effort and eyes wide with passion, saw his gaze soften and his wolfish lips curve into a charming smile.
‘You are infuriating,’ she muttered and sipped her lemonade.
‘Do stop arguing, you two,’ Anne Durban sighed. ‘It’s so wearing.’
‘If Nancy didn’t answer back, we wouldn’t argue,’ James said, eyes glinting.
