Mariette and Mr Charlton get married

Mariette and Mr Charlton get married in a wedding remembered as a radiant family celebration, but the marriage’s significance extends beyond the ceremony: it settles their relationship, brings Mr Charlton into the Larkin family, and becomes the turning point after which he leaves tax inspection for a life and livelihood shaped by the household’s enterprises.

The Wedding in Memory

The wedding appears in retrospect as Pop sits with Ma, Mariette, Charley, and their baby, Oscar. He remembers a day of light and hot sunshine, with a large marquee in the garden and a feast of iced port, cold salmon, and champagne. The scene is recalled not as a formal record of vows but through the abundance and feeling that made it unforgettable to him.

Mariette’s appearance gives the memory its most vivid focus. She wore a striking, unconventional dress of yellow silk that suited her dark hair, and carried stephanotis and cherry-red nerines whose petals seemed dusted with gold. Her sisters—Zinnia, Petunia, Victoria, and Primrose—served as bridesmaids in deep cream, wearing head-dresses of small golden roses and carrying lily-of-the-valley posies. The flowers and colors turn the ceremony into a carefully remembered image, distinct from the everyday bustle that surrounds the family in the present.

A Family’s Shared Celebration

The wedding gathered the whole family and its friends. Ma, Miss Pilchester, and several others wept openly at the sight of the ceremony; even Pop had a tear in his eye. That response complicates the exuberant, irreverent manner in which the family usually conducts itself: beneath the jokes and practical arrangements, the marriage commands sincere emotion. The day belongs not only to the couple but to the people who witness and celebrate their union.

The scene is narrated through Pop’s later recollection, prompted by the domestic present rather than told as a continuous wedding episode. The shift into memory gives the wedding a settled, almost ceremonial brightness, then returns to the family’s immediate concerns. Within that structure, the marriage is both a completed event and a point of departure for what follows.

Marriage and a Changed Household

Less than a week after Mariette and Charley returned from their honeymoon, Pop began asking Ma whether anything was happening yet. Ma replied that she did not think so and remarked that not everybody was like him. The quick movement from wedding celebration to Pop’s expectation of a pregnancy places the couple’s new marriage inside the family’s blunt, intimate domestic life; it also shows how quickly Pop treats the newlyweds’ future as part of the household’s shared conversation.

The marriage changes Charley’s position in the family and in his working life. Pop is pleased that, after marrying Mariette, Charley has the sense to give up his job at the tax inspector’s office. Pop regards a relative’s connection with the tax authorities as intolerable, and Charley’s departure removes that discomfort. What Pop calls sensible conduct is at once a family allegiance and a rejection of the occupation that had first brought Charley to the farm.

Work, Independence, and the Marriage’s Aftermath

Pop gives Mariette and Charley five hundred laying pullets, setting them up in the egg business. The gift translates family welcome into practical support: the couple can build a livelihood together, and within less than a year they have earned enough profit to buy another five hundred hens. Their enterprise is doing well, though Charley continues to make proper income-tax returns, a practice Pop considers a bad habit. The difference preserves a comic tension within the marriage’s new economic life: Charley has left tax inspection, but he has not adopted Pop’s indifference to formal returns.

A bungalow is another promised consequence of the wedding. Pop intends to use materials from Sir George Bluff-Gore’s mansion at Gore Court, which he plans to demolish, to build a home for Mariette and Charley in the meadow near the bluebell wood. The house remains unrealized because Pop is occupied with other ventures, including a large army-surplus deal involving goods as unlikely as beetroot in vinegar, rat-traps, body belts, gherkins in mustard, and caper sauce. The postponed bungalow makes the marriage’s aftermath less like a neatly completed domestic settlement than an ongoing family arrangement: the couple have work and growing independence, while their promised home waits on Pop’s next scheme.

Significance

The wedding joins two strands of the story that had begun in opposition. Charley first comes to the Larkin household in his capacity as a tax inspector, confronting Pop over an unfiled income return; the family draws him into its hospitality, and he gradually becomes a familiar presence. His marriage to Mariette makes that change permanent. The celebration’s sunshine, flowers, food, and tears stand at the threshold of a shared life whose practical realities include poultry, paperwork, and a still-unbuilt bungalow.

That contrast gives the wedding its particular place in the family narrative. It is a moving public celebration, but its consequences unfold through work, gifts, and domestic decisions rather than through ceremony alone. Charley’s marriage brings him into the family while leaving a small, revealing difference intact: he accepts Pop’s welcome and builds a life with Mariette, yet continues to submit proper tax returns where Pop would rather avoid them.