Loe raamatut: «Voyage of Innocence», lehekülg 2
TWO
Peter Messenger loved ocean liners with all the enthusiasm of his ten years. He loved catching the boat train and arriving at the docks where the great sleek white liners were moored with unbelievably huge cables stretching far up into the bows. He loved the oily briny smell and the gulls and the gloomy customs shed and the piles of trunks, all labelled and waiting to be trundled up into the ship, some to disappear into the hold, that mysterious place where the Not Wanted on Voyage went, or to appear in your cabin, waiting to be unpacked and then stowed away by the baggage steward until the end of the voyage, three weeks in the future.
The first time he’d been on a boat, he’d been overwhelmed by the size of it, by the notion that anything that big could sail without sinking. This time, he’d led the way up the gangway with jaunty steps, ahead of his stepmother, Lally, with that Miss Tyrell bringing up the rear.
Miss Tyrell was the one blot on his happiness. What had possessed his mother to bring her?
‘Darling, I’m not bringing her. She’s on her way out to India in any case, to look after her brother and her nephews and nieces. Her sister-in-law died recently, so sad, a tropical disease she said.’
Peter wished Miss Tyrell could be struck down by a tropical disease, right now, before they were even on board. ‘She’s a nanny.’
‘Not any more, and she’s coming to look after me as much as you. My clothes and so on. I shan’t be taking a maid, your father says an English maid is always a nuisance in India, they don’t adapt. Miss Tyrell will be very helpful, and you’ll grow to like her.’
‘I’m far too old for a nanny.’
‘You’re not too old to need some extra looking after, you’ve been so ill, darling. It’ll make me feel much happier when I’m not there to know that Miss Tyrell has you under her eye.’
‘Why won’t you be there?’
‘Well, there’s a social life on board ship, you know that. Bridge and games, and then dancing and so on in the evenings. I don’t want to have to worry about you all the time.’
‘I can look after myself.’
‘Of course you can. You’re the man of the family while Daddy isn’t here, but even so, we’ll be glad of Miss Tyrell. I don’t think she’s a fusser. She seems very practical and down-to-earth.’
Lally kept her own doubts to herself. Miss Tyrell had, although she wouldn’t say so to Peter, been wished on her. Claudia’s sister-in-law had telephoned her.
‘Mrs Messenger? My name is Monica Sake. We met once, in London, when you were staying with Claudia, but I don’t expect you to remember me.’
‘Oh, of course …’
‘I hear from Agnes that you’re going out to India.’
Lally’s heart sank, as it always did when her mother-in-law was mentioned.
‘On the Gloriana.’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I’d like you to take our old nanny with you.’
Visions of some decrepit family retainer sprang to Lally’s astonished mind. ‘Oh, no, really, I don’t think –’ And why was their old nanny going out to India in any case?
‘We’re desolated to lose her, she’s the best nanny imaginable, been with the family since she was a nursery maid, she was my husband’s nanny. And Claudia’s of course, she was nanny to all of them.’
Monica Sake was Lucius’s wife, that was it; she was the Countess of Sake. And the nanny Lady Sake wanted to foist on her had looked after Claudia, and Lucius, whom Claudia and Vee said was – what was the word they used? Bonkers.
Monica’s voice was quacking away. ‘We’ve tried to persuade her to stay. However, her brother’s wife died a little while ago, some foreign illness, and Nanny Tyrell feels she owes it to her brother to go and keep house for him. It isn’t a particularly convenient time for us, she was due to go to Henrietta and take care of the baby. But I suppose she must be allowed to do what she thinks best.’
Lally began to warm towards this unknown Miss Tyrell.
‘She wants to work her passage out. She’s a thrifty soul. I heard you’d be taking your stepson – sickly, isn’t he, and so not yet up to school? She’ll be perfect, she can take the boy off your hands. You won’t want to be bothered with a boy that age when you’re on board. Or are you taking your own nanny?’
‘Well, no.’
‘Or your maid?’
‘No.’
‘She can do that for you as well. She’s extremely competent, she’ll be a great help to you. That’s settled then.’
And it was, to Lally’s dismay. She still hadn’t told Henry that she was bringing Peter with her, and she hoped that news about the sickly boy didn’t reach her husband through the letters that his officious family wrote to him whenever they had an idle moment. Fortunately, Henry rarely read private letters; she suspected the only ones he looked at with any attention were the ones from her, and she took care to keep them brief.
‘Official correspondence is enough for any man,’ he would say, opening a long screed from his mother, flicking through the pages and crumpling the letter into a ball before tossing it into the waste-paper basket.
This wasn’t Miss Tyrell’s first voyage. She’d crossed the Atlantic more than once, had accompanied the Veres out to Hong Kong – now, there was a strange country – and had spent six months in Bombay. She liked India. She liked the heat and the people and the energy, although the shocking poverty and the skinny animals made her uncomfortable.
She was pleased for the chance to work her passage rather than pay for it herself. For one thing, it meant she would be travelling first class, which was what she was accustomed to. If she’d had to pay, it would have been tourist class, and a shared cabin down in the bowels of the ship, and not at all the kind of company she was used to. She wasn’t sure about this Mrs Messenger, though. Lady Sake had spoken of her in the pitying tone her employers used about half-wits, cripples and social outsiders.
‘Of course Harry is absolutely one of us, the Messengers go back for ever, but Lally, as they call her, I believe her name is actually Lavender, is not. She’s American, well that’s another world, don’t you think? Headstrong, I’d say, by the look of her, but then you’d need strength of character to cope with Harry, I never knew a man with so much energy. Her father’s a politician, from Chicago of all places. He was a doctor before he went into the Senate, Irish, of course, her name was Fitzpatrick. And she’s Catholic. Will that bother you, Nanny?’
Having no religious convictions of her own, merely subscribing to the conventional Anglicanism of her employers, Miss Tyrell said no, in the tone of voice that made Lady Sake feel for a moment that she had committed a solecism by even mentioning religion.
‘I do hope you don’t suffer from seasickness, Miss Tyrell. It can be very bad in the Bay of Biscay at that time of year.’
Seasick? Not her. As the SS Gloriana sailed into what her crew called a dirty night, her stomach was perfectly in order. She gave Peter a dose of tonic, though, just in case there should be any inclination to collywobbles, as she called any kind of stomach upset, and it would help to keep him regular, so important when a child was convalescent. Peter was the nervy sort, you could see that, although that might be due to his having been so ill. And Mrs Messenger? Miss Tyrell felt sorry for her. She didn’t care to see a young woman with those tired eyes and that look of haunted care to her. The child had been in danger, yes, but he was better now, and he was a stepson, not one of her own. Perhaps that was the problem. But here she was, on her way back to India, to be reunited with her husband. This was a time for happiness, not for fretting.
And not a good sailor by the look of her.
‘Run along, Peter, Mummy’s not feeling very well and isn’t in the mood for your chatter.’
‘I was only telling her about some people she knows on board, that’s all.’ It wasn’t for Miss Tyrell to keep him away from his mother. Then he understood. ‘She’s seasick,’ he said with scorn.
THREE
Perdita Richardson looked around her narrow cabin. She liked the round porthole, it had a distinctly nautical air that was pleasing; if you were going to be shunted off on a sea voyage, then you might as well feel you were on board a ship, and not merely in some floating hotel. She’d seen her friend Tish and her new husband off last year after their wedding. They’d had a stateroom on the Queen Mary – they’d been going to spend their honeymoon with her husband’s family in New England – and Perdita had been disappointed to see how ordinary it was. Plush, but it could have been a hotel anywhere.
This, however, was unquestionably shipshape; fitted lockers beneath the bunk, everything in its place. She took off the shapeless brown felt hat she’d crammed on her head for want of anything better being immediately to hand, and gave her hair a vigorous ruffle. Curly and unmanageable, she kept it in place when she could be bothered with a fearsome array of pins and fixative. Usually, she left it in its natural state; that was one good thing about being a student of music, appearances went for very little. Most of her fellow students at the Royal Academy of Music were young and hard-up and had minds above mundane items of clothing or the nice arrangement of hair.
She’d tried cutting her thick curls short, but in her opinion it made her look like one of the woolly sheep that chewed the grass around her home in Westmoreland, and there was some hope of elegance, just every now and then, if you had hair long enough to be pinned up. She rummaged in her bag for a hairbrush and tugged it through the disorder. It made little difference to her appearance, but she felt she had made an effort.
Not evening dress the first night out, everyone knew that. So she’d wear – what? Despite the small cabin and the untidy hair, Perdita was far from being a poor student, or a poor anything. Her family were wealthy and she had money of her own; she could buy all the clothes she wanted, but found it difficult to find much ready-made that fitted her tall, rangy frame, and had a dislike of the fussing around at the dressmakers, as she put it. So her clothes were an odd collection of what she’d found that fitted her, including some pairs of men’s slacks, which she found comfortable and which fitted her long legs. No one made anything of them at college, but now, throwing open the lid of her suitcase, she did wonder whether they were quite right for a sea voyage.
I expect lots of people will be frightfully posh, she said to herself. Well, they’ll have to be satisfied with their own poshness, how I look can’t affect them at all. She took out a favourite green dress, gave it a shake, and opened the narrow cupboard to find a coat hanger.
A woman in uniform appeared at the door as though by magic. Small and shrewish, she cast a disapproving look at Perdita’s open suitcase and stepped inside the cabin, making Perdita retreat until she had her back against the washbasin, the green dress held in front of her like a shield.
‘I’ll unpack for you, miss. I’m your stewardess. My name’s Merkin.’
‘Oh, thank you. Only, I can do it myself.’
Merkin paid no attention. ‘You go along to the dining room and put your name down for the second sitting. Not the first, mind, that’s for kiddies and people who don’t care for the social side. My passengers always take the second sitting.’
Such was Merkin’s moral force that Perdita found herself outside her cabin and following the arrows guiding her to G-deck.
‘Boat drill half an hour after we sail, miss,’ Merkin called after her. ‘You’re muster station twenty-three, and you’ll need to have your life-jacket with you.’
Boat drill? Lifejacket? This was Perdita’s first voyage, and she was mystified. Not to worry, someone would explain it to her, and say where she had to be and what she had to do. People always were keen to put you on the right path, especially when it came to anything as institutional-sounding as boat drill. Like fire drill at school, only not shinning down ladders in the dead of night and usually in the rain, it was to be hoped.
A sudden tiredness swept over her, irritating her with her weakness. She was completely well, they all said she was fully recovered, only needed time to get her strength back. Hence the voyage, a round trip to India, with a month or so staying with friends in Delhi; it would do her the world of good, the doctors had assured her. She hadn’t been interested, wasn’t interested in going on a voyage, had never wanted to go to India, they were her grandfather’s friends in Delhi, not her friends, she didn’t want to stay with a lot of strangers, and in what she knew would be a very strange country.
Only Grandpapa had been so keen on the idea, and he hadn’t been well himself, and she hated to disappoint him; it would be churlish and unkind to refuse his generous offer of a ticket and all expenses paid.
Not for the first time, she wondered if he was so urgent for her to go, not because of her recent illness, but because of the coming war. If war broke out soon, she could be stuck for the duration in India. Which might suit Grandpapa, but didn’t suit her at all. What music was there for her in India? Besides, if there was a war, she wanted to be where she belonged, in England, not away from all the bombs and terror on some distant verandah. The last war had gone on for four years; she couldn’t imagine not seeing Westmoreland for four whole years.
No, to be fair, Grandpapa would have sent her to America if he were concerned for her safety and wanted her out of England in time of war. He must think that the war he was so sure was on its way wasn’t going to start for a few months yet.
Her friends weren’t much interested in talk of war, but those who talked about it mostly reckoned that it was necessary to do something about Hitler and the Nazis. Others, cynical arrivals from Austria and Germany, Jewish refugees with music in their souls that made the English students sigh and give up hope, said that Britain and France wouldn’t fight for Czechoslovakia or for anyone else, it was all just words. Hitler got what he wanted, always would get what he wanted, and what he didn’t want was to fight England.
Perdita’s mind turned to the here and now, and to her music. The first thing she had to do was find a piano. There were several on board; that was one thing she had insisted on. ‘Grandpapa, I can’t go if I can’t work. I’m hopelessly out of practice, and more weeks with no playing will just be a disaster. If I can work on the voyages out and back, and if your friends have a piano, something at least halfway decent, I’ll be able to practise there.’ Weren’t things like pianos liable to be eaten by giant ants or inclined to warp and go out of tune for ever in the moist heat of the unimaginable east?
The friends did indeed have a piano, a good one, they had assured her in a courteous letter. So possibly not yet eaten by ants. And Grandpapa had spoken to the chairman of the shipping line, an old chum, needless to say, and had been assured that Perdita would be able to practise in one of the lounges whenever she wanted.
Perdita knew about practice and doing it whenever you wanted. That meant, when no one else was around; well, that was all right with her. She was an early waker, distressingly so since she’d been ill, so if she could get a couple of hours in first thing, no one would be about to bother her or to be bothered by an hour of scales and arpeggios. The dining room forgotten, she set off on a piano hunt.
FOUR
Vee held the white, round box in her hand, hesitating. She lifted the lid, and shook two pills on to her palm.
Recently, these pills had begun to have a strange effect on her, in some mysterious way causing her to relive, in the utmost clarity, scenes from her life. Not truly dreams, for there was nothing in the sequences that rolled through her mind that hadn’t happened. The past was simply playing over again, as though she were watching a film.
When she woke, tired and thick-headed, for she always had alcohol to help the sleeping pills work, she could remember only a little of these waking dreams, the re-enactments of her former life, but the memories and images they left in her mind disturbed her profoundly throughout the ensuing day, until the evening came, and her mind cleared, and she could numb herself once more with a drink and companionship. She never drank to excess. She couldn’t risk losing control, the alcohol was merely a crutch, not a wiper-out of the emotions and dilemmas she longed to be free of.
She had been tempted, over the last few months, to try some of Mildred’s remedy for keeping the world at bay, but it wasn’t for her, she didn’t want a sense of heightened excitement, she had that on her own account. What she wanted was the cessation of feeling, then she could be happy.
Better to relive scenes of her past than to be caught in more nightmares.
She sat down and brushed her hair, long firm strokes to soothe her fears away. Then she climbed into bed, between stiff sheets, smelling of ironing and starch. She left the light on, a glowing blue night-light. Like on a train, she thought drowsily, as the pills began to take effect. Sweet dreams, she muttered to herself, as her eyelids closed. Sweet dreams, or bitter dreams, to match her thoughts.
Tonight, she was back in the Deanery. She was eighteen years old, she knew that, because there was a birthday just past, and a card on the fireplace of her room, wishing her a happy birthday from Hugh. He’d drawn a caricature of her and her cat, a brilliant sketch, both the cat and the chair it was on decorated with bows. Hugh was as gifted with his pen as he was with words.
She was sure that it wasn’t going to work. It was worth a try, it was always worth a try, but she, and the mistresses at school, and Hugh, who had been as encouraging as he knew how, had all known that Grandfather would forbid her to go to university.
‘No chance of a scholarship, Vee, I suppose?’ Hugh asked her as they sat, legs outstretched, on the white window seat in their sitting room on the top floor. The window was open, although the day was cold, since they were enjoying an illicit cigarette. Smoking, like alcohol, was banned in the Deanery.
‘There’s a chap I know at the House, he gets two hundred and fifty a year. Twice what his father earns, actually.’
‘What does his father do?’ Vee asked.
‘He’s a carpenter, I think.’
‘Only Daddy isn’t a carpenter, unfortunately, so I doubt if I count as a deserving case.’
‘Should have had Jesus for a father,’ said Hugh irreverently. ‘After all, God the Father, one substance with the Son, so … All right, I’m not really being frivolous, I’m trying to help.’
‘Irreligious rather than frivolous, don’t you think?’ She tapped the ash from the end of her cigarette carefully on to the outside ledge of the window. ‘Women’s colleges aren’t rich, and the scholarship girls are all poor.’
‘You’ll be poor, if Daddy and Grandfather cut off your allowance.’
‘It isn’t the same. Besides, you have to be brilliant to get a major scholarship, as well as being deserving, and I’m neither.’
‘True. Joel Ibbotson is brilliant, no doubt about it.’
It was all very well for Hugh, but however compassionate he was, his was a different situation. He was a man, he didn’t have to earn or justify or sweat for his place at university. It was the next natural thing for him.
‘Whereas for me, the next natural thing is getting married and starting a family.’
‘I pity the poor husband,’ said Hugh, tossing the butt of cigarette out of the window.
‘You are an ass, Hugh, now we’ll have to go down and find it before the gardener does.’
The gardener, a dour ancient of even more puritanical inclinations than the Dean, deeply disapproved of smoking, and had been known to harangue tourists with a stream of Old Testament prophecy about where those who smoked would end up.
Hugh slid to his feet. ‘Lord, yes, what a bore, but anything not to get a lecture about going from one smoking pit to another.’
Vee got up and linked arms with him. ‘Or Daddy being distressed and asking himself where he went wrong with us.’
Hugh looked at Vee with affection. He was barely half a head taller than her, short for a man. They were very alike, obviously brother and sister in physique and colouring, and with the same direct gaze in their dark eyes.
‘He did go wrong, in a very big way, I fear, but smoking is the least of it.’
Hugh wasn’t there when their grandfather arrived to discuss Vee’s future. ‘Lucky for me I’ll be back in Oxford when he comes,’ he’d said. ‘You know how scenes upset me.’
Unfortunately, scenes didn’t upset Grandfather.
With the easy movement of dreams, she was no longer in her austere, bare-floored bedroom, but in the drawing room, large and sombre; Victorian in furniture and colour, and even smell.
It was a Monday. Family conferences always happened on a Monday. Grandfather never came to the Deanery at the weekend, because on the Saturday the Dean would be polishing his sermon, and on Sunday, Grandfather’s absence from divine service would be noticed.
Unlike many a child of the clergy, Vee never longed to escape Sunday services. The time spent in the great gloomy, chilly Minster: Matins and Evensong, and sometimes Holy Communion as well, gave her hours of peace. Sometimes she thought it was a God-given peace, could almost feel herself wrapped in the arms of a loving God; at other times a harsher realism told her it was simply that it was possible to be alone in church in a way that you couldn’t at home. The Dean never questioned his children’s faith. Even though he had lost all his trust in a beneficent and watchful God, he hoped by one means or another that his beliefs would return, and, meanwhile, his remaining children were going to be brought up in godly ways.
They were both a disappointment to him, Vee knew that perfectly well. Hugh was an aesthete from birth, a fey, babbling infant who had grown into a brilliant twister and spinner of words. His time at school had not been celebrated, as the Dean’s had, by success at sport, and the grim establishment he was sent to at thirteen, his father’s old school, had neither time nor liking for any boy who was different, who wasn’t obsessed with sport, who was in any way unchristian.
Hugh had survived, as Vee had survived her own bleak, northern boarding school. In fact, for most of the time, she was happier at school than at home, although in the holidays there had always been Hugh to escape with, to share jokes and enjoy the excitement of a modern world beckoning from outside the Deanery walls.
Grandfather, when he arrived late on Sunday evening, was in one of his jolly moods. Vee’s heart sank as she gave him a dutiful kiss, allowed him to pinch her cheek – how she hated that, and put his stick in the hall stand.
Grandfather in a jolly mood meant he had a scheme, something that pleased him, and she had a presentiment that it was to do with her – that was why he had come, she was sure of it, from the hints her mother had let drop, clothes for her, now that she was growing up, not much scope for a young lady in York …
She had already broached the subject of What next? with her father. When she told him her plans, striving to sound natural even while her hands were held so tightly together that her nails dug into her skin, he’d simply looked through her in that way he had.
‘Oh, I doubt if that will be possible, my dear. Your mother would hardly like it.’
The truth was, her mother wouldn’t care what she did, as long as she did it somewhere else. Vee knew that her mother was dreading her leaving school and spending days and weeks and months at the Deanery. Almost as much as she herself was dreading it.
‘Besides,’ her father went on, ‘there is the question of money.’
‘Hugh’s paid for.’
Which was a stupid thing to say. Hugh was a man, it was different for Hugh.
‘Your grandfather’s paying for Hugh at Oxford, not me. You’ll have to ask him.’
She knew what the answer would be.
Now they were all in the drawing room. Grandfather, his large and magnificent head under a mane of splendid white hair, sitting erect in the Dean’s chair. The Dean standing awkwardly by the fireplace, not looking at Vee, and Mummy, sitting on a slender upright chair, her tapestry in her hand, fingers searching among her wools for a colour match. Like one of the fates at work, Vee thought with a sudden feeling of resentment. Spinning and weaving and cutting, and what choice or say did any of the lives represented by those slender threads have in their fates?
Vee perched herself on the edge of the heavy-footed sofa.
‘Eighteen, now,’ said her grandfather genially. ‘A grown-up lass. Time to go out into the world. You’re looking forward to leaving school, I feel sure.’
Vee said nothing.
‘So we need to settle what you’re going to do next. You can’t hang around at home, getting under your mother’s feet and taking up with some stiff-necked young curate, that would never do.’
The Dean stirred uneasily and gave the fire an unnecessary stir with the poker.
Vee took a deep breath. ‘I know what I want to do when I leave school, Grandfather.’
‘You do?’ His face became more watchful. ‘Out with it, then.’
‘I want to go to university. I sat the exams, at school, and I’ve been accepted. At Oxford.’ She swallowed, and ploughed on. ‘For the new academic year that starts in October.’
The silence was palpable. The Dean looked down at the floor, her mother stitched resolutely on. Grandfather’s face was reddening alarmingly.
‘And I thought that perhaps I could spend six months abroad before I went up. I’m going to study modern languages, you see, and I’d like—’
Vee moved her head from side to side in a vain attempt to avert the explosion of wrath, the deadly missiles of her grandfather’s anger as they rained about her. She always hated to be shouted at, and even her mother’s cold reserve and chilly indifference was a thousand times better than this terrible rage.
Alarmed, the Dean rang for the maid, ordered a brandy, and the maid, after a frightened glance at the thunderous countenance of the bellowing Jacob Trenchard, scuttled away for the restorative.
It would take more than a brandy to soothe Grandfather. His contempt poured over Vee in an abusive torrent, the stupidity of all women, the wickedness of any university to open its doors to women, the incredible folly and wilfulness she had shown in going about her selfish, pointless schemes with no thought for family or her place in the world.
‘Have you wasted my money on education, so that you can turn into some dreadful bluestocking? Why, they won’t even give women degrees at Cambridge, because they know the whole thing’s a sham. Women’s brains aren’t designed for academic study, just as they aren’t designed for business or politics or any of the other spheres they try to meddle in these days.’
Her grandfather’s hatred and fear of women streamed out of him. Even Vee’s mother looked up from her needlework with a doubtful glance, but she wasn’t going to defend her daughter.
He hated educated women? Dear God, if only he knew how much she hated and despised him. ‘Daddy, please,’ said Vee desperately.
She should have known better than to expect any support from that direction.
‘My dear, it’s folly, and the school should never have encouraged you or allowed you to think of such a thing. I shall have something very sharp to say to your headmistress there, in fact, I shall write to the governors. They have no right to put such notions into an impressionable young head. Your grandfather and your mother and I will decide what’s best for you, and you should know that.’
‘What’s best for you, not what’s best for me.’
Vee had prayed she wouldn’t cry, she mustn’t show any weakness in front of Grandfather. Now she was white hot with rage of her own, and she had no tears to shed.
Grandfather sipped his brandy, calmed down, and proceeded as though she had never spoken, as though he hadn’t said the terrible things about her, about women.
‘Your mother’s place is here, a man in your father’s position needs a wife to help him. So we can’t ask her to go to London with you.’
‘I don’t want to go to London.’
He went on as though she hadn’t spoken. ‘Her sister, your Aunt Lettice, is bringing out Claudia this next season, and she’s agreed that you shall do the season together.’
Vee stared at him. ‘Do the season? In London? Me? Are you mad?’
Not all her arguments or pleading could avert her doom. Grandfather held the purse strings, and her father was too weak and too poor to stand up against his domineering sire – why should he, over this, when he hadn’t gone against the paternal wishes ever in his whole life? As for her mother, London was a long way away, and Vee would be out of her sight, which was all she cared about. She had suggested a year – two years, even – in Switzerland, for Vee to work up her languages and that kind of thing, but she had been overruled.
‘Waste of time and money,’ Grandfather had said. ‘Let her be a debutante, then she’ll meet the right kind of young man and marry. Young women can’t marry too young these days, it’s the only thing that keeps them out of mischief. Let Vee find a husband a bit older than herself, that works best. Mind you, I don’t want her getting attached to any layabout young aristocrat. I don’t have any time for that kind of thing, and I shan’t part with a penny unless I approve of the man. She can pick someone who’s got a career ahead of him, of good family, she is your daughter, Anne, and the cousin of an earl, she’s no reason to go feeling grateful for any fly-by-night who grabs her in a taxi and wants to whisk her to the altar four weeks later.’
