by Barbara Pym
‘It is nice to be home, just the three of us,’ she said, as they sat down to their dish of chops with tomatoes, runner beans and mashed potatoes.
‘Oh, Mother, you always say that after a holiday,’ said Flora impatiently.
‘Do I, darling? Yes, I suppose I’m getting to the age when one doesn’t realise how often one says the same thing and doesn’t really care,’ said Jane complacently. ‘I suppose it’s one of the compensations of growing older.’
‘I can hear somebody coming to the door,’ said Flora. ‘I suppose I’d better go and see who it is. Mrs. Glaze will have gone by now.’
The bell rang and she opened the door to find Mr. Oliver on the doorstep.
‘Good evening, Miss Cleveland,’ he said. ‘I wonder if I could see the vicar for a moment?’
However could I have thought him interesting? Flora asked herself, ashamed at her lack of taste rather than her fickleness. That thin face, like some underfed animal, the fair hair with a curly bit in front … forgotten were the exquisite Evensongs when his face had appeared so spiritual in the dim light. Oh, Paul, darling Paul, she thought, as she showed Mr. Oliver into the study, how was she going to bear the weeks until Oxford term began and she would meet him again after a lecture outside the School of Geography?
‘I hope things are going well at the Bank?’ she asked formally.
‘Yes, thank you, Miss Cleveland. I shall be taking my holiday soon.’
‘In October? That seems rather late. I do hope you will get some good weather. I’ll tell my father you’re here.’
‘I suppose you put him in the study,’ said Jane as Flora came back into the room. ‘What a pity we can’t all hear what he has to say.’
Nicholas left the room and Jane and Flora began to clear the table.
‘I can’t hear raised angry voices/ said Jane regretfully. ‘Mr. Oliver seems to be very subdued tonight. I wonder what he can have called about? It must be something rather important if it has to be discussed when we have been back from our holiday barely an hour.’
‘They seem to be coming out of the study now,’ said Flora. ‘It hasn’t taken long, whatever it was.’
Jane hurried out into the hall. ‘Good evening, Mr. Oliver,’ she said. ‘I hope you are well?’
‘Very well, thank you, Mrs. Cleveland; and I hope you have had a good holiday.’
Jane thanked him and waited hopefully.
‘I have just been telling the vicar that I am afraid I shan’t be seeing so much of you in the future.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. Are you leaving the district?’
‘Well, not exactly that, Mrs. Cleveland. Not to put too fine a point on it, I have joined Father Lomax’s congregation.’
‘Oh.’ Jane hardly knew whether to express regret or to congratulate him. One got the idea that he had somehow been promoted. Friend, go up higher, she thought.
‘I have been going to the services there for some months, off and on, you know,’ declared Mr. Oliver. ‘And I find the form of the service, the ritual, you know, really more to my liking, with all due respect to you and the vicar.’
‘Oh, I quite see,’ said Jane sympathetically.
‘And then there has been a certain amount of friction on some matters, as you may well be aware,’ he continued.
‘Yes, of course. That evening I found you all in the choir vestry…’
‘Of course, Mr. Mortlake has his point of view, but things can’t stand still. Life isn’t what it was fifty years ago.’
‘No, of course not,’ said Jane in a rather puzzled tone. ‘But you will miss reading the Lessons, won’t you?’
Mr. Oliver smiled in a rather superior way. ‘Well, Mrs. Cleveland, I am fortunate enough to have found a little niche waiting for me at St. Stephen’s. The post of thurifer has fallen vacant and I have been asked to fill it. The gentleman who used to do it has embraced the Roman Faith.’
‘Well I never,’ said Jane. ‘You will be quite busy, then.’
‘Yes, Mrs. Cleveland. There will be the Sung Mass at eleven and Solemn Evensong at half-past six, and sometimes a Sung Mass during the week, on Days of Obligation, you know.’
‘We must all come and see you swinging the censer,’ Jane began before she realised that it would hardly be practicable. ‘Good night,’ she said quickly and hurried back into the dining-room, where Nicholas stood rather disconsolate, looking down at the chop-bones now congealed in their fat.
‘Oh, dear, I feel I have failed there,’ he said.
‘Darling, you have done no such thing,’ said Jane warmly. ‘You can’t help it if he quarrelled with Mr. Mortlake and Mr. Whiting and likes incense and all that sort of thing.’
‘What was that you said about finding them all in the choir vestry one evening?’ Nicholas asked.
‘I just happened to be passing and heard them all squabbling in there. So I went in to see if there was anything I could do.’
‘My poor Jane,’ — he put his arm around her shoulders and they gazed down together at the remains of their supper — ‘what can any of us do with these people?’
‘We can only go blundering along in that state of life unto which it shall please God to call us,’ said Jane. ‘I was going to be such a splendid clergyman’s wife when I married you, but somehow it hasn’t turned out like The Daisy Chain or The Last Chronicles of Barset.’
‘How you would have stood by me if I had been accused of stealing a cheque,’ said Nicholas. ‘I can just imagine you! Oh, now who is this coming to the door? Quite a crowd of people. Do you remember our first evening here and how you thought a crowd of parishioners ought to be coming up to the door to welcome us?’
‘And nobody came except Mrs. Glaze with a parcel of liver for our supper!’ Jane laughed. ‘Well, now I can’t complain. It seems to be Miss Doggett with Jessie and Fabian. I will go and ask Flora to make some coffee.’
‘Ah, how nice it is to have you back,’ said Miss Doggett, advancing into the room with her hand outstretched in welcome.
‘Mr. Boultbee seems to have done us a good turn,’ said Nicholas. ‘I gather his sermons were not much liked.’
‘No; we got very tired of Africa and I didn’t feel that what he told us rang quite true. He said that one African chief had had a thousand wives. I found that a little difficult to believe.’
‘Well, we know what men are,’ said Jane casually, surprised that Miss Doggett, with her insistence on men only wanting one thing, should have found it difficult to believe.
‘Oh, come now,’ protested Fabian, for she seemed to have glanced in his direction. ‘And in any case, it was in the olden days, before Mr. Boultbee got to work there.’
At this point Flora brought in the coffee, and Jane began to pour it out rather carelessly.
‘Jessie and I were thinking that we might as well get married as soon as conveniently possible,’ said Fabian. ‘After all, we are neither of us very young.’
‘I can arrange that for you at any time,’ said Nicholas. ‘You know about banns and licences and that kind of thing, I imagine?’
‘Nicholas usually gives a talk to young couples before they marry,’ said Jane hopefully. ‘But perhaps it will hardly be necessary in this case.’
‘He might just take Fabian aside,’ said Jessie.
Nicholas began to talk to them about arrangements, and Miss Doggett said to Jane in a low voice, ‘He has at last decided to do something about a stone for poor Constance’s grave.’
‘I’m very glad to hear it! What is it to be like?’
‘Something quite plain and dignified. He thought Cornish granite, with a suitable inscription. They spent their honeymoon in Cornwall, you know.’
‘Stay for me there; I will not fail
To meet thee in that hollow vale.
And think not much of my delay;
I am already on the way …’
quoted Jane softly. ‘What a good thing there is no marriage or giving in marriage in the after-life; it will cert
ainly help to smooth things out. Is Jessie to wear a white dress?’
‘No; we thought white would hardly be suitable. Something in a soft blue or dove grey, we thought, with a small hat; and a spray of flowers, not a bouquet.’
‘Brides over thirty shouldn’t wear white,’ said Jessie, who had now joined them.
‘Well, they may have a perfect right to,’ said Jane.
‘A woman over thirty might not like you to think that,’ said Jessie quickly. ‘There can be something shameful about flaunting one’s lack of experience.’
Jane, as a clergyman’s wife, hardly knew how to answer this. Also, she was remembering Mrs. Glaze’s hint that Jessie might have ‘stooped to ways Miss Bates wouldn’t have dreamed of’.
It was a subject best left alone, especially with Flora in the room.
Before they went, Fabian managed to manoeuvre Jane into the conservatory leading out of the drawing-room.
‘I had to have a word with you,’ he said. ‘How is she, my poor Prudence?’
‘Well, at the moment she seems to be on holiday in Spain with somebody called Geoffrey,’ said Jane sharply.
‘Oh, really?’ Fabian looked decidedly crestfallen. ‘Can she have forgotten so soon?’
‘I expect so. Haven’t you?’
‘I — forget? My dear Jane …’ He put one hand up to his brow with a characteristic gesture, while his other hand seemed to wander along the slatted wooden shelves of the conservatory, with the flower-pots full of old used earth and dried-up bulbs with withered leaves, until it came to rest on what felt like a piece of statuary. He looked down in surprise at feeling his hand touch stone, and started at seeing the headless body of a dwarf which had once stood in the rockery in the front garden.
‘I can’t understand Mrs. Pritchard having that thing in her garden,’ said Jane. ‘She always struck me as being a person of taste, if nothing else. The head is here,’ she said rather brightly, lifting it up by its little beard and holding it out towards Fabian.
‘Don’t.’ He shuddered as if she had indeed offered it to him and he were rejecting it. ‘Life’s such a muddle, isn’t it? How can we ever hope to do the right thing?’
Jane wanted to agree and to offer him the broken dwarf, perhaps for Constance’s grave, as a kind of comment on the futility of earthly love, but instead she said gently, ‘You must make Jessie happy. That will be the right thing for you now.’
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ he sighed.
‘What plot are you two hatching?’ said Miss Doggett’s voice. ‘Come, it’s nearly dark, and we shall need Fabian to escort us home.’
‘Rather a sad little procession,’ said Jane, hearing the last scrunching of their footsteps on the gravel. ‘Fabian being led away captive by the women.’
‘Like Samson Agonistes,’ observed Flora.
‘Oh, dark, dark …’ said Jane, laughing rather wildly. ‘I told him that Prudence had forgotten him. I wonder if she has?’
Chapter Twenty-Three
IT APPEARED that Prudence had forgotten Fabian to the same extent as she had forgotten Philip, Henry, Laurence and the others. That is to say, he had been given a place in the shrine of her past loves; the urn containing his ashes had been ceremonially deposited in the niche where it would always remain. Philip, Henry, Laurence, Peter, Fabian and who could tell how many others there might be?
‘I feel really that it may have happened for the best,’ she said to Jane as they lunched again at the vegetarian restaurant.
‘Well, yes; things do turn out that way really,’ said Jane, glancing round the room, and seeing what looked like the same people eating the same food as before. She remembered rather sadly that she had not lunched here with Prudence since she had first had the idea of bringing her and Fabian together. Here were the same bearded and foreign gentlemen, and the same woman, dressed in orange and wearing heavy silver jewellery, who looked as if she might have been somebody’s mistress in the nineteen-twenties. At the idea of being somebody’s mistress, Jane became embarrassed, and began scrabbling about rather violently in her shredded cabbage salad.
‘I wonder if one ever finds a caterpillar or anything like that,’ she said in a loud, nervous tone.
Prudence did not answer, so Jane went on, still in the same tone, ‘Now tell me, who is this Geoffrey? You mentioned him in your letter, but I’d never heard of him before.’
‘Hush, Jane. Don’t talk so loud. He’s a young man who works for Arthur Grampian. I’ve known him for quite a long time.
He was very kind to me when Fabian … you know … and then we happened to meet on holiday.’
‘And do you like him?’ asked Jane, lowering her voice and trying not to sound at all eager or interested.
‘Well, yes, in a way,’ Prudence hesitated. ‘We get on quite well together. It was pleasant in Spain. I suppose it’s the attraction of opposites really. But of course it wouldn’t do at all.’
‘Why wouldn’t it?’ asked Jane bluntly.
‘Everything would be spoilt if anything came of it,’ said Prudence seriously. ‘Don’t you see what I mean? That’s almost the best thing about it.’ Jane felt very humble and inexperienced before such subtleties.
‘Do you mean it’s a kind of negative relationship like you once had with Arthur Grampian?’ she asked, trying hard to appear intelligent and understanding.
‘Oh, there’s nothing negative about it. Quite the reverse! We shall probably hurt each other very much before it’s finished, but we’re doomed really.’ There was a smile on Prudence’s face as she said these words, for the experience of being in love with such an ordinary young man as Geoffrey Manifold was altogether new and delightful to her.
‘Therefore the Love which us doth join
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the Conjunction of the Mind,
And Opposition of the Stars’
said Jane. ‘Is that it, perhaps?’ How much easier it was when one could find a quotation to light up the way; even Prudence seemed satisfied with Marvell’s summing-up of the situation.
As they approached the building where Prudence’s office was, Jane noticed a thin, dark young man wearing a raincoat standing in the doorway, and Prudence introduced him. And so Jane shook hands with Geoffrey as she had shaken hands with Arthur some months ago, and was amazed as she had been then at the wonder of love. What object could Fate possibly have in enviously debarring love between Prudence and such an ordinary and colourless young man as this appeared to be? But of course, she remembered, that was why women were so wonderful; it was their love and imagination that transformed these unremarkable beings. For most men, when one came to think of it, were undistinguished to look at, if not postively ugly. Fabian was an exception, and perhaps love affairs with handsome men tended to be less stable because so much less sympathy and imagination were needed on the woman’s part?
But there was no opportunity to say any of this to Prudence, and soon she had left her turning to Geoffrey with every appearance of pleasure. Must it not be rather depressing to embark on a love affair that one knew to be doomed from the start? And yet, Jane supposed, people were doing it all the time, plunging boldly in with no thought of future misery.
She stood by a bus-stop, wondering what she should do. Then she remembered that there was a religious bookshop nearby, and it seemed very suitable that she should go into it and choose presents for the Confirmation candidates. Little holy books, she thought vaguely, stopping by a table and taking up what appeared to be a manual of questions and answers about points of ceremonial.
‘Why do the Psalms end with a pneuma?’ she read, wondering what it could mean and pondering on the answer. Her hands moved over to another pile and she found herself among books about Confession, the Answer to Rome and the mysteries of the Alcuin Society.
‘Can I help you, madam?’ asked an assistant, a kindly, grey-haired woman.
One’s life followed a kind of pattern, with the same things cropping up again and again, but
it seemed to Jane, floundering about among the books, that the question was not one. that could be lightly dismissed now. ‘No; thank you. I was just looking round,’ was what one usually said. Just looking round the Anglican Church, from one extreme to the other, perhaps climbing higher and higher, peeping over the top to have a look at Rome on the other side, and then quickly drawing back.
‘Thank you. I wanted some little books suitable for Confirmation candidates,’ said Jane in a surprisingly firm and thoughtful tone. ‘Not too High, you know.’
‘I understand, madam,’ said the assistant. ‘I think you will probably find what you want on this table.’
Jane set to work with concentration and in ten minutes had chosen a number of little books and even a few early Christmas cards.
By now it was almost tea-time, but Jane, in her newly-acquired virtue, did not feel disposed to linger in Town, listening to the music at a Corner House or eating expensive cakes in the restaurant of one of the big stores. She would go without tea, as a kind of penance for all the times she had failed as a vicar’s wife. Also, by catching a train now, she would avoid the rush-hour.
But at the junction where she had to change she found that she had some minutes to wait for a train, and decided that she had perhaps earned a cup of railway station tea and a bun.
She stood waiting in the orderly little queue, contemplating the window at the back of the counter, which had stained-glass panels showing a design of grapes. They imagined us drinking wine here, she thought, and longed to share her thought with somebody. She turned away to carry her cup to a table and there behind her in the queue was Edward Lyall.
‘They imagined us drinking wine here,’ she said, pointing to the grapes on the window. ‘I was thinking of that when I saw you and wondered if anybody else had ever noticed it.’