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irresolute, then entered and saw her mother at once. She was standing with her bridegroom surrounded by a little group of chattering women. Rhoda’s entrance was almost unnoticed, but she edged through them and saw her mother’s face breaking into a tentative smile. It had been four years since they had met but she looked younger and happier, and after a few seconds kissed Rhoda on the right cheek a little hesitantly, then turned to the man at her side. He was old—at least seventy, Rhoda judged—rather shorter than her mother, with a soft round-cheeked, pleasant but anxious face. He seemed a little confused and her mother had to repeat Rhoda’s name twice before he smiled and held out his hand. There were general introductions. The guests resolutely ignored the scar. A few scampering children gazed at it boldly, then ran off shouting through the French windows to play outside. Rhoda remembered snatches of conversation. “Your mother speaks of you so often.” “She’s very proud of you.” “It’s good of you to come so far.” “Lovely day for it, isn’t it? Nice to see her so happy.”
    The food and the service were better than she had expected. The cloth on the long table was immaculate, the cups and plates shone and her first bite confirmed that the ham in the sandwiches was fresh off the bone. Three middle-aged women dressed as parlour maids served them with a disarming cheerfulness. Strong tea was poured from an immense pot and, after a certain amount of whispering between the bride and groom, a variety of drinks was brought in from the bar. The conversation, which had so far been as hushed as if they had recently attended a funeral, became more lively and glasses, some containing liquids of a highly ominous hue, were raised. After much anxious consultation between her mother and the barman, champagne flutes were brought in with some ceremony. There was to be a toast.
    The proceedings were in the hands of the vicar who had conducted the service, a red-haired young man who, divested of his cassock, now wore a dog collar with grey trousers and a sports jacket. He gently patted the air as if to subdue a hubbub and made a brief speech. Ronald, apparently, was the church organist and there was some laboured humour about pulling out all the stops and the two of them living in harmony to their lives’ end, interspersed with small harmless jokes, now unremembered, which had been greeted by the braver of the guests with embarrassed laughter.
    There was a crush at the table so, plate in hand, she moved over to the window, grateful for the moment when the guests, obviously hungry for the food, were unlikely to accost her. She watched them with a pleasurable mixture of critical observation and sardonic amusement—the men in their best suits, some now a little stretched over rounded stomachs and broadening backs; the women, who had obviously made efforts and had seen an opportunity for a new outfit. Most, like her mother, were wearing floral summer dresses with matching jackets, their straw hats in pastel colours sitting incongruously on newly set hair. They could, she thought, have looked much the same in the 1930 s and ’ 40 s. She was discomforted by a new and unwelcome emotion compounded of pity and anger. She thought,
I don’t belong here,
I’m not happy with them, nor they with me. Their embarrassed mutual
politeness can’t bridge the gap between us. But this is where I came from, these
are my people, the upper working class merging into the middle class, that
amorphous, unregarded group who fought the country’s wars, paid their
taxes, clung to what remained of their traditions.
They had lived to see their simple patriotism derided, their morality despised, their savings devalued. They caused no trouble. Millions of pounds of public money wasn’t regularly siphoned into their neighbourhoods in the hope of bribing, cajoling or coercing