Miss Pym Disposes

by Josephine Tey

  But his wife, quicker-witted, laughed. "Of course," she said. "Mary! Are you from Leys, then? Do you know Mary?" Her face lit and her voice sang as she said it. Do you know Mary? Was it because she was going to see her daughter that she was happy today?

  Lucy explained who she was, and introduced Desterro, who was pleased to find that this charming couple knew all about her. "There is very little we don't know about Leys," Mrs Innes said, "even if we have never seen the place."

  "Not seen it? Won't you come over and have your coffee with us, by the way?"

  "It was too far for us to inspect it before Mary went there. So we decided that we would wait until her training was finished and then come to the Demonstration." Lucy deduced that if fares had not been a problem, Mary Innes's mother would not have had to wait these years before seeing Leys; she would have come if only so that she could picture her daughter in her setting.

  "But you are going there now, surely?"

  "No. Oddly enough, we are not. We are on our way to Larborough, where my husband—he's a doctor— has to attend a meeting. We could go to Leys, of course, but it is the week of the final examinations, and it would only distract Mary to have her parents descending suddenly on her for no reason. It is a little difficult to pass by when we are so near, but we have waited so long that we can wait another ten days or so. What we couldn't resist was turning off the main West road as far as Bidlington. We didn't expect to run into any College people at this hour of the morning, especially in Examination week, and we did want to see the place that Mary had talked so much about."

  "We knew that we shouldn't have time on Demonstration Day," Dr Innes said. "There will be so much to see then. A surprisingly varied training, isn't it?"

  Lucy agreed, and described her first impression of the staffroom with its varying worlds.

  "Yes. We were a little puzzled when Mary chose that for her career—she had never shown any great interest in games, and I had thoughts that she might take a medical training—but she said she wanted a career with a great many facets; and she seems to have found it!"

  Lucy remembered the concentration of purpose in those level brows; she had been right in her face-reading; if Mary Innes had an ambition it would not lightly be given up. Really, eyebrows were the most helpful things. If psychology ever went out of fashion she would write a book about face-reading. Under another name, of course. Face-reading was not well seen among the intelligentsia.

  "She is very beautiful, your daughter," said Desterro unexpectedly. She polished off a large mouthful of spice cake, and then, feeling the surprise in their silence, looked up at them. "Is it not a proper thing in England to compliment parents on their daughter's , looks?"

  "Oh, yes," Mrs Innes said hastily, "it is not that, it is just that we had not thought of Mary as beautiful. She is nice to look at, of course; at least we think so, but then parents are apt to be fatuous about an only daughter. She—"

  "When I came first to this place," Desterro said, reaching out for another cake from the plate (how did she keep that figure!), "it was raining, and all the dirty leaves were hanging down from the trees like dead bats and dripping on everyone, and everyone was rushing round College and saying: 'Oh darling, how are you? Did you have nice hols? Darling, you won't believe it but I left my new hockey stick on Crewe platform!' And then I saw a girl who was not running about and not talking, and who looked a little like my great-grandmother's grandmother who is in the dining-room at the house of my grandmother's great-nephew, so I said: 'It is not after all a barbarism. If it were as it seems to be that girl would not be here. I shall stay.' Is there more coffee, Miss Pym, please? She is not only beautiful, your daughter, she is the only beautiful person at Leys."

  "What about Beau Nash?" asked Lucy loyally. "In England at Christmas time—very little milk, Miss Pym, please—the magazines go all gay and give away bright pretty pictures that one can frame and hang above the kitchen mantelpiece to make glad the hearts of the cook and her friends. Very shiny, they are, with—"

  "Now that," said Mrs Innes, "is sheer libel! Beau is lovely, quite lovely, and you know it. I forgot that you would know Beau, too," she turned to Lucy, "that you would know them all, in fact. Beau is the only one we know because she came to us for the holidays once; at Easter time when the West is kinder than the rest of England; and Mary went to them once for some weeks in the summer. We admired Beau so much." She looked to her husband for confirmation; he had been too withdrawn.

  Dr Innes roused himself—he had the wrung-out look of the overworked G.P, when he sank into repose—and the saturnine face took on a boyish and faintly malicious, if tender, amusement. "It was very odd to see our competent and self-reliant Mary being looked after," he said.

  Mrs Innes evidently felt that this was not the contribution she had been looking for, but decided to make the best of it. "Perhaps," she said, as if thinking of it for the first time, "we have always taken Mary's self-reliance so much for granted that she finds it pleasant to be looked after." And to Miss Pym: "It is because they are complementary, I think, that they are such great friends. I am glad about it because we like Beau so much, and because Mary has never made intimate friends easily."

  "It is a very strenuous training, isn't it?" Dr Innes said. "I sometimes look at my daughter's notebooks and wonder why they bother with stuff that even a doctor forgets as soon as he leaves medical school."

  "The cross-section of the villi," remembered Lucy.

  "Yes; that sort of thing. You seem to have picked up a remarkable amount of physical lore in four days."

  The crumpets came, and even without the ritual standing of the batter they were worth coming even from the West Country for, supposing that had been true. It was a happy party. Indeed, Lucy felt that the whole room was soaked in happiness; that happiness bathed it like a reflexion from the sunlight outside. Even the doctor's tired face looked content and relaxed. As for Mrs Innes, Lucy had rarely seen such happiness on the face of a woman; merely being in this room that her daughter had used so often was, it seemed, a sort of communion with her, and in a few days' time she would see her in the flesh and share her achievement.

  If I had gone back to London, Lucy thought, I would have had no share in this. What would I be doing? Eleven o'clock. Going for a walk in the Park, and deciding how to get out of being»guest of honour at some literary dinner. Instead I have this. And all because Dr Knight wanted to go to a medical conference tomorrow. No, because once long ago Henrietta stood up for me at school. It was odd to think that this sun-lit movement in an English June began to take shape thirty years ago in a dark crowded school cloakroom filled with little girls putting on their galoshes. What were first causes, anyhow?

  'This has been very pleasant," said Mrs Innes, as they stood once more in the village street. "And it is nice to think that we shall meet again so soon. You will still be at Leys when the Demonstration comes off, won't you?"

  "I hope so," Lucy said, and wondered if she could cadge a bed from Henrietta for so long.

  "And you have both promised, solemnly and on your word of honour, not to tell anyone that you saw us today," Dr Innes said.

  "We have," they said, waiting to see their new friends get into their car.

  "Do you think I can turn the car in one swoop without hitting the Post Office?" Dr Innes said, consideringly.

  "I should hate to make any more Bidlington martyrs," his wife said. "A tiresome breed. On the other hand, what is this life without some risk?"

  So Dr Innes encouraged his engine and swung into this risky evolution. The hub of his off front wheel left a faint smudge on the Post Office's virgin white-wash.

  "Gervase Innes, his mark," said Mrs Innes, and waved her hand to them. "Till Demonstration Day, and pray for fine weather for it! Au revoir!"

  They watched the car grow small up the village street, and turned towards the field path and Leys.

  "Nice people," Desterro said.

  "Charming. Odd to think that we should never
have met them if you had not had a craving for good coffee this morning."

  "That is the kind of English, let me tell you in confidence, Miss Pym, that make every other nation on earth sick with envy. So quiet, so well-bred, so good to look at. They are poor, too, did you notice? Her blouse is quite washed-out. It used to be blue, the blouse; you could see when she leaned forward and her collar lifted a little. It is wrong that they should be so poor, people like that."

  "It must have cost her a lot not to see her daughter when she was so near," Lucy said reflectively.

  "Ah, but she has character, that woman. She was right not to come. None of the Seniors has one little particle of interest to spare this week. Take away even one little particle, and woops! the whole thing comes crashing down." She plucked an ox-eyed daisy from the bank by the bridge and gave the first giggle Lucy had ever heard from her. "I wonder how my colleagues are getting on with their one-leg-over-the-line puzzles."

  Lucy was wondering how she herself would appear in Mary Innes's Sunday letter home. "It will be amusing," Mrs Innes had said, "to get back home and read all about you in Mary's Sunday letter. Something to do with relativity. Like coming back the previous night."

  "It was strange that Mary Innes should have reminded you of someone in a portrait," she said to Desterro. "That is how she seemed to me, too."

  "Ah yes, my great-grandmother's grandmother." Desterro dropped the daisy on to the surface of the water and watched the stream bear it down under the bridge and away out of sight. "I did not say it to the nice Inneses, but my great-grandmother's grandmother was a little unpopular with her generation."

  "Oh? Shy, perhaps. What we call nowadays an inferiority complex."

  "I would not know about that. Her husband died too conveniently. It is always sad for a woman when her husband dies too conveniently."

  "You mean that she murdered him!" Lucy said, standing stock-still in the summer landscape, appalled.

  "Oh, no. There was no scandal." Desterro sounded reproving. "It was just that her husband died too conveniently. He drank too much, and was a great gambler, and not very attractive. And there was a loose tread at the top of the stairs. A long flight of stairs. And he stepped on it one day when he was drunk. That was "And did she marry again?" Lucy asked, having absorbed this information.

  "Oh, no. She was not in love with anyone else. She had her son to bring up, and the estates were safe for him now that there was no one to gamble them away. She was a very good estate manager. That is where my grandmother got her talent from. When my grandmother came out from England to marry my grandfather she had never been further from her own county than Charles Street, West One; and in six months she was running the estate." Desterro sighed with admiration. "They are wonderful the English."

  Miss Pym was invigilating at the Senior Pathology final, so as to give Miss Lux more time for the correction and marking of previous papers, when Henrietta's meek little secretary tiptoed in and laid the day's letters reverently on the desk in front of her. Miss Pym had been frowning over a copy of the examination paper, and thinking how badly words like arthritis gonorrhoica and suppurative tenosynovitis went with the clean air of a summer morning after breakfast. Emphysema was not so bad; it might be the gardener's name for a flower. A sort of columbine. And kyphosis she could picture as something in the dahlia line. Myelitis would be a small creeping plant, very blue, with a tendency to turn pink if not watched. And tabes dorsalis was obviously an exotic affair of the tiger lily persuasion, expensive and very faintly obscene.

  Chorea. Sclerosis. Tes Varus.

  Dear goodness. Did those young things know all that? Differentiate the treatment of something-or-other according to whether it is (a) congenital (b) traumatic (c) hysterical. Well, well. How had she ever erred so far as to feel patronizing about these young creatures?

  She looked down from her dais with affection on them; all writing away for dear life. The faces were sober but not on the whole anxious. Only Rouse looked worried, and Lucy decided that her face looked better worried than smug, and withheld her sympathy. Dakers was ploughing steadily over the paper with her tongue protruding and an automatic sigh as she came to the end of each line and began a new one. Beau was confident and detached as if she were writing invitations; doubt was something that had never entered her life; neither her present standing nor her future life was in jeopardy. Stewart's face under the bright red hair was pale, but a faint smile played around her mouth; Stewart's future, too, was assured; she was going to The Cordwainers' School, going home to Scotland bringing her sheaves with her, and Lucy was going to the party she was giving in her room on Saturday night to celebrate. ("We don't ask Staff to individual parties, but since you are not quite Staff you could rank as just a friend.") The Four Disciples, spread across the front row, cast each other communal and encouraging glances now and then; this was their own particular subject and obviously what they did not know about it was not worth mentioning; Manchester was going to get its money's worth. Innes, by the window, lifted her head every now and then to look out at the garden, as if seeking refreshment; that it was not inspiration she sought was apparent from her unhurried progress through the questions; she turned to the garden for some spiritual comfort; it was as if she said: "Ah yes, you are still there, Beauty; there is a world outside this lecture-room." Innes was beginning to look as if College might be too much with her. That tired line from nostril to mouth was still there.

  Lucy picked up the paper-knife from Miss Lux's neat desk, and considered her post. Three bills, which she need not disturb the holy hush by opening. A receipt. An Annual Report. A large, square, deep-blue, and very stiff and expensive envelope with munificent craye embossed in scarlet across the flap (really there was no end to the self-advertising instinct in actresses) which would be five lines of thanks with a broad nib and out-size capitals for her contribution to the Benevolent Fund. That left only Mrs Montmorency. So into Mrs Montmorency she inserted the paper-knife.

  Maddam (wrote Mrs Montmorency),

  I as done as you sed an sent the urgent by passel post. Registered. Fred put it into Wigmore Street on is way to work receit enclosed I as packed the blue and the blouses also underdose as per in-struxions your pink nitie not having come back from the laundry I as put in the bedge instead hopping this will be all rite.

  Maddam, please dont think that I presoom but this is a good thing. It is no life for a woman writin books and not havin no young company please dont think I presoom but I as your welfare at heart you ben one of the nicest ladies I ever worked for Fred says the same. A nice lady like that he says when look at the things thats around not write it isnt please dont think I presoom yrs respectfully

  Mrs Montmorency. P.S. Wire brush in toe of swede shoe

  Lucy spent the next fifteen minutes being touched by Mrs Montmorency's concern for her, being furious with the laundry, and wondering why she paid education rates. It wasn't public schools for everyone that was needed but a great many elementary school classes of not more than a dozen, where the future Mrs Montmorencys could be adequately taken care of in the matter of the Three Rs. Old McLean, their jobbing gardener at home, had left school when he was twelve, but he could write as good a letter as any University acquaintance of hers; and why? Because he came from a small village school with small classes and a good schoolmaster.

  And of course because he lived in an age when the Three Rs were more important than Free Milk. They made him literate and left the rest to him. He lived on white-flour scones and stewed tea and died hale and hearty at the age of ninety-two.

  She was roused from her musings by Miss Rouse. There was a new expression on Miss Rouse's face, and Lucy didn't like the new expression at all. She had seen Miss Rouse look despairing, smarmy, smug, and worried, but till now she had never seen her look furtive.

  Why should she be looking furtive?

  She watched her for a moment or two, curiously.

  Rouse looked up and caught her gaze and looked quickly away agai
n. Her furtive expression had gone; what had taken its place was one labelled Consciously Carefree. Lucy knew all about that expression. She had not been Form Mistress of the Lower Fourth for nothing. Every eater of illicit sweets wore that expression. So did those who were doing their arithmetic in French lesson.

  So did those who were cheating at an examination.

  What was it Henrietta had said? "She finds written work difficult."

  So.

  Emphysema and all those flowery sounding things were too much for Miss Rouse, and so she had provided some aids to memory. The question was what kind of aids and where were they? Not on her knee. The desks were open in front, so that a lap was no safe billet for a crib. And one could hardly write enough pathology on one's fingernails to be of much help; fingernails were useful only for formula. The obvious solution would be the notes up the sleeve, with or without an arrangement of elastic, but these girls had no sleeves below the elbow. Then, what? Where? Or was it that she was just having glimpses of O’Donnell’s paper in front of her? Or Thomas's to her right?

  Lucy went back to her letters for a moment or two, and waited. All schoolmistresses know this gambit. She looked up casually at the Seniors in general and again went back to her letters. When next she looked up it was straight" at Rouse. Rouse's head was low over her paper and in her left hand she held a handkerchief. Now even on a handkerchief it is not possible to write anything that is helpful on so large a subject as pathology, nor is it an easy affair to manipulate; on the other hand handkerchiefs were not common objects at Leys, and certainly no one else was clutching one and dabbing a nose occasionally with it. Lucy decided that whatever sources of information Rouse had lay in her left hand. Her desk was at the back on the window side, so that the wall was to her left; whatever she did with her left hand was not overlooked by anyone.

  Well, thought Lucy, what does A do?

  Walk down the room and demand the handkerchief and find that it is a square piece of white linen, nine inches by nine inches, with the owner's initials properly marked in one corner, and as candid as a good laundry can make it?