STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN
Chapter Four                                                                                                         Part four






                    My wedding day was a cold, cruel winter's day following the hot summer of my engagement.  I wore my pearls.  I had put away his mother's mad, sick words likening the pearls to tears.  They were beautiful and I was blissfully happy.  My wedding day was the day my father and I walked beneath an archway of dead, graveyard trees that stood to attention in two, proud lines and frowned down on my meekness and the whiteness of my silk and lace.  The bleak sky tried to persuade me by spreading its greyness to each horizon and a bitter wind tried to dislodge my veil and its blindness.  But I entered the church willingly and gladly.  A heavy oaken door closed me in and I walked the aisle.  I openly humbly confessed my love for a man, before a witnessing congregation and before God.  I was pronounced a wife, the ring slipped easily over my knuckle and tightened on the soft flesh of my finger.
                 The reception bubbled and babbled with guests and champagne.  Sleek, brilliantined, penguined men stood with their chins in and their beaks and tails out.  Ladies' satin gloved hands tipped crystal glasses to painted lips.
                  I felt myself receding. There were no thoughts in my head, no words in my mind for my tongue to find, so my tongue was still, I stood quietly, emptied like a china doll that might break and show the dark hollow inside.  But no tear were painted on my cheek, so nobody could know, least of all myself.  Only my family looked back at me with the same dark cavity in their eyes, as they watched me fade.  It was the last thing we shared.  My mother, my father, my two brothers and myself were all empty with a blackness where our instincts shouted their fears but were crushed with disbelief and the blackness was quiet and blank and ignorant, left wide and gullible, waiting to be filled and easily convinced by my new husband's fussing and clucking and self assured, overflowing generosity.  So my family smiled, believing their hollowed insides to be filled with relief and joy at the sheer perfection of my future.  And I believed my hollowness to be the dazed and crazed euphoria of love, so I smiled too and stayed close to the man I loved.  And still I found no words from my head for my tongue, so I stood quietly next to him, never wanting to be so far away that I could not reach out to touch him if I needed to, because suddenly I was afraid of the world and I knew that he would protect me.
                  How could I know that it was then that the tears began to fall inside the dark hollow of the china doll.  They trickled and echoed down to the bottom of the black well.  The china doll was my own making, I made her when I chose to love him and sad, slow years would have to pass before the water rose to become heavy in her chest, choke at her throat and spill from her eyes where she would see the tears and they would tell her that her fear of the world began with the man she tried to love.  She would see that it was not her, but the fear that he had placed in her that he had gone to such lengths to protect.  She would see that with great care he had planned every wall he built around her and had devoted much time to assessing and preventing breaches in the stonework and unlocked gates through which her fear might escape.  Me and my mindless, impotent, incapable life were fortressed in and the drawbridge was up.  And my husband laid himself around me like the thick, green unmoving water of a stagnant moat I never dared to cross.
                          We honeymooned in Paris.  Snow fell like slow feathers and lay down like soft pillows over roads and high slate rooves.  We took a ride in a carriage.  The horse's misty breath danced around its nose at it stomped and snorted impatiently while we wrapped ourselves in fur muffs and hats and spread a heavy blanket over our knees.  The driver took our silver coins and the horse pulled away.  Its hooves were silenced by the snow and we floated noiselessly through the city in the drift of a dream that was white and grey, snow white and stone grey, pure white and Parisian grey.  We  were drawn through streets wide and narrow where every wall and railing was topped with a soft white ridge and every iron streetlamp wore a solid, white crown.  We went up an avenue of marching trees, carrying snow on the upper edges of each pruned and nobbled branch and over the Seine where we watched the slow, grey river flow beneath its many bridges.
                     The evenings were spent at the opera or the theatre where we sat in the dark and watched the players walking the stage in lighted circles, their voices singing or calling out unnaturally to the darkness where many invisible people sat abreast in many invisible seats, until the curtain fell and the light moved outwards over the orchestra and then the audience who rose to meet it, applauding.
                    After the performance we would have dinner in a fine restaurant where pianists sat at a
grand piano and filled the air with their gentle playing.  A crystal chandelier hung from the high ceiling like a massive jewel.  The carpet was deep red and the heavy velvet curtains were looped and draped from ceiling to floor with gold braid and gold cords.  The upholstered chairs were round backed and bow legged, ornately carved and painted with gold leaf and the table was set with silver.  It was fit for a princess and the princess was me.  She sat with her prince at a table for two and the flame of a slender candle danced between them.
                         While we ate, the princess sipped at her deep, purple wine and listened to her prince speak of his kingdom and its rules.  It was a fairy tale land of gentility, comfort and generosity, and her prince would love and care for her and grant her every wish.  Then one night he talked of the other kingdom, a lesser world he had defeated and rescued her from.  He spoke of her family's kingdom with contempt and he told her she must discard it to be the princess he knew she wanted to be.  She would learn anew, he was willing to be her teacher, because she deserved no less, because she was very beautiful.
                     I looked across the table and my husband's face was an ugly face.  His eyes were high and haughty, the lids were half closed with disdain and a vile taste drew his mouth downwards at one corner.  He leered at me and I was frightened.  An anger shone deep inside his eyes.  The same anger I had seen in the garden when my hair was loose and tangled and my hands full of brown soil.  In the restaurant my hair was clean, pinned up and beautifully curled and my hands were dainty and manicured, but his anger was still alive.  I felt shame and guilt for causing his ugliness, for being so bad as to twist his face with a disgust that pained him so.  The moment passed and he smiled again, as though he had been smiling all the while with no wish or thought to do otherwise.  I smiled too, but I was awash with panic and the tears were building.  My childhood raced around my memory.  My mother, my father, my two brothers, everything had been free and unfearing, there had been wild laughter and unashamed crying.  Now it was all wrong and wasted.  Eighteen years had been wrong.  My whole life had to be relearnt.  My husband saw my panic and his smile, already wide, broadened.  He put a finger to my cheek and caught a tear.  He told me that I was beautiful and that no other man would tell me so the way he told me.  He spoke as though it was he who had bestowed my beauty upon me.  Once again my soul wept and tried to break me from him.  I remembered my father when I stood before him in my wedding dress before we left for the church, I remembered my older brother one time when he came home from school and I met him at the station to surprise him and I remembered the man in the woods, George, his silence and his blue eyes told me.  All these men had told me I was beautiful and their words and their eyes had filled my heart ad yet my husband's words were directed at my face and they did not go beyond, I recoiled from them.  I was a girl, too young to understand, poor china doll, poor princess.  How could I tell those words were real, how could I tell a spurious smile.  Any fear and distaste that I felt on my husband's part, simply made me feel guilty for feeling it.  My soul drew away from him while I drew closer.  My confusion was a whirlpool and in it I lost myself.  I lost my powers of thought, I lost my reason, I lost my powers of speech, I was struck dumb.  I tried to speak across the table, I tried to speak to my husband and then I cried because the words would not come.  The more I cried the more he smiled. He took me back to our grand, palatial hotel and there he praised my soft, silly sentimentality and he comforted me as a grandfather would comfort a grandchild that had grazed its knee.  Then we made love on a soft, feather bed.  I needed him to comfort the tears he had caused.  And so it was to be time and time again through our marriage.  Afterwards we lay in each others arms and I held him so close and so tight that I left no doubt in my mind that he was my prince and I would follow him to the ends of the earth.  I was a china doll, I was a hollowed out princess.  I pushed my tears and my past to the bottom of the well and stored them there, leaving my head empty, a blank space for my prince to fill as he saw fit.