Although she had caused a little rustle of amusement among the guests, she did not know it: (Copy)

The Soul of Kindness (1964) by Elizabeth Taylor

The whole sentence reads:

'Although she had caused a little rustle of amusement among the guests, she did not know it: her husband was embarrassed by her behaviour and thought it early in their married life to be so; but she did know that either.

Elizabeth Taylor is often writing about what is known and not known to one’s self and others: the gaps in knowledge we call dramatic irony or just irony, which can be very painful, and which for some, constitute the gap between self-knowledge and self-consciousness. Flora Quatermaine is not embarrassed by her behaviour and remains blissfully unaware that her actions — tossing out crumbs to the doves gathered outside the wedding marquee - might be an interruption of the seriousness and focus of the bridegroom’s speech. ‘But she did not know that either.’ There are three things Flora does not know: she does not know that her actions are gauche; she does not know that her husband experiences embarrassment; she does not know he considers this a faux pas so early on in their married life together.

(Apologies for missing out the not’s; my hands are currently trembly, perhaps at the thought of marrying a Richard?)

The husband and the bride, even on their wedding day, experience significant gaps in their understanding of appropriate behaviour. From the start of the novel - this is the novel’s second sentence - we know that Flora does not know what is and what is not decorous. She tosses out wedding cake crumbs to the doves gathered outside and so undoes her husband’s representative: the bridegroom in full flow.

Although for the rest of the novel, Flora turns out to be casually cruel in her approach to others, Taylor lets us know here that the reason for her cruelty is blissful ignorance. She is simply pursuing her own private fairy tale, ignorant of wider circumstances and consequences. Flora can never read particular contexts. These opening sentences are perhaps kindness on the part of the author/narrator as she tries to mirror Flora’s own firmly held belief that she is herself undoubtedly kind: everything she does is an act of kindness even when it misses the real need by some distance. Flora doesn’t know what is and isn’t appropriate for another individual because she has been granted the luxury of pursuing a private set of symbols: the doves that sit outside the marquee happy to be indulged by her spontaneous, whimsically generous gesture. We are told this in the novel’s opening sentence.

Towards the end of the bridegroom’s speech, the bride turned aside and began to throw crumbs of wedding cake through an opening in the marquee to the doves outside.

Flora hasn’t learned the art of true sympathy, a failing she borrows from another infamously failing heroine, Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse. I can’t quite decide whether Taylor is being kind to Flora here, or cruel, or perhaps just warning us of Flora’s foolish ignorance (or is it innocence, if you buy into the fairy tale). Embarrassment on behalf of another - Richard Quartermaine’s response - can also be read as excessive and unnecessary, or an act of sensitive responsiveness and instinctive protection. Embarrassment can also be a kind of censoring of another, although if we read it from its etymological root, embarrassment means to embrace with arms wide open. So perhaps Richard is wishing to cover his new wife with some knowledge of the social decorum and wherewithal she lacks: that is to say, with himself.

For Sabrina, with whom I have shared true sympathy in our reading lives.