Quartet in Autumn

by Barbara Pym

  Letty did her shopping on the way home, at a small self-service store run by Uganda Asians that stayed open till eight o’clock in the evening. She bought only tinned or packaged foods, feeling a doubt about anything exposed to the air. In her comfortable bed-sitting room, which had a washbasin behind a screen and a small electric cooker, she prepared a meal of rice with the remains of a chicken, then settled herself to listen to the wireless and continue working on a tapestry chair-seat she was making.

  The house belonged to an elderly woman who took in, as the most refined type of lodgers, two others like herself and a Hungarian refugee, who had more or less adapted herself to the ways of the house—ones radio considerately turned down and the bathroom left as one would wish to find it. It was a comfortable enough life, if a little sterile, perhaps even deprived. But deprivation implied once having had something to be deprived of, like Marcia’s breast, to give a practical example, and Letty had never really had anything much. Yet, she sometimes wondered, might not the experience of ‘not having’ be regarded as something with its own validity?

  There was a play on the radio that evening, going backwards into the life of an old woman. It reminded Letty of the woman she had seen slumped on the seat on the Underground platform that morning, as if one might visualize her this time last year, say, then five years ago, ten years, twenty, thirty, even forty. But this kind of going back was hardly for Letty herself, who lived very much in the present, holding neatly and firmly on to life, coping as best she could with whatever it had to offer, little though that might be. Her curriculum vitae presented the kind of reading of so many like herself born before 1914, the only child of middle-class parents. She had arrived in London in the late twenties to take a secretarial course, staying in a working-girls’ hostel where she had met her friend Marjorie, the only person she still kept up with from those far-off days. Like most girls of her generation and upbringing she had expected to marry, and when the war came there were great opportunities for girls to get a man or form an attachment, even with a married man, but Marjorie had been the one to marry, leaving Letty in her usual position of trailing behind her friend. By the end of the war Letty was over thirty and Marjorie had given up hope for her. Letty had never had much hope anyway. The immediate post-war years were fixed in her memory by the clothes she had worn on particular dates—the New Look brought in by Dior in 1947, the comfortable elegance of the fifties, and in the early sixties the horror of the mini-skirt, such a cruel fashion for those no longer young. And only the other day Letty had walked past the building in Bloomsbury where she and Marjorie had worked in the thirties—it had been on the first floor of a Georgian house—and found herself facing a concrete structure. Rather like the building where she now worked with the other three, but of course she never noticed that.

  That night, as if inspired by the radio play, Letty had a dream. She was back at the time of the Silver Jubilee, staying with Marjorie and her fiancé Brian in the country cottage they had bought for £300. There was a friend of Brian’s there too, intended for Letty, a handsome but dull young man called Stephen. On the Saturday evening they went to the pub and sat in the quiet musty saloon bar with its mahogany furniture and stuffed fish. It felt damp as if nobody ever used it, as indeed nobody did except timid visitors like themselves. They all had beer, though the girls didn’t like it much and it seemed to have no noticeable ‘effect’ on them, except to make them wonder whether there was a ladies’ cloakroom in such a primitive place. On the other side, in the public bar, there was light and colour and noise, but they, the four young people, were outside it all. On Sunday they went to Matins at the village church. There were bird-droppings on the altar and the vicar appealed for donations towards the repair of the roof. In 1970 the church was closed as redundant and the building was eventually pulled down as being of no architectural or historical interest. In Letty’s dream she was lying in the long grass with Stephen, or somebody vaguely like him, in that hot summer of 1935. He was very near to her, but nothing happened. She did not know what had become of Stephen but Marjorie was a widow now, as alone as Letty in her bedsitter. All gone, that time, those people … Letty woke up and lay for some time meditating on the strangeness of life, slipping away like this.

  Three

  MARCIA ENTERED HER house, that house which, in the estate agents’ language, was on its way to becoming a ‘twenty-thousand semi’. Houses in that road were already reaching nearly that figure but Marcia’s house was not quite like the others. From the outside it looked ordinary enough, with stained-glass panels in the front door, two large bow windows and a smaller window over the porch. The outside paint was a conventional dark green and cream, now in need of re-doing, and the net curtains at the windows could have done with a wash, some thought. But Miss Ivory went out to work and she was not the sort of person you could offer to help. Her neighbours in the more fashionably done-up houses on either side were newcomers. They sometimes passed the time of day with her but Marcia had not been into their houses nor they into hers.

  Inside, the house was dark with brown-painted doors kept mysteriously closed. Dust lay everywhere. Marcia went straight through to the kitchen where she deposited her shopping bag on the newspaper-covered table. She knew that she ought to start getting a meal. The almoner, or medical social worker as they called it now, at the hospital had said how important it was for the working woman to have a good meal when she came home in the evening, but all Marcia did was to fill the kettle for a cup of tea. Her energies had already been spent that morning preparing her lunch to eat in the office. She could not think of any other kind of food now though she might have a biscuit with her tea ‘Biscuits keep you going,’ they used to say in the war, but she had never had a big appetite. She had always been thin and since being in hospital she had become even thinner. Her clothes hung loosely on her but she didn’t really care how she looked, not like Letty who was always buying new things and worried if she couldn’t get a cardigan in the exact shade to match something.

  Suddenly a bell rang, shrill and peremptory. Marcia was as if frozen into her chair. She never had visitors and nobody ever called. Who could it be, and in the evening? The bell rang again and she got up and went into the front room where from a side window she could see who was standing on the doorstep.

  It was a young woman, swinging a bunch of car keys in her hand. Marcia could see a small blue car parked on the opposite side of the road. Reluctantly she opened the door.

  ‘Ah, Miss Ivory, isn’t it? I’m Janice Brabner.’

  She had a rather pink, open face. Young women nowadays didn’t seem to bother much with make-up and even Marcia could see that some would have been improved by it.

  ‘Some of us at the Centre have been worrying about the lonely ones.’

  Could she really have prepared that sentence, for this was what came out. Marcia gave her no encouragement.

  ‘I mean, the people who live alone.’

  ‘Did you think I might be found dead? Was that the idea?’

  ‘Oh, Miss Ivory, of course we had nothing like that in mind!’

  It seemed to be almost an occasion for laughter but Janice Brabner was sure this couldn’t be right. Doing voluntary work at the Centre wasn’t exactly funny even if one smiled sometimes at the people one visited, for some of them were rather sweet. But they could be tragic. Miss Ivory, for instance, in what category should she be placed? It was known that her mother had died some years ago, that she now lived alone and that she had recently left hospital after a major operation. The medical social worker, whom Janice knew, had dropped a hint, suggested that it might be as well to keep an eye on her. It was true that she went out to work but nobody seemed to know much about her — she didn’t speak to neighbours and nobody had ever been into her house. She did not invite Janice to come in now and they continued their conversation on the doorstep. Of course one couldn’t force one’s way into people’s houses, but surely a lonely person like Miss Ivory would welcome a friend
ly advance and a chat?

  ‘We just wondered,’ Janice went on, realizing the need for tact and caution, as she had been instructed, ‘if you’d like to come along to a get-together at the Centre one evening. It’s next to the town hall, you know.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Marcia firmly. ‘I go out to work and my evenings are fully occupied.’

  But there was no television aerial on the house, so what did she do in the evenings? Janice wondered. Still, she had done all she could, sown a seed, perhaps; that was the main thing.

  No sooner was the door closed than Marcia went up to the front bedroom to watch Janice Brabner go. She saw her unlock her car and then sit in it with a list in her hand which she appeared to be consulting. Then she drove away.

  Marcia turned back into the room where her mother had died. It had been left almost untouched since then. Of course the body had been removed and buried, all that was necessary in that way had been done and the proper obsequies performed, but after that Marcia had lacked the energy to rearrange the furniture and Mrs Williams, the woman who came in to clean at that time, had not encouraged her. ‘You want to remember things as they were, not go changing them,’ she had said. She did not care for moving furniture, anyway. The bed had become the place where the cat Snowy slept until his death, when the black part of his fur had taken on a brownish tinge and his body had become light, until one day, in the fullness of time, he had ceased to breathe, a peaceful end. He was twenty years old, one hundred and forty in human terms. ‘You wouldn’t want to be that old,’ Mrs Williams had said, as if one had the choice or could do anything about it. After Snowy’s death and burial in the garden, Mrs Williams had left, the work having become too much for her, and Marcia made no pretence of doing anything to the room On the bed cover there was still an old fur ball, brought up by Snowy in his last days, now dried up like some ancient mummified relic of long ago.

  ‘Miss Ivory has funny staring eyes. And she obviously didn’t want to ask me in,’ said Janice, back at the Centre, basking now in the relief of an awkward duty done.

  ‘Oh, you mustn’t let that put you off,’ said an older and more experienced colleague. ‘A lot of them seem like that at first, but the contact has been made, that’s the chief thing. And that’s what we have to do — make contact, by force, if necessary. Believe me, it can be most rewarding.’

  Janice wondered about this, but said nothing.

  Over the other side of the common Edwin, on an evening walk, was studying a church noticeboard. It offered nothing but the barest essentials — Holy Communion at eight on Sundays, Matins at eleven, no weekday services — and when he turned the handle of the door he found that it was locked. A pity, but that was the way things were now — it wasn’t safe to leave a church open, what with thefts and vandalism With a slight feeling of frustration he turned away and began walking along the road until he reached a side turning which seemed to go in the direction he wanted. Then he read the name of the road and realized that it was where Marcia lived and he walked on quickly. It would be embarrassing to meet her, even to walk past her house, he felt. They were both, in a sense, lonely people but neither would have expected to meet the other outside office hours. Any kind of encounter would fill her with a dismay equal to his. In any case, Edwin always felt that Norman was more Marcia’s friend than he was, more her cup of tea if anyone was. Was he, Edwin, then Letty’s friend? Well, hardly that. Something in the idea made him smile and he walked away along the common, a tall, smiling figure carrying a raincoat, although it was a warm evening and the sky was cloudless.

  Four

  WITH THE COMING of spring, merging into the sunshine of early May, there was a subtle change in the lunchtime occupations of the four in the office. Edwin went on his usual church crawl, for that season of the year was stiff with festivals and the churches in the area had a rich and varied programme to offer, but he also frequented gardening shops and called at travel agents and collected brochures with the possibility of arranging a late holiday, everyone else having booked theirs in January. Norman plucked up his courage to visit the dentist and arrived at the office feeling very sorry for himself, and with a Thermos of soup which was all he could manage for his lunch.

  Marcia forsook the public library and wandered into a shop full of loud music, merchandise from foreign parts and badly finished eastern-style garments for both sexes. She fingered the crude pottery and the garish flimsy blouses and skirts but did not buy anything. The almost deafening pop music confused her and she felt that people were staring at her. She went out into the sunshine, dazed and bewildered. Then she was roused into alertness by the clang of an ambulance bell and she found herself joining a knot of people gathered round a slumped figure on the pavement. Somebody had collapsed with a coronary, a window cleaner had slipped and fallen—the air was full of excited, confused murmurings, but nobody quite knew what had happened Marcia attached herself to two women and tried to find out, but all they could say was, “Poor soul, doesn’t he look terrible—what a shock for his wife.’ Her thoughts went back to her own stay in hospital and the excitement when an ambulance came in, for she had been in a ground-floor ward very near Casualty. It was rather disappointing now to see the man on the pavement attempting to get up, but the ambulance men restrained him and bundled him in and Marcia, a smile on her lips, went back to the office.

  Norman and Letty both felt the pull of the open air, Norman to take his mind off his teeth, and Letty because she had the slightly obsessive or cranky idea that one ought to get a walk of some kind every day. So they both made their way, separately and unaware of each other, to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the nearest open space to the office.

  Norman gravitated towards the girls playing netball and sat down uneasily. He could not analyse the impulse that had brought him there, an angry little man whose teeth hurt—angry at the older men who, like himself, formed the majority of the spectators round the netball pitch, angry at the semi-nudity of the long-haired boys and girls lying on the grass, angry at the people sitting on seats eating sandwiches or sucking ice lollies and cornets and throwing the remains on the ground. As he watched the netball girls, leaping and cavorting in their play, the word ‘lechery’ came into his head and something about ‘grinning like a dog’, a phrase in the psalms, was it; then he thought of the way some dogs did appear to grin, their tongues lolling out. After a few minutes’ watching he got up and made his way back to the office, dissatisfied with life. Only the sight of a wrecked motor car, with one side all bashed in, being towed up Kingsway by a breakdown van, gave him the kind of lift Marcia had experienced on hearing the bell of the ambulance, but then he remembered that an abandoned car had been parked outside the house where he lived for some days, and the police or the council ought to do something about it, and that made him angry again.

  Letty, with her feelings on the subject of exercise and fresh air, was prepared to enjoy these amenities.

  One impulse from a vernal wood

  May teach you more of man,

  Of moral evil and of good,

  Than all the sages can.

  She knew all about that, even if she was not prepared to go too deeply into the implications of those lines. She walked briskly and did not think of sitting down, for most of the seats were occupied and those that had space contained obvious eccentrics, muttering to themselves and eating strange things. It was better to go on walking, though it was hot and she would have liked a rest. Letty was not angry when she saw the young people kissing and cuddling on the grass, even if such behaviour was different from that of forty years ago when she was a girl. But was it so different? Or could it be that she had not noticed such things in those days? She passed a building concerned with Cancer Research and she thought of Marcia. Even Marcia had once hinted at something in her own life, long ago. No doubt everybody had once had something in their lives? Certainly it was the kind of thing people liked to imply, making one suspect that a good deal was being made out of almost nothing.<
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  Back in the office the talk was about holidays. Edwin’s brochures advertising impossible delights had been spread out on his table for some weeks now, but it was known that he never did more than leaf through their pages, for his annual holiday was invariably spent with his daughter and her family.

  ‘Greece,’ said Norman, taking up a booklet with a picture of the Acropolis on the cover. ‘I’ve always had a fancy to go there.’

  Marcia looked up, startled. The others were surprised too but did not show it. What was this? What new aspect of Norman’s life, what never before expressed longing was to be revealed? His holidays, always taken in England, were usually characterized by disaster.

  ‘They say it’s the wonderful light, a special quality it has,’ said Letty, repeating something she had once heard or read. ‘And the wine-dark sea—isn’t that how it’s described?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t care what colour the sea is,’ said Norman. ‘It’s the swimming that would attract me.’

  ‘You mean skin diving and that sort of thing?’ said Edwin in astonishment.

  ‘Why not?’ Norman was defiant. ‘Lots of people do it, you know. They find buried treasure and that.’

  Edwin began to laugh. ‘It would be a bit different from that holiday of yours last year,’ he joked. Norman had been on a coach trip to the West Country when, for some unspecified reason, his only comment had been ‘Never again.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think you found much buried treasure there.’

  ‘I can never understand why people have to leave their homes the way they do,’ said Marcia. ‘When you’re older you don’t really need holidays.’ If Norman really had these secret longings it ought to be enough for him to go and sit in the British Museum at lunchtime, contemplating the riches of vanished civilizations, she felt. Marcia herself never went away; her absences from the office were spent in mysterious ploys of her own.