by Barbara Pym
At last everything was done except for the saucepan with the burnt potatoes. I looked hopelessly around for something to scrape it with.
‘Clean glasses?’ came Rocky’s voice from outside the door. ‘Are there any?’
‘Yes, in the cupboard,’ I said. ‘I’ve just washed them.’
‘There was some gin,’ said Rocky, delving among a cluster of bottles in a corner. ‘I suppose we could drink your brandy?’
‘Oh, yes, do.’
‘Ah, this is better.’ He held up a straw-covered flask of wine. ‘The vicar and I are really getting on rather well. I like him. It’s a pity you didn’t marry him, Mildred, you’d have made a pleasant pair. Come and have a drink with us when you’ve finished that saucepan. We’re upstairs in your room.’
I sat down on a chair in the Napiers’ kitchen, ready to feel tired and resentful, but suddenly something came to the rescue and I began to see the funny side of it. Then the telephone rang. It was Helena.
‘Oh, thank goodness, it’s you, Mildred,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t bear it to be Rocky after all the things he said. Listen, I’m staying with Miss Clovis.’
‘Miss Who?’
‘Miss Clovis—you remember her, surely? She works at the Learned Society.’
‘Oh, of course.’ Our excellent Miss Clovis with the tea. Did she also give sanctuary to runaway wives?
‘She has offered to collect some of my things. I was wondering if you could pack a suitcase for me and meet her at Victoria Station under the clock?’
I agreed to do this, mainly because it seemed simpler to agree. I was to pack a few necessities and slip out of the house without letting Rocky know what I was doing, though I could tell him later that Helena was with Miss Clovis.
It was not very easy to find the things Helena had asked for; all the drawers in the bedroom were so untidy that it was difficult to know what was supposed to be where, but at last I had packed the case and was waiting at the appointed place at Victoria, feeling rather foolish, as if I were about to elope with somebody myself.
It was the rush hour and droves of people hurried by me to catch their trains. Men in bowler hats, with dispatch cases so flat and neat it seemed impossible that they could contain anything at all, and neatly rolled umbrellas, ran with undignified haste and jostled against me. Some carried little bundles or parcels, offerings to their wives perhaps or a surprise for supper. I imagined them piling into the green trains, opening their evening papers, doing the crossword, not speaking to each other . . .
‘Miss Lathbury?’ A crisp voice interrupted my fantasies and the stocky figure of Miss Clovis was standing at my side.
‘Yes. I’ve brought the things Mrs. Napier asked for.’
‘Splendid!’ She took the case from me with a firm gesture.
‘I hope she’s all right?’ I asked.
‘Oh, perfectly—now that she’s got away from that brute of a husband.’
I wanted to protest but hardly knew what to say. I was surprised that such a person as Miss Clovis appeared to be should express herself so conventionally.
‘She will be quite safe with me,’ she went on chattily. ‘I have a cosy little flat on top of the Society’s premises, you know.’
Pictures of savage chiefs and a rolled-up flag in the lavatory, I thought, but perhaps she would have a bathroom of her own.
‘I do hope that Mrs. Napier will soon return to her husband,’ I said firmly. ‘He is very upset.’
‘You think the separation may be only temporary?’ said Miss Clovis, looking disappointed. ‘I hadn’t gathered that at all. He will go to the country where I believe he has a cottage and she will return to the flat. That’s what I understood.’
‘Oh, I see. Well, I hope they will meet again and talk it over before doing anything so drastic.’ I could not admit to Miss Clovis that apart from anything else I did not want Rocky to go away.
‘Well, I must be going,’ said Miss Clovis. ‘Thank you for bringing the things. I will let you know if there are any developments. I believe Mr. Bone is in Derbyshire?’
‘Oh, surely this has nothing to do with him?’ I exclaimed in alarm. ‘I’m certain he wouldn’t want to be concerned in it.’
‘For the sake of anthropology,’ declared Miss Clovis, grasping her umbrella and brandishing it as if it were a weapon or a banner. ‘There is a great bond between those who have worked together in the field—their work on matrilineal groupings, most valuable, a real contribution . . .’ She lowered her voice confidentially. ‘There was that affair of Dr. Medlicott and Miss Etty—I don’t know if you heard about it—I always feel that I brought them together. His wife didn’t like it at first. Still, there you are.’ She nodded briskly and was off.
I stood for a moment in a kind of daze and then made my way slowly home. I was just approaching Grantchester Square when I saw two men going into the public-house at the end of it. They were Rocky Napier and Julian Malory. Well, let them go, I thought. It was somehow a comfort to know that they had made friends over a glass of wine. A comfort for them, though not for me, I decided, unable to face the thought of returning to the flat to wash their empty glasses which they had no doubt left in my sitting-room. It would be better to call in at the vicarage and see Winifred.
I had just rung the bell when it occurred to me that Allegra Gray would probably be there and I should have turned back had not Winifred herself opened the door almost immediately.
‘Oh, Mildred, how nice! You hardly ever come to see us now,’ she complained. ‘Since Allegra and Julian became engaged, things haven’t been the same, somehow. But she’s gone to supper with a friend in Kensington tonight and Julian’s out somewhere, so I’m all alone. You look upset, dear. Has anything happened?’
‘I almost wish the Napiers hadn’t come to live in my house,’ I said. ‘Things were much simpler before they came.’
Winifred did not ask any questions but under the influence of a cup of tea her tongue was loosened. We began talking about ‘old times’ as they now seemed to be. ‘Oh, Mildred,’ she blurted out, ‘sometimes I wish Allegra hadn’t come to live here, either!’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Rocky behaved rather dramatically the next day, packing suitcases and going round his flat marking various articles of furniture and small objects which were to be sent after him to his cottage in the country. When I came home after lunch I found him almost ready to go.
He came up to me with a list in his hand.
‘We may as well get it quite clear,’ he said. ‘I shall want to have my own things with me and you can hardly be expected to know exactly which they are.’
‘I?’ I exclaimed in surprise.
‘Oh, yes, I imagine you will be here, won’t you? I have asked the remover’s men to come on Saturday morning so that you will be able to supervise them.’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said weakly. ‘I suppose they couldn’t be expected to do it alone. About what time will they be coming?’
‘Oh, I told them to come really early, about eight o’clock. Then Helena can come back on Sunday or Monday if she wants to. You might ring up Miss Clovis and tell her so’—I had of course told him where Helena was—‘and then everything will be as it was.’
I wanted to protest, not so much about the furniture-removing and the part I was to play in it, as about his idea that everything could then be as it had been before. But no words came. I wondered if he would suggest that we had tea together before he went, but he did not say anything and somehow I did not feel inclined to offer to make any. I suppose I did not want him to remember me as the kind of person who was always making cups of tea at moments of crisis.
‘Goodbye, Mildred; we’ll meet again, of course,’ he said casually. ‘You must come and stay at my cottage one week-end.’
‘I should like to,’ I began, wondering even as I said it if it would be quite proper. But obviously no such thought had occurred or would ever occur to Rocky. ‘You will remember which pieces of furniture ar
e to come, won’t you?’ were his last words to me.
After he had gone I stood looking out of the window until his taxi was out of sight.
The effects of shock and grief are too well known to need description and I stood at the window for a long time. At last I did make a cup of tea but I could not eat anything. There seemed to be a great weight inside me and after sitting down for a while I thought I would go into the church and try to find a little consolation there.
I opened the door rather timidly and went in. I was relieved to see that there was nobody else there and I sat down hopelessly and waited, I did not know for what. I did not feel that I could organise my thoughts but I hoped that if I sat there quietly I might draw some comfort from the atmosphere. Centuries of devotion leave their mark in a place, I knew, but then I remembered that it was barely seventy years since St. Mary’s had been built; it seemed so bright and new and there were no canopied tombs of great families, no weeping cherubs, no urns, no worn inscriptions on the floor. Instead I could only read the brass tablets to past vicars and benefactors or contemplate the ugly stained glass of the east window. And yet, I thought after a while, wasn’t the atmosphere of good Victorian piety as comforting as any other? Ought I not be as much consoled by the thought of our first vicar, Father Busby—Henry Bertram Busby and Maud Elizabeth, his wife—as by any seventeenth-century divine? I was half unconscious of my surroundings now and started when I heard a voice calling my name.
‘Miss Lathbury! Miss Lathbury!’
I looked up almost guiltily as if I had been doing something disgraceful and saw Miss Statham creeping towards me. She held a polishing-cloth and a tin of Brasso in her hand.
‘You were sitting so still, I thought perhaps you’d had a turn.’
‘A turn?’ I repeated stupidly.
‘Yes, been taken ill, you know. I said to myself as I came out of the vestry, “Why, there’s Miss Lathbury sitting there. I wonder what she’s doing? It isn’t her week for the brasses and it’s too early for Evensong.” Then I thought you must be ill.’
‘No, I’m all right, thank you,’ I said smiling at Miss Statham’s reasons for my presence in church. ‘I was just thinking something over.’
‘Thinking something over? Oh, dear . . .’ she let out a stifled giggle and then clapped her hand over her mouth fearfully. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Lathbury, I didn’t mean to laugh really. Only it seemed a bit funny to be sitting here on a nice afternoon thinking things over. Wouldn’t you like to come home with me and have a cup of tea?’
I refused as graciously as I could and Miss Statham went off to do her brasses. My little meditation in the church was at an end; obviously I could not go on with it now. Had the church been older and darker and smaller, had it perhaps been a Roman Catholic church, I thought wickedly. . . . But it was no use regretting it; the fault lay in myself. Nevertheless, I did feel a little calmer and better able to face furniture removals and whatever else might be in store for me.
When I got home Mrs. Morris was cleaning my sitting-room. It was really her day for the Napiers, but she had finished their work sooner than usual and expressed surprise at the tidiness of the kitchen.
‘Only the breakfast washing up to do and a few odd plates,’ she said. ‘Usually it’s all the meals from the day before and glasses—you’d think they lived on wine.’
I explained that I had done some washing up the previous afternoon. ‘Mrs. Napier is away,’ I said delicately, ‘so she wasn’t able to do it.’
‘And she wouldn’t do it even if she was here,’ said Mrs. Morris emphatically. ‘He’s always the one to do things in the house. The next thing is we’ll have the vicar washing up. Just wait till he’s married and you’ll soon see.’
‘You don’t think that men should help with the housework?’ I asked.
She gave me a look but said nothing for a moment. ‘Not a clergyman, Miss Lathbury,’ she said at last, shaking her head.
‘You think they have enough burdens to bear without that?’
‘I don’t know about burdens,’ she said doubtfully, ‘but that Mrs. Gray will lead him a dance, I don’t mind telling you. A widow! What happened to her first? That’s what I’d like to know!’ She opened the window and shook the mop vigorously out of it.
‘Oh, I think he was killed in the war,’ I said.
Mrs. Morris shook her head again.
‘You told me, Miss Lathbury, that the vicar wasn’t a marrying man,’ she said accusingly.
‘Well, I had always thought he wasn’t,’ I admitted. ‘But we’re sometimes mistaken, aren’t we?’
‘A pretty face,’ said Mrs. Morris; ‘well, she has got that. But what’s his poor sister going to do? What about poor Miss Winifred? Hasn’t she made a home for him for all these years? Given up the best years of her life to making him comfortable?’
I could think of no ready answers to her challenging question, especially when I remembered with some uneasiness what Winifred had hinted at the other evening. Not that she had exactly said anything against Allegra Gray, but she seemed less enthusiastic than she had been.
‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that, Mrs. Morris,’ I said at last. ‘I think Miss Malory has liked to make a home for her brother. After all, it was the natural thing for her to do, as I suppose it would be for most women.’
‘You haven’t made a home for a man, Miss Lathbury,’ Mrs. Morris went on, her tone full of reproach so that I felt as if I had in some way failed in my duty.
‘Well, no,’ I admitted, ‘though after my mother died I kept house for my father for a short time. But then he died too and I’ve been by myself ever since, except when Miss Caldicote was here.’
‘It’s not natural for a woman to live alone, without a husband.’
‘No, perhaps not, but many women do and some have no choice in the matter.’
‘No choice!’ Mrs. Morris’s scornful laugh rang out. ‘You want to think of yourself a bit more, Miss Lathbury, if you don’t mind me saying so. You’ve done too much for Father Malory and so has Miss Winifred and in the end you both get left, if you’ll excuse me putting it plainly.’
‘Yes, I suppose you’re right,’ I said, smiling, for really she was right. It was not the excellent women who got married but people like Allegra Gray, who was no good at sewing, and Helena Napier, who left all the washing up. ‘I can’t change now. I’m afraid it’s too late.’ I felt it would not sound very convincing if I said that I hadn’t really wanted to marry Julian Malory. I was obviously regarded in the parish as the chief of the rejected ones and I must fill the position with as much dignity as I could.
‘You’re not bad-looking,’ said Mrs. Morris quickly and then looked shocked, as if she had gone too far. She bent down, unhooked the bag from the Hoover and shook out a great mound of dust on to a newspaper. ‘Things happen, even at the last minute,’ she said mysteriously. ‘Not that you’d want to marry a man who’d been divorced. Too much of this old divorce, there is,’ she muttered, going out into the kitchen with the bundle of dust. I heard her say that there was a drop of milk in the jug that would do for my tea.
She left me feeling a little shaken, almost as if I really had failed in some kind of duty and must take immediate action to make up for it. I must go to Julian and not do things for him and then he might reject Allegra and marry me. As for Rocky, in his cottage surrounded by nettles, perhaps it did not matter how much I did for him since he could never be regarded as a possible husband. Too much of this old divorce. But then I smiled at myself for the heavy seriousness of my thoughts. Had the Wren officers had their dreams too? I wondered. Had they imagined Rocky wifeless and turning to them for comfort or had they always known they were just playthings, taken down from their shelves only when he wanted an evening’s diversion? I could not flatter myself that I had done even that for him.
I also had a limp suède-bound volume of Christina Rossetti’s poems among my bedside books.
Better by far you should forget and smile,
<
br /> Than that you should remember and be sad. . . .
It was easy enough to read those lines and to be glad at his smiling but harder to tell myself that there would never be any question of anything else. It would simply not occur to him to be sad.
It must not be poetry that I read that night, but a devotional or even a cookery book. Perhaps the last was best for my mood, and I chose an old one of recipes and miscellaneous household hints. I read about the care of aspidistras and how to wash lace and black woollen stockings, and I learned that a package or envelope sealed with white of egg cannot be steamed open. Though what use that knowledge would ever be to me I could not imagine.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It seemed odd to be able to enter the Napiers’ flat freely and to treat their possessions almost as if they had been my own. Rocky’s list made it quite clear what was to be moved—the big desk, the Chippendale chairs, the gate-legged table and then the smaller objects, paper-weights and snow-storms and some china. Even the books were to be sorted out, leaving only Helena’s forbidding-looking anthropological works and a few paper-backed novels. The rooms would be bare and characterless when these things were gone, but even now they looked impersonal and depressing. I wondered if I ought to attempt to tidy the desk, whose pigeon-holes were stuffed with papers, and I did make an effort, conscious all the time that I might come across something which was none of my business. I daresay I hoped that I might but my curiosity was not gratified. There were no love-letters, no diaries, no photographs, even. The pigeon-holes contained only bills and Helena’s anthropological notes. The love-letters from the Wren officers had no doubt been crumpled up and thrown into the waste-paper-basket after a perfunctory reading. But perhaps they had been wise enough not to tell their love. It seemed to me that the natural inclination of women to assume a Patience-on-a-monument attitude was a kind of strength, though judging by what Everard Bone had told me they sometimes gave away their advantage by declaring themselves.