Author: Barbara Pym
Category: Humorous
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‘Yes,’ I lied, ‘I have to go back there for a while. Thank you very much for my lunch.’
‘Oh, it was a pleasure. We must do it again some time.’
I walked away in the direction of my office and, when I had seen Mrs. Gray get on to a bus, went into a shop. I had a feeling that I must escape and longed to be lost in a crowd of busy women shopping, which was why I followed blindly the crowd of busy women shopping, which was why I followed blindly the crowd that surged in through the swinging doors of a large store. Some were hurrying, making for this or that department or counter, but others like myself seemed bewildered and aimless, pushed and buffeted as we stood not knowing which way to turn.
I strolled through a grove of dress materials and found myself at a counter piled with jars of face-cream and lipsticks. I suddenly remembered Allegra Gray’s smooth apricot-coloured face rather too close to mine and wondered what it was that she used to get such a striking effect. There was a mirror on the counter and I caught sight of my own face, colourless and worried-looking, the eyes large and rather frightened, the lips too pale. I did not feel that I could ever acquire a smooth apricot complexion but I could at least buy a new lipstick, I thought, consulting the shade-card. The colours had such peculiar names but at last I chose one that seemed right and began to turn over a pile of lipsticks in a bowl in an effort to find it. But the colour I had chosen was either very elusive or not there at all, and the girl behind the counter, who had been watching my scrabblings in a disinterested way, said at last, ‘What shade was it you wanted, dear?’
I was a little annoyed at being called ‘dear’, though it was perhaps more friendly than ‘madam’, suggesting as it did that I lacked the years and poise to merit the more dignified title.
‘It’s called Hawaiian Fire,’ I mumbled, feeling rather foolish, for it had not occurred to me that I should have to say it out loud.
‘Oh, Hawaiian Fire. It’s rather an orange red, dear,’ she said doubtfully, scrutinising my face. ‘I shouldn’t have thought it was quite your colour. Still, I think I’ve got one here.’ She took a box from behind the counter and began to look in it.
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter really,’ I said quickly. ‘Perhaps another colour would be better. What would you recommend?’
‘Well, dear, I don’t know, really.’ She looked at me blankly, as if no shade could really do anything for me. ‘Jungle Red is very popular—or Sea Coral, that’s a pretty shade, quite pale, you know.’
‘Thank you, but I think I will have Hawaiian Fire,’ I said obstinately, savouring the ludicrous words and the full depths of my shame.
I hurried away and found myself on an escalator. Hawaiian Fire, indeed! Nothing more unsuitable could possibly be imagined. I began to smile and only just stopped myself from laughing out loud by suddenly remembering Mrs. Gray and the engagement and the worry about poor Winifred. This made me proceed very soberly, floor by floor, stepping on and off the escalators until I reached the top floor where the Ladies’ Room was.
Inside it was a sobering sight indeed and one to put us all in mind of the futility of material things and of our own mortality. All flesh is but as grass . . . I thought, watching the women working at their faces with savage concentration, opening their mouths wide, biting and licking their lips, stabbing at their noses and chins with powder-puffs. Some, who had abandoned the struggle to keep up, sat in chairs, their bodies slumped down, the hands resting on their parcels. One woman lay on her couch, her hat and shoes off, her eyes closed. I tiptoed past her with my penny in my hand.
Later I went into the restaurant to have tea, where the women, with an occasional man looking strangely out of place, seemed braced up, their faces newly done, their spirits revived by tea. Many had the satisfaction of having done a good day’s shopping and would have something to gloat over when they got home. I had only my Hawaiian Fire and something not very interesting for supper.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
On my way home, I was just passing the vicarage when Julian Malory came out.
‘Congratulations,’ I said, ‘I’ve just heard your news.’
‘Thank you, Mildred, I wanted you to be among the first to know.’
I felt that the ‘among’ spoilt it a little and imagined a crowd of us, all excellent women connected with the church, hearing the news.
‘I had lunch with Mrs. Gray,’ I explained.
‘Ah, yes.’ He paused and then said, ‘I thought it would be better, easier, more suitable, that is, if you heard the news from her.’
‘Oh, why?’
‘Well, for one thing I thought it would be nice if you got to know each other better, become friends, you know.’
‘Yes, men do seem to like the women they know to become friends,’ I remarked, but then it occurred to me that of course it is usually their old and new loves whom they wish to force into friendship. I even remembered Bernard Hatherley, the lay-reader bank clerk, saying about the girl he had met on holiday in Torquay, ‘You would like her so much—I hope you’ll become friends.’ But as I had been at home in my village and she had been in Torquay the acquaintance had never prospered.
‘Well, yes, naturally one likes everybody one is fond of to like each other,’ said Julian rather feebly.
‘Yes, of course,’ I agreed, feeling that I could hardly do otherwise. ‘I expect Winifred is very pleased, isn’t she?’
‘Oh, yes, although she did once say that she hoped—I wonder if I can say what she hoped?’ Julian looked embarrassed, as if he had said more than he meant to.
‘You mean . . .’ I did not quite like to go any further.
‘Ah, Mildred, you understand. Dear Mildred, it would have been a fine thing if it could have been.’
I pondered on the obscurity of this sentence and gazed into my basket, which contained a packet of soap powder, a piece of cod, a pound of peas, a small wholemeal loaf and the Hawaiian Fire lipstick.
‘It’s so splendid of you to understand like this. I know it must have been a shock to you, though I dare say you weren’t entirely unprepared. Still, it must have been a shock, a blow almost, I might say,’ he laboured on, heavy and humourless, not at all like his usual self. Did love always make men like this? I wondered.
‘I was never in love with you, if that’s what you mean,’ I said, thinking it was time to be blunt. ‘I never expected that you would marry me.’
‘Dear Mildred,’ he smiled, ‘you are not the kind of person to expect things as your right even though they may be.’
The bell began to ring for Evensong. I saw Miss Enders and Miss Statham hurrying into church.
‘I’m sure you’ll be very happy,’ I said, my consciousness of the urgent bell and hurrying figures making me feel that the conversation should come to an end.
But Julian did not appear in any hurry to go.
‘Thank you, Mildred, it means a great deal to me, your good wishes, I should say. Allegra is a very sweet person and she has had a hard life.’
I murmured that yes, I suppose she had.
‘The fatherless and widow,’ said Julian in what seemed a rather fatuous way.
‘Is she fatherless too?’
‘Yes, she is an orphan,’ he said solemnly.
‘Well, of course, a lot of people over thirty are orphans. I am myself,’ I said briskly. ‘In fact I was an orphan in my twenties. But I hope I shan’t ever be a widow. I’d better hurry up if I’m going to be even that.’
‘And I had better hurry into Evensong,’ said Julian, for the bell had now stopped. ‘Are you coming or do you feel it would upset you?’
‘Upset me?’ I saw that it was no use trying to convince Julian that I was not heartbroken at the news of his engagement. ‘No, I don’t think it will upset me.’ Perhaps the consciousness that I was already an orphan and not likely to be a widow was enough cause for melancholy, I thought, as I put my basket down on the pew beside me.
We were the usual little weekday congregation, though Mrs. Gray was not wit
h us. It seemed almost as if the service might be a kind of consolation for the rejected ones, although I did not imagine that Miss Enders or Miss Statham or Sister Blatt had ever been in the running.
After the service I went home and cooked my fish. Cod seemed a suitable dish for a rejected one and I ate it humbly without any kind of sauce or relish. I began trying to imagine what it would have been like if Julian had wanted to marry me and was absorbed in these speculations when there was a knock at the door and Rocky came in.
‘I’m all alone,’ he said, ‘and hoping that you will offer me some coffee.’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said, ‘do come in and talk to me.’
‘Helena has gone to a memorial service, or rather, the equivalent of one.’
‘Can there be such a thing?’
‘I gather so. You remember the President of the Learned Society where they read their paper? Well, he died suddenly last week and this is in commemoration of him.’
‘Oh, dear, how sad.’ I was really sorry to think that the benevolent-looking old man with crumbs in his beard was no more.
‘He dropped down dead in the library—the kind of way everybody says they’d like to go.’
‘But so suddenly, with no time for amendment of life . . .’ I said. ‘What form will the service take?’
‘Oh, I gather it’s a sort of solemn meeting. Fellow anthropologists and others will read out tributes to him. One feels that they ought to sing Rationalist hymns as he was so strong in the movement.’
‘But do they have hymns?’
‘I think they may very well have done in the early days. Most of them had a conventional Victorian childhood and probably felt the need for something to replace the Sunday services they were rejecting.’
‘Poor old man,’ I murmured. And of course the old lady knitting and dozing in the basket chair would now be a widow, I thought, which led me on to remember Julian’s engagement. ‘I’ve heard a piece of news today,’ I said. ‘Julian Malory is to marry Mrs. Gray.’
‘The fascinating widow whose hand he was holding in the park?’ asked Rocky. ‘Poor Mildred, this is a sad day for you.’
‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous!’ I said indignantly. ‘I didn’t care for him at all in that way. I never expected that he would marry me.’
‘But you may have hoped?’ said Rocky looking at me. ‘It would be a very natural thing, after all, and I should think you would make him a much better wife than that widow.’
‘She is a clergyman’s widow,’ I reminded him.
‘Oh, then she is used to loving and losing clergymen,’ said Rocky lightly.
‘Widows always do marry again,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘or they very often do. It must be strange to replace somebody like that, though I suppose one doesn’t actually replace them, I mean, not in the way you buy a new teapot when the old one is broken.’
‘No, my dear, hardly in that way.’
‘It must be a different kind of love, neither weaker nor stronger than the first, perhaps not to be compared at all.’
‘Mildred, the coffee has loosened your tongue,’ said Rocky. ‘I’ve never heard you talk so profoundly. But surely you’ve been in love more than once, haven’t you?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, conscious of my lack of experience and ashamed to bring out the feeble memory of Bernard Hatherley reading the Lessons at Evensong and myself hurrying past his lodgings in the twilight.
‘Once you get into the habit of falling in love you will find that it happens quite often and means less and less,’ said Rocky lightly. He went over to my bookcase and took out a volume of Matthew Arnold which had belonged to my father.
‘Yes! In the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live ALONE,’
he read. ‘How I hate his habit of emphasising words with italics! Anyway, there it is.’
‘What a sad poem,’ I said. ‘I don’t know it.’
‘Oh, there’s a lot more.’
‘Father used to be so fond of Matthew Arnold,’ I said, rather hoping that Rocky would not read aloud any more; I found it embarrassing, not quite knowing where to look, ‘and I love Thyrsis and The Scholar Gipsy.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Rocky shut the book and flung it down on the floor. ‘Long tramps over the warm green-muffled Cumnor hills. How one longs for that world. I can imagine your father striding along with a friend. But I don’t think they’d have taken much notice of the poem I read to you. Healthy undergraduates would have no time for such morbid nonsense.’
‘No, perhaps not. And then, of course, my father was a theological student.’
Rocky sighed and began pacing round the room. I suppose it was a compliment to me that he made no effort to hide his moods, but I did not really know how to deal with him.
‘The other day I met somebody who knew you,’ I said brightly, ‘or rather who had known you in Italy. She was a Wren officer.’
‘What was her name?’ he asked with a faint show of interest.
‘Oh, I don’t know. She was tall with greyish eyes and brown hair, not pretty but quite a pleasant face.’
‘Oh, Mildred,’ he looked at me seriously, ‘there were so many. I couldn’t possibly recognise her from that description—“not pretty but quite a pleasant face”—most Englishwomen look like that, you know.’
I realised that it was probably how I looked myself and was sad to think that after a year or two he might not remember me either.
‘I think she rather liked you,’ I said tentatively. ‘She may even have been a little in love with you.’
‘But, Mildred, there again,’ said Rocky gently, ‘there were so many. I know I can be honest with you.’
‘Poor things,’ I said lightly. ‘Did you throw them any scraps of comfort? They may have been unhappy.’
‘Oh, I’m sure they were,’ he said earnestly, ‘but that was hardly my fault. I was nice to them at the Admiral’s cocktail parties, naturally, that was part of my duty. I’m afraid women take their pleasures very sadly. Few of them know how to run light-hearted flirtations—the nice ones, that is. They cling on to these little bits of romance that may have happened years ago. Semper Fidelis, you know.’
I burst out laughing. ‘Why, that’s our old school motto! Dora and I used to have it embroidered on our blazers.’
‘How charming! But of course it has a kind of school flavour about it. Or it might be the title of a Victorian painting of a huge dog of the Landseer variety. But it’s very suitable for a girls’ school when you consider how faithful nice women tend to be. I can just see you all, running out on to the asphalt playground at break after hot milk or cocoa in the winter or lemonade in the summer.’
‘We didn’t have an asphalt playground. Still, I suppose Semper Fidelis would remind one of that rather than of a past love,’ I said. ‘I suppose it was too much to expect that you would remember that girl.’
The conversation seemed to come to an end here. Rocky stood by the door and thanked me for the coffee. ‘And your company too,’ he added. ‘You really must come and see our cottage now that the weather is nice. It needs a woman’s hand there and Helena isn’t really interested. Perhaps I should never have married her.’
I stood awkwardly, not knowing what to say, I, who had always prided myself on being able to make suitable conversation on all occasions. Somehow no platitude came, the moment passed and Rocky went down to his own flat.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
One evening a few days later I was coming out of my office at six o’clock when I noticed Everard Bone, standing and looking in a nearby shop window. I was thinking of hurrying past him as I was not very well dressed that day—I had had a ‘lapse’ and was hatless and stockingless in an old cotton dress and a cardigan. Mrs. Bonner would have been horrified at the idea of meeting a man in such an outfit. One should always start the day suitably dressed for anything, she had often told me. A
ny emergency might arise. Somebody—by which she meant a man—might suddenly ring up and ask you out to lunch. Although I agreed with her in theory I found it difficult to remember this every morning as I dressed, especially in the summer.
‘Mildred—at last!’ He turned round and faced me, but his voice betrayed the irritation of one who has been waiting for a long time rather than any pleasure at the sight of me. ‘I thought you were never coming out. Don’t people usually work till five?’
‘I don’t usually work in the afternoons at all,’ I said, ‘but some of our staff are away on holiday and I’m helping out. I hope you haven’t been waiting here on other evenings?’
‘No; I found out that you were working this afternoon.’
‘Really? But how?’
‘Oh, there are ways of finding out things,’ he answered shortly.
‘But you could have telephoned me and saved yourself this trouble,’ I said, wondering why he should want to see me and whether I ought to feel flattered.
‘Let’s go and have a drink, shall we?’ he asked.
I looked down at myself doubtfully, but he seemed impatient to be off, so I followed a step behind him, my string bag with its loaf of bread and biography of Cardinal Newman dangling at my side. I had certainly not expected to have any engagement that evening. We passed ruined St. Ermin’s and I saw the grey-haired lady who played the harmonium hurrying out, also with a string bag. I wondered if she too had a biography of Cardinal Newman—I could see that she had a loaf and a large book that might well have been a biography.
‘Omar Khayyam,’ I murmured to myself, ‘only it was a book of verse, wasn’t it?’ And Everard Bone wasn’t very suitable for the ‘Thou’ and although we were going to have a drink it probably wouldn’t be wine. So it was not really like Omar Khayyam at all.
‘Let’s go in here, shall we?’ he said, stopping at a public-house near St. Ermin’s, but he was already opening the door before I could say whether I wanted to or not.