31. WEDDING PLANS

There's more than one place to get married in.

The Reverend John Simpson was most insistent.

“There’s no way you can look anything like the innocent virgin that a bride is supposed to be,” he said to Maureen when she and her husband-to-be, Wallace Pratchett, were at a meeting with him to discuss their forthcoming wedding

“What do you mean?” asked Maureen, “it’s obvious that I’m not still without experience of life, so to speak, you’ve only got to look at my figure to see that, but as for the innocent bit, I think I’m pretty innocent of just about everything you might call a sin.”

“A bride should be untouched,” he said suavely, “and without carnal knowledge. That’s what marriage is for, and you are most obviously very much and very obviously with carnal knowledge. I can’t allow it.”

“Can’t allow what?” asked Wallace, knowing what the cleric meant but wanting to hear him say it

“It’s all the rock and roll and promiscuous dancing,” intoned the Reverend, “it makes people go too far, much too far, and look at what it’s done to you. And now you’re asking me to conduct a wedding of convenience in my church, and create a marriage that will no doubt lead to a divorce court in due course, and I won’t do it. Marriage is a holy state in which two loving people are joined together for life, not just because it’s convenient!”

“We are a loving couple,” said Wallace quietly, though the beginnings of a sense of anger was forming somewhere inside his brain when he heard the dismissal of the man who’d replaced his adoptive father as the clergyman in this very church.

“No, my boy, no,” droned the Reverend Simpson, “you are too young to know what you are, but if you were a loving couple you would have waited to consummate your love and not have barged head-first into the nearest bed and done it there and then. For that was sin, and there is no way a sinful relationship can be a loving one, not in the eyes of the Lord and not in my church...”

“Come on, Maureen,” Wallace said, grabbing the already obviously pregnant Maureen by one hand, “this man knows nothing about us, about you and me! There’s got to be a better way for the two of us!”

The cleric shook his head sadly. “I know enough about you, Wallace Pratchett,” he began, “to judge that you came from a sinful union yourself, for wasn’t it true that your own father was mercifully sent to the hereafter by a bomb during the war, and therefore must have lain with your mother prior to his death, your real mother, that is, and not the woman who took you on? It’s in your blood, obviously. The sins of the fathers are passed down the generations, my son, don’t you forget that.”

Wallace was incensed, but rather than engage in a full scale argument that he knew he would never win no matter how long he bellowed at the priest, he pulled Maureen along and out of the vestibule of the church, and into the early summer air.

“All we want is to get married,” groaned Maureen, “and now that! The man’s no idea what it’s like to be a real person! He cloaks himself in a white surplice and passes judgements as if he was the Lord himself!”

“Let’s see what your mum’s got to say,” suggested Wallace.

“She won’t be happy,” Maureen told him, “she never did like churchy things. Even when your mum married a vicar she thought she could do better for herself, or so she’s told me since. The trouble with men who get obsessed like daft old Reverend Simpson is obsessed, they can’t see that there’s more than one way of looking at things. Think of what it would be like when I was working at the baths. I see a column of bubbles rising to the surface and because, say, I’m obsessed by the way kids find it funny breaking wind under water, it never crosses my mind that someone might be drowning!”

“What about the Register Office?” asked Wallace, deliberately changing the subject. “We could get married there, all legal and they say it’s quite nice there, and no church involved. No criticism from men who have no idea what it feels like to be us. Just a registrar, a few friends who know us, your mum, and it’s done in a twinkling!”

“We’d better decide quickly, though,” pointed out Maureen, “or our little lump of pride and joy might put in an appearance before we’re married, and I wouldn’t like that.”

“I tell you what: let’s go to the office this very minute and book our wedding for as soon as they can do it. Then we’ll tell everyone,” decided Wallace, and Maureen said, with the broadest of smiles on her face, “if you still want to marry me, Wallace.”

“Of course I do!” Wallace looked hurt as though the very idea of her thinking he might have changed his mind was pernicious to him. “You know how I feel about you, darling,” he continued as they walked along, arm in arm, close together like lovers ought to be, “I will always love your like this,” he said, “you’ve got to believe me.”

“But I’m so much older than you,” she smirked, “so how will you be when I’m an old woman with warts and a gammy leg with elastic wrapped around it?”

“I’ll be an old man with varicose veins and a stoop,” he told her, “and if an old man like that can’t love an old woman with warts I don’t know what’s becoming of the world!”

“Are we going to have a reception afterwards?” she asked suddenly, “a party with things on sticks and jelly? And a cake, a dirty great big wedding cake with icing all over it and little icing models of the bride and groom on top?”

“Of course we will! And music and dancing!”

“A band? What about getting Cliff Richard and the Shadows?”

“Or Tommy Steele? But I’ve a feeling we would never be able to afford big names like that!”

“But we would if they were on records and we played them on my Dansette,” she said thoughtfully, “it’s really quite loud, you know. We could play records, proper dance records too, if we know someone who’s got some...”

“My Mum number Two has,” said Wallace, “I remember her saying, once in an English lesson when I was still at school, that she had quite a decent collection of dance records! And she’ll come to our wedding, won’t she?”

“She better had,” grinned Maureen, “if only to give you a hundred lines for needing a shave!”

“I’m going to grow a beard,” he said, mischievously.

“That might be quite interesting. I’ve never kissed a man with a beard.”

“And you plan to kiss me even after we’re married?”

“Just you wait and see! I’ll gobble you all up, beard and face and all!”

“Urgh!” he smiled, “and I’m trying to think what part of your I might want to gobble up first.”

“I think I can guess,” she said, “but look: we’re nearly at the Register office. Let’s pray that everything works out all right.”

“I’m not praying to anyone after that rotten Reverend,” he replied, and he squeezed her fingers gently, “come on!”

© Peter Rogerson 08.07.19