Writing to Cathleen was his safety-valve. He could find George amusing when he had written to her, and when he had a letter from her he could almost salute his brother as a fellow-lover.
The wedding was a noble piece of work. It was at St. Clement's in Upper Kite Street, not a hundred yards away from the Denmark, where there was a rousing breakfast to which Mr. Sherman had invited his cronies and patrons. There were ponderous jokes about perambulators, and George, in an excited little speech, said that when he had a house large enough to accommodate all his family, he would be able to invite those friends who had come to see him and his Elsie married. Two or three old women wept; rice, confetti, and slippers were thrown after the happy pair as they drove off for their honeymoon, and in the afternoon the party went by train to Cheadley Edge and visited the caves, and wandered in the woods, and ate an enormous high tea at Yarker's, the farmhouse which devoted one of its meadows to cocoanut-shies and roundabouts, and its garden to tea-parties. It was all good, vulgar, noisy fun, and René was caught in a series of flirtations with Elsie's sisters and their friends. He kept finding their hands in his as they swung or walked or sat at tea, and they seemed to enter into a competition to be isolated with him in the woods or the caves, but not one of them established an exclusive right to him for the day, and by the return in the evening the party was split up into couples and he found himself thrown with his mother, who had throughout shown a stiff front to pleasantries and was exhausted by jollifications which for her had not been jolly.
Sitting by her side in the tram as they drove from the station, René found himself dreading the return to Hog Lane West. George had been an alien, but a convenient buffer between them. Now they had to establish a new order of living. George's absence was an actuality with which they had to deal more vigorously than with his presence. They left his room empty. Neither had any use for it. The dining-room had been the living-room of the family. Without George, René and his mother found themselves relapsing into oppressive silences, and very soon he took to leaving her in the evenings, and going up to his bedroom and his books and his work.