by Barbara Pym
‘Well, it’s a very satisfactory thing to have done,’ declared Miss Doggett as they stood outside Fabian’s gate in the cold night air. ‘I expect Mr. Driver is very relieved to have it settled. We shall be going in to-morrow to parcel up the things for the gentlewomen.’
‘Well, I suppose I must be getting home,’ said Jane. ‘Poor Mr. Driver — it seems unkind to leave him all alone this evening.’
‘Yes,’ Miss Doggett agreed. ‘One does feel that men need company more than women do. A woman has a thousand and one little tasks in the house, and then her knitting or sewing.’
Jane, who did not seem to have these things, made no answer.
‘A man can have his thoughts,’ suggested Miss Morrow.
‘Perhaps they do not care to be left alone with those,’ said Jane. ‘I often wonder when I leave Nicholas in his study.’
‘But surely, Mrs. Cleveland, a clergyman must be different. He would be thinking out a sermon or a letter to the Bishop.’
‘Yes, he ought to be doing things like that,’ said Jane vaguely. ‘Well, I mustn’t keep you talking in the cold. Good night.’ She wandered away in the direction of the vicarage, but when she reached the church she lingered a while by the churchyard wall, thinking of eighteenth-century poets and charnel-houses and exhumations by the light of flickering candles. Then she saw that there was a light in the choir vestry. No doubt Nicholas was doing something there; there was a meeting of some kind or perhaps a choir practice. Then she remembered that he was away from home that evening, at some ruridecanal conference, something that went beyond the narrow confines of the parish. Mrs. Glaze was to have left her something simple and womanish for her evening meal, the kind of thing that a person with no knowledge of cooking might heat up.
She crept up to the window where the light was and stood outside it for a moment. People seemed to be talking’ inside — men’s voices were raised in what sounded like an argument. Jane felt like some character in a novel by Mrs. Henry Wood. But she was the vicar’s wife and as such surely had a right of entry to the choir vestry. So she went boldly up to the door and opened it.
‘Good evening,’ she said. ‘I saw a light and heard voices so I thought I’d look in.’
‘Good evening, Mrs. Cleveland.’ Mr. Mortlake stood before her, obviously angry at being disturbed and looking rather terrible.
‘Good evening.’ Mr. Oliver stood up and looked a little taken aback. The third member of the party, Mrs. Glaze’s nephew, the butcher, said nothing. To-morrow, thought Jane, we may have to face each other over a tray full of offal or a few chops scattered between us, so perhaps silence is the best thing.
‘I could hear your voices from outside,’ she observed pleasantly. ‘Were you having an argument about something?’
‘We were discussing a little matter,’ said Mr. Oliver in a soothing tone; ‘nothing of any importance, really.’
‘There was some disagreement,’ said Mr. Mortlake.
‘A difference of opinion, you might say,’ ventured Mrs. Glaze’s nephew.
‘Well, I’m sure you ought not to disagree about things,’ said Jane. ‘After all, you are all members of the Parochial Church Council, and in a way I suppose you are on hallowed ground here.’
‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, Mrs. Cleveland,’ said Mr. Mortlake indignantly, so that she feared he must have misunderstood her.
‘Well, perhaps not,’Jane faltered, for she was not really certain whether the choir vestry was in fact regarded as part of the church, ‘but one doesn’t like to think of any unpleasantness here. I know my husband would be sorry to hear about it.’
‘I am not aware that there has been any unpleasantness,’ said Mr. Oliver in a hostile tone. ‘We all have our own opinions and are entitled to them, I suppose.’
‘Of course,’ said Jane. ‘Perhaps an outsider could help you to make up your minds, though.’
‘Well, Mrs. Cleveland, we can hardly regard you as that,’ said Mr. Mortlake unctuously. ‘But we cannot burden you with our little petty differences. It is a matter altogether out of your sphere.’
Really, thought Jane, it was like one of those rather tedious comic scenes in Shakespeare — Dogberry and Verges, perhaps — and therefore beyond her comprehension. She suddenly saw them all in Elizabethan costume and began to smile. ‘Oh, well, I suppose I shouldn’t interfere,’ she said. ‘We women can’t always do as much as we think we can.’ She had imagined herself mediating and bringing them together so that they all went off and settled their differences over a glass of beer. She turned to go, half hoping that they would call her back, but they watched her in silence, until Mr. Oliver bade her good night and the others followed his example.
When she got home she found that Mrs. Glaze had left her a shepherd’s pie, a dish she particularly disliked, to put in the oven. She waited hopefully for Nicholas’s return, but when he eventually came she found herself talking only about the afternoon they had spent at Fabian’s and not mentioning the episode in the choir vestry.
Chapter Twelve
IN HER EARLY DAYS Jane had once had a book of essays published and had somehow managed to become a member of a certain literary society of which she still sometimes attended meetings. These usually took place in the evenings, and were another excuse for Jane to absent herself from parish duties and to stay a night with Prudence at her flat. This particular meeting was to be a rather special one; it was the centenary of the birth of an author whose works Jane had never read, but who had died recently enough to be remembered by many persons still alive. This seemed a good reason for a literary society to be gathering together, as Jane explained to Nicholas, who had protested, though mildly enough, at her missing a meeting of the Parochial Church Council.
‘I shouldn’t do any good there,’ said Jane guiltily, remembering her intrusion into the choir vestry a few weeks ago of which she had told him nothing.
‘I should have thought the time could be more profitably spent in encouraging young authors rather than in celebrating dead ones,’ Nicholas declared.
‘But it does encourage them,’ Jane said. ‘They imagine that one day such a meeting might be held about them, and I suppose they wonder what will be remembered and hope it won’t be something they’d prefer to be forgotten.’
Nicholas sighed and did not argue further, for he knew it was likely to be as profitable as most arguments with his wife. His poor Jane, he must let her go where she wanted to.
The society met at a house with vaguely literary associations, for it was next door to what had once been the residence of one of the lesser Victorian poets, who is, nevertheless, quite well represented in the Oxford Book of Victorian Verse.
Jane entered the house with rather less awe than on her first visit many years ago, and made her way to a room on the first floor where the meetings were held. It was a pleasant room with the air of a drawing-room about it, though the rows of chairs were set a little too close together for comfort. Jane stood in the doorway, looking to see if anyone she knew had arrived, and soon noticed her old college friend, Barbara Bird (‘Miss Bird has her novels and her dogs,’ as Miss Birkinshaw put it), sitting in the back row. She was wearing a shaggy orange fox fur cape and smoking a cigarette which she waved to Jane, indicating a vacant chair at her side.
‘Freezing cold in here,’ she said. ‘Nice to see you, Jane.’
Jane sat down and looked around her. Here again, as when she went back to her old College, she found that she did not really look any more peculiar than the majority of the women present, most of whom were dressed without regard to any particular fashion. But it was a cold evening, so perhaps they had more excuse than the graduates who met in the summer. Jane herself was wearing her old fur lined boots and a tweed coat, underneath which an assortment of cardigans and scarves concealed a red woollen dress that Prudence had once given her.
‘Better gathering than usual,’ said Miss Bird; ‘quite a few critics.’ ‘
‘Such mild-looking m
en,’ said Jane, seeing one of them taking his seat rather near the front. ‘Perhaps they compensate themselves for their gentle appearance by dipping their pens in vitriol.’
Miss Bird then went on to tell Jane about what the critics had said about her latest novel, during which Jane’s thoughts wandered, ‘much incident and little wit’ she heard dimly, and then Miss Bird’s wheezy smoker’s laugh ending in a paroxysm of coughing.
Why was it, Jane wondered, that there were usually more women than men at these gatherings? Were men less gregarious, less willing to listen to a lecture or talk from one of their kind, or was it something really quite simple, such as the lack of alcoholic refreshment, that kept them away? Certainly there were some men who attended regularly, and each had his little circle of what were presumably admiring women. Jane had not so far attached herself to any group; she preferred to wander freely and observe others with what she hoped was detachment.
Tonight there were three speakers, an elderly female novelist, a distinguished critic and a beautiful young poet. Or perhaps he was not really so very young, Jane decided, though he was certainly beautiful, with brown eyes and a well-shaped nose. It is a refreshing thing for an ordinary-looking woman to look at a beautiful man occasionally and Jane gave herself up to contemplation, while the talk of the critic and the novelist flowed over her. The poet spoke last and had a soft, attractive voice which was totally inaudible at the back of the room. Miss Bird shamed Jane at one point by demanding in her gruff voice that he should speak up, which he did for the rest of his sentence, afterwards lapsing into soft inaudibility.
As the time drew on towards the usual hour for closing the meeting, Jane saw through a glass door at the back of the room the faces of two women anxiously peering. One of them was holding a coffee-pot. Perhaps they made their presence felt to the speakers in some way, for shortly after this the talk finished. There was a short, appreciative silence, a hasty vote of thanks and then the crowd proceeded to squeeze itself with as much dignity as possible through the narrow door to the room where the refreshments were to be served. Miss Bird again embarrassed Jane by pushing herself forward, knocking against a novelist of greater distinction than herself and seizing a plate of sandwiches and making off with it to a comparatively uncrowded corner.
‘Didn’t have any dinner,’ she explained.
‘Aren’t you Miss Barbara Bird?’ said a tall, youngish woman with large eyes and prominent teeth, addressing Jane.
‘No. I’m not Barbara Bird,’ said Jane. ‘You won’t ever have heard of me. This is Barbara Bird.’ She indicated her friend.
The woman then gave her name, which was unknown to both Jane and Miss Bird, and the titles of the two novels she had published, neither of which seemed familiar.
‘I think I’ve heard of them,’ said Jane kindly. ‘And now I shall look forward to reading them.’
‘Oh, they’re nothing, really,’ said the young woman.
‘One’s first two books are really rather more than that,’ said Miss Bird. ‘After the first two or three one must be unselfish and consider one’s public and one’s publisher. I have just finished my seventeenth — “Miss Bird’s readers know what to expect now and they will not be disappointed.” ‘
Jane thought the young woman looked a little cast down, so she said, ‘Oh, but I think one develops as one goes on. I feel sure I shouldn’t have had Barbara’s attitude if I had written more than one book. It was nothing you could possibly have read,’ she went on hastily, seeing the puzzled look on the woman’s face. ‘A book of essays on seventeenth-century poets about fifteen years ago. The kind of book you might put in the bathroom if you have books there — with Aubrey’s Brief Lives, and Wild Wales — really, I wonder why, now! It would be an interesting study, that.’
‘It’s been lovely meeting you and Miss Bird,’ said the young woman. ‘I was wondering, do you think I dare speak to him?’ She indicated the young or not-so-young poet, who was surrounded by a little group. ‘ — found his talk so wonderfully stimulating.’
‘Was it? We couldn’t hear a word at the back,’ barked Miss Bird.
‘But do you think I should dare to tell him how much I enjoyed it?’ the woman persisted.
‘Of course,’ said Jane sympathetically, realising how much she longed for a glance from those brown eyes. ‘I expect he is used to being admired.’
‘It was what he said really,’ protested the young woman, though rather faintly.
‘Yes, go on,’ said Barbara Bird, almost giving her a push. She and Jane turned and watched their former companion approach the poet, linger on the edge of the circle and then plunge boldly in with an apparently paralysing effect, for the others immediately broke away, leaving her alone with him.
‘The evening will have been made for her now,’ said Barbara Bird not unkindly.
‘Oh, yes,’ agreed Jane enthusiastically, stepping backwards into a critic and causing him to upset his coffee over himself.
‘I think it will be better to pretend I didn’t notice,’ she whispered to her friend.
‘Yes, by all means. Look, he is being attended to. A woman is mopping at his trousers with her handkerchief.’
‘This seems a good time to leave,’ said Jane. ‘The last impression will have been good — one woman rendering homage to a poet and another mopping spilt coffee from the trousers of a critic. Tilings like that aren’t as trivial as you might think.’
Rather to Jane’s surprise, their decision to leave seemed to break up the other little groups, and once outside in the dark square they were groups no more, but isolated individuals, each one going his or her own way. Barbara Bird took a taxi, the critic made his way to the Underground, the poet walked quickly away, while the young woman who had admired him, after a regretful glance after him, stood rather hopelessly at a request bus stop. Perhaps she had hoped that they might stroll to a pub together or continue their conversation — if such it had been — walking round the square. But once outside the magic circle the writers became their lonely selves, pondering on poems, observing their fellow men ruthlessly, putting people they knew into novels; no wonder they were without friends. Jane was reminded of Darley’s Siren Chorus and found herself thinking of the last verse:
In bowers of love men take their rest,
In loveless bowers we sigh alone;
With bosom-friends are others blest,
But we have none - but we have none.
The swans in snowy couples and the murmuring seal lying close to his sleek companion… . Jane almost forgot where she was supposed to be going and came to herself just as she reached the stop for the bus that would take her to Prudence’s flat. She enjoyed riding on the top of the bus, smoking a cigarette and looking into the lighted windows of the houses they passed, hoping that she might see something interesting. Mostly, however, the curtains were discreetly drawn, except occasionally in a kitchen where a man was seen filling a hot-water bottle (for his invalid wife or for himself? Jane wondered) or a woman laying the breakfast ready for the morning. Once they stopped outside a high, dark house and Jane found herself looking through the uncurtained window into an upper room, dimly lit, where a group of men and women were sitting round a large table covered by a dark green cloth. The glimpse was too fleeting to reveal whether it was a seance or a committee meeting. Would she ever pass that house again? Jane wondered. She doubted in any case whether she would have recognised it again.
Prudence’s flat was in the kind of block where Jane imagined people might be found dead, though she had never said this to Prudence herself; it seemed rather a macabre fancy and not one to be confided to an unmarried woman living alone. Prudence came to the door quickly in response to Jane’s ring; she was wearing a long garment of dark red velvet, a sort of rather grand dressing-gown, it seemed to Jane, who supposed it was a housecoat, the kind of thing to wear for an evening of gracious living. Not the sort of garment a vicar’s wife could be expected to possess.
‘Jane, how lovely to s
ee you! Was it a good meeting? Let me take your bag — then perhaps you’d like a drink or some tea or Ovaltine?’
Prudence prided herself on being a good hostess and tried to think of every tiling that a guest could possibly need. Jane, while appreciating this and benefiting from it, thought the flat a little too good to be true. Those light striped satin covers would ‘show the dirt’ — the pretty Regency couch was really rather uncomfortable and the whole place was so tidy that Jane felt out of place in it. Her old schoolboy’s camel-hair dressing-gown looked as unsuitable in Prudence’s spare-room as Prudence’s turquoise blue wool housecoat did at the vicarage.
‘You’ve got a new dressing-gown,’ she said, trying to keep out of her tone the accusing note that women are apt to use to each other, as if one had no business to spend one’s own money on nice clothes.
‘Yes, I have. Red seemed a good colour for winter and people seem to think it suits me. You’re quite sure you wouldn’t like whisky? I actually have some — but then I know you don’t really like it.’ Prudence was fussing a little, almost as if she were nervous.
‘No. Ovaltine for me, thanks,’ said Jane. ‘I hate the taste of whisky.’ Had she entertained Fabian in her red velvet dressing-gown? she wondered. ‘People’ seemed to think it suited her, and ‘people’ said in that way often meant a man.
‘Does Fabian like you in red?’ she asked bluntly.
‘Yes. I think so,’ said Prudence rather vaguely.
‘Has he seen you in that?’
‘I can’t remember really — he probably has.’
‘I suppose it’s all right in London,’ said Jane, thoughtfully stirring her Ovaltine.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, to entertain a man in one’s dressing-gown.’