by Barbara Pym
Emma hesitated, remembering the night of the flower festival and the non-event it had been. She knew what her mother was driving at but did not feel inclined to tell her the full story of that afternoon and evening – Graham’s appearance in the church (perhaps she might mention that) but not the tea and the boiled eggs, especially not the boiled eggs, nor his wanting to stay the night, not because he particularly wanted to” be with her but because he had left it rather late to go back and was feeling tired.
‘I suppose he wanted someone to talk to,’ she said.
‘He stayed the night here?’
‘Yes, but we slept in separate rooms. He made no attempt at anything else – rather humiliating!’ Emma felt she had to make a joke of it.
‘And of course a night in a cottage can’t really be compared with those aristocratic Edwardian house-parties with their sophisticated arrangement of bedrooms,’ Beatrix said.
‘Hardly!’ Emma laughed. ‘And he hadn’t even brought pyjamas and toothbrush with him – ridiculous, really.’
‘Well, in a way, that’s what it is, isn’t it, the relationship between men and women.’
Beatrix’s short experience of the married state had hardly given her the right to pronounce in this way, Emma felt, nor did she believe that her mother really held this unromantic view of the relationship between the sexes – her studies of Victorian fiction would seem to indicate otherwise. It was only that she didn’t want to seem too eager for Emma to enter into a ‘meaningful relationship’ with Graham that she adopted this attitude. All the same, there was a good deal in what she said.
‘He admired the Golden Lily bedcover – I suppose that was something.’
‘Will he come again, do you think?’
‘I don’t know – he didn’t say. I suppose it depends on various things.’ Emma wasn’t even sure whether she wanted him to. ‘What did you think of this evening?’ she asked her mother. ‘Quite a success, wasn’t it?’
Beatrix agreed but found herself thinking that Emma could have made herself look more attractive. She was getting a little too old for the modish drabness and wispyness so fashionable today. Surely a dress of a prettier colour and some attempt at a hair style, either curled or neatly cut and set, might have made the evening even more successful? It wasn’t as if Emma had ever produced anything that could justify such high-minded dowdiness – here Beatrix considered various contemporary women of distinction – no novel or volume of poetry or collection of paintings, only a few unreadable anthropological papers. Was she not capable of better things?
In bed that night Beatrix employed her favourite remedy for sleeplessness, going over in her mind her college contemporaries and recalling their Christian names and their appearance as it had been forty years ago. Starting with Isobel – Isobel Merriman Mound – who had looked then very much as she looked now, she moved on to the more exotically named of her fellow students. Use Benedikta Roelofsen, the Dane, and Alessandra Simonetta Bianco, the Italian, were two that came to mind, pictured in a college group of the time but now difficult to recall because they never came back to the annual reunion. A detailed memory, irrelevant in the way such memories often are, came to Beatrix of Use’s hand with its red-varnished nails, surely some of the first ever seen, and Miss Birkinshaw’s look of horror at the sight. Ilse would have done it to shock, but girls in those days did take more trouble with their appearance than they seemed to now. Even she and Isobel, plain and hard-working, had been neat and tidy, with waved hair and timid attempts at make-up. And, after all, she, Beatrix, had married, as anyone could learn from the college register, ‘m. 1939, Dudley George Howick’, and ‘one d., Emma, born 1940’. Dudley had been a contemporary, also reading English, and Beatrix had known him for several years before they married in September 1939. Had it not been for the war, they might never have married, but it was the sort of thing people were doing at that time, and Beatrix had always felt that a woman should marry or at least have some kind of relationship with a man. Dudley had been killed at Dunkirk, all those years ago, and since then there had been nothing much in that direction. A young, academically inclined widow with a child, as she had been, was not immediately attractive or accessible, and then there had been her work, the Victorian fiction. Charlotte M. Yonge’s novels contained more than one attractive young widow….
But Emma was a different proposition altogether – what was to be done with her! Nothing, of course. One did not ‘do’ anything about daughters of Emma’s age in the nineteen seventies. This Graham Pettifer – nothing there, obviously, and the village was most unlikely to provide anybody suitable. Adam Prince, with his ‘memorable sole nantua’? One couldn’t help smiling here – not a marrying man. And poor Tom could hardly be described as an eligible widower…. Beatrix was becoming sleepy now, perhaps the thought of Tom had induced drowsiness. ‘Ineffectual’ was the word that sprang to mind when she thought of Tom – not even capable of locating the site of that “ridiculous deserted medieval village in the woods, the D.M.V. And not all that efficient in the running of his church, either. Beatrix found herself remembering certain lapses of detail (presumably during some temporary absence of Miss Lee) – Christmas decorations still up on the first Sunday after Epiphany, daffodils on the altar at Quinquagesima – surely incorrect? – which Tom ought to have picked up but probably hadn’t even noticed. But of course he had lost his wife, one must remember that, and was saddled with the unfortunate Daphne. Poor Tom, and poor Daphne – definitely poor Daphne…. Beatrix slept.
Tom was so much nicer than Adam Prince, Emma thought, going over the supper party in her mind as she lay waiting for sleep. He was an essentially good person. As well as preaching about heaven he had also given them a sermon about helping one’s neighbour, and she was sure that he meant it. But to get down to practical details or brass tacks, could Tom really help her if she asked him? Would he, for example, be capable of cleaning her top windows, which was what she really needed?
Isobel fell asleep quickly and dreamed that she was walking in a bluebell wood with Adam Prince – highly unsuitable! She woke in the middle of the night, thinking of Shelley’s poem,
I dream’d that, as I wander’d by the way,
Bare Winter suddenly was changed to Spring….
All those flowers – violets, daisies, ‘faint oxlips’, wild roses and others she couldn’t remember (no fox’s dung there!), and the gathering of a nosegay of all these and then the last line, much loved and quoted in her girlhood,
That I might there present it! Oh! to Whom?
Like Beatrix she too went back to college days, a memory of that time coming to her, but of somebody not at all like Adam Prince.
13
There was a good summer that year. The mud in the lanes dried into hard ruts and the fields were burnt and bleached like an Italian or Greek landscape.
Martin Shrubsole nodded his approval when he saw his mother-in-law setting out for a walk in the woods with Miss Lee and Miss Grundy. He was unaware that the main purpose of the walk was to catch a glimpse of Sir Miles and his guests at the manor – mother was taking exercise, that was the main thing. And they had been lucky – if you could call it luck – to be rewarded by a sight of Sir Miles standing on the terrace with a group of ladies in summer dresses. By concealing themselves in a thicket, the walkers had been able to watch for some minutes while others came out from the house with glasses in their hands (it was just before lunch) and food was set out on white-painted garden tables. The sound of laughter came through the trees.
‘In the old days’, Miss Lee reminded them, ‘people didn’t eat and drink out of doors like this, though there were wonderful picnics, of course. Miss Vereker was a great one for picnics.’
‘Miss Vereker…?’ Magdalen Raven had forgotten for the moment who Miss Vereker was.
‘The girls’ governess,’ Miss Grundy said. As if anyone could fail to know about Miss Vereker the way Olive was always going on about her!
‘Oh yes, I re
member now. I suppose she didn’t live in this cottage?’
They had left the thicket and were passing the cottage in the woods which looked attractive in the hot weather, shaded by a grove of trees.
‘No, one of the keepers lived here, but now they prefer a council house.’
‘It would be such a romantic setting for a young couple, wouldn’t it?’ said Miss Grundy. ‘I suppose Sir Miles could let it.’
‘Oh yes, it’s certainly habitable,’ said Miss Lee. ‘Miss Vereker might have preferred it to West Kensington, where she now lives, but of course she didn’t have the chance.’
‘My daughter feels it ought to be offered to some homeless family,’ said Magdalen, ‘though it would hardly be suitable, one feels. Remember in the war how the evacuees hated the country?’
‘One fears the elemental forces of Nature,’ said Miss Grundy.
Her companions seemed unable to comment on this and the conversation moved into more comfortable channels. It was time to be getting back for their own lunches – perhaps a salad eaten out of doors, inspired by the example of Sir Miles and his guests. It would certainly be hot in Greece and no doubt Daphne would be eating at a taverna – wasn’t that the word? As for Tom, they had noticed him mooning about in the churchyard that morning – things did get rather out of hand when Daphne was away.
There was hay round the gravestones – the grass in the churchyard was badly in need of cutting, Tom realised. They had discussed it at the last meeting of the parochial church council. And was there no way of restraining or controlling the excesses of the village mourners? Could nothing be done to educate their execrable taste? Christabel Gellibrand had suggested at that same meeting that elaborate curb-stones, green marble chips and florid gilt lettering disfigured the general appearance of the churchyard. Some graves even had vases of artificial flowers on them, surely a disgrace in a rural area? Were there not rules that could be applied and enforced by the rector? Here several meaningful glances had been directed towards Tom, but he had just smiled, admitting that of course there were certain rules, but who was he to attempt to apply them, to act in what would undoubtedly seem a highhanded and unfeeling manner towards fellow human beings at a time of sadness, still suffering the grief of bereavement? After all, everybody couldn’t be blessed with the gift of good taste (like Christabel G.). It was difficult to answer this, unpalatable, as it was to acknowledge a common humanity with those who would cover their graves with green marble chips or even, in one instance, a sickly piece of statuary which had somehow got itself put up in the fifties (before Tom’s time as rector).
But in the far corner under the yew trees the sugary seventeenth-century cherubs, the newness of their faces blunted with the years, glowered at him over their tantalisingly indecipherable inscriptions. Perhaps even they had once been new and in deplorable taste? It was too late now to do anything about the churchyard, bolting the stable door and all that – the place was already spoilt. Only the older graves and the mausoleum, with its chaste granite obelisk, were likely to please the few who noticed such things.
Even though the interior of the mausoleum was not to Tom’s taste, there was something attractive about the idea of chilly marble on a hot summer day, and he pushed aside the velvet curtain and went in.
‘Ah, rector….’
Tom had not expected a greeting and was startled when he saw that Dr G. was already inside the mausoleum. Tom had sometimes wondered why Dr G. should, like himself, have a key to the mausoleum. Its inhabitants were surely beyond his help now.
There was something slightly ridiculous about the two men confronting each other in this way and in such a place, and after the doctor’s first, ‘Ah, rector…’ and Tom’s response of, ‘Well, Dr G….’ they stood smiling at each other, Tom’s hand resting, almost in blessing, on a cool marble head, and the doctor appearing to be examing the contours of a marble limb as if he were probing for signs of a fracture.
What are you doing here? Tom wanted to ask, and yet in a sense both had an equal right to be here, though neither could expect to end their days in the mausoleum. But it was Dr G. who put the question to Tom, turning the tables in an unexpected way. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘I never expect to find anybody else in this place.’
‘Do you come here often?’ The trite social enquiry was out before Tom realised it.
‘Oh yes, I come here quite often.’ The doctor’s tone was casual.
‘There’s a young man who comes to see to things,’ Tom said. ‘I met him here one day.’
‘Yes – an arrangement was made – to see that the place was kept decently and in order. One does feel that’s how it should be kept.’
Almost as if it concerned him personally, Tom thought, irritated by the doctor’s attitude. As if he owned the place – but of course this was an absurd reaction, for why shouldn’t the doctor have as much right to enter the mausoleum as anybody else? In fact more right, because he had been so long in the village and could even remember the last survivors of the de Tankerville family.
‘Did you ever know…?’ Tom began, indicating the marble representations surrounding them.
‘Well, hardly these. The girls, certainly, and Miss Vereker – she was fond of coming here.’
‘Miss Vereker?’ Tom was at a loss.
‘The last governess.’
‘Of course!’ Tom’s thoughts had gone back to the seventeenth century, where he recalled no such name. ‘Miss Vereker, the last governess – how sad that sounds. She taught the girls at the manor?’
‘Yes, she was quite a young woman in those days.’
‘And she liked to come here? A strange taste in a young woman.’
‘Well, she had the interests of the family very much at heart. She used to put flowers here at Easter and other times…. I was just taking a stroll through the churchyard and thought I’d look in – funny that we should meet here,’ said the doctor, now more genial, ‘but after all, you and I are rather in the same line of business, aren’t we?’
‘Yes, I suppose we are,’ said Tom, but whereas the doctor’s surgery was full, the rector’s study was empty – never any queue there. So there was a difference. Yet there might be a means of getting together and in a rather useful and practical way, for it now occurred to Tom that he might ask Dr G. to give a talk at one of the winter meetings of the history society. ‘Death in the Olden Days’ or words to that effect? He was sure the doctor would be able to think of a suitable subject.
Of course Dr G. said he would be delighted and the two men left the mausoleum, each feeling satisfied as if it had been a social occasion. So his ‘Do you come here often?’ wasn’t so out of place after all, Tom thought.
Going back to what he thought of as his solitary lunch – and, indeed, with Daphne away it was a solitary meal – he happened to glance down the village street and see Emma going into her cottage, holding a letter – or it might have been a postcard – in her hand. Had she not seemed to be preoccupied with whatever news the communication contained, he might have suggested a drink at the pub. At least this was “what he imagined himself doing – in practice he would probably have said nothing and so missed his opportunity. Still, tomorrow was another day – the day of the history society’s summer excursion, and it promised to be at least a fine day. The clergy nowadays seldom included the weather in their prayers, but there were other blessings to be hoped for as well as sunshine.
14
Tom knew in advance that the party joining in the history society’s summer excursion would consist mainly of middle-aged and elderly women from neighbouring villages – ‘Tom’s history ladies’, as Daphne called them. Mary, Janet, Leila, Damaris, Ailsa, Myrtle and Hester – he knew them all by their Christian names, and they were undoubtedly the backbone of the society. And of course there were also a few from his own village – Miss Lee and Miss Grundy (whom he did not call ‘Olive’ and ‘Flavia’), Dr Shrubsole’s wife Avice and her mother (Magdalen?) and lastly, as he had
hoped, Emma Howick, no doubt in her role as anthropologist and student of village life. One or two of the original village inhabitants also came along, not as local historians, for they cared little for such matters, but ‘for the ride’. Among these was Mrs Dyer, determined to have her share of anything that was going, and almost as if to humour the rector in his childish obsession with the old days and people being buried in wool.
The only man in the party, not counting Tom, was Adam Prince, wearing jeans (a more successful buy than the pair he had given to the jumble sale).
‘Your sister need hardly have gone all that way for sunshine,’ he said to Tom.
‘Oh, but Daphne goes to Greece for much more than that,’ said Tom. ‘And she really needs to get away.’
‘Yes, we all need to get away, perhaps women especially,’ said Adam. No doubt he was remembering women who had worked for him in the days when he was a parish priest, for he smiled mysteriously and Tom wondered if he was about to embark on one of his reminiscences of his former life. But his next remark was about the weather – they were really lucky to have such a beautiful day.