Civil to Strangers

by Barbara Pym

  Luncheon was rather an odd meal. Nobody except Miss Doggett seemed to be hungry. Anthea looked quite distracted, but Miss Doggett attributed her strange manner and lack of appetite to the fact that she had given her a severe talking-to for having bought such a poor selection of cakes.

  ‘Bishop Fordyce’s nephew – he’s Lady Mortlake’s son, you know – and the new chaplain of Randolph College are coming,’ she wailed. ‘I particularly wanted them to have a nice tea.’

  ‘Perhaps clergymen don’t notice what they eat,’ said Miss Morrow demurely. ‘One feels that they might not.’

  ‘And you were a very long time decorating the church this morning, Miss Morrow,’ said Miss Doggett, turning on her. ‘I expected you back by half past eleven. Were there a great many flowers to arrange or were there fewer helpers than usual?’

  ‘Oh, there were fewer helpers,’ said Miss Morrow. ‘Certainly one less than usual.’

  Miss Doggett rose from the table. ‘Well, we shall see tomorrow what the church looks like,’ she said. ‘I hope our flowers are in a good position.’

  ‘Irises on the pulpit!’ said Miss Doggett at luncheon the next day. ‘Most unsuitable. The colour is quite wrong for Whitsuntide. I thought the altar vases were very badly arranged … did you do them, Miss Morrow?’

  ‘Oh, no, I did nothing that could be seen,’ said Miss Morrow quickly. It was a brilliantly hot day and she had decided to wear her new dress for the tea party.

  ‘We might have tea in the garden, perhaps?’ suggested Anthea. ‘It’s such a lovely day.’ If only she could slip away somewhere by herself and think about him, instead of having to sit and make conversation with dull young men in a stuffy North Oxford drawing room.

  ‘Tea in the garden? Oh, no, I’m afraid I should find the sun too much,’ said Miss Doggett. ‘Besides, people are not at their best in the open air. Conversation is so difficult and things blow away.’

  ‘Wasps get in the food,’ murmured Miss Morrow.

  So they sat waiting in the drawing room which faced north and whose windows were obscured by the bottom half of the monkey-puzzle.

  The first arrivals were two shy young men who came together. It seemed that they had met on the doorstep and were giving each other mutual support. One of them carried an umbrella which he seemed unwilling to relinquish.

  ‘Ah, Mr Burden and Mr Monksmoor,’ said Miss Doggett, ‘I knew your aunts. Wouldn’t you like to leave that umbrella in the hall? It will be quite safe.’

  ‘I have a feeling it is going to thunder,’ said one of the young men, addressing Anthea in a loud, nervous voice.

  But she could not answer him, for at that moment a third guest was announced, the Bishop’s nephew and Peer’s son, and it was the young man she had met on the river yesterday morning.

  ‘Ah, Mr Fordyce, at last!’ There was a real welcome in Miss Doggett’s tone. ‘I am so much looking forward to having a long talk about your uncle.’

  So he was the Bishop’s nephew, Aunt Maude’s young man, not hers. It was a sickening disappointment. Anthea could hardly bear to look at him.

  ‘Please try to keep the conversation away from my dear uncle,’ he whispered.

  ‘Why? It will at least be something to talk about,’ said Anthea indifferently.

  ‘But he isn’t my uncle and I’m not Basil Fordyce. I wanted to find a way of seeing you again and I knew Basil had an invitation to take tea in North Oxford this weekend, so I changed places with him.’

  Anthea smiled. ‘But we could have met some other way – at the lectures or in the town. You didn’t have to come here.’

  ‘No, but I wanted to be accepted by your aunt.’ He gave her a bright-eyed wicked look that seemed to shut them off from the rest of the room.

  ‘Where is Miss Morrow?’ said Miss Doggett rather sharply.

  ‘Here I am, Miss Doggett,’ said Miss Morrow, coming in through the door in a new dress patterned with leaves.

  ‘Miss Morrow and I have been in the garden,’ said the handsome clergyman with her. ‘I somehow missed the front door, and Miss Morrow found me wandering in the laurels.’

  Missed the front door … wandering in the laurels … and Miss Morrow in that gay unsuitable dress … Miss Doggett was bewildered. She sank down into a chair. This was the new Chaplain of Randolph College, a very good-looking man, perhaps a little free in his manner for a clergyman. He and Miss Morrow were actually laughing together. She was asking him if he had had a good breakfast, had there been mutton chops and beer … what could she mean? Miss Doggett turned away in despair. She would have a little chat with Mr Fordyce about his uncle.

  ‘Now, Mr Fordyce,’ she began, ‘how is your uncle?’

  ‘Which one?’ he asked brightly.

  ‘Why, Bishop Fordyce, of course.’

  ‘Oh, Miss Doggett, I’ve done a very wicked thing,’ he burst out.

  ‘Come now, Mr Fordyce,’ she had to smile indulgently, he was really such a very good-looking man with those brilliant hazel eyes. ‘I’m sure you can’t have done anything so very bad.’

  ‘Oh, but I have. I’m an impostor. I’m not Basil Fordyce at all. I’m Simon Beddoes.’

  ‘Well, really, Mr Beddoes … ’ Miss Doggett smiled again, but a little absently. There was a connection somewhere and it was quite a good one, though she could not remember for the moment exactly what it was. Something political or diplomatic, she fancied … Bishop Fordyce had not been much of a man really, rather a dull stick, she had never particularly cared for him.

  ‘You see, I wanted to meet your niece, and,’ he added hastily, ‘I had heard of your delightful tea parties.’

  ‘Oh, well, I suppose I do manage to collect an interesting circle of people round me,’ said Miss Doggett, almost purring. ‘Do have another cake, Mr Beddoes. Now, Mr Merriman,’ she turned to the handsome clergyman, ‘I do hope my companion has not been boring you?’

  ‘Oh, I am used to being bored by ladies,’ said Mr Merriman lightly. ‘There is nothing I enjoy more.’

  ‘You must see the garden before you go,’ said Miss Doggett, ‘though I’m afraid it is not quite at its best now – that heavy storm yesterday morning … ’ She paused. Yes, there had been something strange about yesterday morning. ‘The peonies were very fine but the rain spoilt them. They look quite … ’ what was the word Miss Morrow had used, something most unsuitable … ‘quite beaten down,’ she said rather loudly. ‘Mr Beddoes, perhaps you would like to see the garden too? And Mr Burden and Mr Monksmoor, I should like to have a chat to you about your aunts. We met in Malvern in 1923.’

  She rose from her chair and the little procession wound its way through the furniture, out into the dining room and through the french windows on to the lawn.

  After they had gone, Miss Morrow picked up a cake and devoured it in two bites. Then she too went out through the french windows and followed them solemnly round the garden.

  Goodbye Balkan Capital

  The six o’clock news blared out, crowding the already overcrowded little drawing room with all the horrors of total war in 1941. The photographs on the piano shook with the noise. The Archdeacon’s face, or as much of it as was not concealed in his bush of beard, seemed to express distaste at the vulgarity of it all. Mrs Arling looked as she had in life, meek and resigned. Thirty years of her husband’s thundering sermons had hardened her to loud voices and violent opinions. And anyway, all this that was happening was no concern of theirs. They had both died in the 1920s, when Hitler was writing Mein Kampf, and the Archdeacon, also a disappointed man, had turned to preparing a collected edition of his sermons as a consolation for a vacant Bishopric which he had failed to get.

  The Misses Arling, accustomed to these horrors, sat quietly listening. Janet, the elder sister, was knitting a khaki sock. A cigarette jutted from her square face, and she held her head thrust up to avoid getting the smoke into her eyes. Her fingers went on mechanically with the knit two, purl two ribbing. There would be no need to look until she started to
turn the heel.

  Laura Arling was arranging some polyanthus in a bowl. She was dim and faded, with a face that might once have been pretty in her distant Edwardian youth. It was an unfashionable face, but somehow nostalgic and restful in a world so full of brutality and death. If anyone troubled to look at her they might say that she had a sweet expression, if, indeed, that phrase is ever used seriously now.

  She had spread a sheet of The Times on the round mahogany table, and the flowers, crimson, purple, yellow and creamy white, were scattered all over the Deaths column, so that as Laura picked up a flower her eyes would light on a death and then go all down the column, looking fearfully for the words ‘by enemy action’. She wished Janet wouldn’t have the wireless quite so loud. It must be because of her deafness, although she would never admit it. The words seemed to lose all their meaning when they were blared out like this. It reminded Laura of the police car which had come round on that dreadful September evening, telling them to get ready for five hundred evacuee children who had arrived at the station. Laura smiled as she remembered the sad little procession dragging through the garden gate, labels tied to their coats, haversacks and gas masks trailing on the ground. Janet had been so splendid. She had sent them all to the lavatory, which was just what they wanted, if only one had been able to think of it, for after that they had cheered up and rushed shouting about the garden until it was time for bed. It seemed such a long time since those first days of the war. The children had all gone back after a month or two and the house had seemed unnaturally quiet until April, May and June, when the distorted voice of the wireless had flung so many terrible pieces of news at them, that now, a year later, it seemed hardly possible that they had survived it all and were still here.

  Now it was the Balkans, the Drang nach Osten, Janet said, and she always knew about things like that. At the beginning of the war she had got a translation of Mein Kampf out of Boots. Of course, as everyone said, the Balkans didn’t seem quite so bad. They were further away, for one thing, and after the collapse of France one no longer had the same high hopes of other people. Also, it was mildly comforting to feel that the Germans were going in the opposite direction. Now, after the usual War of Nerves, German troops had begun to enter another Balkan Capital. But this time it seemed more real and important. Laura stopped arranging the polyanthus and listened. This was his Balkan Capital, her dear Crispin’s. He was First Secretary at the Legation there, and they were saying that the British diplomats were ready to leave at any moment.

  ‘You can’t trust these Balkan people. No guts,’ said Janet, brushing a wedge of ash off her knitting. She got up and turned the wireless off with a snap.

  Laura did not protest. She was remembering Crispin at a Commemoration Ball in Oxford, when she was eighteen and he twenty-one. They had danced together an improper number of times, having somehow got separated from the decorously chaperoned party in which they had started the evening, and at six o’clock, when the dance was over, they had gone on the river in a punt and had breakfast. It had been like a dream, walking down the Banbury Road in the early morning sunshine, wearing her white satin ball gown and holding Crispin’s hand. Even Aunt Edith’s anger and her threat to Tell the Archdeacon had failed to terrify her, because she was remembering Crispin’s kisses and the beautiful things he had said. It had been their first and last meeting, for she had never seen him again after that morning. She supposed that she must have been a little unhappy at parting, she must surely have longed for letters which never came, but her memory did not help her here. It had kept only the happiness, enshrined in all its detail like those Victorian paperweights which show a design of flowers under glass, and which are now sought again, in days when Victorian objects are comforting relics of a period when the upper middle classes lived pleasant, peaceful lives and wars were fought decently in foreign countries by soldiers with heavy drooping moustaches. Laura had never loved anyone else, not even in the last war, when officers used to come to supper on Sunday nights, and her poor mother had dared to hope that it might not be too late even then. Crispin had gone into the Diplomatic Service after leaving Oxford and it had been quite easy to get news of him. Laura had been able to imagine him in Madrid, in Washington, in Peking, in Buenos Aires, and now in this stormy Balkan Capital, where he had been First Secretary for several years. Indeed, she was expecting that he might be made Ambassador or Minister somewhere, although she feared that there must be a lot of unemployment among diplomats, with the Germans occupying so many countries.

  Laura’s imagination and Harmsworth’s Encyclopaedia had helped to give her quite a vivid picture of the town where Crispin now lived. She could see its fine modern buildings, the streets all glass and steel and concrete skyscrapers, with brilliant neon lighting flashing out foreign words into the darkness, and the fine Art Gallery and Museum were as familiar to her as if she had really trudged round them on a wet afternoon. The British Legation was in the old part of the town, near to the famous Botanical Gardens. Laura often thought of Crispin walking there on fine spring mornings, perhaps sitting on a seat reading official documents, with lilacs, azaleas, and later, scarlet and yellow cannas making a fitting background for his dark good looks. For she could not think of him as fat or bald, the brightness of his hazel eyes dimmed or hidden behind spectacles, his voice querulous and his fingers, gnarled with rheumatism, tapping irritably on his desk. Devouring Time might blunt the Lion’s paws; these things could happen to other people, but not to Crispin.

  ‘I’ve got a WVS meeting tonight,’ said Janet brusquely. ‘We’re going to divide the town into districts and get somebody to canvass each street.’

  ‘What for?’ asked Laura vaguely.

  ‘Pig swill,’ said Janet briefly. ‘There’s still far too much food being wasted, especially among the poorer classes.’

  Laura studied her sister dispassionately. She was so formidable in her green uniform, or splendid, that was what one really meant, what everyone said. She was like the Archdeacon, firm as a rock, much more efficient than Laura, who took after their mother and was dreamy and introspective. Perhaps it’s because I haven’t got a proper uniform, thought Laura, who, as a member of the ARP Casualty Service, had only a badge and an armlet. Uniform made such a difference, even to women.

  The next day the news was worse. The perfidious Balkan State had signed the Axis Pact, the British Legation was leaving, and there was a talk on the wireless about what happens when diplomatic relations are broken off. Laura now imagined Crispin in his shirt sleeves, burning the code books, stuffing bulky secret documents into the central heating furnace, a lock of dark hair falling over one eye. She was sure he would be doing something really important, for he had always seemed so fine and exciting to Laura, shut in then by the Archdeacon and North Oxford aunts in Edwardian England, and now by Janet and all the rather ludicrous goings-on of a country town that sees nothing of the war.

  In the Balkans, in the dangerous places,

  Where the diplomats have handsome faces …

  she thought, as she walked along with her shopping basket. But that wasn’t right at all. It was the Highlands and the country places, and the Highlands brought her back to porridge and oatmeal. Lord Woolton had said that we must make more use of oatmeal. Janet had got some recipes from the WVS and they were going to have savoury oatmeal for supper tonight.

  One couldn’t honestly say that it was very nice, but it was filling and made one feel virtuous and patriotic, especially when eggs or something out of a tin would have been so much more tasty. But Janet had banned all tin opening and the eggs were being pickled for next winter, when they would be scarce, or difficult, that was the word she had used.

  They had just finished supper when the siren went. Laura’s stomach always turned over when she heard the wailing, although this was the fifteenth time this year, according to her diary. Still, it was eerie when it went at night, and one never knew for certain that the planes were just passing over on their way to Liverpool. So
metimes they sounded as if they were right over the house, and, as the Head Warden had said, not without a certain professional relish, two or three well placed HE bombs could practically wipe out their small town.

  ‘What a good thing you’ve had supper,’ said Janet, splendidly practical as always. ‘I should change out of that good skirt, if I were you.’

  Janet ought really to have been the one to go out, thought Laura, but she had resigned from ARP after a disagreement with the Head of the Women’s Section. It had started with an argument about some oilcloth and had gone on from strength to strength, until they now cut each other in the street. And so it was Laura, always a little flustered on these occasions, who had to collect her things and hurry out to the First Aid Post.

  She came downstairs carrying her gas mask and a neat little suitcase, in which she had packed her knitting, Pride and Prejudice, some biscuits, and a precious bar of milk chocolate. On her head she wore a tin hat, painted pale grey and beautiful in its newness. They had been given out at the practice that evening, but Laura had hidden hers in her room, wanting to surprise Janet with it the next time she had to go out.

  Janet seemed rather annoyed when she saw it. It made Laura look quite important and professional. ‘I should think it must be very heavy,’ she said grudgingly. ‘I’ll leave a thermos of tea for you, though I suppose you’ll get some there.’

  ‘Well, expect me when you see me, dear,’ said Laura, her voice trembling a little with excitement. Going out like this and not knowing when she would return always made her feel rather grand, almost noble, as if she were setting out on a secret and dangerous mission. The tin hat made a difference, too. One felt much more splendid in a tin hat. It was almost a uniform.

  Laura went out and switched on her torch, being careful to direct the beam downwards. The bulb was swathed in tissue paper and tied as on a pot of jam, so that she wanted to write on it ‘Raspberry 1911’, as their mother used to. After a while her eyes got used to the darkness, and she could see that it was a lovely night with stars and a crescent moon. The planes were still going over, a sinister purring sound somewhere up there among the stars. Laura hurried on. Her tin hat was loose and heavy on her head, making it feel like a flower on a broken stalk.