Less Than Angels

by Barbara Pym

  Her glance came to rest on the little table where she kept drink, when she had any. There was half an inch of sherry in the decanter, no gin, and a sticky bottle of orange squash, half full. The table was dusty, too. Feeling more cheerful, she went into the kitchen and got a duster and mop. She loved housework when she felt in the mood for it and was often inspired with ideas for romantic fiction when shaking the mop out of the window or polishing a table.

  The sitting-room window looked out on to a row of small shops with flats above them. Almost opposite was a restaurant run by Cypriots, where Catherine often went to have a meal or to buy cheap wine. She was just wondering whether she could afford to have a meal out this evening, when she saw Digby and Mark approaching. She waved her mop at them and hurried to let them in. She would have to see whether she had anything to give them to eat, for they came like trusting animals, expecting to be fed, and she could not disappoint them.

  ‘Does she do housework in the evenings?’said Mark as they came up to the house. ‘ She seemed to have a mop in her hand.’

  ‘Yes, it’s odd. People usually do that kind of thing in the mornings,’ said Digby almost disapprovingly. ‘I don’t know what my mother would say.’

  ‘Does it really worry you?’

  ‘Well, I shouldn’t like my wife to do housework in the evenings, would you?’

  ‘No, I suppose not, but women usually have their own way.’

  By this time Catherine had opened the door and welcomed them in.

  ‘We’ve brought some beer,’ said Digby. ‘There’s been a party at Felix’s Folly, and it seemed a pity to stop drinking.’

  His last words seemed a little out of character, Catherine thought. Digby and Mark were such sober, hard-working young men, though Mark was sometimes rather spiteful in his conversation.

  ‘Oh, was that where the two anthropologists were going?’ said Catherine. ‘ I saw them from a window when I was having tea. How nice that you were invited too.’

  ‘We weren’t exactly invited,’ said Digby. ‘We happened to be working there and Miss Clovis couldn’t very well leave us out. The party would have gone on around us, as it were.’

  They were talking in the kitchen, where Catherine had started to prepare a risotto with whatever remains she could find. She was mincing some cold meat in her mincing machine, which was called ‘Beatrice’, a strangely gentle and gracious name for the fierce little iron contraption whose strong teeth so ruthlessly pounded up meat and gristle. It always reminded Catherine of an African god with its square head and little short arms, and it was not at all unlike some of the crudely carved images with evil expressions and aggressively pointed breasts which Tom had brought back from Africa. When he had gone away she had shut them all up in a cupboard, but now she supposed she must bring them out again or his feelings might be hurt.

  Digby was laying the table in the sitting-room, pausing to read the sheet in Catherine’s typewriter. ‘Oh, my darling love,’ she sighed, laying her head on his shoulder, ‘it’s been so long.’ ‘I know—dear as remembered kisses after death, he said gently. ‘Did people really say things like that to each other? Digby wondered. His life did not seem to have allowed much time so far for what he called ‘amorous dalliance’. Either they said nothing, ‘submitted to his embraces’ he supposed Catherine might write, or pushed him away indignantly.

  Catherine ran into the room and snatched the sheet out of the typewriter. ‘You mustn’t look,’ she cried. ‘It’s not your kind of story.’

  ‘ Will you say that to Tom when he comes back? After all, it hasn’t been so very long—less than two years. When do you expect him?’

  ‘Next week-at least that’s when the boat docks. He may go to see his mother first, it would be on the way.’

  ‘We’ve decided to fly when we go out to the field,’ said Mark, ‘then there won’t be any danger of our being expected to change for dinner. We consider it an outmoded custom, but I suppose Tom was brought up to it and finds it hard to shake off.’

  ‘Surely he wouldn’t take a dinner jacket into the field?’ asked Digby in a shocked tone.

  ‘No, of course not. Tom has broken away from his upbringing very successfully. He is even shabbier than you are,’ Catherine added, not meaning to be unkind.

  ‘I suppose you’d call him an impoverished young man of good family, wouldn’t you?’ said Mark. ‘I heard that the Mallows have quite a big place in Shropshire which is now falling into decay.’ There was a hint of satisfaction in his tone.

  ‘Yes, but it’s sad,’ said Catherine. ‘His brother manages the place and I believe his mother works very hard too.’

  ‘Have you met his—er—people?’ Digby asked.

  ‘No, I suppose I couldn’t expect to, really. Anyway, Tom only goes home occasionally, out of duty. You see, they think he has gone to the bad—it was a great disappointment to them when he took up anthropology. He could have entered the Colonial Service; that would have been all right; one of his uncles was a distinguished Governor somewhere in Africa in the twenties. But for Tom to ‘go native’, as they regard it—well, you can imagine…’

  ‘I suppose his father is a broken man,’ said Mark smugly.

  ‘Oh, his father died years ago. An old uncle lives with them, though. I don’t know whether he is a broken man or not, somehow one doesn’t associate that kind of thing with uncles.’

  ‘Is the uncle his mother’s brother?’asked Digby.

  ‘Yes, I think he is,’

  ‘How ironical that is, when you consider that Tom has spent so much of his time investigating the role of the mother’s brother in his tribe,’

  ‘Oh, I don’t understand these things,’ said Catherine impatiently. She busied herself putting things on the table, a dish of grated cheese and a bowl of fruit. She had always envied Tom his family, having none of her own except cousins with whom she had long since lost touch. If she and Tom were to marry, she would acquire a mother, as well as a brother and sister. Tom’s sister was rather formidable, she believed, and had married ‘well’. Catherine imagined her in pearls and tweeds, good tweeds of course and real pearls, with an account at Harrods. He had two aunts in London, one living in South Kensington and the other in Belgravia, but naturally Catherine had not been taken to meet them. She sighed and began serving the risotto.

  ‘What’s the matter, Catherine?’ asked Digby kindly.

  ‘I don’t know. I was just thinking that kind of life would be rather nice. Tom had a girl friend at home, you know, I suppose he could have married her and lived happily as a kind of squire of the village. She was called Elaine—I suppose she still is—and she used to breed golden retrievers.’ Catherine giggled. ‘It sounds funny, I don’t know why. There’s something comic and pathetic about doggy Englishwomen, and yet she may not be like that at all.’

  ‘There was a girl at the party we might have brought along,’ said Digby. ‘We rather debated whether we should have taken her out to supper somewhere, but before we could make up our minds she had hurried away to some distant suburb on a bus.’

  ‘We hadn’t enough money, anyway,’ said Mark harshly.

  ‘Oh, I wish you’d brought her,’ said Catherine. ‘I should like to meet some of your girl friends.’

  ‘Well, she isn’t exactly that,’ said Digby, ‘though we thought she was quite nice. She didn’t talk much.’

  ‘She’s rather too tall for me,’ said Mark.

  ‘Yes, if it were a question of her having to lay her head on somebody’s shoulder, I suppose I should have to offer mine,’ said Digby with a malicious glance at Catherine. ‘Though Tom’s would be even better.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  The rugs are all out on the lawn,’ said Mabel Swan. ‘I suppose Mrs. Skinner is going to beat them,’

  ‘The morning is really the time to do that,’ said Rhoda Wellcome, her sister. ‘Mr. Lydgate must realize that he isn’t living in the African jungle now. One doesn’t want to be narrow and suburban, goodness knows, but
if everybody were to beat their rugs in the evening, just think of the noise!’

  ‘It would be like native drums, I suppose,’ said Mabel mildly.

  ‘Poor Mrs. Skinner, I think she has a difficult time,’ said Rhoda. ‘Probably Mr. Lydgate won’t let her do things when he’s in the house. I suppose he may have gone out now and she’s making the most of the opportunity.’

  Why couldn’t Rhoda say right out that she knew he had? thought Mabel with a flash of irritation. During the afternoon she herself had heard the click of the next door gate and she knew that her sister had been standing in the dining-room window. So she must have seen him go out. What was the point of living in a suburb if one couldn’t show a healthy curiosity about one’s neighbours?

  ‘Deirdre will be in soon,’ Mabel said. ‘I suppose I ought to go and see about supper.’

  ‘Shall I help you?’

  ‘No, no, I have everything planned, thank you.’

  The sisters had been sitting in Rhoda’s bed-sitting-room, which commanded an excellent view of the next door back garden. They often did this on the lengthening spring evenings between tea and supper, for they were both at home all day and their household duties were not particularly arduous. It was natural that they should find the unmarried and apparently rather eccentric Alaric Lydgate more interesting than their neighbours on the other side, a married couple with three young children, whose lives followed a pattern which was now familiar, though they had once considered them unconventional. Mr. Lydgate was not often to be seen in the garden, but there was always the hope that he might appear, especially when the weather got warmer. There was a good deal about him that was promising. He was tall and thin and looked rather ill; indeed it was said that he had retired from the Colonial Service because of ill health and come to live in this suburb where a house had been left to him by a relative. He was apparently to do ‘ light work’, whatever that expression, usually associated with gentlewomen unwilling to soil their hands with ‘rough’, might imply for men. There did not seem to be any trace of a Mrs. Lydgate, but he had a housekeeper, Mrs. Skinner, a little grey-haired woman with a curiously indignant expression who usually wore large artificial pearl ear-rings.

  Mabel Swan went downstairs. She was glad that her sister was not helping her with the supper, for she liked to do things in her own way and Rhoda was apt to suggest different ways which, she had to admit, were often more efficient, but after all it was her house and she couldn’t be expected to change after nearly thirty years of running it. She pottered round now, a tall vague woman in her early fifties, with a long pale face and brown eyes which her daughter Deirdre had inherited. As she pottered she murmured to herself, ‘large knives, small knives, pudding spoons, will they need forks too? Oh, large forks, serving spoons, mats, glasses, well two glasses in case Deirdre and Malcolm want to drink beer, Rhoda probably won’t… and now, wash the lettuce ..’ It was nice when the warm weather came and they could have salads for supper, she thought, though why it was nice she didn’t really know.

  Washing a lettuce and cutting up the things to go with it was really almost as much trouble as cooking a hot meal, and she herself had never got over an old-fashioned dislike of eating raw green leaves. When her husband had been alive they had always had a hot meal in the evenings, winter and summer alike. He needed it after a day in the City. But now he was gone and Rhoda had been living with them for nearly ten years now and everyone said how nice it was for them both, to have each other, though of course she had the children too. Malcolm was a good solid young man, very much like his father, reliable and, although of course she never admitted it, a little dull. He did not seem to mind about the hot meal in the evenings. But Deirdre was different, clever and moody, rather like she herself had been at the same age, before marriage to a good dull man and life in a suburb had steadied her.

  ‘Shall I lay the table?’ Rhoda asked, appearing in the kitchen doorway.

  ‘Oh, thank you, that would be a help. I’ve put the things out on the trolley.’

  ‘You’ve forgotten side plates,’ said Rhoda evenly, taking four from the plate-rack.

  ‘Have I? Well, I hadn’t really finished putting out the things. I just put out some to be getting on with. Then I thought it would be better to start washing the lettuce.’

  Rhoda wheeled the trolley into the dining-room and began to lay the table. It irritated her to see Mabel in the kitchen, doing things so vaguely and inefficiently. Sometimes it was all she could do not to interfere, but they had had ‘words’ about this when Rhoda first came to live with the Swans and Rhoda was sensible enough to realize that it was Mabel’s house and she must be allowed to do things as she liked. For, after all, they got on so well together. They both liked church work, bridge and listening to the wireless in the evenings. And then they looked so alike, both tall and dark with brown eyes; it was difficult to believe that Rhoda was the elder, for she was neater and better dressed, better preserved, one might almost have said. But then she had not been married and had two children. She had always lived very comfortably, keeping house for her parents, living alone for a short time after their deaths, and then coming to live here with Mabel and the children. It was a very satisfactory arrangement and Rhoda was not in the least envious of her sister’s fuller life, for now that they were both in their fifties there seemed to be very little difference between them. She would perhaps have liked what she called ‘the experience of marriagea vague phrase which seemed to cover all those aspects which one didn’t talk about, but she would not have liked to have had it with poor Gregory Swan. She was still sometimes faintly interested in men, as she was now in Alaric Lydgate, but in what way she hardly knew. She certainly did not think of marriage any more.

  Every evening there was the arrival of Malcolm and Deirdre to look forward to. After a day at work they were, or should have been, full of interesting little scraps of gossip and information about this and that, and if they sometimes seemed uncommunicative and withdrawn it was quite easy to draw them out with a little tactful questioning and perseverence.

  Malcolm came in now as she was laying the table. He was a pleasant-looking young man of twenty-five with brownish hair and eyes and nothing particularly distinctive about him. He put his bowler hat and neat flat brief-case down on the hall table and went into the downstairs cloakroom to wash his hands.

  ‘Had a good day?’ Rhoda called out.

  ‘Not too bad, thanks,’ he replied, as always, and then went through to the kitchen to get his usual glass of beer.

  Rhoda went into the hall and took up his evening paper which was lying neatly folded on top of his brief-case. There had been a nasty murder, or series of murders ; bodies of women had been discovered in a house in a not very nice part of London, and Rhoda, in common with a great many people in all walks of life, was anxious to read about the latest developments. It was dark in the hall, for the stained-glass windows on either side of the door did not let in much light, but she sat down and began to read avidly.

  ‘Deirdre’s rather late tonight,’ said Mabel, passing through to the dining-room with a dish of salad in her hand.

  ‘Mm, yes,’ murmured Rhoda, turning a page of the newspaper. ‘ They noticed a strong smell, it says, no wonder.’

  ‘As we are just having salad, I think we had better start without her,’ Mabel went on. ‘1 expect she’ll be in soon,’

  Deirdre was at that moment sitting on top of a bus which was moving very slowly along a suburban road. The drinks she had had seemed to have sharpened her perceptions and she looked about her in a detached way, noticing her surroundings as if she were a stranger visiting the neighbourhood for the first time. But she was not yet detached enough to appreciate any of the beauties of the scene. The houses seemed to her ugly and their well-kept gardens conventional and uninteresting. The wallflowers and tulips were the same every year and the lilacs and laburnums obviously could not grow in real country gardens. Even the magnolias were not the right kind, with shiny leave
s and huge creamy flowers, which one saw growing against Georgian houses in country villages.

  She got off the bus and hurried along her own road. Mr. Dulke who lived opposite, was cutting his hedge, but she pretended not to see him, walking along with her head bent, fearful of the facetious greeting or comment that might come. Towards the end of the road the houses became larger and there was the church, a modern red brick building with a vicarage to match. The Swans’ house stood back from the road and the front garden was overgrown with trees and shrubs. Just inside the gate was a guelder rose bush; Deirdre had loved the greenish-white flower balls when she was a child, but now the bush seemed to need pruning and the flowers, when they came, were full of green fly. Ah, my childhood, my innocent childhood, she thought, remembering a Tchekov play which she had recently seen. In the middle of the garden path lay a headless doll, no doubt left there by one of the Lovell children from next door. Deirdre pushed it aside with her foot.