No Fond Return of Love

by Barbara Pym

  There was a plopping sound as the evening post fell through the letter box on to the floor.

  ‘I did hope for a postcard from Tuscany from Aylwin,’ said Dulcie, examining the circulars and bills. Then she saw her own handwriting and felt a faint tremor of excitement. It would be — it must be — the tariff of the Eagle House Private Hotel.

  ‘The birthplace of Aylwin Forbes,’ she said, opening the envelope. ‘I suppose he was born there — perhaps not literally, but we know it was his childhood home.’

  The front of the little folded card showed what might be described as an artist’s view of the hotel. He — or more likely she — had, as so often, seen his subject illuminated by ‘the light that never was on sea or land’. It appeared to be a kind of Gothic castle, standing back from the road in such spacious grounds that the wrought-iron seats seemed a little out of keeping. Outside the gates stood an Edwardian type of motor car.

  ‘Oh, do you think Lord Berners ever stayed there?’ said Dulcie rapturously. ‘I suppose some grateful guest — a lady, I think — drew this. She happened to have her sketching things with her.’

  ‘I wonder when it was done,’ said Viola rather sourly. ‘Years ago, I should think. I don’t suppose it looks a bit like that now.’

  ‘No,’ Dulcie agreed. ‘It dates from the time when ladies had time to do sketching and things like that. But this “A Corner of the Residents’ Lounge” seems to be a photograph. It would look more real if they had somebody actually sitting in it. It looks rather unlived-in as it is — so does this photo of “One of the Bedrooms”.’

  ‘They could hardly show somebody in bed.’

  ‘No — though I shouldn’t mind volunteering to be photographed if I was given due warning. It would make a good picture to have somebody sitting up in bed drinking early morning tea. But how can one think of Aylwin Forbes there — that’s the impossible thing!’

  But Viola’s thoughts were on another subject. Had he really meant it when he said that she had brought something into his life that he had never had before? She supposed he might have done — anyone could say a thing like that, really, and it could be true in the most uninteresting ways. But when it was murmured in a mixture of German and English it had an air of greater sincerity. Of course the whole thing was absurd, when one came to think of it. This dapper little refugee, not quite as tall as she was — after somebody like Aylwin — surely not! She remembered him in the shop window that Sunday night, arranging the knitwear among the boughs of artificial cherry blossom. And yet, as she had said to Dulcie, he did make her feel that she was a woman, and that — in these pushing, jostling days of the so-called equality of the sexes — was a great deal. Perhaps all love had something of the ridiculous in it. Look at Aylwin, even, collapsing like that at his lecture, and Dulcie’s former fiance, Maurice, with his absurd pronouncements on art and literature. One came across it all the time.

  Chapter Eighteen

  WHEN it came to the point, Dulcie showed a surprising reluct-ance to book rooms at Eagle House straight away. At the same time as she had written to Mrs Forbes for her tariff, she had also obtained a list of hotels and boarding houses from the town’s information bureau, and she proposed that they should stay the first night at one of these and then move into Eagle House, hav-ing first had a look at it from the outside, as it were.

  ‘As long as we know that Aylwin is definitely in Tuscany,’ she said, ‘it’ll be all right. If only he would send a postcard!’ And at that moment, as if in answer to a prayer, the telephone rang. It was Laurel, and at the end of their conversation she let fall casually the information that she had had a card from Italy — ‘from Dr Forbes. A picture of a church.’

  ‘How nice!’ Dulcie said. But privately she thought it would have been more suitable if he had sent one to Viola and herself. After all, Laurel was only a child. Still, it was kind of him to feel himself responsible for her cultural education.

  ‘He wouldn’t mind us going to stay at his mother’s hotel,’ said Viola. ‘He’d probably expect us to. I can’t think why you’re making such a fuss.’

  ‘Oh — don’t you know how it is! One goes on with one’s research, avidly and without shame. Then suddenly a curious feeling of delicacy comes over one. One sees one’s subjects — or perhaps victims is a better word — as being somehow degraded by one’s probings…’ Dulcie stopped, her face flushed, then went on, ‘And going to Neville’s church — it had to be done, but I suppose, in a way, it isn’t right to go to a church for such a reason. And then to find out that about him — it was like a judgment.’

  ‘But it wasn’t our fault. It would have happened whether we’d gone there or not. In fact, it had already happened. Our going or not going had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘One wonders how it all started,’ said Dulcie rather desperately. ‘I mean, my interest in the Forbes family.’

  ‘At the conference, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, that must have been the beginning. If Maurice hadn’t broken off our engagement, I shouldn’t have gone to it and seen Aylwin, but then, being the sort of person I am, it might have happened anyway …’ she broke off in confusion.

  ‘But going to Eagle House will be just rather amusing,’ said Viola soothingly. ‘There couldn’t be anything upsetting there.’

  ‘No, I suppose not. Oh, let’s have a cup of tea!’ Dulcie took the kettle to the sink and began to fill it in a kind of frenzy. ‘And which of all these other hotels shall we stay at on the first night? Blen-cathra, Strathmore, Lomond House — how curiously Scottish the names of boarding-houses always are! Moranedd and Min y Don — those are Welsh, I suppose. Here’s Eagle House, but it doesn’t say anything special about it. The Anchorage — “bright Christian atmosphere” — should we try that?’

  ‘We might,’ said Viola doubtfully.

  ‘Yes,’ Dulcie agreed, equally doubtful. ‘Why is it that one suspects a place that actually claims to have a bright Christian atmosphere? What is one afraid of?’

  ‘A certain amount of discomfort — and that the Christianity will manifest itself in unpleasant and embarrassing ways,’ said Viola.

  ‘And that one will have to endure the company of those who call themselves Christians. Shall we risk it? It seems to be almost opposite Eagle House, judging by this map — and the Welsh and Scottish places might be worse.’

  In fact, the window of their room looked out on to the turning down which Eagle House lay. It looked smaller and darker than the artist’s impression, and there was no motor car of any description outside. Dulcie stationed herself at the window until darkness fell and nothing more could be seen.

  ‘Perhaps it isn’t really open for Easter,’ she said, ‘but we shall have to find somewhere else to go tomorrow.’

  They had been extremely lucky, so the manageress informed them to get in at The Anchorage for this one night. ‘We are fully booked for Easter,’ she informed them. ‘It is really our speciality,’ she added somewhat obscurely.

  She was a tall, neat-looking woman of about forty-five, wearing rimless glasses and a very clean white nylon overall, which made her look like a dentist’s receptionist. She had a high-pitched, tinkling laugh, perhaps the ‘bright’ part of the Christian atmosphere.

  ‘Do you know a hotel called Eagle House?’ asked Viola casually.

  ‘Oh, my goodness!’ The tinkling laugh rang out. ‘You wouldn’t want to go there! I’ve heard it’s very old-fashioned inside.’

  ‘A Mrs Forbes is the proprietress,’ said Dulcie.

  ‘Yes, old Mrs Forbes. She’s quite eccentric.’ She pronounced it ‘essentric’, which gave the word a new significance. ‘And there’s been talk about the place — things that go on there.’

  ‘Things? But it’s not licensed, is it?’ asked Dulcie naively.

  ‘No — but there’s something about it. I see that clergyman son is back — the good-looking one. Now why should a clergyman leave his parish at a busy time like this?’ The manageress’s eyes, disconcer
tingly magnified through the rimless glasses, gave Dulcie a penetrating stare, under which Dulcie’s own glance faltered, and she found herself stammering, ‘Well, er — I don’t know, really. There might be all sorts of reasons. Perhaps to give a bright Christian atmosphere to the hotel for Easter,’ she added naughtily.

  ‘He certainly won’t give it that by going about in his cassock,’ said the manageress firmly, apparently taking no offence at Dulcie’s remark. ‘And of course, it isn’t necessarily a clergyman who provides a Christian atmosphere in a place. Oh, no! Quite the contrary, sometimes. A lot of dismal Desmonds some of them are!’ The laugh rang out again.

  ‘Is there a Mr Forbes?’ Dulcie asked.

  ‘Well, there must have been, mustn’t there? But we don’t see him about now. I suppose he’s passed on,’ she added comfortably.

  ‘Oh, how I’d like a drink,’ said Viola, when the manageress had left them, to attend to some domestic matter. ‘I really think we shall have to go out and buy something to drink here.’

  ‘You mean gin?’ asked Dulcie, in a rather fearful tone.

  ‘Yes, why not?’ Viola’s tone had almost a note of challenge in it.

  ‘No reason, really. It just seems rather depraved to drink it in one’s bedroom.’

  ‘How old-fashioned you are in some ways, Dulcie,’ said Viola impatiently.

  ‘Yes,’ Dulcie agreed humbly. ‘I suppose I am. People obviously do these things all the time now. I feel a wine might be more appropriate — there’s something rather pleasing about the idea of sitting up in bed drinking wine. There might even be special vintages recommended for drinking in the bedrooms of unlicensed hotels.’

  ‘Here’s a shop open,’ said Viola. ‘You’d better leave this to me.’

  ‘Good evening, ladies!’ A dark, good-looking man seemed to be lying in wait for them, almost, behind the counter. He stood against a background of bottles, many of unfamiliar and intriguing aspect.

  Dulcie longed to ask him for something suitable for drinking in the bedroom of an unlicensed hotel, and she was sure he would have been equal to the challenge, but she kept silent, allowing Viola to ask for a quarter-bottle of Gordon’s gin. Only when he was wrapping it up, respectfully as if it were medicine, did she say anything.

  ‘Perhaps we should have a corkscrew?’ she suggested nervously.

  ‘A corkscrew? Oh, madam,’ the salesmanlaughed quite pleasantly, ‘you won’t need that, I can assure you.’

  ‘Really, Dulcie,’ said Viola when they were outside the shop, ‘you did make me feel a fool. Surely you know how a gin bottle opens?’

  ‘I know you don’t need a corkscrew for champagne,’ said Dulcie, ‘but I’d forgotten about gin.’

  ‘Dinner is at a quarter to seven,’ said Viola, ‘which is much too early. I can hear the gong now.’ She gulped down her gin and water. ‘I suppose this is the kind of place where they don’t like you to be late.’

  There was silence as they entered the dining-room and were shown to a table for two near the door. The window tables were occupied by an elderly couple and what looked like a family party — mother and father and two daughters and a boy of about fifteen, who glared resentfully round the room. At a small table by herself sat a fierce-looking, white-haired woman, extremely thin and surprisingly sunburnt considering the time of year. Her collar bones stood out sharply from the neck of her low-cut blouse — there was something almost aggressive about so much burnt flesh. Two women of about their own age, and a clergyman with his mother, judging by the similarity of features (beaky nose and small pursed mouth), sat at two tables in the centre of the room. A third table was unoccupied, but laid hopefully with the appropriate china and cutlery.

  The silence in the room was broken only by the sound of water being poured out into glasses — perhaps the most dismal sound heard on an English holiday, and having nothing in common with the musical trickle of spring water rippling over stones in a mountain stream. The elderly couple in the window had a bottle of lemon barley water on their table. Dulcie thought of the little bottle of gin upstairs and wondered if it could be smelt on their breath.

  A plate of bright tomato soup was put before her, and the waitress handed a basket piled with very small squares of white bread.

  ‘You take bread” she said fiercely, revealing that she was a foreigner and not the gentle, slow-speaking West Country girl that might have been expected. That in itself was saddening and disillus-ioning. Dulcie wanted to remark on it to Viola, but she left it too late, so that the soup-drinking — under cover of which she might have spoken — was finished, and the unnerving silence again descended on the room.

  After a moment the clergyman took up the water jug and began to fill glasses for himself and his mother.

  ‘Don’t do that, Clive,’ came a whisper from one of the window tables, as the mother admonished the fifteen-year-old.

  At last, and it was fitting that he should be the one to break the silence, the clergyman made an audible remark. Addressing the white-haired lady, whose table adjoined his, he said tentatively, ‘This must be a change from Buganda, Miss Fell.’

  It was less than he deserved that she should be a little deaf, so that he was forced to repeat his not very brilliant observation, whose inanity she emphasized yet further by saying in a loud bright voice, ‘A change from Uganda — it certainly is!’

  ‘What a lovely title for a novel that would be,’ Dulcie whispered, ‘and one can see that it would be almost easy to write. The plot is beginning to take shape already …’

  ‘I suppose one should say Bwganda to be strictly accurate,’ laboured the clergyman with unnecessary pedantry, but his efforts had not been in vain, for now a general conversation started between the tables.

  It seemed that Miss Fell was a missionary, a sister of the owner of The Anchorage. She was on leave, or ‘furlough’, as she called it, from Uganda, where she was headmistress of a girls’ school.

  ‘I hope you got your walk before the rain started,’ she said to the clergyman’s mother.

  ‘Yes, we went quite a way. In fact, we saw the castle in the distance, but of course we couldn’t have gone in.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t open to the public till Saturday,’ said Miss Fell. ‘I often wonder what old Miss Forbes would have thought, to see all those people traipsing through the rooms. It’s really a mercy she i. ť can t.

  Some thin slices of meat were now served, and little dishes with just enough vegetables for two were placed on the table. Remembering that it was Friday — and Good Friday, too — Dulcie glanced to see whether the clergyman was having fish. But he was not, and did not appear to object to what was put before him. Dulcie was disappointed, having hoped for some spirited protest or whispered conference between him and the waitress. She supposed he must be rather Low Church.

  ‘Old Miss Forbes,’ repeated Viola in a low tone, and of coursc Dulcie had noticed it too. It was odd how a name would crop up when one happened to be interested in it. ‘I suppose that’s the castk you see from the train,’ Viola went on.

  ‘Yes, we must go and look over it,’ said Dulcie. ‘You never know, there might be some connection.’ She would have liked to join in the general conversation and find out more about it, but the subject had now been left, and walks in the neighbourhood were being discussed.

  It was at this point that somebody came to the unoccupied table, but as she was a woman of about forty, ordinary-looking and unaccompanied, nobody took much notice of her. As it happened, she was a novelist; indeed, some of the occupants of the tables had read and enjoyed her books, but it would never have occurred to them to connect her name, even had they ascertained it from the hotel register, with that of the author they admired. They ate their stewed plums and custard and drank their thimble-sized cups of coffee, quite unconscious that they were being observed.

  The thought of the small ‘lounge’, crowded with chairs and tables, was insupportable, so Dulcie and Viola went up to their bedroom. Sitting aimlessly in be
drooms — often on the bed itself — is another characteristic feature of English holidays. The meal was over and it was only twenty-five past seven.

  ‘The evening stretches before us,’ said Viola gloomily. ‘What shall we do with it?’

  ‘I should like to have another look at Eagle House,’ said Dulcie. ‘It’s dark now and we must decide whether we’re going to stay there or not, as they can’t have us here.’

  ‘I don’t want to stay here,’ said Viola. ‘Let’s go boldly to Eagle House and see if they can take us.’

  ‘They might be in the middle of dinner now,’ said Dulcie doubtfully.

  ‘Well, we can wait a little — we could always go into one of the hotels and have a drink.’

  ‘Another?’ said Dulcie nervously. ‘But I can see now that it’s a way of passing the time.’

  ‘There’s a big hotel on the sea front,’ Viola suggested. ‘There might be a bit of life there.’

  They put on their coats and went down the road that led to the beach. The distance was what The Anchorage in its description claimed it to be — ‘sea 500 yds’. It was dark and quiet there, for the tide was out and nothing was to be seen but wet glistening sand and large stones.

  ‘I suppose they have fairy lights strung along these trees in the season,’ said Viola rather sadly.

  ‘It must look quite gay,’ Dulcie agreed.

  An elderly man with an Aberdeen terrier passed them.

  ‘It must be strange to live at the seaside all the year round,’ Viola observed. ‘Look — there’s the hotel I was thinking of — the Bristol. It seems to be the biggest one. Shall we go in?’

  ‘Yes, but let’s peer first,’ said Dulcie. ‘This is the dining-room, obviously.’

  A middle-aged couple, looking like people in an advertisement — she in pearls and a silver fox cape over a black dress, he in a dark suit — sat at a table in the window. A waiter bent over them — ‘deferentially’, Dulcie supposed, helping them to some fish — turbot, surely? Its white flesh was exposed before them. How near to the heart of things it seemed!