by Barbara Pym
Next day she returned to the office, but when they asked her how she had spent her leave she was evasive, only saying that the weather had been good and she’d had a nice break, which was what people always said.
The first day of Norman’s leave was brilliantly sunny, the kind of day for going to the country or the seaside or for walking hand in hand with a lover in Kew Gardens.
None of these ideas occurred to Norman when he woke up and realized that he did not have to go to the office that day. As there was plenty of time, he decided to have a cooked breakfast—bacon and eggs with all the trimmings, which for him meant tomatoes and fried bread—far more than his usual plate of cornflakes or All-Bran. And he would have it in his pyjamas and dressing gown, just like somebody in a Noel Coward play. If they could see me now! he thought, meaning Edwin, Letty and Marcia.
The dressing gown was a jazzy rayon satin, patterned with a design of maroon and ‘old gold’ geometrical shapes. Norman had bought it at a sale, thinking he might look good in it, that it might in some unspecified way ‘do’ something for him. He was willing to bet that Edwin had nothing like this, probably just an old plaid woollen thing that he’d had since school days. He was pretty sure that Letty would have something smart, frilly and all the rest of it, like the ladies he had seen when he’d visited Ken in hospital, but on Marcia’s dressing gown he did not like to speculate. In a curious way he found himself sheering away from her and turning his thoughts to something else. In any case a shout from his landlady—some complaint about the smell of frying—soon brought him back to earth again.
Most of Norman’s holiday was spent in this idle and profitless way. The truth was that he didn’t really know what to do with himself when he wasn’t working. In the last week he had to visit the dentist, to adjust his new plate and to practise eating with it. The dentist was a Yorkshireman and rather too jolly for Norman’s liking, and although he was National Health Norman had to fork out quite a lot of money for a considerable amount of discomfort. Thank you for nothing! he thought bitterly. When he was reasonably confident of being able to attempt something more than soup or macaroni cheese, Norman went back to work. He had a few days leave still in hand. “You never know when they might come in useful,’ he said, but he felt that those extra days would never be needed, but would accumulate like a pile of dead leaves drifting on to the pavement in autumn.
Six
LETTY WAS NOT altogether surprised to get the letter from Marjorie saying that she was going to marry David Lydell. So much can change in such a short time especially, it would appear, if one is living in a village, though Letty didn’t quite see why this should be so.
‘David and I found that we were just two lonely people with so much to give each other,’ Marjorie wrote.
Letty had not realized that her friend might have been lonely. Her life as a widow living in the country had always seemed so enviable, so full of trivial but absorbing doings.
‘The vicarage is so uncomfortable,’ the letter went on. There is a great deal to be done there. And would you believe it, the estate agent tells me that I can ask (and get!) £20,000 for the cottage! Of course you will realize that there is only one slight worry and that is you, dear old Letty. It will hardly be possible (and I don’t for a moment suppose you would wish it) for you to come and live with us at the vicarage when you retire. So it’s occurred to me that you might like to take a room at Holmhurst where I think there may well be a vacancy shortly (due to death, of course!), only you must let me know soon because…’ Here the letter went into further tedious detail, the upshot of it being that Marjorie could ‘get Letty in’ because she knew the woman who ran it. It was not by any means an old people’s home because of course only selected applicants would be accepted, on a personal recommendation…
Letty did not bother to read the last part of the letter very carefully. Marjorie went on with what seemed like girlish enthusiasm, but no doubt a woman in love, even if she is over sixty, feels no less rapturous than a girl of nineteen. Skimming over the final page, Letty learned that David was such a fine person; he had been so lonely and misunderstood in his last parish and some people in the village hadn’t been too kind. Finally, they were so much in love that the difference in their ages (‘I am of course some ten years older than he is’) didn’t make the slightest difference. Letty reflected that the difference must be nearer twenty years than ten but she was prepared to accept the fact of their love even if she could not understand it. Love was a mystery she had never experienced. As a young woman she had wanted to love, had felt that she ought to, but it had not come about. This lack in her was something she had grown used to and no longer thought about, but it was disconcerting, even a little shocking, to find that Marjorie was by no means beyond it.
Of course there was no question of her living at Holmhurst, a large red-brick mansion standing in wide lawns which she had often passed when she went to see Marjorie. She had once noticed an old woman with a lost expression peering through one of the surrounding hedges and that impression had remained with her. When her retirement day came, and it was not far off now, she would no doubt stay in her bed-sitting room for the time being. One could lead a very pleasant life in London—museums and art galleries, concerts and theatres—all those things that cultured people in the country were said to miss and crave for would be at Letty’s disposal Of course she would have to answer Marjories letter, to offer her congratulations (for surely that was the word) and to ease her conscience about the upsetting of the retirement plans, but not necessarily by return of post.
On her way home Letty noticed a barrow selling flowers near the Underground station. It occurred to her that she might buy a bunch for her landlady who had invited all the tenants to coffee that evening—not all-the-year-round chrysanthemums, but something small and unobtrusive like anemones or violets; but nothing of that sort was available and one could not buy the daisy-like flowers, dyed turquoise blue or red-ink pink, which were being offered as a bargain, so Letty walked on without buying anything. As she approached the house she was overtaken by Marya, the Hungarian who also lived there, carrying a bunch of the turquoise-dyed flowers that Letty had rejected.
‘So pretty,’ she said enthusiastically, ‘and only 10p. You remember, Miss Embrey has asked us to coffee, so I thought, one takes flowers.’
Letty now realized that Marya had got the better of her, as she often did, filling the bathroom with her dripping clothes and taking Letty’s Daily Telegraph in pretended mistake for her own lesser paper.
Miss Embrey lived on the ground floor and her three tenants—Letty, Marya and Miss Alice Spurgeon—came out of their rooms like animals emerging from burrows and descended the stairs at half past eight.
How aggressively nice and good her ‘things’ were, Letty thought, as she accepted a cup of coffee in Miss Embrey’s Crown Derby. And now, it appeared, she was taking herself and these nice things to a home for gentlewomen in the country, perhaps the very home that Letty had decided to reject.
‘My brother has arranged it all for me.’ Miss Embrey smiled as she gave them this information, perhaps because she realized that none of her tenants had a man to arrange things for her. They were all unmarried women and no man had ever been known to visit them, not even a relative.
‘Arthur has dealt with everything,’ Miss Embrey stressed, and this included the house which was to be—indeed had already been—sold, with the tenants in it, quite a usual practice.
‘And who is to be our new landlord?’ Miss Spurgeon was the first to put their thoughts into words.
‘A very nice gentleman,’ said Miss Embrey in her mildest manner. ‘He and his family will occupy the ground floor and basement.’
‘It is a large family?’ Marya asked.
‘I understand a near relative may be sharing the accommodation with him. It is good to know that the ties of blood and kinship are still respected in some parts of the world.’
This led Letty to ask tentatively wheth
er their new landlord was perhaps not English—a foreigner, if one could put it like that, and Miss Embrey was equally circumspect in her answer, implying that, in a manner of speaking, he was.
‘What is his name?’ Marya asked.
‘Mr Jacob Olatunde.’ Miss Embrey pronounced the syllables carefully, as if she had been practising them.
‘He is black, then?’ Again it was Marya, the Hungarian, who dared to ask the blunt question.
‘Certainly his skin is not what is usually regarded as white, but which of us, for example, could say that we were white?’ Miss Embrey looked round at her three tenants—Letty, with a pinkish skin, Marya, a sallow olive, Miss Spurgeon, parchment—all quite different. ‘As you know, I have lived in China, so these distinctions of skin colour mean very little to me. Mr Olatunde comes from Nigeria,’ she declared.
Miss Embrey sat back and folded her hands one over the other, those pale, useless hands exceptionally spotted with brown, and offered more coffee.
Only Marya, toadyish with her murmurs of ‘such delicious coffee’, accepted the offer. Miss Embrey smiled and poured her another cup. It was not the expensive blend of freshly ground beans that she would have offered to guests of her own choosing. Nor were the peculiar dyed flowers that Marya had pressed upon her the sort of decoration she would choose for her drawing room, so in a sense it was tit for tat.
‘That is clear, then?’ she declared, the chairman closing the meeting. ‘Mr Olatunde will be your landlord from the Michaelmas quarter day.’
Afterwards there was talk on the stairs as the tenants went back to their rooms.
‘We must remember that until very recently Nigeria was British,’ said Miss Spurgeon. It was pink on the map. In some old atlases it still is.’
Letty felt that with the way things were going nothing was pink on the map any more. That night, as she lay in bed finding it difficult to sleep, the whole of her life seemed to unroll before her like that of a drowning man … is said to do, she thought, for of course her experience did not extend to drowning and it was unlikely that it ever would. Death, when it came, would present itself in another guise, something more ‘suitable’ for a person like herself, for where would she ever be likely to be in danger of death by drowning?
‘It never rains but it pours,’ said Norman the next morning when Letty had told them in the office about the new development in her retirement plans. ‘First your friend getting married and now this—whatever next? There’ll be a third thing, just you wait.’
‘Yes, troubles do tend to come in threes, or so people say,’ Edwin remarked. There was of course an undeniable interest and even unadmitted pleasure in the contemplation of other people’s misfortunes, and for a moment Edwin basked in this, shaking his head and speculating on what the third disaster might be.
‘Don’t tell us you’re getting married too,’ said Norman jauntily. ‘That might be the third thing.’
Letty had to smile, as she was meant to, at such a fantastic suggestion. ‘No chance of that,’ she said. ‘But I can still go and live in the country if I want to. There’s a nice house in the village where I could get a room’
‘An old people’s home?’ Norman asked, quick as a flash.
‘Not exactly—you can have your own furniture there.’
‘An old people’s home where you can have your own furniture—your bits and pieces and treasures,’ Norman went on.
‘Of course you won’t necessarily have to leave your room in London,’ said Edwin. ‘The new landlord may be a very good man. A lot of splendid West Africans come to our church and they do very well in the sanctuary. They have a great love of ritual and pageantry.’
This was cold comfort to Letty, for it was these very qualities that she feared, the noise and exuberance, all those characteristics exemplified by the black girl in the office which were so different from her own.
‘Oh, she’ll find their way of life so different,’ said Norman, ‘the cooking smell and that. I know about bedsitters, believe me.’
Marcia had so far contributed nothing to the discussion for there was a fear in her mind, even if it was not a very strong one, that she might have to offer Letty a room in her house. After all, Letty had always been kind to her; she had once offered to make her a cup of tea before going home, and even though the offer had not been accepted it had not been forgotten. But this did not mean that Marcia was under any obligation to provide accommodation for Letty in her retirement For of course it would be impossible - she couldn’t have anybody else living in her house. Two women could never share the same kitchen, she told herself, forgetting for the moment that she never really used the kitchen except to boil a kettle or make a piece of toast. Then there would be the difficulty of the store cupboard where Marcia kept her collection of tinned foods, and the special and rather unusual arrangement she had about milk bottles, not to mention the use of the bathroom and the arrangement of personal washing—the difficulties were insuperable. Women alone had to make their own way in the world and no doubt Letty already knew this. And if she couldn’t cope there would be somebody like Janice Brabner coming round, asking personal questions, making stupid suggestions and inviting her to do things she didn’t want to do. It certainly wasn’t Marcia’s duty to offer a home to Letty, just because she had a house of her own and lived by herself. Indignation welled up inside her, and she asked herself, why should I? But there was no answer to this question because nobody asked it. Nobody had even thought of it, let alone Letty herself.
‘I’ll wait and see what happens,’ she said sensibly. ‘After all, one doesn’t want to go looking for new accommodation in August. It’s not a very good time.’
‘August is a wicked month,’ said Norman, who had seen the phrase somewhere.
Not wicked so much as awkward, Edwin thought August 15th—Feast of the Assumption, Solemn Mass 8 p.m. There might not be the full complement of servers, even with the splendid West Africans, and people were disinclined to attend an evening Mass at the end of a hot summer day. You’d have thought Rome would have chosen a more convenient time. But the Doctrine of the Assumption had been proclaimed about 1950, he believed, and church life in the Italy of twenty years ago was no doubt rather different from present-day practice in England in the seventies, even in a High Anglican church, where most of the population didn’t go to church anyway and those that did might well be away on holiday. Some people thought Father G. went rather too far—‘way out’—in observing some of these so-called obligations, but of course Edwin would be there this evening, among the two or three gathered together, and that was the main thing.
‘I may get on very well with Mr Olatunde,’ Letty was saying, in a bright, brave tone. I certainly shan’t do anything in a hurry.’
Seven
JANICE ALWAYS HAD to nerve herself before going to see Marcia again. She wasn’t like the other old ladies she visited, in fact the term ‘old lady’ didn’t seem to describe her, yet she wasn’t eccentric in a quaint or lovable way either. But there were always people like this—one had to regard it as a challenge, to try to get through to Marcia, to understand what went on in her mind.
Janice decided to choose Saturday morning rather than an evening for her next visit. People who worked were usually in on Saturday morning and with some, though not with Marcia, there might be the chance of a cup of coffee if one chose a suitable time. Still, she did open the door and that was something.
‘How have things been with you?’ Janice asked, stepping into the hall uninvited, but one must ‘gain access’, that was very important. ‘Have you been managing your housework all right?’ The dust on the hall table told its own story and the floor looked grey and gritty. Real nitty-gritty, Janice smiled at the fancy. But of course one mustn’t smile—how had she been coping? She wished Marcia would make some remark, however trite, instead of staring at her in that unnerving way. There was a shopping basket on a chair in the hall. This could be a talking point and Janice seized on it with relief.
‘I see you’ve been shopping.’
‘Yes. Saturday is my shopping day.’
This at least was encouraging, that she had a shopping day, just like any other woman. But what had she bought? Nothing but tinned food, it seemed. A word of tactful criticism and friendly advice was needed here. Fresh vegetables, even if only a cabbage, would be better than processed peas, and apples or oranges than tinned peaches. She ought to be able to afford suitable food, but perhaps she didn’t want to eat sensibly, that was the annoying and irritating thing about the people one went to see. But of course she had been in hospital; she was still ‘under the doctor, as the expression was. Didn’t he ever enquire into her diet?
‘I always like to have plenty of tinned foods in the house,’ Marcia said in a rather grand manner when Janice tried to suggest that fresh food would be better for her.
‘Oh, yes, of course. Tins are very useful, especially when you can’t get out or don’t want to go to the shops.’ No point in going on to somebody like Marcia who obviously wouldn’t be led or advised by anyone. Janice was getting to know that she was the kind of person one mustn’t interfere with but just keep an eye on. It would be better not to make any comment on the housework or lack of it. Some people didn’t like doing housework, anyway.