by Barbara Pym
‘How do you do?’ he murmured.
Jane, watching from the side, thought ‘Oh, goody,’ in a childish sort of way. It was going to be all right. The way he had looked at her was most promising. By our first strange and fatal interview … she said to herself.
Prudence and Fabian drew a little apart from the whist players, who had now started again, Edward Lyall and his mother among them.
‘Have you been playing?’ Fabian asked.
‘Only a little,’ said Prudence, with a laugh. ‘I’m afraid I’ve forgotten all I ever knew about it, though.’
‘I like to look in at these affairs,’ said Fabian. ‘One has a certain responsibility, living in a small community.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
There was a pause. It’s like being at a cocktail party without anything to drink, thought Prudence.
‘Would you like a sandwich?’ she asked, offering a dejected-looking plate.
‘No, thank you. I had dinner before I came. I was wondering, though,’ he looked deeply into her eyes, ‘whether we might slip out and have a drink? Would you like one?’
‘Yes, I certainly would. The strain of making conversation with so many people has quite worn me out.’
‘Had you a coat or something? It’s rather cold outside.’
‘I had a little fur.’ Prudence made a helpless gesture round her shoulders. ‘We left it somewhere when we came in.”
Fabian retrieved her cape from a pile of tweed coats and they went out together. The pub was just the other side of the pond.
They seemed almost to run towards it and were soon sitting by a blazing fire. Most of the villagers were at the whist drive and the bar was deserted. Fabian asked Prudence what she would like to drink and she told him with no false modesty or beating about the bush. Mild-and-bitter or light ale, which she did not like, anyway, would have seemed unworthy of the occasion. But their conversation did not improve very much even with strong drink, though they gradually became more relaxed and their eyes met so often in penetrating looks that it did not seem to matter that they had little to say to each other, or that Prudence found herself doing most of the talking. She had spent many such evenings in her life and always enjoyed them; the time passed pleasantly until it was time to go home.
‘I’m afraid it’s rather dark in the country,’ said Fabian, taking Prudence’s arm. ‘I shall have to guide you.’
‘I can see quite well, thank you,’ said Prudence in her cool voice. ‘I like walking in the dark.’
‘I will see you to your door,’ said Fabian.
‘Well, that is kind of you. I’m not quite sure where the vicarage is from here.’
‘Just the other side of the pond. But it’s quite easy to get lost in a strange place. My house is just here.’ He indicated a gate.
‘How nice. Jane tells me it is a lovely house.’
Fabian sighed. ‘Yes, I suppose it is, but I’m a lonely person.’
Prudence, her perception a little blunted by whisky, did not smile. She looked up at his face and found his profile pleasing. Poor, lonely Fabian… . She began to wonder if he would kiss her outside the vicarage gate.
‘Good night, Mr. Driver,’ a loud countrywoman’s voice broke in on her thoughts, and she realised that they were passing the village hall, from which a crowd was now emerging. So it was unlikely that he would have the opportunity to kiss her good night. She wondered if she would have enjoyed it if he had.
‘We must meet in London,’ Fabian was saying as he let go of her arm. ‘Perhaps you could have lunch with me or something? Or we might go to a theatre and have dinner.’
‘That would be very nice.’
‘May I write or telephone you, then? Is your name in the book?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Miss Bates — Miss Prudence Bates.’ He took her hand as if he would kiss it, but his gallant gesture was interrupted by the appearance of Miss Doggett and Miss Morrow, who called out ‘Good night’ and went on their way muttering.
Fabian sighed. ‘Ah, well … good night, my dear,’ and Prudence walked up the vicarage drive alone.
Inside the vicarage the family had assembled in Nicholas’s study.
‘We felt like a cup of cocoa,’ said Jane brightly. ‘Would you like one?’
‘No, thank you,’ said Prudence, blinking her eyes in the light.
‘No, perhaps not — you had a drink with Fabian, I imagine.’
Jane tried to keep her voice flat and uninterested.
‘Yes, I did.’
‘What did you have?’
‘Whisky.’
Jane made a face. ‘How horrid! Was Fabian in good form?’ she asked, yielding to temptation.
‘Good form? Well, I don’t know. We talked about Italy and Coventry Patmore and Donne and various other things.’
‘Coventry Patmore and Donne! He has never talked like that to me — you must have got on well.’
‘I thought him rather pleasant,’ said Prudence in an offhand way. Really, now she came to think of it, though, it was she who had brought Coventry Patmore and Donne into the conversation.
I wonder if he kissed her, Jane thought. She was surprised to hear that they had had what seemed to be quite an intelligent conversation, for she had never found Fabian very much good in that line. She had a theory that this was why he tended to make love to women — because he couldn’t really think of much to say to them — but she could hardly reveal her thought to Prudence.
‘Edward Lyall is charming, don’t you think?’ she went on. ‘I thought he looked rather tired tonight. It must be exhausting to be admired like that, and one feels that politicians aren’t quite so used to it as the clergy are.’
Nicholas smiled down into his cocoa.
Prudence agreed that Edward Lyall was good-looking. Flora busied herself removing the cups, but said nothing. Tonight she had known the exquisitely painful sensation of a moment’s unfaithfulness to Mr. Oliver, whose place in her affections had not yet been taken by any undergraduate. Edward Lyall’s pale, even slightly hollow, cheek had touched her imagination. But everyone had been rather horrid to Mr. Oliver, and that had touched her heart. She scarcely knew which she would think about before she went to sleep that night.
Jane stood up and stretched her arms. She hoped it had been a good evening. Perhaps Fabian and Prudence could meet in London. She began to plan lunches and dinners for them. Really, she was almost like Pandarus, she told herself, only it was to be a courtship and marriage according to the most decorous conventions. Fabian was a widower and Prudence was a spinster; there wasn’t even the embarrassment of divorce. No, when she thought it over, Jane decided that she was really much more like Emma Woodhouse.
Chapter Ten
‘DO YOU SUPPOSE Miss Bates has any love life?’ asked Marilyn idly one morning after Prudence had been staying with Jane. ‘She’s quite attractive still, really.’
‘I wonder how old she is,’ said Gloria. ‘About thirty, do you think?’
‘Oh, yes, must be. I hope I die before I’m thirty — it sounds so old.’
‘Forty must be worse,’ said Gloria sensibly. ‘I shouldn’t like to be forty. Miss Trapnell’s over forty, I should think, and Miss Clothier too.’
They brooded silently for a moment over this horror.
‘Manifold’s thirty,’ said Marilyn in a brighter tone. ‘It doesn’t seem so bad for a man.’
‘And Gramp’s forty-eight this year,’ said Gloria. ‘I looked him up in Who’s Who.’
‘Fancy him being anybody,’ giggled Marilyn. ‘You wouldn’t think it to look at him. Forty-eight! That makes him nearly twenty years older than Miss Bates. “When she was a baby, he was grown-up. Fancy that! How do you think the passion’s going these days?’
They discussed Miss Bates’s passion for Dr. Grampian for some moments, after which they came to the conclusion that any feeling one might have for such an elderly man — and in the office too — could hardly be counted as love life
. They regarded themselves as much mpre fortunate in having friends of their own age who had nothing to do with their work.
‘I suppose I’d better make the tea,’ said Gloria, getting up and taking the kettle to fill it. ‘It’s my turn to-day.’
‘Are you going to make Manifold’s Nescafé?’
‘No, he can make it himself if he wants it. I don’t mind boiling water for him — he can have what’s left over from the tea.’
In another room Prudence sat with Miss Trapnell and Miss Clothier, discussing the possibility of tea being ready within the foreseeable future.
‘Five-past eleven,’ said Miss Trapnell. ‘I hope they’ve put the kettle on.’
‘I thought I heard a sound,’ said Miss Clothier, opening her tin of biscuits.
‘What kind of a sound?’ asked Prudence idly.
‘The sound of running water.’
‘Did you say rushing water?’ asked Miss Trapnell seriously.
‘No, no; running water,’ said Miss Clothier impatiently. ‘As if somebody was filling a kettle.’
Footsteps were heard outside the door. They paused for a moment.
‘Ah,’ said Miss Trapnell.
‘Look here, Miss Bates!’ Mr. Manifold burst into the room and confronted the three women.
I suppose he hides his feeling of inferiority under this blunt and rather ill-bred manner, thought Prudence, hardly looking up from what she was doing. After a moment she did glance up in what seemed to him her cool, maddening way.
She saw him standing by her side, holding a bundle of galley proofs. Corduroy trousers, plaid shirt and tweed jacket — why must he dress like an undergraduate? she thought with irritation. And the dear boy was so cross about something. His eyes were blazing.
‘Have I done something?’ she asked.
‘Yes, or at least I think so,’ he faltered, disarmed by her coldness. ‘Didn’t you write up these notes of mine for Gramp?’
‘I may have done. Let me see.’ Prudence held out a hand for the proofs. ‘What’s it all about? Ah, yes,’ she smiled. ‘It was most obscure — Dr. Grampian and I had a very difficult time with it. We couldn’t make out what you meant.’
‘Well, it wasn’t what you’ve put,’ said Mr. Manifold rather more meekly now. ‘Perhaps I didn’t make it quite clear.’
‘No, I don’t think you can have done. Oh, good, here’s tea. Stay and have yours here and then we can talk it over.’
‘I don’t want any tea.’
‘Oh, no. You don’t like it, do you? Gloria will make you some Nescafe, won’t you, Gloria?’
‘All right, Miss Bates,’ said Gloria rather sulkily.
‘I don’t want anything, thank you,’ said Mr. Manifold. ‘I’ll make it myself later, if I do.’
‘You really ought to have something,’ said Miss Clothier. ‘Won’t you have a biscuit?’
‘Thank you. I am rather hungry as a matter of fact.’
‘I’ll just slip out and tell Gloria to make you some Nescafe,’ said Miss Trapnell.
Mr. Manifold sat down by Prudence and together they discussed the corrections that would have to be made.
‘You see, it isn’t really quite what’s written here,’ he explained. ‘You’ve over-simplified it.’
‘Really?’ Prudence assumed an interested tone and looked up into his clear hazel eyes as if she understood every word he was saying. ‘I’m afraid we’ve got it wrong, then.’ ‘
‘One doesn’t want to be misrepresented.’
‘No, of course not. I’m sorry.’
‘Oh, that’s all right. I only thought for a moment…’
‘What did you think?’ Prudence looked up at him again. Really, his eyes were beautiful, she thought. Her voice had taken on an absent-mindedly intimate note a;s if she were not in the office at all.
Mr. Manifold looked surprised. Then he smiled and something like a blush flooded into his pale cheeks. Prudence turned away to hide a smile and he hurried out of the room.
‘Why, he didn’t finish his Nescafe,’ she exclaimed after he had gone.
‘I suppose he forgot it’ said Miss Trapnell.
‘Being with you must have put it out of his mind,’ said Miss Clothier.
‘Being with me?’
‘Yes, I always think he rather likes you, Miss Bates.’
Prudence laughed. ‘Well, really, what an extraordinary idea!’ But, why not? What could be more natural? She was attractive and intelligent, even ‘desirable’; it was not at all surprising that Geoffrey Manifold should find her so.
When the telephone rang and she was summoned into the presence of Dr. Grampian she went to his room feeling light-hearted and confident, ready to be admired by him too.
He was sitting at his desk with a glass of water and some tablets before him. Prudence felt a pang that she was not as moved at the sight as she would have been a few weeks ago.
‘Ah, Miss Bates,’ he said, opening the bottle and shaking a few tablets out on to the desk.
‘Aren’t you feeling well?’ asked Prudence, her tone softening. We must love them all, she thought, and perhaps we should make a special effort with those for whom our love is growing cold.
‘I suppose I am as well as I ever am,’ said Dr. Grampian in a colourless tone. ‘But things have been rather trying lately.’
Prudence wondered what things. Men did not have quite the same trials as women - it would be the larger things that worried him, his health, his work, perhaps even his wife Lucy. Was she being unsatisfactory in some way? Prudence felt that she could hardly ask.
‘I think you and Manifold between you could manage to do something with this…’ he went on, taking up a thick folder of type-written foolscap, turning over the pages and marking certain paragraphs with a pencil. Prudence appeared to be attending to him, but her thoughts were wandering to the evening she was to spend with Fabian. Their acquaintance had prospered since the evening they had met at the whist drive. Luncheons and dinners, with the appropriate foods and wines, had turned it into quite a romantic love affair.
When the time came to leave the office, Prudence was ready to go before six o’clock had struck.
‘Being with Dr. Grampian always takes it out of me,’ she explained. ‘I’m really quite exhausted.’
Miss Trapnell nodded sympathetically. ‘Contact with a brilliant mind like that must be very tiring,’ she agreed. ‘You have to be so very much on your mettle.’
Prudence remembered the bottle of tablets and the fingers turning the pages of the typescript and her own silence, filled with thoughts of Fabian, and had the grace not to pursue the subject further.
She was to meet Fabian at a Soho restaurant which they usually frequented, but luckily there was time for her to go back to her flat first to change her dress and give herself a suitable evening face.
He was waiting for her with a spray of red roses, her favourite flowers. He found it pleasant to be taking an attractive woman out to dinner again - ten months was a long time to be away from it all, he had hardly realised how much he had missed it, and was gratified to find that he had not lost his old touch. And this time there was the added pleasure of a clear conscience; it was a very long time since he had been able to take out another woman without the nagging guilty feeling at the back of his mind, the picture of Constance, sitting in a deck-chair under the walnut tree, doing her needlework.
‘My darling,’ he said as they sipped cocktails, ‘how very lovely you look tonight. I’ve been so longing to see you again.’
Prudence took a larger gulp of her drink. She had thought his words rather banal, disappointing, even. Her imaginary evenings with Arthur Grampian had not been quite like this, but probably he would have been just as dull when it came to the point. Perhaps nothing could be quite so sweet as the imagined evenings with their flow of sparkling conversation, but it was not the kind of thing she could very well say to Fabian. All the same, she told herself sensibly, he would probably make quite a good husband for her. He
was the right age, they had tastes in common and she enjoyed his company. Also, and this was not unimportant, he was good-looking. They would make a handsome couple.
‘Now we must have something nice to eat,’ said Fabian, studying the menu. ‘What would you like, my dear?’
Prudence chose what she would have, perhaps more carefully than a woman truly in love would have done, and Fabian made his choice, which was equally deliberate and not quite the same as hers.
The chicken will have that wonderful sauce with it, thought Prudence, looking into Fabian’s eyes. She had ordered smoked salmon to begin with, and afterwards perhaps she would have some Brie, all creamy and delicious.
‘Have you seen Jane lately?’ she asked.
‘Oh, yes. I quite often see her,’ said Fabian. ‘We are great friends. I find her a most delightful person.’
‘Yes; dear Jane. She is rather wonderful, and yet in a way she’s missed something. Life hasn’t turned out quite as she meant it to.’
Fabian looked blank.
‘She seems quite happy,’ he ventured.
‘Seems, well, yes…’
Fabian found Prudence’s tone disconcerting; it was as if no woman could be really happy even when she was being taken out to dinner. He felt he ought to say something profound, but, naturally enough, nothing profound came out.
‘I mean, she leads a useful kind of life - work in the parish and that kind of thing,’ he went on vaguely.
‘But she’s really no good at parish work - she’s wasted in that kind of life. She has great gifts, you know. She could have written books.’
‘Written books? Oh, good heavens!’
‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’ asked Prudence rather sharply.
‘I always think women who write books sound rather formidable.’
‘You’d prefer them to be stupid and feminine? To think men are wonderful?’
‘Well, every man likes to be thought wonderful. A woman need not necessarily be stupid to admire a man.’
Prudence thought a little sadly of her admiration for Arthur Grampian, now perhaps in the past. She could not pretend that she really admired Fabian in quite the same way. But when the wine came, golden and delicious, her heart warmed towards him and by the time they were drinking black coffee and brandy she felt that perhaps she really did admire Fabian. After all, what was a brilliant mind and some rather dull books that nobody could be expected to read? Not so very much really when compared with curly hair, fine eyes and good features.