Courtship in the Wet

Tale 1A SOGMARSH WEDDING

In the boggy hollows of Sogmarsh, where the weather has only ever offered two opinions — damp and more so — there was a wedding. There is always a wedding; the realm is sinking, but it is not, whatever the Cartographic Committee hopes, dying. People go on falling in love in it, which is either very brave or a symptom of the fumes off the Slough; the parish has never settled which.

The couple were young Hob, who cut peat, and young Bryony, who minded the eels, and they had wanted each other since they were small enough to be left in the same dripping doorway. The trouble, as ever, was money — by which Sogmarsh means potatoes. Bryony's people asked nine sacks of King Edwards for her hand; Hob's people had four sacks and a cousin who could be persuaded to count loudly; and the haggling took an entire winter, conducted at full volume across the green, until both families had thoroughly insulted each other's spuds — which, if you know the realm, is not the obstacle to a Sogmarsh wedding.

It is the rehearsal for it.

Because you should understand, before we go a step further, what a Sogmarsh wedding actually is, and it is not the soft business you are picturing. The vow is quiet, and it comes later, and I will get to it. But the part the whole parish comes for — the part the children practise all year, the part that decides whether a marriage is blessed — happens at the chapel door, and it is this:

When the bride comes out, the parish curses her.

Loudly. Lovingly. At the very top of its lungs.

The parish calls it the kistomary, and could not tell you why, and does it anyway, and to skip it would doom the harvest, or so they will swear — being, in the way of this realm, entirely wrong and entirely right at once. What they know is the doing of it, and they do it magnificently.

The champions were already massed outside the chapel when Hob and Bryony went in — a dozen of the loudest souls in the parish, in full ceremonial dress, which in Sogmarsh means potato-sack capes and rusted bucket-lids worn as breastplates, and one man (there is always one man) with a colander on his head, taking the whole thing more seriously than anyone has ever taken anything. They had spent, by their own proud account, a fortnight composing. A Sogmarsh insult is not thrown together. It is crafted.

And when the chapel door opened and Bryony stepped out into the drizzle on Hob's arm, the parish drew one enormous breath — and let her have it.

— each delivered with the anguished intensity of a tragedian on his final night, hands flung to the grey heavens, voice breaking on the vowels, two of the champions moved nearly to tears by the sheer quality of their own artistry.

And here is the thing the dry countries could never be made to understand: it is a blessing. The fonder the parish is of a bride, the fouler her send-off. A girl the village did not care for would be waved away in polite, wounding silence — and would know herself unloved to the end of her days. Bryony was cursed for a full four minutes without one repetition. It was among the great send-offs of the decade. Grown women wept at the craftsmanship.

And Bryony did not flinch, or blush, or hurry — because a Sogmarsh bride who cowers at her own cussing has no business at the altar, and she knew it in her bones.

She had come prepared.

From beneath the train of her good grey dress she drew the club — the heavy wooden frying-pan every bride of the parish carries down the aisle for exactly this moment, seasoned black by generations, swung by her own mother before her — and she waded into the barrage, laying about her with a will. She caught the colander-man a ringing blow across his bucket-lid breastplate that sat him down in the mud mid-couplet. She gave back everything she got, and better:

The parish adored her for it. That is the whole tell of a good match in Sogmarsh: not that the bride is gentle, but that she gives back. A woman who can stand in the rain and out-curse an entire village, her mother's frying-pan swinging, is a woman who will still be talking to her husband in fifty years — because she will still have things to say to him, and the breath to say them, and the wit to make them land where they hurt least and mean most.

Hob, for the record, stood through the whole of it beaming like a lamp, and when a cousin cursed his marrow he only nodded, because a man is not cursed on his wedding day. A man just has to watch the woman he loves being told, by everyone who loves her, exactly how magnificent she is — in the only language the parish trusts, which is abuse.

Only after — bruised, hoarse, radiant, the colander-man helped up and forgiven and stood the first drink — did they do the quiet part.

They were married over the bucket. The curate set the parish bucket between them — the one that stands under the worst of the leak — and the pair took the handle together, one hand each, and swore not the soft southern nonsense about sunshine and forever, but the true local vow: to mind the drip together, and to keep holding the handle when it is full. Hob said it. Bryony said it, still catching her breath from the door. The bucket, by long tradition, said nothing, and dripped.

Then the reception, held — as the best ones are — on the firm-ish margin of the moat, in the green shallows the castle still calls, with no evidence whatsoever, the love-lagoon. There was eel. There was peat-smoked everything. There was a cake, three tiers of it, which Old Mother Stilton had been persuaded to bless and which sank, with enormous dignity, four inches into the mire before the speeches were done, so that the happy couple cut the top tier at chest height and pretended this was deliberate.

And then, of course, it rained. It rained the way it rains in Sogmarsh — straight down and sideways at once, with intent — and the cake went under, and the eel jelly slid off the trestle, and the fiddler's fiddle made a noise like a duck being audited. And nobody ran for cover, because there is no cover; there never has been. So the whole parish simply stood where it was, in the rain, in the bog, up to the knees in the love-lagoon, and stayed, because the weather does not improve in Sogmarsh — the weather is the test — and they got soaked to the soul and called it the best wedding in years.

It was, too. Hob got fifty-one years out of it. He said, near the end, that the cussing at the chapel door had been the happiest he had ever been in his life — right up until the fifty years that came after it, every single one of which was better, and louder, and ruder, and kinder.

The moral, from the chapel path: anyone can love in the sunshine, and promise a garden, and mean it in the easy way. A Sogmarsh marriage promises something harder and truer — not a garden but a bog, not sunshine but fifty years of weather — and it is sworn twice: once quietly, over a bucket that will never stop dripping, and once at the top of the lungs, in a hail of magnificent abuse, with a frying-pan. Both vows say the same thing, and it is this: a happy marriage is two miserable people who never once run out of ways to cheer each other up — chiefly by being deafeningly, tenderly, creatively rude to one another, in the rain, for as long as they both shall live. The fonder you are, the worse you are, and you mean every word of it kindly. Mind the drip. Mind the club. And may your best pig learn your name.

Tale 59THE WALKING-OUT

You cannot court indoors in Sogmarsh, because there is nowhere dry, and you cannot court by speaking, because the parish would hear, and the parish hearing is the one thing a courting Sogmarsher will die sooner than allow.

So the realm courts by walking.

A young man is sent to fetch a thing from Drudgeford. A young woman is sent to fetch a thing from Drudgeford. They are sent, you understand, entirely separately, by entirely different people, for entirely unconnected reasons, on the same afternoon, along the one road there is — and they meet in the middle, by the purest chance, and walk the last stretch together because it would be rude not to, and neither of them ever finds out that the whole of Sogmarsh arranged it over their heads and is watching from behind every hedge on the route.

This is called a walking-out, and the parish is very, very good at it.

The two in this tale were Tibb Sennet and Alma Crouch, and they were the hardest case the parish had handled in a generation, because they were both shy — and two shy people, left to themselves, will walk past each other for the rest of their lives, each certain the other has not noticed them and relieved about it.

The parish noticed. The parish always notices. It noticed the way Tibb went the long way past the Crouch gate and the way Alma found reasons to be in the yard when he did, and it did what it does, which was to convene, without ever calling a meeting, and get to work.

The general in charge was Gammer Yarrow, who is eighty and has not stood up in some years and runs the entire social life of the parish from a chair by the green, and who has walked out more couples than the chapel has married, which she considers roughly the same job done properly.

Her method was errands, and the errands began gently.

Tibb was asked, by his mother, who had been asked by a neighbour, who had been asked by Gammer Yarrow, to take a basket to Mucklecombe. Alma was asked, by an aunt, who had been asked by the same chain, to bring one back. They passed on the road. They said good afternoon. That was the whole of the first day and Gammer Yarrow declared it a triumph and everybody agreed.

The second errand put them on the green at the same hour. The third had them both waiting for the same cart. By the fourth, the parish was becoming ambitious, and this is where a walking-out can go wrong, because an over-managed one starts to smell of management, and a shy person who smells management bolts.

Tibb very nearly bolted. He was sent to fetch a bucket that did not need fetching — the fourth invented bucket in a week — and even Tibb, who noticed nothing, noticed that Sogmarsh appeared to have run entirely out of buckets in exactly the places Alma Crouch happened to be standing.

He said to his mother, carefully, that it was strange how many buckets wanted moving lately.

His mother, who is not a liar and hated every second of it, said the roof was bad this year. And Tibb, who loved his mother and did not want to catch her in something, decided to believe her, and the walking-out survived, on the thin grace of a boy choosing not to look too hard at a kindness.

It came right on the day of the long fetch, which is the manoeuvre Gammer Yarrow keeps for the hard cases, and which she had not needed to use in six years.

They were both sent to Drudgeford — properly sent, real errands, real things to fetch, so that even the most suspicious heart could find no fault — from opposite ends of the parish, timed so that the only way either of them got home before dark was to walk the middle stretch together.

And they did. And it was raining, because it is always raining, and they shared the one dry bit of the causeway, which is not wide, and they walked the whole of the Drudgeford road not saying very much, and what they did say was about the weather and the state of the road and a goat they both knew, and it was, by every account that reached Gammer Yarrow that evening, the most successful afternoon in the recent history of the parish.

They were married in the autumn. At the wedding, which the whole parish attended and wept at as though surprised, not one soul mentioned the buckets, or the baskets, or the six years of errands, or the chair by the green from which the entire campaign had been run. That is the rule, and it is absolute: a walking-out is never, ever admitted, least of all to the couple.

Years later — this is the part Gammer Yarrow liked to tell, at the end, when she told it at all — Tibb Sennet came to her chair by the green, on his own, an older man by then, and sat down beside her without being asked, which nobody does.

And he said he had worked it out. Not at the time. Long after. He had lain awake one night and counted up the buckets, and the baskets, and the carts they had both just happened to want, and he had understood the whole of it, every hedge and every hand, and he had told nobody and would tell nobody, but he had wanted, once, to sit by the person who did it and say thank you.

And Gammer Yarrow, who has walked out half the parish and been thanked by none of them because that is the price of the trade, looked at the green for a while and then said the only thing the rule allowed her to say, which was that she didn't know what he meant, and the roof had been bad that year.

And Tibb said aye, it had, and they sat there, the two of them, not admitting a thing, for a good long while.

Some kindnesses only work if the person never knows they were done — so a whole parish will spend six years pretending to run out of buckets, and take the thanks to its grave, because the gift was never the marriage. The gift was letting two proud, frightened people believe they had managed it all by themselves.

Tale 67IS THERE TEA?

There are, in the calendar of Sogmarsh, perhaps six afternoons a year when it does not rain, and the parish has an arrangement for every one of them, and the arrangement is called Tea Weather.

You must understand the mechanics first, because the mechanics are the whole of the comedy. This is a wet realm. Roofs are thatch, thatch rots, and thatch can only be re-reeded dry — so a thatcher spends eleven months of the year unable to do the one thing he is for, and then the sun comes out, and every thatcher in the district goes up. Up onto the roofs, in the rare warmth, and — because it is warm, and because reeding is hot work, and because a man cannot swing a leggett in a good coat — in his shirt.

And the lane, which on any ordinary day is empty because everyone is inside keeping dry, discovers, all at once, that it has a very great deal of doorstep-sweeping to do.

This is the point at which a coarser realm would be coarse about it, and Sogmarsh is not, and the not-being-coarse is exactly what makes it a Tale.

Because what actually happens on a Tea Weather afternoon is this: the women of the lane come to their doors, with their tea, and they look. At length. Openly, but not — and this is the fine distinction the whole parish observes without ever once stating — not rudely. A woman on her own doorstep, with a cup in her hand, watching a young man re-reed a roof in the sun, is doing nothing whatever that anybody could name. She is having her tea. It is her doorstep. If her eyes happen to travel upward, well, that is where the roof is.

The tea is the alibi and the tea is the point. You cannot stand in a doorway doing nothing — that is loitering, and a Sogmarsh woman would sooner drown than be caught loitering. But you can always, at any hour, in any weather, be having your tea. The cup makes the whole thing decent. Remove the cup and it is ogling; add the cup and it is a break. The realm that invented deniability out of a filing system invented it here too, out of a kettle.

Widow Marle, that particular afternoon, cleaned the same step four times. It had been clean since Monday. She knew it was clean. Everybody knew it was clean. But a step, unlike a woman, may be attended to indefinitely without comment, and so the step got attended to, and the Rennie boy got re-reeded, and the tea got drunk, and the afternoon was, by the standards of the realm, thoroughly enjoyed by all.

Now. Here is the tale inside the custom, and it turns, as everything in this realm turns, on one small unbreakable rule.

You may look. You may not offer the cup.

To carry your tea out — across your own threshold, down the path, up to the foot of the ladder, and hold it up to the man on the roof — is not a kindness in Sogmarsh. It is a declaration. It is done in front of the entire lane, which is watching, which is always watching, and everyone in that lane knows exactly what it means, and so does he, and so, the moment the cup leaves the doorstep, does everyone's mother.

It is the boldest thing a Sogmarsh woman can do sober, and it is done perhaps twice a decade, and it is never, ever done lightly, because there is no taking a cup back.

The afternoon of this tale, it was done by Alma Crouch.

Alma Crouch you may know, if you know the parish, as one of the two shyest people in it — she and Tibb Sennet having been walked out, years back, by the whole village pretending to run errands, because left to themselves the pair of them would have looked at each other across a lane for the rest of their natural lives and called it courtship.

They were long married by the Tea Weather of this tale. And that is the thing that makes it a good tale and not merely a sweet one: it was not a young girl declaring herself to a stranger. It was a married woman of some years, watching her own husband — who thatches, in season — up on the Sennet roof in his shirt, in the one warm week of the year.

And Alma Crouch, who had never in her courting life been able to say a forward thing out loud, stood in her doorway with her tea, and looked at the man she had somehow, against all the odds of two shy people, ended up married to, and thought — the lane agrees she must have thought something, from what she did next — I never once told him. The whole parish told him for me. I never got to.

And she put down her own cup. And she made a fresh one, properly, the way you make it for somebody. And she carried it out — across her threshold, down her own path, in front of the whole watching lane, to the foot of her own husband's ladder — and held it up, and said the words that are the plainest love a Sogmarsher will ever speak, which are not I love you, which no one in this realm has ever managed, but:

"Is there tea? There's tea."

Tibb Sennet came down off that ladder so fast he took a yard of reed with him.

The lane, to its eternal credit, looked very hard at its own doorsteps and saw nothing at all. Widow Marle cleaned her step a fifth time with tremendous concentration. Nobody said a word, then or after, because to remark on it would have been to have seen it, and the whole architecture of Tea Weather depends on nobody having seen anything.

But it is in the parish now. Alma Crouch carried the cup out to her own husband, in front of everybody, after all those years, because the village did her courting for her and she wanted, once, to do a bit of it herself. And when a Sogmarsh woman wants to say the largest thing she has, and cannot find the words, because the words were never given to her, she still, to this day, in that lane, makes a fresh cup, and carries it out, and says the only words the realm has ever trusted with the weight.

In a realm too shy to say the word, tea is the word — the cup on the doorstep is a look, and the cup carried out is a vow, and a whole parish has agreed, without ever admitting it, that "is there tea?" may be made to mean "I have loved you the entire time and never once got to say so." Offer it carefully. There is no taking it back, and in Sogmarsh, that is precisely what makes it worth offering.