The Sweet Dove Died

by Barbara Pym

  ‘Please take that tray away from here,’ said Leonora, in an icy voice.

  ‘I must put it somewhere, Madame,’ the old woman grumbled.

  There was a hostile silence during which Leonora was conscious that she herself belonged here too, with the sad jewellery and the old woman and the air of things that had seen better days. Even the cast-off crusts, the ruined cream cakes and the cigarette ends had their significance. The woman, still muttering, removed the tray and dumped it on another table where a man preparing to tackle a doughnut with a knife and fork—presumably the implements provided—caused Leonora to shudder. She turned her head away and huddled into her fur coat, feeling herself debased, diminished, crushed and trodden into the ground, indeed ‘brought to a certain point of dilapidation’. I am utterly alone, she thought.

  Fortunately the state of being ‘utterly’ alone is a rare one. Leonora saw it as applying to herself because James had left her. She would not have counted the friends she still had, like Humphrey and the elderly admirers who took her out to expensive meals, nor yet her women friends and acquaintances. One would almost rather not have had them at all. She was therefore dismayed as well as surprised when a woman carrying a cup of coffee sat down at the table and exclaimed, ‘Why, it’s Leonora!’

  Leonora could hardly pretend not to recognise her cousin Daphne, though they seldom met. Quite a smart tweed coat and fur hat, but the sheepskin boots looked clumsy and countrified, was Leonora’s automatic reaction.

  ‘How nice to run into you like this,’ Daphne went on. ‘I’m just up for the day to see the exhibition at the Academy.’

  How conscientiously cultured she was, coming up to town for such a purpose, thought Leonora, with something of her usual scorn. All the same, Daphne was a kind woman and perhaps as one grew older there was something to be said for kindness. Leonora found herself not unwilling to accept her invitation to lunch with her at her club.

  It was a little unnerving to see quite so many women gathered together in one place. Daphne made no apology—as indeed how could she?—for the absence of men, and there were one or two scattered about in the dining-room, looking remarkably at ease in their surroundings.

  ‘Segregation seems old-fashioned now,’ said Daphne in answer to a comment from Leonora, ‘and yet one does rather like to have the place to oneself.’

  As the meal went on Leonora felt an absurd desire to confide in Daphne. The wine might have loosened her restraint but she was careful to drink sparingly, recognising the warmth she was beginning to feel towards her cousin as a danger signal.

  ‘Have you had flu this winter?’ asked Daphne brightly. ‘There’s been a lot of it about.’

  ‘Yes, I haven’t been too well,’ said Leonora evasively.

  ‘Perhaps you need something to buck you up,’ said Daphne. ‘Sanatogen Tonic Wine, I saw an advertisement for it in the underground when I was waiting for a train. It has added iron, you know.’

  Leonora glanced at her in surprise, but there was no vestige of mockery in her tone.

  ‘Or Wincarnis,’ she went on, ‘like one’s mother used to take.’

  Daphne’s mother—Aunt Hilda—certainly not Leonora’s mother with the young Italian lover one had been thought too much of a child to know about.

  There was a little left in the half bottle of Chablis they had drunk with their chicken. Daphne poured it into Leonora’s glass. It looked very pale and weak compared with the imagined richness of the tonic wine.

  The waitress brought the menu for them to choose a sweet. As was to be expected Leonora shook her head, almost with distaste. Daphne, who had perhaps hoped for the jam roll they did so well at the club, regretfully also shook her head and murmured, ‘We’ll just have coffee, thank you.’

  ‘You live alone, don’t you?’ said Daphne, settling herself down in one of the leather armchairs for an afternoon’s cosy chat, Leonora felt. She nodded an answer.

  ‘You don’t find it lonely sometimes?’

  ‘No, I never have.’

  ‘Of course you have a lot of friends abroad, haven’t you, living there so much. I wonder you don’t try to escape the English winter.’

  Leonora saw herself’abroad’, sitting at a marble table with a cool drink, watching people through her dark glasses. Or opening the shutters after a siesta and standing on a balcony looking at a distant view of roofs with perhaps a glimpse of the sea in between. Or visiting family friends, old now, who would remember her parents and herself as a girl. She was better off in her own house, rearranging her ornaments and waiting for James.

  ‘I find life in London more amusing,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, well …’ Conversation was obviously beginning to flag. Leonora thanked Daphne for the lunch and even echoed her hope that they might ‘do it again sometime’. They parted in the street with no certainty that they would ever meet again.

  Leonora, moving away in the direction of Fortnum and Mason, found herself entering that emporium. She wanted to feel soft carpets under her feet and to move among jars of foie gras and bottles of peaches in brandy. A women’s club—though it had been kind of Daphne to ask her there—how could people bear such places? One really felt most unlike oneself in surroundings like that.

  ‘Taxi, madam?’ The doorman, solicitous as such people always were to Leonora, was holding an umbrella over her, for a few flakes of snow were beginning to fall.

  ‘Thank you, yes.’ Leonora smiled up at him.

  The snow was falling quite thickly now and when she got home the little patio was almost covered. Leonora stepped out to look at it and as she did so, one of Liz’s cats came up to her crying and rubbing itself against her legs. How had it got over from next door? she wondered. She tried to send it back over the wall but the animal would not go and continued to weave around her uttering its mournful cries. What did it want? She felt she ought to say something to it, but she could never distinguish Liz’s cats by name, and ‘Pussy’ seemed altogether too feeble and inadequate a form of address. As she puzzled, Liz came to the wall in her usual fussing way, ‘Oh, there he is,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t think what had happened to him.’

  One would hardly want to be like the people who fill the emptiness of their lives with an animal, Leonora thought, going back into the house.

  XXIII

  Ned was bored. It had been amusing to see if he could get James away from Leonora—though the issue had never been in doubt, for when had he ever failed in such an enterprise?—but now that he had succeeded, what was he going to do about him? Jimmie was a sweet boy, but as time went on the innocence and naivety which had first attracted Ned became tedious, even pitiful, and they seemed to have less and less in common. Jimmie was not very intelligent, had little sense of humour and was always ‘around’ in a way that began to be irritating.

  One evening they were at the theatre and in the interval James went to the bar to get drinks. Waiting for him, Ned’s glance moved over the crowd, finally lighting on a dark young man standing alone, also waiting to be brought a drink. Their eyes met, they moved towards each other, they made an assignation for the next day, and that was that. It had been a simple romantic encounter just as Ned’s meeting with James in the Spanish post office had been. From then on Ned had been forced to practise little deceptions on James—not always answering the telephone, sometimes assuming a foreign accent or disguising his voice in other ways. It was surprising how easily Jimmie could be taken in, but

  Ned was coming to the conclusion that maybe he was rather stupid altogether. For instance, dropping Leonora so completely— Ned hadn’t really meant it to happen like that. Women friends must sometimes be gently but firmly pushed out of the way when necessary, but it must be done skilfully.

  ‘My dear Jimmie,’ he said, when they were together one evening, ‘you don’t mean to tell me that you don’t call her ever?’

  ‘You said it was the best thing,’ said James resentfully, ‘and the last time we met was so embarrassing, we didn’t seem t
o have anything to say to each other. Of course I’ve seen her with Humphrey occasionally, but I haven’t been in touch with her since Christmas.’

  ‘Not since Christmas? Oh, Jimmie, what have you done! Leonora was so devoted to you, and you talk about me being cruel!’

  ‘Well, she hasn’t tried to get in touch with mesaid James, on the defensive, ‘and my uncle sees her quite often. He’d tell me if she wasn’t well or anything.’

  ‘And then what would you do?’

  ‘I don’t know. The situation’s unlikely to arise, anyway.’

  ‘I think you should do something about it.’ Ned’s blue eyes were serious and concerned. ‘It just isn’t like you, Jimmie, to be unkind.’

  ‘Well, what do you suggest?’

  Ned hesitated, then looked at his watch. ‘Jimmie, I can’t suggest anything right now because I’m expecting this friend of my mother’s that I told you about.’

  ‘All right, then, I’ll go. Shall we have lunch tomorrow as usual?’

  ‘I’m not quite sure about lunch—I’ll call you.’

  ‘I suppose you’ve got to take her to see the Tower of London,’ said James, with an attempt at sarcasm.

  Ned laughed. ‘The Wallace Collection, more likely,’ he said. ‘My mother’s friends are vurry cultured ladies.’

  As James got out of the lift a dark young man was waiting to get into it. Their fingers touched for a moment as they politely handed each other in and out of the gates.

  James got into his car and drove away, feeling obscurely worried. When he got home he poured himself a drink and sat looking around him. The rooms in his new flat were larger than in his old one and displayed his furniture and objects to better advantage, yet he did not really like it. The evening stretched before him and he had nothing arranged, having assumed that he would be spending it with Ned.

  ‘We don’t seem to see much of Miss Eyre these days,’ said Miss Caton regretfully. ‘Now that the weather’s so nice, really quite like spring this morning, perhaps she’ll pay us a visit.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Caton, she very well may,’ said Humphrey smoothly.

  James, who was studying a catalogue and marking items to view, said nothing. He had given some thought to what Ned had said about getting in touch with Leonora but found himself incapable of taking any action. One morning not so long ago he had seen her in Bond Street, but luckily—that was how it now seemed—he had been able to turn into a side street before coming face to face with her. He could have sworn that she hadn’t seen him but of course he couldn’t be absolutely sure and for some hours after the incident he had been haunted by doubt. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to see her, but the idea of such a meeting was somehow shameful as well as embarrassing—he wouldn’t have known what to say.

  ‘That little Rockingham basket,’ Miss Caton continued, ‘I know Miss Eyre would like that. Very much her style, I thought when I saw it. She’s always so smart,’ she added, ‘so beautifully dressed.’ Miss Caton had a plain woman’s unselfish interest in the clothes of somebody more elegant. She did wonder what Miss Eyre had bought this spring, what her ‘colour scheme’ would be. ‘You’d think she’d be married, somebody like that,’ she went on boldly, for she did not usually talk in this way to Humphrey or James and she realised they might think she was taking a liberty in seeming to comment on Leonora.

  ‘Many women remain unmarried,’ said Humphrey, ‘there’s nothing surprising about it. Being unmarried has its own status—why, you yourself,’ he added with absent-minded gallantry, and then stopped in dismay at what he had said. But Miss Caton thought too little of herself to rise to the implied compliment and the moment passed off without embarrassment. Humphrey promised that he would bring Leonora to the shop one day to see their new acquisitions and Miss Caton appeared satisfied.

  Humphrey and James were going together that afternoon to view the lots James had been marking in the catalogue. James would indicate what he thought might be worth bidding for and how much it would be prudent to go up to, while Humphrey would tell him why he disagreed with him. It was a game they both enjoyed but James seemed listless and preoccupied this afternoon.

  ‘Isn’t that where your American friend lives?’ Humphrey asked as the dome of Brompton Oratory came into view.

  ‘Yes, we’re just passing the block,’ said James looking away from it. Lately he had found himself wondering what Ned might be doing at a given time, when before he had always known.

  ‘I suppose he’ll be going back to America soon?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘Leonora finds him quite delightful—she’s often said so.’

  ‘Older women do seem to like Ned.’

  ‘There’s nothing so surprising about that. After all, Leonora was—is—very fond of you.’

  They walked on in silence for a time. Humphrey felt that he ought to say something to James about Leonora but he could not decide what words to use. At the back of his mind he was conscious of a feeling of resentment towards his nephew. When Phoebe had first appeared on the scene Humphrey had hoped that Leonora might turn to him; when Phoebe had been succeeded by Ned he had been certain that she would. But the reverse had happened and now even the pleasant earlier relationship he had enjoyed with Leonora was in danger of being spoilt. Humphrey now felt that he was in some way responsible for James’s behaviour and an element of guilt had crept in so that his presents to Leonora were becoming more expensive and the bunches of flowers more lavish, as if to atone for something that wasn’t even his fault.

  ‘What happened, exactly?’ he said at last. ‘What went wrong between you and Leonora?’

  James looked at his uncle in surprise. Surely he must know the answer to that question? If he didn’t there was no basis for discussion. He shrugged his shoulders as if to dismiss the subject and they went into the sale room.

  XXIV

  Leonora loved May—it was almost her favourite month, with tulips and irises in her patio and glimpses of lilac and laburnum over distant garden walls. This year she followed her usual custom of buying new clothes and changing her sophisticated winter scent for the lighter fragrance of lily-of-the-valley. Although it seemed as if a part of her had died in the hard cruel winter which had taken James from her, the spring had revived her in some way so that she felt almost as she had when a girl in that generation which had grown up in the late thirties, still expecting and seeking—though rarely finding—the phenomenon of ‘romantic love’. In those days she had gone about in eager anticipation of such an experience but when she seemed to be on the threshold of it she had always drawn back; something had invariably been not quite right. Now, of course, one did not expect anything like that, or indeed anything at all, but on a fine evening she would sometimes go into one of the rooms at the top of the house and look out along the road.

  One evening she was standing in the room which had the bars on the window—those bars she and James had joked about so light-heartedly when he had first moved in—when she saw a young man walking along towards the house. James had never come to see her on foot and it saddened her to realise that she didn’t even know what his new car—bought that spring, as Humphrey had told her—looked like.

  Leonora’s long sight was excellent and she had recognised the young man long before he reached the house. It was Ned. She was dismayed at the effect that seeing him had on her—everything came back to her in a rush. For a moment she thought of pretending not to be in, but then her natural courage took possession of her. Ned was still an enemy to be fought. She went into her bedroom and did what was necessary to her appearance, then sat down and waited.

  Ned had imagined himself walking along this tree-lined road in the early evening sunshine, bringing Leonora what she could only regard as good news. He had wondered what flowers he should take and had in the end decided on a simple tribute of lilies-of-the-valley, seeing the simplicity of the flowers reflected in himself, almost as if he, still a boy in his mother’s New England garden, had pick
ed them with his own hands.

  ‘Why, Ned …’ Leonora’s surprise sounded almost genuine, but Ned also had excellent long sight and he had seen her in the distance looking out as he approached the house.

  ‘Leonora, my dear …’ Their cheeks touched briefly and for a moment her lily-of-the-valley mingled with his Mitsouko.

  ‘Obviously these are your flowers,’ he said, thrusting the bunch towards her with a shy gesture, almost like a child presenting a bouquet to a royal personage. ‘But I suppose your garden’s full of them—I might have thought of that.’

  ‘Not at all—I haven’t got any and I do love them so. They’ll go beautifully in this.’ Leonora began arranging the flowers in a Victorian glass vase painted with sprays of forget-me-nots.

  ‘I feel somehow that James gave you that,’ said Ned gently.

  Leonora did not answer, but busied herself with offering and pouring out drinks.

  ‘It’s partly about Jimmie that I’ve come to see you.’

  ‘Oh?’ Leonora had not yet asked herself why Ned had come; of course it could hardly not be connected with James in some way.

  ‘You’ve changed the arrangement of this room, haven’t you, Leonora? I like it. And you’re wearing a very becoming new gown that I don’t think I’ve seen before.’ Ned’s eyes lingered, appraising and pricing everything about her as they had on his first visit.

  ‘What were you going to say about James?’ Leonora asked when she could bear the scrutiny no longer.

  ‘Oh, Jimmie …’ Ned seemed vague. ‘Perhaps you’ll understand when I tell you that I’ve come to say goodbye.’

  ‘You’re going back to America?’

  ‘Yes, my mother hasn’t been too well and I really think I ought to be with her.’