by Barbara Pym
‘You must come and see the new flat soon,’ said James.
‘Yes, of course,’ said Leonora, turning her head away.
There was a rather long silence. James had a terrible fear that she might be going to cry or make some kind of scene.
‘Oh, Leonora,’ he began, ‘it isn’t that I don’t love you . .
Leonora looked up at him, startled. The word ‘love’ had not been mentioned between them before.
‘I shall always love you,’ James went on, hardly making things better, for ‘always’ had such a final sound about it; it might just as well have been ‘never’.
‘James, dear, you really are rather stupid,’ she said in a cool tone. ‘You know I’ve never wanted to stop you from having your own friends—after all, one isn’t a monster. You loved Phoebe and now you love Ned. When Ned goes back to America, as he no doubt will in time, you’ll love somebody else.’
‘But Leonora, I’m not like that. If only I could explain …’ James moved his head from side to side in hopelessness.
‘And now, James, I really must turn you out—I’m dining with an old Italian friend tonight and I want to have a little rest first.’
She did not watch him go but waited until she heard the sound of his car driving away before she went upstairs to gather strength and make herself elegant for the Conte, who liked to eat steak and kidney pudding and drink Guinness whenever he was in London. It gave her only the merest vestige of satisfaction to remember the hurt look on James’s face, but she was rather pleased with herself for having had the courage to deal with him as she had. To hear the word ‘love’ actually spoken might well have been too much for somebody like, say, poor Meg.
The day before James’s move Leonora took advantage of a long-standing invitation to spend a few days with the Murrays at their country cottage. She had always rather despised them and of course November wasn’t the ideal time to leave London, but she knew that they had every modern comfort and Joan had arranged a party on the Friday evening which might be quite amusing. Humphrey and James would supervise the moving of the furniture on Saturday, and Liz had promised to look in to see that all was well after they had gone.
The journey westwards in a comfortable first-class carriage did something to soothe Leonora’s feelings. There were only three other occupants, two substantial-looking men, occupied with taking papers out of their briefcases and putting them back again, and a young woman deeply absorbed in a paperback with a pornographic cover. Leonora was the only person to respond to the summons to tea and found herself placed at a small window table already occupied by another person.
She sat with downcast eyes, as some women do when faced with a strange man. Leonora did not trust the kind of man one was apt to meet in trains, though in her younger days she had been bolder. She had a book with her—Tennyson’s In Memoriam in a rather pleasing leather-bound edition—which she immediately opened and tried to read, but it was difficult to concentrate, what with trying to pour tea against the jolting movement of the train, and the fact that In Memoriam was perhaps not the kind of reading one would have chosen for a meal taken under difficult circumstances. She had really intended to read it in bed at the Murrays’, preferably in the watches of the night when she lay sleepless.
She succeeded in having first pour from the shared milk jug and negotiated her own little teapot successfully. Then hot buttered toast was brought and there was the question of what to eat with it.
‘Will you have some jam?’
The stranger opposite was offering her first choice of the little pots of jam, holding them out on a plate encouragingly. Raising her eyes she saw that he was a very good-looking clergyman.
‘I don’t know …’ Leonora was used to men suggesting or choosing food for her in restaurants, but perhaps this was not quite the same.
‘Yellow, red, green or purple?’
‘Which would you recommend?’
‘That depends. Perhaps somebody reading Tennyson would prefer purple?’ he suggested, with an air of gallantry.
‘Yes, purple, I think; red and yellow would be unsympathetic.’ She smiled and looked up at him. Clergymen, however handsome, were safe, one felt, though this might well be an old-fashioned notion. It would be all right to flirt with him a little, in the way that only middle-aged people did flirt nowadays.
It turned out that he was going to Malvern—his brother was headmaster of a school there, He implied, without actually saying it, that it was a pity Leonora was not going to Malvern too.
‘I shall be getting out at Moreton-in-Marsh where my friends are meeting me,’ Leonora explained.
‘Alas …’ He smiled.
‘Together?’ The restaurant car attendant was hovering over them ready to make out the bill.
‘No, apart,’ said Leonora quickly.
He was too delicate in his behaviour to attempt to pay for her tea; that would have been very brash, Leonora decided. As she swayed back along the corridor—he had earlier entered a second-class carriage—she felt encouraged by the little episode. She was still beautiful, still ‘desirable’, if that wasn’t putting it too strongly. She could make something of the encounter when Joan drove her from the station.
But in the car Joan went on boringly about having to call at a teashop run by some woman who had promised to make vol-au-vents for the party which hadn’t been ready when she had called earlier. And Dickie was bringing some caviare and it had to be spread on biscuits. And did Leonora mind, but she hadn’t had time to make her bed yet.
Leonora sat rather stiffly in the car, wondering why she had come. It was ominous, the bed not yet being made, as if she wasn’t really expected. She needed to be very well looked after this weekend.
When they reached the cottage she felt more hopeful. Dickie opened a bottle of champagne to revive her after the journey and the room they had given her was quiet and looked over the garden. While Joan had been out somebody had made the bed and there were flowers in a pink lustre jug on the bedside table. In Memoriam seemed perfectly in keeping with the pretty Victorian objects that adorned the mantelpiece and dressing table. While she was changing, Joan came into the room, ostensibly to have her dress zipped up but really to ask Leonora about James.
‘My dear, we’ve heard such things—can they be true?’
Luckily the front door bell rang before Leonora could go into the subject ofjames. She never minded the first plunge into a party and entered the room with her usual confidence. But the Murrays’ friends turned out to be exceptionally uninteresting and Leonora realised now that she was too tired to make the effort needed for sparkling conversation, even if she had wanted to. After the party had been going for some time she found herself stranded on a sofa with an unattached woman in a bright blue dress, who had somehow fastened on to her and who kept eyeing her in a critical way.
‘I can see you come from London,’ she said. ‘You look so washed out.’
The woman’s own toothy ruddy face certainly didn’t look that; a glance at it convinced Leonora that one would prefer to look ‘washed out’, whatever that might mean.
‘What do you do?’ asked the woman. ‘Didn’t Joan tell me you were in the BBC? I wish they wouldn’t play all that dreadful pop.’
Leonora informed her coldly that she was not in the BBC, and that she didn’t have a job.
‘You mean you do nothing?’
‘One lives one’s own life.’
‘But you could do voluntary work, surely?’
The question was not worth answering, but Leonora’s silence gave the woman the chance to enumerate all the things she might do—hospital work, old people, mentally handicapped children, the lonely ones, there were so many lonely ones …
‘Now then, Ba,’ said Dickie coming to the rescue, ‘everyone’s going. If you’re quick the Fosdykes will give you a lift.’
‘Goodness, is that the time?’ The woman, now identified as ‘Ba’, got up and almost scuttled into the hall.
Suddenly everyone had g
one.
‘Good old Ba,’ said Dickie, ‘always the first to arrive and the last to go. Sorry you got stuck with her, Leonora.’
Leonora gave him a faint smile of forgiveness, but there was no forgiveness in her heart. How could he have let it happen?
‘Poor old Leonora,’ said Dickie when, very much later, he and Joan were washing up the glasses. ‘She doesn’t seem in quite her usual form.’
‘But she’s always so elegant and that was a lovely dress,’ said Joan loyally. ‘It was just bad luck she got landed with Ba.’
‘She’s so cold and inhuman, or something,’ said Dickie, ‘I always feel I’d like to …’
‘Now, darling, don’t be beastly about Leonora,’ said Joan, with a delighted giggle.
‘But suppose one did … That’s really just what she needs. Do you think Humphrey ever has?’
‘Just imagine them—no, I can’t …’ Joan was shaking with suppressed laughter now, so that Leonora, lying in bed in the room above, heard what sounded almost like sobs coming from the kitchen. Then of course she realised that it was laughter—Joan and Dickie being silly about something, as they so often were. She wished now that she hadn’t come, but it had seemed better to be away when James’s things were moved out. But was she going to be able to sleep tonight? The bed, though comfortable, was not her own, and when she looked up there was darkness where the window should have been.
The next day Leonora had one of her migraines. There was nothing she could do but lie in the strange bed, dozing fitfully, being sick, then dozing again, her splitting head full of James’s furniture going up and down the stairs, each piece woven into a kind of pattern that was pressing inside her head until she thought it would burst. Every now and then Joan would tiptoe up the stairs, pop her guilt-stricken face round the door and ask if there was anything she wanted. Once she heard Dickie singing, only to be sharply hushed by Joan. She knew that she had cast a blight over the house and that they would never ask her again, but she felt too ill to care.
It was not until the evening that the pain and sickness left her and she sat up tentatively to find that her head no longer ached and that she was able to drink a cup of weak tea. In her relief at being well again, other things seemed better too. Dickie had promised to drive her back to London the next day; she almost looked forward to taking up the threads of her life again.
XXII
Christmas was now almost upon them. It had come round again in its inexorable way, with its attendant embarrassments which this year seemed even more numerous than usual. Ned was going to have to spend it in Oxford with his friends, who were rather hurt by his neglect of them. The evening before he went James took him out to dinner in Chelsea to give him his Christmas present, a pair of expensive cuff links. This had been comparatively easy to choose, for all Ned asked of a present was that it should have cost the giver a lot of money. Leonora’s had been much more difficult. The Sunday paper colour supplements offered no advice on what to give an older woman towards whom one was conscious of having behaved badly. Anything like the Victorian ‘love tokens’ of the past seemed inappropriate, so James eventually chose a picture book of reproductions of Victorian paintings. He knew that Leonora would be disappointed; even if she did not show it in her face, her tone of voice when she thanked him would betray it, as Miss Caton’s had when he opened the book of poetry Phoebe had sent him for his birthday. Books as presents were somehow lacking in excitement and romance. He was relieved when he learned that Humphrey was giving her a pair of amethyst earrings and hoped that his uncle’s present would in some way make up for his inadequacy, though he really knew it would not. James himself was going to winter sports as usual with what Humphrey called ‘a party of young people’, making it seem something very remote from himself and Leonora.
‘What are you doing on Christmas Day?’ he asked. ‘We could spend it together if you like.’
‘Thank you, Humphrey dear—but I always feel rather guilty about poor Liz on these occasions. It’s a kind of duty to give her a Christmas dinner. There she is all the time, with only those cats and unhappy memories of that cad of a husband for company, one does rather feel …’
Humphrey had always thought Liz seemed perfectly contented in her own way, but he was relieved that he need not entertain Leonora; he liked to spend the day quietly at his club, sleeping and playing bridge.
On Christmas evening Leonora was invited to’supper with Meg. There was cold chicken, and Colin, temporarily unattached and on his best behaviour, had made a special salad just like those he served at the snack bar.
‘So different from last year,’ Meg whispered to Leonora when Colin was out of the room. ‘That dreadful time … I thought he’d never come back, but he did.’
Leonora could have agreed that this Christmas was different for her too, but she had no wish to discuss her situation with Meg. Soon they would be entering into another year, during the course of which Ned would go back to America.
January was bleak and cheerless and the waiting turned out to be less easy than Leonora had expected. Every day that passed brought the time of Ned’s departure nearer, but at the same time it seemed to widen the gulf between herself and James. As the month went on it became obvious that James had ‘dropped’ her completely. Humphrey hardly mentioned him now; it was as if he were dead or had never existed. The days seemed long and hopeless and Leonora began to wish she had not given up working, for a routine job would at least have filled the greater part of the day. Yet she lacked the energy and initiative to find herself an occupation; she remembered the dreadful woman—’Ba’, was it?—she had met at the Murrays’ party and the impertinent suggestions she had made about the useful voluntary work one could do. But when Leonora came to consider them each had something wrong with it: how could she do church work when she never went near a church, or work for old people when she found them boring and physically repellent, or with handicapped children when the very thought of them was too upsetting?
Humphrey, sensing that she was in a low state, suggested that she should find another tenant for the flat; obviously James would never come back and it would be less lonely for her to have somebody in the house. It might even be the means of providing her with a new interest. He envisaged a nice woman of about her own age, or a girl student, or even a young couple, but Leonora didn’t feel she could endure any of these.
Another woman might encroach on her independence and one never knew what a ‘student’ would get up to. As for a young couple, they would probably have a baby and she certainly wasn’t going to put up with that.
Eventually Leonora forgot about the emptiness of the flat and stopped going up there as she sometimes used to just after James had gone. She had always cared as much for inanimate objects as for people and now spent hours looking after her possessions, washing the china and cleaning the silver obsessively and rearranging them in her rooms. The shock of finding that James had taken the fruitwood mirror had upset her quite disproportionately and Humphrey had searched everywhere to find another for her. Sensitive women were really very irritating at times, he had thought; it wasn’t even as if the mirror had been a particularly valuable piece. In the end he had managed to get one tolerably like James’s, of a pretty design but badly neglected. Leonora had taken a great deal of trouble polishing it and restoring its beauty with loving care. Yet when she looked into it the reflection it gave back was different from James’s mirror in which she had appeared ageless and fascinating. Now her reflection displeased her, for her face seemed shrunken and almost old. Or was she really beginning to look like that?
Her love of beautiful objects led her again to make solitary excursions to the sale rooms. She pored over flower books in Sotheby’s book room but could not bring herself to bid for anything; she could never hope to be as lucky as that first and only time. Then she would go down to Christie’s to see what was on view there. She kept all this secret from Humphrey, choosing times when it was unlikely that she would meet him,
for at the back of her mind was the hope that she might run into James unexpectedly. But she never did.
One particularly cold morning at that time of year when it seems that winter will last for ever, she was examining some jewellery at Christie’s—fine stones in settings of the Edwardian era and the twenties, the kind of things she and James had so often laughed over, imagining their owners wearing them on unbelievably splendid occasions—when the full realisation of her unhappiness came to her. Her throat ached and tears came into her eyes, not only for herself but also for the owners of the jewellery, ageing now or old, some probably dead. It was all she could do to walk composedly out of the room, down the wide staircase and into the street. She felt lost, uncertain what to do or where to go, and began walking aimlessly. She must have collided with somebody unknowingly, for she was conscious of a woman apologising in a well-bred voice that had a note of surprise in it, as if Leonora were behaving in a peculiar way. One must at all costs avoid making an exhibition of oneself, she thought, pulling herself together and walking on until she found herself outside a cafe.
It was not until she had been sitting at a table for some minutes that she realised it was a self-service place and also that she had been there with James. Of course he had always fetched the coffee but now she had to go up to the counter and get it herself. This was not at all the kind of thing Leonora liked, though she had not minded going to Colin’s snack bar with Meg occasionally, and when she had got her cup and returned to the table she noticed other things to upset her.
The elderly woman clearing away the used crockery seemed even older and more fragile than when she had been here with James. He used to call her ‘the Polish Countess’, Leonora remembered; she had worn, aristocratic features and muttered to herself disturbingly in a foreign accent. In Leonora’s mind there seemed to be a connection between the old woman and the jewellery she had just seen. To make things worse, she now crashed down a heavy tray on Leonora’s table on which were piled not only dirty cups, saucers and plates but all kinds of food scraps—sandwich crusts, bits of lettuce and tomato, the remains of cream cakes and even squashed-out cigarette ends—it was really too disgusting.
