THE WEDDING
by V. S. Pritchett, 1945

In the preface to Collected Stories (1982), V. S. Pritchett talks of the short story as a form that reduces "possible novels to essentials." The writer of short stories, he suggests, is "something of a ballad-maker." "The Wedding," collected in It May Never Happen (1945), has the superficially simple lineaments of a ballad, but they are present in a fashion that is richly suggestive of the extended psychological and social analysis we expect from a novel.

The story's opening is wonderfully evocative and almost elegiac in its juxtaposition of linguistic registers and of modern amenities with traditional patterns of rural life:

The market was over. Steaming in the warm rain of the June day, the last of the cattle and sheep were being loaded into lorries or driven off in scattered troupes through the side streets of the town which smelt of animals, beer, small shops, and ladies. The departing farmers left, the exhaust of their cars hanging in the air.

The paragraph establishes the cattle and the economic reality they represent as the ground for all that happens later. The wedding of Tom Fletcher's daughter Flo prompts much talk of love, but Pritchett never allows us to forget the money and the cattle that underlie the talk. Mrs. Jackson's romantic pieties are undermined by Fletcher's economic determinism.

Fletcher himself is described by Messel the art teacher as "the town bull." Pritchett describes him accompanying his daughter up the aisle, while the organ "bellowed" like Fletcher's herd, as a bull about to charge. Fletcher the bull goes about things in his "meaty way," but in truth such strength as he has is deeply rooted in weakness and dependence. For all his show of masculine dominance, he is a frightened man. His wife is dead, one daughter is now married, and the other, Mary, may be carried away from him by her education, which is encouraged by Mrs. Jackson. He is vulnerable and lonely, and so, too, in many different ways is Mrs. Jackson. Each gives off an air of confidence that is largely illusory.

With Mary's aspirations there is talk of Oxford and Cambridge. Mrs. Jackson adds talk of Paris, from her own past, and portraits painted by French artists. "A girl," we are told by Mrs. Jackson, "is a new thing: they have to invent themselves." Her own attempt at self-invention took her away from her origins, from her identity as the daughter of "old Charlie Tilly," seedsman and alcoholic pub owner. But now she has returned and is everywhere haunted by the ghost of her own childhood. When Fletcher addresses her as Little Chris Tilly, it is a reminder of her maiden name that is both disturbing and liberating. Already her attendance at Flo's wedding has made her feel "for the first time since her divorce, unmarried." Her aspirations to refinement have taken her away from the world of cattle, but "inventing" herself has finally failed. She is still Charlie Tilly's daughter.

At the wedding reception any talk of love is further undermined as the men play their openly sexual game of "lassoing" the women, obviously a displacement of the use of their ropes to control their cattle, just as Fletcher gives a slap on the bottom to a woman he wants to move. As Mrs. Jackson—she is still trying to be Mrs. Jackson rather than Chris Tilly—seeks to leave, Fletcher lassos her. Unlike the other women, she is not ready to play the game according to his rules, and she struggles and forces the rope from his hands. She leaves angrily, but by next morning it seems to her "a triumph" that the rope has marked her waist, and "she would have liked to show it to him."

When, not surprisingly, Fletcher comes to her cottage, ostensibly to collect his rope, their differences are beautifully captured in a characteristic piece of dialogue, one that is especially comic after we learn that a younger Mrs. Jackson was the author of a book entitled Rambouillet: The Art of Conversation:

"Well," said Mrs. Jackson. "I am not cattle. I suppose it was what one would have to call a country junket."

"I can't bear the stuff," said Fletcher innocently. "We used to give it to the girls, with prunes, when they wanted loosening."

In a tale so acute in its perception of the economic necessities at the root of most human relationships, it is not surprising that Fletcher should be here to talk in terms of a "deal": "I want you down at the farm, and we'll do what you like about Mary." Her doubts and complaints are smothered in kisses, and her "horror was growing into a pleasure in itself."

In agreeing to the deal, Mrs. Jackson buys Mary's freedom to "invent herself." Yet is it entirely a matter of sacrifice? Does it not also offer her a means of reintegrating herself into a society on whose edges she had been uncomfortably living? Or is it the final failure of her own attempt to invent herself. Her invented self hangs on the wall in the portrait by Vandenesse, which her rich husband paid for and which Fletcher naturally enough sees mainly in terms of money. The story closes with Messel's wry comment that "Vandenesse was a third-rate painter with a knack of catching girls inventing themselves but no good when they had turned thirty." Are we to take it that it is only now that Mrs. Jackson has reached womanhood? Or might we not take an altogether bleaker view of things? Is this the final collapse of all of her claims to individuality? It is entirely characteristic of Pritchett that we should be left to wonder, that the story's weight resides as much in what is not said as in what is made explicit.

—Glyn Pursglove