Civil to Strangers and Other Writings

by Barbara Pym

  ‘Liverpool again,’ said a calm, melancholy voice behind her. She recognized the shape of a woman she knew.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid it must be. It’s so terrible,’ said Laura helplessly, wishing there were something adequate one could say. But there was nothing. It was of no consolation to the bombed that the eyes of women in safe places should fill with tears when they spoke of them. Tears, idle tears were of no use to anyone, not even to oneself. This oppressive sorrow could not be washed away in the selfish indulgence of a good cry.

  At the First Aid Post everything was jolly and bustling. Stretcher bearers and First Aid parties in dark blue boiler suits were filling water bottles and collecting blankets. Women were hurrying to and fro carrying large bottles, dressings and instruments. An efficient girl was at the telephone and the doctor, stout and reassuring, was hanging his coat on a peg and looking forward to a game of bridge later on. Everything was ready for the casualties that might be brought in.

  Laura put on her overall. It was of stiff blue cotton, voluminous and reaching to her ankles. It had full, short sleeves, a neat collar and ARP embroidered on the bosom in scarlet letters. She got out her knitting and sat down on the bed with the nurse and the friend she had walked up with.

  At first they were jolly and talkative. These nocturnal meetings were a social occasion enjoyed by everybody. The most unlikely people were gathered together, people who would otherwise never have known each other, bound as they were by the rigid social conventions of a small country town. Conversation was animated and ranged over many topics, horrible stories of raid damage, fine imaginative rumours, titbits about the private lives of the Nazi leaders gleaned from the Sunday papers, local gossip and grumblings about ARP organization. Time passed quickly, an hour, two hours. The throb of the enemy planes was drowned with voices until everything was quiet, except for the chatter and the welcome hissing of the Primus from another room. When this sound was heard everybody began to get out their little tins of biscuits, rare blocks of chocolate were broken up and shared, like the Early Christians, Laura thought, having all things in common. At last somebody came round with cups of tea on a tray and thick triangular slices of bread and margarine, with a smear of fish paste on each. No banquet was ever more enjoyed than this informal meal at one o’clock in the morning. Whatever would poor Father and Mother have thought of this gathering? Laura wondered. Perhaps it was a good thing that they had not been spared to see it. Laura had always thought that the shock of a Labour Government in office had hastened the Archdeacon’s end.

  After the meal everyone settled into lethargy. Conversation died down to a few stray remarks. The doctor’s voice was heard saying, ‘Double five hearts,’ and there was a hum of voices from the decontamination room. The women knitted rather grimly, and the men, already tired after a day’s work, dozed and smoked. The room was very hot and people were seen dimly through a haze. Laura thought longingly of rivers, pools and willows, of her own linen sheets, of plunging one’s face under water when swimming, even of the inside of a gas mask, with its cool rubbery smell and tiny space of unbreathed air.

  They had turned the light out now and the room was in darkness, except for the glowing ends of cigarettes and a Dietz lantern which flickered on the table. The scene would have made a good subject for a modern painter; there was nothing in Dali and the Surrealists more odd than this reality, the smoky room crowded with silent men and women, lying or sitting on beds, chairs or the floor, some covered with dark army blankets, others with coats, one or two faces with mouths a little open, defenceless in sleep, one man, surprisingly, for it was very hot, clasping a stone hot-water bottle with ‘HMGovt’ stamped on the end. As still life garnishings there were the tables covered with dressings, bottles and instruments, with all that their presence implied, long metal Thomas splints lying on top of a cupboard, heavy wooden walking sticks and crutches crowded into a corner. In a hundred years’ time this might be a problem picture. What were these people doing and why?

  Laura sat bolt upright, leaning against the wall. She closed her smarting eyes and tried to sleep. But she found herself thinking about Crispin in the Balkans, wondering what he was doing at this minute. He was probably lying down in a comfortable sleeper in a special diplomatic train, like the luxurious Nord or Orient Expresses, which glide silently into stations at night, their dark windows shuttered, conveying their rich sleeping passengers with the least possible disturbance across a sleeping Europe. But Europe was never sleeping, and now less than ever. Things happened in these hours when human vitality was at its lowest ebb; bombers rained death between one and four in the morning, troops crossed the frontiers at dawn. Crispin was probably awake too, looking through important documents, perhaps even dictating to a secretary, while the great train, diplomatically immune from the inconveniences of Zoll and Douane, carried him eastwards to Moscow or Istanbul, further and further away from his Legation. Laura saw it as a large suburban house, built in continental wedding cake style, a magnolia tree, impersonal in its beauty, in bud in the garden, and inside all the desolation of a house whose occupants have had to leave it in a hurry. Drawers open and empty, out of date foreign newspapers on the floor, dead flowers in the vases, dust on the rococo furniture and the massive square stoves, their pretty majolica tiles cold now and stuffed with the dead ashes of the code books and secret documents. The keys had been left with the kind, homely American Ambassador, who had promised to keep an eye on the things that couldn’t be taken away, like the valuable paintings and the stuffed eagle shot by the Minister on a hunting tour in the mountains, just as if they were going to the seaside for their summer holidays and would be back in a month. But it was ‘Goodbye Balkan Capital!’ and the train was rushing through the darkness to deposit its important passengers, blinking like ruffled owls in the early morning sunshine, on the platform of some other foreign capital, where Great Britain still had a representative to greet them. And then, after a cup of tea, so to speak, they would be pushed on to another train or boat, always on the move like refugees, except that they had their own country waiting for them at the end of the journey, houses in Mayfair or Belgravia and loving friends to welcome them, servants to put cool, clean sheets on their beds …

  A beautiful note sounded through the room, piercing and silvery as the music of the spheres must sound. It was the All Clear. In a surprisingly short time the blanket-covered shapes became human and active, everything was put away and they walked out into the sharp, cold air, their voices and footsteps ringing through the empty streets. They were all much jollier and noisier than they normally would have been, because they were up at such an odd hour of the morning and they felt the glow of virtue which comes from duty done. There had been no bombs and no casualties but they had been standing by. They had missed their night’s rest so that if anything had happened they would have been there to deal with it.

  Laura let herself into the house very quietly. She went into the drawing room and sat by the dead fire, drinking the tea that Janet had left for her. It wasn’t very hot and had that tinny taste peculiar to thermos tea, but Janet would be hurt if she left it. It did not occur to Laura that she could pour it away.

  It was an exquisite pleasure to turn over in the cool sheets and stretch her tired limbs. She remembered some lines from Sir Philip Sidney:

  Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed,

  A chamber deaf of noise and blind of light,

  A rosy garland and a weary head …

  It was as if she had never been really tired before.

  Outside the first birds began to sing. It would soon be dawn. How thrilling one’s first sight of Moscow must be, Laura thought. All those curiously shaped domes and towers, the Kremlin, Lenin embalmed …

  Eventually, as Laura gathered from much anxious listening to the news, the Legation staff did arrive in Moscow. They were to take the Trans-Siberian railway back to England. This journey was so great and so amazing that even Laura could hardly conceive what it would
be like. A journey to the moon would have been easier to imagine. She studied her atlas carefully, but it was all too vague to be real except for the ending, the eventual safe arrival in England on a sunny day in June, July or August – she had no idea how long it would take – with the plane trees in the squares in full, dusty leaf. She wondered whether Crispin had a house in London and where it was. She hoped that it had not been bombed, and even began the futile occupation of studying the addresses of people in The Times killed ‘by enemy action’ to see what parts of London might be supposed to be in ruins.

  It was while she was doing this one day that she came across it, his obituary among the long, impersonal list. She read it through mechanically, attracted by the name Crispin, without at first realizing that it was anybody she knew. He had died at the house of his sister Lady Hinge, in a village in Oxfordshire. It didn’t say anything else, but Laura discovered a small paragraph about him on one of the inner pages. ‘Since leaving Oxford,’ it said, ‘he had been in the Diplomatic Service, retiring from it in 1936.’ Five years ago! Laura was annoyed to think that she had missed that information, if, indeed, it had ever been mentioned anywhere. The paragraph ended with three dry words. ‘He was unmarried.’ Laura had somehow thought that he would not be married. Her reading and imagination had given her a picture of diplomats which did not include wives, although she had not been so unworldly as to suppose that there could not be substitutes which were just as good. And at the back of her mind there may have been a hope that he would one day come back to England and the romantic first meeting would happen all over again.

  When she had recovered from the first shock Laura found herself grieving not so much for his death, as that could make no practical difference to her, but for the picture she had had of him. The remembrance of her wonderful imaginings about his journey made her feel foolish and a little desolate, when all the time he had been perfectly safe in an Oxfordshire village, his life as dull as hers. He might even have been an Air Raid Warden. She paused, considering this possibility for Crispin with amusement and dismay.

  She cut out the notice with her embroidery scissors. It was sad to think that the only tangible souvenir she had of Crispin was the bald announcement of his death. And yet her memory had a great deal. She found it hard to look forward to the future and a New Social Order, when there had been so much happiness in the past, the bad old days, as she had heard them called. Surely they (by whom she usually meant people like Mr Herbert Morrison and Mr Ernest Bevin) would leave her that, her Victorian paperweight, with its bright and simple design of flowers? Perhaps she had already been punished for her self-indulgent dreaming by her disillusionment about Crispin. No dramatic ‘Goodbye Balkan Capital!’ but a quiet death in a safe part of England. It was even possible that her end might be more violent and exciting than his.

  Why, she thought, when the siren went that evening, I might get killed by a bomb! And yet that would not be right. It was always Crispin who had had the dramatic adventures, and after all these years Laura did not want it to be any different. In life or in death people are very much what we like to think them. Laura knew that she might search in vain in the Oxfordshire churchyard among the new graves with their sodden wreaths to find Crispin’s. But it would be easy in the Balkans, in the dangerous places. There would always be something of him there.

  The Christmas Visit

  On Christmas Eve Sophia Ainger’s old tortoiseshell cat, Faustina, emerged from her basket by the kitchen boiler and began to take an interest in the icing of the cake.

  ‘Ought she to be licking out that bowl?’ Mark Ainger asked.

  ‘It’s all right – I’ve given her a bit of almond paste – she does love it so.’

  ‘Is this all you’re putting on the cake this year?’ Mark picked up a battered-looking plaster Father Christmas.

  ‘Yes, I forgot to buy new decorations, so we’ll just have to put up with this old thing, looking like King Lear in the snow, deserted by his daughters. Many people are lonely and neglected at Christmas,’ Sophia said, a serious look on her thin dark face, ‘so perhaps this is suitable in a way. And isn’t it about time you went to the station to meet Daisy?’

  ‘So it is.’ Mark looked at his watch, trying not to sigh. Sophia had always been surrounded by what he thought of as a kind of flotsam and jetsam of deprived relatives and friends, the kind of people who would welcome an invitation for Christmas, especially now that the Aingers had moved to a country parish with three churches. This year Sophia had asked Daisy Beaver, a newly discovered distant cousin who lived alone in London, while Mark was expecting an old college friend and his wife.

  ‘I suppose the Starlings’ – Sophia could not yet think of them as Edmund and Isabel – ‘will come later this evening?’

  ‘Yes, they’re driving down. It’ll be good to see Edmund again.’ Mark said this rather as if he felt he ought to express such a sentiment, for the old college friends had not met for nearly thirty years and Mark had not exactly invited him to stay. Edmund’s ancestors came from one of the villages in Mark’s parish, so he had suggested the visit and also a delving into the parish registers on Boxing Day.

  Sophia finished icing the cake, found a frill from last year, and put it away safe from Faustina. Mark got out the car and went to fetch Daisy. In half an hour they were back.

  ‘Daisy, how nice!’ Sophia embraced the solid dumpy figure, seized her suitcase and led her up to her room.

  Instead of a fattening tin of biscuits by Daisy’s bed, she had added a copy of The Ritual Reason Why – relic of Mark’s hopeful Anglo-Catholic boyhood – to the selection of paperbacks on the table, for Daisy was the kind of woman who was always higher than the vicar, whoever he might be. There was also an old Crockford in the bookcase, but that was too heavy even for the most eager researcher to read in bed.

  ‘I suppose there will be Midnight Mass?’ Daisy was asking.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Sophia, feeling a little guilty at not revealing that the service would be a little different from what Daisy was accustomed to.

  ‘Of course, one does miss one’s own church at these times,’ Daisy said. ‘Father Spode will be so busy today, hearing confessions right up to the time of Midnight Mass. He never spares himself.’

  At that moment Faustina entered the room.

  ‘I try to keep her out of guests’ bedrooms,’ said Sophia hopelessly.

  The cat jumped into Daisy’s open suitcase and began plucking at a folded garment.

  ‘Now then, pussy,’ said Daisy, as Sophia removed her. She was obviously displeased.

  The cat was also passionately interested in the fish pie Sophia had made for supper, so she had to be shut away in Mark’s study where she jumped up on his desk, settling herself down among the sermon notes he was sorting out for the various services. The largest of his churches had advanced as far as Series Two (‘authorized for experimental use in the Church of England until 8 July 1972’, Mark sometimes quoted to himself when he realized that they were still using it in 1978). There was to be a midnight service (not called ‘Mass’) here, and also a morning ‘Family’ service which was likely to be attended by some of the once-or-twice-a-year churchgoers of his congregation. The other two smaller churches were to have morning services at suitably staggered times, a retired elderly lay-reader assisting Mark at one of these. If only Daisy could have been a deaconess or even a woman priest!

  ‘Ah, supper.’ Mark came into the kitchen. ‘Fish pie?’ It was what they always had on Christmas Eve. ‘Where is it they have carp at this time? Poland, I believe, perhaps Russia, I daresay.’

  ‘This is not carp,’ said Sophia, serving out the pie.

  ‘Cod, I expect,’ said Daisy.

  Sophia did not reveal that it was not cod but coley, for fear that Mark might exclaim without thinking, ‘Oh, but that’s what you get for Faustina!’ Economic necessity had made her aware for some time now that the pinkish-grey of the coley in its raw state could be transformed by cooking i
nto a perfectly acceptable white fish.

  ‘Edmund and Isabel would know about carp,’ Mark went on. ‘They’ve probably eaten it somewhere on their travels.’

  ‘Have they lived abroad?’ Daisy asked.

  ‘Yes, Edmund was at Oxford with Mark – he’s had a brilliant career, hasn’t he, dear?’ Sophia turned to her husband.

  ‘Yes, he’s done well in the Diplomatic Service,’ Mark admitted, wondering why people often spoke of ‘a brilliant career’ in these circumstances, when a person achieved in the course of time and by gradual steps no more than was expected of him. ‘I suppose you might describe him as brilliant,’ he added, feeling that he was being ungenerous.

  ‘Of course, one doesn’t often hear of somebody having a brilliant career in the Church,’ said Sophia. ‘It might suggest something shady or not quite above-board. And who could be brilliant in a country parish?’ She glanced affectionately at her husband, who was not altogether pleased. After all, though he could hardly point it out now, he and Edmund had started out equal after the University, it was only later that their paths had diverged. Could he perhaps work out a sermon on these lines, with some kind of a pay-off ending, though he had no idea what that was going to be, or even if it was at all likely that there would be one …

  ‘I never draw the curtains in the kitchen,’ Sophia said, seeing that Daisy was glancing over towards the window as if, as a town-dweller, she expected to see it shrouded in nylon or Terylene net. ‘We aren’t overlooked in the churchyard, after all. I chose this particular vicarage because of this view from the kitchen – Faustina can play among the graves safely and it will prepare her for her own end.’