by Barbara Pym
'I think I prefer the more civilized forms of discomfort,' said Father Ransome smiling.
'I had a letter from Mary Beamish a few days ago,' said Miss Prideaux, as if mention of discomfort had reminded her of the convent 'She was getting her letter-writing done before Lent. She didn't say very much about herself. The letter was mostly questions about various people and activities in the parish. I have a feeling she misses the worldly things, you know.'
I could not help smiling at the idea of Mary's harmless, indeed praiseworthy, activities in the parish being regarded as worldly, and yet I supposed that they were. It was all a matter of comparison. I too had had a letter from her of a similar kind. I could hear her eager voice in the questions she asked : Had I been to the Settlement with Sybil lately? How was Mr Bason getting on at the clergy house? Had the study groups on South India started yet? Who was giving the Tuesday evening Lenten addresses this year? She did not mention Marius Ransome, and this omission made me suspect that they had perhaps written to each other. I wondered if he would mention that he had heard from her, but he did not. We left Miss Prideaux's tea party together, and I tried to lead the subject back to Mary by asking him whether he thought she would stay at the convent for always.
'I couldn't really say. I believe that she intended to when she first went there. She is a fine person,' he said uncertainly.
I felt impatient with him for having so little to say about her and for using a phrase in which he had already described her once before. Then I began to wonder whether it was the only thing he ever said about women, the only compliment he knew.
'She could do a great deal of good in the world now that she has her mother's money,' I said. 'I should have thought that might have appealed to her.'
'Yes, one can do good with money, of course,' said Father Ransome. 'Did you know that Mrs Beamish had left me a legacy?'
'No, I didn't,' I said, rather taken aback.
'Yes - five hundred pounds. An awkward amount really.'
'How do you mean, awkward?'
'Well, had it been five thousand pounds one might have done some rather spectacular good with it. As it is there is the temptation to do good only to oneself.'
'I'm sure she must have meant it just for you to use as you wanted,' I said. The picture had come into my mind of old Mrs Beamish altering or adding a codicil to her will, surely almost on her deathbed, for Father Ransome had been with them such a short time before she died. It was like a scene in a Victorian novel. 'Did she leave legacies to all the clergy?' I asked.
'She left Father Thames a pair of Georgian silver wine- coasters which he had always admired - I don't know about Father Bode. He is always so much better than the rest of us that one feels he was not left anything - to distinguish him, as it were.' Father Ransome smiled rather ruefully.
'Won't you come and have a glass of sherry with us?' I asked, as we approached the house.
'Thank you very much, but I've given up drinking for Lent,' he said, not looking at me.
'So the clergy do give up things?' I said lightly. They are always urging us to, so I'm glad to know that they practise what they preach.'
There was a rather uncomfortable silence and I felt that my remark had perhaps been cheap and frivolous.
'We have to try to, sometimes,' he said at last, 'otherwise we shouldn't be able to preach at all, and think what a loss that would be.'
I was reassured to find him back in his usual form.
'All these abstinences and fastings are rather difficult for lay people to remember,' I said. 'I always find them very muddling. I suppose one could always ask the clergy when in doubt.'
'Of course,' he agreed, 'or write to our favourite church newspaper. "Is there any liturgical objection to eating hot cross buns on Maundy Thursday?" you might ask.'
'And whatever would the answer to that be?'
He looked at me solemnly, then said in a prim tone, 'We know of none, though we should not care to do so ourselves.'
I parted from him laughing and turning over in my mind the rather surprising news that Mrs Beamish had left him a legacy in her will.
Chapter Thirteen
We had a hard winter that year. February and March were cruel months - not in the poet's way perhaps, but bad enough for most of us. Only Rodney seemed to enjoy himself, lagging pipes, unfreezing the tank and dealing with a neighbour's burst pipe in the middle of the night. I began to wonder if I really knew the man I had married, for I had not hitherto suspected these talents. Like writers to the cheaper daily papers who urged us to think of the old-age pensioners, I could not help thinking of Mary in her presumably cold convent, and Miss Prideaux and Sir Denbigh with so little on their old bones to keep them warm. I am afraid I did not worry overmuch about Father Ransome and his leaking ceiling, nor even about the possibility of his going over to Rome. I somehow felt that the cold weather might discourage doubts, or at least temporarily suspend intellectual activity, like food preserved by freezing. Father Thames took to his bed with influenza in Holy Week and Father Bode battled gallantly with the exacting services of that solemn season. It was not until Holy Saturday, when the flame from Bill Coleman's cigarette lighter efficiently kindled the New Fire of Easter in the dark church, that any feeling of hope rose in me. The lights revealed a bough of golden forsythia decorating the font, and life seemed to stretch out before me new and exciting.
April was balmy and delicious, and cruel in the way the poet did mean, mingling memory and desire. The memory was of other springs, the desire unformulated, unrecognized almost, pushed away because there seemed to be no place for it in the life I had chosen for myself.
One day Rowena and I met to have a cosy women's shop- ping lunch together. She had come up to town to buy new clothes for the children, but when I met her in our favourite restaurant she admitted that she had spent the whole morning buying things for herself and nothing for the children at all.
'And this afternoon we're having our hair done,' I reminded her, for we were going together to my hairdresser who was to create elegant new hairstyles for us.
'Oh this weather,' Rowena sighed, pulling off her pale yellow gloves. 'It makes one so unsettled. One ought to be in Venice with a lover!'
'Of course,' I agreed. 'Whom would you choose?'
There was a pause, then we both burst out simultaneously, 'Rocky Napier!' and dissolved into helpless giggles.
'We say this so glibly,' Rowena pointed out, 'and yet we're both so respectable. Neither of us has had a lover, or is ever likely to. The idea has got translated into something remote, even comfortable, now. Like morning coffee with a woman friend in a country town - none of the uncertain rapture and agony of those Rocky Napier days!'
I suddenly felt that I wanted to break out of the mould of respectability into which Rowena had cast me and say, 'Speak for yourself!'
'Even this restaurant,' Rowena went on, 'in spite of its gay Italian paintings round the walls, has an air of Eastbourne about it. Look at the curtains - cream net and cretonne with a Jacobean design - that brings one down to earth all right! Perhaps it's just as well. But sometimes, you know, I envy really wicked women, or even despised spinsters - they at least can have their dreams.'
'And can't we?' I asked.
'Not really,' said Rowena, 'or if we do, we know that there's absolutely no hope of their coming true. Whereas the despised spinster still has the chance of meeting somebody - perhaps a young man who will love her for her money, or an old one to whom she can be a comfort in his declining years. At least she's free!'
We were eating spaghetti. Rowena managed hers clumsily and began to giggle. 'As a matter of fact,' she went on, 'I do feel wonderfully free at this moment - my wicked selfish shopping, a good lunch with drinks and the prospect of a new hairstyle this afternoon. I almost feel as if I had cast off Harry and the children for good. And he may be feeling the same, for all I know.'
'I shouldn't think so,' I said, but then, remembering our winter luncheon together, I w
ondered if perhaps Rowena wasn't right. Surely on that occasion he had cast off Rowena and the children for a little while? I believed it was a thing men did quite easily. I felt a sudden prick of annoyance that the lovely spring weather had not inspired him to ask me out again. Perhaps he had felt something of the anticlimax of the little box, for, with Rowena and Rodney knowing all about it, it did seem to be that.
'He's so fond of you, Wilmet,' Rowena said, as if reading my thoughts. 'I know it sounds dreary put like that, a man's wife telling another woman that her husband is so fond of her, but he really is.'
I wanted to ask if Piers was fond of me too, but didn't like to.
'And Rodney is fond of you,' I said feebly.
'Oh, but hardly in the way that Harry is fond of you,' said Rowena rather too quickly, so that I now knew what I had often suspected - that she considered Rodney rather dull and unlikely to break out as Harry might.
'At last she has arrived,' I said in a low voice, for earlier we had commented on an attractive-looking young man sitting alone at a corner table, obviously expecting somebody.
The girl was not beautiful but there was a kind of glow about her. She wore a black dress, and round her wrist she had twined a string of beads, rose-coloured and translucent like some delicious sweet. The young man stood up as she came to the table and she held out her hands towards him.
'They're going to drink a whole bottle of claret,' said Rowena in a low rather sad voice. 'What will they do afterwards? Walk in the park?'
'I hope neither of them has an office to go back to,' I said, thinking of Piers and an occasion, so long ago it now seemed, when he had not returned to his.
'They might go to an art exhibition,' Rowena went on. 'Really modern art is extraordinarily sympathetic when you're in love and have eaten and drunk well. I once... well, it was a long time ago, and now I suppose I'm just as ignorant and prejudiced as most women of my age and background. To think that I could once have looked at a Picasso, or even worse, with love and sympathy,' she sighed extravagantly.
'You'd think that we had been drinking a whole bottle of claret instead of a modest half carafe of rosé,' I said. 'We mustn't be too long over our coffee or Monsieur Jacques will be angry.'
Monsieur Jacques was no less tyrannical and no more French than most hairdressers. In moments of stress and anger his Midland accent became more pronounced and I liked him the better for it, imagining the provincial boy making good in London and how proud his mother must be of him. I pictured her as a cosy grey-haired little woman, far beyond the range of any of her son's elaborate coiffures.
'Really we are at our lowest ebb here,' said Rowena, as we sat side by side in the big room under the driers, turning the glossy pages of expensive magazines. 'Do you think we should have our nails done while we're about it? Several of our companions seem to be having red claws made. I long to ask if their husbands really like that colour, or if they just do it to keep up their tottering morale.'
'I wonder why it is that one can never read a serious book at the hairdresser's?' I asked. 'Does the actual haircutting and shampooing do something to one's brain - shrivel it in some way?'
'You mean you'd like to think of yourself reading Proust or a book about archaeology?' Rowena asked. 'Yes, it's a strange thing. Here we sit capable only of turning the pages of these magazines, reading snippets about the Royal Family or looking at pictures of clothes and society goings-on - not even reading the stories. Sunday Evening, by Catherine Oliphant,' she read out. 'It begins rather well with a young man and girl holding hands in a Greek restaurant, watched by the man's former mistress - unknown to them, of course.'
'But what a far-fetched situation,' I protested. 'As if it would happen like that! Still, it must be dreadful to have to write fiction. Do you suppose Catherine Oliphant drew it from her own experience of life?'
Rowena laughed. 'I should hardly think so! She's probably an elderly spinster living in a boarding-house in Eastbourne - or she may even be a man. One never knows.'
'Jennifer, take the pins out of these madames!' hissed Monsieur Jacques, patting our heads rather too hard. They are dry.'
When we emerged - for that is surely the word - from Monsieur Jacques's establishment, we were both rather red in the face from the heat of the driers but otherwise more elegant than when we had gone in.
'After we've had a cup of tea shall we go and see Piers?' . Rowena suggested.
'You mean at the press?'
'Yes, pay him a surprise visit. I'm sure he'd be amused.'
'Do you think so?' I asked doubtfully. 'It's so very dingy there. I think we'd be rather out of place.'
But Rowena would not be put off and we were soon on our way.
'It is sordid, isn't it?' she said as we climbed the dusty stairs. 'I can't imagine what made Piers take a job here. Perhaps the hours are easy - I can't believe the pay is very good.'
Rowena went boldly forward and knocked on a door. 'Is this where he generally is?' she whispered. 'I can't quite remember - anyway, somebody will be able to tell us.'
A sharp female voice bade us come in, and we entered the room where Piers had taken me before. A woman, whom I remembered as Miss Limpsett, was sitting alone at a table.
We hesitated, almost drew back, but it was too late for that. I experienced the embarrassment, guilt almost, that an elegant soigneé young woman may, if she has a nice nature, feel when confronted with another who is none of these things. Miss Limpsett was older, uglier and more untidy than I had remembered. She had obviously had a hard and tiring day, for her grey hair was awry as if she had been running her fingers through it, and there was ink on her fingers. Her face was haggard, and it occurred to me that it was not only this day which had been hard and tiring, but all days and even life itself.
'Yes?' she barked, gathering up a long slippery bundle of galley proofs and seeming to clasp them to her bosom.
'We're looking for my brother, Piers Longridge,' Rowena explained in a rather faltering tone.
'He's not here today,' said Miss Limpsett, 'nor is Mr Towers.'
The galleys finally eluded her clutch and slithered to the floor. I hurried to pick them up.
'Oh don't bother,' she said ungraciously.
'He isn't here,' Rowena repeated. 'I hope he isn't ill?'
'That isn't usually the reason for his absences,' said Miss Limpsett rather sourly, 'As a matter of fact he hasn't been here all this week. He may even have left, for all I know.'
'Oh dear' Rowena looked worried. 'Well, I'll telephone him,' she said, backing out of the room. 'So sorry to have disturbed you.'
My eyes, which had been searching round the room for personal touches, came to rest on a vase of pussy-willows, all golden and fluffy, on top of a filing cabinet. I supposed that Miss Limpsett must have put them there, and the idea seemed almost unbearably pathetic. Had she gathered them in the country one fine weekend? I wondered. Or bought them at a florist's, perhaps having to skimp on her already meagre lunch to be able to do so?
I confided my thoughts to Rowena as we hurried away down the dark stairs.
'Oh, Wilmet, you're much too sentimental,' she said. 'She's a perfectly grisly woman. It's just as likely that Piers or Mr what's it bought the pussy-willows.'
'That seems even worse, somehow - men buying flowers to brighten a dusty office. But, Rowena, she said Piers hadn't been in all this week and that he may even have left. Oughtn't we to find out, or something?'
'Well, I must get a taxi to Waterloo if I'm to catch my train,' said Rowena looking at her watch.
'You don't feel like going to call on Piers at his flat?' I suggested tentatively.
'No, Wilmet Piers is not the kind of person one drops in on unexpectedly, and in any case I must get this train.'
'I suppose we could telephone?'
'Yes, you do that. I really haven't time.'
'I don't think I've got the number,' I said. 'And it probably won't be under his name in the book, will it?'
'No, b
ut I have it.'
Rowena handed me her diary, and I took down the telephone number and the address, which did not convey much to me.
'What a lovely day it's been,' said Rowena, 'and it's still a lovely evening. The kind of day when a wife hopes her husband may bring her back some exciting present.'
It was true that Rodney did occasionally buy me an unexpected present, but never just because it happened to be a lovely day. He might have been passing an antique shop and noticed something in the window that he thought I would like, or have seen something I had once expressed a wish for. There was always a good reason.
Nevertheless, when I got home I saw that there was a large bouquet of flowers on the chest in the hall. Remembering the little box at Christmas I approached it cautiously, my mind a blank.
Now who can be sending me these lovely roses? I wondered, unable to suppress entirely a feeling of excitement as I looked for the card that would tell me. It probably wouldn't be Rodney or Harry and it certainly wouldn't be Piers, so there remained the possibility of some unknown or forgotten admirer.
The little envelope was addressed to Mrs Forsyth, but when I took out the card it said To Sybil', followed by some words in Greek which I could not understand. I put it back quickly, feeling annoyed and disappointed. Why should anyone send flowers to Sybil? I wondered. It wasn't her birthday and she was hardly the kind of person who invited these spontaneous tributes of admiration.
I took the box into the drawing-room and waited impatiently for her to come back from her committee meeting at the Settlement. The evening post had brought a letter from Mary Beamish. She wrote in a curious disjointed way, so that I began to wonder if spring had penetrated even the walls of the convent. The gist of the letter was that she wanted me to go and visit her. 'I've had such an odd letter from Marius and should like to talk to you,' she wrote. I was pondering over what she could possibly mean when Sybil came in, looking rather harassed.
'Oh dear,' she said, sitting down heavily in an armchair, 'the old people are still being difficult about that fish dinner. Poor Miss Holmes is at her wits' end. Though,' Sybil added drily, 'the extent of her wits is somewhat limited.'