by Barbara Pym
‘I don’t have to,’ said Emma, ‘but I quite often do.’ She was surprised that Graham had agreed to join her until she realised that he wanted to ‘show himself’ in the village, to make it clear to everyone that there was nothing hole-and-corner about his living in the woods or about his association with Emma. By the same token there had been no repetition of what Emma thought of as the ‘amorous dalliance on the grass’. She found this irritating rather than upsetting – he need not be quite so circumspect – and she was also irritated by his attitude towards her meeting with Claudia and their lunch together. He had been more interested to know what they had eaten – he rather liked Greek food – than to know what they had said about him or the situation existing between the three of them. As for the umbrella incident, he seriously suggested that Emma might like him to make a special journey to Islington, taking Claudia’s umbrella and bringing Emma’s back with him.
‘Is one allowed to have another slice of bread?’ Dr G.’s voice was heard demanding querulously. ‘I’m hungry. I notice Adam Prince hasn’t put in an appearance.’
‘No, Mr Prince is working,’ said Miss Lee sternly. ‘He said how very sorry he was not to be able to come. He has to go round some restaurants in the Peak District – such a long journey for him.’
Tom came up to Emma and Graham. ‘Are you quite comfortable in that cottage?’ he asked. ‘I believe it hadn’t been lived in for some time.’
‘Miss Vereker had always wanted to live in it,’ said Miss Lee. ‘She often used to say how she wished she could – she loved those woods.’
‘And now she’s living with her nephew and his wife in London,’ said Miss Grundy. ‘It doesn’t seem the same, does it….’
‘Like Daphne living in Birmingham when she’d always dreamed of something in Greece,’ said Tom.
‘Well, we can’t expect to get everything we want,’ said Miss Lee vigorously. ‘We know that life isn’t like that.’
They all looked instinctively towards Tom, as if expecting his confirmation of Miss Lee’s pronouncement, but he said nothing. Why should the clergy always be expected to have some pious bromide at the ready? he thought. It was an outmoded concept.
‘I should like another slice of bread,’ said Dr G. plaintively. ‘We never had these hunger lunches in the old days. Weren’t the natives hungry then?’
Now they all turned towards Graham who had, after all, been in Africa. He should know the answer to that one.
‘We looked after our own people out there in those days,’ said Miss Lee. ‘That’s the answer to Dr G.’s question. Things aren’t the same now.’
‘No, they are not,’ said Dr G., ‘and do you realise that in the old days, when I first came here, it was nothing unusual for patients to walk to the surgery from the outlying villages – there’s no exercise like walking. Now they all come in their motorcars, or if not in their own motorcars, somebody else’s. People expect to be conveyed everywhere now – even the children don’t walk to school –lolling about in charabancs you see them, when a two-mile walk would do them all the good in the world.
‘I suppose it might be dangerous for children to walk, with all the traffic there is on the roads now,’ said Emma mildly.
‘And have you noticed’, Dr G. went on, ‘how every car has some slogan on it these days? Support the Teachers – Rethink Motorways – Protect Wildlife – Don’t Waste Water – I could think of plenty more to the point than those.’
‘I wonder what the legendary Miss Vereker would have had on her car?’ Emma asked in a low voice.
Tom was the only one to hear her. ‘Women didn’t drive about in cars in those days,’ he said. ‘Sir Giles was the first to have a car here, I believe.’
‘Sir Giles de Tankerville?’ Emma asked.
‘A friend of King Edward the Seventh,’ said Miss Lee. ‘Of course I never knew him personally, nor King Edward,’ she added with a laugh.
‘I wonder if Miss Lickerish remembers that first motorcar,’ said Tom thoughtfully. ‘It might be worth investigating, though her memories don’t seem to go back all that far.’ Her collection of photographs, which she had once displayed for him, was also a disappointment, the highlight being a picture of a goose sitting up at the tea-table, of little historical interest.
Now people began to drift away, with little prospect of more stimulating conversation and nothing more to eat. Emma noticed the same homemade pottery bowl placed to receive money as at the coffee morning. She wondered if Graham would put 25p. in for her but he seemed unwilling to compromise himself even to that extent. Would it create gossip in the village if he had been seen to pay for her hunger lunch?
Tom, seeing them go off together, with much loud talk of ‘getting back to work’, went quietly back to the rectory feeling depressed. It was his afternoon to visit the hospital, not his favourite occupation or one in which he felt he did much good to anyone, but it was expected of him and you never knew – something might come of it. All the same, he was conscious of feeling hungry, which was just as it should be, and envious of Martin Shrubsole, who had been provided with a casserole lunch before his ante-natal clinic.
21
Emma and her mother were picking blackberries along a lane a little way out of the village, trying to avoid Mrs Dyer who had been seen approaching in the distance. Emma braced herself to meet Mrs Dyer’s comments in her raucous, almost triumphant, tones, ‘You won’t find many there, Miss Howick – I’ve just been along that bit.’
Emma felt like pretending that she wasn’t really out blackberrying at all, just taking a walk, but there was no getting away from the fact that both she and her mother were carrying various receptacles and that they must have been seen in the act of picking.
‘Couldn’t you imagine a Wordsworthian encounter here?’ said Beatrix when Mrs Dyer had passed with her full basket. ‘Meeting some interesting old person or an idiot boy or even the rector, poor Tom, or your friend Graham Pettifer?’
‘Men don’t go blackberrying,’ said Emma. ‘Children and boys, perhaps, but not grown men.’
‘And Graham is busy working, no doubt.’
‘Yes, he does work hard.’
There was silence as they went on searching for the blackberries, picking what Mrs Dyer had left. Beatrix had been expecting more than Emma’s bare comment on Graham now that he was living in the village.
‘Has Claudia been down?’ she asked.
‘Been down?’ Emma asked in surprise. ‘Not that I know of.’ The cottage in the woods was not exactly the kind of place one would have ‘been down’ to from a house in Islington.
‘You ran into her in London, you told me.’
‘Yes, at Esther Clovis’s memorial service. It was a terribly wet day. We had lunch together at some Greek place and I got Claudia’s umbrella by mistake – one of those ludicrous things that happen sometimes, reducing everything to the level of farce.’
‘Did you talk about Graham?’
‘We mentioned him, of course. And she said again that I might keep an eye on him at the cottage.’
‘That was somewhat ambiguous, wasn’t it? Or was she being sarcastic? Does she know about you and Graham?’
‘There isn’t all that much to know. I don’t know how I feel about him.’
‘How does he feel about you?’
‘Oh, we get on quite well together,’ said Emma evasively, ‘and, of course, we have the work experience in common….’ She sounded doubtful at this and Beatrix immediately took her up on the jargon phrase ‘work experience’. What exactly did she mean by that and in what way was it relevant to a state of love between two people?
‘Oh love,’ said Emma impatiently. ‘I wasn’t thinking about love.’
‘In the Victorian novel’, Beatrix said, ‘a young woman had nothing like this. A hero could hardly share the work experience of a governess.’
‘You don’t think in Villette, perhaps? But that wasn’t quite what I meant – hardly to be compared with the years at L.S.E�
��.’
‘If you made blackberry jelly you could take some to Graham, couldn’t you?’ said Beatrix, adopting a more practical approach. ‘And I dare say Tom would be glad of a pot.’
‘I can’t go taking jelly to every lone man in the village,’ said Emma. ‘And what about Adam Prince, while you’re about it? Can you see me going up to the rectory with a pot of jelly? Tom wouldn’t know what to say. And talk of the devil, here he is now, wandering aimlessly along the lane, not even picking blackberries.’
Tom seemed embarrassed at meeting the two women and murmured something about spindleberries – could Emma and Beatrix distinguish their leaves or point out the exact spot where they were to be found in the autumn? Apparently it could be of historical interest, of importance in the matter of hedge-dating.
But nobody really knew what the leaves of spindleberries looked like and Tom moved on, saying that he really ought to be getting back, there were so many things he should be doing.
‘Poor Tom, I expect he misses Daphne,’ said Beatrix, ‘although they never got on very well. Now he has no human contact at the rectory, only Mrs Dyer coming in to clean. You’ll have to take pity on him.’
‘I don’t see what I could do,’ said Emma, ‘and after all, nobody likes to be pitied.’
Beatrix glanced at her daughter, startled by a certain fierceness in her tone She wondered if Emma was pitied in the village. Judged by the harshly conventional standards of the inhabitants, she probably would be.
Tom, too – they were a pair. She smiled. Taking pity on somebody might not always be the same as that pity which is thought to be akin to love. ‘ “Pity is sworn servant unto love,” ‘ she quoted. ‘Do you know that?’
‘Who is it? Some obscure Victorian poet?’
‘No, an Elizabethan, Samuel Daniel. Minor, I suppose, but you probably know some of his sonnets.,..’ Her voice faltered, for Emma probably did not. It was sometimes a grief to her that her daughter was not better read in English Literature, with all the comfort it could give. A few sad Hardy poems, a little Eliot, a line of Larkin seemed inadequate solace.
‘We’re going round the manor this evening,’ Emma said, as if the mention of Tom had reminded her. ‘I suppose you’ll come?’ She peered down into the dark glistening mound of blackberries they had just gathered and noticed a small white grub moving among them.
‘I’ll put some sugar on these, then we can eat them raw,’ said Beatrix, who had not seen the grub. ‘Yes, I’ll come tonight.’ Great houses, even when they had seen better days, provided an agreeable link with her literary interests.
It was the usual party going round the manor, dominated by Miss Lee, who had ‘known the family’ and was, as always, very ready to point out ways in which things were different from the old days. Even the books lying on a low coffee-table in one of the rooms lived in by Sir Miles and his family drew a disapproving comment from her. ‘Horses, yes, one would expect that, but old Sir Hubert wouldn’t have had some of this rubbish in the house,’ she muttered, pointing to the latest lurid-looking paperback novel of a popular American author. ‘And Miss Vereker would never have allowed the girls to read this kind of stuff.’
She had doubtless forgotten that such popular literature had not been available in those far-off days, but nobody bothered to remind her of this.
‘One of the girls did the flowers,’ she went on, ‘and Miss Vereker always did the flowers in the hall.’
‘Not Lady de Tankerville?’ Beatrix asked.
‘No, her ladyship never cared for flower arranging. And Miss Vereker had such original ideas. There was always an arrangement of wild grasses in season – dried in the winter, of course – and she had a way with fir-cones.’
‘And now we come to the chapel,’ said Tom in an attempt to get away from Miss Vereker and her flower arrangements, ‘a fine late seventeenth-century building.’
The chapel was rather more than Sir Miles had bargained for when he bought the house or ‘acquired the property’, as some put it, so he had shut it up, feeling that putting it to any secular use “might bring disaster on his family. It would have been convenient to turn it into a billiard-room or even a library – though none of them were great readers – or even to pull it down, but it turned out to be a ‘listed building’ or something of that sort, with its carving that might just possibly be Grinling Gibbons, and its floor made of a special kind of rare marble. He didn’t want some retired male do-gooder or bossy elderly woman coming snooping round and threatening to ‘do’ something about it, getting up petitions and that kind of thing. So the chapel was kept shut up but could be visited by parties going round the house, as on this September evening, when the days were drawing in and it was nearly dark by half-past seven. The idea of being buried in woollen seemed quite attractive in the chilly gloom of the chapel, Tom thought as he reminded the party of the edict of 1678, just about the time when the chapel would have been built. Mr Swaine, the agent, who was officially conducting the party round the house, was keeping in the background, feeling that the rector knew much more than he did about the history of the place, though not quite as much as that woman Miss Lee, who seemed to know everything about the more recent past.
‘In Sir Hubert’s time’, she was saying, ‘they had family prayers in the chapel every morning and evening.’
‘Is Sir Hubert buried in the mausoleum?’ Emma asked, her question coming out rather too loud and clear in one of the temporary silences.
‘But of course,’ said Miss Lee with enthusiasm. ‘You must let me show you some time.’
‘And the girls, I mean the daughters, and Miss Vereker – are they also buried there?’ Magdalen Raven asked eagerly.
There was a shocked silence as Miss Lee explained about the ‘girls’ – one killed in the Café de Paris air-raid in 1941, the other now living in the South of France, and Miss Vereker, very much alive with her nephew and his wife in West Kensington.
‘Wood came here, of course,’ Tom said. ‘And Dr Plot found a particularly interesting stone in the grounds – that was his only comment on the house or garden. It had borne a shape closely resembling the female pudenda, he remembered, but did not mention this.
Beatrix was inclined to encourage Tom to tell them more about the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century associations of the house, but before she could continue on these lines the talk returned to trivialities and somebody asked Tom for news of his sister.
‘Daphne? Oh, she seems to have settled down very well,’ said Tom heartily. ‘She and her friend Miss Blenkinsop – you remember, she often used to stay here – have now acquired a dog.’
‘What sort of dog have they “acquired”?’ Beatrix asked in a dry tone.
Tom did not seem at all sure what sort it was. ‘A large one, I believe. Daphne did tell me the breed, but unfortunately I’ve forgotten what it was.’
‘They’ll be able to take it for walks on that delightful wooded common,’ Emma said, and their glances met in a kind of sympathy. Perhaps she would take a pot of bramble jelly to Tom after all, if the next lot turned out well.
‘Did you get many blackberries this afternoon?’ Magdalen asked. ‘I saw you coming back. My son-in-law likes me to get a walk every day and I nearly came out myself, then I thought it might be better to wait a day or two if many people had been picking.’
‘Miss Vereker was famous for her blackberry wine,’ said Miss Lee. ‘Old Sir Hubert used to say that it was better than….’ She paused, unable to remember the precise name of the famous French wine it had been better than. ‘Chateau something or other,’ she concluded. ‘I don’t suppose she’s able to gather many blackberries in West Kensington….’
‘If this carving is not Grinling Gibbons,’ Tom was saying, ‘it is certainly by one of his pupils – just look at these swags of flowers….’
But nobody was looking. The chapel was cold (‘chilly’) and musty with being shut up all the time. There was a chance to see some of the bedrooms and that was going to be m
uch more interesting. Then, at the end of the evening, there was to be coffee at Miss Lee’s house and they were all looking forward to that. There would be tea also for those who did not like coffee or were influenced by the popular superstition that it was supposed to keep you awake.
‘As if coffee as weak as this could possibly keep anyone awake,’ Emma whispered to her mother.
‘A pity Graham didn’t join us this evening,’ Beatrix said. ‘He might have had a good influence on the level of conversation.’
‘Indeed, yes,’ said Tom, who had come up to them. ‘Dr Pettifer would have been most welcome, but of course if he’s writing a book….’
‘Oh, is he writing a book, your friend?’ Miss Lee asked. ‘What is it about?’
‘Nothing very interesting, I’m afraid,’ said Emma disloyally, but why should she be loyal to Graham? Yet as she spoke she seemed to catch the eye of Canon Grundy, in his silver frame on the piano, the light shining on his high clerical collar, and the sight of him gave rise to a slight feeling of shame. ‘I mean, it’s a rather specialist sort of book,’ she added.
‘Oh I see, not popular,’ said Miss Lee in a comfortable tone, as if relieved that she would not have to read it.
For the second time that evening Emma found herself exchanging a sympathetic glance with Tom.
22
As the unmistakable end of summer approached – misty mornings, the first falling leaves, the days inexorably drawing in – Graham found himself coming to the conclusion that as far as Emma was concerned he had ‘bitten off more than he could chew’, to quote a phrase his mother sometimes used (even his academic attempts at L.S.E. had come into that category, he remembered). Yet he had not exactly bitten anything off, it had been thrust at him in the form of Emma writing to him after the TV appearance. But he need not have responded – he could have ignored her letter, pretended he had never received it, if it came to that. Why had he sent that postcard? Vanity and curiosity mixed? He was flattered that Emma should have written and curious to see what she was like now. Well, he had seen and now he knew. Their meeting had not been the kind of amusing romantic encounter he had imagined – certainly not romantic, hardly even amusing, though she had a kind of wry wit. It had been an ‘amusing’ idea to take the cottage in the woods and he had managed to do a good deal of work, made substantial progress with his book, but the village atmosphere and Emma’s apparent involvement in its activities had proved surprisingly inhibiting. Really the whole thing had been Claudia’s fault. None of the Emma situation would have come about if Claudia’s upsetting behaviour had not coincided with the TV discussion programme and Emma’s response to it. Certainly he would not now be walking with Emma in the woods on a sultry late September afternoon after an inadequate lunch.