Wigwam and Rufus’s marriage

Wigwam and Rufus’s marriage is introduced through the family they already share and the child they may yet have together. Rufus married Wigwam knowing that her children were from an earlier relationship; as an orphan, he welcomed the prospect of a ready-made family. The couple’s attempt to conceive another child makes their marriage a point of contrast with Sarah Trafford’s uncertainty about motherhood, while Sarah’s impressions of Rufus—quiet, vague, and difficult to know—remain sharply different from Wigwam’s confidence in him.

A ready-made family

At a dinner party, Rufus is absent while Wigwam arrives without him, explaining that he is occupied and will come later. His absence fits a pattern Sarah associates with him: whatever Rufus is doing tends to become vague, even if the matter began as something quite definite. Sarah thinks of him as her startling new acquisition, startling chiefly because he is younger and willing to take on her children. In most other respects, she regards him as run-of-the-mill, and suspects she might forget his name if she had the chance. That dry appraisal belongs to Sarah’s view of the marriage, not to a disclosure of what Wigwam sees in her husband.

The children’s parentage is made explicit in conversation at the party. Gerard Inchon asks whether they are Rufus’s; Wigwam says they are not, and confirms that Rufus married her anyway. She explains that Rufus was an orphan and that a ready-made family was just what he wanted. His acceptance is therefore not presented as a reluctant compromise or as a secret about the children: it is part of the appeal of the marriage as Wigwam describes it. Rufus does not deny her account. Instead, he lets the conversation pass around him, like a small rock in a stream, without pushing himself into it. Sarah finds this reticence irritating and wonders how he charmed Wigwam, allowing herself the unkind possibility that he may simply have been available.

Privacy and Sarah’s limited view

Sarah’s judgments are shaped by her own position as Wigwam’s oldest friend, but intimacy does not give her full access to the couple’s life. At the party, Wigwam says Rufus is doing something vague; later, when Sarah asks what he does, Wigwam says he does not actually want anyone to know. Sarah speculates privately about possible occupations, but the narrative supplies no answer. When Rufus claims to be taking adult literacy, Wigwam explains that he said it to silence someone who was acting important. He did try the course once, she says, but disliked it and stopped. The episode offers a small, concrete instance of Rufus’s privacy: his public explanation is a deflection, and the real account comes from his wife.

This guardedness helps explain the mismatch between Sarah’s dismissive assessment and Wigwam’s assurance. Sarah sees a man who stays unobtrusive and is hard to read; Wigwam speaks for him readily and describes him as lovely with her children. The difference does not establish that either account is false. It shows instead that Sarah’s comic irritation with Rufus is an imperfect measure of a marriage whose private arrangements she only partly knows.

A child of their own

Later, Wigwam tells Sarah that she and Rufus are trying to have a child. Sarah is not pregnant, and Wigwam’s carefully measured sympathy registers that she understands her friend is not disappointed. The distinction matters: Wigwam wants a child, but she does not assume the same desire in Sarah. When Wigwam asks whether Sarah thinks five children would be too many, Sarah answers from her own position, saying that even one would be too many for her. Their exchange places the marriage’s plans alongside an existing family without making Sarah’s reluctance into a judgment on Wigwam’s choice.

Sarah does ask whether a baby might make things awkward, given that Rufus is already a stepfather. Wigwam rejects the concern: he is lovely with the children, she says, and becoming an actual father will strengthen the bond. Her response is confident, almost as though she has learned it from a manual. Sarah notices that confidence but has no experience of raising children with which to challenge it. The conversation leaves the couple’s hopes intact while marking a difference between Wigwam’s faith in the family’s capacity to grow and Sarah’s uncertainty about parenthood.

Marriage against Sarah’s expectations

Wigwam’s plans sit in a broader conversation about marriage and children that preoccupies Sarah. In her own marriage, Mark Trafford has become increasingly focused on work and career goals, while Sarah feels that her own ambitions have stalled. She is unemployed, has barely continued looking for another job, and spends a day moving between housework, food, and television. The contrast gives her response to Wigwam’s pregnancy plans a personal edge: she resists motherhood for herself even as her friend embraces it.

Sarah’s account of her disagreements with Mark also frames the social pressure she associates with marriage. She resents his expectation that she should have a baby because she does not currently have a career, and imagines the domestic role as a form of pruning that keeps women small and ornamental. That analysis is Sarah’s, rather than an explanation of Wigwam and Rufus’s motives. Against it, Wigwam’s description of an orphan who wanted a ready-made family, and of a husband whose bond with the children will strengthen through fatherhood, presents a different household arrangement: not a demand Sarah must accept, but a future Wigwam and Rufus are actively trying to make.