A Few Green Leaves

by Barbara Pym

  ‘I expect you still miss her,’ Emma said, feeling that, although it was an inadequate comment, honesty was less awkward than polite social murmurings. She was rewarded by Tom’s simple matter-of-fact reply.

  ‘I suppose I do, in a way,’ he said. ‘But after all, one gets used even to the state of missing somebody, and as a person she seems remote now. Sometimes I can hardly remember her.’

  ‘What was she like?’

  Tom hesitated. Perhaps he was less capable of describing what Laura had been like than of giving an account of the village in the late seventeenth century, but Emma gathered that she had been a contemporary of Tom’s at Oxford, clever, amusing, ‘good’ socially in a way Tom never could be. It was difficult to gain any impression of her as a person or to speculate on whether one would have liked her. Perhaps she was not as nice as Tom – a sharp, clever woman married to a good man? What had she died of? What did people die of nowadays? Not consumption or a Victorian illness like typhoid or scarlet fever – but cancer and various kinds of heart disease were always with us, so probably it was one of those.

  ‘She developed leukaemia,’ Tom said, ‘and in those days there was nothing to be done. Perhaps it might have been different now.’

  And there might have been a formidable wife at the rectory, Emma thought.

  ‘You didn’t – in time, of course – think of marrying again?’ she said.

  ‘Well, Daphne came, as you know.’

  Emma felt she couldn’t bear another conversation about Daphne and her dog, but to her relief Tom went on talking about the time after Laura had died, and even seemed to be making excuses for not having married again.

  ‘I didn’t seem to have the chance, or meet anyone suitable….’ He must have been aware how feeble he sounded. As if a man, especially one connected with the church, couldn’t meet women if he had a mind to, however much hemmed in by a sister!

  ‘But people in your parish – in London and here – there must have been….’ Emma protested.

  ‘Oh, there were, of course. Every church has plenty of women, even eligible women, but somehow…. Well, you haven’t married either, have you?’ Tom turned to Emma as if attacking her. ‘Was it Dr Pettifer? Was he the one?’

  Emma laughed. ‘I did think so at one time, when we first met. But it didn’t come to anything and then he married somebody else. I didn’t see him for years until I saw him on the telly one evening and wrote to him. People go on about the harmful effect of television on children, but what about the dangers for the older viewer?’

  ‘So that was it – your first love reappearing.’

  ‘Well, in a way I suppose it was.’

  ‘He must have been interesting when you first knew him.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘He always seemed to me rather a dull dog – on the few occasions we met.’

  The idea of Graham being any sort of dog made Emma laugh again. Altogether it was turning into a rather successful evening after the unpromising start to the day. She and Tom finished the bottle of wine and the conversation turned away from Graham to more comfortable matters, one of which, rather surprisingly, concerned the mausoleum and Tom’s ‘worry’ about it. Miss Lee had been on at him to get in touch with the people who were supposed to be looking after it. It needed to be ‘serviced’, just like a car, and nobody had been down to see to it for some time.

  ‘Whatever would Miss Vereker say if she could see it now,’ they both agreed.

  25

  When Terry Skate’s little van did eventually turn up at the mausoleum it was obvious that he was in some kind of ‘mood’. Tom feared that he probably wanted more money or was about to announce a strike or withdrawal of his labour in some way. That was the usual pattern these days. Possibly he was intending to ‘work to rule’, whatever that might involve in the tending of the mausoleum. But in the end it was none of these. It was a simple but essentially fundamental matter. The truth was that Terry Skate was disinclined to carry on the mausoleum work because he had lost his faith.

  Tom was so surprised, even stunned, by the news that his first reaction was one of nervous laughter, but of course it was no laughing matter. It was obviously his duty to go into the matter more fully, even to attempt to restore what had been lost. When pressed Terry admitted that there were certain aspects of the faith that he hadn’t been happy about for some time.

  ‘Ah, you’ve been reading a book that’s worried you?’ Tom suggested. There had certainly been a number of books lately, he recalled, that might have had an impact equal to that of Honest to God in the early sixties, though it seemed a little unlikely that Terry would have read them.

  ‘Oh, it’s not books,” Terry said. ‘It’s those talks on the telly.’

  They were standing inside the mausoleum, surrounded by the chilly marble effigies uncomfortably appropriate for such a discussion.

  ‘I mean, university professors and that, and one of them was the reverend somebody or other. But he was wearing a green turtle-neck jumper – I ask you!’

  The green turtle-neck jumper rather than the clerical collar seemed to have made a deep and lasting impression on Terry, who went on to complain about ‘people like that’ coming into your lounge through the media, throwing doubt on what you’d been taught to believe.

  Tom, who had neither television-set nor lounge, was at a loss to know what to say next. Then he remembered that having doubts was no new phenomenon. We all had them at times. Adam Prince had doubted the validity of Anglican Orders, though a discussion of that question would not help Terry now. He did his best to console him, to assure him that this period of uncertainty would soon pass and that his faith would return, stronger than ever. ‘After all,’ he pointed out, ‘much greater men than either you or I have been assailed by doubts and overcome them.’

  ‘Oh, but that was in the old days, wasn’t it? Darwin and those old Victorians.’ Terry laughed, dismissing them.

  There had probably been a play on the telly about that, Tom thought, coming to the conclusion that Terry wasn’t really all that worried about his doubts. He was accepting them – men speaking on the box had swept away his childhood faith and he was not prepared to be reassured by Tom. There was really something in what Emma had said about the dangerous influence of television on the older viewer. The point Terry had been wanting to make was that he was no longer able to look after the mausoleum – that, rather than the question of his doubts, was what he was trying to make clear to Tom.

  ‘Of course that doesn’t mean to say that we wouldn’t be happy to assist if you were having another flower festival or anything like that,’ Terry added. ‘And we do weddings, as you know. Cheerio then, rector.’

  Tom watched Terry drive off and returned to the church, where Miss Lee was doing what she called ‘her’ brasses and Miss Grundy attending to the flowers on the altar.

  ‘I thought it was about time that young man put in an appearance,’ said Miss Lee in a censorious tone. She was wearing old black cotton gloves, presumably to protect her hands from the metal polish, and her gestures with these gave her a sinister air.

  ‘He probably won’t be coming any more,’ Tom found himself saying, though he had not intended to confide in Miss Lee.

  ‘Oh, they’re all the same now. Nobody wants to work,” she said fiercely.

  The brasses had never looked more brilliant than now, in the November gloom, Tom thought, and he knew that it was hard rubbing that did it. But he felt disinclined to go into the subject of work with a retired gentlewoman as much out of touch as he was with the present industrial situation. So much of his life as rector of a country parish seemed to be wasted in profitless discussions of this kind.

  ‘I expect there’ll be no difficulty in getting somebody else to do it,’ he said lightly, but with a confidence he did not really feel. A competent agnostic with some knowledge of horticulture – was that all that was needed? Believer not objected to? Like a Church Times advertisement of the old days?
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br />   ‘Miss Vereker always took such a pride,’ Miss Lee began, but Tom did not encourage her to go on. Instead, he found himself speculating on whether Miss Lee had ever had ‘doubts’; if, when rubbing up the brass head of the eagle lectern, she had ever wondered whether the whole business wasn’t an elaborate fiction and asked herself what she was doing here, Sunday after Sunday and even some weekdays, subscribing to something she wasn’t sure about. Could he possibly ask her? he wondered, his eyes roving round the church and finding proof of her industry wherever he looked.

  But it was while he was doing this that his glance fell on the lectern, the brazen bird of his imaginings, and he suddenly realised that it was not made of brass at all but of wood. It was an oak lectern made, according to an inaccurate local legend, from a tree on the de Tankerville estate. He must have been remembering some other lectern, probably the one in the church of his childhood. How could he have been so forgetful and unobservant! So now the question he put to Miss Lee was nothing to do with faith or lack of it but something much simpler. ‘Do you ever wish we had a brass lectern?’ he asked. ‘As they have in some other churches?’

  ‘Oh no, rector,’ she answered. ‘I love that old wooden bird, and I love polishing it. A brass one may look more brilliant, but wood can be very rewarding, you know, and I think I can flatter myself that nobody can get a better polish on it than I do.’

  Tom turned aside, humbled by her words. It was almost an idea for a sermon, what she had said about brass looking more brilliant but wood being very rewarding. Of course Miss Lee never had doubts! And if she ever had, she was much too well-bred ever to dream of troubling the rector with such a thing.

  He made his way towards the altar where Miss Grundy was putting the finishing touches to an arrangement of roses.

  ‘Roses in November, that’s really something!’ he said with forced heartiness, but he always felt obscurely guilty about Miss Grundy and so tended to behave unnaturally towards her. She was one of the people one ought to ‘do’ something about, though it was difficult to think what, added to which he was uncomfortably aware that the kind of services he conducted were not really to her liking.

  ‘Oh, there are still roses out in our garden,’ she said in her flutey voice, ‘and I think these will do another week, with a few more leaves. A few green leaves can make such a difference.’

  There was another crumb for a sermon, Tom thought, what with that and the rewarding qualities of wood. But it was somehow depressing the way these elderly women kept giving him ideas for sermons. He determined not to use them.

  ‘You’re so good with flowers and plants,’ he said, picking on Miss Grundy’s solitary talent. Perhaps she would be the one person who could raise corn from the grains of wheat found in the wrappings of a mummy. He had read in a local history book about something of the kind which had occurred in a village not twenty miles from here. If only one could get hold of a grain of this ‘mummy wheat’, Miss Grundy might come into her own!

  26

  All through her exile in West Kensington Miss Vereker had cherished a memory of her early days as governess to the girls at the manor, and before she died she determined to pay a last visit to the village to see the house again, the church, the mausoleum, and the few people who still remembered her. She chose a beautiful November day, with brilliant sunshine and the air almost like spring, the kind of day that may suddenly come in the unpredictable English autumn. She took the train from Paddington to the station nearest to the village, not telling her nephew and his wife what she was doing. After all, she was just going for the day (half price on her Senior Citizen’s rail-card) and would be back in the early evening. She wouldn’t tell anyone in the village either – just surprise them, perhaps for a light lunch with Miss Lee, but she didn’t want to think of anyone taking trouble. A bit of bread and cheese would do for her, what was jokingly called a ‘ploughman’s‘ lunch, herself being the most unlikely ploughman you could possibly imagine (though hardly more unlikely than those who habitually ordered it in the pub where her nephew went).

  She thought of her nephew as she sat in the train. Of course in theory he would have been only too happy to take her wherever she wanted to go in the car, but in practice it never seemed to be the right time. To begin with, he could only manage a Saturday or a Sunday and there was always something else more urgent on Saturday, while Sunday morning was devoted to cleaning the car and the afternoon to visiting his wife’s parents, like as not. Of course she was very lucky to have been ‘taken in’ like this; an aunt was not a very high priority on most people’s lists of obligations, but she had been the favourite sister of her nephew’s dead mother and in this way held in superstitious veneration. And then, of course, when she reached her seventies, though she was marvellous for her age apart from a touch of bronchitis in the winter, she became an old person and therefore entered yet another sacred category, that of ‘the aged’. So, all in all. Miss Vereker had nothing to complain of in her present life, except that it was not the past.

  After Oxford the train seemed to slow down as if there was no hurry now, no need to arrive anywhere at any particular time. It stopped at several places which Miss Vereker remembered from the old days, though the stations looked sadly neglected now, with no neat little gardens, only a tangle of weeds and grass with perhaps the remains of some more persistent plants which had seeded themselves. The ‘family’ would not have approved of this, she felt, as she got out and handed in the half of her ticket to a youth who seemed to be in charge of the station. There was, of course, no car from the big house to meet her, or indeed any car to take her anywhere, though there were a great many cars parked in the station yard, more than she ever remembered seeing. Presumably people used the station to go to work in Oxford or even in London, returning in the evening.

  She set out to walk to the village. It was less than half a mile to the outskirts of the woods, and she could easily manage that. Then, after a pleasant stroll through the woods, with a sight of the house, she would arrive in the village to surprise Miss Lee or even Dr G. – not the rector, she was not acquainted with the present incumbent – there would surely be somebody who remembered her.

  In the village, morning surgery was nearing its end – both Dr G. and Dr Shrubsole were having a busy morning. The waiting-room had been crowded with people who knew each other and might be surprised to meet in these circumstances, though it was not a reaction they could express. Conversation at these times was kept to a minimum – one did not talk in this place. Adam Prince and Emma, sitting at opposite ends of the room, he with his own copy of the Daily Telegraph, she with a battered copy of Woman’s Own, dated some twelve months back, which she had picked up from the waiting-room table, acknowledged each other with a smile then immediately absorbed themselves in their reading. Adam read with growing indignation and dismay about women ‘priests’ ordained overseas, while Emma plodded through the sexual difficulties expressed by writers to the advice page. Could she perhaps have written in about her own unsatisfactory relationship with Graham to this sympathetic woman adviser? But there was so little to confide. Better, surely, to turn to the cookery pages where she might find ideas of what she might give Tom for supper, if she invited him again. The brightly coloured illustrations gave other kinds of food for thought.

  Dr G. had started off his day in high spirits. A fine bright autumn morning, but there was quite a nip in the air and the days were certainly drawing in. The cosy comforting of these chilly nights might lead to a good crop of babies in the summer…. He was therefore disappointed when Adam Prince came into the surgery, looking the very picture of health, fat and sleek as a well-living neutered cat. What could be his trouble? he thought irritably as he greeted him in his usual genial way and asked him how he did.

  Adam proceeded to tell him. ‘I suppose you’d call it tension or stress – isn’t that the fashionable word? And I’ve been suffering from insomnia – things seem to be “getting me down”.’ He smiled at the slang expres
sion.

  ‘Not sleeping, did you say?’ Dr G. dismissed Adam’s ‘insomnia’. ‘A warm milky drink at bedtime, perhaps …,’ he added vaguely, but even as he said it he realised that this remedy, the very idea of warmness and milkiness, would repel rather than help Adam Prince. Nor did one think of a man of his age as having a ‘bedtime’.

  ‘I don’t think, in my case…,’ Adam began.

  ‘What sort of things worry you, get you down?’ Dr G. asked.

  ‘Oh, well…,’ again Adam smiled. These ‘things’ were, of course, rather less serious than his doubting the validity of Anglican Orders or anything of that nature, but they did cause worry, tension, stress, whatever you liked to call it. Yet when you actually listed them they sounded trivial, mere pinpricks of irritation. He proceeded to tell Dr G. about the unreasonable fury he felt at seeing a bottle of wine being warmed up (‘chambréed’) on a storage heater, or being offered vinegary bottled mayonnaise instead of homemade, or sliced bread or processed cheese, or there being no Dijon mustard available when asked for, or freshly ground coffee, and finally, the use of tea-bags – that seemed to upset him quite, unreasonably.

  Dr G. stopped him at this point – for the list threatened to be endless – to remind him that the use of tea-bags in restaurants was now universal, so very sensible and convenient and much less trouble for the womenfolk, avoiding their stress, you might say. ‘It seems to me’, he pronounced, ‘that the sort of job you’re doing is getting you down. You need a rest from it. All this going round eating meals and writing about them….’ He seemed to reduce Adams occupation to a very unimportant level. ‘Well, it’s not natural, is it?’ He became bluff and hearty again. ‘Try not to be quite so critical – learn to like processed cheese and tea-bags and instant coffee, and beefburgers and fish fingers too – most of the people in this village live on such things and they’re none the worse for it. As for the sleeping or not sleeping – insomnia, I think you called it – well, as I’ve said, try not to be so critical – take a short brisk walk last thing at night, and a warm milky drink at bedtime takes a lot of beating. I often recommend it.’ He did not feel it necessary to add that this was usually for young pregnant mums. When Adam murmured something about a prescription for sleeping tablets, Dr G. scribbled something, more in the nature of a placebo, repeated his advice to Adam not to worry, and dismissed him. He had seen Emma Howick in the waiting-room and a woman patient would surely be more interesting and rewarding than a pompous bore like Adam Prince.