by Barbara Pym
‘Yes, it’s good and strong,’ said Catherine. ‘One needs that sometimes.’
‘Excuse me for asking,’ leopard-hat began, ‘but is there- have you—er—recently suffered a bereavement?’ she brought out in a rush.
‘I? Oh, no, not exactly,’ said Catherine, feeling rather flustered and unsure of herself.
‘It was your black dress and those jet ear-rings—excuse me for mentioning it,’
‘Oh, that’s quite all right. I easily might have done, after all,’
‘Yes, we must be prepared,’ said leopard-hat. ‘My friend here has just lost her mother,’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry .. ,’ Catherine looked at black-beetle in a kind of wonder and thought how strange it was that anybody who looked as old as she did should have had a mother recently living.
‘Now that mother’s gone I’ll be able to go to the Congregational church,’ said black-beetle confidingly. ‘ The minister’s quite a young man and doesn’t always dress like a clergyman. Of course the other church, the Anglo-Catholic one, has an old vicar… ,’
Catherine stood up rather abruptly. The nightmare, which the strong tea had temporarily dispelled, seemed to be coming back. She wondered how long they would sit there discussing the ages of clergymen, and whether they would ever discover who got the young ones just ordained.
‘Please excuse me,’ she said, ‘I have to go now-good night I’
Now that mother’s gone … it would have been a sad loss, certainly, but at least she could now go to the place of worship she preferred. If Tom went, she would be free too, but there wasn’t the comfortable certainty of the Congregational church and the young minister waiting for her. She imagined him standing at the door, shaking hands after the Sunday evening service, perhaps with a special word for those who had recently suffered a bereavement….
There was no sign of life when she looked up at the window of the flat, though she hardly knew whether she had expected to see any. In the sitting-room the desk was littered with pages of Tom’s bad typing. She took one up and read a sentence, ‘prior to the commencement of my second field trip …’ it began. She remembered suggesting some simplification of this phrase, but he had not heeded her. I suppose we love people for what they are and not for what we hope to make them, she thought, holding the page against her cheek. She wandered aimlessly about the room, watching the darkness come outside and wondering if Tom and Deirdre were still in the restaurant. They might well be, since it was still not very late, and with all that holding of hands they must be making very slow progress with their eating. Perhaps they would go for a walk in the park. Tom was not as a rule fond of Nature, but Catherine knew that in the early stages of a love affair it was not at all unusual for people to act out of character.
She now remembered that she had not been able to have any coffee with her supper, so she made some and then settled down at her typewriter at the table in the window. There was, as usual, a half-written page in it, stopped in the middle of a sentence, so she was able to go straight on, filling in the French background of the story she was writing, where two strangers, soon to become hero and heroine, found themselves with three hours to wait between trains in the middle of a hot afternoon and wrandered into the square of the little French town. They sat on a seat and looked at the pink and white oleanders, making conversation to the strains of a distant military band … Catherine became so absorbed that nearly two hours went by, until she heard a step on the stairs and found Tom standing, looking over her shoulder.
‘Hullo,’ she smiled up at him, absently, for she was still far away. ‘Had a good evening?’
‘Yes, thank you. I’m rather hungry, though,’
‘I suppose you had an early meal,’ said Catherine lightiy. ‘As a matter of fact I did too—we’ll have an omelette, shall we?’
While she was cooking, Tom took a piece of paper from his pocket and read it, then he called out, ‘Do you know who Scheherezade was, Catty?’
‘What a funny question! Some sort of Arabian slave girl, I think, who kept on telling stories to the Sultan and she had to go on and on because if she failed to hold his interest he would have her beheaded the next day,’
‘I see. The kind of thing you might do rather well, but not everybody,’
Catherine could feel that he was smiling as he spoke. She made the omelettes and brought them to the table, pushing her typewriter to one side of it.
They ate in silence for a time, then Tom said in a rather stilted tone, ‘Being married to somebody must be rather cosy, in a way,’
‘In what sort of way?’asked Catherine, deliberately unhelpful, for she felt disinclined for a talk about marriage in the abstract.
‘Oh, having a person there all the time, you know-the same face on the pillow, and at breakfast and then still there when you got home in the evening,’
‘I think you make it sound horribly depressing, if it’s just a question of having the same face around all the time.’
‘Yes, that’s what I feel too, in a way,’ said Tom almost eagerly. ‘I mean, there might come a time .. ,’ ‘ When you wanted a different face,’ said Catherine promptly. ‘Well, not all the time perhaps, but sometimes.’ ‘Unfortunately we can’t yet cope with that very well,’ said Catherine. ‘Two wives or even two girl friends need a good deal of time and skill and even money to manage successfully, and you’ve got your thesis to finish, don’t forget.’
‘Oh, Catty, you’re really too responsive—you understand things almost too well.’ “There isn’t all that much to understand, is there?’ ‘She seems so unhappy, perhaps that’s it,’ said Tom in a puzzled tone. ‘In a way, I feel that she needs me and a man likes to feel that sometimes,’ ‘Of course he does,’ Catherine agreed. ‘That’s what seems wrong with so many relationships now, the women feeling that they are the strong ones and that men couldn’t get on without them. In the olden days,’ she smiled at the phrase, ‘it was quite different-or so we always imagine. Or were women more diplomatic then?*
‘She lives in that rather depressing suburban house, where nobody really understands her,’ Tom went on. ‘Oh, yes, I know it was very pleasant going to tea there… ,’ ‘So it is Deirdre we’re talking about.’ Tom looked starded. ‘But of course. Who else did you think it could be?’
‘I don’t know, but you seem to meet so many girls in the course of your studies. How do I know which ones are likely to hold your hand in restaurants? I hope it was one of the better meals this evening, by the way? We know how the food can vary there.’ She darted an amused look at him, and he thought how different her merry sardonic grey eyes were from Deirdre’s intense brown ones with their spaniel-like look of devotion. The trouble was that he liked—perhaps even loved—both of them. He began to form a sentence about polygamy and how primitive societies were really rather better arranged than our own civilization, but another glance from Catherine stopped him.
‘Yes, I did see you,’ she said. ‘Now, Tom, what practical arrangements will this involve? You can’t bring her to live here, you know. Her mother and aunt wouldn’t like it and there isn’t room, anyway.’
‘No, I suppose there isn’t,’ said Tom, as if he had been seriously considering bringing Deirdre to live in Catherine’s flat. ‘Perhaps I could take a room with Mark and Digby.’
‘Oh, Tom, in that depressing mouldering house by the railway, and with that dreadful geyser in the bathrooml’
‘I can finish my thesis there as well as anywhere,’ said Tom rather stiffly.
‘And anywhere will do for love, won’t it. Now I can see what Donne meant when he wrote about love making one little room an everywhere. And it will be such a very little room, quite poky, you might say…’ she began to laugh in an uncertain way.
Catty, please don’t.’ He came and sat beside her. ‘I don’t have to go, you know. I didn’t mean to start all this, and I don’t think I did. It seems to be all your idea.’
‘But it’s a good idea, and you’ll be able to finish y
our thesis much better away from me,’ She looked up at him, apparently recovered.
‘I believe I could have Ephraim Olo’s room in a week or two,’ said Tom thoughtfully. ‘He’s going back soon.’
‘Has he finished his studies then?’
‘Yes, he’s going to be a Cabinet Minister.’
‘Of course, they’ve got their own sort of government now, haven’t they. It’s comforting to know you’ll occupy the room a Cabinet Minister once had. It’s a bit like Marx and Lenin living in London and then going back to Russia. It would be even more comforting if it were somebody like Mr. Gladstone, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yes, darling,’ he said, humouring her.
‘I suppose we can see to your packing in the morning?’
‘Good heavens, yes. I shan’t be going for a week or two.’
‘It seems rather cold-blooded, doesn’t it, not going for a week or two? In books and films and even in life, too, people go and pack suit-cases there and then and hurry out of the house,’
‘Catty, please, I don’t want to go now.’ Tom suddenly realized that he was very tired. The long and unaccustomed walk with Deirdre in the park must have taken it out of him. He hadn’t really meant to start anything; perhaps in the morning they would realize that it had all been a mistake.
CHAPTER TEN
That same evening Rhoda Wellcome sat writing a letter to the Electricity Board. The bill for the last quarter had just arrived, and it was preposterously large, more than if they had left all the electric lights and fires on in the house all day and all night. Round her on the table were strewn the bills for past quarters, which she was studying and comparing, reading out extracts to her sister, who sat knitting and trying to listen to a popular humorous programme on the wireless.
‘There must be a mistake,’ Rhoda repeated for the fifth or sixth time. ‘And now that I come to think of it, the man couldn’t get in to read the meter last time, or said he couldn’t, though I’m sure there must have been somebody in, so I filled in the card myself.’
‘Perhaps you did it wrong,’ said Mabel Swan mildly.
‘Well, I’m going to look now.’
‘AH right, dear. I’ll come and make a cup of tea, that would be nice, wouldn’t it. Perhaps Deirdre will be in soon and would like some when she comes in.*
Rhoda crouched among the metres, holding a torch to read the little clocks, but whatever she saw there did not seem to solve the mystery. Finally she wrote a sharp note, being as rude as one can only be to an impersonal body, and flinging at them a kind of challenge, which was perhaps irrelevant but which relieved her feelings. ‘I have also noticed,’ she concluded, ‘that the light has become much dimmer lately and should be glad to know how you would explain this. Yours truly, Rhoda Wellcome.’
She sealed up the envelope and addressed it, but her remark about the dimming light had left her with a faint sense of disquiet, as if it might have a wider and more disturbing significance. Though perhaps it could be put right by some comparatively simple means, such as the buying of more powerful electric light bulbs.
‘Let me see now,’ said Mabel, ‘who is Deirdre out with tonight?’ There was an undertone of pride in her voice, which Rhoda did not fail to notice for she said quickly and with an air of inner knowledge, ‘Oh, Tom, of course! He’s definitely the one now.’
‘Poor Bernard,’ sighed Mabel. ‘Still, men must put up with these things and I never thought she was really very keen on him.’
‘Oh, certainly not! She endured his attentions,’ said Rhoda, feeling that she had read the phrase somewhere in a novel, ‘but that was all. She and Tom have so much more in common.’
‘Yes, and he is older than Bernard. I feci she’s been needing an older man, someone she can respect and look up to. From what she says Tom seems to be just that kind of person.’
‘And his people have an old place in Shropshire, so I dare say there will be some money there,’ said Rhoda in a full tone. ‘Of course he is a brilliant anthropologist.’
The sisters were silent for a moment, either in tribute to Tom’s brilliance, or because there seemed nothing to say about a profession of which they were almost totally ignorant. If Mabel thought rather wistfully of Bernard’s steady position with his father’s firm, she did not mention it.
‘Of course there is Catherine,’ she said uncertainly. ‘One doesn’t quite know if there is any attachment there.’
‘You mean Miss Oliphant?’ said Rhoda in a surprised tone. ‘Oh, surely she is just a friend. I thought her very nice but rather an odd little tiling, not the kind of girl to attract a man.’
‘All the same, I shouldn’t like to feel that Deirdre was—well, causing any unhappiness there.’
‘If should think Catherine is well able to look after herself,’ said Rhoda positively, ‘and after all, women must put up with these things too, as you said about Bernard. That’s life, isn’t it.’ She spoke with an almost callous detachment, for although she knew that it might be life for other people it had not been so for her. An aunt can if necessary fight as tenaciously for a niece’s rights as a mother can for a daughter’s.
‘There’s Deirdre now,’ said Mabel, her sharper mother’s ear having heard the key in the lock. ‘But she seems to be going straight upstairs.’ She lifted the lid of the teapot and peered inside it. ‘There is some tea here if she’d like it-it hasn’t been made long.’
‘I expect she’ll come down if she wants any,’ said Rhoda sensibly.
Upstairs in her room, Deirdre combed her hair and put on more powder and lipstick to compose herself for meeting the searching glances of her mother and aunt. She would have preferred to go straight to bed, to go over in her mind the dinner at the little Greek restaurant, the walk in Regent’s Park and the things they had said to each other which, for a girl of nineteen, are full of the magical freshness of never having been said before. This evening she could almost have believed that Tom loved her as much as she loved him; only the thought of Catherine, so sweet to her at the party and altogether such a nice person, cast a slight cloud over her happiness. Naturally they had not spoken of Catherine during dinner and certainly not when they were stumbling over the grass in Regent’s Park. Deirdre salved her conscience by remembering that Catherine had laughed about Tom and his thesis, and this seemed such a very dreadful thing that perhaps she deserved to lose him.
When Deirdre came into the drawing-room she could feel her mother and aunt consciously restraining their curiosity, asking her if it had been raining outside, if she would like some tea or anything to eat.
‘No, thank you,’ Deirdre said. ‘I couldn’t eat. Tom gave me a very nice meal at a Greek restaurant and then we went for a walk in Regent’s Park.’
‘Regent’s Park,’ Rhoda exclaimed, unable to hold herself in check any longer. ‘How lovely that must have been! Queen Mary’s garden,’ she added, hardly conscious of the slight incongruity of her words.
‘We didn’t go there,’ Deirdre smiled.
‘You must bring Tom here again some time,’ said Mabel, encouraged by her daughter’s friendliness. ‘We could ask Malcolm to ask Phyllis, or you could invite that nice girl Catherine who came to tea and that young Frenchman. We could have quite a jolly party.’
‘Yes, I’ll ask Tom to come to supper one evening,’ said Deirdre absently. But not Catherine, of course, her mother and aunt did not know about Tom and Catherine and she herself did not want to think about them now.
‘I dare say Father Tulliver would come too, and of course if we could get Mr. Lydgate as well…’ Rhoda’s ambition was driving her almost into the realms of fantasy. ‘It would be a cold meal, as it’s summer, a fork supper, and perhaps a wine cup of some kind.’ She could see it all laid out on the table like one of those lovely coloured pictures in Good Housekeeping.
Deirdre, like Tom, was tired after the long walk and was glad when the time came to go to bed and dream about him. But dreams can seldom be arranged as we wish them, and Deirdre’s were
of Digby Fox, of all people. They were walking in a garden full of flowers and he kissed her. She woke up feeling disappointed and cross, and was quite rude to him when she met him the next morning. And yet he was very kind to her, offering to lend her some notes he had made on a long and difficult book, which would save her the trouble of reading it.
‘How refreshing to meet a feminine and unscholarly girl,’ he said to Mark, ‘not too proud to accept my humble offering of a few notes. Most girls would throw them back in your face.’ He wondered if he should ask her out to lunch with him but then thought better of it. No amorous dalliance until the Foresight Fellowships were setded, but then, ah then … he promised himself.
Deirdre and Tom had arranged to meet in the afternoon at Felix’s Folly, where they could sit quiedy side by side reading dieir books. They had been doing this for about ten minutes, when Tom began to talk to Deirdre in a low voice. Opposite them sat Miss Lydgate, surrounded by sheets of paper covered with lists of words and charts in brightly coloured chalks. Her white hair stood up on end, for she had been running her fingers through it. The expression on her face was almost one of anguish, her eyes glared through her spectacles and seemed to fix themselves on Tom and Deirdre.
‘Come outside a minute,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve got something to tell you. We’d better not talk here as we seem to be annoying Miss Lydgate.’
‘Yes, she’s positively glaring at us,’ said Deirdre.
In all fairness to Miss Lydgate, it must be said that she was not glaring at them at all and was, indeed, totally unconscious of their presence. She had been making a comparative study of the vocabularies of some little-known languages and had come across a feature in one of them which reminded her of something in another. But where had she met it before? She plunged through the mangrove swamps of the Niger Delta, but it was not there; then up to Lake Chad, hovering around the bit that was always drying up and looking so odd on the map, then down through French Equatorial Africa to the Belgian Congo, where she lingered for a moment among the pygmies. ‘Tyrell Todd? Impossible’ she breathed impatiently, and swept right across to the spicy coasts of Tanganyika, up through troubled Kenya and into the hills of Ethiopia. Here she stopped and murmured the poetical-sounding names of well-known Italian ethnographers and linguists—Cerulli, Robecchi-Bricchetti, Vanutelli, Citerni—but still it evaded her. Then suddenly she took a leap across the border into the Sudan, stood up and cried out something that sounded like ‘Jebel Pingpong! Well, I’ll be jiggered! Come here at once, Father Gemini!’