Crampton Hodnet

by Barbara Pym

  ‘I’d better telephone Amy,’ she said. ‘Then we can leave our suitcases here and do some shopping before lunch.’

  When they got to the shops, Anthea brightened up a little and was carrying quite a number of parcels by the time they had found their way, weary, hot and rather dishevelled, to a restaurant where hundreds of women in a similar state were wondering whether they ought to have the slimming salad lunch or the something more substantial which they felt they had earned after A hard morning’s shopping.

  ‘I love my shoes,’ said Anthea. ‘Now I must try and get a bag to go with them.’

  ‘Escalope de veau viennoise,’ said Mrs. Cleveland in a dazed tone. ‘Why, that’s veal cutlet, isn’t it? I don’t think we want soup, do we?’ she said urgently, as she saw a waitress approaching. ‘We haven’t quite made up our minds,’ she said, looking round to see what everyone else was having.

  All these women, do they have trouble with their husbands? she wondered. You, in your smart silly hat and silver-fox furs, you in your sensible navy felt and too-hot flannel costume, you with your calm face and dangling pince-nez … do your husbands have lapses, as Olive Fremantle calls them? And if so, what do you do about it? Perhaps you have lapses yourself, she thought, looking at the first woman’s long scarlet nails and full, red, sticky mouth. Well, that might be one way out of it. But hardly for Margaret Cleveland. She belonged with the other two, especially with the one in the sensible hat and costume. She looked an excellent woman, full of good sense. Her opinion would be worth having.

  At that moment she lifted up her left hand to tuck in a stray wisp of hair, and Mrs. Cleveland saw that the hand was ringless. Then, presumably, she hadn’t got a husband. She was a comfortable spinster with nobody but herself to consider. Living in a tidy house not far from London, making nice little supper dishes for one, a place for everything and everything in its place, no husband hanging resentfully round the sitting-room, no husband one moment topping and tailing gooseberries and the next declaring that he had fallen in love with a young woman. Mrs. Cleveland sighed a sigh of envy. No husband.

  The same could be said of her sister Amy, she realised later in the afternoon, as they sat drinking tea in the gloomy house in Bayswater, except that one didn’t, for some reason, envy poor Amy. One never had envied her. It was impossible to imagine her ever allowing herself to get into a position where she could be envied. One felt that she would not enjoy life at all if she were not continually enlisting sympathy for something or other.

  ‘Oh, Margaret, such a sickening thing happened!’ she said at tea. ‘You know that little dressmaker who always does things for me? Well, I went there last week with my pattern and material and everything, and what do you think? The house seemed to be all shut up, so I asked next door and they told me that she died a month ago. Isn’t it sickening?’

  Mrs. Cleveland murmured that it was indeed.

  ‘Of course when Percy was alive I used to buy all my things at Marshall’s, but now—well, there aren’t so many pennies.’

  She became rather coy and babyish, and Mrs. Cleveland murmured with profound wisdom that one did indeed have to cut one’s coat according to one’s cloth.

  ‘Well, tomorrow we’ll have a lovely day shopping, won’t we?’ said Amy, brightening up. ‘I do so enjoy these little jaunts. You ought to come up to town more often. Of course Anthea does come up, don’t you, dear?’ she said, turning round and fixing her prominent pale blue eyes on her niece. ‘I’ve heard all about a certain young man who lives in Chester Square.’

  Anthea smiled a sickly smile.

  ‘Is he very handsome?’ her aunt asked.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Mrs. Cleveland vigorously, ‘but of course he isn’t the only one. Anthea has so many friends.’

  ‘Oxford’s full of young men,’ said Anthea rather shortly. ‘I think I’ll go for a walk in the Park,’ she said, standing up.

  Simon might be in town, she thought, even though he said that he never stayed in London for more than a week at a time. Lady Somebody might be giving a dance for her horrid debutante daughter, and Simon was very eligible. But it was nearly the end of July now. The Times and Telegraph were full of announcements of people leaving for Scotland or the South of France or, more simply, ‘abroad’ or just ‘the country’.

  ‘Lady Beddoes has left 175 Chester Square for the Lido.’ Poor Lady Beddoes. Was she enjoying herself in fashionable beachwear and red toenails? Whatever would she do with herself all day? Anthea wondered as she trudged through the Park in her not very comfortable high-heeled shoes.

  It was such a long way to Simon’s house. Anthea got lost in the vastness of Belgrave Square and took the wrong turning out of it, so that she found herself walking nearly into Knightsbridge. She was very tired and had a blister on one heel by the time she reached Chester Square.

  Anthea stopped and patted her hair. She wasn’t looking very nice but it didn’t matter now. For when she reached the house she knew that nothing mattered; it was so shut up that it might just as well not have been there at all. She could hardly have had a greater shock if it had been in ruins. She had been so sure he would be there.

  But inside the dust would be collecting on the marble bust of Pilsudski, the flowers in Lady Beddoes’s little conservatory would be dying for want of water, Simon’s desk would be littered with notes and invitations days and weeks old.

  Anthea walked slowly away. She found it soothing to count the houses and stare into the windows. Sometimes she saw an empty room and the notice CARETAKER WITHIN, and once she looked down into a basement kitchen and saw a prim-looking maid smoking a cigarette and a manservant in shirtsleeves reading a paper. She walked on and on until she realised that she was tired and wanted nothing so much as to get on to the first bus that was going to Marble Arch.

  When Anthea reached the tall, dark house in Bayswater, Amy had got on to the servant problem. Mrs. Cleveland was listening. Not knitting or doing anything, just sitting there with her hands folded, a picture of resignation in a navy foulard dress with a small white pattern.

  XIX. An Evening on the River

  Francis Cleveland felt thoroughly at a loose end after his wife and daughter had gone. He pottered about the house and garden feeling vaguely resentful, as if he had been in some way illused. Margaret had just gone off in a huff without even listening to what he had to say about Barbara. If she wasn’t careful the whole thing might become far more serious than she had bargained for. It would serve them right, he felt—Margaret, Aunt Maude and all those gossipping North Oxford women—if he ran off with Barbara. He would show them, he thought defiantly. They would soon realise that they had been mistaken, he laboured, although he had no very clear idea how they were going to be made to realise it.

  After tea he walked up the Banbury Road on his way to see Barbara. Nobody who saw him, a tall, stooping man with a handsome but mild face, would have guessed at the violent, defiant thoughts that were jostling each other in his mind. Miss Nollard and Miss Foxe, who passed him in St. Giles’, even remarked to each other what a nice man he was and how pleasantly he smiled when he said ‘Good evening’. Francis had imagined that his greeting was highly ironical in its honeyed affability and that it conveyed, very subtly of course, his contempt and dislike for all the female inhabitants of North Oxford. But we are often allowed to keep our illusions in small matters, and so he went on his way feeling very pleased with himself.

  Barbara was living in lodgings in St. John Street, and was supposed to be doing some work on her thesis. When Francis came into the room he found her sitting at a table writing. He bent and gave her a perfunctory, almost husbandly kiss, but as this was in Barbara’s opinion the most bearable sort, she was perfectly satisfied and began to talk about the work she was doing.

  ‘They’ve gone away. They went this morning,’ said Francis, interrupting her rudely.

  Barbara of course knew what he meant. ‘They’ always meant his family. She hesitated as if she did not quite know what wa
s expected of her.

  ‘Now we can really enjoy ourselves,’ he said boldly. ‘We can do whatever we like.’

  ‘Oh, yes, that will be nice,’ she said vaguely, even a little apprehensively. ‘I don’t quite know what I’m going to do about my thesis,’ she said quickly. ‘I looked in Bodley this morning and found something about it in one of those American periodicals, but of course it hasn’t been done at all thoroughly… .’

  There was a pause.

  After a while Francis said, ‘You haven’t kissed me properly today. Come here.’ He held out his arms to her.

  ‘Oh, but I have kissed you,’ she protested. ‘I kissed you when you came in.’

  Francis sighed. Barbara was in some ways a little unsatisfactory. These beautiful walks and understanding talks between intelligent people were all very well, but he was beginning to get just a little bored with them. It was a tiring business trailing around Oxford in the hot weather pretending to be more misunderstood and illused than one really was, he thought, with a sudden flash of honesty. Barbara was a sweet girl and he was very fond of her, but he could not help feeling that the affair was beginning to drag a little. Because, when one came to think of it, almost anyone could give sympathy and understanding—Miss Morrow, Miss Nollard and Miss Foxe, even Margaret. Indeed, sympathy and understanding were a great stand-by for a plain-looking woman who could never hope to be more to a man than A dear sister. But Barbara was young and pretty, and it was surely not surprising that he should expect a little more from her than from, say, Miss Morrow. Could it be, he wondered, that she was not quite what she seemed? Those dark glances, so full of passion, from those beautiful eyes: could it be that they were just her natural way of looking at everybody? There was nothing in the invaluable Cambridge History of English Literature—nothing, indeed, in the whole Bodleian, even—to provide the answer to this question.

  ‘You’re so provoking,’ he said peevishly. ‘I don’t know what to make of you.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ she asked, gazing at him soulfully.

  ‘You look so amorous and really you’re just a cold fish,’ he said shortly.

  No woman, however much she values her virtue, likes to have it described in such unromantically blunt terms, and so it was only natural that Barbara should protest.

  ‘Oh, but I’m not cold,’ she assured him. ‘It’s only that I prefer a more romantic setting than this.’

  Francis brightened up a little. ‘Let’s go on the river this evening,’ he said. ‘It should be romantic there. We’ll go from Magdalen Bridge. I always think that’s the nicest part.’ And the farthest away from North Oxford, he added to himself.

  ‘Oh, I’d love that,’ said Barbara quite enthusiastically.

  A beautiful evening on the river. Perhaps a bottle of wine, thought Francis boldly. Niersteiner…. Simon Beddoes always took a bottle of Niersteiner on the river. Age could sometimes learn a thing or two from youth. Respectable Oxford dons were naturally a little rusty in some things. They had forgotten the details of these romantic episodes: what one ought to eat and drink; even, sometimes, what one ought to say. Well, that was natural. One couldn’t imagine even brilliant men like Arnold Penge, Lancelot Doge, or Arthur Fenning being much good at this sort of thing. Thinking of them, he had a sudden desire to go into Randolph and have a gossip with them. He felt he would like to boast and say, ‘Ah, you’ll never guess what I’i. going to do this evening’. But of course one must be discreet. It would never do to give anything away.

  Opposite Randolph he stopped and began to cross the road. There was a good deal of traffic in St. Giles’, and he stood on an island looking up at the fagade of the college.

  ‘Ah, Cleveland,’ said a deep, rumbling voice. ‘You are pondering on the vicissitudes of human life. I can see that.’

  Francis turned and saw Dr. Fremantle standing beside him.

  ‘I wasn’t really thinking about anything,’ he said, as one usually does on such occasions.

  ‘But you are gazing at our Victorian-Gothic facade,’ said Dr. Fremantle. ‘And you are seeing the green creepers that now cover it, and you are thinking that they must soon turn red and brown until at last they die. Am I not right?’

  ‘I’m afraid my thoughts were less exalted,’ Francis admitted, as they walked across the road together.

  ‘Ah.’ Dr. Fremantle put a wealth of expression into that single sound. ‘I am apt to forget that the Fellows of Randolph are not all old men,’ he said. ‘Some of them are still able to enjoy the pleasures of this life instead of preparing for the next. I don’t suppose there will be many pleasures there, or at least hardly comparable with those of this world. You are a lucky man, Cleveland. You don’t have to waste your time thinking exalted thoughts.’

  ‘Well, I should hardly have thought it was a waste of time,’ said Francis, feeling like an undergraduate.

  ‘It is an occupation for old people,’ said Dr. Fremantle shortly, ‘for Olive and me, together. Now you can see what sort of an occupation it is,’ he added with a short bark of laughter. ‘Are you going away?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, eventually,’ said Francis. ‘The usual family holiday.’

  ‘You look rather depressed,’ said Dr. Fremantle in a fatherly tone. ‘Do you know what I should prescribe for you?’

  ‘What?’ asked Francis politely.

  ‘A weekend in Paris,’ declared Dr. Fremantle. ‘But you shouldn’t go alone. Perhaps you have a friend who could go with you?’

  ‘Edward Killigrew or Lancelot Doge?’ suggested Francis vaguely.

  ‘Well, yes, Edward Killigrew and mother,’ said Dr. Fremantle. ‘That would be quite a family party. But it was hardly what I meant.’

  ‘No, I guessed that,’ said Francis knowingly. In another minute, he thought, noticing the twinkle in the old man’s eye, we shall begin quoting Limericks to each other.

  Paris … Francis thought as he walked home. The word had so many associations, and each time somebody said it one imagined something different. Dr. Fremantle’s jovial yet secret voice conjured up a picture of the Continent in the days of King Edward the Seventh: the Entente Cordiale, black silk stockings and garters and rather naughty jokes. Miss Doggett’s shocked pronunciation of the name made it into a dark, wicked city where one might have an “unpleasant experience” and where it was essential to get the name of a good, respectable hotel from Cook’s. Simon Beddoes’s caressing voice gave the impression of a place where he knew a little hotel, where it was always spring and one was always on honeymoon, though not necessarily monsieur et madame, except in the hotel register. Paris, when Francis had said it, had hitherto been just the capital of France, where he and Margaret had once lost their luggage and passed an uncomfortable night on the way to somewhere else. But now he began to think of it differently. Barbara had said that she liked a romantic setting. What city in the world was more romantic than Paris, provided one didn’t lose one’s luggage?

  When he reached his own gate he saw Miss Morrow scuttling away from it.

  ‘Good evening,’ he called out. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Miss Morrow, who had not been able to think of any adequate reason why she should be hanging round the Clevelands’ gate. She could not very well explain that Miss Doggett had told her to watch for Francis’s return and to notice whether he brought Miss Bird with him.

  ‘When are you going away?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, soon, I hope,’ she said. ‘Oxford’s so depressing now.’

  ‘You ought to go to Paris,’ said Francis surprisingly.

  ‘Paris? What should I do in Paris?’ said Miss Morrow.

  ‘Oh, you might have some interesting experiences there,’ he said vaguely.

  Miss Morrow shook her head. ‘No, I’m afraid nothing would happen to me,’ she said regretfully. ‘I shouldn’t even have the sort of experience my cousin Bertha had.’ She paused and then laughed suddenly. ‘I must be off now,’ she said. ‘Good-bye!’ She felt quite guilt
y at having nothing to report to Miss Doggett, almost as if it were her fault.

  But later in the evening she did see a most extraordinary sight. She was going out about nine o’clock to post some letters, when she noticed Mr. Cleveland hurrying out of his gate. That in itself was nothing extraordinary, and she would have thought nothing of it, had he not been carrying a bottle of wine. It struck her as so very odd that she could not resist waiting to see where he went. But after she had seen him get on a bus she was really none the wiser. He might be going anywhere or nowhere. All the same, the whole affair seemed a little suspicious—rather Crampton Hodnet, was how she put it to herself. Oh, yes, distinctly Crampton Hodnet. She supposed she ought really to tell Miss Doggett. But what good would that do? Unless one could do positive good by telling a thing, one ought to keep quiet, thought Miss Morrow stoutly. She would not tell Miss Doggett.

  She went back to Leamington Lodge, thinking vaguely about Omar Khayyam. How very odd Mr. Cleveland had looked carrying that bottle! She could hardly help laughing to herself.

  How did one carry a bottle easily and nonchalantly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to be carrying? Francis wondered. He felt so foolish with it in his hand, and yet it would have looked even more odd if he had tried to hide it under his coat. He was glad when he and Barbara and the bottle were all safely together in a punt, where it did not seem quite so much out of place.

  It was an ideal evening for the river. There was a warm breeze that stirred the leaves above them, and as it grew darker an enormous, unnatural-looking moon came out. Faint music could be heard in the distance and occasionally voices: towns-people, Americans, foreigners, the usual vacation inhabitants of Oxford.