by Barbara Pym
When the telephone did ring she was not surprised to hear Graham’s voice and to learn that the cottage he was renting was the cottage in the woods, ‘the ruined cottage’, as it was called. Apparently, however, it was habitable, but did the milkman deliver there? Perhaps Emma could find out? And bread, potatoes and a few basic groceries – he was sure Emma could arrange that?
15
Tom did not go away for a summer holiday that year, even when Daphne returned from Greece. He was relieved that she did not yet show any sign of getting a dog – perhaps the prolonged heat-wave was not the most suitable time. As for himself, the quick journey back into the seventeenth century by time machine, which was the sort of holiday Tom would have liked most, was still to be invented. He did not fancy Spain, where Mrs Dyer and her son and daughter-in-law were going, or Miss Lee’s Christian guest-house (‘The Anchorage’) in the West Country, or even Miss Grundy’s few days in London, visiting congenial churches. The middle summer months were not the best for festivals and Tom felt he had long since grown out of that particular kind of self-indulgent churchgoing. The Shrubsoles were to take a cottage in Cornwall, where Avice’s mother would be available to spend long days on the beach with the children, while Adam Prince took his ruby-red Renault over to the Dordogne and wandered round in search of truffles and Mombazilliac, the most refined sort of busman’s holiday. Dr G. and Christabel went to Scotland and stayed with old friends in a castle. Tom was glad that
Dr G.’s clergyman brother was not coming to caretake in the house this year, for on one occasion he had been rather too eager to help out with church services and it had been embarrassing having to admit that they never had incense and possessed neither thurible nor thurifer. Robbie and Tamsin Barraclough were the most adventurous of the village holiday makers, travelling overland to the East – Afghanistan, some said, or was it India? – somewhere in that direction.
Emma was expecting her mother and Isobel to come to the cottage some time during the summer, though they planned to stay in Isobel’s cottage in the Lake District in August. Why was it so eminently suitable that a headmistress should have a cottage in the Lake District? Emma wondered. Obviously something to do with Wordsworth and the Victorian love of mountains, for the cottage had belonged to Isobel’s grandfather.
The week before Graham was due to arrive at the cottage he was renting, Emma had an old school-friend, Ianthe Potts, to stay with her. She always felt guilty about Ianthe, who had doggedly kept up with her since school days when Emma would have let their acquaintance drop. Ianthe worked in a museum and had for some time cherished an unrequited passion for a fellow worker. Because of this, and also because Ianthe lived in a rather dreary flat on the wrong side of Kilburn High Road, Emma felt bound to invite her for a weekend now that she was living in the country and the weather was so good.
Emma noticed that the hopelessness of her situation had now inclined Ianthe to concentrate more on her health and on preserving herself for whatever the rest of life might have in store for her. She was more
impressed by there being two doctors in the village than by the tranquil charm of the honey-coloured stone buildings or the spectacular display of summer flowers in the cottage gardens. They went for several walks, including one past the cottage where Graham was soon to live. Ianthe commented on the romantic setting, though she feared it might be damp with so many trees round it.
‘You once had an affair with him, didn’t you?’ she said, in such a way as to put whatever there had been between Graham and Emma very firmly into the past with no prospect of any future. Emma found this irritating, for although she had no strong feelings for Graham – indeed, hardly knew how she felt about him – it was not for Ianthe to imply that there was nothing between them. But she decided to let it pass. Instead she began to ask Ianthe about her own affairs; was it still Ian, was he still the one?
‘I’m afraid so,’ Ianthe said. ‘But there’s not much hope. You see, I’ve found out that he’s gay.’
Her lugubrious tone and appearance – she was tall and droopy, with mousey hair hanging in curtains round her pale face – made Emma want to smile and even to protest at the use of this unsuitable word. But of course it was the word in current use to describe the situation. Ian – another un-gay sort of person if ever there was one – shared his flat and his life with a young man called Bruno, so that was that.
On Sunday morning they went to church.
‘Your vicar’s good-looking, isn’t he?’ Ianthe said. ‘Is he a celibate?’
‘No, he’s a widower, and he’s a rector, not a vicar.’
Emma had a good chance to think about this on the Sunday evening, for Ianthe had to catch a train just after five (‘Must be in the museum by nine-thirty Monday morning,’ was her depressingly conscientious explanation), which meant that after she had taken her to the station Emma found herself going again to church and considering Tom with more detachment. He certainly was good-looking, but he was also ‘nice’, agreeable, sympathetic, however you liked to put it. Not, of course, a dynamic personality, but who wanted that? The singing of the hymn
For the beauty of the earth.
For the beauty of the skies,
with its lines about the joy of human love (brother, sister, parent, child), which invariably led on to the contemplation of other, more interesting kinds of love, made Emma realise that Tom needed a wife and Ianthe needed a husband. Could she perhaps bring them together? It might work, but could she not do better for him than Ianthe? He was by no means ‘averse to the company of women’, she thought, pleased at that way of putting it.
On this occasion Emma did stay behind to say goodnight, but she did not mention Ianthe who had just gone, nor did Tom ask after her or enquire where she was. Instead, when there was an akward pause in their conversation, Emma told him about Graham Pettifer coming to live in the cottage in the woods. ‘To work on his book,’ she added, as if his coming could be for any other reason.
‘Oh, that will be pleasant for you,’ said Tom, doing the best he could with a curiously unwelcome piece of news. ‘He will be an asset to our small community,’ he added in a stiff, clerical sort of way, saying the kind of thing that might be expected of him but which meant absolutely nothing, for how could an agnostic academic, and rather a bore at that, possibly add anything to the ‘small community’? Emma was disappointed in him and walked home feeling that Tom and Ianthe might well deserve each other.
When the telephone rang later on it was not Graham with further domestic instructions, but her mother. There was to be the usual old students’ summer evening drinks party at her college, would Emma like to come to it? When she hesitated, Beatrix told her that she believed Claudia Pettifer would be there. Wasn’t Emma at least curious to see her? ‘And wear something nice,’ she added, just as if Emma were a school-girl, incapable of choosing suitable clothes.
16
Emma always had the feeling at these college gatherings that her mother would have been happier if she could have presented her in a more favourable light, a daughter to be proud of – married, and the mother of fine children, or even not married, but still the mother of fine children; or, failing that, somebody with an interesting career, a television ‘personality’, a successful actress or even a novelist – anything that distinguished her, made her stand out from the crowd drinking wine on this summer evening in the garden of a women’s college. But Emma, as well as being only a very average anthropologist who had published nothing but a few articles in obscure learned journals, wasn’t even looking particularly attractive or well-groomed. She was wearing one of her drab cotton dresses in a grey and black print and hadn’t even had time to have her hair done. Beside her Claudia Pettifer (‘a pretty, frivolous young woman’ in Beatrix’s description) made an ironical contrast.
Claudia was tall and elegant, a rather formidable figure in her vividly flowered flowing kaftan. Her eyes were hidden behind dark glasses and she had adopted the frizzy hairstyle fashionable at th
at time – unsuitable,
one might have felt, for the wife of a serious academic, obviously a sign that she was ‘frivolous’. Yet who could blame her, remembering how boring Graham could be? And as he married Claudia after her own brief affair with him, Emma found herself reflecting that frivolity must have been what he wanted at that time. (But was he now reverting to his natural dullness? It was better not to see it like that.)
‘Red or white?’ A tray with glasses of wine was being offered.
‘That seems very basic, doesn’t it?’ said Claudia, in a light, friendly tone. ‘Is the colour all we can expect to have explained to us?’
‘We can see that for ourselves,’ said Emma, accepting a glass of something pale.
‘What year were you up?’ Claudia asked.
‘I wasn’t here – I was at L.S.E. I did anthropology there.’
‘Of course, L.S.E.! And you know, or used to know, Graham.’
‘Yes, I do know him.’ For some reason Emma found herself leaving it at that – that she knew Claudia’s husband.
‘He’s taking a cottage somewhere in your neck of the woods. To finish his book, he says.’ Claudia laughed, as if it couldn’t possibly be true but that she hardly cared whether it was or not.
‘Yes, it’s in the village where I’m living at the moment – and it literally is in the woods.’
‘It would be nice to know you were keeping an eye on him.’
‘Well, I’ll probably see him,’ Emma said. The friendly, almost cosy, note of their conversation seemed wrong, as if Claudia cared so little about Graham that he wasn’t worth anybody else caring about either, especially when she added that Emma would be a most suitable person to keep an eye on him because she had known Graham ‘all those years ago’.
‘It wasn’t so very long ago,’ said Emma, stung by the implication of age and now uncertain whether Claudia was being cosy or just catty.
‘I know – one feels the years just slipping away, especially at this kind of gathering.’ Claudia glanced round her as if in illustration at the groups of eager women reliving old times. ‘Nothing that’s happened since seems all that important – people come up to you and call you by your name of twenty years ago.’
And now somebody did come up to Claudia (‘Why, isn’t it Claudia Jenks?’), so she and Emma were separated. They had had their encounter, for what it was worth. It was more restful and certainly less demanding to be standing next to one of Beatrix’s colleagues, a mathematician who, it appeared, was responsible for the garden in some way and was worried about the drought and the effect it was having on the lawns. Emma found that she did not have to make any effort to respond – she just received and accepted the worry and helped herself to another glass of the pale wine. Pale and weak though it was, it did seem to blur her senses and induce a feeling of not caring what happened. Did people ever get drunk at these college gatherings, with their predominance of women? There were a few men present, mostly husbands, and she wondered if Graham had ever attended these functions in the past, if he had waited dutifully by the rather formidable Claudia, waiting to be introduced to her contemporaries or the dons who had taught her. She would have to ask him some time, when she described this evening and her meeting with Claudia – if she ever did.
‘Did you have some interesting talk?’ Beatrix asked, coming up to her.
‘Oh, yes – she seems a friendly sort of girl. I dare say we’d get on quite well if we ever had to. She thought I might keep an eye on Graham, by the way.’
‘Well, she’d have to say something like that.’
‘A kind of joking relationship between spouses,’ said Emma ironically. ‘She obviously finds Graham as boring as I do.’
‘Surely not,’ said Beatrix, wishing Emma wouldn’t talk in this way. ‘But I do think she’s got other things on her mind at the moment. She told me she was busy moving into a new house in Islington and that must take up all her time.’
Graham had mentioned something about this and also that the house was really too big for them and inconvenient, only two rooms on each floor, “but that Claudia had decided it was what she must have, so he really had no say in the matter. Perhaps the cottage in the woods had been chosen as a deliberately contrasting summer retreat from all this. And he did have a book to finish, whatever Claudia might imply.
‘It looks out over the canal,’ Beatrix went on. ‘A fashionable district, I believe. We shall just have to see how things go on.’
We? Emma wondered, pondering on the obscurity of this last statement. It was almost as if her mother was arranging the whole thing. ‘Graham is supposed to be arriving tonight,’ she said. ‘I shall go round to see that he’s got everything he wants.’
‘Are the requisites all in the toilet?’ Beatrix quoted. ‘So important to remember details like that, as well as tins of soup and baked beans. And I suppose you could occasionally cook something for him.’
‘Carry a casserole through the woods, you mean?’ said Emma. ‘Yes, I suppose I could do that.’
It was the next morning before Emma could go round to see Graham, and any feeling of excitement she might have experienced the evening before had evaporated on a hot walk through the village with a slight headache and dry mouth from drinking too much of the pale weak wine.
The village street seemed empty and foreign, with dogs and cats sleeping in doorways, but Emma had the feeling that she was being observed and seen to enter the woods. Everybody would know where she was going, for it was of course common knowledge that Graham (Dr Pettifer) was renting the cottage, though what exactly he was doing was another matter. Some even thought that, being ‘Dr’, he was intending to set up in rivalry to Dr G. and Martin Shrubsole, but he could hardly be holding a surgery in the woods, could he, unless he was some kind of faith healer?
The cottage looked attractive, shaded by trees even if it was damp, and the agent had arranged for the garden to be tidied and the brick path weeded. There were even a few flowers out, self-seeded marigolds and acceptable weeds, but the most interesting sight was Graham, sitting out on the grass with his typewriter at a small folding table, a stack of notebooks and files on the ground by his side – the perfect picture of an academic working on a book in rural surroundings. There was something self-conscious, even comic, about him and Emma found herself smiling with more than a normal welcoming smile.
He looked up at her approach and her ‘Hullo – so you got here all right’ was returned cordially enough, but then he said, ‘I didn’t expect you till later on – don’t you usually work in the mornings?’
‘Sometimes, but I thought I’d see if you’d settled in all right, got your milk and the groceries from the shop.’ Did I once love this man? Emma asked herself, feeling that perhaps they should have kissed or at least greeted each other a little more warmly.
‘Yes, thank you – the milk came this morning and I found the box of groceries – rather an odd selection.’
‘Odd? In what way? I just asked them to put in some necessities, bread and butter and cheese and various tins, to tide you over.’
Graham smiled. ‘I just thought it seemed odd to have tinned vegetables in the country – I’d imagined produce from people’s gardens, even yours. And I don’t much care for spaghetti hoops.’
‘I don’t grow vegetables,’ said Emma, feeling nettled (surely that was the appropriate word?). ‘You’ll probably be glad of a tin of peas or carrots one of these days. As for the spaghetti hoops, I suppose Mrs Bland at the shop thought they’d do for a light supper dish.’
‘We obviously have different ideas about supper. Oh, and there was a loaf of sliced bread.’
‘You sound just like Adam Prince with your criticisms.’
‘I was hoping you’d come last night – bring something you’d cooked yourself. I’ve got a good collection of suitable wines inside.’
This at least showed a more personal interest and for a moment Emma imagined a future evening occasion with something she had cooked for
him and a bottle of wine that went with it. And Graham and herself recapturing whatever there had been between them in the days of their first meeting at L.S.E.
But now he was working and seemed disinclined to be interrupted. ‘I must work in the mornings,’ he said. ‘I really do have to finish this book.’
‘Of course – that’s why you came here, to get peace and quiet to finish your book. But why don’t you come and have supper with me this evening?’
The rather formal invitation was extended and accepted, then Emma left, not quite sure whether to feel pleased or not. She had purposely not mentioned her meeting and conversation with Claudia – that would keep for another time. As she walked through the village she remembered that Daphne Dagnall was now back from Greece and that she would be giving a talk to the W.I. on her ‘experiences’ that evening. Emma had rather wanted to hear that and regretted having invited Graham to supper, but she could not go back again and put him off.
Noticing Tom in the rectory garden, she wondered if he would call on Graham, whether out of curiosity or as a pastoral duty. She was still remembering his foolish remark about Graham being an asset to their small community. Let him find out for himself just how wrong he had been to say a thing like that.
17
It didn’t seem so bad in the village during the long summer months; even the rectory was warmer and the draughty, paraffin-smelling rooms of the winter seemed pleasantly cool and airy. Also, the realisation that there was a limit to her days here, that the time was running out, made it easier for Daphne to bear what had for so long been an intolerable burden. She and Heather had talked so much about future arrangements and now everything was nearly complete – Heather would be giving up her flat and soon Daphne must break the news to Tom that she was going to leave him. Of course the idea of ‘leaving’ him could hardly be compared with the breaking up of a marriage, a husband or wife leaving a spouse, but she and Tom had been together for a long time now, ever since she had ‘made a home’ for him when Laura died. So it would be a shock to him, a blow even, the breaking of her news.