by Paula Byrne
It is the casual, unfeeling neglect from her friends and neighbours that is so deeply shocking. They believe that Mildred has an empty life because she is unmarried, which makes them feel justified in asking her to perform duties and tasks that they simply would not dream of asking anyone else. Nobody in the novel sets out to be unkind, but nobody takes the trouble to discover anything about Mildred’s inner life or even to notice her feelings. Mildred is intelligent, funny and kind. She has a keen sense of the ridiculous, and observes the world around her with amusement and compassion: ‘The sight of Sister Blatt, splendid on her high old-fashioned bicycle like a ship in full sail, filled me with pleasure.’[2] She does not see herself as other people see her. But everyone takes her for granted.
The plot revolves around two couples, the (unhappily) married, glamorous Napiers (Helena and Rockingham, known as Rocky), and the vicar and his sister, Winifred and Julian Malory – his name clearly a variant on Julian Amery. Mildred is, unwittingly, at the centre of the two plots. The Napiers’ marriage is threatened by the presence of renowned anthropologist Everard Bone, while a beautiful, unscrupulous widow, Allegra Gray, disturbs the amity of the Malory siblings.
Pym’s world in Excellent Women is distinctly post-war London. We are in an era of bombed-out churches, food rationing, bedsits; men coming home from war to find their hasty marriages are defunct; electric fires and nylon stockings, and knickers hanging on a washing line in the kitchen. Though the setting is in London’s Pimlico, it has a similar feel to the country village world of Some Tame Gazelle.
Pym used much of her own experience to add local colour. St Mary’s church is based on St Gabriel’s. The self-service cafeteria in the Coventry Street Corner House is where Pym and her colleagues from the institute often used to dine. The ruined church of St Ermin’s was based on St Saviour’s, Pimlico, and St James’s in Piccadilly – where Pym once saw a woman making coffee on a Primus stove. Both churches were badly hit during the Blitz: bombs took out almost all the stained glass on the west side of St Saviour’s. The blast damage can still be seen today.[3]
Pym’s strong but stealthy proto-feminism rises to the forefront in the character of gentle Mildred Lathbury. From her Oxford journal – when she provocatively suggested that women had more right to philander than men, gradually building from the poor and unsatisfactory way that she had been treated by her lovers – Pym does not hold back from her incipient belief that men are selfish and careless. It is always the splendid women who end up with their hands in the kitchen sink: ‘And before long I should be certain to find myself at his sink peeling potatoes and washing up; that would be a nice change when both proof-reading and indexing began to pall. Was any man worth this burden?’[4]
Mildred is imaginative and sensitive. She is resourceful and dripping with dry humour and common sense. Some of Pym’s best one-liners are given to her: ‘Surely many a romance must have been nipped in the bud by sitting opposite somebody eating spaghetti?’ And the unforgettable: ‘I was so astonished that I could think of nothing to say, but wondered irrelevantly if I was to be caught with a teapot in my hand on every dramatic occasion.’[5] When she wants to be alone, Mildred retires to the kitchen sink where no men will follow her.
In Some Tame Gazelle, Pym had quoted one of her much-loved platitudes, but she had qualified it with a waspish codicil:
‘The trivial round, the common task – did it furnish quite all we needed to ask? Had Keble really understood? Sometimes one almost doubted it. Belinda imagined him writing the lines in a Gothic study, panelled in pitch-pine and well dusted that morning by an efficient servant. Not at all the same thing as standing at the sink with aching back and hands plunged into the washing-up water.[6]
Now, with Mildred Lathbury, she takes her beliefs one step further. Pym had once proclaimed to her journal: ‘Oh darling [Gordon], how peculiarly insensitive your sex is!’ But in Excellent Women, she reveals this sentiment in all its pathetic glory.
It is not only Rocky Napier who disappoints. He is all good looks and charm, flirting with Wrens in the Admiral’s villa in Naples (as did the real-life ‘flag’ Rob Long) and romancing his Italian girlfriend even though he is married to Helena. We almost expect it of him. It is the vicar, Julian Malory, who is deeply dispiriting. He esteems and respects Mildred, but is infatuated by the elegant and fragrant Allegra Gray, who uses her beauty to exploit not only gullible men, but the good nature of women such as Winifred and Mildred. She wants Julian’s devoted sister out of the way and expects that sad, lonely Mildred will oblige her by offering Winifred a place to live. Beautiful women in Pym’s world are used to getting their own way. But Mildred does not want to live with Winifred. Nor does she want to please Allegra or Julian.
From the opening lines, Pym sets out her theme: ‘“Ah you ladies! Always on the spot when there’s something happening!” The voice belonged to Mr Mallett, one of our churchwardens and its roguish tone made me start guiltily, almost as if I had no right to be discovered outside my own front door.’[7]
Helena Napier is a working woman – an anthropologist – who turns a blind eye to her husband’s philandering, but takes revenge by a flirtation with a colleague. The splendidly named Everard Bone is perhaps an allusion to the villain of a remarkable novel called Vera by Pym’s admired Elizabeth von Arnim. In that novel, Everard ‘gaslights’ his young wife, and keeps her a virtual prisoner in the marital home.
Helena (whom we are told is not an excellent woman) assumes along with everyone else that unmarried women have empty lives. When she discusses her imperfect, hasty ‘war’ marriage with Rocky, she speaks dismissively to Mildred: ‘“Of course you’ve never been married,” she said, putting me in my place among the rows of excellent women.’[8] Mildred’s old friend, William Caldicote, a thinly disguised version of Jock Liddell, does not want her to ‘throw herself away’ in marriage: ‘But my dear Mildred, you must not marry … Life is disturbing enough without these alarming suggestions. I always think of you being so very balanced and sensible, such an excellent woman. I do hope you’re not thinking of getting married.’[9]
When Everard Bone finally does notice Mildred, he treats her ungraciously: ‘“Oh, I expect we shall be going somewhere for dinner,” he said vaguely, “You may as well come too.”’ It is a similar kind of carelessness that makes Helena Napier use Mildred’s toilet paper in their shared bathroom. It’s a small detail, but, as always in Pym, revealing of character: ‘The burden of keeping three people in toilet paper seemed to me rather a heavy one,’ Mildred notes, drily.[10]
When Mildred and her friend Dora return to their old boarding school for a ceremony to honour her old headmistress, she feels that she is being judged by her friends: ‘For after all, what had we done? We had not made particularly brilliant careers for ourselves and, most important of all, we had neither of us married. That was really it. It was the ring on the left hand that people at the Old Girls’ Reunion looked for.’[11]
In fact, Mildred enjoys her single life and when she looks around at the married people around her, she does not feel envy. The Napiers’ marriage is troubled and Mildred is sickened that she is, unwittingly, dragged into their messy relationship. Helena and Rocky play emotional games with one another, but they need an audience. Mildred becomes inextricably bound up with the disintegrating marriage. She goes along with Rocky to hear Helena and Everard read a jointly written paper at a meeting of the Learned Society of Anthropologists. Afterwards, Rocky begins to ask frivolous questions, chiefly to annoy his wife and Bone, as he suspects they are having an affair:
‘What was that about a man being expected to sleep with an unmarried sister-in-law who is visiting his house?’ he asked.
‘That’s called a joking relationship,’ said Everard precisely.
‘Not exactly what one would call a joke,’ said Rocky, ‘though it could be fun. It would depend on the sister-in-law, of course, Does he have to sleep with her?’
‘Oh, Rocky, you don’t understand,’
said Helena impatiently. It was obvious that she and Everard did not appreciate jokes about their subject.
‘I wonder if the study of societies where polygamy is a commonplace encourages immorality … Do anthropologists tend to have many wives at the same time?’ he went on, ‘Have you found that?’
‘They would naturally tend to conceal such things,’ said Everard with a half-smile, ‘and one could hardly ask them.’
‘Oh, they are drearily monogamous,’ said Helena, ‘and very virtuous in other ways too. Much better than many of these so-called good people who go to church.’ She turned a half-amused, half-spiteful glance towards me.[12]
Mildred knows that she is being used by the Napiers in their passive-aggressive one-upmanship: ‘I have never been good at games; people never chose me at school when it came to picking sides.’ Furthermore, Helena twists the knife deeper into Mildred: ‘“You and Everard seemed to be having an interesting conversation,” said Helena at last. “Was he declaring himself or something?” Her tone was rather light and cruel as if it were the most impossible thing in the world.’[13]
Mildred, walking past the parish hall, hears the sound of working-class Teddy Lemon (loosely based on Iain aka ‘Starky’) and his friends, and ‘much prefers his rough honesty’ to the superficial charm of the Napiers: ‘My heart warmed towards them, so good and simple with their uncomplicated lives. If only I had come home straight after the paper.’ The ‘undercurrents’ between the Napiers and ‘their disturbing kind of life’ is distasteful to Mildred, leading her to reflect that ‘Love was rather a terrible thing.’[14]
It is tempting to suggest that Pym was channelling some of her own distaste for the complicated love life of the Glovers and her own part in it. She recorded in her diary at that time that a pleasant afternoon spent with one of her old female friends made a refreshing change from life at the Coppice. Similarly, Mildred enjoys spending time shopping with a girlfriend: ‘I forgot all about the Napiers and the complications of knowing them. I was back in those happier days when the company of women friends had seemed enough.’[15]
Mildred is happier in the company of her female friends. She is tired of the gay bitchiness of William Caldicote, the superficial charm of Rocky, and even Father Julian Malory has become a disappointment. He has allowed himself to be ‘taken in’ by the beautiful but cold widow, Allegra Gray. Julian arrogantly believes that Mildred is in love with him but is too cowardly to tell her of his love for another woman. He ensures that Allegra breaks the news of his engagement. When he subsequently meets Mildred, she is shocked that he seems to want her to be upset by his news, merely to inflate his ego:
‘Ah, Mildred, you understand. Dear Mildred, it would have been a fine thing if it could have been … it’s so splendid of you to understand like this. I know it must have been a shock, a blow almost, I might say,’ he laboured on, heavy and humourless, not at all like his usual self. Did love always make men like this? I wondered.
‘I was never in love with you, if that’s what you meant,’ I said, thinking it was time to be blunt. ‘I never expected that you would marry me.’
‘Dear Mildred,’ he smiled, ‘you are not the kind of person to expect things as your right even though they may be.’[16]
Here, we are worlds away from the gorgeous comic simplicity of Some Tame Gazelle and Crampton Hodnet. Pym is writing on a whole new level. All of her rage at Gordon Glover and his cowardice in not telling her the real reason for his rejection – that she was merely a pleasant interlude – is contained in this masterly scene. ‘I saw that it was no use trying to convince Julian that I was not heartbroken at the news of his engagement.’
Mildred is not jealous of Allegra, for she sees her as she is: a beautiful but hard woman, who is used to having her own way and who will turn Julian’s sister out of doors the moment she gets a chance. Love, or infatuation, makes Julian behave badly and cowardly. Similarly, Everard Bone loses his nerve when he discovers that Helena intends to leave her husband for him. He flees to Derbyshire and asks Mildred to break the news that he is breaking off the affair. Mildred, not unreasonably, responds: ‘But men ought to be able to manage their own affairs … After all most of them don’t seem to mind speaking frankly and making people unhappy. I don’t see why you should.’[17]
Time and time again, Mildred is used by other people to sort out their mess. Life is made up of ‘small unpleasantnesses’. It is as though her feelings never count. The sad truth is that she knows it: ‘I pulled myself up and told myself to stop these ridiculous thoughts, wondering if 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 that perhaps they may have just a little after all.’
When Winifred Malory is turned out of her house after a quarrel with Allegra, it is Mildred who is left to pick up the pieces. When Rocky and Helena separate, it is Mildred who is left to sort out their dirty flat and send on the furniture. It is Mildred who finally reunites the estranged couple. Why wouldn’t she? She’s an excellent woman.
CHAPTER VII
In which Miss Pym leaves Pimlico for Barnes
Pym’s new landlady sounds as if she had sprung from the pages of one of her novels. Her name was Mrs Beltane, and she was ‘scented and jingling with bracelets’. Pym and Hilary had decided to move from Pimlico to larger accommodation south of the river, in the suburbs. They had found a spacious two-bedroomed flat with a sitting room, kitchen and bathroom, at 47 Nassau Road in a converted house in leafy Barnes. Mrs Beltane, ‘refined and preoccupied by her appearance’, lived on the ground floor.[1] She told the Pym sisters that Harrods delivered to Barnes, though it was unlikely that they could afford to shop at Harrods.
Barnes, bounded by the River Thames, Barnes Common and Richmond Park, felt very much like a village. It had literary associations dating back to the time of Henry Fielding, who spent the last few years of his life in a house overlooking the common. It was not on the underground circuit, so Barbara took the number 9 bus to work at the International African Institute. Around the same time, the offices and library of the institute moved to new premises in Fetter Lane, just off Fleet Street.
Barbara shared an office with young Cambridge graduate, Hazel Holt, who would become a great friend and her first biographer. Holt remembered Pym as ‘a tall, quiet, reserved woman’. The pair shared a small rather dingy office with olive-green filing cabinets and ‘cigarette-scarred desks’ facing one another. They typed on old-fashioned typewriters using two fingers. Holt recalled the map cupboard, which was under Barbara’s control. It was waist-high and Pym would spend much of her time crouching on the linoleum floor ‘in search of an elusive map’. Behind Pym’s desk was a bookcase containing all the file copies of the ethnographic survey Africa, jostling next to a motley collection of novels and poetry. More exciting was their version of a ‘juju’, containing ‘magical objects’, including a Nigerian wooden bull-roarer, feathers and a lock of Holt’s hair (which Pym had snipped off one dull afternoon when she was feeling bored). If the women needed a new reviewer, or if the proofs were late, they would make an offering of a pressed flower or a paperclip to their ‘juju’ – ‘only partly in jest’.[2]
Around this time, Pym wrote another radio play called Parrot’s Eggs. It referred to a custom attributed to the Yoruba tribe in west Africa, who would apparently send their king a parrot’s egg when they wished him to resign by suicide. The play was never performed.
All of this delicious anthropological detail and more would find its way into Pym’s stories. In Excellent Women, Everard Bone is worried sick that he has been spotted by colleagues in a compromising position with Helena Napier, and Mildred tries to comfort him by saying: ‘Anthropologists must see such very odd behaviour in primitive societies that they probably think anything we do here is very tame.’ Bone responds drily: ‘Don’t you believe it.’[3] In one of her notebooks of ideas, Pym wrote: ‘The Hadzapi will eat anything that is edible except the hyena.’
&nb
sp; Holt was an English graduate and was surprised to learn that Miss Pym had published a novel called Some Tame Gazelle. She assumed that it was a book about game-hunting in Africa and did not bother to buy a copy. When a friend lent her a copy, she was ‘enchanted’ and now looked with ‘considerable interest’ on this reserved woman ‘who had written this perfect book’.[4]
Pym’s first book was published in May 1950 and received good reviews, which no doubt bolstered her confidence. Praise from the reviewers focused on Pym’s wit, ‘so gentle that the reader scarcely notices the claws’, and her interest in village life and small things: ‘working in petit point she makes each stitch with perfect precision’. Unsurprisingly and surely much to her delight, some of the reviewers drew comparisons with Jane Austen: ‘There is a touch of Trollope here, of Mrs Gaskell, Jane Austen and Mrs Thirkell, but Miss Pym’s sharp fresh fun is all her own,’ and: ‘This excellent first novel on a theme of English village life is in the direct tradition of Jane Austen.’ Happily, most of the reviewers found it funny: ‘I may have been in a singularly happy mood when I read it, but I found it quite uproariously funny,’ wrote one. Another spoke of its ‘rich comedy’ and ‘its quiet and good-humoured ironies’. The review by the novelist Antonia White in the influential New Statesman and Nation was glowing: ‘she is a modest and original writer who owes nothing to anyone’. For a first novel, this was excellent coverage and it encouraged Pym to keep writing. White’s perceptive review drew attention to the subtext of the humour: ‘Her portraits of three clergymen … are gentle but relentless, as a conscientious snapshot can be more devastating than the cruellest caricature.’[5] Whether by design or not, Pym’s novels would darken in tone as she matured, though she always leavened them with her unique sense of irony.