by Barbara Pym
I let out a snort of laughter before I realized that Rodney's manner was serious, almost deferential, and that the question was being gravely considered. So James was one of those boring wine men, I thought.
'I think you've hit upon an admirable compromise here,' he said politely, though I believe you could almost get away with one of those outrageously sweet wines - perhaps even a Samos - the kind of thing that seems otherwise to have no possible raison d'être. Perhaps that is their raison d'être - to be drunk with gooseberries or rhubarb! If you like I will raise the matter with my own wine merchant - a man of considerable courage, even panache.'
'Thank you,' said Rodney seriously. 'We - my wife and mother, rather - are very fond of gooseberries. We often eat them in one form or another.'
'Perhaps they are more a woman's fruit,' said Sybil, 'like rhubarb. Women are prepared to take trouble with sour and difficult things, whereas men would hardly think it worthwhile.'
The men were silent for a moment, as if pondering how they might defend themselves or whether that, too, was hardly worthwhile. Rodney's next remark showed that they had evidently considered it not to be.
'And what have you done today, Wilmet?' he asked. 'I hope you've enjoyed your birthday? We have planned a theatre party for tomorrow evening,' he added, turning to James, as if he felt some explanation was necessary.
'I went to the lunchtime service at St Luke's,' I said, 'and Father Thames actually spoke to me. Then I went shopping.'
'Our parish church isn't really High enough for Wilmet's taste,' Rodney explained.
'I'm afraid it's all the same to me,' said James. 'I don't go to any kind of church.'
'Neither do I,' said Sybil. 'I thought out my position when I was twenty, and have found no reason since to change or modify the conclusions I came to then.'
I could not protest, for there was something about my mother-in-law's bleakly courageous agnosticism that I admired. It seemed to me rather brave for somebody nearing the end of life to hold such views. I wondered if she was ever afraid when she woke up in the small hours of the night and thought of death.
'Today, during the service,' I said, 'the telephone rang in the vestry, and that apparently was the answer to our prayers. We had been praying for a suitable assistant priest,' I explained.
'Yes, I suppose that is quite often done,' said James in a detached tone, 'but I imagine that certain practical measures must be taken as well - a word to the bishop or the patron of the living, perhaps even an advertisement in a suitable paper.'
'Ah yes, the Church Times?' said Sybil, 'with a few tempting titbits to encourage suitable applicants. Vestments - Western Use - large robed choir - opportunities for youth work. Though perhaps not the last - we know the kind of thing that sometimes happens : the lurid headlines in the gutter press or the small sad paragraph in the better papers.'
Rodney threw her a warning glance.
'How very distressing it all is,' Sybil went on, ignoring her son. 'One wonders how these poor creatures fare afterwards. I suppose they would be unfrocked - is that the procedure? One hopes there is some place where they can be received afterwards. It would be a noble work that, the rehabilitation of some of those fallen ones. Even a house of this moderate size could accommodate four or five ...'
Rodney and I looked at her apprehensively, for Sybil was a keen social worker.
'Surely, Mother, you aren't thinking of starting such a place here?' asked Rodney impatiently. 'And we do seem to have got rather off the point, don't we?'
'Perhaps we have strayed into a byway,' said James with a little laugh. 'I suppose the arrival of a new clergyman must be rather exciting for the ladies. Would he be a celibate?'
'I should think so,' I said. 'Neither Father Thames nor Father Bode is married.'
'Do they live together at the vicarage?'
'Well, it is called the clergy house,' I explained. 'It is a rather Gothic looking building in the same style as the church. On the door is a notice telling you not to ring unless on urgent business.'
'I should have thought all clergy business must be urgent,' said Rodney. 'They are concerned with the fundamental things, after all - birth, marriage, death, sin - though I suppose they are also besieged by idle women wanting to know about jumble and things like that.'
'Well, let us hope this new one will be up to standard,' said Sybil vaguely, with a glance at me. 'Shall we leave the gentlemen to their port and manly conversation. Women are supposed not to like port except in a rather vulgar way,' she added as we rose from the table, 'and the male conversation that goes with it is thought to be unsuitable for feminine ears.'
I could not help smiling as I looked at the two men, who seemed so very formal and correct. I supposed they might discuss the port itself, then perhaps something that had happened at the Ministry - trouble with the typing pool or the iniquities of some colleague would be the very worst that might be expected of them.
'I saw Rowena's brother today,' I said to Sybil when we were alone in the drawing-room. 'He was at St Luke's and we had a few words of conversation. Then I got on to a bus and saw him going into a pub.'
'Oh dear!' Sybil paused and then laughed. 'I wonder why I said that? Isn't there supposed to be something unsatisfactory about him? He must be well on into his thirties now. At what age does one start to accept a person as he is? Could a man in his fifties or sixties still go on being labelled as "unsatisfactory"?'
'Perhaps up to thirty, one may still go on expecting great things of people,' I suggested, 'or even thirty-five.'
'Why is Piers unsatisfactory? Because he has had rather a lot of jobs and hasn't yet married? Is that it?'
'Yes, I think so. You see, Rowena is so very much married, with three children, and Harry being in Mincing Lane.' I giggled. 'You know what I mean - so very solid and good, and so very much sticking to the business founded by his great- great-grandfather. I suppose Rowena chose him as a kind of contrast to all the Portuguese men she must have met living out there - somehow one doesn't think of them as being solid and reliable. Piers is now proof-reading learned books, and teaching French and Portuguese in the evenings, he told me.'
'Oh, let's go to some of his classes,' said Sybil enthusiastically. 'I really had thought we might go to Portugal next summer, and it would be a good thing to get some rudiments of the language. Will you ask him about them next time you see him?'
'Yes, but I'm not sure when that will be. I don't suppose he'll be at Rowena's when I go to stay there - Harry doesn't really like him.'
'What a pity. Why don't you ask him here one evening? He might like to come into a good solid English home - I suppose ours is that. Home life is generally supposed to be a good influence, isn't it.'
'Yes, but perhaps only for young men and women coming to London for their first job from the provinces - for the times when they aren't spending an evening at the Y.M.C.A. or some church youth club. I suppose Piers wouldn't really come into that category. Incidentally, Father Thames said something about evening study groups in the winter - perhaps he might be persuaded to go to those.'
'That hardly seems likely,' said Sybil with a laugh, 'but it would be nice for you to have some intellectual occupation, if it would be that.'
'You mean that I should have some work to do?' I asked, rather on the defensive, for I sometimes felt guilty about my long idle days. I did not really regret not having any children, but I sometimes envied the comfortable busyness of my friends who had. Nobody expected them to have any other kind of occupation.
'Not at all, dear,' said Sybil calmly. 'Everybody should do as they like. You seem to fill your days quite happily.'
It was true that I had tried one or two part time jobs since my marriage, but Rodney had the old-fashioned idea that wives should not work unless it was financially necessary. Moreover, I was not trained for any career and hated to be tied down to a routine. My autumn plans to take more part in the life of St Luke's, to try to befriend Piers Longridge and perhaps even go to
his classes, ought to keep me fully occupied, I thought.
'Why don't you come to the Settlement with me one day?' Sybil suggested. 'Mary Beamish was asking me if you'd be interested the last time I was there.'
'Yes, I'll come along with you,' I said. 'It might be rather …'
I had been going to say amusing, but obviously the word was unsuitable. My sentence was left unfinished as the men came back into the room.
'Ah - the gentlemen,' said Sybil with a slightly mocking air. 'Now we shall have to stop our conversation and you will have to stop yours.'
'We were exchanging our experiences of the young women who do our typing,' said James. 'Oh, there was nothing shock- - ing about them,' he added, sensing Sybil's ironical glance.
'I was telling James how I had occasiôn to criticize, quite mildly I may say, a piece of work one of them had done,' said Rodney. 'I had asked for a three-inch margin and she had done only a two-inch. It was really quite important or I shouldn't have asked for it. I said, "I'm afraid this won't do, Miss Pim", whereupon she snatched the report out of my hand and ran from the room in tears, slamming the door after her. It was really quite upsetting.'
'Perhaps she's in love with you,' I heard myself saying with unsuitable detachment.
There was a slight pause, then James burst into laughter and said, 'Oh, I can assure you, nothing like that goes on in our department!'
I was glad that he had broken the silence. I glanced at Rodney, but he did not seem to have noticed anything, if indeed there had been anything to notice.
'You like this Tia Maria, don't you, Mother?' he said smoothly, taking up a bottle. 'I know Wilmet finds it too sweet.'
I took a large gulp of brandy and began to cough. Then I turned my thoughts to the visit to the Settlement and Mary Beamish.
Chapter Two
Mary Beamish was the kind of person who always made me feel particularly useless - she was so very much immersed in good works, so splendid, everyone said. She was about my own age, but small and rather dowdily dressed, presumably because she had neither the wish nor the ability to make the most of herself. She lived with her selfish old mother in a block of flats near our house and was on several committees as well as being a member of St Luke's parochial church council. This particular morning, which seemed to me in my nastiness the last straw, she had just been to a blood donor session and had apparently come away sooner than she ought to have done; for when Sybil and I arrived at the Settlement she was sitting on a chair surrounded by anxious fussing women, one of whom held a cup of tea seeming uncertain what to do with it.
'You should have rested for at least twenty minutes, said Miss Holmes, the warden of the Settlement, a tall worried looking woman. 'It was most unwise of you to come away so soon.'
'And not to wait for your cup of tea either,' said Lady Nollard in her fruity tones which always made me think of some great actress playing an Oscar Wilde dowager. 'That was very naughty, you know.'
'But I've given blood so many times,' said Mary in a weak bright voice. 'I really didn't think it would do me any harm to come away a little sooner than I usually do. I didn't want to be late. It was only on the trolley bus that I began to feel a little faint -
'Ah, the trolley bus!' Lady Nollard's tone was full of horror and I realized that she had probably never travelled on one.
Not that I had myself very much, for I did not tend to visit the parts of London where they operated. I had noticed them sometimes going to places that seemed impossibly remote and even romantically inviting, but I had never been bold enough to risk the almost certain disillusionment waiting at the other end.
'The motion can sometimes be quite upsetting,' said Miss Holmes, 'like a ship.'
'Personally that's why I like them,' said Sybil in her gruff tones. 'And I'm always fascinated by the blue flashes they give out at night. I suppose we may as well start the meeting now as we are all here? You'll feel better after you've rested awhile, Mary,' she said rather briskly. 'Are there any apologies, Miss Holmes?'
Miss Holmes began to go into unnecessary details about why various members of the committee could not attend, but Sybil firmly put a stop to her meanderings and set the meeting in motion.
I always find committee meetings very difficult to attend to because my thoughts wander so unsuitably. I began by trying to take in what was being said; but after a while I found myself looking round the room, resting my eyes on the pleasant carvings and mouldings on the ceiling and round the fireplace, for the Settlement was situated in a part of London which had been a fashionable residential area in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the house had preserved many of the pleasing elegancies of that period. It made me sad to think of the decay and shabbiness all around, and the streamlined blocks of new flats springing up on the bombed sites, although I supposed it was a good thing that children should now be running about and playing in the square gardens, their shouts and laughter drowned by the noise of the machinery that was building hideous new homes for them.
'... the old people don't like fish,' I heard Mary Beamish saying. 'It's funny, really, Mother is just the same. She seems to need meat, and yet you'd think that somebody over seventy -' she gave her bright little smile and made a helpless gesture with her hands. I imagined old Mrs Beamish crouching greedily over a great steak or taking up a chop bone in her fingers, all to give her strength to batten on her daughter with her tiresome demands. I was thankful that Sybil was so independent and self-sufficient, and that my own mother, had she been alive still, would never have expected as much of me as Mrs Beamish did of Mary.
'Well, we have to give them a fish dinner one day a week,' said Miss Holmes in a harassed tone. 'We can't afford meat every day, and of course Friday does seem to be the obvious day for fish.'
'When I was a girl,' said Lady Nollard, 'there was an excellent cheap and nourishing soup or broth we used to make for the cottagers on the estate. Quite a meal in itself, made of bones of course, and large quantities of root vegetables - turnips, swedes, carrots and so on.'
I could see Sybil looking at her rather warily. I knew that she felt the need to be careful with Lady Nollard, for there was always the danger that she might start talking about the 'working classes', the 'lower classes', or even quite simply 'the poor'.
'Yes, of course we do give them good soup,' said Sybil, 'but I'm afraid they'll have to go on having the fish. As Miss Holmes points out, we can't afford to give them a meat dinner every day. And now for the report on the Youth Club. Mr Spong?'
A red-haired young man rose to his feet and began to read in a rather aggressive tone. There was some discussion about what he had called 'undesirable elements' creeping into the club, and then the meeting was at an end. I realized that I hadn't uttered a single word or contributed in any way to the good work that was being done.
'How nice to see you here, Wilmet,' said Mary Beamish. 'I was wondering if Mrs Forsyth might bring you along some time.'
'Yes, Sybil told me you had suggested it,' I said. 'But I'm not sure that it's quite my sort of thing,' I added lamely. 'Perhaps giving blood would be better.'
'Oh, that's great fun!' said Mary enthusiastically. 'If you really would like to be a blood donor I can send your name in.'
'All right, I should like to very much.'
'Good! I must hurry home now. Mother will be waiting for her lunch.'
'Poor Mary,' said Sybil. 'I do feel that she has too much to put up with. Old people shouldn't expect their children to give up their lives to them. It isn't as if Ella Beamish really needed her - she has plenty of money and could get a paid companion who would expect to be bullied.'
'I know,' I said. 'But Mary is somehow the kind of person to be put upon. I suppose there must always be people like that. And after all, what would she have done if she hadn't devoted her life to her mother and good works? Married and had children? That's what people always say, isn't it?'
'Well, she would have been able to lead her own life, though i
t might not have been so very different from her life now. I thought we might have lunch out today,' Sybil went on. 'It's nearly one o'clock already. Shall we go in here?'
We had been walking as we talked and now stopped outside an extremely unappetizing looking cafeteria, where a small queue had formed near the counter. Sybil marched in and joined the end of it, so I could do nothing else but follow her. Although she knew about good food, she had a rather splendid indifference to it where it concerned herself and I had often been with her to places which my own fastidiousness or squeamishness would have stopped me from entering alone. Now, as we manoeuvred our heavy trays along the counter, I tried to choose the dishes that seemed most harmless - a cheese salad with a roll and butter, some stewed apple, and a cup of black coffee.
We found two vacant places at a table where a young man and woman were already sitting. The floor around us had the appearance of being strewn with chips. I pushed one or two aside with my foot, moved some dirty crockery to a corner of the table, and sat down.
Sybil began to examine the lettuce in her salad with detached efficiency.
'They can't always wash it as well as one would at home,' she explained. 'One could hardly expect them to, having to prepare so many lettuces - just imagine it!' The examination over, she began to eat abstractedly as if she had switched her thoughts away from food entirely.
I could not bear to examine mine with such thoroughness, so my eating was apprehensive. All the time I was worrying, imagining grit and live things, certain that I was going to get food poisoning, waiting almost with resignation for the first symptoms, although I knew that they could not possibly manifest themselves for several hours. The people around me seemed particularly unattractive, the young man smothering his sausages and chips in bright red sauce, talking in such a low voice to his girl friend that all she ever seemed to say was 'Pardon?' in an equally low voice. I was glad when the meal was over and we were outside in the sunshine again.
