93. A Wedding in Luxembourg.

Note:
This blog is the sequel to blog 19, 'In London, In Love' (27th December 2011). The italicised text below is taken from the tape recordings made by Mary on our trip to the USA and Europe in 1981-82. The non-italicised text records some of my memories of Mary triggered by listening to her tape of a wedding we went to in Luxembourg in December 1981. Other blogs that include memories of  this trip are 5, 'Mogg's Bakery and Jack Blandiver's Clock' (5th November 2011) and 38, 'Here Comes the Can-Can. Oh, shit the tape's running out' (7th March 2012). See also blogs 15, 'Mr Oliphant's Tears' (5th November 2011) and 37, 'One Wedding, Two Funerals, Three Letters, Thirty Years' (2nd March 2012).

"It’s now Friday the eleventh. We’re still at Heathrow Airport although we did go back to John’s brother’s to sleep last night. We were all day getting from there to the airport, hanging around, and back again, and we’ve been up since six o’clock and we’re back at the airport. It’s now quarter to one. We’re hoping the Luxembourg flight will get off about two o’clock. Jan’s wedding is at six and the reception at seven. We weren’t going to go but she was so disappointed when we rang her last night that we’ve decided to make the effort and see if we can get there, but everyone at the airport’s looking pretty tired, the Christmas trees are beginning to look a bit sad and the snow is still falling down everywhere – it’s about six or seven inches deep out on the runways…

We’re in the Luxembourg aircraft now, waiting for take-off, and they’re spraying antifreeze all over the plane. It’s running down the windows like detergent suds. Meanwhile the snow is really thick and still coming down outside. It’s going to be quite an experience to take off in it.

I wish Anita and Neal could see this take off; they’d be absolutely having a heart attack. It looks like we’re going to make the wedding after all. It’s two o’clock and the wedding’s not until four and the flight will be an hour… no, the wedding’s not until six, we’ve got plenty of time. We’ll get there at what time?"

"Should be four, local time."

“Be there at four o’clock.

The runway’s absolutely covered in ice. We’re just taxiing out for our take off, piles of snow on the side of the runway where the tractor’s piled it all up. The snow’s still falling very heavily, it’s amazing we’re getting off the ground at all. There’s planes and trucks and passenger gear and walk-on things all absolutely covered in snow all over the place. The snow’s piled four or five feet deep in big piles on the side of the runway, it’s really quite scary. The snowplough’s shifting the snow on the runway, it’s going at least thirty miles an hour, really moving. One plane just landed in a cloud of snow. It looked like it was exploding.

Well, we’re taking off at last. What a terrifying experience. Still snowing. Runway’s all icy. S’posed to have an ace pilot, a grade two according to a lady at the airport, one of the best in the business. Well, the wheels are off, we’re up. Can’t see a thing. Snowing. I want to see what it’s like going through the clouds when it’s snowing. God, it’s white down there. Can see the ground, it’s absolutely amazing. There’s roads and outlines of houses and a few bits of traffic moving around and it’s, it’s just like someone’s emptied a flour bag over the whole place. I thought snow clouds would be thick and icy but they seem to be just the same…"

I’ve always preferred train travel to air travel, the relaxed pace of it. Gazing out at the passing landscape through the windows of a train has a sad but beautiful melancholy about it, like watching a sunset. But all forms of travel provide an opportunity for reflection, for looking back and planning ahead.

How would I describe Mary? In all my letters to Mum and Dad over the years, I don’t think I ever describe her to them. What could I tell them I wonder? The conventional physical things? Five feet four, curly headed blue eyed blonde (well, hairdressers’ blonde anyway), strong fingers from all that shampooing, the slightly overweight figure of someone who enjoys food and life and is not obsessed by fitness – round and cuddly isn’t it that Pat writes to Mum and Dad when she and I separate?

Perhaps I will describe the bumps on Mary’s head, as the phrenologists do in their search for character types. Has a round head so is at ease with strangers, makes friends readily and is naturally suited to sales work.

Or I will describe Mary in the conventions of a lovesick swain, some lunatic Don Quixote in thrall to his divine Esmerelda (or was that his horse?) or Launcelot singing the praises of the mystical Guinevere – the softness of her lips, the caress of her smile, the sparkling laughter in her eyes, the peaches and cream complexion. But none of that captures Mary.

I could tell them how glamorous she looks dressed to kill in her gold lamé evening jacket, how professional in her two piece cream business suit, how homely in her pale blue smock and faded jeans, or describe how sweet and serene and vulnerable she looks asleep at night with, in the words of Air Supply, her hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden dawn, or is it a sleepy golden storm - something like that – or is that from one of our favourite Roberta Flack songs?

But that won’t capture Mary either. I need to be a poet to convey the warmth of her personality and her infectious gaiety in spite of all the dramas of her past – even the broken nose, an inheritance of her disastrous short-lived marriage, is, in my eyes, as cute as cute. But all that does is tell them how much I love her and nothing about herself.

"Landing in Luxembourg. It’s still snowing. There’s a lot of trees around the place but the snow doesn’t look as thick as at Heathrow. About an inch thick here, but it’s foggy and very dark. Hope there’s someone to meet us because we haven’t got any money…

I’m whispering because we’re in the church in Luxembourg waiting for Jan and Nico to come back from their civil ceremony, which they have before the church wedding. The clocks advanced an hour so we weren’t as early as we thought. We caught Jan on the phone just as she was going out to the civil ceremony, so all she could do was send the wedding car for us, a big Mercedes, which was hilarious because it was all decorated with white ribbon. The chauffeur, Benny, was like a character from a Walt Disney film. He had actually been a circus performer and was only about four feet six high, greyish hair and very quick moving, like a little elf around the place. We pulled in for some petrol on the way and the garage attendants congratulated John and I, thinking we’d just married! We barely had time to change, race out and get to the church.

Jan has arrived. She’s wearing a white lace top and a black skirt and a bowler hat that’s silver sequins, with a grey velvet sort of bowler edge on it and an apricot flower at the back…"

I could tell them she is a Taurus with a ruling planet in Venus, the goddess of love, and if they believe in that astrological stuff, which I know they don’t – well, how could they? – it might give them some clues to her personality – earthy, dependable, compassionate, enjoying every moment to the full, loving luxury and the creature comforts of life – jewellery, fur coats, cooking and eating and dinner parties and buying expensive beautiful things for the home, soft cushions and floral chintzes and solid rosewood furniture and flowers everywhere (in Sydney we filled our hotel room with roses) and a mulled claret with chocolate gateau in front of a cosy log fire – and (I particularly like this bit about Taureans) – cherishing and nourishing and spoiling her partner with grand romantic gestures and unexpected little tokens of affection. But that, true as it all is, won’t capture the essence of Mary either.

"I’m recording over some of the wedding ceremony stuff because the voice isn’t easy to hear and you can’t hear the service.

The church was very big, magnificent windows, really modern sculptures of bronze and brass, beautiful Madonnas and saints all round the place. It was a Catholic service and the priest celebrated mass. None of the guests seemed to know quite what to do. When Jan arrived we all walked up the aisle behind her, which was a bit tricky. She told me afterwards that she thought everyone would have been seated.

I could tell of Mary's family. Fred, her gruff kiwi jack-of-all-trades Dad, who she loves dearly and who is miffed that, now I am the new man in Mary’s life, he has to do his weekly grocery shop on his own. Her elder sister Anita, co-conspirator in many of Mary’s business ventures, the red haired party girl who, in her mid thirties, marries Neal, her flying instructor, and now, on the cusp of her fertility, is desperate not to miscarry yet again. Chrissie, her mentally ailing mother, who trains her teenage girls in the family salon in Shirley Road (though Mary really wants to be a florist) and, as children, makes them sit in the car in their underwear in case they spoil their dresses on their way to visit family friends. John, Mary’s son, apprenticed as a motor mechanic, who flats round the corner with his trainee seamstress girlfriend Lynette and sits outside the Big I on his motor bike whenever his mum goes for a drink with a strange man. And that might tell them something more of the Mary I love.

"The wedding reception was held at the Airport Hotel. The most magnificent spread of food was put on. All the guests had soup and then there was a buffet, then sweets with liqueur ice-cream, fresh fruit salad, oh, there was chocolate mousse, and then a special sort of very thick coffee and liqueurs. And plates of bonbons, biscuits and chocolates came round, then a whole lot of cigars, more wine, more drinks, schnapps, kirsch and some fancy cocktail, not kirsch but tasted like kirsch, which was very powerful stuff. The guests got quite hysterical, everyone jabbering in their different languages, and somebody took Jan’s shoe and auctioned it off. Apparently it’s an old custom where the groom has to match the highest bid to prove his love for his bride, but some of the English community that were there got a bit carried away and were frightfully boozed, and one guy started auctioning off his wife’s shoe as well, and then went round the room collecting shoes from all the women and auctioning them off. Sort of killed the main purpose of the thing but it was so hysterically funny that we had to laugh. We did manage to change some money at the airport, we needed some for the phone, but we had no idea of the value of it. At the church a collection plate went around which was a bit tricky, again because we didn’t know what the money was worth. I think we put in a bill that was worth about four dollars or something - there wasn’t much else we could do - but we daren’t bid for the shoe because we wouldn’t have had a clue what it was going up to, but the next day when they left for their honeymoon we met them at the hotel and had about an hour together. Jan had a big roll of notes from the shoe auction tucked in her purse and was going to spend that in Morocco where they went for their honeymoon."

Or I can tell stories about Mary, little vignettes that seek to encapsulate her personality. I can tell how warm and precious I feel when she puts her arm in mine and cajoles me, ever so sweetly, into yet another dress shop. I can tell how funny she is when she throws a tantrum and lies on the floor kicking her heels in the air and banging her fists on our new Persian rug because the parsimonious Scotsman in me growls at her for being so extravagant. I can tell about chicken bones thrown in restaurants and her abuse of doctors. I could tell them what fun Mary is in bed but will spare their blushes, though God knows these days we seem to have moved from phrenology, graphology, iridology, and astrology to gynaecology in our search for the keys to character, as though the clues to personality lay in the revelations of the orgasm or the excavation of the g-spot. But I hardly think to capture Mary there, she who used to think that cunnilingus was a cough syrup and conceived John the very first time she made love.

"At the wedding reception everyone was really excited, talking away and happy, and the hotel owner, Pirot someone or other, turned up with a whole lot of hats. He had an African safari hat and a Mexican - black embroidered in silver, a gigantic one, and a bowler and a whole lot of other hats. Then everybody started dancing. Thought my whole life had changed actually, I got dragged up onto the floor. We did a whole lot of sort of Greek dances where everyone just hangs on, runs around in a circle jumping up and down, and then a conga all the way through the room, and up and down the stairs.

The Luxembourgers were very elegantly dressed, simple sort of restaurant style. I thought perhaps the others had overdone it a bit. Jan’s mother and sister were there. Her mother had a brown velvet long skirt on and an elaborate blouse and sort of bolero, long bolero, and she had a wig on and on top of that was perched a funny little hat with a big rose on the top like a pompom. Her sister looked very nice though. She had, again, a long dress with a silky blouse. I wore a leather skirt and bolero I bought in London, and it was just about the right weight because it was so cold in the church, you just couldn’t have had anything light on. I’d planned to wear the same dress I’d worn to John junior’s wedding but that was completely out of the question. I wore boots, although a lot of the women wore very elegant shoes I noticed, particularly with the shoe auction going on. There’s no way they could have taken mine because I couldn’t have hauled a boot off my foot.

I can tell of Mary’s robustness in the face of adversity and how she bounces back from the disappointments of the men in her life, not least the wayward unreliable son John with his good looks and bad behaviour so reminiscent of his sad father, Mary’s ballroom dancing partner (they were New Zealand Champions) and first love, whose parents connive at the marriage of two teenagers, failing to disclose Nigel’s history of mental instability and forestall a pattern of abusive behaviour that precipitates Mary with three month old John home to mum and dad and seven years of celibacy.

Or her humiliation by Roy the Mormon who, when Mary finds him in bed with another woman, gaily informs her that he and Mary have no future together anyway because he’s looking for a wife who can go to the Celestial Kingdom with him, whereas she, in her sinfulness, will never progress beyond the Terrestrial Kingdom and will be lucky to be redeemed from the devil at the last resurrection.

Or her humiliation of the randy Henry, the Education Department official from Wellington that she dines with on his periodic forays to Auckland and who harasses her constantly until, in exasperation, she finally undresses in his hotel bedroom, lies naked on the bed watching him take off his clothes and inquires, on inspecting the apparatus, “Is that it, then?” thereby deflating his amorous intentions and extinguishing his dinner invitations for all time.

Or her disappointment in Ross, who fails to tell her of the wife back home in America yet does have the grace, on returning to his loveless marriage, to send her a copy of Sonnets from the Portuguese ‘with much love from a special friend.’

I can tell of the tender way she off-loads a motley array of boyfriends after I move in with her, watching their disappointment in smug amusement, and of the gay hairdresser ‘Gerald of London’ who, in a desperate bid to conserve their platonic friendship, arrives on the doorstep late at night considerably the worse for wear and asks Mary to marry him.

"During the dancing I teased Jan and threatened to make an announcement to everybody that she was ex New Zealand ballroom dancing queen and she’d had a lot of training. The dancing was so funny, so weird. A cross between a continental mountain goat dance and a, ah, Greek traditional. Jan was posing, she had this great big Mexican hat on, and I kept dashing up to her saying ‘You can tell you’ve had training, you can tell you’ve had dancing training, let me tell everyone just how famous you are back in the old country,’ and she was going hysterical thinking that I was about to make a big announcement. Here she is. I recorded this bit at the reception.”

“Neeta, look I can’t believe it Neeta. Do you know the trouble your scungy sister caused us? Well, we had to end up, to tell the truth we had to end up sending our wedding car to pick her up from the airport, and we had to take the best man’s car to the commune, where we had the civil ceremony, and to the church afterwards. Now, I shouldn’t say you won’t believe it because I know you will. She arrives at the church in our wedding car and we were around at the back in the sacristy with the priest, trying to sneak in the front so no one can see us getting out of a beat up old car."

"And I looked the best, everyone thought I was the bride. I totally upstaged her. But then you know her dress sense. She looked a fright. Like her mother dressed her. You didn’t really. You looked lovely. It was a lovely wedding. I didn’t say anything wrong in church and I didn’t sing anything wrong and I knelt at all the right times. I tried not to disgrace you.”“

"Neeta, I never heard her say anything at all. Oh, I have to dance, dear, I’ll talk to you later."

Or I could tell of her tarot character, the Queen of Wands, her Earth Mother signifier, the magnetic friendly self-made woman, enterprising and creative, who draws immense confidence, satisfaction and security from her business and professional achievements and recognition – though she isn’t too happy to be described as ‘The Mother of New Zealand Hairdressing’ at a function to honour her - and who is sought out by her myriad of friends as a wise counsellor in times of distress, not because she has any particular book learning or even street smarts – although she does have a hard robust tough-love edge when needed - but because they respect her experience and judgment, know she has been through her own dark days, and feel the honesty and genuineness of her sympathy and care. That would tell them something more of Mary.

“Another message from the bride and groom.”

“Am I talking to Freddie and the family again?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, that’s nice. Do you know, Freddie, what my groom just told me? He said I’m a mouse and that, that he’s the leader in everything we do, but you see he’s forgotten today’s made the big difference and today’s the big switcheroo. You know what I mean, don’t you love?

I can’t help but laughing. I’ve got your daughter here. She’s completely upstaged me, arrived late, right at the last minute as we were off to the commune and the church. We even had to send the wedding car to pick her and not even her husband up, and… she can tell you the rest when she gets home. Bye, bye Freddie, and I hope you’re feeling a lot better, and Chrissie, and love to Anita and Neal, and everyone there, and that rotten little John who just got married too.”…

What more could I say? I told Mum and Dad about Sydney and the magic of our falling in love, and could have told them more of our great romance. If they had seen the transformation in me, they would know Mary, for what she releases in me is but the mirror of her love. It is I who send her long letters from England full of extracts from Walt Whitman singing of ‘the mystic deliria’, the amorous madness, the passionate trembling, singing of ‘the beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh… of the woman that loves me and whom I love more than my life’. It is I who boldly announce my full-time arrival in the lottery of her life with two suitcases left in the middle of her lounge at Huia Road and, on the top of the coffee table, a little gift and card with the message ‘You’ve won the Golden Kiwi – I hope you like it.’ It is I, the King of Cups, in my most imaginative, intuitive and romantic vein, who buys two silver-plated goblets and produces them at a candlelit dinner to toast our love and disclose, beneath the blood red wine in Mary’s cup, a silver lovers’ knot to bind us for eternity. To me Mary is elemental – the earth I am grounded in, the fire in my groin, the air I breathe, the water that nourishes me. I am in love!

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[Blog taken from material written in 2001/2002. Today is the 32nd anniversary of Mary's death on the 19th of February 1982. We were married for 5 days.]