The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  Piers’s drink problem gets worse and he disappears for a stretch of time, only to re-emerge sober and smartly dressed for a party. When Wilmet is given a secret Christmas present, an inscribed antique trinket box, she immediately assumes it is from Piers. There is more than a hint of Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse in her misunderstanding of people and events. Despite the mystery surrounding troubled, charming Piers, Wilmet still cherishes hope for a secret love affair. When she telephones him, on an impulse, she is surprised and more than bemused to hear a ‘slightly common’ male voice, which she assumes to be his ‘colleague’. No, she cannot speak to Piers, he says, in his flat, northern vowels. Still, Wilmet does not guess the truth.

  As she hurtles towards the final denouement, with ‘the delicious, walking-on-air feeling’ of being in love on a balmy May day, going to meet Piers for tea, there can only be one outcome. Piers rebukes Wilmet for ‘talking like one of the cheaper women’s magazines’. But it is not until he is walking her to his flat, near Shepherd’s Bush, that the terrible truth dawns.

  That it occurs in a grocer’s shop is a typical Pym touch. On the way home, Piers stops by the shop where his ‘colleague’ can be found. Peering into some biscuit tins, like a character in a Denton Welch novel, is Keith: small, dark and good-looking. Pym uses animal imagery to describe the man who Wilmet now realises is her rival. Keith’s short, cropped hair glistens ‘like the wet fur of an animal … like a hedgehog or porcupine’. It is only when he speaks in his ‘flat, rather common little voice’ that she is finally awakened. It is a painful, awkward moment and an embarrassed silence ensues, broken by a discussion of streaky bacon:

  ‘What do you think, Wilmet?’ asked Piers. ‘Which is the best kind of bacon?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, unable to give my attention to bacon. ‘It depends what you like.’[5]

  Wilmet’s first feeling is sadness, ‘as if something had come to an end’, before shame and indignation set in. Too late to back down, she is forced to confront the fact of Piers and Keith’s living arrangements and to endure the tea that Keith has prepared so painstakingly, with his pink and white morsels of gateau on plastic doilies. It is only when Piers walks her to her taxi that she vents:

  ‘So that is the person with whom you live.’

  ‘Yes. He’s obviously taken a great fancy to you,’ Piers smiled, ‘do you like him?’

  ‘He seems a nice boy,’ I said, ‘but rather unexpected.’

  ‘In what way unexpected?’

  ‘You said you lived with a colleague from the press. I suppose I’d imagined a different sort of person.’

  ‘You always said that I lived with a colleague. But aren’t we all colleagues, in a sense, in this grim business of getting through life as best we can?’

  I said nothing, so he went on. ‘My dear girl, what’s the matter? Do you think I’ve been deceiving you, or something absurd like that?’

  ‘No, of course I don’t,’ I said indignantly. But of course in a way, he had deceived me.[6]

  Piers tells Wilmet that he enjoys coming home to a person who is not intellectual, echoing a sentiment that Pym recalled in her notebook of 1956: ‘on occasions of unhappiness too one might unburden oneself to one’s hairdresser and enjoy the cosiness of non-intellectual conversation’. It is striking that Wilmet is not at all shocked by Piers’s homosexuality, only by his deception.

  The next surprise, in a novel that keeps surprising, is Wilmet’s discovery of how much she likes Keith. He comes to tea and she sees how he has saved Piers from his alcoholism and his self-hatred. Keith, a catalogue model from Leicester, is kind and good. A compelling composite of ‘Little Thing’ (black jeans and tangerine shirt) and Denton’s lover, Eric Oliver, he is hard-working, fastidious and deeply caring. He has standards of taste: he fingers Wilmet’s curtains to ensure that they are fully lined.

  Wilmet learns from her snobbish attitudes, in the manner of Emma Woodhouse. Piers’s rebuke to her cuts deep: ‘After all I didn’t really mean to imply that you’re to blame for who you are. Some people are less capable of loving their fellow human beings than others.’ But Piers is wrong. Wilmet learns to love and accept Keith. She is also confronted with her husband’s ‘brief encounter’ with another woman, Prudence Bates. Wilmet is so sure of Rodney’s fidelity and his predictable dullness, that she fails to see him as a desirable human being with his own needs and desires: ‘I had always regarded Rodney as the kind of man who would never look at another woman. The fact that he could – and had indeed done so – ought to teach me something about myself, even if I was not quite sure what it was.’[7]

  Wilmet finally discovers that there is no reason why her own life should not be ‘a glass of blessings too. Perhaps it always had been without my realizing it.’[8]

  CHAPTER XX

  In which Miss Pym goes to Swanwick

  In August 1957, Pym attended a writers’ conference in Swanwick, near the picturesque Peak District of Derbyshire. There were talks given by publishers and writers on tips for getting published. Phyllis Bayley from Vanity Fair gave a talk on the magazine story and there was a panel in which delegates were invited to ask questions, some of which Pym found tedious: ‘It really makes one despair when someone gets up and asks if publishers like chapters to be all the same length.’[1] More fun was to be had visiting Haddon Hall and Chatsworth House, the seat of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. The duchess was Deborah ‘Debo’ Mitford, sister of Unity the Nazi. One wonders if Pym reflected on the different paths the sisters had taken.

  The writers’ conference gave her the opening for her new novel. Dulcie, the heroine, who has been jilted, attends a conference in Derbyshire to help mend her broken heart and for the opportunity to meet new people, ‘and to amuse herself by observing the lives of others, even if for only a weekend and under somewhat unusual circumstances’. Dulcie, thought by Pym’s friends to be the heroine most like the author herself, spends a large proportion of her life ‘prying’. She works part-time as a researcher, usually proofreading and compiling indices for editors, and wonders if one day ‘the time will come when one may be permitted to do research into the lives of ordinary people’.[2]

  In contrast to the treatment of previous snooping heroines, Dulcie’s hobby is portrayed in uneasy terms. Pym’s stalking of Bear (there can be no other word) had resulted in a trip to a private hotel in the West Country, where Bear’s mother was the proprietress. There, she had also visited the graveyard to discover the death date of Bear’s father. She copied out the inscription on his tombstone and drew a picture in her notebook. Her churchyard visit and the West Country hotel were recreated in No Fond Return of Love, when Dulcie goes to ‘Eagle House’ to discover more about Aylwin Forbes. Tall, rugged and handsome, he is the editor of a journal. He is a philanderer whose long-suffering wife finally departs when he is found kissing pretty Viola Dace, who is compiling his index. Dulcie convinces Viola to accompany her on the ‘research trip’ to Devon, where they stake out the hotel and then finally meet Forbes’s mother and brother, Neville.

  In her ‘Bear log’, Pym had written: ‘Isn’t it time this log stopped?’ Then, in dark ink, she has underlined the word ‘Yes’. She continued the record of her sightings, nonetheless. Her uneasiness about her stalking of Bear and his lovers is the engine that drives No Fond Return of Love. Dulcie begins her search on Forbes by looking in the telephone directory for his address. Once she finds it, it is easy to contrive an ‘accidental meeting’. The discovery that Forbes has a clergyman brother leads her to investigations in the local public library and even the Public Record Office:

  For this was really the kind of research Dulcie enjoyed most of all – investigation – some might have said prying – into the lives of other people, the kind of work that involved poring over reference books and street and telephone directories. It was most satisfactory if the objects of her research were not too well known, either to herself or to the world in general.[3]

  The clerical directory C
rockford’s leads to the discovery that Neville Forbes is a vicar in north-west London. Later, at a jumble sale, she meets Aylwin’s estranged wife and discovers that Neville has been involved in some unpleasantness with a young woman. Dulcie knows that her snooping is ‘strange and rather deceitful’, but she is unable to stop herself.

  Later on, Dulcie makes a point of going to his church in order to uncover more details about the ‘trouble’ he is in. Viola Dace (who has rented a room from Dulcie) is surprised by Dulcie’s curiosity about the Forbes brothers. Dulcie, again, tries to explain her interest: ‘It’s like a kind of game. It seemed – though she did not say this to Viola – so much safer and more comfortable to live in the lives of other people – to observe their joys and sorrows with detachment as if one were watching a film or a play.’[4] Her love of ‘finding out about people’, she knows, is ‘a sort of compensation for the dreariness of everyday life’.[5] Living in the lives of other people is about as good a definition of the novelist’s art as one could imagine.

  When Dulcie invites Aylwin to a dinner party, she forgets what she should not reveal about her knowledge of his life. She feels that her intense curiosity could potentially land her into trouble. When she persuades Viola to accompany her to the Eagle Hotel, she again feels a stab of shame: ‘One goes on with one’s research, avidly and without shame. Then suddenly a curious feeling of delicacy comes over one. One sees one’s subjects – or perhaps victims is a better word – as being somehow degraded by one’s probings.’[6] Pym, of course, had the excuse of being a novelist. Her own ‘intense curiosity’ about the lives of others was what made her such an observant writer. Dulcie, who admits she is neither a novelist nor a detective, does not have the same excuse for prying and hence there is a degree of self-loathing that is new to the Pym heroine.

  In her private journals, Pym was toying with the feeling that ‘one wasn’t a particularly nice person. (Selfish, unsociable, uncharitable, malicious even).’[7] She had been plagued with this sense since her wartime days and had confided feelings of self-loathing to her diary in a distressing incident when she made a complaint about a washbasin in a ladies’ cloakroom. All these years later, the incident is recreated in No Fond Return of Love.

  ‘What a nuisance,’ she said, as a tall woman came into the cloakroom, ‘somebody’s cluttered up the basin with flowers and I wanted to wash my hands.’

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ said the woman rather stiffly. ‘I’m afraid the flowers are mine. There wasn’t anywhere else to put them.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t realise,’ said Dulcie apologetically. ‘Of course one must put flowers in water to keep them fresh.’

  ‘I’m taking them to an invalid …’

  ‘An invalid,’ Dulcie repeated, ‘I am sorry. If only I’d realised.’[8]

  When Maurice, the man who jilted her, returns, suggesting that they should reunite, Dulcie refuses his charmless proposal. There is no Persuasion-like Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth happy ending. Nevertheless, Dulcie’s quietly cynical attitude towards men and marriage does not prevent her from seeking love, even if that love is merely ‘cosiness’ or the gratification of being needed: ‘Those are the people from whom one asks no return of love, if you see what I mean. Just to be allowed to love them is enough.’[9]

  It is the ending of Mansfield Park that Pym invokes at the close of the novel, though there is an element of ambiguity in Dulcie’s happy ending. When No Fond Return of Love was published, Pym sent a copy to Bob Smith: ‘You are one of the few who know how truly B. Pym it is – but really Dulcie had an easy time of it compared with us searching for Bear’s church, didn’t she?’ Bob replied, astutely: ‘It’s not, I think, your easiest book, but somehow the most purely Barbara Pym, her art at its quintessence.’[10]

  CHAPTER XXI

  In which Miss Pym goes over to Rome

  On a cold day in late October 1959, Pym viewed a semi-detached house at 40 Brooksville Avenue across the road from Queen’s Park and close to St Lawrence’s church, where Bear played the organ. Not then gentrified, it was surrounded by council estates and blocks of flats in Kilburn and Kensal Rise. However, the park was pleasant, with a Victorian bandstand, the street was quiet and tree-lined and the houses pretty, with small walled front gardens.

  She and Bob Smith loved their ‘church crawls’, and had visited numerous London churches, attending high mass at All Saints’ in Notting Hill and a less incense-laden service at All Saints’, Margaret Street, Fitzrovia. Both churches were Victorian Gothic Revival in architecture and Anglo-Catholic in allegiance. As we have seen, a spontaneous visit to a lunchtime service at St Mary Aldermary in the City had inspired the opening of A Glass of Blessings. Father Twisaday from All Saints’ Notting Hill (‘an elderly dried up celibate, irritable and tetchy’) had provided rich material for Father Thames.

  Pym’s pursuit of Bear had led her to St Lawrence’s in Queen’s Park and this was the church where she decided that she wanted to worship. The move to a less salubrious part of north-west London was partly to be closer to the church and partly as a result of the 1957 Rent Act, which pushed up rents and gave increasing rights to the landlord rather than the tenant. The sisters, having rented for many years, wanted a house of their own. Hilary, who had more money and financial security thanks to her job at the BBC, bought the property, which had a garden suitable for their tabby cat, Tatiana, but a cold winter and burst pipes delayed the house move.

  Finally the sisters were able to move in, deciding that the drawing room should be on the first floor, where there was better light and a view. The sisters would sit in the window, looking out on their neighbours, just like the sisters in Some Tame Gazelle. Many of the details of the house and its environment would find their way into the pages of Pym’s new novel, An Unsuitable Attachment.

  Pym told Bob that Brooksville Avenue now felt like a proper home. They borrowed a modern red sofa and chairs from one of Hilary’s friends, hung magnolia cream curtains and brought in Bear (Maurice) to decorate the sitting room in yellow and grey striped wallpaper. They bought an ‘all-over’ grey carpet on hire purchase. Best of all, there was a small garden with hyacinths, daffodils and forsythia in full bloom, perfect for feline adventures.

  Bob had kindly offered to lend the Pyms some of his furniture that was currently in storage. When the sisters went along to the facility, she learned that another woman had been there, too. Pym had not known about Bob’s other female friend and the incident was stored up to be used as a plot point. Pym liked to relate bits of church gossip to Bob: ‘Terrible goings-on at the Church of Ascension … much too strong for a novel. Vicar accused by Sunday School teacher of having intercourse (sexual) with her 75 or 80 times.’[1]

  In the spring of 1961, Pym went on a work trip to Rome, for an anthropology conference. She flew in to Leonardo da Vinci airport, where she saw nuns ‘waving handkerchiefs and with bunches of flowers to welcome back a Mother Superior’. At the opening gathering of the conference, she noted that most of the delegates were carrying or wearing raincoats. She ‘felt like Prudence, overdressed in cream Courtelle’. Later, at the Ritz Hotel – ‘walls covered with pleated silk, gold plush sofas and chairs, pictures of Roman emperors’ – they had drinks and canapés.[2]

  Ever observant, Pym noted the thin stray cats of Rome, ‘mostly grey tabby or tortoiseshell, which are said to be fed by elderly ladies’, and the Spanish Steps, ‘massed with red, pink and white azaleas’. There was a lengthy excursion to Amalfi and Ravello: ‘Acres of lemon groves … also for oranges with stalks and leaves still on them and the little bunches of dried lemon leaves which you unwrap to reveal a few delicious lemon-flavoured raisins in the middle.’ Ravello cathedral had a pulpit supported by marble lions. In the garden of the Villa Ridolfo, there was a marble lion licking its cub.[3] Much of this detail would also be used in An Unsuitable Attachment. The trip to Italy also evoked memories of Naples. Pym’s new novel would feature a working-class man, loosely based on Starky, who would fall in love
with an elegant and aloof older woman, Ianthe.

  CHAPTER XXII

  A Sketch of Philip Larkin

  Pym was feeling good. She was delighted to receive a fan letter from the poet Philip Larkin, who had written to say that he wished to write a review essay about her career to date. In the event, he had been too late for the publication he had in mind, but Pym wrote back to express her thanks: ‘Perhaps, if you still like doing it, I could let you know when my next is ready … it will be my seventh novel which seems a significant number.’[1]

  With Larkin’s encouragement, she continued to work hard on her new book, which was going slowly. She told Larkin how much she had enjoyed his novel, A Girl In Winter, wondering whether he might write a second, or would he be sticking to poetry? Larkin penned a generous write up of Pym in the Guardian and continued on his long review essay.

  Not yet forty, Philip Larkin was a tall, shy, balding man, who wore thick spectacles and still retained traces of a childhood stammer. He was the senior librarian at the University of Hull and the author of two novels and two volumes of poetry. Larkin’s somewhat unprepossessing appearance and his ‘librarian’ persona belied an outrageous, scatological sense of humour and a sharp wit.