Excellent Women

by Barbara Pym

  I was glad that Julian had preserved his dignity, as, indeed, I knew he would, even with the ping-pong bats in his hand.

  ‘She said she’d had quite enough being married to one clergyman, and something about them not knowing how to treat women and no wonder.’ Mrs. Morris paused, a little puzzled. ‘I don’t know what it was no wonder about, Mrs. Jubb didn’t say. And then she went on about Miss Winifred, oh, it was shocking the things she said.’

  ‘What kind of things?’ I found myself asking.

  ‘Oh, well, Mrs. Jubb didn’t say exactly or maybe she didn’t hear but she said it sounded something terrible. Not bad words, you know,’ said Mrs. Morris, lowering her tone and looking at me a little fearfully, ‘if you see what I mean. Not the kind of things with bad swear words, but dreadful things. And then Mrs. Gray ran screaming upstairs to her flat and he went out of the house very quickly. And then she came running down again with a case packed and went away somewhere, Mrs. Jubb didn’t seem to know where.’ Mrs. Morris looked at me hopefully to supply this missing information.

  ‘To a friend in Kensington, I believe,’ I said, thinking that although I shouldn’t be talking like this to Mrs. Morris, it was better that she should know some of the truth.

  ‘Kensington, well,’ said Mrs. Morris, sounding more Welsh than usual in her excitement. ‘And when Mr. Malory, Father Malory, I should say, got back he looked terrible, Mrs. Jubb said. I should think he’d been walking the streets, distracted,’ said Mrs. Morris, adding something of her own. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if he hadn’t been down by the river.’

  I could hardly believe that sitting quietly by my electric fire could have given Julian such a terrible appearance, unless, of course, he had not gone straight home when he left me. ‘He was here with Miss Malory and me,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, he knew who to turn to,’ said Mrs. Morris, beaming. ‘Didn’t I tell you, Miss Lathbury? He knew who his true friend was, the poor soul. A pity he didn’t see it before. But a thing often happens like that, some terrible calamity and we get some kind of a revelation. Like St. Paul, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, perhaps, not quite . . .’ I began, but I was unable to stem the flow of her Welsh eloquence.

  ‘The scales fell from his eyes and he saw her for what she really was and you for what you really was, and oh, the difference! To think he’d been so blind all this time, groping in darkness . . .’

  ‘I hardly think . . .’

  ‘Not knowing black from white, but a lot of men is like that. And a clergyman’s just the same as other men, isn’t he, only he wears his collar back to front, that’s all, really, isn’t it?’

  I did not think it worth pointing out that there were perhaps more subtle differences between clergymen and others than the wearing of the collar back to front.

  ‘Well, look at us, this won’t get the work done, will it, Miss Lathbury?’ she said suddenly, seizing the wet mop and swilling it vigorously in the bucket. ‘But I’m not surprised at this. I saw it coming.’

  I was not quite clear as to what it was that Mrs. Morris had seen coming, but I decided that we had talked enough about it. Was I then to marry Julian? Was that what she had seen coming? Would he propose to me, after a decent interval, of course, and should we make a match of it and delight the parish? It sounded ideal, but somehow morning had not brought any more enthusiasm than the night before. I still thought of myself as one of the rejected ones and I could not believe that he loved me any more than I loved him. Of course I liked and admired him, perhaps I even respected and esteemed him, as Everard Bone did Esther Clovis. But was that enough? In any case, it was indecent, wicked, almost, to be thinking of such things now. There must surely be some practical help I could give. What was to happen to Mrs. Gray’s furniture and possessions? Was a go-between needed, or a letter-writer? Letter-writing reminded me of the unfinished letter to Rocky Napier which was still lying on my desk. Gritting my teeth, as it were, I determined to get it out of the way, and sat down there and then and did it. I hardly knew what I wrote and spent no time on subtleties. I told him the news about Julian and Mrs. Gray and made that an excuse for my careless writing.

  When I had posted the letter, I walked towards the shops to buy some things to eat. I was walking back with my string bag full of uninteresting food, when I saw Sister Blatt advancing towards me on her bicycle. She lowered herself carefully off it and blocked the pavement, so that I could not help stopping and talking to her.

  ‘Well, well,’ she said, waiting for me to begin.

  ‘Well,’ I repeated, ‘there really seems to be nothing to say. It’s all very upsetting, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry for Father Malory, of course, though I never liked the woman, but good comes out of everything.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it does,’ I said uncertainly, for although I believed that it did I thought that it was surely a little soon for any to be apparent yet.

  ‘I am to have Mrs. Gray’s flat,’ said Sister Blatt triumphantly. ‘A friend of mine from Stoke-on-Trent is coming to work in Pimlico, so near, you see, and we have been wanting to get a place together and now this has happened.’

  ‘A ram in a thicket, in fact,’ I said, feeling like Mrs. Morris and St. Paul.

  ‘Exactly.’ Sister Blatt nodded vigorously. ‘Just what I said to Father Malory this morning. I went to the vicarage as soon as I heard the news. You see, I realised that it might be awkward for them being under the same roof, so I put forward my idea as a solution to the difficulty. As it happened, she had gone away.’

  ‘To a friend in Kensington,’ I murmured.

  ‘Yes, much the best thing for all concerned. You’re looking tired,’ she said suddenly. ‘Your face is quite grey. You must take care of yourself.’ And with these encouraging words, she swung herself up on to her bicycle and rode majestically away.

  I am tired, I said to myself, as I walked upstairs, and my face is quite grey. Nobody must come near me. I would have a rest this afternoon, for Winifred had gone back to the vicarage and was comforting Julian. I felt a little sorry for him, surrounded as he would be by excellent women. But at least he would be safe from people like Mrs. Gray; Sister Blatt would defend him fiercely against all such perils, I knew. Perhaps it might after all be my duty to marry him, if only to save him from being too well protected.

  I made myself what seemed an extravagant lunch of two scrambled eggs, preceded by the remains of some soup and followed by cheese, biscuits and an apple. I was glad that I wasn’t a man, or the kind of man who looked upon a meal alone as a good opportunity to cook a small plover, though I should have been glad enough to have somebody else cook it for me. After I had washed up I went gratefully to my bed and lay under the eiderdown with a hot-water-bottle. I had finished my library book, and thought how odd it was that although I had the great novelists and poets well represented on my shelves, none of their works seemed to attract me. It would be a good opportunity to read some of the things I was always meaning to read, like In Memoriam or The Brothers Karamazov, but in the end I was reduced to reading the serial in the parish magazine, and pondering over the illustrations, one of which showed a square-jawed young clergyman in conversation with a pretty young woman, as it might be Julian and Mrs. Gray, except that Julian wasn’t square-jawed. The caption under the picture said, ‘I’m sure Mrs. Goodrich didn’t mean to hurt your feelings about the jumble sale’. I finished the episode with a feeling of dissatisfaction. There was some just cause or impediment which prevented the clergyman from marrying the girl, some mysterious reason why Mrs. Goodrich should have snubbed her at the jumble sale, but we should have to wait until next month before we could know any more about it.

  I turned back to the parish news. There was a warning from our treasurer about our financial position. Julian’s letter to his flock was short and uninteresting. The servers had had a very enjoyable day at Southend; all those who had brought gifts and helped to decorate the church for Harvest Festival were thanked; there was to be a
working-party to mend the cassocks, ‘commencing on the first Tuesday afternoon in October’. I was distressed that Julian should use the word ‘commence’, but I suppose I must have dropped off to sleep somewhere here, for there was a long gap between the announcement about the cassocks and my next conscious thought, which was that I was thirsty and that it must be teatime.

  I was just finishing tea when the telephone rang. I let it ring for quite a long time before I lifted the receiver warily and held it to my ear, wondering whose voice would come out of it and what it would ask me to do. It was a man’s voice, a pleasant voice, but for the moment I could not think whose.

  ‘Hullo, Mildred. This is Everard.’

  I was instantly suspicious. I had hardly even realised that we called each other by our Christian names but I supposed that after all this time we probably did, though I was not conscious of ever having called him Everard.

  After a few formal preliminaries, during which each asked how the other was, and gave and received an answer, there was a pause. What does he want? I wondered, and waited for him to say.

  ‘I rang up to ask if you would come and have dinner with me in my flat this evening. I have got some meat to cook.’

  I saw myself putting a small joint into the oven and preparing vegetables. I could feel my aching back bending over the sink.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t tonight,’ I said baldly.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ His voice sounded flat and noncommittal, so that it was impossible to tell whether he really minded or not. ‘Perhaps some other time?’ he added politely.

  ‘Yes, that would be nice,’ I said. But perhaps then he wouldn’t have any meat. Although there was a telephone line between us, I felt embarrassed and ashamed at my lie and was convinced that he must know from my voice that I was not telling the truth.

  There was another pause. He did not suggest any other evening but said he would ring again some time.

  ‘Thank you for the postcard,’ he added.

  ‘Oh, it was nothing,’ I said foolishly, for indeed it was nothing. ‘There isn’t any news,’ I added.

  ‘News?’ he sounded puzzled. ‘What kind of news?’

  ‘About the Napiers.’

  ‘Oh, would there be?’

  ‘Well, there might have been. . . .’

  Our conversation seemed about to trail off very miserably and then I blurted out, ‘Our vicar has broken off his engagement.’

  ‘Oh, that’s rather a good thing, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is, really.’

  ‘I imagined you would think so.’ His voice sounded as stiff and unfriendly as in the days when we had first met.

  ‘I’m sorry about the meat,’ I said, trying to infuse life into our now nearly dead conversation.

  ‘Why should you be sorry about it?’

  ‘Do you know how to cook it?’

  ‘Well, I have a cookery book.’

  There can be no exchange of glances over the telephone, no breaking into laughter. After a few more insincere regrets and apologies we finished and I hung up the receiver, thinking that the telephone ought never to be used except for the transaction of business. I paced about my sitting-room, feeling uneasy and yet not quite knowing why. I had not wanted to see Everard Bone and the idea of having to cook his evening meal for him was more than I could bear at this moment. And yet the thought of him alone with his meat and his cookery book was unbearable too. He would turn to the section on meat. He would read that beef or mutton should be cooked for so many minutes per pound and so many over. He would weigh the little joint, if he had scales. He would then puzzle over the heat of the oven, turning it on and standing over it watching the thermometer go up. . . . I should have been nearly in tears at this point if I had not pulled myself together and reminded myself that Everard Bone was a very capable sort of person whose life was always very well arranged. He would be quite equal to cooking a joint. Men are not nearly so helpless and pathetic as we sometimes like to imagine them, and on the whole they run their lives better than we do ours. After all, Everard knew quite a lot of people he could ask to dinner and was probably even now ringing them up. If I could not come, no doubt somebody else would be only too glad to. But then another thought came into my mind. Why had I assumed that I was the first person he had telephoned that evening? I might very well have been the last. There must be many people whom he knew better than he did me and with whom he would rather spend an evening. For some reason that I could not understand, for I believe I have always had a modest opinion of myself, I found this a disturbing thought. It seemed as if it was necessary for me to know that I had been the first choice, but I did not see what I could do about it. I did not look forward to my evening at home, and all the useful and half-pleasant things I had planned to do, like ironing and sewing and listening to the wireless, seemed uninteresting and unnecessary. In the end I decided to go over to the vicarage to see if there was anything I could do there.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  ‘Mildred, darling . . . how wonderful to see you!’

  I was quite unprepared for Rocky’s effusive greeting and embrace. I was unprepared for his appearance at all at that moment, for I had had no answer to the letter I had written to him some time ago, and I had begun to think that I had offended him by my well-meaning efforts to bring him and Helena together again. It is a known fact that people like clergymen’s daughters, excellent women in their way, sometimes rush in where the less worthy might fear to tread.

  ‘Hullo, Rocky,’ was all I could say.

  ‘You don’t seem very pleased to see me.’

  ‘Oh, I am, but it’s so unexpected. . . .’

  ‘Surely nice things always are?’ He stood looking at me, confidently charming. I noticed that he was holding a bunch of chrysanthemums.

  ‘These are for you,’ he said, thrusting them at me. I saw that the stems had been broken very roughly and that they were not tied together at all.

  ‘Are they out of your garden?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes; I snatched them as I was hurrying for the train.’

  Somehow they seemed a little less desirable now. He had not chosen them, had not gone into a shop for that purpose, they had just happened to be there. If he had gone into a shop and chosen them . . . I pulled myself up and told myself to stop these ridiculous thoughts, wondering why it is that we can never stop trying to analyse the motives of people who have no personal interest in us, in the vain hope of finding that perhaps they may have just a little after all.

  ‘Helena said that I must bring you some flowers and these happened to be in the garden,’ he went on, leaving me in no doubt at all.

  ‘Thank you, they’re lovely,’ I said. ‘Is Helena with you, then?’

  ‘Yes, of course. After getting your letter, I wrote to her and we met.’

  ‘I hope you didn’t think it interfering of me?’

  ‘Of course not. I know how you love contriving things,’ he smiled. ‘Births, deaths, marriages and all the rest of it.’

  Perhaps I did love it as I always seemed to get involved in them, I thought with resignation; perhaps I really enjoyed other people’s lives more than my own.

  We were standing in one of our usual talking places, the entrance to my kitchen. I could feel Rocky looking at me very intently. I raised my eyes to meet his.

  ‘Mildred?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I was hoping . . .’

  ‘What were you hoping?’

  ‘That you might suggest making a cup of tea. You know how you always make a cup of tea on “occasions”. That’s one of the things I remember most about you, and surely this is an “occasion”?’

  So he did remember me like that after all—a woman who was always making cups of tea. Well, there was nothing to be done about it now but to make one.

  ‘Oh, certainly,’ I said. ‘And anyway it is nearly teatime, I mean, the conventional hour for drinking tea.’

  ‘You never came down to visit me at my co
ttage. Why?’

  ‘Well, you didn’t ask me.’

  ‘Oh, but people mustn’t wait to be asked. Other people came.’

  ‘Did any of the Wren officers come?’ Had they had luncheon in the wild garden with a bottle of some amusing little wine? I was very much afraid that they might have done.

  ‘Wren officers?’ Rocky looked puzzled for a moment and then laughed. ‘Oh, yes, one or two. But of course they weren’t in their uniforms, so one regarded them as human beings. Oh, lots of people came. I was very social. Had you imagined me there all alone?’

  ‘I don’t know, really. I didn’t think.’ I was unwilling to remember or to tell him how I had imagined him. ‘Of course, men don’t tend to be alone, do they? I think we talked about it before some time.’

  ‘Oh, surely! Haven’t we tired the sun with talking on every possible subject?’

  The tea was made now and it was as strong as it had been weak on the day Helena had left him. I wondered why it was that tea could vary so, even when one followed exactly the same method in making it. Could the emotional state of the maker have something to do with it?

  We sat in silence for a while, brooding over our strong tea, and then I began to ask him about the furniture which had been moved and whether he was going to have it all brought back again.

  ‘Oh, no, we have decided to settle in the country,’ he said. ‘We don’t really like this place very much.’

  ‘No; I suppose the associations . . .’

  ‘The rest of the stuff can quite easily be packed up and sent after us, can’t it?’

  ‘Oh, yes, that can easily be arranged,’ I said in a consciously bright tone. ‘I wonder who will take your flat?’

  ‘Somebody respectable, I hope, as you have to share the bathroom. Couldn’t you advertise in the Church Times for a couple of Anglo-Catholic ladies? That’s really what you want.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’ I hoped I did not show how depressed I felt at the idea of this future. But then I remembered that it was not within my power to decide who the new tenants should be. The landlord would arrange that, though I supposed that had I known anyone in need of a flat I could put in a word for them.